SFBG Blogs

Key redistricting meeting March 7

Zelda Bronstein
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6
Key redistricting meeting March 7

The Redistricting Task Force, which is drawing new lines for the Board of Supervisors, meets March 7 at City Hall, and supporters of the Community Unity Plan map will be presenting the proposal and making the case for a set of lines that dozens of community-based organizations have spent months putting together. The idea is to look not just at any one district but a the city as a whole — and to ensure that the downtown types, who would like to corral all the progressive voters into a handful of districts, don’t get their way.

The meeting’s at 6 pm in Room 406. If you want to check out the latest version of the Community Unity Map, it’s here. If you click on it, you can expand it and see where all the street boundaries are. The current districts are oulined in dark black lines; the proposed districts are in color.

Nite Trax: Red Bull Music Academy schools the Bay

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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We’re not usually ones for product placement, but Red Bull has been making some serious roads into quality nightlife. Tonight (Thu/1) the always impressive annual Red Bull Thre3style DJ competition comes to Ruby Skye, pitting several local DJs — and two from farther up the Coast — of various styles against each other for regional championships that could lead them to glory in Vegas later this year. (The “thre3style” refers to the requirement that DJs mix at least three different genres of music into their 15 minute sets.) 

Red Bull Music Academy Radio is a go-to for dance music lovers who want to get clued in to what some of the best techno, house, hip-hop, and global bass DJs and producers are doing. And last month, the Red Bull Music Academy itself came to San Francisco to kick off the open-to-all Academy application period, participating in an excellent series of talks and performances by some music greats. What is the Red Bull Music Academy, you ask? (Don’t worry, there’s no quidditch involved.) You can actually be a part of it!

The Academy is a “world-traveling symposium” consisting of DJs, vocalists, producers, musicmakers, and super-fans who’ve been selected based on their applications to attend workshops, training sessions, and parties that are, well, rad. The Academy season culminates in a huge weeklong nightlife and music extravaganza in New York City. From what we saw, Academy members are a really diverse international crowd that benefits from all this networking and exposure (and energy drink?). In any case — apply already, applications are due April 2. Find out more details here.

Meanwhile, here are recordings of the interviews with the musicians who blitzkrieged SF for the application kick-off.   

>>Saxophone deity (and Black Panthers soundtracker) Gary Bartz, who later appeared for a stylish, jazzy, super-diverse and nattily dressed evening at Yoshi’s with Bilal and Aloe Blacc as “The Gary Bartz Project featuring Bilal and Special Guest Aloe Blacc produced by Jill Newman Productions” (branding!)

>>Stretch and Bobbito, groundbreaking hip-hop hosts on Columbia University’s WKCR radio in the early ’90s — our friend texted us from their talk: “Their spilling all their secrets about cutting up vinyl and shit!” — who later rocked Mighty.

>>Absolutely spot-on house legends Masters at Work, aka Kenny Dope and Lil Louie Vega, spilled a few secrets of their own in their lively discussion, and then went on to play a bonkers-packed 1015 Folsom for an adoring crowd that stuck with them til 4 a.m., through Latin jazz, some R&B twists, and plenty of classics. 

We’re excited to see what happens at the big Academy summit in NYC — sign up and tell us how it goes. 

Cloud somethings

Tony Robles
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It’s unsettling how the first track off Cloud Nothings’ new LP makes one want to drop everything and flop on the ground in an arrested development expression of perma-teen angst. It’s hard to even type these words when the song is playing. It’s hard to lift my hands. I just want to listen to the melancholic chug-chug of dangling chords, bursts of crashing cymbals, and singer-guitarist Dylan Baldi’s stretched-out moan, “No Future/No Past.” I don’t want to do anything.

But that first track is something of a subterfuge as the rest of the album truly picks up beat-and-tone-wise, though the lyrics remain similarly restless. The second song off Attack on Memory peels me off the floor. By track four, “Stay Useless,” I’m nearly dancing, it’s nearing popped traditional emo, though still in that morose, everything-is-fucked clattering noise – recorded, as breathlessly reported in every story on the band, by the legendary musician-producer Steve Albini (Shellac, forever linked to Nirvana).

And that’s when I realize I love this record, I love everything about it: the trick start, the nouveu-grunge milieu, Baldi’s struggling vocals, suburban angst at its best. And the kicker: dude is only 20. He was maybe 2-years-old when Kurt Cobain died. And, perhaps even more surprising, he’s totally likeable, offering stoney laughs during our chat, and affably answering surely oft-repeated queries:

SFBG: How’s it going?

Dylan Baldi: Hey, I’m fine.

SFBG: How tired are you of talking about Steve Albini?

DB: I’m pretty tired of that [laughs], but if you have questions I don’t mind it.

SFBG: I can imagine, but people are obsessed with him. So I here I go – just wondering what your experience was like working with him?

DB: We were only there for four days and he’s a nice guy. He was pretty hands-off in terms of actually coming up with things to do but I kind of like that. I wasn’t looking for someone to tell us what to do with our songs, I just wanted someone to make the record sound good, and he did.

SFBG: The first Cloud Nothings record you recorded alone, correct?

DB: Yep.

SFBG: So when you recorded that first album was it almost an accident? Were you intentionally making a new project?

DB: Yeah it was sort of an accident, I just made two songs and put them online and someone liked it and wanted to put out a tape, so I made some more songs. It’s spiraled from there yeah. [This] started about two years ago.

SFBG: How long was the gap between putting it up on the Web and an interest being generated?

DB: It was literally two or three days. Super fast. It was on Myspace and a couple of blogs picked it up right away.

SFBG: Pretty awesome. So when did you start writing ‘Attack on Memory?’ What influenced you during that time?

DB: Last June pretty much. One of the big influences musically is a band called the Wipers. I was listening to them a lot over the year, between the two records. I guess musically also I wanted to do something that wasn’t like the last record, so it was a conscious effort to make something a little different.

SFBG: How did you discover the Wipers?

DB: A friend first told me about them, and I got their first couple records and I really like them and I couldn’t stop listening to them.

SFBG: They’re such an underrated punk band, it’s weird that people don’t talk about them more.

DB: They totally are! I was going to say exactly what you’re saying, it’s weird that more people don’t know about them. They’re amazing.

SFBG: What was the first record you ever bought with your own money?

DB: Oh! Um, I think it was probably Apollo 18 by They Might Be Giants. I was into them, I’m still into them.

SFBG: What are the some of the records you’ve guys have been listening to on this tour?

DB: You know that song by Ozzy Osbourne, “Mr. Crowley” – it goes like [singing] “Miiiister Crooowley” [laughs]. It starts off with this crazy keyboard thing? We listen to that song a lot. As far as full-length records, our goal today is to listen to Death Magnetic by Metallica because we have a 12-hour drive and that’s a good album. I guess we don’t listen to a lot of like, “good” music.

Cloud Nothings
With Mr. Dream, Your Cannons
10pm, sold out
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com

Arting around: Monthly Polk Street art cruise debuts today

Andrew Lam
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Arting around: Monthly Polk Street art cruise debuts today

Lower Polk has surged forth as one of the city’s more exciting hubs of gallery art. So it’s no surprise that the neighborhood is expanding its quarterly art walk into a monthly event — the Lower Polk Art Walk, which will take over the sidewalks every first Thursday, starting today. 

The beauty of an art walk is that there is no start point or end point — and there’s plenty of chin-scratching and ah-oohing to be done at galleries up and down Larkin and Polk Streets. So throw away your itinerary and let your feet do the planning for you as you peruse the participating eight galleries. Just make sure to meander into the showing by Larkin Street Youth Services, a collection of works by the young people who are participants in its programs geared towards homeless youth. Here’s three other gallery spaces that’ll be worth a look: 

Art installation in former “Leftovers” furniture store

Pretty much, there it is. Chad Hasegawa and other artists are rumored to be involved in this pop-up art exhibit in an old furniture store, repurposing the Polk Street milieu for the debut of this new monthly art event.  

1300 Polk, SF

“Calamity” a solo show by Mary Iverson at Shooting Gallery 

Iverson’s exhibit includes five large-scale oil paintings and six to ten smaller acrylic on panel works, and feature shipping containers superimposed on sublime landscapes. She critiques the tolls that have been taken on the environment for the sake of private profit by integrating cutouts from environmental magazines and basing much of her paintings off views of national parks. Her signature marks are the measurement lines that she leaves sprawling to the edges of the canvas. 

839 Larkin, SF. www.shootinggallerysf.com

“Young and Free” at 941 Gallery

Sun, surf, boxing kangaroos — sorry, that’s reductive, but you do get the general sense of youth and devil-may-care-ity when you think of Australia. Time to move beyond the stereotypes? Check out what is being created Down Under at this group show, which highlights the work of 13 of Oz’s most talented “urban” (the new term for art traditionally on the street that’s being shown into gallery) creatives. 

941 Geary, SF. (415) 931-2500, www.941geary.com

Lower Polk Art Walk

First Thursdays

Thurs/1 6-10 p.m., free.

Polk and Larkin between Geary and Bush, SF

lowerpolkartwalk.blogspot.com

The 8 Washington disaster goes to Planning

Zelda Bronstein
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100
The 8 Washington disaster goes to Planning

The urban planning disaster that is 8 Washington goes before the San Francisco City Planning Commission March 8 amid a long list of questions — including Mayor Lee’s position on the project and how it could screw up the America’s Cup.

Developer Simon Snellgrove wants to build the most expensive condos in San Francisco history on the waterfront, 145 units that will be far out of reach to anyone who makes less than half a million dollars a year. And many of the units will require income far higher than that. It’s not just housing for the 1 percent; it’s housing for the top half of the 1 percent.

There’s no need for this kind of housing in SF; the very rich have no problem finding places to live. And the spot zoning violates every standard of good waterfront planning practice.

The project will benefit the Port of San Francisco, which stands to take a cut of the money since some of the project is on Port land. But more than half of the land is owned by Golden Gateway and is a former redevelopment area, so the supervisors and the Port are going to have to fight over who gets the property tax increments and how that’s all financed.

More interesting, 8 Washington will be a boon to Golden Gateway, which as the landowner is a partner in the deal. And Golden Gateway is one of those big properties that are paying far too little in city taxes. When the complex changed hands several years ago, the owners used a stock-swap deal to transfer it, avoiding the Prop. 13 reassessment that could have substantially raised its taxes. So the city’s losing millions of dollars — and now Timothy Foo, who is the principal owner of Golden Gateway, will be getting a nice favor from the city he’s been screwing.

Oh, and by the way — a lot of Golden Gateway units are being advertised as short-term (that is, hotel) rentals — something that violates at least the spirit of city law. This is an outfit that deserves special zoning treatement from San Francisco?

Then there’s the fact that this could be a serious problem for the big America’s Cup party. Project critic Brad Paul has been analyzing the impacts of the development, and noticed some new language in the comments and responses to the Environmental Impact Report suggesting that excavation could lead to something like 200 dump-truck trips a day along the Embarcadero — roughly one trip every two minutes. In an email to Paul, Paul Matltzer in the Planning Department confirmed that the likely construction process could, indeed, involve that many dump trucks, rumbling along the Embarcadero during the peak construction period, which will also be the peak period for America’s Cup tourism.

Dump trucks, Paul (who used to drive one) notes, start slowly and brake slowly. The Embarcadero is already crowded — and will be far more crowded during the Cup races, so much so that city officials are thinking of closing traffic lanes to all but bicyles and transit. How, exactly, will that work out with 200 trucks a day fighting for room?

I’ve called and emailed the America’s Cup people, but they haven’t gotten back to me. I’ll keep you posted.

Lee’s office hasn’t gotten back to me, either, but I’m hearing that the mayor is telling people he hasn’t made up his mind — on a project that’s a week away from the Planning Commission and that one of his close allies, Rose Pak, is strongly promoting.

 

Nathan Blumberg, a tough but compassionate teacher

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By James Oset

(James  Oset was a classmate of Wilbur Wood in both Roundup High School (Montana) and the School of Journalism at the University of Montana in Missoula. Both were students of Blumberg in the early 1960s.  Oset was a reporter at the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, Wisconsin, from 1967-69,  copy editor at the Milwaukee Journal.from 1969-71, and copy desk chief for the Billings (Montana) Gazette from 1971 to 2005. He lives in Billings with his wife Karen.  His remembrance of Blumberg was published in the Feb. 23 issue of the Billings (Montana) Outpost, an independent weekly published by David Crisp. Read two remembrances of Blumberg by Wilbur Wood and Les Gapay, both former Blumberg students,  as well as an obit that Blumberg wrote on himself. http://www.sfbg.com/bruce/2012/02/29/nathaniel-blumberg-open-change )

No one could ever walk away with a feeling of indifference after a conversation with Nathaniel Blumberg. Knowledgeable and sagacious, Nathaniel always made a deep impression on those who met him and those who knew him. A masterful teacher of journalism, he deeply delved into history, current events and political issues. He was, in my mind, a scholar’s scholar, insisting on accuracy in speech, writing and thought. Forever curious about everything, Nathaniel also possessed an almost childlike sense of wonder.

He developed deep and lasting bonds with most of his students. If you were a friend when you were in school, you remained a friend for life.

Nathaniel was a tough teacher, always insisting on academic excellence. He approached his work much like an Army drill sergeant training new recruits. He would give you holy hell for a dumb mistake but then offer a big pat on the back and great praise when you corrected yourself.

Nathaniel, a Rhodes Scholar, received a Ph.D in modern history from Oxford University in England. After leaving Oxford in the early 1950s, he worked for a short time for the Washington Post, among other newspapers. He told me on several occasions that the Post sought to hire him in the early 1960s to be an understudy for the editor there. Nathaniel, who fell in love with Montana, said he just couldn’t bring himself to move his family to D.C. The man who eventually got the job was Ben Bradlee. And the rest is history. “I could have been the guy directing Watergate coverage,” Nathaniel told me without a hint of regret.

When I worked as a copy editor for The Milwaukee Journal, I talked to the medical reporter, who was a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Illinois. I knew that he was at Northwestern at about the same time Nathaniel was a visiting professor there. When I mentioned Nathaniel’s name, the reporter’s face lit up with a broad smile. Yes, he said, Nathaniel was the only journalism prof at Northwestern who would go out and have a few beers with his students.

About a decade ago, the School of Journalism at the University of Montana, invited former students and faculty to a reunion. I recall John Frook, a former student who was the managing editor of Life magazine before it folded, asking Nathaniel if he had any famous historians as dons at Oxford. Nathaniel named about four, but the name that stuck with me was Arnold Toynbee, a major 20th century historian.

Nathaniel also could be personally influential. In the early 1980s, my teenage daughter Becky and I had problems getting along. She and I quarreled constantly about relatively small matters, and I was reaching my wits’ end. We took a family vacation and decided to visit Nathaniel who was living several miles south of Big Fork and just above Flathead Lake. By that time, Nathaniel had retired as dean and professor at the University of Montana School of Journalism, and he and his wife Barbara, a poet, were spending much of their time writing. When I told Nathaniel how difficult it was raising a teenage daughter, he put his arm around Becky’s shoulder, and they walked down to the lake where they had a three-hour conversation. When they returned, Nathaniel said something like: You have a beautiful and bright daughter, but the schools in Billings are not teaching her much. I could tell that their long talk had gone very well. It was a transformational moment. I look back on that late afternoon as the time my daughter and I began a much closer and healthier relationship. When Becky attended the University of Montana, she became close friends with Nathaniel and Barbara, frequently taking the bus to Flathead Lake to stay with them over long weekends or holidays.

Beginning in the mid-1980s my family and I would drive to Missoula to meet Nathaniel and sometimes Barbara for Grizzly homecoming football games. We often visited them in summer at their place near Big Fork. Nathaniel always offered his insights on state and national events and often told us amazing and amusing stories. But he also talked about daily events in his life and asked about ours. His warmth radiated through those conversations, and he never hesitated to tell us that he loved us.

With Nathaniel alive, I looked to Northwestern Montana and, in my mind, I saw a bright beacon. Now that light has been extinguished. But Nathaniel leaves us his daughters and their children and hundreds of students, colleagues and friends who honor his life. The beacon is becoming many points of light emanating from many different places. I am sure of that.

 

Splinter sound: Bayonics’ side projects take the stage tonight

Andrew Lam
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Normally, when the white-hot energy that first surrounds a music project fades, there is drama to be had. Obviously. You’re sneaking around on the group with that guitarist? Do you really think your lyrics will hit the same notes with that other emcee? Maybe it’s because Bayonics have been around the block, but apparently this local funk-hip-hop-soul-R&B mega-group has few jealousy issues: the collective will be showcasing its members’ next steps tonight (Wed/29) at “Leapstock 2012” a showcase taking over the top floor of Elbo Room.

Here’s some of the crew that’ll be fanning out tonight: 

Starship Connection: Intergalactic badmen? Now that’s good press release language. Starship Connection is a future-forward electronic-leaning project headed by DJ B. Bravo, who has enjoyed commercial success with the Red Bull Music Academy in the past. Starship carries on the grand tradition of space funk. Blast off, hey. 

Shamilah Ivory: This lady has PIPES. Normally supplying vocals for Bayonics, she’s taking centerstage tonight for a solo set. 

Hot Pocket: By my count, there are few things more crowd-pleasing than a Hot Pocket set. HP is Bayonics minaturized: four of the original group’s members play covers of classics, usually from the ’90s, usually R&B. I think the term is panty-dropping for the effect this group has on the 20-something to 60-something female contingent. 

Roja and Elive: Bayonics drummer and founding member Pedro Gomez describes the collaboration between Bayonics’ frontman and El Hurwitz as “electro boogie dance funk.” We’ll see what they have to bring — this is one of the duo’s first public performances. 

Plus there will be rumored sets by DJ Teeko, Batucci Brothers, and Fog City Mavericks. The only thing: how the hell are they going to get this many groups onstage in four hours? Bless, Bayonics. 

Leapstock 2012: Bayonics showcase

Feat. Hot Pocket, Shamilah Ivory, Roja and Elive, Fog City Mavericks, Analog Starship, Starship Connection, and Batuci Brothers

Wed/29 9 p.m., $10

Elbo Room

647 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-7788

www.elbo.com

Maximum Consumption: Overlap at Public Works pairs the audio with the edible

Tony Robles
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So at Public Works this Thursday you can: watch veteran SF DJ Mophono and beat-driven gothsters Water Borders* live, learn about innovative advancements in music-making, peep some short films and new local art, and nibble tasty vegan treats. All in one event, from the safety of your own neighborhood club.

We all know there are overlapping circles between the arts – even the edible arts – and this is the belief that drives Overlap.org, a hyphen organization (music-arts-technology) that also has been hosting parties since 2006. In prep for the next installment of Overlap – which goes down Thursday – I spoke with Ghostly International’s Christopher Willits (Overlap.org’s founder, experimental SF-based musician) about music, food, and fostering local creativity:

SFBG: What will you be doing during the designing process workshop?

Christopher Willits: I’ll be covering a popular music-making and production tool called Ableton Live. I’ll be talking about the basics of this software system and how you can make expressive creative art with this digital tool.

SFBG: What are some other activities that will take place during this installment of Overlap?

CW: We have some great live music and a diverse lineup with Mophono, Water Borders, and Danny Paul Grody. Local films will be shown, we’ll have local vegan food from Freedom Kitchen, food by Rocky’s Fry Bread, and more local vendors announced the day of. We’ll have an info booth for our friends at Mission Creek Festival, and this time we also have very cool art vendors – Dave Marcoullier, The Heated, and more.

SFBG: Can you describe the vibe? What has been most surprising about previous Overlaps?

CW: I connected with Public Works after a SF Forage event I performed at, and we found that we shared a common vision of where the Overlap event could go. Our first event with [them] was last October, it proved the concept and set the tone – a relaxed evening of diverse art and some really awesome people hanging out and meeting. It’s cool to see people coming out of their usual scene and connecting with this idea of greater creative community overlapping, a community made from unique but interrelated groups.

SFBG: Why incorporate local food into a music event?

CW: We support the localization of food. Our last events have featured permaculture discussions about decentralizing our food sources. We can do this in SF.  Plus we just want people to be comfortable with some delicious clean food and feature these hard-working culinary artists. They are so much a part of the creativity of this city.

SFBG: Do you see any connections in the art of cuisine and the art of music? If so, what?

CW: Absolutely, the process, texture, flavor, color, history. Music, just like food, is woven in the very fabric of our culture. I don’t know of two other things that bring people together better than food and music.

SFBG: What are your personal favorite local places to eat?

CW: I’m really into Gracias Madre right now. Ask for the hot sauce, it’s this paste-like mixure of a couple different chiles. Yum. I think you need to ask for it.

SFBG: Future goals for Overlap.org and Overlap parties?

CW: Our goal is simple – to grow creative community in San Francisco. The rest will fall into place. We want to provide that place and time for people to come together and strengthen new bonds.

I have this feeling that we’re within a new creative wave in SF. We’re living in an amazing place and time, we’re all redefining how art and community interact and grow together. We have so much imagination and creativity. Together we are redesigning how our local communities can connect, come together and ultimately incite creative change.

Overlap
With Christopher Willits, Danny Grody, Mophono, Water Borders
Thurs/1, 7 p.m., $5-$10
Public Works
161 Eerie, SF
(415) 932-0955
www.publicsf.com

 

*An absolute aside: Water Borders’ Amitai Heller once casually told me he’d want to do a TED talk on the intersection of goth and baseball, and I think about this often, joke or not.

Nathaniel Blumberg: Open to change

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By Wilbur Wood

 (Wilbur Wood was a student of Nathaniel Blumberg in the early 1960s at the University of Montana in Missoula. And he was the leader  of a contingent of Blumberg students that turned up in San Francisco, many dispatched by the  Dean to work on the Guardian during the highly active and newsworthy 1960s.   Wilbur was a poet and a reporter,  with a master’s degree in creative wiriting at San Francisco State, so he fit in well at the Guardian. He had edited his campus paper,  so I made him city editor. He covered the 1967 mayor’s race and operated as if he were directed by Blumberg himself.  Wilbur followed Joe Alioto around, from place to place, and found that Alioto was changing his story depending on the audience.  Wilbur, as a Blumberg mentee, was not shocked. He nailed Alioto and  wrote one of the most amusing and  illuminating stories of the campaign. but it did not deter Alioto from becoming mayor. Wilbur ‘s big triumph as city editor was his work in positioning and editing an investigative story exposing how the members of the  local  San Francisco draft boards were anonymous, establishment types who worked in secrecy at secret meetings to draft a disproportionate number of minorities.  The expose  appeared in Deccember, 1967, in  the red hot middle of the Vietnam War. It was a bombshell, the first such story ever done in the nation, and led to extensive litigation on behalf of draftees in federal court, pioneering reforms in the draft, and inspired a national New York Times investigation.  It was written by Eugene Hunn, the husband of Nancy Engelbach Hunn from Kalispell, Montana, and a classmate of Wilbur’s and a student of Blumberg at the Montana School of Journalism.

(Alas, Wilbur  went back to Montana, as all Montana people seemed to do, and is now a poet, reporter, and philosopher living in his hometown of Roundup, Montana with his wife Elizabeth. She worked as an ad representative at the Guardian. Elizabeth and Wilbur run a a writing, editing, and consulting business called Stone House Productions. The stonehouse was built by Wilbur’s grandfather and is where the two live, work, and play.   Others in this Guardian era also went back to Montana:  Printer Bowler, Troy Holter, Larry Cripe, Nancy Engelbach Hunn, Karen King, Bruce DeRosier, Doug Giebel et al, a talented group of journalists, writers, and political activists bristling with Montana populism. The Blumberg/Montana contributions were enormously valuable in our early days when we had lots of ideas and ambitions but slender resources.   Why they left San Francisco to go back to Montana is still a mystery to me.)

I’m late for class, jogging, short-cutting across a mowed lawn in front of the School of Journalism. A window squeaks open and the unmistakable voice of the Dean, Nathan Blumberg, roars out a second story window: “BARBARIAN!”

Astonished, I plop down on the ground, speechless, chagrined, then leap up and disappear into class. It is the early 1960s. The Dean is, at that time, a man who believes that people should walk on the sidewalks, not upon the carefully tended lawns, at the University of Montana. He sees a reason for rules, even as he openly questions many of them

A scant six or seven years later, this same man is gliding over those same lawns, sailing Frisbees into the sky, chasing the return throws from students, the occasional faculty colleague, and former students back for a visit.

“When did Nathan start calling himself Nathaniel?” asks Bruce Brugmann, editor and publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. We’re talking on the phone on the day of Nathaniel Blumberg’s death, February 14, 2012. Valentine’s Day. It is fifty-four days before his 90th birthday, on April 8. (April 8, Blumberg was delighted to learn, is Buddha’s birthday.)

“The name change happened in the 1970s or early ‘80s,” I tell Brugmann. Bruce, back in 1953, at the University of Nebraska, was a student of Nathan Blumberg. “We called him by his last name,” Brugmann said, “outside class. We never used his first name.”

Nor did we in the early ‘60s, I reply. He was The Dean, Dean Blumberg — until Printer Bowler (one of his students) began calling him “Coach.” Things were starting to loosen up by then.

“Blumberg is who inspired me,” Brugmann says. “He was highly critical of the mainstream press–and this was back in the ‘50s. He pointed out their faults in class. He advised me to go someplace – he mentioned San Francisco — and start an independent weekly newspaper. When I could do that, I did.”

But why change his name from Nathan? Both Brugmann and I know people who, through the years, met Blumberg and later named their sons Nathan. “It’s about affirming his full identity,” I say to Bruce. “He decided to accept his name as it appears on his birth certificate: Nathaniel Bernard Blumberg.”

NBB arrives at middle age in the 1960s — a man of high principles, acute intelligence, possessing an inquiring mind along with great reservoirs and pride and stubbornness, his career a success. He arrives at middle age but does not come to a stop. He opens up. Opens his heart to an expanding circle of friends. His property on Flathead Lake becomes a destination. Music, talk, good food and drink flow in the clearing under the tall trees.

Not long ago Nathaniel brought up an argument he and I engaged in, more than 40 years ago, driving up the Big Sur Coast on our way back to San Francisco. We’d made a day trip to San Simeon, and toured the hilltop castle of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Our argument was about Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. Blumberg thought the two issues were different, and that linking one with the other would damage the prospects for each cause, anti-war and anti-segregation. “You said the two were connected,” Blumberg reminded me, adding that about a year later, Martin Luther King, Jr., made that connection in public, in a speech at the Riverside Church in New York City. Nathaniel wanted to tell me that I had been right.

A veteran of World War II, NBB wrote the story of his weaponry unit going up against highly trained Nazi soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge. He honored that moment in history, but he approved of the next generation’s aversion and resistance to the war it had been handed: Vietnam. Although he was part of what Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation,” Nathaniel rejected that label. He preferred the Sixties Generation, he told me, more than once, because “you did not accept the word of the government as truth.” Nor did we accept, he said, the word of the big corporations.

Nathaniel supported anyone trying to create a world based on love.

Les Gapay, a forrmer Blumberg student, writes a Blumberg remembrance and Blumberg writes his own obituary.

http://www.sfbg.com/bruce/2012/02/28/nathaniel-blumberg-everyone-needs-mentor

 

 

 

 

The right to a civil lawyer

Zelda Bronstein
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10
The right to a civil lawyer

I like Sup. David Chiu’s idea of giving indigent plaintiffs in civil cases the right to a lawyer. It’s one of those legal and political issues that’s been hanging around for decades: Everyone accused of a crime has the Constitutional right to counsel, but if you’re sued and have no money, you could very well be  SOL.

Now, there are a few places that some people can get help — nonprofit legal groups that help seniors, tenants, and others, but there aren’t enough of those lawyers to meet the need, and some people don’t qualify for any of the available help. Under the law, a poor person who gets sued has no guaranteed right to any assistance at all, and can wind up representing him- or herself in court, even if he or she has no legal background or experience.

That’s one reason landlords tend to win eviction cases against low-income people: If the tenant can’t find free legal help, it’s high-priced landlord lawyer who knows all the tricks against poor tenant who has no idea how to respond to a summons and complaint.

The supervisors have approved Chiu’s resolution, which asserts than San Francisco is a “right to civil counsel” city, but there’s not a whole lot of money around to fund it. He’s asking for a modest pilot program costing no more than $100,000 and focusing on eviction defense, which is a great place to start. His idea is to get the big law firms in the city to help out — to devote some of their time and money to pro bono work in the city’s indigent civil defense program.

And some of them will, and that’s great. But what we really need is a funding source for this — and it seems to me that the lawyers of the city are a logical place to start.

Yes, there are unemployed lawyers and lawyers who barely make rent. But as a whole, the class of people licensed to practice law in San Francisco is better off than most of the rest of us. The state bar hits every lawyer up for about $400 a year to fund bar operations, and the interest that lawyers earn on client trust funds has to go to indigent legal defense.

So why not set up a San Francisco lawyer’s fee — say, $50 a year for everyone practicing in the city — to fund the city’s civil legal defense program? I don’t know exactly how many lawyers we have, and I can’t find anyone at the state bar who can answer that, but I’ve seen published reports in the past suggesting that the city has more lawyers per-capita than anywhere else except Washington, D.C. One story that ran years ago in the Examiner put it at one per 70 residents — which would mean more than 10,000 lawyers in the city. So a $50 fee would bring in half a million dollars –plenty to set up an office and hire a couple of lawyers and have a director who could spend time running down pro bono counsel to help.

I have no idea if the city can legally do that; I checked with the folks in the City Attorney’s Office, and they have no simple answer. So Chiu would have to request a legal opinion on the question.

But if it’s possible, it’s a great idea, and I suspect even most lawyers in the city would support it. 

 

UPDATE: The state bar folks pointed me to the right place on the bar website, and it turns out there are 17,000 lawyers in SF. That’s $850,000 a year.

 

In their words: party people from the Guardian’s Club Action cover

Charles Russo
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Last week we got to photograph folks from several different corners of the Bay Area nightlife scene for Marke B’s Club Action cover story. Listen to them talk to Guardian art director Mirissa Neff and contributing photographer Matthew Reamer about what they love to do when they’re out and about in the wee hours.

Cookie Dough, The Monster Show:

cookiedough by SFBayGuardianSounds

DJ Love Gun, Iron Maiden Lane at Otis:

djlovegun by SFBayGuardianSounds

davO and Krylon Superstar, Electro-Hop duo Double Duchess:

doubleduchess by SFBayGuardianSounds

 

Odie Kim, Flo-ology House Dance Crew:

odiekim by SFBayGuardianSounds

 

Vicki Virk, Non Stop Bhangra:

vickivirk by SFBayGuardianSounds

 

Journalists express doubts about nonprofit media merger

Sasha Cuttler
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Journalists express doubts about nonprofit media merger

Will the Bay Area’s two biggest nonprofit newsrooms — Bay Citizen and the Center for Investigative Reporting — merge and what would that mean for local journalism? While we await votes as soon as next week on the first part of that question, I explored the second part in last week’s Guardian. But for the old-fashioned reason of limited space in the paper, I couldn’t use another set of interviews that I’d gathered for the story at the recent launch party for San Francisco Public Press’ sixth print edition.

In many ways, the Bay Citizen and Public Press are mirror images of one another. Both pursued the nonprofit, noncommercial, reader-supported model for doing local journalism with an emphasis of media partnerships. But while the Bay Citizen tapped wealthy benefactors to fund well-paid leadership and full-time reporters, the Public Press has been a labor of love put out on a shoestring budget largely with volunteer labor, although its journalists are now getting small stipends.

I played a role in the launch of both newsrooms. In 2008, I was one of the founding board members of the Public Press, working with director Michael Stoll (the Examiner’s former city editor and a current journalism professor) to help launch the project and hire its first paid editor, consulting with them periodically thereafter. I had also developed a good working relationship with billionaire financier Warren Hellman and helped spark his interest in reversing the decline in local journalism, which led to Hellman’s founding the Bay Citizen with $5 million in seed money in 2009. Before that, I helped set up a mutually beneficial meeting between Hellman and Stoll (Hellman got some good advice for his project while the Public Press soon secured its first $35,000 grant from San Francisco Foundation, run by Hellman’s family).

Yes, the journalism community in the Bay Area seems just that small at times and – despite our fiercely competitive impulses at times – we all have an interest in promoting good reporting on local institutions. It’s just something we believe in, and something that we don’t like entrusting to the big, out-of-town corporations that own the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner.

So, as Stoll and his Public Press colleagues celebrated their latest print edition – a solid effort featuring investigations of human trafficking that go beyond the hype of activists and pandering politicians, as well as follow-ups on their last issue’s coverage of Healthy San Francisco – at Booksmith on Haight Street, I asked what they thought of the proposed merger.

“Hopefully the marriage of the two will be better than either of them are independently,” Stoll said.

He praises the statewide work CIR has done under director Robert Rosenthal, a respected journalist, but it hasn’t helped fill the gaping hole in Bay Area journalism created by years of media mergers and layoffs. And while Stoll thinks Bay Citizen has done some good work, it hasn’t had the local impact one might expect with a $17 million budget over the last three years.

“If I had the millions of dollars they had, I would have done some things differently,” he said.

Praveen Madan, who owns Booksmith and has worked as an editor for Public Press, is even more critical of Bay Citizen, calling it a “misguided philanthropic activity” that lacks the independence journalistic outlets need to be credible and effective.

“It’s about public education,” Madan said, calling the proposed CIR-Bay Citizen merger “a terrible idea.” Madan has been in the business world for 20 years and has consulted on mergers and acquisitions, and he said that 60 percent of mergers fail, usually because of differences in the culture and values of the entities. And he said media mergers are an especially bad idea.

“Independent media means you need lots of independent organizations reporting on the community,” Madan said.

He also criticized the proposal that the merged newsrooms would be led by Phil Bronstein, who ran the Examiner before taking over as editor of the Chronicle when Hearst Corp. bought it. “He is the person who presided over the failure of the Examiner,” Madan said.

Stoll agrees that Bronstein could be problematic as a leader, if for no other reason than the symbolism: “He has had such an influence on the quality of journalism in San Francisco that it’s tough to distinguish between him and the problems we’re trying to address.”

Public Press Publisher Lila LaHood also expressed reservations about Bronstein and the merger: “One runs the risk of having one voice homogenizing both the corporate and nonprofit journalism in San Francisco.”

When I asked Bronstein about that issue for my last article, he said, “I don’t know that I’m the best person to take it over. That’s something other people should determine, not me.”

But Stoll thinks the merger itself might help each entity make up for the others’ shortcomings. “If CIR can provide the leadership that the Bay Citizen has been lacking, and if Bay Citizen can provide some of the magic and capital that the Bay Citizen had, it may work,” Stoll said.

“They’re going through a lot of changes and permutations, and who knows what their future is,” Stoll said of the Bay Citizen.

Its funding model has been working well, but it doesn’t seem to have a guiding vision of the role that it wants to play in San Francisco or the kind of journalism that the city needs. And for Stoll’s crew, the problem is how to find the resources to fund the community-based journalism they believe in.

“We had a vision and we still have that vision, but the goal is not as close at hand as it seemed four years ago when we started this,” Stoll said. “If it’s not sustainable, it’s not going to help anyone.”

But, like Bronstein and Rosenthal both told me, Stoll said it’s important that these conversations and efforts are taking place because of the important role journalism plays in this country and in the Bay Area: “We’re all trying to do something to keep journalism alive and keep public service journalism alive.”

Noise Pop Roundup 3: Flaming Lips, Veronica Falls, Matthew Dear, Archers of Loaf

Tony Robles
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MVP for Noise Pop coverage this year goes to Ryan Prendiville. See below to find out why – Ed.

TUESDAY: The Flaming Lips at Bimbo’s

Time, for the Flaming Lips, is important. Because as a band — one that has been through all sorts of well documented shit — the Flaming Lips know the value of time (particularly borrowed) and have made it their work to not just create music but get into the complete manufacture of moments. Which is a tricky business, because moments are bastards.

Take all the pictures you want of the blinding lights, the beautiful costumed kids, the confetti cannons or all the other individual weapons that the Flaming Lips use to wage musical psychedelic war on time, and the moment still might not fit in a shutter, no matter how you slice a second. Full review here.

WEDNESDAY: Grimes, Born Gold, oOoOO, and Yalls at Rickshaw Stop

Cecil Frena described the lineup at Rickshaw Stop last night simply as “weird music.” He should know. Performing with his synth-fueled electronic dance trio, Born Gold (formerly Gobble Gobble,) Frena stood in front of a camera-slash-iPad pulpit, singing and conducting a third of the group’s sound via a motion-captured, clearly homemade, Janet Jackson Rhythm Nation era-esque military jacket. Full review here.

THURSDAY: Surf Club and FIDLAR at Cafe Du Nord, New Diplomat and Big Black Delta at Rickshaw Stop

“This song is called ‘Stoked and Broke,’” the band’s most talkative, spastic member introduced the first song, explaining, “because we’re stoked and broke.” What followed was a frenetic set of punk fueled, stripped down rock. With a rollicking tightness that reminded me of Thee Oh Sees, FIDLAR shot along, keeping the energy up by alternating singers. Full review here.

I left Cafe Du Nord after FIDLAR, hoping to catch at least some of Big Black Delta at the Rickshaw Stop. When I arrived another band was just starting. A local five piece, New Diplomat reminds me of the kind of groups that dominated the alternative rock airwaves in the late ’90s after grunge and pop-punk stopped being exciting. Since it was about the same time period when I stopped listening to the radio, and New Diplomat’s spiky haired singer had that emo/screamo edge that I have a hard time tolerating, it makes sense that the band put me off.

But then when Jonathan Bates, a.k.a. Big Black Delta started to perform, and I felt almost nothing, a more alarming possibility came to mind: maybe I’m burnt out. On record, I’ve liked what I’ve heard of Big Black Delta’s droned, vocally distorted hard electronic tracks. And performance-wise, Bates kept things appropriately dark, moody, and atmospheric, bumping up the sound with two drummers, each banging away on their side of the stage for some heavy hitting percussion. That whole stereo kit thing is usually the easy way to pull me in, but in this case all I could do was recognize it with cheap approval. Between New Diplomat and Big Black Delta the crowd thinned out a bit, and I leave early too, hoping to reset my baseline by the next day.

FRIDAY: Brilliant Colors, Bleached, and Veronica Falls at Rickshaw Stop, Matthew Dear at Public Works

My plan for the night was to see Veronica Falls at Brick and Mortar, and then hopefully run across the street to catch Matthew Dear at Public Works. But when I showed up at Brick and Mortar, the man at the door told me I had the wrong venue, their Noise Pop show was the night before. I apologized and, checking my schedule, saw that I was indeed an idiot. So much for that plan, at least I wore a coat.

The show was underway at Rickshaw. I didn’t know any of the bands opening for Veronica Falls. The androgynous singer onstage had a bowl cut and was wearing a collared button up that was the most over-sized fashion piece since Stop Making Sense. I couldn’t make out the words, but it was a nice voice – a little deep and dreamy – that mixed in with some catchy guitar riffs. The band was playing melodic pop, and having fun by all appearances. I found out later they are SF’s Brilliant Colors.

The next band, Bleached, had a sound that reminded of the Dum Dum Girls with a lo-fi punk edge. Two of the girls are blondes and the other two aren’t even girls. Bleached was more energetic on stage than Brilliant Colors, but I found their songs didn’t really hook me in. (It also didn’t help that there was a camera crew onstage with them.) The group harmonized a lot and decently, but too often spent a lot of time singing vowels (oohs, ahhs, and ohhs), which started to wear on me. They played a Ramones cover. I think it’s “When I Was Young.”

Still, it was good lineup leading into Veronica Falls, a UK band that has a retro pop sound as well. VF’s sound live was as clean and distinctive as it is on record, with nice guitar work over a signature drum sound that has an ever-present jangle that’s accomplished by little more than taping a tambourine to the floor tom. The band’s vocal style has some nice contrast, between Roxanne Clifford’s usual lead with backing from James Hoare and Patrick Doyle, but really I think it’s its structure and a Belle and Sebastian-like sense of lyrical imagery on songs like “Stephen” or “Bad Feeling” that sets the group apart.

So much so that on “Crimson and Clover”-referencing song, “Come on Over” VF can bust out some oohs and ohhs without it seeming like a shortcut. It was a good set, with a lot of new material as well, for the band that canceled its earlier SF debut due to visa issues. If anything, Veronica Falls was overly apologetic, drummer Patrick politely stated before the encore, “I know I keep saying it, and I feel like a bit of a dick saying it, but thanks.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE6BFAwzwLU

It was before midnight when Veronica Falls finished, so I hurried to Public Works, where they were still setting the stage. While waiting for Matthew Dear to come on, however, I had the misfortune of standing in front of someone explaining to everyone within earshot how terrible the venue was, how it was a warehouse that they just put equipment in but never fixed up, how if she just got a warehouse for a weekend she could fix it up nicer, how there was a bare two-by-four nailed to the beam above the stage for no apparent reason, how they charged club prices but it was “not really a club.” (Sort of the reason I actually like it, that last part).

When Matthew Dear started performing, with a live band – his second night with the lineup – it all sounded more loud and abrasive than I had expected. I think my attitude, and my tired ears had been switched to bitch mode by the girl behind me. The show was sweaty and chaotic, it being a weekend late night at Noise Pop, but I called it a night while it was still going on.

SATURDAY: Noise Pop Culture Club at Public Works, Built Like Alaska, Hospitality, The Big Sleep, and Archers of Loaf at Great American Music Hall

This would be my last day of Noise Pop, I was convinced. As much as I would’ve liked to, I started the day knowing that I would not make it to Sunday’s Dodos show. Between my day job, covering Noise Pop, and pet-sitting three cats (who operate in a binary of meowing or vomiting) back in the East Bay, I may have taken on too much last week. That said, somehow, Saturday at noon I found myself back at Public Works, for the Noise Pop Culture Club, a six-hour-long block of workshops, screenings, interviews, performances, and something called the Seagate Remix Lounge that I didn’t really understand.

When I got to PW they were screening selections of Petites Planètes, another musical documentary series by the guy behind the Take-Away Shows on YouTube. The videos were cool, but the director, Vincent Moon, wasn’t there for the Q&A. Something about being a “nomad.” Dude bailed. Disappointing. Since I was sitting 20 feet from a bartender with nothing to do, I decided to get a drink, but the shaky feeling in my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t had the right ratio of solid food to alcohol in my diet last week. Some spicy noodles from the food truck outside created a buffer on which I began to add of few layers of bourbon, while watching the restored, color version of Méliès A Trip to the Moon, with soundtrack by AIR.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nx8hVGzSO4

The main plan was to see Zigaboo Modeliste of the Meters play the drums. Modeliste was there as part of a Q&A with the makers of Re:Generation Music Project, a documentary-slash-Hyundai promotion in which he appeared. The clips made the recently released film (which apparently no one in the audience had seen) seem interesting, if only for scenes with whipper snapper EDM artists like Skrillex and Pretty Lights attempting to work with established musicians in other genres, awkwardly. At the end Modeliste played the drums for a bit, and the snare was so loud that each time he smacked it everyone in the audience blinked. A walk outside in the sun and a Bloody Mary later, I returned for a how-to session on using Ableton, and realized I am un-Able ton stay awake.

Clearly, when I made it to the Great American Music Hall, I was in bad shape. Nearly asleep on my feet, with quite a bit of time to go, and not thinking clearly, I made a bad strategic move that combines Red Bull and vodka, two things I don’t like anymore together than apart. When the first band, Built Like Alaska went onstage, I was in a fairly vile mood, my head hanging limp over the balcony while I wrote down petty things about the drummer that I didn’t like: his hat (a fedora indoors) his shirt (vintage Mickey Mouse) his facial hair (Tom Selleck meets Mario Brothers). All this, when his consistently irregular drumming was actually my favorite part of the band who I really had no problem with. Clearly, I was hating hard that night.

Until the next band, Hospitality played. I’d never heard Hospitality before – it was the band’s first time playing in San Francisco – but the sound pulled me in almost immediately, led by the charming, identifiable lilt in guitarist and lead singer Amber Papini’s voice. The songs were light and bouncy, and Papini performed with a slight disaffected edge, always looking up and off to something above the crowd, making strange faces and rolling her eyes at no one in particular. When I got home later, I went online almost immediately to listen to its album and find the song “Friends of Friends.”

Likewise, I tried to find music from the final opener, the Big Sleep, but that’s more of a band to see in concert form, as the trio’s main attraction is a Jack White-like guitarist, who has a lively style of playing and a way of alternating his sound between growling and loud to Jesus Christ, where did I put my ear plugs, I can feel my cochlear hair cells dying.

Now I’m not the biggest Archers of Loaf fan – the band’s actually only been on my radar since a number of high profile reissues last year – but other people at the Great American were clearly eager to see the reformed act live. When a few random notes came out of bassist Matt Gentling’s instrument during the band’s set-up a woman above stage in the balcony yelped, jumping to her feet and clapping her hands together excitedly.

Launching into “Harnessed in Slums,” the band played with an easy energy that gave no suggestion of their hiatus or age, and people in the crowd were shouting “I want waste! We want waste!” along with the chorus. Gentling in particular was electric. He leapt around stage and struck every hard rock guitar god stance imaginable but did it with a physicality that actually pulled them off. (Dude is ripped, FYI.)

At one point early on, struggling with some technical issues, Gentling looked at singer-guitarist Eric Bachmann and joked, “It’s just like the old days, everything is breaking.” Not quite getting the kink out of his bass, Gentling asked the crowd if it’d be ok if the band just kept playing through the difficulty, and Archers of Loaf continued on, powering through a long set. The place wasn’t full, but the crowd made up for it, and was still shaking the floorboards fifteen or so songs later when Archers play “Wrong” and shred a version of “Nostalgia”, making an encore completely obvious.

Ten minutes later – when I headed for BART to wait for a train alongside a couple of giggling guys laying on the platform surrounded by what must have been a dozen empty nitrous canisters – I was no longer tired and sent a text that read: “Okay. That was a good show. Worth it.”

Son burn: “We Need to Talk About Kevin” review

Sue Vaughan
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Son burn: “We Need to Talk About Kevin” review

It’s inevitable — whenever a seemingly preventable tragedy occurs, there’s public outcry to the tune of “How could this happen?” (Exhibit A: recent events in Ohio.) But after the school shooting in We Need to Talk About Kevin, the more apt question is “How could this not happen?”

Lynne Ramsay (2002’s Morvern Callar) — directing from the script she co-adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel — uses near-subliminal techniques to stir up atmospheric unease from the very start, with layered sound design and a significant, symbolic use of the color red. While other Columbine-inspired films, including Elephant and Zero Day (both 2003), have focused on their adolescent characters, Kevin revolves almost entirely around Eva Khatchadourian (a potent Tilda Swinton) — grief-stricken, guilt-riddled mother of a very bad seed (played as a teen by Ezra Miller, at age seven-ish by Jasper Newell, and as a baby by Rocky Duer).

The film slides back and forth in time, allowing the tension to build even though we know how the story will end, since it’s where the movie starts: with Eva, alone in a crappy little house, working a crappy little job, moving through life with the knowledge that just about everyone in the world hates her guts.

Motive was a hot topic post-Columbine. Both of the Colorado killers kept rage-filled diaries, but their home life has remained largely enigmatic. Dylan Klebold’s mother penned an essay for O magazine in 2009, titled “I Will Never Know Why.” It describes her shock upon realizing that her beloved son was involved in the massacre, and her enduring regret at not doing more to prevent it. She also touches on her experiences after the event: “I was widely viewed as a perpetrator or at least an accomplice since I was the person who had raised a ‘monster.'”

Eva shares these feelings of shock and guilt, and experiences, as Susan Klebold describes, constant public shame. She can’t leave her house without experiencing humiliation, thanks to the vandals who’ve splashed her porch and car with crimson paint. (The grim, practiced way she takes a sander to her sullied front door suggests it’s not an infrequent occurrence.) Forget about blending in when everybody knows your face — or your last name is as memorable as “Khatchadourian.”

But Eva’s guilt runs even deeper. Kevin‘s flashback scenes are stuffed with rock-solid evidence that her kid was born a complete psycho, and that Eva is fully aware of it.

What’s worse, she suspects it’s her own fault. She didn’t even want a baby in the first place, really; husband Franklin (played with gee-whiz oblivion by John C. Reilly) passive-aggresses her into domesticity. “Stop resisting,” the doctor urges as she’s giving birth, but it seems resisting would’ve saved her a lot of anguish. The baby screams all day (Eva’s only relief: parking the stroller at a construction site, where the sounds of a jackhammer drown out his cries); later, when the family moves to the ‘burbs, he grows into a scowling child who spends every waking minute terrorizing his mother. Even worse, he adopts a fake-sweet personality whenever Franklin is around.

Frustrated, Eva takes him to the doctor, who concludes, “There’s nothing wrong with him.” So, is Eva what’s wrong with him? Later, when she’s scouring high school-aged Kevin’s room, she finds no Columbine-style diaries, only a CD-ROM marked “I Love You.” It’s the only time love and Kevin are presented as part of the same thought — and, naturally, the “I Love You” disc actually contains a crippling computer virus.

Kevin is very nearly a full-blown horror movie, and the demon-seed stuff does get a bit excessive. But it’s hard to determine if those scenes are “real life” or simply the way Eva remembers them, since Kevin is so tightly aligned with Eva’s point of view. Though she’s miserable in the flashbacks, the post-tragedy scenes are even thicker with terror. The film’s most unsettling sequence unfolds on Halloween, horror’s favorite holiday; Eva drives past a mob of costumed trick-or-treaters as Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” (one of several inspired music choices) chimes on the soundtrack. Masked faces are turn to stare — accusingly? Coincidentally? Do they even know she’s Kevin’s mother? — with nightmarish intensity heightened by slow motion.

And indeed, “Everyday” Eva deals with accepting her fate; the film is sympathetic to her even while suggesting that she may actually be responsible. When a woman walks up to her on the street and punches her in the face, screaming “I hope you rot in hell!”, Eva brushes off help from a stunned bystander: “It’s OK. It was my fault.” Whether or not Eva will forgive her son is uncertain. Clearly she’ll never forgive herself.

We Need to Talk About Kevin opens Fri/2 in Bay Area theaters.

Talking with “We Need to Talk About Kevin” director Lynne Ramsay

Sue Vaughan
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Talking with “We Need to Talk About Kevin” director Lynne Ramsay

As I sat in a hallway at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, waiting for director Lynne Ramsay to finish a photo shoot with We Need to Talk About Kevin star Tilda Swinton, I realized that Kirsten Dunst was stepping over me. I quickly stood up, apologetically, just in time to let a sunglasses-wearing Kiefer Sutherland pass by. They were both doing interviews for Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.

But there was no time for stargazing: I was about to chat with one of cinema’s most important filmmakers, the creator of Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002). As Swinton, Ramsay, and I headed down the hallway, passing paparazzi, I reached out for Ramsay’s coat and said, “Don’t lose me!” Ramsay grabbed my arm, pulled me into the crowd and said, “We’re sticking together.”

San Francisco Bay Guardian: There’s so many people that wanna talk to you!

Lynne Ramsay: You’re all working me!

Tilda Swinton: But remember, it’s a very, very good thing.

LR: It is, right?

TS: It is! It’s a very, very good thing! I remember last year — no, wait, two years ago — being taken over to some interview with some television guy and when we arrived, the people were like, “What film are you with?” We said, “It’s Italian: I Am Love.” And they said, “We don’t know anything about it! We’re not gonna write about that.” And we had to walk back across Toronto.

LR: Oh no!

TS: They had no interest in talking to us!

LR: (Shrieking) Really?

SFBG: So this is a good thing!

TS: This is a great thing!

(Swinton bids us farewell)

SFBG: So, as soon as your film ended last night, the Toronto folk sitting around me immediately began questioning Tilda’s character and her parenting skills. (Ramsay laughs hysterically.) They were all like, “I would never have let him — .” Or “He would have gotten a smack across the — .”

LR: (Laughing) Totally! Totally!

SFBG: And this immediately made me realize since I don’t have kids, how just the plot alone will provoke audiences to have extremely different perspectives towards your film. It really is a film that could be watched multiple times, which is exactly what I wanted to do as soon as it was over. The structure, the editing, the sound, it all made me want to be smarter.

LR: I’m not really that “smart” myself. (Laughs) I mean everyone who worked on the film is gorgeous, but the script was completely edited. We had no money; we had absolutely no time. I had to be so precise about the images. [Editor Joe] Bini is a musician and so is [my husband, Rory Kinnear], who was a co-writer on the film. So I think that helps as well. [Bini] also edited [Werner] Herzog’s new film Into the Abyss! He’s so sweet and such a great editor.

I’m also a big fan of music and I think we constructed a lot musically, added to that the soundtrack by Johnny [Greenwood, of Radiohead], and the amazing sound editor Paul Davies, who has done all my movies starting with my short films.

SFBG: Gasman (1998) and Ratcatcher (1999)?

LR: Yes, he did both. You know, I wanted to be a mixer in another life! It’s so much fun. Cinema is an atmosphere and …

SFBG: Well, your cinema is.

LR: [We Need to Talk About Kevin] was really constructed in the script. The sound design is even in there. It was pretty arduous trying to get — I mean it was 87 pages so there wasn’t a bit of fat on it. I was still asked to cut stuff because they were like “There’s no fucking way you’re gonna make this!” And in 30 days! Are you kiddin’? We didn’t believe it.

SFBG: 30 days?

LR: I don’t believe it myself, you know! Fuckin’ producers, bastards. We were gonna do it but we were broke as well, me and my husband and it had to all be prepared, it’s a high maintenance movie.

SFBG: Were you eating?

LR: (Laughs) Not really. We had smokes. But Seamus [McGarvey] was very generous with his time; he’s the DP [and an Oscar nominee, for 2007’s Atonement]. The gaffer, Jim McCullagh, had worked on The Godfather III and he really got behind us. The script supervisor Eva Cabrera had done a Malick film [The New World] and [production designer] Judy Becker had done Brokeback Mountain. They were all working for nothing because they loved the script.

SFBG: And maybe they loved you?

LR: (Laughs) Well, actually, they loved Seamus.

SFBG: Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar are such amazing films. I’m curious how Morvern was received in the UK, because it felt like at the time the film sort of went under radar in the states.

LR: It’s never been totally embraced. But I think it was a little bit ahead of its time because people seem to be finding it now. But at the time people were like “How dare you make this movie?”

SFBG: So let’s talk about the music. Johnny Greenwood’s score is so haunting but I’m curious about your choices of songs in both Kevin and Morvern.

LR: It was actually Rory who chose a lot of the tracks. This is a guy who I love, he’s an artist and he’d never done music in a film before. So we made mix tapes before we started and I love that because sound is such an integral part. Morvern is my little lush child and I love Samantha [Morton]. I want to work with both Tilda and Samantha again! They’re my kind of actors.

SFBG: You know, they are a very similar type of actor. In fact, [Kevin star] John C. Reilly falls into their category as well. They all know how to be the most interesting character on the screen in pretty much every movie they’re in. Yet you’ve taken them and put them in lead roles.

LR: I love the couple in Don’t Look Now (1973) because it’s Julie bloody Christie and Donald Sutherland, who isn’t the best looking guy but it all felt real, they weren’t this carbon copy couple. And in the book John C. Reilly’s character is more 2D, an all-American guy: “Golly gee, buddy.” And I thought that would make things way too flat if you cast a typically good-looking blonde guy.

SFBG: Tilda and John are so sweet together onscreen.

LR: They loved each other on set too, hanging out together. John came to my house and I would make him dinner! It was really cool shit! He bought me this beautiful guitar; it’s like a 1956 Gibson.

SFBG: Are you kidding?

LR: No! I know, right?

SFBG: Why?

LR: Well, we went to this guitar shop together and I was looking at this guitar and me and my husband were kinda too broke at the time but we were hoping that after the film was made, well maybe … if things went well … well, John just went and bought it. It was such a lovely gesture! He also recorded a song for my niece who came to the film set as my little assistant.

SFBG: I wanna hear that song.

LR: It’s so sweet. Her name is Shawn and he made the song called “Wee-Shawn,” and it’s so beautiful.

SFBG: Reilly, in my opinion, is one of the funniest men in Hollywood. How did you get him? Why would you think of him as the husband?

LR: Well, in fact, he contacted me! He had made a list of five directors he wanted to work with. He knew I was working on something and I was like, “I only have a minor part, and I’d love to give you a main part but this is a minor part,” and he was like “Dude, I’ll do it, yeah!” And he totally “got it.” You know?

SFBG: I do! I “got it” from him. His character is such a sweet ninny. Like a very sweet male who’s placed himself with a very commanding female.

LR: Totally, totally. A ninny who brings a certain kind of love, sort of an unconditional love because he doesn’t want you to see the bad side. And of course Ezra [Miller]’s Kevin responds quite well to him, but John brought so much depth to the character especially since it’s not the biggest part. He’s just amazing. Even Tilda brought her kids on set and John loved hanging out with them!

At Cannes, he hung out with my Mom and my sisters. He was in love with them. He’s a real part of the family now. Anytime I go to L.A. I just wanna hang out with John. We come from a very similar background you know, he’s a blue-collar guy and half-Irish.

SFBG: Kevin is so different from Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar yet you havn’t lost your voice. I am so excited for this film to hit the rest of the world.

LR: It was hard to make a movie in the U.S., an alien country for me. It was terrifying, in terms of the union and the money which doesn’t go the same way in America. Just getting a jackhammer seemed to be Kafka-esque! It was like, there’s a union who does do this and a union who does do that and I was laughing and going insane and I just wanted a meeting so I could say “get a fucking jackhammer! It’s an important scene and I need it!”

SFBG: So you were basically like Tilda’s character in the movie.

LR: Yes! But once we were up and running, the crew in New York was fantastic. They really get behind us.

SFBG: I love that there is no narration in this movie. In fact all of your films stress the image over dialogue. Does your brain look like these films?

LR: Are you calling me a weirdo? (Laughs) I’ve always thought very visually. When I was a kid, you could put me in the corner with some paper and some pencils and I’d be happy for the entire day. My mum thought it was great because my younger sister was super-clingy and I was the easy one. I didn’t even need TV. I’d just go into my own world. But again, even though my family was blue collar, there were lots of jazz drummers and saxophonists. Even my godfather was a painter.

SFBG: That’s this movie! This movie is jazz cinema!

LR: It’s crazy you’re saying that. We were just talking about that a couple of days ago!

SFBG: I said earlier I wanted to watch it again as soon as it ended, mainly because toward the end of the film, I swore I heard specific sounds that you had used in the beginning! Your films are so layered. They sincerely remind me of Orson Welles’ movies. They really are made for repeat viewings.

LR: I never went to school. So really, it’s just all street smarts. My mum was a cleaner and she’d go to work at six o’clock in the morning, she’d get us ready for school, I’d go out and then I’d come back when she was away, climb through the window, go back in and I’d be so much happier! I just wasn’t learning that much at school. There were too many people in the class, all these zombies, you know? People throwin’ things, half of the class was just destruction, you know? So what was the point?

(Ramsay pauses and smiles) You know, my dad was smart in my eyes. He just died; well, not totally recently but … and he loved crossword puzzles. And you know, that’s what I think it all is. You just need to put together the right puzzle pieces.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV7Y5cylhNc&feature=related

We Need to Talk About Kevin opens Fri/2 in Bay Area theaters.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks teaches at the Academy of Art University as the Film History Coordinator and programs the film series Midnites for Maniacs.

Nathaniel Blumberg: Everyone needs a mentor like this

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My favorite obituary on Nathaniel Blumberg, the journalism  icon who died on Valentine’s Day in Kalispell, Montana, is the one he wrote himself.

My next favorite was the remembrance written by a former student, Les Gapay, for the Daily Inter Lake of Kalispell. Gapay graduated from the Journalism School at the University of Montana in Missoula, in l965, when Blumberg was the dean. 

Gapay knew Blumberg for four years as a student and then became friends with him as his career spanned stretches at the  Missoulian in Missoula, the Sacramento Bee, Congressonal Quarterly in Washington DC., the Wall Street Journal, mostly in the Washington bureau, and then to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He changed his lifestyle and bought a cherry orchard near Bigfork and became the Bigfork  correspondent for the Daily Inter Lake. He  lived near the cabin where Blumberg retired and saw him often. Gapay is now a free lance writer living in the desert in Southern California at Rancho Mirage near Palm Springs. He visited Montana most summers and saw  Blumberg on each visit.

I’ve added two more tributes to Blumberg:

One by James Oset, “A tough but compassionate teacher“

and one more by Wilbur Wood, “Open to change” 

 

 

 


Image Comic Expo showcases new stars and the old guard

Tony Robles
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Comic cons serve a variety of functions. They can be press junkets, costume parties, swap meets, social retreats, even museums. Comics writer Warren Ellis has a habit of referring to San Diego’s huge Comic Con as “nerd prom,” which perfectly captures the glow of excitement for mass socialization in funny costumes. By contrast, this year’s Image Comic Expo was more like a nerd Sadie Hawkins dance – a deliberate reversal of the standard hierarchy, where creator-owned books are championed over the widely beloved DC and Marvel franchises that sometimes seem to oversaturate the comics market. It was also a little less garish and hectic than some larger cons, but the sense of community and pride was still richly evident.

The event coincided with two historic peculiarities – the twentieth anniversary of Berkeley-based Image Comics and the migration of San Francisco’s WonderCon to Anaheim this year. And, fittingly, there was no shortage of Image worship over the con’s three days. In the center of the convention floor like a hub was the main Image vendor, which sold books, distributed tickets to panels and workshops, and hosted signings, all in the shadow of a massive edifice with Image book covers on one side and images from Robert Kirkman’s Skybound imprint on the other.

Local vendors were well-represented on the con floor, with Berkeley’s Fantastic Comics (shout-out to my hometown comic book guys and gals) and Escapist Comic Bookstore, and San Francisco’s Two Cats Comic Book Store, among others. The “artist alley” was rife with independent artists and creators selling their wares and producing sketches, while several Image creators, including Jonathan Hickman (Red Wing), Nick Spencer (Morning Glories), and the MAN OF ACTION gents, got their own booths around the con.

As for the sort of crowd the Image Expo attracted, based entirely on my casual observations, there was a notable diversity of age, gender, and ethnicity. There were strikingly few cosplayers, though I spotted one full-blown Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender, a group of ladies in anime-inspired dress (I made out one Sailor suit), and two young’uns dressed as Batgirl (or a female Batman) and Captain America. Among con guests, the Skybound booth featured an Atom Eve cosplayer, and the comedians of Dipstick Swagger sported a variety of disguises including their own mascot, Luchacat.

By virtue of the con’s Image-centric organization, the panels which ran through Saturday and Sunday were occasionally redundant, with guests like Kirkman, Joe Casey, and Brian K. Vaughan each appearing in multiple places. But breaking announcements and a sense of fan enthusiasm for these beloved creators’ upcoming work kept it all going. Among the exciting announcements at Friday night’s keynote speech by Image publisher Eric Stephenson: the long-awaited sequel to Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss, a third volume of Phonogram from Gillen/McKelvie, a collaboration between Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson called Happy, and several other new titles.

The most enjoyable panels were the ones that featured folks with a less-established fanbase, who were in a position to introduce new readers to their ideas. The inaugural Saturday panel, moderated by G4’s Blair Butler, focused on the forthcoming Kickstarter-funded collection Womanthology, a showcase for comics by female creators. The panel featured Trina Robbins, Mariah Huehner, Nicole Sixx, Fiona Staples, and Bonnie Burton, all of who contributed in various capacities. The audience, though smallish, was enthusiastic about both the cause and the content, and discussions of such exasperating issues as the “brokeback pose” (slightly NSFW tumblr here) drew applause and thoughtful questions.

Also engrossing was Sunday’s “Image Introduces…” panel, with a slate of recently recognized creators whose series are still in their early issues, including Joe Keatinge (Glory, Hell Yeah), S. Steven Struble and Sina Grace (Li’l Depressed Boy), Daniel Corey (Moriarty), Jim Zub (Skullkickers), Brandon Seifert (Witch Doctor), and Kurtis J. Wiebe (Peter Panzerfaust). It was a joy to see their pride in their creations and their genuine pleasure at getting to share their work with potential new fans.

But let us not forget the old guard: at the “Twenty Years of Independence” panel, the founders of Image told their story and the audience got a chance to witness controversial icons like Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld; the “Stories and Scripts: Writing Comics” panel featured Image’s hottest properties, including Jonathan Hickman, Ed Brubaker, Nick Spencer, John Layman, Joe Casey, Steven T. Seagle, and Brian K. Vaughan, who basically all teased each other and had a grand old time.

Since it was an Image-minded convention, creators came first, which is always refreshing, especially for less iconic newcomers with a lot to offer, but the apotheosis of one publisher might wear thin if the convention continues in subsequent years. With a bit of expansion, though, an East Bay comics event might differ enough from WonderCon to hold an audience.

All photos by Taryn Erhardt

 

Sorting out the America’s Cup re-do

Zelda Bronstein
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Sorting out the America’s Cup re-do

I have to say this for Mayor Ed Lee: He’s not so stubborn or egotistical. He’s willing to listen. And when something really, really doesn’t make sense, he’s willing to let it slide.

Not like Gavin Newsom.

If Newsom were still the mayor (ick! gasp!), he’d be desperately trying to keep together the deal that gave five pieces of the waterfront to the sixth richest person on Earth for more than two-thirds of a century. He’d refuse to admit that maybe the promises of vast wealth accruing to the city from what’s really an untested event might be a little lower than projected. He’s be sucking up madly to Larry Ellison, promising him more and more city money if only His Larryness would bestow the greatness of his hotel, restaurant and condo manna upon us poor lowly San Franciscans.

The current mayor has a little more sense. But then, I don’t think Ed Lee spends much time dreaming about the Oval Office.

So now that Ellison’s team realized they weren’t going to be guaranteed enough of a profit on waterfront development and Lee realized that giving away any more of the store, or rushing this through any faster, was bad for the city, we have a deal that’s based on San Francisco hosting a sports event, not on extensive real-estate development on the waterfront. It’s better than it was, and I give the mayor credit for that.

But a few things are worth remembering:

The proverbial devil is in the proverbial details, and right now they aren’t so proverbial. There’s the minor matter of about $15 million worth of upgrades and repairs to the waterfront that’s needed for the race — and the city’s on the hook for it. Right now, it’s not clear where that money’s going to come from.

One option: The city could go back to giving Ellison some property or development rights. The Chron quotes Jennifer Matz, the mayor’s economic development director, saying that the rights to Seawall Lot 330 are still on the table (bad, bad idea). Stephanie Martin, spokesperson for Ellison’s operation, told me there are no long-term development plans included at all. Maybe the city will just pay cash from the General Fund to Ellison (seems unlikely; I’d love to watch that Budget and Finance Committee meeting.) Maybe the Port will sell revenue bonds and pay Ellison out of the projected new income from the event.

Or maybe some other deal that will be bad for the city and good for Larry will emerge, and we’ll all have to fight that one.

I realize that, if the attendance figures are anywhere near what’s projected, the city will still wind up millions of dollars to the good.

But I still don’t understand: Why are we paying Ellison to hold his race here? Yeah, it will bring tourists to the city — but as former Sup. Aaron Peskin points out, we don’t pay the Navy to bring Fleet Week and the Blue Angels to town. If anything, we should be charging these folks for the right to use so much public property for their own commercial gain. (Yes, the America’s Cup involves commercial gain. Ellison does it because he loves yacht racing and likes to win shit, but you don’t think that giant Oracle logo in 80 million pictures in newspapers and on TV isn’t worth a whole lot of money?)

Why isn’t a guy who counts as one of this generation’s great industrialists, with a fortune rivaling the Rockefellers and the Morgans and that gang, donating anything at all to San Francisco? Those old robber barons built libraries and museums and stuff for the benefit of the public. Come on, Larry — step up and help out here. Do the race, defend your Cup, then give something back to the city instead of asking the taxpayers to cover your tab.

PS: I read Randy Shaw’s attack (if that’s what this odd little piece was) on Aaron Peskin, and I wonder — what’s wrong with being a maverick who works from the outside to try to defend the city’s interests? I don’t always agree with Peskin (see: Home Depot) but I can tell you: There are a lot of people inside City Hall who are really, really happy that he’s out there doing what he’s doing. If nobody on the outside was taking on the America’s Cup deal, the city would absolutely be worse than it is. Peskin’s trying to save the city money. Why is that a bad thing?

Here’s what made me really laugh, though: Shaw criticizes Peskin for failing to support Malia Cohen and Jane Kim for supervisor, saying that he could have been mayor if he’d been working for candidates who ended up winning. Huh? Don’t progessives usuall go after pols who sell out their principles for political gain? If Peskin thought that Debra Walker and Tony Kelly would be better supervisors than Cohen and Kim, shouldn’t he be working for them instead of thinking about his own political future?

Odd where Randy Shaw is going these days.

 

 

Guardian editorial: SF should go after mortgage criminals

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EDITORIAL The mortgage crisis in San Francisco isn’t just devastating to homeowners and to the southeast neighborhoods where foreclosures are most common — it’s clear evidence that lenders and their affiliates are and have been acting illegally. This city ought to be taking the lead on pressing civil and criminal charges against the mortgage outfits.

City Assessor Phil Ting commissioned a report in February that showed that nearly every one of 382 foreclosures actions in the city between January 2009 and October 2011 had at least some irregularities. In more than 80 percent of the cases, the report identified direct violations of law.

It’s a stunning revelation: In nearly 100 percent of the cases studied, the mortgage companies did something wrong. Homeowners were not notified that they were in default. Properties were seized and sold by companies that didn’t have the proper title to them. Documents were backdated or signed by an entity that didn’t have the authority to sign. In some cases, it wasn’t clear who actually owned the mortgage, because the corporation that filed for foreclosure had never property taken title to the loan.

The report comes as Occupy protesters in San Francisco are moving aggressively to target banks that are tossing people out of their homes and at a time when county sheriffs in other parts of the country are refusing to execute foreclosure orders.

There may not be much San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi can do — mortgage foreclosures in California can be done with almost no oversight and by the time the sheriff is called in there’s nothing left but an eviction. But the report makes clear that there were both violations of business regulations and crimes, in some cases felony crimes — and the San Francisco city attorney and district attorney should be moving as quickly as possible to take legal action.

Both City Attorney Dennis Herrera and District Attorney George Gascon have asked for more material from Ting’s office, although neither has announced a formal investigation. But every day that this goes on, more people lose their homes and more crimes are committed — and both offices should move as quickly as possible to take action.

There’s nothing in the federal settlement over fraudulent mortgage activity that prevents local officials from taking this sort of action. There’s nothing preventing Herrera from seeking an injunction against further foreclosures or preventing Gascon from indicting the lenders and their executives.

Meanwhile, Ting told us that he’s asking Attorney General Kamala Harris to investigate, because the pattern of violations almost certainly goes beyond San Francisco.

State Sen. Mark DeSaulnier has introduced a bill that would mandate transparency in foreclosures, so at least homeowners would know who to contact to seek a modification. That’s a good start. But holding these sleazy operators accountable would send a message that San Francisco isn’t going to let this sort of behavior continue.

—

Localized Appreesh: The Shants

Tony Robles
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Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

The Shants have done something curiously rare these days: created an authentically Southern and categorically enjoyable stompy blues and folk record in the heart of garage punk and hip-hop obsessed Oakland. That authenticity come from real roots, as these sorts of things often do – the new record, Beautiful was the Night, is said to be a “haunted love letter” to singer Skip Allum’s youth in the South Louisiana delta pines.

The resulting record is a lively mix of Americana, twanged vocals, bluesy riffs, bits of piano and violin, and steel guitar, with guest appearances by the likes of multi-instrumentalist/horn player Ralph Carney, Blue Bone Express, and vocalist Quinn DeVeaux. I think singer Brianna Lea Pruett, who also guests on the record, describes the music best when she says in the short documentary on the making of the album, “Even in the dark parts, there’s a sweet treatment to it.”

With the long-awaited release of its debut full-length record finally here, the quartet will play Cafe Du Nord this Thursday.

You can watch the making of the new album here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaPdF3T8UZs

Year and location of origin: Oakland, 2009

Band name origin: Its a reference to the Gaelic word, shiant, meaning blessed or charmed… and the Shiant Isles of Scotland. Skip came across it while doing some research on his Scottish family origins, which can be traced to those islands. That’s the short version, anyway.

Band motto: “Is the pedal steel too loud? How ’bout now?”

Description of sound in 10 words or less: A dusty, slow blend of Southern folk, and country blues.

Instrumentation: 1954 Harmony archtop guitar, Emmons double-neck pedal steel guitar, 1970s Peavey bass guitar, drums. May soon have a new fella on many other instruments. Stay tuned!

Most recent release: Beautiful Was The Night, our first full-length! Available now at live shows, our website, iTunes, Bandcamp, Spotify, etc. and all Rasputin Records locations. It was recorded with all analog gear over at the Rec Center (formerly Bakesale Betty’s storage space) and at Tones on Tail Studios in Oakland, with Mr. Eliot Curtis.

Best part about life as a Bay Area band: The diverse musical community is pretty inspiring. We may not sound like a lot of other bands coming out of Oakland and the city… but we are all very DIY-focused & often looking to expand our sound with new textures.

Worst part about life as a Bay Area band: Tolls and parking tickets are a bitch, man. After shelling out this much money, we should get board seats with Caltrans and Alameda County.

First album ever purchased:
Skip: Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend
Carver: Nirvana – Nevermind
Adam: The Police – Synchronicity
Sam: Son Volt – Trace

Most recent album purchased/downloaded:
Skip: Samantha Crain – You (Understood)
Carver: Etta James – Etta James Rocks the House
Adam: Keith Jarret – Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues
Sam: Calexico – Feast of Wire

Favorite local eatery and dish:
Skip: Aslam’s Rosoi on Valencia. I love their lamb Madras.
Adam: Lo Coco’s on Piedmont Ave in Oakland. Their Maria and Suzanne pizzas so good.
Carver: Brown Sugar Cafe in Emeryville. Get the chicken & waffles.
Sam: Bakesale Betty’s in Oakland. Fried chicken sandwich, of course.

The Shants
With Chadwick Stokes
Thurs/1, 8 p.m., $17
Cafe Du Nord
2170 Market, SF
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com

Cole Hardware pleads guilty in SFPUC scam

Sasha Cuttler
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Cole Hardware pleads guilty in SFPUC scam

We at the Guardian have long celebrated small businesses as more beneficial to San Francisco than large corporations, which often extract wealth from the community and use it for competitive advantage or political corruption. But a recent criminal case shows that even a beloved local business – in this case, Cole Hardware – can get caught up in shady dealings.

The District Attorney’s Office yesterday announced the settlement of a procurement scam case involving the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and employees of Cole Hardware. The company pled guilty to felony charges and has agreed to pay $51,545 in restitution to the SFPUC and $650 in court fines and fees.

“Our city will not tolerate city vendors who steal taxpayers’ money. We are pleased Cole Hardware has accepted responsibility for their role in this multi-level scheme to defraud the SFPUC,” District Attorney George Gascón said in a public statement.

Court records detail a scam that ran from April 2003 to October 2007 in which Cole Hardware and another city vendor worked with former SFPUC manager Donnie Alan Thomas – who pled guilty to his role in the scheme last year – to submit false invoices to the SFPUC for personal purchases.

Cole Hardware has issued a public statement explaining its role in the case and reasons for accepting the guilty plea: “For more than 50 years, Cole Hardware has stood for integrity, excellence and good citizenship in San Francisco. Unfortunately, a few years ago two trusted 20+ year employees submitted misleading invoices to the City, thereby facilitating a fraud by some of the City’s P.U.C. workers. At the time, Cole Hardware’s ownership was not aware of this misconduct. When we learned the details we terminated both employees, fully cooperated with the District Attorney’s investigation, adopted new internal policies to prevent future misconduct and offered to reimburse the City for any losses attributable to our employees. Sadly, after more than two years of huge expenses fighting the charges in court, Cole Hardware has reluctantly accepted a plea bargain. This is purely an economic decision. Cole remains committed to our mission of serving those living and working in San Francisco.”

SFPUC General Manager Ed Harrington noted in his public statement how important it is to take a hard line against this kind of fraud: “Today we have sent a strong message that the City will not tolerate public servants or vendors who attempt to fleece our hardworking taxpayers.”

There are six other co-defendants who have already pled guilty in this case: Donnie Thomas, Jean Quiroz, Centennial Distributors, Inc., John Rauch, Robert Mazariegos, and Vincent Padilla. There are three other co-defendants who have not yet pled guilty and who await their preliminary hearing: Miles Bonner, Tri-Delta Electric, and Elizabeth Bradford.

Live Shots: Bowie beatification at Stardust Sunday

Andrew Lam
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We made a point to sleep in late on Sunday morning to make sure we made it to church. Services started at 9:30 p.m. that evening, so we had to be sure to get our beauty sleep before putting on our Sunday best. Once ensconsed the holy space, there was singing and readings. We were repeatedly told that yes, we are loved… by Bowie. Public Works was hosting Stardust Sunday, the ecstatic services propagated by the First Church of the Sacred Silversexual, an entity devoted to the worship of all things David Bowie.

But this was no mere night of “Rebel Rebel” and “China Girl,” people. Everyone had their lyric pamphlets in hand, glitter layered on, and were sure to join in the many “wham bam, thank you ma’am!”s proclaimed between each epic musical moment. It was pure, ridiculous fun. Mancub and 8ball of the DJ collective Space Cowboys provided the hymnal Bowie beats, and a fabulous mass was had by all. 

Late that night as we walked home, we came upon a golden sign decorating the cold pavement several blocks away from Sunday mass. It served to remind us, just one more time, that Bowie does indeed love us.

For information on the First Church of the Sacred Silversexual’s next services, go here

 

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