SFBG Blogs

The Performant: A mutable feast — or, theater, buffet-style

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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If the venerable San Francisco Fringe Festival is a full-on Circus Circus-style, all-you-can-eat-buffet, I like to think of its kid cousin the San Francisco Theatre Festival  — which took place Sunday, August 8 — as more of a pu-pu platter. Tasty little morsels of performance presented in manageable, bite-sized chunks designed to whet the appetite for the main courses (the full productions) to come. I don’t know about you, but when I’m confronted with the choice between dainty nibbling, or cleaning each plate as it comes, I tend to adapt the life-is-uncertain principle and gorge myself on all the available goodies in sight.


Gorging comes more easily than restraint at all-day festivals, and it’s hard to determine before you bite whether your picks will be sweet or savory. A delectable treat, first of the day, was an excerpt from a brand new company: The 11th Hour Ensemble. The 11th Hour members’ 20-minute preview of their movement-based, Lewis Carroll-inspired “Alice” was fresh, exciting, hilarious, and completely unexpected. If their full-length production (opening September 8th) is half as charming as their highlights reel, it’ll be a don’t-miss. A quick dash across the park and into the Metreon brought me to Mugwumpin’s excerpt of their current show “This is all I Need” (playing at NOHspace through September 4). Thematically-connected to their last, site-specific “Occurrence” which took place in a semi-residential motel in June, “Need” explores the relationships between ourselves and our possessions. A particularly funny bit involved a convoluted daydream of property ownership and a barricade of berry boxes, but over too soon, it was back outside for a glimpse of No Nude Men (ha! there weren’t any! But there were zombies!). On my way to see San Francisco Recovery Theatre’s modernized take on the Amiri Baraka classic “Dutchman” (opening in October, I believe) I slipped into Ray of Light’s “Jerry Springer, the Opera” (opens September 10). Classically-trained singers reveling in lyrics about adult diaper-play, stripping, and self-abuse? Someone ought to write a show about that.

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A one-man smorgasbord of theatrical tropes and truisms, Will Franken played the Clubhouse this past weekend,serving up a bubbling stew of new material mixed in with a few old favorites. As physical as he is cerebral, commedian Franken’s act conforms far less to the traditional stand-up routine but rather to that of the highly-refined, abstracted-reality sketch comedy of Monty Python, The Kids in the Hall, and The Cody Rivers Show. Jim Carrey might be the man with the rubber face, but Franken’s whole persona is as elastic as a rubber band, and in a whirlwind 20-minute set, Franken portrayed a panoply of distinct characters from cross-dressing panhandler to schizophrenic marriage counselor, Al Gore to General Petraeus, an outsourced solar panel salesman in China to a well-meaning yet ultimately self-deluding “condom lady” in Whitechapel circa 1888. No passively-progressive sacred cow ever emerges from Franken’s contrarian logic unscathed—he’s out there gleefully hacking off the hindquarters and serving them up on a slightly tarnished platter before you can say “yoga mat.” But even late on a Friday night with no BYOB, just a taste of Franken’s mad creations left us salivating for more.

How to save Muni

Zelda Bronstein
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How to save Muni

 

Editors note: In this week’s paper, we offered a series of proposals for discussion at the community congress Aug. 14th and 15th. Here’s one that we couldn’t fit:

By Jerry Cauthen

San Francisco is a transit-first city, yet its bus system is perennially in crisis. Everyone knows Muni needs fixing—but how do we do it in a way that honors the needs of both drivers and riders, while deepening San Francisco’s commitment to sustainability and transit innovation? How do we maintain and improve service when Muni and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency face deep budget deficits and service cuts on a regular basis?

Here are a few priorities that Muni advocates have identified:

1. The discussion around MUNI must include everyone–motorists, Muni drivers and riders, neighborhood groups, business people, labor groups, low-income people, communities of color, seniors, youth and the disabled. 

2. Muni drivers should be encouraged and empowered to take an active part in the discussion.  In order to creatively address Muni’s operating problems, we must tap into the knowledge and experience of those on the front lines driving our buses.

Accountability, reasonable work rules and good performance are essential. While changes to the current work rules and practices deserve consideration, it must be recognized that Muni drivers have difficult jobs and important responsibilities that warrant good pay and proper respect—from both Muni riders and SFMTA Management.

3. An outside financial audit of the SFMTA should commence immediately.  The audit should include an analysis of how overtime is assigned, how other departments assess Muni for services, and how developer transit assessment fees and other revenues for Muni are assessed and collected. 

4. There’s been no management audit of the SFMTA since 1996.  Such an audit is long overdue, and should be performed as soon as possible.
Some other recommendations discussed at a Muni summit this spring:

A) Improving the flow of Muni Vehicles.  In September 2009, SFMTA Executive Director Nathaniel Ford supported the idea of conducting test programs to improve the flow of transit vehicles on congested streets such as Stockton Street and Columbus Avenue.  To date, there has been no follow through on this promise.  Action on this should proceed at once.

B) Priority for Light Rail Vehicles.  We must take steps to prevent trucks, automobiles, bicycles and pedestrians from slowing down light rail vehicles.  This would include pre-empted signals, signals in place of stop lights and traffic barriers, and eliminating the queues of automobiles that block the flow of light rail vehicles.  Similar steps would help facilitate the flow of buses: eliminating parking lanes on certain streets, limiting deliveries to off-peak hours and creating special parking zones for trucks.

C) Improved Customer Service. Buses will run faster and more smoothly with greater emphasis on getting riders to the back of the bus.  This would involve stationing rear door loaders to sell and collect tickets during peak commute periods. Conveniently located ticket vending machines would help speed up the loading process and allow passengers to pay fares with either credit cards or cash.
Funding and Costs

We all know that Muni must be adequately funded and efficiently run – but how?

To boost Muni use and revenues, the city can:

Work with large and small employers, apartment owners, residential developers and Municipal permitting authorities to provide incentives for people to use Muni Fast Passes and/or TransLink. 
Create a moderately priced all-day pass, and a higher cost day pass also valid on ferries and commuter bus services. Along major commercial corridors, businesses and employers who benefit from Muni should help subsidize the system — for instance, through progressive impact taxes.

Increase parking meter fees/hours/days and garage taxing rates as appropriate.  Eliminate parking exemptions, discounted all-day parking (except for neighborhood protected parking) and all other special parking privileges.

These are just some of our ideas.  We invite you to attend the Community Congress to continue this important dialogue and draft your own recommendations on transit issues. 

SFBG Radio: Crash

David Talbot
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SFBG Radio: Crash

 

This week, Johnny and Johnny talk the bad numbers and go where no one else dares–is a world wide depression headed our way?

Crash2 by jwangell

Will the Potrero power plant be shut down by the end of the year?

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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At the beginning of 2010, the official word was that an undersea high-voltage power line called the Trans Bay Cable would go live in February, supplying up to 40 percent of San Francisco’s power. This was the missing piece of the puzzle that would finally lead to the shuttering of Mirant’s Potrero power plant, which activists and city officials have railed against for years.

But February came and went. March, April, May, June, and July brought the same story, and the Potrero power plant kept chugging away. Good news for the roughly 30 employees who work there, bad news for nearby residents with lung problems.

August rolled around, and we decided to ask San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom what the deal was.

“We’re very close to making an announcement,” Newsom said at an Aug. 9 press conference, and added that he has been working closely with the head of the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), Yakout Mansour, who has “made it a priority.” Then Newsom found a way to work in something about his bid for lieutenant governor. “I made it clear that I’m not leaving till it’s shut down,” he said, and reminded us that he fully intends to leave for Sacramento in January.

Why the seven-month delay? Newsom’s press secretary, Tony Winnicker, chimed in to say the setback had something to do with how the Trans Bay Cable “couldn’t carry capacity,” which didn’t sound too good for a $500 million project. But project spokesperson P.J. Johnston sounded confident in a recent telephone message, saying work crews have identified the problem and corrected it. “We still believe we can go operational this year,” Johnston said.

Apparently, the delay resulted from a technical issue involving some faulty sub-module parts, which have since been replaced. “Hopefully this fix did the trick,” Johnston said.

“We’ve been doing testing since June with Siemens,” he added, referring to Siemens Power Transmission & Distribution, Inc., a partner in the project development. “We started a second round of testing here in August, and we should be doing so for several weeks, well into September.”

If the Trans Bay Cable goes live before the end of 2010 and the Cal-ISO finally releases the Potrero power plant from a requirement that says it “must run,” the result will be an improvement in air quality in San Francisco – particularly for residents in Dogpatch and Bayview Hunter’s Point neighborhoods.

However, the Trans Bay Cable will ultimately be bringing in power from somewhere else, and for now, the bulk of that electricity will still be generated by fossil fuels. The other end of the 53-mile, high-voltage undersea cable will connect to power sources in the city of Pittsburg. Mirant operates two major electricity generation units there — one is 50 years old and the other is 38 years old — for a total capacity of 1,311 megawatts. It sells the power to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. PG&E is seeking state approval to build two more power plants in Antioch and Oakley, located a bit further east of Pittsburg in Contra Costa County.

A report by Pacific Environment explores the potential health impacts of PG&E’s proposed power plants, highlighting the toxic landmarks that already mar the air quality in that area.

“Contra Costa County already contains more than its share of polluting industries,” Pacific Environment notes, “including over a dozen power plants, five oil refineries, several chemical plants, and many other industrial facilities. Due to the volume of pollution already located in Eastern Contra Costa, the increased emissions from these two new power plants are likely to exacerbate already-high rates of respiratory and other diseases. The report also concludes that PG&E does not need the power plants, as the utility already has more than 30 percent of the power needed in ‘peak’ conditions.”

Maybe Newsom will boast someday about being the San Francisco mayor who worked with the Cal-ISO to shut down the Potrero power plant. But at the state level, a sustainable solution is one that would leave residents of Pittsburg, Antioch, and Oakley breathing easier too.

Same-sex marriages set to resume in California

Sasha Cuttler
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Same-sex marriages in California will resume on Aug. 18, barring a higher court issuing a stay. Judge Vaughn Walker today announced that he is removing the stay against new same-sex marriages that was in place since his ruling last week that Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure banning gay men and lesbians from getting married, was unconstitutional.

“Because proponents fail to satisfy any of the factors necessary to warrant a stay, the court denies a stay except for a limited time solely in order to permit the court of appeals to consider the issue in an orderly manner,” Walker wrote.

Mayor Gavin Newsom sent out a press release announcing that San Francisco will begin performing marriages again – just as it did in 2004 when Newsom permitted same-sex couples to apply for license, setting off California’s rollercoaster ride on the issue – as soon as it is allowed to do so.

“From the beginning, I have strongly agreed with Judge Walker’s decision that the right to marry deserves equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Today’s decision by Judge Walker to lift the stay on marriage discrimination on August 18th is another victory for the fundamental American idea that all people deserve equal rights and treatment under the law,” Newsom said in the prepared statement.

Edgar Wright vs. the World

Sue Vaughan
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Edgar Wright vs. the World

Go here to read Sam Stander’s review of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World in this week’s Guardian. What follows is Stander’s complete interview with director Edgar Wright.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: What is your favorite visual effect or sight gag in all of Scott Pilgrim?

Edgar Wright: Oh my god. There’s so much … I probably have to pick, off the top of my head, I like watching the twins scene because it was only very recently finished, so I’d have to pick that.
 
SFBG: How did you originally get involved in adapting Scott Pilgrim?

EW: I was given the book six years ago, when the first volume came out, by … the producers who had kind of leapt on the rights to it before it was even in bookstores. And I really loved the book, and I thought it would be a really interesting thing to try and adapt. At that point there was only the one book. [We] began a five-year process of working on it as [author Bryan Lee O’Malley] continued to develop the books, so the development of the film and the books kind of went in tandem in places. So it’s kind of been, six years ago I was given the book, and now the final book just was released, and the film is coming out, too.
SFBG: How many books were there when the film was in production? Were there four?

EW: By the time we started filming, there were five and the sixth book had been kind of half-written. But over the course of the production, I’m thinking of various stages where we stalled for time as much as we could, so that we could get as much material as possible. But there was a decision made early on that the two things would have to be different beasts, and Bryan was certainly aware of that, and understood that that would be the case. In a way, I think he actually preferred there being two different versions, that the film could be an alternate-reality version of the comic.
 
SFBG: But you still definitely kept a lot of the details of the comic. I was curious what inspired the choice to visually represent sound effects.

EW: I kind of figured that, you know, it’s a huge part of comics that most people completely jettison, because usually comic book adaptations are striving for reality. I thought, as well, it made sense within Scott Pilgrim that the character would choose to live his life like that, that Scott Pilgrim, as a character who’s grown up on a diet of Saturday morning cartoons and gaming, would actually choose to live his life that way if he could, and have points pop up and sound effects pop out when the doorbell rings. Because the books are funny and imaginative, it was just a way of embracing that kind of imagination within the artwork. It wasn’t a film where we had to strive for absolute realism like The Dark Knight. We had a chance to embrace the bubblegum, pop art nature of the artwork.

SFBG: It reminded me in places of the opening titles to ’60s Batman, which I enjoyed.

EW: Oh, I was always a fan of that show as a kid. I like some of those ’60s comic book adaptations that would embrace the form of the comics a little more. I guess, you know, in the ’80s, with the Tim Burton Batman, comic book movies started to strive for legitimacy, but we didn’t really have to do that with this. It was something where we could actually have fun with the form.
 
SFBG: I was wondering if the characters of Shaun from Shaun of the Dead or Tim from Spaced — how you see them in relation to Scott as a protagonist, or even Ramona?

EW: I think Scott Pilgrim has some things in common with Shaun and Tim Bisley. Tim Bisley and Shaun are both older than Scott Pilgrim, and I think maybe, you know, Tim is in his mid-20s, so he’s a bit more frustrated than Scott Pilgrim is. I think Scott Pilgrim is still in that sort of stage in his life where he’s powered by blind optimism, and I don’t think he’s necessarily a character who’s been worn down by the harsh realities of life yet, and that kind of effects everything he does, in terms of — the way that he pursues Ramona is like the way you pursue a shiny object in a videogame. I don’t think he’s really had his hard knocks yet, and this film is slightly about him getting his karmic comeuppance. I think Shaun is Scott Pilgrim plus about ten years, where he’s kind of settled into a slightly more lazy, depressed state. He’s kind of given up, slightly.
 
SFBG: I was curious, who came first: Gideon or Jason Schwartzman?

EW: Gideon came first. There was a drawing of Gideon back in 2004. I remember when I first read the first book, there was the first book and the script for the second book, but then there were also sketches of all the other exes and their stats that Bryan had drawn. So he’d drawn all of them way back in 2004. But the Gideon sketch back in 2004 looks uncannily like Jason and what he eventually drew for the sixth book.
 
SFBG: In light of having just made a movie entirely referencing videogames, what do you have to say to Roger Ebert’s constant claim that videogames aren’t a form of art?

EW: I think that the film shows both the good and the bad, in a way, in terms of, there’s elements of Scott Pilgrim’s character as maybe a slightly thoughtless person in the way that he powers through life and doesn’t necessarily think about the feelings of the people around him, and even treating them sometimes like bit players on his quest, that that shows maybe a downside to being lost in the world of gaming, and he’s forced to face the consequences later in the film. But then, I think sometimes the criticism about videogames stems from games that are pretty generic, because there is art and brilliant design and amazing ideas at work in gaming and game design, and I think that that would be difficult to deny, in a sense, that there are artists as good as the people working at Pixar working in games today.

But I think that some of the negative articles that are written about games are usually referring to games that are more generic and just concentrate on violence and destruction, that are kind of Xeroxes of films. So I think sometimes there are probably some games that undo the good work done by others, maybe. I’m sure that’s part of it. And then you get videogame adaptations … that are Xeroxes of a Xerox. I can see where that criticism comes from, I don’t necessarily agree with it, because I feel like … on a design level, Nintendo has become sort of the Walt Disney for our era, in a way. I mean, the characters are so identifiable and so beloved. And you get some games that are just works of beauty and interaction, so I can see it go both ways, you know. I would hope Roger Ebert would enjoy this film on the basis that we namechecked Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, so I would hope we could score brownie points even if he didn’t like the videogame stuff in it.
 
SFBG: With the development of the characters, certainly a lot of the comedy of the characters in the comics comes from playing with various stereotypes — of the way people behave in relationships, also jokes about Knives’ Chinese heritage and Wallace being gay, and different characters coming from different contexts like that. I was curious what level of depth do you perceive these characters having, as opposed to being sort of absurd caricatures?

EW: Well, I think a lot of those people came from friends and colleagues of Bryan Lee O’Malley, because Toronto is a very multicultural society, and Bryan himself is half Irish and half Japanese. The two characters you just mentioned, I know Knives and Wallace are based on real people. In the books at least, and certainly in the film, it’s an attempt to show actually a very ethnic community. We tried, in terms of the gay characters in the film to kind of, in hopefully a progressive way, not make a big deal about it. I’m actually quite proud that we have a PG-13 rating when sometimes that has been, you know — depicting homosexual relationships is sometimes frowned upon by the MPAA, or given a more restrictive rating. So it’s actually nice in a studio comedy to have characters who are gay and out, and there’s no stigma about it whatsoever.
 
SFBG: Definitely, in the United States, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are really seen as archetypally very English comedies. Were you trying to work as a Canadian comedy director with Scott Pilgrim, or how do you see it relating to that?

EW: I don’t know, I’ve always found that question difficult to answer because I don’t really know how my sense of humor or what I find funny particularly relates to Britain, because I grew up on comedy from all around the world. Obviously, I really like a lot of British comedy, but a lot of my favorite comedy films are American. I wouldn’t like to thing that my sense of humor is completely defined by where I’m from. So I didn’t try and put a Canadian hat on to direct Scott Pilgrim. I tried to just be myself.
 
SFBG: I was curious about the music in the movie. I thought it was really interesting that you got some of the bands that it seemed like Bryan Lee O’Malley was sort of lampooning in the comic to do the actual music, and I was wondering what the process was for picking those bands and getting them involved.

EW: Basically, we had an embarrassment of riches in terms of the people that came on to collaborate. I know that Bryan had drawn Envy Adams based on a live shot of Metric in performance … but I think that most of the bands are a mélange of bands that he played with when he was in a band himself. I think some of the bands in Scott Pilgrim are kind of lampooning his own efforts, and other bands that were doing that circuit at the time. But, you know, in terms of the artists coming on board, everybody was really excited to be a part of it. And I think in the case of the bands, they got to also play a part, they’re sort of almost cast as characters in the film. I mean, Broken Social Scene’s songs in the film don’t sound anything like Broken Social Scene, and Beck was channeling his earlier, fuzzier roots. So I think people had fun playing a part rather than playing themselves. Even the Metric track that’s in the film is them almost doing a pastiche of themselves. In that case, with the track “Black Sheep,” [Metric frontwoman] Emily Haines had said it was a track they left off the last album because they thought it maybe sounded like somebody doing an impression of Metric. And so when I heard that, I said, ‘Well, that’s the song that we want!’”
 
SFBG: You also worked on the screenplay for the upcoming Tintin film, right?
EW: I did. Not for very long, sadly, because I got busy on Scott Pilgrim, but I worked on a couple of drafts, and it was very exciting to work on.
 
SFBG: Was that adaptation-of-a-comic experience similar to Scott Pilgrim or notably different?

EW: Well, different in the sense that [Tintin creator] Hergé is dead, so you don’t get a chance to — in that case, radically different, because you’re only going on his work and his life, rather than actually being able to talk to the creator himself. Unlike with Scott Pilgrim, I couldn’t call Hergé every day, so I could only go on reading those books and trying to recapture how I felt about them when I was eight when I read them.
 
SFBG: All right, anything else you want to say about the film?

EW: Go and see it in theaters.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

Te Vaka paddles up with news from the South Pacific

Andrew Lam
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Opetaia Foa’i’s mother’s ancestral home is sinking into the ocean. And he’s not supposed to talk about it. Tuvalu, comprised of four South Pacific Islands whose combined mass comes to a grand total of ten square miles, has its own language, a distinct cultural heritage like many of its neighbors. But what struck Foa’i (who was born on Samoa and raised in an islander community on New Zealand) saw when he went back was that rising ocean levels had reached up the air strip his plane landed on. So he wrote a song about it. His music and dance group, Te Vaka (which comes to Great American Music Hall Fri/13) plays music that evokes not only the ancient tales of those faraway seas, but also the fact that they matter, here and now.

“I was in the bad books of my parents,” Foa’i tells me. We’re sitting with his wife, band manager Julie Foa’i, at a table in the courtyard of the Phoenix Hotel on Eddy Street. At the start of a whirlwind two year tour, the band is a bit boggled by their first view of the U.S. on this pass through. “We’re like, is the rest of our American tour going to look like this?” Julie tells me of the group’s quick trip out for supplies in the textured Civic Center-Tenderloin area before today’s drive to Santa Cruz. Her bewilderment is fetching, but it belies the fact the band has been touring the world for the last 15 years, during which time they’ve performed in Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD world music concert series, and in a whole passel of festivals the world over.

But back, for a moment, to the whole ocean taking over ancestral home thing. Opetaia wasn’t supposed to talk about it because in Tuvalu culture to speak of the rising waters, attributed scientifically to the dissipation of the polar ice caps, was to give them power. Simply not done. But Opetaia is a man who wanted a voice. One doesn’t go from doing covers in New Zealand bars to assembling a ten-piece ensemble of talented young island musicians, touring the world with them, and even recording with Peter Gabriel without a desire to be heard.

Not that he did it alone — there is a much loved story in the group of Julie quietly writing on a piece of scrap paper at a meeting “Take this music to the world”: she continues to be a driving force behind the group’s conquests. Te Vaka’s name comes from the word for “canoe,” paying tribute to the ancients that Opetaia says “sailed the ocean in a simple canoe using the environment to guide them. These guys, they populated the islands and they carried on — that’s why there’s this thread of culture connecting all the islands.” One senses the group thrives on that connection between cultures, cannot believe their luck when a new city is picking up what they’re putting down.

The song about the rising waters, “Toko Matua,” went on “Nukukehe,” Te Vaka’s third album. Subsequent releases have turned a gaze on AIDS, over fishing in the South Pacific — as well as the joys of island life. In addition to traditional music, Opetaia cites the artists that impressed him when he first went to the New Zealand mainland as a child with his parents for formal education: Jimi Hendrix, Joan Armatrang, Joni Mitchell. The band’s repertoire is now vast enough that they can tailor shows to their audience, upbeat for dancing crowds, slowed down for the times when a more traditional sound is appropriate.

And oh, those joys of island life. 

I mention an observation from many a review I’ve read of Te Vaka’s stage show: that it is undeniably, hip-thrustingly sensual. Is that a conscious effort on the part of the band? “We actually underdo everything!” laughs Opetaia. “If they call that sensual… If you want something sexy, go to Tahiti and the Cook Islands. The ritual of shaking hips, it has sexual connotations. That’s the original meaning, courting.” He smiles. “It’s not done on purpose.” “Although the girls do wear coconut bras,” Julie tells me. Apparently, the band has a boatload of costume changes at a typical show.

Which tends to confounds customs. Between the skins and feathers of the costumes to the backbone of the group’s percussion, the traditional log drums, they tend to get hassled a bit in the airport. Not to mention those drums are heavy. “We can’t do without them,” muses Opetaia. “But I can understand why other bands have ditched them.”

That’s not all that other groups from their region have ditched, either. The couple can’t name a single other band who has successfully brought the traditional sounds to the rest of world. “We’re the first that delivered it more South Pacific than any other group,” Opetaia says. Julie adds “we’re not vaguely related to what’s happening in Australia and New Zealand, most groups are doing reggae.” “It’s really sad,” Opetaia chimes in “I thought a lot of people would follow, there’s a lot of great musicians out there — but you’ve got to have patience” to make it big on the international scene “I think that’s what they need.” Of those who have turned to the fallback of modern island cultures everywhere, reggae, he says “they make more money than we do, but we don’t do this to be rock stars.”

But that patience that he was talking about is beginning to pay off for Te Vaka. Earlier this week, the group was selected to play the after-party for the Edmonton Folk Music Festival, a packed, high energy affair in a cavernous hotel ballroom. They were under the impression they’d be background music to the crowd, but were surprised when the floor started shaking beneath them. “You see that at rock parties — but people were jumping!” says Opetaia, aglow with the way the South Pacific’s sounds are resonating far beyond the reach of even the most intrepid canoe paddler.

Te Vaka

Fri/13 9 p.m., $26

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

 

Court upholds Bay Guardian verdict

Zelda Bronstein
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11

In a dramatic victory for small independent businesses in California, the state Court of Appeal ruled Aug. 11th that the state’s Unfair Practices Act protects the victims of predatory pricing as long at they can prove that a bigger company sold its product below cost and did so with the intent of damaging the smaller competitor. You can read the decision here.

The ruling in the Bay Guardian’s case against SF Weekly and its chain owner could have lasting implications on anti-competitive conduct in the state.

The Bay Guardian sued the Weekly and New Times, now owned by Village Voice Media, alleging that the chain had systematically sold ads below cost in an effort to harm the locally owned independent paper. In 2008, after a six-week trial, a San Francisco jury agreed with the Guardian, and awarded more than $6 million in damages. Trial court judge Marla Miller then trebled part of the award. Today, with interest and attorney’s fees, the judgment is worth more that $22 million.

The Weekly and New Times appealed, arguing, among other things, that the California law that bars predatory pricing should require proof that the predator would be able to recoup its losses down the road – a nearly impossible standard that has eviscerated federal unfair practices cases.
In an unanimous decision, the three-judge panel rejected that claim and concluded that the state law was designed to protect small businesses from precisely the type of anticompetitive behavior demonstrated by the Weekly.

In the state law, the Court ruled, “the very gravamen of the offense is the purpose underlying the anticompetitive act, rather than the actual or threatened harm to competition.  The intent or purpose of the below-cost sale is at the heart of the statute, and distinguishes the violation from a below-cost pricing strategy undertaken for legitimate, nonpredatory business reasons.”

In fact, the Court concluded:

“The history of the amalgamation of statutes that comprise the UPA “teaches that a primary concern in the enactment of the UPA was the protection of smaller, independent retailers, especially grocers, against unfair competitive practices of the large chain stores.  As a contemporary commentator explained, the prohibitions added in 1933 on secret rebates and unearned discounts (now section 17045) and below-cost sales (now section 17043) ‘are designed to protect the retailer whose more powerful neighbor is attempting to drive him out of business.’ “

We’ll be covering the case in depth in next week’s paper. 

‘Love Over 60’ adds wisdom to poetic desire

John Elberling
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‘Love Over 60’ adds wisdom to poetic desire

   
    It’s fair to say that a lot of Western love poetry is biased towards youth and the male perspective. You could blame the influence of the British Romantics, who for all their unquestionable genius were essentially a bunch of horny twentysomethings who discovered that eloquence could get them laid. You could trace the prejudice back to Renaissance sonneteers, to the Greco-Roman Classics, or even to the general patriarchal bent of our culture. Politics—identity politics included—are pretty inimical to art, and you’d be missing the point if you looked at the whole corpus of poems dealing with sex and desire and saw only a conspiracy to propagate male supremacy and ageism. Still, it doesn’t make you a philistine if you point out that female voices—especially the older ones—are sometimes excluded from this particular canon.
    Last Thursday’s reading at Moe’s books didn’t explicitly acknowledge these realities, but it didn’t exactly have to. The title of the new compilation from which the evening’s content was culled—Love Over 60: An Anthology of Women’s Poems (Mayapple Press, 126 pages, $16.95)—is tough to read as anything but a rebuttal to those who see erotic verse as a young man’s game. The poems themselves dealt with love in a variety of forms—we heard lots about sexual love, sure, but there were also plenty of lines dedicated to its maternal, aesthetic, and metaphysical cousins.
    The first poet who read was Ellery Akers, an occasional writer of fiction and self-described naturalist. Akers presented two pieces, each of which combined a biologist’s fascination with minute organic phenomena with a poet’s worshipful awe of nature. In “The Naturalist in Love,” her eroticism was frank and explicit, though it always arrived filtered through a scrim of natural metaphor. Her overall ethos is pantheistic, drawing no division between her desire for her partner and her all-encompassing love of the natural world. It was vibrant, zesty, smart stuff, but Akers did employ the occasional hackneyed image, especially when she explored the erotic potential—“slide its wet petals apart”– of flowers. 
    Akers was followed by Gail Entrekin, who dished out a rapid series of witty, slice-of-life vignettes. These pieces were charming, funny, and insightful, but they were hampered somewhat by their resolute literalism. There’s nothing that says a poem has to be obscure or packed with dense figurative language, but snappy lines are generally a poor substitute for truly arresting imagery. The exception was her closing poem “Recovery Room,” a shattering but ultimately hopeful portrayal of long-term illness.
    After Entrekin, Kathie Isaac-Luke, a Registered Nurse and the editor of Caesura literary journal, took the mike. Her poems were rife with choice language—the line “I cannot walk her to the stars that guide her” from the parental ode “Blame Aphrodite” really stuck in my head. Furthermore, “Alchemy,” her wistful, joyous paean to classic cinema, seemed the most deeply-felt and potentially the strongest piece read that evening. 
    Following that, things got a little darker.  The final three poets—Rosalie Nelson, Carol Wade Lundberg, and Ellaraine Lockie—expressed degrees of sorrow and anger that hadn’t been present in the preceding poems. This sometimes got a little heavy-handed, particularly in Lockie’s “Translation of a facelift.” She made up for it, though, with her wonderfully ambivalent dialogue “Wings Clipped,” which managed to combine an amusing intergenerational exchange with an overwhelming sense of existential dread. Wade Lundberg’s “Under a Thin Film of Ice” was similarly ambivalent, and ended up being one of the evening’s highlights.
    If the reading—and by extension the collection—had a unifying theme, it was experience. Taken together, the poems implied that a lifetime of love and loss doesn’t make the palate jaded, but instead makes it richer, allowing for an appreciation of subtle hues and undertones. There’ll always be a place in poetry for callow young men, but if Love Over 60 is any indication, perhaps they could benefit from occasionally listening to their elders. 
   

Former employees saw problems coming at Planned Parenthood Golden Gate

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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48

This week’s announcement that Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) was severing ties with Planned Parenthood Golden Gate (PPGG) came as no surprise to some former employees, who have for months been trying to sound the alarm that the chapter was being mismanaged, had major financial problems, and was in a steep decline that could threaten important reproductive care services that low-income women rely on.

A former PPGG employee with knowledge of the organization’s internal affairs described a longstanding pattern of financial mismanagement when former president and CEO Dian Harrison was at the helm. There was widespread concern about spending on expensive marketing campaigns and lavish functions, the person said, and a high level of employee turnover and discontent.

Warning signs of financial difficulties surfaced at least a year ago. Dan Cohen, a spokesperson of the Packard Foundation — a major donor to PPGG — told the Guardian that Packard awarded PPGG a 12-month, $30,000 “organizational effectiveness” grant, which will expire in September. The grant “allows an organization to select a talented, external provider to help them think through some of these challenges,” Cohen explained. The Packard Foundation also awarded a 3-year grant for general operating support for $800,000, which will also expire next month.

Another former employee told the Guardian that she would love to discuss internal problems, but was made to sign a confidentiality agreement upon leaving the organization.

Therese Wilson, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Golden Gate — who took over PPGG when Harrison left last year on medical leave — did not return repeated calls seeking comment.

An internal PPGG document provided to the Guardian displays the agency’s on-hand cash reserves as compared with other affiliates, suggesting that the reserve ratios were at or below the minimum required by the national Planned Parenthood federation for all but one year from 1998 to 2007 — and well below that of other affiliates of similar size. That is a key requirement for meeting accreditation standards.

When we asked Elizabeth Toledo, a PPFA representative, about this apparent pattern she said she could not comment because she had not seen the documents. She also said the accreditation reviews were confidential. “Understanding the true financial picture for health care providers takes a very in-depth evaluation,” Toledo said. “PPFA and PPGG were working together over the last few years to resolve fiscal challenges.”

Despite delays at the state level in awarding nonprofit funding and the loss of support from the national organization, Toledo and a union representative for PPGG employees both said they believe the clinics will continue serving patients under a different name.

“They plan to stay open, and employees are planning to stay,” said SEIU Local 1021 representative Sarah Sherpun-Zimmer, who has been a union rep for PPGG employees for the last two years. “Folks are really happy working there and they feel like it’s going in a good direction.”

PPGG operated eight clinics, which will lose their Planned Parenthood accreditation Sept. 3, effectively severing their ties to a trusted entity that thousands of low-income women rely upon for birth control, abortion procedures, and other forms of reproductive health care. PPGG operates clinics in San Francisco, Alameda, San Mateo, Sonoma, Marin, and Mendocino counties, serving about 55,000 women per year.

Roughly 92 percent of the clients they serve live at or below the federal poverty line, according to PPGG’s 2008 annual report.

Planned Parenthood affiliates Mar Monte and Shasta Diablo are in the process of hatching plans for taking over some of the eight affected clinics or otherwise growing their own operations to cover any gaps in service area, according to Toledo. She said neighboring affiliates are in a position financially to be able to cover a wider territory and added that they have been in “expansion mode,” adding new clinics over the past couple years.

“It’s unusual to have a disaffiliation,” she said. “But it’s not unusual for national committees to have a reallocation of service area. That part is well-practiced.” Toledo added that “Every effort possible will be made” to ensure continuity of care.

Nima Maghame contributed to this report.

Immigrant advocates accuse ICE of “pattern of dishonesty”

Mary Magee
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13
Immigrant advocates accuse ICE of “pattern of dishonesty”

A coalition of national civil rights organizations held a August 10 press conference to discuss recently released internal government documents that they say reveal “a pattern of dishonesty” regarding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)  “Secure Communities” (S-Comm) program.

Representatives with the National Day Laborer Organization Network (NDLON), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law noted that though ICE officials have declared their intention to expand S-Comm into every jurisdiction in the country by 2013, information about the program has been scarce, and development of its operational details has been shrouded in secrecy.

The coalition also pointed to a July 27 letter that U.S. Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren recently wrote to Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder as evidence that ICE led Congress to believe that SecureComm is a voluntary, and not a mandatory, program.

In her letter, Lofgren, who is chair of the House of Representatives’ subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law,  asks for “a clear opt-out procedure for municipalities that do not wish to participate in the S-Comm program.”

“As we discussed, Secure Communities is a voluntary program that relies upon the resources of both of your agencies [referring to DHS and DOJ] in order to provide State, local, and federal law enforcement agencies with information related to the immigration status of persons booked into our nation’s jails and prisons,” Lofgren wrote.

“I am aware that some local law enforcement agencies have expressed concern that participating in Secure Communities will present a barrier to their community policing efforts and will make it more difficult for them to implement a law enforcement strategy that meets their community’s public safety needs,” Lofgren observed.

“There appears to be significant confusion about how local law enforcement agencies may ‘opt out’ of participating in Secure Communities,” Lofgren continued.

Lofgren notes that staff from her House subcommittee were briefed on this program by ICE and were informed that localities could opt out simply by making such a request to ICE, while subsequent conversations with ICE and FBI CJIS added  to the confusion by suggesting that this might not be so.

“Please provide me with a clear explanation of how local law enforcement agencies may pot out of Secure Communities by having the fingerprints they collect and submit to the SIBs checked against criminal, not immigration, databases,” Lofgren concludes.

To date, Lofgren has not received a reply, a press spokesperson in her office confirmed.

Immigration rights advocates charge that S-Comm, which is operative in 544 jurisdictions in 27 states, functions like the controversial 287(g) program and Arizona’s SB1070, making state and local police central to the enforcement of federal immigration law.

They say the program, which automatically runs fingerprints through immigration databases for all people arrested, targets them for detention and deportation even if their criminal charges are minor, eventually dismissed, or the result of an unlawful arrest.

After reviewing the recently released ICE documents and other information, advocates for NDLON said they found evidence supporting their claim that ICE has been dishonest with the public and with local law enforcement regarding S-Comm’s true mission and impact.

“While ICE markets S-Comm as an efficient, narrowly tailored tool that targets ‘high threat’ immigrants, it actually functions as a dragnet for funneling people into the mismanaged ICE detention and removal system,” stated a NDLON press release. “ICE’s own records show that the vast majority (79 percent) of people deported due to S-Comm are not criminals or were picked up for lower level offenses.”

They also charge that the program serves as a smokescreen for racial profiling, allowing police officers to stop people based solely on their appearance and arrest non-citizens, knowing that they will be deported, even if they were wrongfully arrested and are never convicted.

“Preliminary data confirms that some jurisdictions, such as Maricopa County Arizona, have abnormally high rates of non-criminal S-Comm deportations,” NDLON continued.

 “Lastly, the impression ICE fosters that S-Comm is not mandatory and jurisdictions can opt out is riddled with questions,” they conclude.

 “These records reveal a dangerous trend,” said NDLON Executive Director Pablo Alvarado. “This program creates an explosion of Arizona-like enforcement at a time when the results have proven disastrous. Thanks to S-Comm, we face the potential proliferation of racial profiling, distrust of local police, fear, and xenophobia to every zip code in America.”

 “S-Comm co-opts local police departments to do ICE’s dirty work at significant cost to community relations and police objectives,” said CCR attorney Sunita Patel. “Without full and truthful information about the program’s actual mission and impact, police are operating in the dark. The bottom line is that thrusting police into the business of federal immigration enforcement isn’t good for anyone.”

 “ICE is racing forward imposing its S-Comm program on new states and localities every day, without any meaningful dialog or public debate,” warned Bridget Kessler, a teaching fellow at the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

The three organizations vow to litigate for the release of more data and records “to uncover the truth behind S-Comm and other ICE efforts to draft local police into immigration enforcement.”

Also speaking at the Aug. 10 press conference was San Francisco Sheriff Mike Hennessey. Earlier this summer, Hennessey blew the whistle on S-COmm, after attending a meeting in May at which ICE revealed it was going to switch the program on in San Francisco in June.

But despite Hennessey’s efforts to opt San Francisco out of the program, S-Comm went live June 8 in San Francisco.

“We were told we could opt out through the State Attorney General’s Office,” Hennessey said, recalling how AG Jerry Brown’s office told him that San Francisco could only opt out through the feds.

“We were given the run around,” Hennessey said.“It’s a program forced upon individual local law enforcement agencies, no matter what the local community wants,” Hennessey said.

Henessey worries that the program is having a chilling effect on community policy efforts.

“Witnesses and victims of crime won’t come forward for fear they will be deported,” he said.

Henessey notes that ICE has detained folks who were arrested for minor traffic violations, and whose charges were subsequently dropped, as well as folks with no criminal records.

“My Board of Supervisors, my Police Commission and my mayor have said they would rather not participate in deportations at that level,” Hennessey noted.

He worries that the program could be expanded to include employment record checks.

“They say the program won’t be used for civil purposes, but it’s already being used for federal employment checks,” Hennessey said. “This further isolates minority communities from the mainstream.”

Si se puede, making a difference: El Tecolote turns 40

Andrew Lam
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0

It was with relish that I awaited my interviews with El Tecolote’s managing editor, Roberto Daza, and its founding editor Juan Gonzales on a homey couch in the paper’s modest office on 24th Street. Being a community journalist, it isn’t every day that you are able to check out the digs of another community newspaper – particularly one with as storied a history as the Mission’s bilingual go-to for news on social issues that affect the historically Latino and working class neighborhood. El Tecolote is celebrating forty years of activist journalism this month, kicking off with an opening reception tonight (Wed/11) at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts of an exhibit featuring their extensive photo archives. 

I’m stoked to be there, so I chill and savor the feeling that good work is being done around me. Reporter-advertising manager Francisco Barradas’ computer keys are nearly the only sounds in the office, though passing staff assure me that this is a deadline day in the office. He answers the phone and speaks alternately in Spanish and English, most often a genial mixture of the two. Calendar editor Alfonso Texidor stalks past me multiple times, his distinctive hat and cane combo instantly marking him as one of the driving forces of last week’s popular literary review issue as identified by Eva Martinez, executive director of Accion Latina, the organization which houses Tecolote. 

The office itself reads – as many of the headquarters of these rags will do – like desks and computers framed by a collection of events past. Owls (the newspaper’s namesake) stare at me wide-eyed from the corners. An owl cuckoo clock here, a mascot originally meant to frighten birds away from property perched on a potted tree next to the couch there, a kite on the back wall, the reception desk lined with a cache of ceramic hooters. The walls have a bright collection of silk-screened posters announcing EL Tecolote fundraisers going back through the history of the paper, some which announce that proceeds will also go “for Chile democratico.”  

Later, after it is determined that rush hour traffic and recent hip replacement surgery have held up Daza and Gonzales, respectively, we settle on phone interviews all around. Still sitting on the couch in the office, I ask Gonzalez which stories he is most proud of looking back on the past forty years. His three examples are all moments in which his paper made a difference in the lives of Missionites. In the ’70s, a woman came to them who had recently lost a child. She had gone to SF General Hospital complaining of stomach pains and bleeding, but with no Spanish translators on hand, staff sent her home, told her to lay down. When she returned with her English-speaking son later that day they admitted her, but it was too late: she miscarried soon thereafter.

“We jumped on it,” Gonzales tells me. The newspaper discovered woefully inadequate translator staffing levels at General, and impelled their readers to act. “We mobilized the community,” says Juan. The hospital was forced to sign an agreement with activists from the neighborhood to guarantee translators on duty – the first such accord between a hospital and a community group. El Tecolote pursued similar campaigns with telephone emergency services in the ’80s, and more recently has supported tenants in a fight against Mission Housing Development when they attempted to raise rents in one of their apartment buildings.

“It’s one thing to make people see a newspaper around all the time. It’s another one to speak to the heart of the community,” Gonzales reflects.

From the get, the creation of El Tecolote was meant to give voice to those whom it was elusive. Gonzales started the paper as an off-shoot to his work in SF State’s fledgling Ethnic Studies program, itself born of the Alcatraz occupation and its own student strikes. A recent journalism graduate from the university himself, Gonzales was tapped by the administration to put together a course syllabus that analyzed media coverage of Latinos and taught ways to talk about issues that affected the population. He called it La Raza Journalism, but also craved a place where his students could get on the job experience.

So he held a series of fund-raising events, including an amateur talent show which drummed up the necessary $300 to publish the first El Tecolote on August 24th 1970. And then some. “At that time $50 was enough to publish 500 copies,” Gonzalez muses. His team chose to locate its office in the Mission, in a space donated by non-profit organization Centro Latino on 25th Street and Potrero to avoid reliance on university funding, which they felt could be pulled at any time. Already known to the community from his efforts in covering the area for the SF State paper, Gonzales and his paper were off and running.

“The bottom line is, the paper had to reflect the neighborhood,” he tells me. In those early days, the issues weren’t that much different than now: housing, tensions with the police, immigration, bilingual services and education, schools. They took care to represent all the facts of the controversies. “Don’t be afraid to ask the other side their reaction,” Gonzales says. “They could say things that help the cause.” El Tecolote, running as it does today 90-95% on the efforts of dedicated volunteers, also published pieces on young artists, many of which were at the center of an exciting new push for Latino-centric art forms. “We had to reflect how the cultural movement was really expanding,” its founder tells me. 

Nowadays, the paper experiences its share of the challenges to adapt that are facing most print publications. “We’ve had to make concessions: the quality of the paper we print on, the number of pages,” says Daza, who at a chipper 25 years old comes to the paper as another recent SF State grad. He first entered the Tecolote offices two years ago on a field trip as part of a technical writing class, and tells me the paper’s website upgrade earlier this year was much needed. “The running joke prior to that was that we didn’t want to tell people we even had a website.” 

Which is not to say that they are moving past the paper page. “For us,” Daza says “the print edition represents something completely different. It’s for people that don’t have an iPhone, don’t spend a good percentage of their lives online. That’s the kind of people we want to provide for.” Many community members still use El Tecolote to learn a language – initially, scanning the English articles for new vocabulary words, but more recently, with changes in the neighborhood’s demographics, checking out the Spanish pieces to develop new skills in español.

Daza makes it in after the majority of our interview, in time before his staff meeting to escort me through the paper’s recently organized binders of historic photos (from which we selected this piece’s graphic of Cesar Chavez’s visit to the paper’s office for a press conference on a UFW boycott). We flip to it past shots of a struggle immortalized. Demonstrations in the playgrounds of schools, under murals who this week I will recognize as I fly past them on my bicycle. Fists raised, hands extended, changes wrought – and it’s all there in El Tecolote, typed down in two different languages so that we can remember that this neighborhood has a past (and present, and future) worth remembering. 

“El Tecolote is all about making a difference in the struggle for social change,” says Gonzales, who will reassume the managing editor position when Daza heads across the Bay to pursue a graduate degree at UC Berkeley this fall, tells me. Safe to say the paper has, and will continue to do so, si se puede.

 

Imagining the Mission: El Tecolote’s 40th anniversary

Wed/11 6:30-9:30 p.m., $5

Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts

2868 Mission, SF

(415) 643-2785

www.missionculturalcenter.org 

 

Hot sexy events August 11-17

Andrew Lam
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0

It’s nice to see a couple of homegrown boys cinching their ties to their community. Dan and JD of Two Knotty Boys make some of the city’s more evocative bondage scenes – scroll through the galleries on their website for various visions of unrestrained restrained beauty, like two Manic Panic red heads impelled by the boys’ handiwork to assume an intimate “cuddle.” It’s this kind of imaginative use of ropes – they also do a series of “decorative bondage” in which corsets, bras, panties, and even dresses are crafted onto models by tightly pulled knots and loops – that make them the perfect teachers of the art. Couples especially are invited to their class at Good Vibrations this week (Wed/11): just remember to bring your ropes and you’re bound for inspiration.

 

 

Sex Bondage

Learn how to tie in furniture, vibrators, and more to your rope bondage play in this two hour workshop by SF’s good old boys, Dan and JD. The class is meant to be a serious, but humorous look at how you can aspire to the Two Knotty Boys’ level of corded mastery.

Wed/11 6-8 p.m., $25-30

Good Vibrations

1620 Polk, SF

(415) 345-0500

www.goodvibes.com


Sex Tapes for Seniors

Finally, a stage show about how those hot feelings south of of your control top don’t cease when you hit 60. Mario Cossa’s world premier plot takes us to Shambala Springs retirement home, where a group of sexually diverse couples are filming hot, wrinkly scenes of lust – to the chagrin of their peers and adult offspring. Not explicit by any means, the show is nonetheless a comic exploration of the bump and grind in the golden years.

Fri/13 (through Sun/22) 8 p.m., $25-40

Victoria Theater

2961 16th St., SF

(800) 838-3006

www.stfsproductions.com


San Fran Sexy Zine Launch

Before Kinky Salon takes a well deserved six week break, won’t you grab your partner (or single girlfriends) and head to the party for their new printed smut, San Fran Sexy? Here’s hoping it’s as successful as the city’s last licentious launch, the trans mag Original Plumbing. The first hour of the night celebrates the zealous zine and afterwards all the carnal cavorting the party is known for takes center stage. Ah, illiteration… 

Sat/14 9 p.m., $25 members only

Mission Control

2519 Mission, SF

www.kinkysalon.com


Iron Dom Contest (Updated: Correction! The Iron Dom competition is actually scheduled for Sat/20)

We’ve all played this game before. You’re stuck on a desert island – what three things would you need to create the bondage scene of your dreams? If you’re a candidate for top honors in Domina’s contest this Saturday, you won’t be picky – the point is to craft the best possible BDSM situation you can from what you’re given in terms of props (DIY castoffs) and partner (enthusiastic, yes. Your gender/sexual proclivity of choice, possibly not). Do you have what it takes to be the next Iron Dom? Kitchen Stadium – er, the Citadel is waiting to see. All proceeds go to the Somona County AIDS Food Bank.

Sat/14 doors 2:30 p.m., contest starts 5 p.m., $20-25

SF Citadel

1277 Mission, SF

(415) 626-1746

www.sfcitadel.org


Big

Stroke your hand seductively over your load of love – that belly’s getting you laid tonight! Particularly if you lope over to The Stud, where South Bay’s hottest chubby chase session is relocating for the evening. Skinny minnies out there? Remember, the bigger they come, the harder they come. Get you a fattie, stat.

Sun/15 6 p.m.-12 a.m., 

The Stud

399 Ninth St., SF

(415) 863-6623

www.studsf.com


Use Your Words: Hot and Sexy Talk

Can Tina Horn talk you into sexy time? The queer BDSM porn star would sure like to try. And it’s only right to let her – after all, Horn is facilitating this workshop so that you beatimous self can grab their reins of your voicebox to take your love making to new heights. It’s called dirty talk, y’all: get some.

Tues/17 6-8 p.m., $25-30

Good Vibrations

1620 Polk, SF

(415) 345-0500

www.goodvibes.com

Unions sue to block Adachi measure

Mary Magee
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53

Five city-employee labor unions have filed suit to stop  Public Defender Jeff Adachi‘s “Sustainable City Employees Benefits Reform Act” (or Prop. B) from making it onto  the November ballot.

The San Francisco Fire Fighters Local 798, International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers Local 21, Service Employees International Union Local 1021, the San Francisco Municipal Executives’ Association, and the San Francisco Police Officers Association filed suit August 10.

In a press release, Adachi said the suit attempts to discredit the Civil Grand Jury, the Department of Elections, the City Attorney and the rights of over 77,000 San Franciscan’s who signed the petition and, of course, Adachi himself..  

“The law has very specific requirements that must be followed in order to receive the approval from the Department of Elections for a measure to qualify for the ballot,” Adachi observed. 
“The democratic process by which the Sustainable City Employees Benefits Reform Act was approved both by the City Attorney through granting title and summary to the petition and by the Department of Elections when the signatures of 49,178 San Francisco voters were verified and accepted,” Adachi continued. “We as Americans have the freedom afforded to us by the Constitution to have our choices heard at the ballot box and the taxpayers have the right to address how their tax dollars are spent in San Francisco without interference from special interest groups.”

Representatives from the unions filing suit have yet to return my calls, but I’ll update this post, when they get back to me on the Adachi amendment, which is shaping up to be the hottest political potato on the November ballot.

The Photo Issue: Parker Tilghman

John Elberling
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0

SFBG Your website is more cunningly organized than a lot of photographer’s or artist’s sites. How does it relate to your photography?
Parker Tilghman I feel like my site isn’t fully representative of what I’m doing now. I’m in this weird exploration phase. I’m enjoying the medium as much as possible while I have access to tools at CCA. My website began as a creative outlet and a place to show my photography. It started with nightlife photography, but I got over it quickly. Once school started I didn’t have time to go out and I stopped working in that way to focus on my studies.

SFBG One of my favorite photos from the “night.” series on your site is of Fauxnique.
PT That was from [her show] Faux Real. It was such a cool number. I took that the last or second to last night [of the run]. I just happened to be in the front of the stage, and I was really excited when I got it. I showed it to Marc [Kate], her husband, and he was all about it. She’s so talented and I’m really thrilled about the success she has been achieving. 

SFBG “night.” also includes a photo of Veronica Klaus.
PT Veronica is probably one of my favorite women in SF. She’s amazing – so sweet and full of life and energy. One photo of her is from a big gay wedding that I shot shortly after Prop 8 passed. The other is of her and Joey Arias. Joey and Veronica were co-hosting Tingel Tangel that month. We did it really quick and dirty in the downstairs basement of The Great American Music Hall. The people behind the event wanted it to be done that night and I said if I was going to do it I wanted to take the time to do it right. I chose a spot and I set up all of my lights, but didn’t realize I was in front of the bathroom – someone took a major shit and it smelled really bad. Joey had to go on in about 15 minutes. I shot a few rolls and prayed for the best. It was classic.

SFBG Some of the bedroom and intimate interior shots from “lover no longer.” remind me a bit of the Boston School – Mark Morrisroe, David Armstrong, Nan Goldin – but they are mixed with outdoor scenes. Can you tell me a bit about that series and its subject?
PT He was this boy I was absolutely in love with. One of the first I felt I was actually in love with. He was living in NY and in graduate school at Columbia getting his MFA. Our time together was intense and very in the moment. He was here this time last year visiting me for a few weeks. The interior shots were taken in my apartment with a Polaroid Spectra. I would shoot without the flash in order to get these blurry, creepy images. I realized after we broke up that I never had a full head-on shot of him. It made sense because he was so far away both literally and emotionally. I was totally heartbroken but I  didn’t want to be a bitchy queen about it. I wanted to honor him in some way.
There are a lot of nude portraits of boys I don’t have on my site because everyone does that now. I have a beautiful collection of images of boys that I’ve encountered throughout my life. The images are a reminder of those relationships, sexual and otherwise.

SFBG You’ve made triptychs, and also series’ of related but varying images. What attracts you to that approach?
PT I’m obsessed with repetition – and how it can express obsession. People are drawn to form connections when they are confronted with multiple images in the same work. I’m interested in forming a communication between the images, whether they have something visually in common or not. In life I tend do the same stupid things over and over again. The repetition is an aesthetic choice, but it also forms a rhythm I become comfortable with and great things happen in that cycle.

SFBG What was it like to photograph Daniel Nicoletta?
PT I love Danny. He is such an idol to me and when I met him I was starstruck in a way. I think about it now and it seems silly because he is such a sweet man. I grew up queer in a small town in South Carolina. He was one of the first gay photographers I learned about through reading about Harvey Milk. He doesn’t have the recognition as a photographer that he deserves outside of SF. I feel that he has that potential now and I am very excited for him.
We spent a wonderful day together at Danny’s house when I photographed him. Danny was a bit of a bossy bottom — he tried to tell me what to do, but soon realized what he was doing and said, “I’m sorry, I’ll stop.” That image was the one moment where he let his guard down. He was fantastic and I still remain in close contact with him.
Recently, I’ve been spending some time with Arthur Tress. I photographed him last week. These photographers are coming into my life and I feel I can learn so much from them. They were there through the AIDS crisis and the Stonewall riots. They paved the way for me to make the work I am doing now.

SFBG “RGB” might be the most striking series on your site, both because of the colors and the sudden bursts of motion.
PT The original installation is on three separate televisions screens turned on their sides.  It’s fully dimensional and takes on aspects of 2-D, 3-D, and 4-D based mediums. They’re animated GIFS. I took the photographs with a stereoscopic lens and compiled the images in Photoshop to make them 3-D.
Stereoscopic imagery has been around since photography’s inception and you can still get these cheap stereoscopic lenses from Japan for about $100. At the time that I was heavily immersed in color theory- and constantly thinking about red, green, and blue. I wanted to play with those ideas on top of underlying notion of digital identity.

SFBG “marshall’s beach.” is different from some of the other series’ on your site in that it isn’t populated. Instead, you photograph detritus. It made me think of a time when I was on a beach with friends in Bolinas, and everyone was shell collecting, and I was most attracted to this bright yellow plastic bottle of Joy dishwashing liquid.
PT That series is more or less a placeholder for my site, although I do find the images to be beautiful. I was out at the beach on my birthday. The best thing I found in the sand that day was a deflated Mylar “Happy Birthday” balloon. I came back three days later and it was still there, so I kept it.
I saw this shirt on the pathway down to the water and thought, “Oh, someone’s cruising.” I walked through the bushes, but they were gone. All that was left were their condoms and lube on the ground. I began noticing that all the trash was in pairs around the area. I don’t think I’m the kind of photographer who just goes out and shoots rolls of film in hopes of finding something. That’s a boring task to me, but I like the idea of queer documentation in whatever form that takes.

SFBG That story makes me think about the waterfront and different photographers who’ve used it either to create gay photography, or documented gay life in that kind of zone. Alvin Baltrop did so in the Piers in New York, and his photos are also now a record of a Manhattan that doesn’t exist anymore. The other night I met an artist, Doug Ischar, who has a book of mid-1980s photos [Marginal Waters] of a sunbathing and cruising space in Chicago that also is no longer around. SF Camerawork had a show devoted to Alan B.Stone, who took pre-Stonewall photos of the Montreal coastline. And here in SF Denny Denfield was doing 3-D physique photography on the beaches.
PT Have you see Arthur Tress’s images from the New York piers in the ’70s? They’re fucking stunning – beautiful and violently sexual. He wouldn’t have sex with his subjects. The way he got off was by photographing these beautiful men in sexy, compromising spaces.
I like work like that because, while I’m a pervy gay boy at heart, I don’t want sex to be the overwhelming projection. I love Mapplethorpe, but more for the technical perfection and beautiful tones achieved in his prints than the blatantly sexual subject matter. I don’t want overwhelming sexuality to be present in my work because some people can’t get past it and it hinders further exploration.
For me, it’s more about having subtle undertones that are a little uncomfortable. You can feel its presence, but aren’t quite sure what is off. I think the magenta in the “Untitled.” color series is a good example of that. It has this underlying tone of strange eroticism that isn’t immediately recognizable.

SFBG There’s a specific alphabet on your main page, and around half of the letters aren’t attached to images yet. What’s to come?
PT I’m going to fill them up eventually. Knowing me, in a year’s time the entire site will be completely different. I like the format – if you get it, you get it. I live in the Tenderloin and within two days I got called a faggot twice walking down the street. I’ve been called a faggot my whole life, but I was in my own fucking neighborhood and I was just wearing boots and flannel! I didn’t even look that gay. I wanted to do something with the word ‘faggot’ and liked the idea of removing it from the alphabet completely. I like making people confused.

SFBG The image in the Guardian’s Photo Issue comes from “untitled (transparencies).” Can you tell me a bit about that series?
PT For this project I spent hours in the darkroom and sometimes forgot to eat or sleep. For me, it always starts as an aesthetic choice. I know a lot of people don’t like that idea, but I need something beautiful to work from as a point of departure. I wanted to play with pure color and investigate it was much as could within the photographic medium. I knew I wanted deep, rich color. I tried a bunch of crazy experiments with my film like pushing and pulling 5 or 6 stops at a time. I began using positive transparency film and printing it on normal color paper in order to produce a negative image. They’re double-exposed and manipulated in-camera. I can’t give away all my secrets.  There were tons of problem solving moments where I thought I would have a nervous breakdown, but it was fun to run with and work through.
The images themselves are horrific if you really look at them. I was reading a lot of Julia Kristeva, especially her writings about abjection and the duality of horror. She really defined what I was doing. I think in terms of queer art and culture she has so much to say, without even realizing it. There are so many connecting channels, even though her writing can be excruciatingly painful to read.
I was excited about making something beautiful and ugly at the same time by mutilating the figures. It’s something I’m proud enough to show, which is a big thing for me.

SFBG Your portraits of women have a mix of directness and depth.
PT Nude female portraiture is something straight male photographers do all the time. Being a gay male, the sexual tension was completely removed, which makes the gaze and the pose of the women very different.
A portrait shoot with me is like a two hour-long conversation. People ask about my camera because it’s big and imposing and it freaks them out sometimes.
I was interested in showcasing these queer women and normalizing them in a way. One person told me it’s like Cathy Opie without everything that makes them who they are. She’s concerned with all the surroundings that make them queer, while I’m interested in them when they are most vulnerable.

SFBG You’ve combined photography with different forms, from installation to bookmaking. What do you like about changing formats?
PT This is going to sound arrogant, but I don’t want to be just a photographer. I’m excited by having the opportunity to change and explore other mediums to achieve what I want. I don’t even really foresee that stopping in the near future. At the same time I’m interested in refining and focusing on what I’m trying to say and getting past making things just because they’re pretty.

SFBG What’s next?
PT I’m still playing with processes and have recently begun shooting directly onto color paper with an 8×10 camera to make paper negatives. I’m creating large wall installations of several small images. The color and detail I have been achieving is simply out of this world.

D. 10 candidate Malia Cohen opposes death penalty

Mary Magee
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0

It’s relief to discover that D. 10 candidate Malia Cohen does not support the death penalty.  Confusion over her stance arose yesterday, thanks to an answer on her DCCC questionnaire that was posted at the SF Democratic Party’s website. (I noted in an earlier post that I was surprised by Cohen’s position and would include an update once I had a chance to ask Cohen about her position on this issue.)

“Sometimes it’s tricky,” Cohen told me today, making her yet another candidate to confide that they were confused by the DCCC questionnaire’s formatting.


Cohen assures me that the DCCC questionnaire now posted at the Dem Party’s site accurately reflects her opposition to the death penalty. And she’s focussing on moving forward with communicating her vision for D. 10 , following a debate that the SF Young Dems hosted at the Southeast Community Facility last night. 

“It was an excellent turnout, but you can never get your ideas out in 30 seconds,” Cohen said, noting that things got contentious when some D. 10 candidates showed up to complain that they had not been invited to participate in the debate.

“We have out migration and a shrinking African American community, so I do believe a minute could have been extended to allow folks to introduce themselves,” Cohen said, observing that D. 10 candidates Marlene Tran, Nyese Joshua, Diane Wesley Smith,  Espanola Jackson and Ed Donaldson (to name a few) were omitted from the debate table last night.

Sorry to hear that not everyone got to sit at the table. Especially, since being left out of the conversation is a recurring and historical theme in the Bayview. The truth is that there are a ton of interesting candidates in this race. And with D. 10 shaping up to be one of the most pivotal battles this fall, getting to hear the myriad of candidate viewpoints is critical for those wanting to make informed decisions when it comes to voting in November.

PayPal releases Burning Man Temple funds

Sasha Cuttler
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32
PayPal releases Burning Man Temple funds

After Guardian readers posted dozens of comments expressing outrage that PayPal froze the account of Burning Man’s Temple of Flux crew, the company today agreed to release the funds, according to PayPal spokesperson Anuj Nayar, who just responded to a Guardian inquiry from yesterday.

“It seems the power of the Interwebs still works,” Catie Magee, one of the Temple project managers, told us, saying the company contacted the crew this morning. “They agreed to release our funds and said they were doing us a big favor.”

“I’m happy we were able to get this addressed,” Nayar told us, although he says he can’t explain why the Flux Foundation’s funds were frozen or released: “Because of PayPal’s privacy policies, we can’t go into more detail on that.” But speaking generally about their policies toward groups with pending nonprofit status, he said, “We encourage nonprofits to get 501c3 certification because we are under certain regulations and we have to report that back, but I can’t go into more details than that.”

Magee said the group submitted nonprofit paperwork to the necessary state and federal agencies back in April and heard back from state officials on July 22 asking for revisions to their articles of incorporation, which they promptly returned. The Internal Revenue Service won’t grant 501c3 status until the state approves those articles, and even then it can take months longer, according sources in the nonprofit world.

Despite releasing the funds, Magee said PayPal won’t let the group continue using the account, so the Temple crew has set up alternative ways to donate to the project, which has so far fallen short of its ambitious fundraising goals. Details for donating are on the Temple’s website.

I’ve been journalistically embedded with the Temple project since its inception for a Guardian cover story that comes out Sept. 1, as well as for my upcoming book: “The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert is Shaping the New American Counterculture,” due out in December from CCC Publishing.

Daly endorses James Keys in D.6.

Mary Magee
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7
Daly endorses James Keys in D.6.

Termed out D. 6 Sup. Chris Daly announced last night via Fog City Journal that he has endorsed community organizer James Keys. Keys was Daly’s re-election campaign manager in 2006.

“James was by my side through my toughest battles,” Daly told FCJ. “While there are many good candidates in this race, James Keys best represents what I’m about – social and economic justice for our City’s most vulnerable. His campaign may not have the most money or endorsements, but he does have a special connection with the constituents that I love and the will to overcome great odds.”

Daly’s endorsement vaults Keys into the front line of candidates vying to replace Daly. 

“I am humbled to be receiving the endorsement of Supervisor Chris Daly, who has done so much for our District,” Keys told FCJ. ” It’s going to be helpful to have him with me as I work to continue his legacy.”

Daly said he will formally endorse Keys during a campaign barbecue this  Saturday at 11am in Boeddeker Park. And as FCJ founder, editor and photographer extraordinaire Luke Thomas put it, in an email about his scoop, “An interesting development, n’est ce pas?”.

 

What DCCC questionnaires reveal about Adachi reform, sit-lie and marijuana

Mary Magee
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20
What DCCC questionnaires reveal about Adachi reform, sit-lie and marijuana

The DCCC makes its endorsements for the November election on August 11. And in preparation for that crucial endorsement, candidates filled out questionnaires that are posted online, providing fodder for those interested in Jeff Adachi’s pension reform, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s sit-lie ordinance, and the legalization of marijuana, amongst other measures.

But before we get to those issues, I have to admit I was a bit surprised to see that D. 10 candidate Malia Cohen, who has already secured the endorsements of Sally Lieber, Fiona Ma and Aaron Peskin, says on her DCCC questionnaire that she supports the death penalty.

Now, to be fair, advocating for or against the death penalty isn’t the duty of the Board of Supervisors. And I haven’t yet caught up with Cohen yet to clarify why she holds this stance, (or whether it was one big typo, though I somehow doubt it). So, I’ll be sure to update this post, once I have a chance to talk to Cohen, who was busy at yet another candidate forum, when I was writing this entry. UPDATE: Cohen says she does not support the death penalty, and that she inadvertently misanswered the question. (Thanks for clearing up the mystery, Malia, and being gracious about it in the process.)

I should mention that Peskin also endorsed D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly.

And I should also note that while D. 10 candidate Lynette Sweet’s questionnaire says she supports Jeff Adachi’s pension and healthcare reform, Sweet’s campaign says that’s not the case, pointing to how Sweet said at the Potrero Hill Democratic Club’s August 2 D. 10 forum that what Adachi did wasn’t a bad thing, but the way he went about it was.

I quoted Sweet saying those very words in a previous post, and Sweet’s campaign manager Shane Mayer told me that he forwarded what I wrote about that meeting to the DCCC to clarify Sweet’s position. But Mayer got testy when I asked him about the rent, or rather the lack of rent, that Sweet, who Mayor Gavin Newsom has already endorsed, appears to be paying for her campaign headquarters at 25 Division Street (at Rhode Island).

As Beyond Chron tells it, the deal looks more than a bit fishy, and appears to be bankrolled by the Visovichs, a family with Republican leanings that supported Mayors Willie Brown and Newsom in past election campaigns.

 Mayer tried to dismiss the Beyond Chron article as a “hit piece”.

“The article focuses on only one candidate,” Mayer said. “We’re paying fair market rate, and using only a small portion of a warehouse. When we moved in, we didn’t have lights.”

But Sweet isn’t the only D. 10 candidate to come under Beyond Chron’s fire in recent days: fellow D. 10 candidate Steve Moss also took flak for receiving $500 from Andrew Zacks, the landlord attorney famous for doing Ellis Act evictions.

While on the phone with Moss recently, I asked what he thought about Newsom’s sit-lie ordinance, Moss said he hadn’t made up his mind yet.

And in his DCCC questionnaire, Moss also waxes ambiguous on sit-lie. “There’s clearly a lack of civility in certain areas of the city,” Moss wrote. “And in Bayview-Hunters Point, youth loitering can create conditions that create violence. However, it’s not clear to me that sit-lie is an appropriate response to this issue, and that it won’t result in unintended consequences. For example, sidewalks in Bayview-Hunters Point are also often used for peaceful gathering of neighbors, which is community-building and non-threatening.”

Makes me wonder what Moss and the rest of the candidates think about City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s recent gang injunction in Viz Valley…

UPDATE: I should add here that termed-out D.6 Sup. Chris Daly has just endorsed legislative aide and D.6 candidate James Keys, whose DCCC answers I’ve included in my round up of some of the candidate responses to this year’s DCCC questionnaire. UPDATE: And for all the Glen “Anna Conda” Hyde supporters, my humble apologies for omitting your candidate’s positions in my first post on this issue:

Chiu’s non-citizen voting in School Board elections
Supportive of non-citizen voting:  Adachi, Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier and D. 2 challenger Janet Reilly, D. 6 candidates Glen “Anna Conda” Hyde, James Keys, Jane Kim, Jim Meko, Debra Walker and Theresa Sparks. D. 8 candidates Rafael Mandelman, Rebecca Prozan and Scott Wiener. D. 10 candidates Isaac Bowers, Cohen, Chris Jackson, Tony Kelly, Dewitt Lacy and Eric Smith.
Opposed: D.2 candidates Farrell and Berwick, D. 4 incumbent Carmen Chu, and D. 10 candidates Kristine Enea and Lynette Sweet.

Newsom’s ban on dual office holding

Supportive: Berwick, Farrell, Glen “Anna Conda” Hyde, Meko, Enea.

“Yes. Better distribution of power,” Anna Conda said.

Opposed: Adachi, Alioto-Pier, Reilly, Keys, Kim, Walker, Sparks, Mandelman, Sweet, Lacy, Kelly, Cohen, Wiener, Jackson, Smith and Prozan.
“This measure is the result of petty politics between the mayor and the Board,” Prozan, who contributed S100 to Newsom’s Lt. Governor campaign, famously wrote on her DCCC questionnaire.

Newsom’s Sit-Lie Ordinance
Supportive: Farrell, Alioto-Pier, Reilly, Chu, Sparks, Wiener and Sweet.
Opposed: Adachi, Berwick, Glen “Anna Conda” Hyde, Keys, Kim, and Walker. Mandelman and Prozan. Cohen, Jackson, Kelly, Lacy and Smith.

Adachi’s Pension Reform
Supportive: Adachi, Berwick, Meko, and Sweet
Opposed: Chu, Farrell and Reilly. Glen “Anna Conda” Hyde, Keys, Kim, Walker and Sparks. Mandelman, Prozan and Wiener. Cohen, Jackson, Kelly, Lacy and Smith.
No position, yet: Alioto-Pier.

Legalization of pot (Prop. 19)
Supportive: Adachi, Berwick. Glen “Anna Conda” Hyde, Keys, Kim, Meko, Sparks, and Walker. Mandelman, Prozan and Wiener. Cohen, Jackson, Kelly, Lacy, Smith and Sweet.
Opposed: Chu and Farrell

No position, yet: Alioto-Pier, Janet Reilly.

Hard to tell: Moss.

“I philosophically support this measure but am concerned that its economic and social implications haven’t been carefully considered, nor its interaction with federal law,” Moss wrote on his DCCC questionnaire.

Sparks for her part just clarified that she mistakenly answered “No” on two DCCC questionnaire items: “Do you opposeprivatization of essential government services,” and “Will you oppose anti-worker initiatives that seek to undermine the ability of union leaders to carry out will of members and engage in political activities.”

“I meant to answer yes, as I explained at my DCCC interview,” Sparks said. “I was confused by the double negatives.”

While she was on the phone, Sparks also admitted that the pace on the campaign trail is getting intense with forums and meetings every night.

“David Campos, who has been a good friend since we were both on the Police Commission, recently told me, ‘win or lose, you need to schedule a few weeks off in November when the election is over,’” Sparks said.

Campos is right. To all the candidates on the campaign trial, here’s wishing you lots of energy and calm in the weeks to come. And see you at the DCCC forum.

<!–[endif]–>

PayPal freezes the finances of Burning Man’s Temple crew (UPDATED)

Sasha Cuttler
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117
PayPal freezes the finances of Burning Man’s Temple crew (UPDATED)

PayPal has frozen the account of the Flux Foundation – a large crew of Bay Area artists and burners that is headed to the Black Rock Desert this week to build the most ambitious Temple in Burning Man‘s 25-year history – claiming the right to profit from the money until the group formally attains its nonprofit status from a backlogged federal government.

“All that money is just sitting there and we can’t touch it,” says artist Jess Hobbs, referring to the tens of thousands of dollars that the crew has raised this summer through events and other fundraising drives to supplement an art grant from Black Rock City LLC that didn’t come close to meeting the project’s $180,000 budget.

PayPal — which has been criticized for its secrecy, financial manipulation, and other corporate misbehavior — was founded in San Jose in 1998 to facilitate online financial transactions and in 2002 was taken over by eBay, the company from which billionaire California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman acquired her wealth.

The company has not returned inquires from the Guardian made this morning. Hobbs and a crew that includes more than 200 other artists and burners have voluntarily worked almost every day this summer to build the Temple of Flux, a series of massive dunes that replicate peaks, canyons, caves, and other natural land forms – a project that I’ve been embedded with for a Guardian cover story that comes out Sept. 1.

“They will take the donations and their fees, but they won’t give us our money until we get our nonprofit status,” Hobbs told a meeting of the crew last night at the American Steel warehouse in West Oakland, where they’ve been working on the project since early June, before she and other principle artists PK Kimelman and Rebecca Anders left for the playa today. “And the IRS is so backed up they’re taking at least six months to give out nonprofit status.”

Hobbs and other Temple crew members are now scrambling for ways to support a difficult on-site build that will take more than two weeks to complete, including asking crew members for loans and encouraging everyone to put the word out to the community, hoping to find generous benefactors who can at least extend a bridge loan.

Burning Man crews and camps are traditionally informal groups, but given the scale of this project, the Temple of Flux crew this year tried to create a new model for fundraising and sustaining the organization beyond this year’s Burning Man event by filing the voluminous paperwork required to create the nonprofit Flux Foundation.

But now, PayPal has thrown the effort into a real state of financial flux, taking its cut of nearly 3 percent but refusing to even explain why the corporation has deemed it necessary to freeze the group’s finances.

UPDATE: PayPal has released the fund due to reader outcry. Read more here.

DCCC endorsements will test progressive unity

Sasha Cuttler
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2
DCCC endorsements will test progressive unity

When the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee convenes tomorrow (Aug. 11) evening to vote on its endorsements for the November races and ballot measures, the clout and unity of its slim progressive majority will be tested in a few high profile contests where the outcome isn’t entirely clear.

As I reported last week, progressives occupy only about 17 of the 33 seats, so any defectors from the slate that won in June could create some squirrely politics or backroom deals. Progressive supervisorial candidates Rafael Mandelman from District 8 and Debra Walker from District 6 are widely expected to get the top endorsements in their races, but Rebecca Prozan in D8 and Jane Kim (and possibly Jim Meko) in D6 each have some progressive supporters on the committee and could make a play for the second slot in the ranked-choice voting election. D8 candidate Scott Wiener, the former DCCC chair, will probably also try to get some kind of spot on the slate but is likely to be met with fairly unified progressive opposition.

The District 10 endorsement will be a free-for-all with no clear progressive consensus alternative to downtown-backed candidate Lynette Sweet yet emerging from the crowded field. Party chair Aaron Peskin has endorsed Malia Cohen and Tony Kelly in that race, but Chris Jackson, Dewitt Lacy, Kristine Enea, and other candidates also have progressive backing, so it could be tough for any of them to get to 17 votes at this point. But in District 2, Janet Reilly appears to have the endorsement locked down, despite a judge allowing incumbent Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier to run for a third term.

On the local ballot measures, the progressive majority is likely to endorse the revenue measures (a hotel tax increase pushed by labor, a transfer tax on properties worth over $5 million, and a small local vehicle license fee surcharge) and reject Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s measure to increase how much city employees pay for health care and into their pensions and Sup. Sean Elsbernd’s measure to end pay guarantees for Muni drivers (although not even progressives are feeling much love for the recalcitrant Transportation Workers Union these days).

The aggressive effort by the legal community to overturn the DCCC endorsement of Michael Nava for judge – waged on behalf of Judge Richard Ulmer, a recent appointee of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, ostensibly over judicial independence but also as a way of sucking up to judges that lawyers want to curry favor with – is expected to fail, mostly because it requires a two-thirds vote. An ordinance to ban sitting or lying on sidewalks that is being pushed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, Police Chief George Gascon, and San Francisco Chronicle columnist CW Nevius is also likely to be soundly rejected by the party.

DCCC endorsements usually carry quite a bit of weight in heavily Democratic San Francisco, getting the candidates on party slate cards and entitling them to other party resources. Any races that don’t yield a majority endorsement this week would get pushed back to the September meeting, when the DCCC will consider school board endorsements.

The fun starts at 6 p.m. at the Unite-Here Local 2 office at 209 Golden Gate Avenue.

Finally, some logic on same-sex marriage

David Talbot
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11

Same-sex marriage does no conceivable harm to anyone

EDITORIAL Judge Vaughn Walker’s historic decision overturning Proposition 8 was remarkable not so much for its conclusion, but because it has taken so long for a federal court to conclude that same-sex marriage does no conceivable harm to anyone.

The legal scholars can debate whether this particular civil rights issue deserves strict scrutiny or must meet only a rational-basis test. And everyone knows the case will eventually wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court, where nine justices will decide whether official discrimination can be legal in the United States of America.

But what Walker did was crucial — he devoted the vast majority of his 138-page decision to discussing the facts of the case. As Bob Egelko notes in a nice San Francisco Chronicle piece Aug. 8, Walker provided a forum for the public debate that should have happened around the ballot measure but never did. Prop. 8 was decided after political consultants used carefully honed messages designed to play on people’s emotions; the real facts of the matter were hardly ever discussed on a statewide level.

The facts of the matter, as the record clearly shows and Walker eloquently related, are simple: there’s nothing wrong with same-sex marriage. The ability of same-sex couples to marry has no impact on the rights of opposite-sex couples. There is also no legal reason to believe that something rooted in an old tradition — from a time when gender roles were rigidly prescribed — has, in and of itself, any validity. “Tradition alone,” Walker noted, citing a 1970 U.S. Supreme Court case, “cannot form a rational basis for a law.” Furthermore, studies show that children brought up by same-sex couples fare just as well (and in some studies, better) than children raised in traditional households.

In fact, the judge concluded, the only real reason Prop. 8 supporters put the measure on the ballot is that they don’t like gay and lesbian people: “Proposition 8 was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples. Whether that belief is based on moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus toward gays and lesbians, or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate.”

That record of factual evidence will make it harder for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals or Supreme Court to overturn Walker’s ruling. And the very essence of his decision — that no harm comes to anyone in society when same-sex couples are allowed to wed — is ample reason for him to deny any stay while the case is on appeal. A stay, which would leave Prop. 8 in effect for several more years while the case works its way through the system, would make sense only if some irreparable harm would come to some party. There’s no such harm — real or potential or imaginable — to anyone or anything except institutional and personal bigotry.

The decision demonstrates another crucial factor, one that politicians of both parties should pay attention to this fall. Courts tend to (slowly) reflect changing attitudes in society. And while the polls are still inconclusive, the demographics are not: Almost nobody under 30 opposes same-sex marriage, and every year that passes, California and the country come closer to the day when Prop. 8 will seem as silly as anti-miscegenation laws.

Both Attorney General Jerry Brown and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have asked Walker not to stay his ruling. Sen. Barbara Boxer has hailed the decision. But Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and Senate contender Carly Fiorina remain adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage. Brown and Boxer shouldn’t be afraid to make this part of their campaigns. There’s not a whole lot to bring young people to the ballot this fall, and making Prop. 8 an issue can only help the Democrats.

It’s also worth remembering that nearly every Democratic leader in the nation blanched when San Francisco, under Mayor Gavin Newsom did the right thing and legalized same-sex marriage in 2004. We warned then that Sens. Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Washington crew would wind up on the wrong side of history. And now that a judge who has never been known as a leftist (or even a liberal) has made the case that marriage is a civil right and discrimination is never legally acceptable, they ought to admit they were wrong.

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