By Tim Redmond
In case you missed it Saturday, here’s the CNN segment on Tom Ammiano’s pot decrim bill. The governor was supposed to be on with Ammiano, but he ducked at the last minute, claiming he was too busy with the Santa Barbara fires. (Funny, I didn’t see him carrying an axe or a hose.)
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Chris, Market and Montgomery
Tell us about your look: “Very greasy”
By Steven T. Jones
Paul Hogarth has announced his withdrawal from the District 6 race for the Board of Supervisors, clearing the way for Debra Walker to be the sole significant progressive candidate in that race (although Jim Meko will also vie for those votes in a district that is one of the city’s most liberal, while downtown is expected to offer up its own candidate).
In making his announcement, Hogarth — who works for Tenderloin Housing Clinic and writes for its Beyond Chron blog — cited financial reasons and the fact that his heart just wasn’t in it right now. He had come under some criticism in the Guardian and elsewhere for planning to continue writing for the blog as he ran.
Tpday’s Ammianoliner:
Schwarzenegger redecorates his smoking tent.
Palm tree out.
Lamp plant in.
Disco ball groovy.
Maria, I’m hungry.
(And so Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who has unleashed a torrent of publicity with his pioneering legislation to legalize marijuana, puts the issue into an Ammianoliner on his home telephone answering machine on Saturday, May 9, 2009.) Stay tuned, as they say.) B3
By Steven T. Jones
San Francisco financier Warren Hellman is one of downtown’s most complex and interesting figures, as I learned years ago when I worked on an award-winning profile of him. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch and spoken every few months, often about the state of the print media in San Francisco and around the country.
Earlier this year, as the Chronicle was having its problems, we again talked about the need for a more sustainable media model and he said that he planned to contact Hearst executives and explore the possibility of creating a nonprofit paper, a goal that other less connected and endowed entities have also been pursuing (including The Public Press, on whose steering committee I’ve served). But Hellman has the pull to get top executives on the phone and to generate significant capital.
Now, as the San Francisco Business Times reports, Hellman has made significant progress and says he intends to make an announcement in two months about how he plans to create a new print media presence in San Francisco.
We wish him luck and are anxious to see what his team comes up with.
By Tim Redmond
Okay, here’s the TV event of the month: Assemblymember Tom Ammiano will be discussing his marijuana legalization bill with Gov. Schwarzenegger, live on CNN, tomorrow (Sat) at 2:30 pm. The segment will be rebroadcast later in the day.
Must-see TV.
Star Trek? Campiness (Shatner! Montalban!) aside, I was always more of a Star Wars person. That said, I’ve pretty much hated the last four Star Wars movies (yep, Skyguy, that’s me admitting I saw 2008’s pitiful cartoon Star Wars: The Clone Wars, on the big screen no less) — but I thoroughly enjoyed JJ Abrams’ Star Trek (out now). Over at io9, my former Guardian colleage Annalee Newitz’s review is entitled “The Sexualization of Spock” — so that alone should tell you that Trekkie purists might have Bones to pick (har) with Abrams’ youth-gone-wild study of the USS Enterprise. But from a summer-movie standpoint, this flick has it all: explosions, witty one-liners, a fast-paced plot, entire planets in danger, rakish heroes and charismatic villains (including Eric Bana as a sarcastic Romulan), a Beastie Boys-injected car chase, and Simon Pegg. Zoe Saldana’s Uhuru — all false eyelashes and miniskirt — is underwritten to a laughable extent. But that’s pretty much my only complaint, other than I didn’t get to see the movie in IMAX. Yet.
Um, and just for fun:
By Steven T. Jones
It’s shameful that the Bay Area is home to so many of the top people implicated in creating this country’s torture program. They include the former White House lawyers who created the legal justification for the program, Jay Bybee (who is now a justice at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, located on 7th Street) and John Yoo (who teaches law at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall); top Bush Administration enablers Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, who are down at Stanford’s Hoover Institute; and our own Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who was reportedly briefed on the program when it began back in 2002 as chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
While Pelosi has so far (inexplicably) escaped serious scrutiny of the issue (just as she did about her foreknowledge of Bush’s illegal wiretapping program), there’s a budding impeachment movement against Bybee, Rice and Rumsfeld reportedly need to consult lawyers before traveling (they should really visit Spain, which I hear is lovely this time of year), and regular protests calling for Yoo’s removal continue next week when World Can’t Wait plans to have a large protest outside Boalt’s commencement ceremonies on May 16 at the Greek Theater.
Justice is coming slowly, but it is coming.
By Juliette Tang
“CHOOSE what’s right — Come What May“
Slumdog Millionaire won the coveted Academy Award for Best Picture this year, but I doubt the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had seen Come What May when they made that decision. The best sexist and preachy abortion movie you’ve never heard of, Come What May is a masterpiece that the Christian Pulse describes as a cinematic feast, literally. “I love movies that set the table with a Christian main course and side dishes of probing intellectual issues”, writes Donald James Parker. A succulent and delicious movie about abortion, my mouth is watering.
We ladies are so silly on the topic of our own bodies that sometimes it takes a strapping young protagonist like Caleb Hogan, played by the handsome Austin Kearney [Yummy, yummy! – Ed.], to set us straight. Caleb is so upstanding, his Christian compass pits him against his own mother, a morally irresponsible Constitutional lawyer who is representing an abortion clinic against the wishes of her husband and son. Maybe she didn’t get the memo that she was supposed to unconditionally obey of the men in her family? Luckily she has her son to parent her.
Baseball, abortion — “It’s all in my book”
Unfortunately, this movie wasn’t released in theaters, but you can score a DVD online, and if you apply to show it at your church, they will give you a copy for free. Forget The Cider House Rules, Revolutionary Road, Vera Drake, and Citizen Ruth. Forget Dirty Dancing, even. From now on, Come What May has the monopoly on the abortion circuit.
Text and photos by Ariel Soto. Read Marke B.’s take on Boy in Static’s single “Young San Francisco” here
Alexander Chen
Newish to the San Francisco music scene, Boy in Static already has a fledgling following. Only one of the duo could make it, but Bottom of the Hill on Wednesday, May 6, Alexander Chen used everything from a violin, ankle bells and a toy piano to play pieces that expressed both joy and melancholy.
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s look: Ramona, Market and Davis
Tell us about your look: “I feel like this outfit is me in the 90’s, but sunnier.”
By Laura Peach
Shotwell, the store, is at 36 Geary off Union Square. But for a recent Guardian article, I chatted with Shotwell owners Michael and Holly Weaver in their actual Shotwell Ave. home in the Mission, a space filled with glass jars holding a rainbow of bubblegum and chandelier candle holders. The former armory storage facility has been transformed into a wonderland — three separate concrete structures are connected by pathways where fountains trickle and faux birds roost in trees. The domestic space is fitting for this fashion-forward duo, who hope to push San Franciscan shoppers in a stylish new direction.
SFBG This place is pretty amazing.
Michael Weaver Originally, we were going to run the store out of the garage in front, but there just wasn’t enough space. And this location is so tucked away that there wouldn’t be much foot traffic.
Holly Weaver We love finding little hidden gems in neighborhoods, and we did want to create that in some ways.
SFBG But you chose Union Square instead.
HW Right. San Francisco has lots of shopping in neighborhoods, yet nowhere that is really a shopping destination.
MW Except Union Square.
HW We thought, if that’s the case, shouldn’t we be there?
More Shotwell talk after the jump
By Steven T. Jones
As the Board of Supervisors prepares to reject the Municipal Transportation Agency’s budget this Tuesday, word is the Mayor’s Office and MTA are threatening to play chicken and not try in good faith to develop a new budget before the current one expires at the end of the month (in which case, the city General Fund would pay for current Muni service levels, thus expanding the city’s budget deficit).
“We don’t have a course of action charted for if the Board of Supervisors rejects this budget,” MTA spokesperson Judson True said. When I asked whether the board would get together next week to try to develop a budget (its next meeting is May 19), he said, “Whether the MTA board convenes or not is up to the MTA board.”
And that board is made up entirely of mayoral appointees, which is how we got into this mess in the first place. The Mayor’s Office has not answered our inquiries, and MTA director Nat Ford hasn’t been available to supervisors or anyone else. He even cancelled a long-planned interview tonight on the City Desk News Hour, on which I’ll be discussing this issue tonight (7 p.m. on Comcast Channel 11).
It’s not as if the MTA and Newsom didn’t see this coming. More than a month ago, Board President David Chiu visited the MTA and said the Board of Supervisors would reject the budget if it relied too heavily on Muni service cuts and fare hikes and if it continued to subsidize other city agencies through ballooning work orders.
By Steven T. Jones
News that prosecutors have raided the administrative offices at City College of San Francisco seeking documents associated with a scheme to launder public funds into campaign contributions (a story that Chron investigative reporter Lance Williams broke in 2007, and which the Guardian has furthered a couple times) is a big deal and a long time in coming.
As the Guardian has written repeatedly over the years, City College administrators from former Chancellor Phil Day on down have always played fast and loose with the people’s money and need to be held accountable.
The DA’s investigation should cast a wide net in learning who knew about this money laundering scheme, including looking at longtime board members who enabled Day and held back the reformers. Luckily, that board now has some public spirited members, including Milton Marks, John Rizzo, and Chris Jackson (who just joined the board last year), but they’re still in the minority. Nonetheless, they need to push this board to work hard to restore the public’s confidence in this important institution.
By Juliette Tang
Here’s a sexual etymology lesson of the day. Did you know that the term “penis” is only 341 years old? English Dictionary lists as having been used from 1379-1668. Now how about that.
… And while we’re on the topic of etymology, I put together a Dick-tionary this morning for your enjoyment. This index has not yet been peer-reviewed, so please do not hesitate to inform us if there are any synonyms you would like us to add to this important list.
By Steven T. Jones
Hearst dropped the hammer on the San Francisco Chronicle this morning, laying off 20 people in the newsroom, including award-winning veteran writers Susan Sward and Jane Kay. SFist was the first up with a fairly complete list, which our sources at the Chron has confirmed is accurate.
The layoffs follow voluntary buyouts that dozens of Chron employees took, including political writer John Wildermuth. Most of the terminations, both the layoffs and buyouts, go into effect at the end of the month. Although Chron employees knew this was coming, it was still tough blow to morale at the paper.
An employee meeting to discuss the news has been set for 4:30 pm. We’ll have more on this story as it develops.
By Tim Redmond
The Marin Independent Journal is going nuts about the fact that San Francisco Sup. Ross Mirkarimi got a slot on the state Coastal Commission. The IJ wanted a Marinite, Sup. Steve Kinsey, and is blasting Sen. Mark Leno for recommending Mirkarimi (which for all practical purposes guaranteed that the San Francisco environmental leader would get the post).
According to the IJ:
Leno said it was a difficult choice and that he respects Kinsey’s experience. He said Mirkarimi offers strong environmental credentials and stressed that a San Franciscan has not held the North Coast seat for 32 years. He pointed to Mirkarimi’s leadership in winning passage of San Francisco’s ban on plastic bags. Leno said he also heard from some environmentalists who asked him not to pick Kinsey. Apparently Kinsey works harder than they would like to balance historic private property rights and local agriculture with protection of California’s coast.
You get the point — Kinsey thinks that the Coastal Commission should “balance” property rights and coastal protection. Actually, that’s not the panel’s job. The commission was set up to prevent development along the coast; it’s supposed to be really, really hard to get a permit to do anything that would limit public access or damange a pristine coastal area.
A former Sierra Club president makes the point nicely here.
But wait — the IJ isn’t done. In an oped column May 5th, Brad Breithaupt insists that Leno was snubbing the northern part of his district:
For the first time in 30 years, a Marin resident isn’t serving on the commission, even as an alternate.
Guess what? It’s been more than 30 years since San Francisco had a seat on the commission.
But that’s not the issue. The issue is that coastal protection is more important than whether someone lives in San Francisco or Marin — and on an increasingly conservative and pro-development commission, the representative from the SF/Marin/Sonoma area needs to be a hard-core enviro, someone who isn’t looking to compromise with property owners or developers.
“And I think Ross Mirkarimi has already proven he’s doing an excellent job,” Leno said. So lighten up, Marin.
By Julian Davis
(Julian Davis is on the board of San Francisco Tomorrow, an urban environmental organization. He chaired last November’s Clean Energy campaign, prop H.)
In the wake of Tuesday’s vote on the Recurrent solar power deal for the Sunset Reservoir, long time progressive activists have to ask themselves, what happened?
A widespread commitment to positive government courses through the veins of San Francisco’s political community. Whether it’s defending the public health care system against cuts or the perennial advocacy of public power, one thing that unites progressives is a belief that government should work for the people and that corporate special interests have no place dictating or writing the terms at City Hall.
Barack Obama boarding an Air Force One plane for the first time. Gay calendars from the 1960s. A New York Times article on the death of a major urban newspaper. Sundays at the Alemany Flea Market. These are some of the temporal markers at play in Matt Keegan‘s exhibition “Postcards & Calendars.” The show (reviewed in the current Guardian) could be Keegan’s postcard to New York about time spent in San Francisco. It’s also an exploration of the ways in which calendars and other time keepers can be used subversively to convey forms of experience or forge communities. Keegan is no stranger to the such endeavors: his 2008 book AMERICAMERICA (Printed Matter, 140 pages, $35) gathers interviews, old People magazines, memorabilia connected to the “Hands Across America” project, artifacts from his small-scale update of that endeavor, and unorthodox archival material into a journal that doubles as a portrait of the Reagan era. The artist and I recently sat at a petite lemon yellow table with pretty lemon yellow flowers in Altman Siegel Gallery to discuss his current exhibition.
View of Matt Keegan’s “Postcards & Calendars.” All images from “Postcards & Calendars” courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery
SFBG Many shows repeat the same execution of a single theme, over and over. In contrast, “Postcards & Calendars” has many forms and facets.
Matt Keegan The thematic of this show is definitely influenced by my time in in San Francisco, but not relegated to being here. Lots of things at play are continuations of my preexisting engagement with photography.
In terms of local influences, the calendars from the GLBT Historical Society had a tremendous impact on this show. Before I met with Rebekah Kim, the Historical Society’s archivist, I was trying to figure out how to map the ways time is not only recorded but visually structured — to think about such rudimentary things as a planner, or a calendar, or a newspaper, in terms of how days and months can be iterated.
When I saw their collection of calendars, part of the power of those objects comes from the way they integrate a social history into an innocuous form. Also, some of the calendars that have a clear porn element, also have a social element. For example, Fizeek from the mid-‘60s — the back of that calendar has notations about who shot which photo and where the photographers are based, which provides it with this added level of social exchange.
Matt Keegan
SFBG In the past year I’ve amassed a stack of the 1970s SF gay magazine Vector, so it was serendipity to come across a calendar from Vector on the wall in your show. More than with microfiche of local newspapers, I get a sense of what was going on in San Francisco at the time from a publication such as that magazine, simply through the addresses in advertisements.
MK Material that might be considered insubstantial or peripheral in terms of formal archiving and recording has a historical implication. Close to the time when I met with Rebekah, I met with Gerard Koskovich, one of the founding members of the GLBT Historical Society. He told this amazing anecdote about Bois Burke placing an ad in The Hobby Directory that is significant in helping to understand a 1940s and ’50s queer history of correspondence. Within this guide, people would reach out about hobbies such as nude sunbathing and physique photography. I am very interested in the various ways that such print-based and distributed publications were activated to serve unintended purposes. And, I love the way that the calendars, specifically, embed such a social history so that it becomes part of daily and monthly activities.
Barack Obama, 31 shades of white, newspapers as endangered species, the archivist’s life, the art of interviewing, and more, after the jump
By Steven T. Jones
The supervisors that voted 4-1 yesterday to reject the MTA’s budget were smart, deliberate, curious, and forward-looking, so it’s no surprise that the Mayor Gavin Newsom’s flack Nathan Ballard told the Chronicle that they were “failing to grasp the big picture” and causing cuts in public health and other city services.
If those cuts happen, that’s Newsom’s fault for blocking the new revenue measures that President David Chiu, who also led this charge in questioning a budget that will hurt Muni and the city, tried to create. Instead, Newsom supports this utterly dishonest MTA budget, which takes even more than the $26 million per year that voters in 2007 said they wanted Muni to have by approving Prop. A and using it to fund pet projects that he wants to claim in his run for governor.
Newsom was also the one who decided to pay MTA director Nat Ford $316,000, the highest salary in the city, and to negotiate overly generous contracts with city police, fire, and management unions that he’s now having to try to go back and undo. He lets taxpayers pay Ballard and other highly paid political operatives and lets his precious 311 call center charge the MTA almost $2 per call, which is more than it costs to ride the bus. And he wants MTA is increase the number of fare inspectors, even though that program costs $8 million and only netted $350,000 in fines. On and on it goes, as the hearing yesterday clearly highlighted.
But don’t take my word for it, go to SFGTV and watch the Budget and Finance Committee hearing, starting around the third hour when this item began. Watch Chiu respectfully and intelligently ask insightful questions of Ford that clearly showed just how bad this budget is. Then you’ll grasp the big picture and appreciate who’s really running the city and who’s willing to sacrifice this city on the altar of his personal ambitions.
Here is our monthly installment of Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Unconventional Economic Wisdom column from the Project Syndicate news series. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University, and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, is co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.
It’s time for Plan B in bank restructuring and another dose of Keynsian medicine
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
New York – As spring comes to America, optimists are seeing “green sprouts” of recovery from the financial crisis and recession. The world is far different from what it was last spring, when the Bush administration was once again claiming to see “light at the end of the tunnel.” The metaphors and the administrations have changed, but not, it seems, the optimism.
The good news is that we may be at the end of a free fall. The rate of economic decline has slowed. The bottom may be near – perhaps by the end of the year. But that does not mean that the global economy is set for a robust recovery any time soon. Hitting bottom is no reason to abandon the strong measures that have been taken to revive the global economy.
By Marke B.
Some smooth and mellow Mophono pho’ ya
Oh, the transient grunts and groans of the dance floor: Just got word yesterday that the eagerly awaited appearance of disco progenitor Nicky Siano at Paradise Lounge has been cancelled — my deep throat tells me there were sound and venue concerns (although I love the ‘Dise!). In any case, there’s plenty of other things to hold your ear-nterest and get you bangin’ this weekend. Besides my rundown in this week’s Super Ego column, below are some more earth shakers and affairs.
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He loves me, he loves me not
Wanna spoon?
I had absolutely no idea that those little plastics coffee spoons from McDonald’s were banned because of illicit uses (or perceived one, anyway.) You’d think after all this time, plastic + noses = OK. But no. In any case, snort in luxurious style with the unveiling of a perfect publicity stunt: renowned hip mens’ clothiers and artists Ju$t Another Rich Kid, Nice Collective, Terence Koh, and more have designed cute, exclusive, and most likely expensive little Bolivian helpers (watch that terrorism funding!). They’ll be giving the dish at Harput’s from 6pm-9pm tonight (expect beautiful people), and then there’ll be a kiki afterparty at Triple Crown. Don’t try to force your way into the stalls. It’s all called “He loves me, he loves me not” which brings to mind a kinky game somehow.
Thu/7, 6-9pm, free. Harput’s Market, 1527 Fillmore, SF. www.harputsmarket.com
Afterparty, 10pm-midnight, free. Triple Crown, 1760 Market, SF. www.triplecrownsf.com
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Lazer Sword + Mophono live
Lazer Sword, can you blap me for loving you?
Local future blap fave raves Lazer Sword are back from their whirlwind Euro tour with an uptempo live set to get you moving, supported by Bay man of intrinsic deep dance knowledge, Mophono at, yes, the Paradise. Put ’em up and get down, child — and let’s see if those speakers still work.
Lazer Sword at 111 Minna San Francisco 1/15/09
Fri/8, 10pm, $10. Paradise Lounge, 1501 Folsom, SF. www.hacksawent.com
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The Rod
Post-Cinco uprising
Why, yes, I DO host a wet jock strap contest. Come down to Bus Station John’s retro bathhouse disco monthly, The Rod, at Deco this Friday around midnight and see me and Hunky Beau scare up a willing and wet bevy of gorgeous, unclad alternaqueer boys — and see who’ll win $100. (No muscle queens need apply, thanks.) Then stay and dance until 3am to the best disco you’ve only ever heard sampled in other songs before. It’s fun and a little scary: frisson alert!
Fri/8, 10pm-3am, $7. Deco, 510 Larkin, SF. www.decosf.com
