Discussion of VICE mag piece, plus what i used to use as a teen
SFBG Blogs
The path to President Chiu
By Steven T. Jones
How did David Chiu, the supervisor with the least experience in government, end up as president of the Board of Supervisors? And what does it say about the role that ideology and alliances will play in a city that’s wrestling with a dire economic situation?
I have some thoughts on both of those questions, but first, let’s run through how today’s voting went down because it illustrates the political dynamics now at work in City Hall. It’s important to understand that there was a split in the board’s progressive majority, which includes Chiu, John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, Chris Daly, and Ross Mirkarimi.
After the last election in which the first four of those progressives first won their supervisorial seats, Daly (and to a lesser degree, Avalos) privately began to challenge Mirkarimi’s bid for president, for reasons both personal and political. But they pledged to vote for a progressive and began promoting the idea that one of the four freshmen get the job.
That move raised the possibility that Mirkarimi (a Green who was the top supervisorial vote-getter in November and a strong contender for mayor) might look for some moderate votes, or perhaps even support a moderate pick like Sophie Maxwell or Bevan Dufty. That was the stage that was set for today’s vote.
Parea: Wine, friends, and a burrito afterwards?
By Sarah C. Jimenez
Paréa, meaning a friend or family gathering in Greek, first came to my attention through my bar manager, who’s been raving incessantly about its small plates and organic ingredients. Hitting up the spot with my own paréa, I found that the one (and only) thing I had to rave about this place is their expensive—I mean extensive—wine list, featuring an incredible selection of high-end wines. If you’re a super bougie cork-dork who doesn’t mind shelling out hefty bills for international wines you won’t see on most California wine lists, then perhaps this is your go-to place. But for those of you San Franciscans who actually have to pay rent and eat a decent meal without going broke, you might want to grab a burrito somewhere else instead.
If you do insist on enjoying yourself at Paréa, then by all means, drink two glasses of wine as quickly as possible (while taking careful note of its exquisite taste, of course). With a smooth buzz, you might not notice that the thinly sliced beets taste kind of limp and do nothing for the taste buds. Or that the cheese plate here is good, but nothing spectacular. If homegirl from your paréa has been baby-sitting her wine for too long, then drink hers too. Feel the tipsiness! Now you won’t care that you’re eating a dry panini with a weak slab of turkey – the whole thing mostly just a mouthful of bread. To further enhance your experience, don’t ask questions when the bill comes; just peel away those Jacksons and ignore that your broke friends decided not to pitch in again. You were insistent on enjoying yourself, right?
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Joseph, Bartlett and 24th St.
Tell us about your look: “I get my clothes at thrift shops and from free boxes on the street. My favorite thrift shop is Thrift Town.”
David Chiu wins
On the seventh vote, Dist. 3 Sup. David Chiu has been elected president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Hanna, Valencia and 21st St.
Tell us about your look: “I’m all about color.”
Photo Essay: 11th Annual Hip Hop DanceFest
Photos and text by Ariel Soto
For the 11th annual Hip Hop DanceFest on November 22, eleven dance troupes graced the stage at the Palace of Fine Arts. The dance companies hailed from California, South Korea, Norway, Canada, London, and New York, showcasing a diverse definition of what hip hop dance means today. There was some tap dancing, classical music, and Michael Jackson tributes. The ages of the dancers ranged from kids to adults, but their skill and proficiency was perfectly cohesive and steeped full of energy. There was also a spectacular trio, the ILL-Abilities Crew, made up of three dancers with various disabilities who danced with such passion and talent that it brought the whole crowd to a standing ovation. It was obvious after seeing these dance companies perform that hip hop is a dance of all nations, where everyone speaks the universal language for getting your groove thang on.
Pecha Kucha: PowerPoint sprints for artists
By Susan White
Last month, an amalgamation of hipsters and art aficionados congregated at the Harlot Nightclub for a “hyperintellectual show-and-tell,” otherwise known as Pecha Kucha Night, a worldwide event created in Tokyo six years ago (and recently adapted for San Francisco Design Week).
Basically, Pecha Kucha (pronounced “pe-chak-cha” – Japanese for “chit chat”) is a function at which designers each have exactly six minutes and 40 seconds to present 20 slides of their work (giving them 20 seconds per slide). Having no control over the speed of the projector, speakers are forced to make their points quickly and effectively, moving on before the audience gets bored. Their work usually ranges from architecture to furniture – even the occasional science experiment. Anyone can sign up to speak in advance, and the events are usually free (with suggested donations).
Ragas to remember: Robbie Basho’s ‘Bonn 1st Supreme’
ROBBIE BASHO
Bonn Ist Supreme
(Bo Weavil)
By Max Goldberg
Steel-string master Jack Rose emphasizes the gravity of Robbie Basho’s playing in a brief note introducing this second-generation recording of a late Basho performance: “For me, 12-string guitar begins and ends with Blind Willie McTell and Robbie Basho.”
Basho was loosely affiliated with the “American Primitive” movement centering around John Fahey’s Takoma label, but from early on he displayed a unique voraciousness for cross-cultural transfusions. Besides adapting his last name from the Japanese haiku poet, his extended “ragas” were as likely to veer into Moorish and Persian terrain as the typical Indian-blues hybrid.
Bonn Ist Supreme is a generous helping of Basho’s searching guitar spirals, and while 66 minutes worth of his immersed playing may be too much for one sitting, dipping in piece by piece makes for lovely swimming.
In spite of coming in the midst of Basho’s much-derided Windham Hill period, the 1980 concert shows the guitarist still hard at work at compositions he wrote 15 years earlier. Dewy epics like “Rocky Mountain Raga,” “The Girl and the Lotus,” and “California Raga” are all given energetic run-throughs, and though Basho’s occasional baritone wails make for an easy mark, they’re also a powerful indicator of the guitarist’s unembarrassed zeal.
Street Threads: Look of the Day
Max, Broderick and Haight: “Dress differently.”
Street Threads: Look of the Day
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Julia, Haight and Ashbury
Tell us about your look: “I like the soldier look, boots and big buttons.”
Live from City Hall
By Steven T. Jones
City Hall is packed with people here to watch the election of the new Board of Supervisors president, both in board chambers and the overflow area of the North Light Court. The nominees (in order of nomination) are Chris Daly (who nominated himself), Sophie Maxwell (nominated by Bevan Dufty), Ross Mirkarimi (nominated by David Campos), John Avalos, and David Chiu (those last two nominated one another).
Public comment is now underway and should take awhile. Stay tuned because I’ll announce the winner as soon as there is one.
The news from Rock Rapids, Iowa
The news from Rock Rapids made the Keith Olberman show on MSNBC cable television. Watch the report below.
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Last night my daughter Katrina Perez called me from her home in Santa Barbara, quite excited, with a field report to the San Francisco correspondent on breaking news from Rock Rapids, Iowa. That would be me, of course.
She reported that Keith Olberman featured an item about Rock Rapids on his evening MSNBC cable news show. Something about a deer breaking into a bank.
She suggested I watch the show, which airs an hour later in San Francisco, and get all the details.
I did and to my surprise found that the show, which featured news on the Obamas in Washington, the worst person in the world (Bill O’Reilly of Fox News), fighting in the Gaza strip, and the latest moves to seat the senator=designate from Chicago, also featured a breaking news item from Rock Rapids.
A deer on Sunday had “busted” the window in the Frontier Bank in Rock Rapids which had “loads of money,” according to Keith. The deer tripped the alarm, got into the bank, and wandered around. The bank’s video camera caught the deer in action and Keith showed it as he commented on what the caption said was “Deer Day Afternoon.”
As to motive, Keith said the “coppers” reported that the deer was “looking for a few bucks,” attempting to “pass along fawny checks,” or “simply trying to reign in spending.” By the time the “coppers” got to the scene, the deer had fled the scene of the crime. And Keith, having exhausted all his bad puns for the night, moved on to the next item.
So, as Paul Harvey would say out of his Chicago radio station, “what’s the rest of the story?”
To me, the rest of the story was how this deer-in-the-bank incident from a small town in northwest Iowa and got to New York and on to the Keith Olberman national television show. I promptly emailed Ken Barker, the star page two columnist of the local Lyon County Reporter, to check it out for me. He said he was worried that the deer had gotten in to his account. But he said he would nail down the rest of the story and get back to me. I’ll keep you posted.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Peskin’s going-way gift
By Tim Redmond
Aaron Peskin, who has generally been a good Board of Supervisors president, gave the city a nice going-away present at his last meeting, moving to call a special election in June to look for ways to raise new revenue.
It’s got the mayor’s panties all in a wad:
Mayoral press secretary Nathan Ballard said Newsom is in the middle of sensitive negotiations with labor and business leaders that could result in broad support for any cost-cutting or revenue-raising measures, but that Peskin’s legislation “threw a money-wrench into the plan.”
In other words, Gavin Newsom wants to squeeze labor for every penny he can get, and cut as much as possible out of the city budget — and the prospect that all that blood on the floor might not be necessary, that there’s actually a chance of bringing in new revenue, screws up all of his plans.
Too bad. There’s no way to cut $500 million out of the city budget without losing very essential services. Peskin did the right thing; at the very least, new revenue ought to be part of the budget discussions.
MTA tries to help cyclists by removing bike lanes
Photo of Market and Octavia intersection by Kate.
By Steven T. Jones
San Francisco’s bicycle community is baffled by last night’s unanimous Metropolitan Transportation Agency vote to seek the removal of bike lanes at the intersection of Market and Octavia, where more than a dozen cyclists have been injured by cars making illegal right turns onto the freeway.
The logic offered by MTA traffic engineer Jack Fleck and the City Attorney’s Office (which is apparently concerned about liability issues after a couple injured cyclists sued the city) is that forcing bikes and cars to merge into one lane will prevent drivers from inadvertently turning into cyclists.
But that logic apparently only makes sense to bureaucrats and lawyers (and Mayor Gavin Newsom’s MTA appointees, none of whom seem to understand bike issues) because the plan has been uniformly criticized today by cyclists and other alternative transportation types. They say the forced merge at that busy intersection will only create more conflicts between bikes and cars.
“It makes no sense. I was really surprised they even brought it to the board,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which was not consulted on the proposal.
Even the Planning Department agrees this is a dumb idea, one that conflicts with the Upper Market Design Plan that was approved less than two months ago. It calls for raised, colored bike lanes to make cyclists more visible and with trees and other visual barriers to make that illegal turn less attractive to drivers.
Ironically, bicyclists are placing their hopes for killing the proposal in Judge Peter Busch, who issued the current injunction against new bicycle projects and who will be asked Jan. 22 to approve this proposal. As Shahum said, “Our hope is that the judge denies it.”
Is Vallejo’s loss Lennar’s gain?
From Vallejo’s “Discover Vallejo” site.
Text by Sarah Phelan
“Due to the Company’s termination of its right to purchase certain LandSource assets, the Company recognized deferred profit of $101.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2008 (net of $31.8 million of write-offs of option deposits and pre-acquisition costs and other write-offs) related to the recapitalization of the Company’s LandSource joint venture in 2007.”
I’m no expert on investor relations, but it seems that the above paragraph, excerpted from Lennar’s December 18 2008 8-K report, means that by filing bankruptcy at Mare Island last summer, Lennar either spared its shareholders from further loss, or earned them a profit.
Either way, the financial calculation that lurks behind that deal feels like cold comfort to communities like San Francisco whose last pieces of undeveloped lands are caught up in Lennar’s shareholder-driven financial web.
LIT: Authors and SFBG talk saving the earth
by Amanda Witherell
Yes, even careless placement of renewable energy is hurting the land — addressed in chapter five.
Photo courtesy of losingthewest.com
This week we reviewed The American West at Risk, a recently-published tome that details how ongoing environmental issues are destroying the general livability of Earth for all species, including humans. In short, this book shouldn’t just be on every wannabe Greenpeace activist’s nightstand. Each of the 13 chapters explore one subject in depth — forestry, mining, military operations, road building, to name a few — and balances science with politics and reality to sharpen the argument for preservation of natural resources.
We spoke with two of the authors, Howard G. Wilshire and Jane E. Nielson, who will be reading and discussing the book with co-author Richard Hazlett on Thursday, Jan. 8 at Books Inc, 601 Van Ness Ave.
SFBG: I’m curious why you wrote this book and who you feel you wrote it for.
Howard G. Wilshire: We wrote it because the three of us, all geologists, have a great deal of experience working on environmental issues in the West and we were concerned about it. We get a lot of inquiries from reporters and lawyers and others about specific issues and we figured that since we’re not going to be around forever we should write down our responses and make them available.
When we began the book we told Oxford University Press that we were writing it for nonscientists as well as for academic use, but they’re pretty fussy and decided they would market it only as an academic book. But we wrote it for people who have a problem in their own backyard and want to get some background information on how to respond to it.
Jane E. Nielson: Or for decision makers and environmental lawyers. Often they are not people trained in science and they may not know all the ramifications. Reporters often don’t know all the questions to ask when presented with some sort of a program that’s going to improve things or they have a hard time figuring out what the answers mean. These are the kinds of people who would call us, as well as people from a citizens group who have some kind of major problem coming up and want to know what they needed to think about and what they should be concerned about. This is really the reason we wrote the book. There’s a lot of expertise here and a lot of consideration of things that most people don’t think about.
The age of antiquarian: Lennon, Hemingway, and more
By Laura Peach
A few years ago, single and sullen on a rainy Valentines Day, I was moping past the library on my way back to my apartment. A sandwich board sign for the “Book Lovers Library Discard Sale” caught my eye and enticed me inside. A small, closetish room on the first floor was bursting with books soon to be orphaned from the library shelves. I spent my time scanning several spines before settling on a cheery red art history text from the 1920s and a distinguished hardcover volume on Hanoi. Happily home I went with these beautiful books in my arms, decidedly less depressed.
Whether or not you have a Valentine this year, you’ll be sure to find literary love at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair this Saturday. Peruse the offerings of hundreds of rare booksellers, and pick up the tomes that turn on your inner bibliophile, from a first addition of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to a signed copy of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea.
Nat Hentoff’s last column in the Village Voice
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Nat Hentoff, a graduate with honors from the George Seldes/I.F. Stone School of Journalism and a great journalist on his own, wrote his last column for the Village Voice on Tuesday, Jan. 6.
The Village Voice newspaper chain laid off Hentoff, 83, on Dec. 30 of last year, signalling that the New Times owners from Phoenix, Arizona, had officially and formally ruined the legendary alternative paper.
Read Hentoff’s last column and see what the Voice since 1958 had as a writer, talent, jazz critic, First Amendment guru, and distinguished civil libertarian with a civil sense of rage and what they will have no more. And read Louis Menard’s Jan. 5 piece in the New Yorker that told how the Voice was once “one of the most successful enterprises in the history of American journalism.” Alas. Alas.
Click here to read, Nat Hentoff’s Last Column: The 50-Year Veteran Says Goodbye
Click here to read the Guardian’s politics blog, How New Times ruined the LA Weekly.
Click here to read Stephanie Clifford’s December 30th article in the New York Times, Village Voice Lays Off Nat Hentoff and 2 Others.
Adventures! Bodily injury! No sleep! Hawnay Troof/Vice Cooler’s 10 patience-testers of ’08
Under pressure: Vice Cooler in repose. Photo by Manjari Doxey.
We saved the worst for last. Another in a series of year-end picks from Bay Area musicians, writers, scene-makers, and music lovers. Here’s the rest of Hawnay Troof/Vice Cooler’s best (or worst) of 2008; for more, go here.
HAWNAY TROOF/VICE COOLER’S TOP 10 SHITTIEST TOUR HAPPENINGS IN 2008
1. The police stole my rental car.
On the third to last day of my first US leg we were cruising through eastern Arizona when a policeman pulled us over. He thought we had drugs and illegally searched the car. After not finding anything he was bummed. My friend Rory Rabut was driving, and when the officer looked up his license he found out that Rabut had a small parking ticket that hadn’t been paid yet. He used this as a basis for seizing our vehicle.
How New Times ruined the LA Weekly
By Tim Redmond
Wow, this is nasty. But real. Marc Cooper, longtime alternative press reporter and columnist, dissects (with a nice, sharp scalpel) the decline of the LA Weekly under the chain now known as Village Voice Media, nee New Times Newspapers.
His nut:
Weekly readers were informed, quite simply by its out-of-town owners, that they have been wrong, wrong, wrong for the last 30 years. They might think they like opinion and commentary and national news and sober and thorough investigative reporting, and all with a progressive tinge. But they’ve been wrong. Dead wrong. Instead, they want a smart-alecky, sophomoric, barely edited, thinned out, often reactionary sensationalist stew that displays little or no editorial rhyme nor reason. Yeah! That’s the formula.
Sound familiar?
(Oh, and by the way: Here’s the last column from Nat Hentoff, who these same chain owners just fired at the VIllage Voice.)
Theremin cat, faux GN’R, guit-playing Lil Wayne: Vice Cooler’s 10 things of ’08
Take me down to the paradise kitty: gotta love that theremin cat.
Another in a series of year-end picks from Bay Area musicians, writers, scene-makers, and music lovers. Here’s more of Hawnay Troof/Vice Cooler’s best of 2008; for the first part of his best-of list, go here.
HAWNAY TROOF/VICE COOLER’S TOP 10 THINGS
1. A goat saying, “Mom.”
Local Artist of the Week
LOCAL ARTIST Wayne Smith
TITLE Untitled (after GW) #1
BIO Wayne Smith is a visual and sound artist who lives and works in San Francisco. He received a BA in painting and MA in sculpture from San Jose State University. His work in a variety of media, including drawing, installation, and video, has been shown locally and nationally. In 2007, he collaborated with Berlin-based artist D-L Alvarez on a sound and video installation loosely based on Joan Didion’s The White Album, at New York’s Derek Eller Gallery. As Aero-Mic’d, he records music in SoundEdit 16, a now-defunct sound software, joined by an alternating group of musicians that has included Cliff Hengst, Scott Hewicker, William Fowler Collins, Cory Vilema, and Anne McGuire.
SHOW "Zen With a Lisp: David Enos, Frank Haines, Wayne Smith." Through Sun/11. Sun., noon–5 p.m. [2nd floor projects], call for address. (415) 824-2644