SFBG Blogs

A message from Angels?

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By Jeremy Spitz

If I were Christopher Ablett — who police say shot Frisco Hells Angels head Mark “Papa” Guardado on Sept. 2 in the Mission District — I would seriously consider turning myself in to the police. If the 1500-2000 grieving bikers with their mile long chrome and leather procession didn’t send a clear enough message then surely the three pipe bombs detonated early this morning at the San Jose home of Mongols leader Robert Rios must have gotten their point across.
There is no proof that the Hells Angels were responsible for the attack, but if I were Ablett I would feel a lot safer in custody than facing retribution from the “filthy few,” the club’s fabled death-squad. No one was hurt when the bombs went off around 4 a.m. this morning, but authorities have begun to express fear that the attack may herald an “all out war” between the rival clubs.

Where is Elsie? Who took her stuff?

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I got a call from Paul Skilbeck, a local resident who is worried sick about the well being and the whereabouts of a 69-year-old homeless German woman called Elsie.
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Elsie typically spends her day sweeping the streets. but Skilbeck tell me she was sounding suicidal, yesterday (September 17) morning, after someone took all her stuff, and she was left with nothing but her brush and pan.

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And today, Elsie has disappeared from her usual spot, after getting extremely drunk last night. Oh dear.

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Skilbeck reports that all of Elsie’s worldly possessions—her bedding, clothing, food, everything—got taken around 8 a.m., September 17, after she left them neatly stacked against the side of a building, opposite St. Luke’s Church, outside the old Kinko’s building on Clay Street, near Van Ness.

According to Skilbeck, Elsie, who is about 5’ 2”, has gray hair, which comes to her collar. She wears a gray fleece top and blue jeans. She has been homeless for about five years.

Elsie is well-known to local businesses and residents, says Skilbeck, who slips her money from time to time, because, as he puts it, “she’s a useful member of the community.”

“Elsie is very neat and tidy, she doesn’t smell, she cuts her own hair and she really has her stuff together,” says Skilbeck, who spoke to Elsie yesterday, after her stuff was taken, when she was leaning against the wall, on the corner where her stuff disappeared, visibly distraught.

Dick Meister: Sarah Palin and Frances Perkins

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Dick Meister is a rarity in U.S. journalism. In an era when the media is hiring more business reporters and doing more business reporting, it has cut out almost all labor reporters and labor reporting. However, Meister has been covering labor and political issues for more than 50 years from his San Francisco base. He was a former labor and political reporter for the Associated Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Guardian, and KQED. His weekly column will appear regularly on the Bruce blog and the Guardian website. You can see previous columns on his website at DickMeister.com. B3

A FIRST FOR LABOR, A FIRST FOR WOMEN
By Dick Meister

Amid the speculation that Sarah Palin could become our first woman vice
president, don’t forget the first woman who actually did serve in a
president’s cabinet — Frances Perkins, one of the most important
leaders, woman or man, to ever hold any federal post.

Perkins, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first – and only – secretary of labor, had
a tremendous impact on government policy and the status of ordinary
Americans. Her politics were far different from Republican Palin’s rigid
conservatism. Perkins was a liberal Democrat, a very liberal, politically
astute Democrat who devoted her entire career to improving the lives of
America’s working people and helping provide them and others true economic
justice and security.

Clubs: Seeking Justice with DJ Richie Panic

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By Marke B.

Justice, “DVNO”

Bonjour, Fifi! In this week’s Guardian I go after French hardcore electro sensation Justice (Kim Chun wonderfully defends them), and share a few personal thoughts on the explosively glitzy banger scene that’s grown up around their sound. Some people have written me to call me “old” and “a scold” — that rhymes! Others have lauded me as an “old-school defender” and for “finally taking a hard look at today’s materialistic youth.”

I don’t know about all that. I am old-school — I’ve been around a while — but that doesn’t mean I want to divide stuff up and take sides. Move on dot org!

I can see good things and bad things about most kinds of nightlife. And I surely feel a positive energy and musical innovation at certain banger clubs like Blow Up, even as I worry over some of the materialistic and surface aspects of the hardcore electro scene. Nightlife is an art, and like any art critic, I retain a moralistic vision — but I know that the wonderful purpose of art is to blow up (get it?) any moralistic vision to smithereens and go beyond mere words. But I’ll always totally be down with, as fabulous DJ Richie Panic says below, “going out at night, doing drugs, having sex in bathrooms, and listening to DANCE music.”

It’s difficult to try to objectively critique an underground scene I love and support! BUT at least it’s not this, roight:

Rockstar SF @ Roe/Prive

And here, for comparison’s sake, is Blow Up:

Besides the hipster quotient and economic differences (the banger audience is def not $200 bottle service — yet speaks better french!), and also A LOT more comfort with the gays and female empowerment, plus far less douchebags in dimestore cornrows laughing about rape — HAHAHA — I think I root the difference mostly in the music. I get chills when the change comes in on the lovely Empire of the Sun track above. (With mashups of “Obsession” …. not so much.) And that’s a fundamental of underground nightlife right there — better music and hair than the douchebags. See? We’re still all one.

Anyway, back to Justice. They’re weird! they can fill giant venues, which kind of forfeits underground cred, yet they still somehow retain underground cred. For illumination, I turn to Richie Panic, one of my favorite DJs, the king of the Cali banger scene, and a real sweetheart. Plus a genius. Oh, and he’ll be playing a monster show at Mezzanine with Too Many DJs and Soulwax on Oct. 30 — so catch that! His take below:

SF metal band Animosity breaks out

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By Jen Snyder

Thank Lucifer that people are still putting their bodies out on stages and their egos on the line for reasons that make them seem as masochistic as they are talented. Here in San Francisco, we’re lucky to have a multifaceted creative milieu that, more often than not and sometimes unintentionally, works independently of the mainstream.

As an avid indie-show-goer, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing many of the same faces swapped in and out of bands and projects. What’s interesting to me, however, is not just the underappreciated indie scene, but also lesser-known rock ‘n’ roll communities. Today, I wanna talk about independent metal, and the journey of Animosity, one of SF’s finest and most distinctive metal bands.

I sat down with Leo Miller at the headquarters for Man Alive, the label that Miller and Ryan Brewster pioneered here in the city. Miller, 22, is the vocalist for Animosity, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the way he looks. He’s wearing a “Don’t ask me for shit” T-shirt and looks like a fairly clean-cut guy, not someone who screams verbal blood into a microphone in front of a crowd of people angrily pumping the goat horn hand gesture.

Best seller list for independent bookstores

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NCIBA /IndieBound Bestseller List

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The Northern California Indie Bestseller List, as brought to you by IndieBound and NCIBA, for the sales week ended Sunday, October 12, 2008. Based on reporting from the independent booksellers of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association and IndieBound. For an independent bookstore near you, visit IndieBound.org.

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Mormons against same-sex marriage

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Did you know that Mormon religious groups are claiming to have donated a full 35 percent of the money to repeal same-sex marriage this November?

As Julia Rosen writes on Calitics:

Look, I don’t have anything specific against Mormons. It’s just that when a specific religious institution decides to play a large role in a political battle, it weirds me out. Separation of chuch and state….

The Republicans did it again!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

My grandfather’s drugstore in Rock Rapids, Iowa, was the only store on Main Street to survive the Great Depression. C. C. Brugmann had invested heavily in RCA records for his store just before the crash came in 1929 and the investment almost wiped him out. But he survived and became an instant expert on the Depression.

As one of the few Democrats in town, he would tell me that it was the Republicans and their policies of speculation and trickle-down economics and two-chickens-in-every- pot Herbert Hooverism, that created the Great Depression. He would explain that it was the Democrats, Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, using the power of government, that saved the farmers and the townsfolk and the country. He loved to tick off the specifics: how FDR imposed price supports to protect farmers from the vagaries of the weather and market, brought electricity to farmers (REA), greenbelts to protect their soil, banking reforms and federal funds to revive the local failed banks, WPA projects to put the unemployed to work and build much needed infrastructure, fair trade to protect small businesses from the chains, cheap public power with TVA, the entire state of Nebraska, and other lucky places. I’m just a little guy, he would say, and the market doesn’t give a damn about me. I need some help now and then from the government.

Lipstick on a Palin: SNL, Fox News, and Youtube

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My lovely and extremely talented significant other missed the Tina Fey as Sarah Palin tour de force this past weekend on Saturday Night Live. So she did what millions of other young Americans have done: she went to You Tube to check it out. But there was a problem, which she shared with me this morning. The first half dozen, maybe more clips on the ubiquitous video upload site are not full-length excerpts from Saturday Night Live. They are, instead , outtakes from a Fox News broadcast covering the story.

A good portion of these clips are taken up by Fox News commentators yacking about the show. (AKA: shoot me now, please.) They then switch to an extremely abridged version of the SNLsketch, about half a minute or so out of what I believe was a five minute bit. And as more cynical (or seasoned) observers might have already guessed, the part of the sketch Fox chose to feature makes our potential “Pitbull with Lipstick” Veep look downright reasonable. Meanwhile, Amy Poehler’s Hillary Clinton gets all the laughs as she practically demolishes the podium out of pent-up jealousy.

In other words: if, like untold millions of people, you only saw the sketch via the Fox News upload on Youtube there’s a damn good chance you came away thinking SNL was bashing Hillary instead of poking fun at Palin. Never mind that the other four a half, five minutes of the sketch savagely lampooned the Alaska Gov.

I know NBC won’t let Youtube post any of its content. But still, how did Fox News’ coverage come to dominate the search results like this? Anyone else detect the distinct odor of the McCain campaign here?

Here is one of the offending Fox uploads:

4OneFunk take scratch music to the Monterey Jazz Festival

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By Billy Jam

Initially disdained and dismissed by most as just mere noise, not music, the hip-hop-originated practice of scratching, that originated in a Bronx bedroom in the 1970s when Grand Wizzard Theodore accidentally stumbled upon the then new sound, sure has come a long way in a few short decades. Now elevated to the recognized artform commonly known as turntablism, scratch music has even become a course at the Berklee School of Music, “Turntable Technique.”

And at this year’s Monterey Jazz Festival (Sept. 19-21) the festival’s curators are unveiling a new stage, added specifically for DJs and turntablists who incorporate traditional jazz instrumentation into their sound. This new stage’s main act will be San Francisco turntablist group 4OneFunk, who are scheduled to perform, in an extended lineup, each day of the festival.

The 4OneFunk Band‘s festival lineup will include Colin Brown on live synths and Austin Bohlman and Patrick Korty aka Pdub on drums, Teeko on Controller One Turntable and MPC, Max Kane on Controller One Turntable and Vocoder, Ian McDonald on guitar, and Alphabet Soup’s Kenny Brooks on sax. The ensemble will heavily utilize the newly created Vestax turntable model Controller One, which group member DJ Teeko, along with DJs D-Styles and Ricci Rucker, among others, designed for the Japanese turntable manufacturer. Both 4OneFunk’s Teeko and DJ Max Kane will be rocking this new turntable, which Teeko says is taking turntablism into, “a new phase of melodics and control.”

A walk in the PARK

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Think metered parking spaces can only be used for cars? Think again. The forward-thinking, public space-obsessed art collective REBAR has been exploiting a legal loophole that allows just about any use of those car-sized spots – as long as the meter’s being fed – since 2005.

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Back then, the small Bay Area-based collective started by building miniature public parks in places where private SUVs usually live. The result was so surprising and delightful that the idea’s caught on worldwide – and now, on Friday, September 19, in 600 cities globally, metered spaces will be used for everything from extended sidewalk seating outside a café to, in one Bay Area case, a marriage locale. (Watch the two men wed on Friday at 137 Scott, from 3 to 5pm.)

Even if you don’t have time to build your own park, take a walking tour and join in the fun as businesses, individuals, and arts groups all over the city transform gutters into gardens. For more info on PARK(ing) Day, visit www.parkingday.org. Or, for maps of the day’s haps, check out the Trust for Public Land’s national info at their website.

For more information on REBAR, including other projects such as a commission for the City of Amsterdam and a presentation at the world-renowned Venice Architecture Biennale, check out their website at www.rebargroup.org.

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Sure beats a carpool. Flickr photo by Plaid Iguana.

Connecting the Attacks

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Photos and text by Sarah Phelan.

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Unjust immigration laws destroy families and harm workplaces, said protesters at today’s anti ICE rally at City Hall.

If you are part of San Francisco’s immigrant and/or transgendered community, chances are you’ve figured out that a three-pronged attack on the protections that this City offers is in full swing.

If you are not, then today’s rally at City Hall helped people connect the dots.

1. ICE raids have intensified. (On average, San Francisco has one a year, but there have already been two in 2008. The first was May 2 at El Balazo Taquerias. The second was September 11 at a residential residence.

2. The City’s Sanctuary Ordinance is under attack following a series of embarrassing leaks ( under investigation by the Public Defender’s Office) about how San Francisco has been handling undocumented juveniles felons.

3. Mayor Gavin Newsom says implementing the municipal ID legislation, which the Board of Supervisors has already approved, isn’t a priority.

Sonic Reducer Overage: My Morning Jacket, Common/NERD, Menomena, and so much more

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Shadow shag: My Morning Jacket’s “One Big Holiday.”

Feeling frisky, SF? There’s plenty to do besides Treasure Island Music Festival this week – more than we could fit betwixt our hot pages.

THESE ARMS ARE SNAKES
Prog, math, post-punk – whatev, dude. The Seattle collection of players from Botch, Kill Sadie, and Nineironspitfire is just as aggro as it’s ever been, from the sound of the upcoming CD, Tail Swallower & Dove (Suicide Squeeze). Wed/17, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455.


HIEROGLYPHICS
Photons, gather round. The onetime Bay Area party-starters return to the scene of some many rhymes. Thurs/18, 8 p.m., $26.50. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 421-TIXS.

California’s budget is like Sarah Palin

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

California’s state budget is like Sarah Palin: bogus, phoney, a bridge to nowhere, Republican.

(Sup. Tom Ammiano, revving up for his startup as an assemblyman in Sacramento,
speaks on his home telephone answering service on Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2008.) But what is Tom’s idea on solving the state’s structural budget crisis? Better yet, what is his solution for solving the city’s structural budget crisis?)
Yes on the Clean Energy Act (Proposition H) and bringing cheap clean energy and public power to San Francisco. B3

Mugwumpin ‘n’ denial: it’s not just a river in Egypt

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By Robert Avila

In October, local performance company mugwumpin – a kinetic and fervidly experimental ensemble that does not shy from being highly entertaining, too – travels to the massive Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre.

There it will represent the US with a newer, leaner version of its 2006 deconstruction of the American hero complex, super:anti:reluctant. Those who can’t afford the trip can catch this singular piece of post-abstract expressionist theater during a special three-show run at Noh Space this weekend, before it heads east.

super:anti:reluctant
Preview Fri/19, 8 p.m., $10; gala performance and artist reception Sat/20, 8 p.m., $25; final performance Sun/21, 8 p.m., $12-$20 sliding scale
NOHspace
2840 Mariposa, SF
(415) 621-7978

Covering a Hells Angels funeral

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Story and photos by Jeremy Spitz
It was a hazy morning in Daly City, but the thunder did not come from the sky.
The ground literally shook as an estimated 1,500 leather-clad bikers honored the memory of Mark “Papa” Guardado , president of the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angles, with what police estimated to be the largest, and loudest funeral procession in Daly City history.
Guardado, 45, was shot on September 2 outside a bar in the Mission District. Police are still searching for Christopher Ablett, 37, of Modesto, a member of the rival Mongols Motorcycle Club, the chief suspect.
The service took place on Monday with a memorial vigil the previous evening Duggan’s Serra Mortuary. Hells Angles from as far as Germany and Belgium, England and Australia came to pay their respects for their fallen comrade. Though the parking lot of the mortuary looked more like a tailgate party or a Harley Davidson dealership, the scene inside was a somber and touching tribute to a man that had enormous ties to his community.

Clubs: The Great Steve Lady passes on

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“The way you fierced Middle-America with your thong-and-boots model stomp into that truckstop Diary Queen will be a moment I’ll never forget … ”

An amazingly sad evening, as news that The Steve Lady, stunning drag queen, winner of the first Miss Trannyshack, and, really, just a fierce human, a paragon of class and sexiness, with always a hilariously kind and sisterly word for me, has passed on. I use the word legendary a lot, but The Steve Lady really was it.

Tribute to the Steve Lady

From Juanita More’s Web site:

Dear Friends,

The Steve Lady passed away peacefully at home with her partner and father at her side. Over the past couple of weeks the notes that you left for her were shared with The Lady at her bedside. She was floored by your messages of love.

There will be a celebration of his life in San Francisco, date and time to come.

Love, Juanita

Read the many messages of love. You can help with donations, etc here.

The Steve Lady will be incredibly, sorely missed.

The Steve Lady and Juanita More perform “The Funky Watusi” at Trannyshack’s inflammatory “Wetback night” in ’99 …

Poisoning the green UCSF Mission Bay hospital

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The only way to fight the ruinous Potrero Hill power plant is to approve the Clean Energy Act and bring clean energy and public power to Mission Bay and San Francisco

By Bruce B. Brugmann

The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Saturday that the University of California is set to move foward with a new $l.6 billion hospital complex in San Francisco that is being touted “as the greenest medical center ever built in California.”

The project, Reporter Tanya Schevitz wrote, would “incorporate innovative ‘green’ practices such as the inclusion of garden areas, water cooling towers to process heat from mechanical operations and ‘blow down’ water for landscaping, water treating storm drains, environmentally friendly linoleum and rubber floors instead of vinyl, floor and ceiling tiles mde of recycled materials, and heat recovery ventilators to reclaim energy from exhaust overflow.”

Clubs: In case you were wondering …

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Hola. My name is Marke B. I write a sort-of biweekly clubs column for the SF Bay Guardian called Super Ego. Sometimes I write about electro. This is not my party.

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In June 2007, the same folks threw this party I think at Etiquette. I wrote to them! They wrote back! It was informative!

Sports: A San Francisco Yankee’s tribute to the old house

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By A.J. Hayes

Every team needs a second-string catcher, and from 1948-56, San Francisco native and current Peninsula resident Charlie Silvera was owner of the plumb back-up backstop job in baseball, caddying for Yogi Berra with the powerhouse New York Yankees for nine seasons.

While playing behind a future Hall of Famer didn’t allow Silvera much playing time, it did allow him to be part of one of the greatest dynasties in baseball history. The Yankees won seven American League pennants and six World Series championships, including five straight from 1949-53.

Yankee Stadium will be demolished after this season to make way for a parking lot for the state-of-the-art new Yankee Stadium, set to open in 2009. On the eve of the final game ever to be played in the original big ballpark in the Bronx, Silvera, now 83, and still active in baseball as a major league scout with the Chicago Cubs, talked about his memories of the big ballpark in the Bronx.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: It’s ironic that after the Yankees great history of winning, Yankee Stadium will close (on Sunday, Sept. 21) with the Yankees most likely not advancing to the playoffs for the first time since 1995.

Charlie Silvera: Yeah, It’s too bad the place will close on a losing note, but what can you do – 26 world championships are pretty good for one place. There are a lot of people who hate the Yankees and they are gloating now. I say let them gloat. Look at the rings we have collected over the years.

SFBG: When your were growing up in the Mission District, the city had the Seals of the Pacific Coast League, but as far as major league baseball was concerned, did the city root for the Yankees?

CS: Oh yeah, San Francisco was a Yankee town no doubt about it. Look at all the city kids who played for them: Tony Lazzari, Lefty Gomez, Frankie Crosetti and of course Joe DiMaggio who I saw play for the Seals when I was a kid. I was a Seals fan first, but also rooted for the Yankees. My idol was Bill Dickey, the Hall of Fame catcher.

A Prop. M for housing

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Editors note: This is something I have supported and written about in detail. Marc makes the case nicely — T.R.

By Marc Salomon
San Francisco’s future as a creative and diverse progressive beacon is at risk due to the Planning Department’s Eastern Neighborhoods plan. The planning staff has decided the city’s need for luxury housing is so significant that it has set the development bar too low, allowing big builders to cash in on market rate housing.

Planning staff has labored to produce an inelegant community benefits and affordability model that has so many unproven moving parts it might barely work for current conditions but cannot be counted upon to provide for changing circumstances in the future.

But there is an existing successful city policy, passed by the voters in 1986 to control office sprawl, that can serve as a model for harnessing the insatiable demand to build profitable luxury housing, both for the benefit of existing San Franciscans as well as those of the non-rich who would seek refuge here in the future as so many of us did in the past.

Proposition M imposed a 950,000 square foot annual limit on office space. When applications to build exceed that cap, developers may offer up additional sweeteners to increase the chances of their projects being permitted.

The Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task force broke off from Eastern Neighborhoods planning process in 2004, and is nearing completion on its democratic, participatory, community-based plan. One policy that has caused consternation among the development types, who expect to run planning processes unhindered, has been a proposal to replicate Prop M, but this time, applied to housing.

Peter Camejo: 1939-2008

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Peter Camejo, one of the nation’s leading progressive voices, died Saturday at the age of 68. We at the Guardian mourn this brilliant, compassionate man who we came to know well and admire during his runs for governor and president. Camejo was a truly unique leader, marrying a consistently progressive worldview that has changed little since his 1976 presidential run as a socialist with a proven record as a socially responsible investor who made millions and showed the pursuit of wealth needn’t come at the expense of people or the planet. May we all long remember the lessons he taught us.

Lotsa press on Prop. H

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The SF Weekly is usually against anything we’re supporting (they love to bash the left over there, and particularly like to bash us), but to my astonishment, along with his typical snide comments, Benjamin Wachs actually has some intelligent comments on the Clean Energy Act:

The city has the right -even the duty- to plan responsibly for its future, and then follow-up. Prop H shouldn’t even need to be on the ballot, it should be standard practice. Yes, let us evaluate our options and pick the best one. I wish the city would run its economy, law enforcement, and housing offices the same way. To be clear: anyone who is against Prop H isn’t against public ownership of utilities – they’re against planning.

Randy Shaw’s on the case, too. He’s a little dubious about the political hopes for Prop. H, since it doesn’t fit his own rule of “Keep it Simple,” and he suggests that the measure may get buried in the PG&E propaganda and the flood of other stuff on the ballot. The problem is, you can’t make a serious clean-energy initiative simple; there’s just too much policy involved. And if it were simpler, PG&E would call it “a simplistic solution.”

We all knew from day one that PG&E had endless money and would spend whatever it thinks is necessary to defeat Prop. H. But Shaw acknowledges that

With Mark Leno, Susan Leal, and Bevan Dufty taking high-profile roles in backing Prop H, the initiative has a broader and more diverse base than its similar predecessors.

And the Yes on H campaign is only really starting.

If this wasn’t going to be close, PG&E wouldn’t already be pulling out all the stops.

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