SFBG Blogs

Shining a light on the Diamond Days ’08 music fest

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Heeb mag’s Diamond Days – just what brings it to the Bay from Brooklyn? There’s no denying that the lineup is doozy, including Audacity, Fences, Glitter Wizard, Thee Makeout Party, Tiny Vipers, Ellen Mary McGee, and Young Animals, as well as a slew of local talents. I traded e-mails with Heeb magazine publisher Josh Neuman and associate editor Amy Westervelt to find out more.

SFBG: How did Diamond Days originate?

Amy Westervelt: It started last year in Brooklyn as sort of a throw-back to music shows you and your friends might have put together in high school or college. One of Heeb‘s contributing editors, Jay Diamond, grew up in the ‘burbs of Chicago playing in bands and putting together shows and he wanted to recreate that fun, but focus it on really great local bands in Brooklyn. After the first fest, we really wanted to recreate it in different parts of the country.

Josh Neuman: The fest is partially named in honor of Jay, and partially an homage to a Vashti Bunyan song, which is everything a summer song should be.

SFBG: Why did it move from Brooklyn to Oakland this year?

Ammiano advises New Yorker on Obama

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

Obama campaign says New Yorker should learn from the Examiner. Just forget to print it.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Tuesday, July 15, 2008.) B3

Obama Moves Right? Pundits Cheer

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Is Obama moving to the right? If so, how far? I am personally disturbed at his vote to support Bush’s FISA legislation, although I liked Jim Hightower’s radio commentary summing up that this kind of change is why progressives need to keep pushing, to be “noisy, feisty, and confrontational.” In any event, I find that FAIR, the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting media advocacy group, has one of the best commentaries on the issue of Obama’s moves.

Click here to read Obama Moves Right? Pundits Cheer from FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting)

Don’t kill the peakers — yet

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A GUARDIAN EDITORIAL

The supervisors are meeting a day late this week, thanks to the San Francisco Examiner’s screw-up, which means that a key vote on the city-owned combustion turbines, or peakers, will probably come Wednesday, July 16. The mayor, with some environmental backing, wants the board to kill the city peakers and leave Mirant Corp, a private power company, with the responsibility of generating extra electricity in San Francisco during peak use periods. That’s the worst possible scenario.

We recognize the contradictions inherent in any city plan to construct new fossil-fuel generation plants. San Francisco ought to be moving away from any energy solution that increases carbon emissions, and if the city wants to simply ban any facilities that burn anything to generate electricity, we would by sympathetic.
But that’s not the choice here. The mayor (and Pacific Gas and Electric Company) want to continue using natural-gas-fired turbines to generate electricity in southeast San Francisco. They just want a private company, not a public agency, running the plants.

And we’ve seen no legally binding, written guarantee that Mirant will close its big, polluting Unit 3 under the deal.
There’s some dispute about whether Mirant will operate cleaner peakers than the city, but there’s no dispute about the fact that a private company will be far less accountable than a city department that will soon by run by commissioners who must be approved by the supervisors. And if the city kills the peakers, it will have no leverage at all over what Mirant might be required to do.

The supervisors need to leave their options open here and hold off on killing the public-power peaker plan until the public can see, review, and participate in hearings on binding agreements for the future of Mirant’s plant. As Potrero Hill activist Tony Kelly, who has been working on this issue for years, put it in an email to us:
“I have to emphasize that a vote in favor of the CTs tomorrow doesn’t have to lock the city into the CTs; there’s already an amendment to the ordinances giving the city an out in case another program (Mirant retrofit, or transmission only) turns out to be better. However, if tomorrow’s ordinances fail, or are tabled, then the CTs go away as an option. That’s the problem.

Because it really looks like the PUC will formally rescind the public CTs next Tuesday, in their last act of defiance and corruption; and that will kill the public CTs, and then Mirant holds all the cards to do whatever it wants to do from then on.”

Again: We’re open to a solution that involves neither the city-run peakers nor Mirant. But we’ve been around long enough to know that when the mayor, PG&E and a private power-plant owner are mucking around with energy policy, you have to be very, very careful before you trust what comes out of the discussion. We don’t trust Mirant for a second, and the supervisors shouldn’t give up the city’s leverage too early.

Sports: The Giants’ quiet hex

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Eddie Grant, swinging from the heels in the pre-hex days
By A.J. Hayes

When compared to other noted sports hexes – notably, the Chicago’s “Billy Goat Jinx” and Boston’s now squelched “Curse of the Bambino” – the San Francisco-directed “Plague of the Plaque” falls short of the fences in terms of romantic heft.

The mysterious malediction is not centered around a larger-than-life superstar who was peddled to a rival club to help finance a Broadway play, nor does it have anything to do with a rogue farm animal that was ejected from Wrigley Field during the 1945 World Series for behaving and smelling like an, er, rogue farm animal.

No, the protagonist in this whammy was a gaunt infielder turned World War I hero named Eddie Grant, who only managed to hit his weight in 10 big league seasons because he was so darned skinny.

But if you’re inclined to believe in the sporting spirits, or you think “Field of Dreams” was a pseudo-documentary, you just might buy into the “Plague of the Plaque,” AKA “Eddie’s Affliction.”

Aimee Mann’s ‘@#%&*! Smilers’ is @#%& great

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AIMEE MANN
@#%&*! Smilers
(SuperEgo)

By Todd Lavoie

“Turn that frown upside down! Smile! Be happy!”

Aarggh, I can’t stand phony happy-smiley types, either, Aimee. This isn’t to say I’m in a constant state of mopeyness – perish the thought! – but I don’t exactly see the point in refusing to acknowledge a little melancholia when it sets in from time to time. Why deny it if I’m feeling it? I used to work with someone who would carp and crow away – practically shouting up into the sound system overhead – in response to every song which failed to blow rainbow-pony kisses for its entire three-minute duration. Upon hearing even the faintest allusion to sadness or anger or frustration, away she’d go with cries of, “Oh, why can’t you just be happy!” See, it’s as simple as that: paint on a smile and greet the world grinning from ear to ear. Flick of the switch. Life as one endless loop of Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine.”

Mann’s new album, @#%&*! Smilers, probably won’t win the heart of my former co-worker – wherever she may be, blinders on and her frown firmly fixed upside down – but it probably will do all sorts of fiendishly wonderful things to the hearts of those who aren’t afraid to recognize the scrapes, stumbles, and scabby knees of life. The title alone should be a tip-off – a snide, willfully rude poke with a sharp stick into the eyes of ever-cheerful folks who insist upon everyone smiling along with them, it practically revels in antagonizing the superficial shiny-happy pop song.


Aimee Mann takes the “Freeway.”

Ammiano on Julie Lee’s conviction

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

Julie Lee can’t come to the phone right now. She’s at home waxing her floors and laundering her money.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on July 14,2008.) B3

The street-sweeping non-scandal

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Warren Hickle over at the argonaut is all in a tizzy about the prospect that mayor’s budget reduces the regularity of mechanized street sweeping on the west side of town. But I have to agree with the commenters at sfist — most neighborhoods would be thrilled to have those damn street sweeping machines gone.

Street sweeping is a tax on people who own cars but don’t have enough money to have garages. That’s mostly tenants. I’m all for getting rid of cars, and I’m all for taxing them, but the tax ought to be fair: Charge everyone who owns a car in SF a set fee a year, or even better, charge a fee based on the value of the car, so the rich pay more. Or levy a tax based on the weight of the vehicle (hits SUVs) or the gas mileage (ditto).

The sweeping is mostly a regressive way to bring in revenue for the city. I live in a part of town where we don’t have any street cleaning program, and our streets are just fine.

Besides, it’s kind of environmentally dumb: If you use your car once a week or less, isn’t it better to leave it parked instead of starting it up every couple of days and driving it around to avoid the street sweepers?

I can see sweeping on Mission, 16th Street, Haight Street and other major commercial strips, but why would anybody on the west side be mad about losing a service that costs a lot, does little good and amounts to a bad tax?

All Emmylou Harris intends to be

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EMMYLOU HARRIS
All I Intended to Be
(Nonesuch)

A little context before launching into a rush of superlatives over Emmylou Harris‘ new stunner, All I Intended to Be: back in 1995, Harris made an abrupt – and enormously successful – career turn with the release of her classic Wrecking Ball (Elektra), a haunting, endlessly layered collection of shimmers and swirls deeply steeped in atmosphere by producer Daniel Lanois. Largely gone was the country traditionalism associated with her most well-known work, and instead she’d offered up one of the decade’s boldest, most compellingly adventurous torch-carriers for the “cosmic American music” tag coined by former collaborator Gram Parsons several decades before.

While obviously drawing heavily from folk and country, Wrecking Ball could never fit the purist’s definition of either. Rather, this was something truly deserving of the label “visionary,” having re-positioned roots music out of the farms and the forests and into the heavens. Nothing else sounded quite like it, and the album not only solidified Harris’ standing as a peerless interpreter – refer to her covers of Jimi Hendrix’s “May This Be Love” and the Neil Young-penned title track if you need reminding – but it also marked the start of a tremendous creative burst for the artist, both as a songwriter and as a collaborator.

The albums that followed – 2000’s Red Dirt Girl and 2003’s Stumble Into Grace (both Nonesuch) – showed no let-up in Harris’ inspired momentum, serving up considerably fewer cover songs in favor of adventurous, highly personal songwriting. (One obvious highlight: Red Dirt Girl‘s “Bang The Drum Slowly,” a grand, ethereal weeper written for her father, who had passed away around the time of Wrecking Ball.) Teaming up with Luscious Jackson’s Jill Cunniff proved to be a particular left-field triumph, as evidenced by the hypnotic groove of 2000’s “J’Ai Fait Tout.” Meanwhile, both albums carried on with a refined vision of Wrecking Ball‘s lush whirl-and-eddy aesthetic, with producer Malcolm Burn inserting the occasional drum loop and world-music element into the mix to tremendous effect. In short, the past decade-plus of Harris’ career should be considered nothing less than a renaissance – quite wowing, considering the breadth of her catalog, but entirely true. If anything, the vocalist is enjoying a higher profile now than she ever has before.

Dolores Park mini guitar hero

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By Phil Eil

For those of you who declined invitations to Dolores Park on Saturday: Don’t worry, you didn’t miss much. It was the usual scene: young people drinking Tecate, dogs chasing Frisbees, an eight-year-old guitar prodigy playing Creedence covers.

What’s that? There isn’t usually a third-grader playing to throngs of fans? I see. OK, then. Maybe you did miss something. Here’s what happened:

At around 6 p.m., I was lounging on the grass near the center walkway, talking with a friend, when I heard the unmistakable guitar intro to “Suzie Q.” But then, instead of a grown-up Fogerty-wannabe belting out the lyrics, I heard a tiny, determined voice wailing, “Oh, Suzie Q, baby I love you…” Curious to see who was singing, I shuffled toward the source of the music. By the tennis courts, I found a raucous crowd of hipsters whistling and hooting around a kid with an electric guitar and a microphone. Behind him, sitting on an amp, there was an older guy playing back-up guitar. I sat down and stayed mesmerized for the next 45 minutes.

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My PS3 abilities no longer seem so impressive …

Mirant plant staying open?

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San Francisco’s proposal to install several combustion turbines, or “peaker” plants, in the southeast neighborhoods has created a firestorm of protest, particularly from environmentalists who don’t want the city building any new fossil-fuel plants.

I get that. I also know that PG&E has its dirty little fingers in the public-policy pie. And that makes it more complicated.

The lastest proposal, which comes out of the mayor’s office, calls for Mirant Corp. to retrofit its own peakers, clean them up, run them on natural gas, and put that power into the grid so the city doesn’t have to build its own plants. The argument is that Mirant’s peakers would be cleaner than the city’s, and might run less often.

I’ve always thought that leaving Mirant in control is a terrible idea. If we want to tell the state that we aren’t going to build any new fossil-fuel plants, then let’s stick to it, and rely entirely on renewables (at the possible risk of brownouts in high-use periods). But I don’t trust Mirant for a second — and I don’t think the mayor has any legal guarantee that Mirant will do what it says it will.

All that said, I got an interesting communication this weekend from Joe Boss, who’s a Potrero Hill activist. He and Tony Kelly are worried that the Mayor and Mirant will wind up creating the worst possible scenario: The big Mirant plant, with its smokestack and pollution, will continue to operate for the forseeable future.

It’s admittedly a bit of a speculative scenario, and a lot of things would have to go wrong for it to happen. (Among other things, Mirant, which loses its permit to use Bay water for cooling at the end of this year, would have to invest in a big new air-cooling system.) But it’s worth putting out there as the supervisors prepared to decide on the fate of the city peakers.

You can read Boss’s perpective after the jump.

L’homme de evasion: Tell No One

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By Erik Morse

Winner of four 2007 César Awards, including Best Director and Best Actor, Tell No One — aka Ne le dis à personne — stars François Cluzet as Alexandre Beck, a successful Parisian doctor whose wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) is horribly murdered in the disturbing opening scene. Huit ans plus tard and we learn that Beck has been investigated, harrassed and scapegoated by the gendarmerie for the crime until several key pieces of evidence link Margot’s death to the work of a local serial killer. Taken to drink and solitudinous reveries of the past, Alexandre remains consumed by the events of that night. His obsession over Margot’s death is further inflamed when he receives an email containing a surveillance video of his wife still very much alive. Her instructions to him: “Tell no one.” Is it a hoax? His imagination? Or his wife returned from the dead?

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Newsom, Eric Jaye and PG&E

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The following is an email exchange between me and Nathan Ballard, the mayor’s press secretary, on the subject of the Clean Energy Act. It raises some interesting questions; I thought I’d just post it without further comment.

ME: Will Mayor Newsom be endorsing the Clean Energy Act?

NATHAN BALLARD: Check with Jaye.

ME: Thanks, I will. A private political consultant is now speaking for the mayor on policy positions?

BALLARD: I don’t use public resources/time to comment about endorsements on ballot measures, candidate races, etc. Eric Jaye is Newsom’s point of contact for the media on such issues.

ME: Interesting. How long as this been your policy? (And by the way, I don’t think the Clean Energy Act is a ballot measure yet. It’s still before the board of supervisors. So you can’t speak for the mayor about his positions
on pending legislation?)

I’m also intrigued by the possibility of serious conflicts here. Eric Jaye is often involved in local political campaigns as a paid consultant. Should he be speaking for the mayor if he is getting paid to take one side on an issue?

BALLARD: Yes, I can speak for the Mayor on pending legislation. Once it’s on the ballot, I probably shouldn’t. Anyways, I don’t know of any local legislation called the Clean Energy Act. Do send me the text and I’ll see
if the Mayor wants to express an opinion to you about it.

As to your question about Eric Jaye, it sounds like you are suggesting that he is doing something wrong. I know and respect Eric, and so I know that you are on the wrong track. His professional ethics are unimpeachable. But
instead of spreading rumors about Eric through third parties, why don’t you just pick up the phone and call him with your accusations? I am confident that he will be quite happy to set you straight.

ME: Eric Jaye informs me that since he is, in fact, working for PG&E in opposition to the Clean Energy Act, he has a conflict (as I had suspected) and can’t speak for the mayor on this issue.

There was a hearing on the measure this week, and I’m sure the mayor is aware of it and what it entails. Can you let me know if he has taken a position or plans to?

Thanks for your help.

BALLARD: The Mayor says he is aware of this legislation and he is looking into it.

Newsom slaps down the Paul Reveres

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By John Bardis

Mayor Newsom has proposed some disturbing legislation. He wants whistleblower citizens to pay a $500 filing fee to exercise the right to request the Planning Commission to hold a public hearing on proposed construction projects that might violate the Planning Code.

What a shameful example of misguided legislation in San Francisco. It’s akin to the Mayor of Boston in 1775 requiring Paul Revere to pay a fee before he could ride to sound the alarm that “The British are coming!”

Instead of encouraging citizen participation in our democracy, the mayor is promoting a plutocracy. While residents in wealthier neighborhoods like Pacific Heights and Sea Cliff will be able to afford this proposed fee increase, its imposition discriminates against citizens living in the less affluent neighborhoods.

A Request for Discretionary Review is a cornerstone of the planning process. Residents can exercise their right to request a public hearing on a proposed construction project that might violate the city’s Planning Code or Master Plan.

Years ago, there was no fee for filing a Request for Discretionary Review. In those days, civic leaders welcomed volunteers who gave freely of their time to provide an invaluable service for our city by monitoring proposed construction projects to ensure they complied with the law — and blowing the whistle on developers violating the law.

Back then, all costs associated with processing a Request for Discretionary Review were logically and rightfully included as part of the fee charged for the filing of building-permit applications. City officials recognized that, since the submission of a questionable building permit application triggered the Request for Discretionary Review, it was only reasonable that the burden of all costs associated with the processing the request should fall on the developer.

This is not the case today. The city began requiring citizens to pay a fee for filing a Request for Discretionary Review, which presently is a ridiculous $300. And now Mayor Newsom has proposed to add insult to injury by increasing this fee by 67.5% to an absurd $500.

The mayor’s proposal penalizes less affluent citizens and neighborhoods by restricting their right to protest questionable developments by raising the financial hurdle for citizen participation. It discourages all citizens from participating actively in the city’s planning process by sending a punishing financial signal that their participation is not wanted.

On June 19, 2008 the Planning Department and Planning Commission ignored public protests over this fee increase and voted to recommend that the Board of Supervisors approve it.

At its meeting on Tuesday, July 15th, the Board of Supervisors will take up the mayor’s misguided proposal. The mayor and our city officials should encourage rather than discourage and penalize San Franciscans – our citizen volunteer “Paul Reveres” who sound the alarm about possible code violations that make possible the lawful implementation of San Francisco’s Planning Code.

The Board of Supervisors should reject the 67.5% fee increase – if not the entire fee altogether! The Board should amend the legislation to recover any such costs associated with the filing of a Request for Discretionary Review by making an appropriate increase the fees charged for building permit applications.

John Bardis is a former San Francisco Supervisor and former President of the Coalition San Francisco Neighborhoods..

Ammiano must have your documents

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

Mayor’s office denies sanctuaries to former chiefs of staff. Documents, I must have your documents.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano Friday July 11, 2008.) B3

Gear stolen from Maria Taylor and Taylor Hollingsworth

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Looking for help: Maria Taylor.

This just in from Taylor Hollingsworth’s people:

“Taylor Hollingsworth, sideman for Maria Taylor, had some of his and Maria’s gear stolen on Thursday, July 10, on tour promoting Maria’s newest EP, Savanna Drive. The band were tucked in for the night in San Francisco when some folks busted out the back window of Maria’s van and stole six guitars, two suitcases, two pedals, and some boxes filled with copies of Maria’s newest EP. Luckily, the band recovered one of the bass guitars at a local pawnshop. Here is a list of all the stolen goods:

– Left-handed Red Gretsch Tennessee Rose Guitar.
– Left-handed Martin Acoustic Guitar.
– Right-handed Purple Fender Jazz Bass guitar.
– Right-handed 1976 Black Les Paul Deluxe.
– Right-handed Alvarez acoustic guitar (Hand painted white w/ black swirls. Guitar strap is nailed on.)
– Boss Tuner Pedal.
– Boss Distortion Pedal.

“If you have any information regarding the items listed above, please contact info@saddle-creek.com, jeff@saddle-creek.com, or publicity@teamclermont.com. In the meantime, Maria plans to finish up the last two dates of her tour; one show in LA and one in Sonoma.”

Vega leaving the Chron for KGO-TV

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Cecilia Vega — who covers Mayor Gavin Newsom for the San Francisco Chronicle, where she broke big stories ranging from the big sex scandal to the mayor’s extravagant spending during hard times — has taken a job with KGO-TV Channel 7 covering Oakland City Hall.
It’s a loss for the newspaper industry, which Vega has worked in for about 10 years, reporting for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and San Bernardino Sun before joining the Chron four years ago. But Vega — who has been a colleague of mine on the City Desk News Hour (a TV show she’ll also be leaving) for the last couple years — sees it as a good opportunity during these trying times for the Chron, which has made deep staff cuts to cope with declining readership and big financial losses.
“Making the decision to leave newspapers wasn’t easy — even in these uncertain times in the industry. It’s not something I ever thought I would do. But I’ve got a great opportunity to learn a new form of story telling at Channel 7. And besides, with all the scandals going on in Oakland City Hall right now, what political reporter isn’t itching to do stories there? It’s an exciting opportunity I just couldn’t pass up,” Vega told me.
Her last day at the Chron is July 25 and she’ll be starting her new gig in early September after getting married in August. The word is reporter Erin Allday, a novice to political reporting, will take over the Newsom beat.

Another privatization success story

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The stock market took another tumble today on the work that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which guarantee a large percentage of the mortagages in the United States, are in crisis and may be nearing collapse. Word is that the Bush Administration may have to step in with a bailout plan that could compare with the massive S&L bailout of the early 1990s.

Why are the two giant corporations, without which the entire housing market could collapse, in so much trouble? Dave Iverson discussed that on forum this morning, and some interesting points came out. According to his guest, Thomas Davidoff, a business-school professor at Berkeley, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were doing what short-term profit-seeking companies do — investing in instruments that do well when the economy is doing well, particularly, and ironically, in mortage-backed securities. Now that the housing markets are tanking, and those securities have fallen in value, and the two companies are facing huge liabilities for the mortgages they guaranteed, the taxpayers are going to have to step in.

But here’s what a lot of people forget: Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association, was originally a government agency, created by Roosevelt as part of the New Deal. In 1968, it was privatized. Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, was never a public entity, but was created to provide competition in the market when Fannie Mae was privatized. (By the way, these are the outfits that have made the securitization of morgtages possible.)

But of course, both have operated with what finance experts call an “implicit guarantee” of federal backing. Everyone assumes that if they screw up, Uncle Sam will come to the rescue.

So we have the worst of both worlds: A private outfit making bad investment decisions because there’s no real downside fear — and the taxpayers, who have little control over it, having to foot the bill.

Privatization has done such wonders for the mortgage-finance market, eh? Perhaps President Obama and Speaker Pelosi will have enough sense to stop bailing these companies out and turn them back into government agencies.

Stirring Matmos: a chat with the ex-SF duo

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Excitable: Matmos’ “Exciter Lamp and the Variable Band” from their new album, Supreme Balloon (Matador).

While you were dozing, the rabidly talented Matmos quietly slipped out of town, relocating to Baltimore, MD., from their longtime home in San Francisco’s Mission District. I recently caught up with MC (Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel as they drove through the Northwest on their current US tour, which stops in SF on July 12 at Great American Music Hall.

SFBG: I’ve been enjoying the record – it has this great Wendy Carlos/Switched on Bach quality to it, which is a departure, no?

Martin Schmidt: We take turns being in charge of the record – and this was my turn. I wanted to go away from our shtick – like we’re the goofy sound band – and I thought a simple short cut to that would be to make the rule that we would use no microphones. It quickly turned into a synthesizer record from there. We love, love, love, love Wendy Carlos, and I don’t mean just Switched on Bach, we love her compositions as well, like Sonic Seasonings and the Clockwork Orange stuff and so on, so we figured we couldn’t do this without a nod to her.

SFBG: So the Carlos influence was very conscious…?

MS: We’re not DFA but I must admit I think a lot of our music is the result of wearing our record collections on our sleeve. I don’t mean DFA, I mean that guy in LCD Soundysystem. He’s the most, “I took all my records and boiled them down…” I think we’re a little like that, too. Guilty, guilty…


Matmos perform “Rainbow Flag” from Supreme Balloon in Baltimore on Feb. 9.

A hollow victory for urban gardening movement

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When I first heard about current plans to build a “Victory Garden” in Civic Center Plaza — which will be officially planted tomorrow at 10 a.m. in a ceremony featuring Mayor Gavin Newsom and Alice Waters, the pioneering restaurateur who founded Slow Food Nation — I thought it was a really cool idea. Here was the city of San Francisco giving some of its most prime and high profile real estate over to the urban gardening movement, which seeks alternatives to the fossil fuel dependent industrialized food system.
And the Victory Garden concept is great, conjuring up the collective commitment to our national interests that inspired patriotic citzens to plant gardens during the two world wars. Sure, the logistics of tending and securing the garden might be tough, but Newsom seemed to be making a commitment to put city resources behind this important symbolic statement.
Then I heard that they’re going to rip out the garden in a couple months, in my mind reducing the garden to a mere photo op for our jolly green would-be governor. Ick. Just what this country needs, another hollow gesture toward environmental sustainability rather than the bold collective action that we actually need to tackle serious problems like climate change, resource depletion, and a wasteful, polluting, and ineffective global food system.

Presidential Musical Chairs

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Musical support alone might be enough to swing undecided voters in the November presidential race.
On the one hand, you could vote for a guy who has “It’s Rainin’ McCain, Hallelujah!” kinda musical backup:

I’m sorry, but whatever way you look at it that video sucks. Unless you are an Obama supporter, which makes me wonder just who made this fiasco.

Or you could vote for a guy who has a whole string of musical support. The latest I’ve seen is Coco Tea’s reggae Obama, which is a nice mellow tune for a Friday.

but my alltime favorite remains Barack O’Bollywood:

It’s described as “east meets west meets acid”. Enjoy–and enjoy your weekend!

Stevie Wonder satisfies onboard the Sleep Train

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Don’t you worry ’bout a thing: Stevie Wonder, circa the ’70s.

By Joshua Rotter

When two travel four hours to see one of their all-time favorite artists, Stevie Wonder, perform at a venue that should have been a 40-minute drive away – the usual journey from San Francisco – a simple outing becomes a vision quest.

En route to Wonder’s Sleep Train Pavilion show in Concord on Tuesday, July 8, amid triple digit temperature, and dehydrated and dampened by sweat in my friend’s passenger seat, I was convinced that we would never see the legendary R&B performer. Car accidents and heat-induced area power outages seemed to conspire against us. San Francisco may have been as hot as July elsewhere in the county, but Concord was hotter than hell. We inched closer and closer, but the venue, obscured by rolling hills, wasn’t even in eye shot, much less the eighth Wonder of the world.

Whether it was the excess of heat, the lack of liquids and nicotine, or being hopped up on myriad packs of sugary gum, an image of the vocalist suddenly appeared in my mind’s eye, and I was set adrift on memory’s bliss, imagining much of his career, from the innocent tracks of his early Motown period – “Uptight (Everything’s Alright),” “My Cherie Amour,” “For Once in My Life” – to his ’70s consciousness-spreading classics “Superstition,” “Living for the City,” and “Higher Ground,” through the Stevie of my youth – “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” “Part Time Lover,” and “That’s What Friends Are For,” as well as his guest-starring role on The Cosby Show, in which he invites the Huxtables to join him in the studio after his driver hits two in a fender bender. But traffic was too stalled at this point for any such luck to befall me.

Youth gone wild: Black Tide

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Who better to embody the spirit of mayhem than a posse of rock-crazed teenaged boys? Especially if it’s capital-M Mayhem, which happens to be the name of a package tour of metal bands sponsored by crack-tastic Rockstar Energy Drink?

The show, which hits the Shoreline on Saturday, July 12, with a roster of bands both horns-worthy (Mastodon!) and ehhh (Five Finger Death Punch?), signals the local debut of Black Tide, a quartet whose chief source of notoriety thus far is that they’re fronted by a 15-year-old (their oldest member just turned 20). Yep, you read that right: though they’re the same age you were when you got your first job at Jamba Juice, this gang of Miami whippersnappers has a deal with Interscope Records and are currently touring the world to promote their new album, Light from Above. What gives? Do we have a metal Hanson on our hands, or what? And would they kill me for suggesting as much (duh)? I called up bassist Zakk Sandler mere hours after Black Tide played their first Mayhem set at tour’s kickoff in Seattle, Wash.

Old Skool Cafe Gospel Brunch gives back

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Guardian videographer Ariel Soto visited the Old Skool Cafe Gospel Brunch at Farmer Brown restaurant, and really enjoyed the bacon.

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