SFBG Blogs

‘Alternative to Pride Parade’ announced

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‘Alternative to Pride Parade’ announced

In the wake of all the kerfuffles besetting Pride this year — from the Pride Board’s egregiously mismanaged reaction to the election of Bradley Manning as a community grand marshal (his supporters have plans of their own), to the recent announcement that military recruiters would be descending upon the celebration in earnest, and, well, just the continued corporatization of Pride in general — it comes as no surprise that a radical Pride-questioning movement has been reawakened.  Just like the ’90s are back, so is Gay Shame, at least in spirit.

And thus an alternative parade to the Pride one on Sunday has been announced — let us not be surprised that it is a bar crawl! In any case, it’s a nice start to getting us back to our gay, unlicensed roots while joining with other activists who are Over the Rainbow(TM). Here’s the statement from the organizers with more details.

Have you had enough with the poor political choices of some community leaders that claim to represent you? Are you over the over-corporatizing of SF PRIDE??? Or just tired of the same old events that don’t reflect who you are, and how you want to celebrate your queer pride?

Want to be part of something different, something fun, something that will challenge conventional thought within the SF LGBTQ community?

Then join us for an ALTERNATIVE TO PRIDE PARADE (AND BAR CRAWL).

We will be getting back to our gay roots, meeting at THE CINCH BAR at 1723 Polk Street at 12 NOON with the parade beginning at 1pm (we don’t think a 10:30am start time for a Pride Parade is appropriate), ending up at THE SF EAGLE.

We will make stops along the way, passing through SF PRIDE at Civic Center to express (peacefully) our displeasure with what passes for gay pride at this event, and then we will continue on to SOMA with stops at THE POWERHOUSE/HOLE IN THE WALL, and finally we will end up at The SF EAGLE.

We encourage you to DRESS UP, whatever you want: Drag, Leather, Freak, Nerd, Casual, Beach Wear, Furry, Punk, etc. We also encourage you to BRING PROTEST SIGNS, be creative (body paint?), be original! We will definitely want folks to know what we are up to and perhaps get people thinking about why we need BUDWEISER, VIRGIN AMERICA, VERIZON, WELLS FARGO, BANK OF AMERICA, and COMCAST to have a good time!

RSVP TODAY!!!

Buddy cops, a one-man army, a boozy doc, and more: new movies!

Sue Vaughan
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Buddy cops, a one-man army, a boozy doc, and more: new movies!

This week: two music docs, a buddy-cop movie starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, and America’s Sweetmeat Channing Tatum saves the White House and, ergo, the world. Plus, more! Read on for takes from our critics.

The Heat First things first: I hated Bridesmaids (2011). Even the BFF love fest between Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig couldn’t wash away the bad taste of another wolf pack in girl’s clothing. Dragging and dropping women into dude-ly storylines is at best wonky and at worst degrading, but The Heat finds an alternate route. Its women are unlikable; you don’t root for them, and you’re not hoping they become princesses because such horrifying awkwardness can only be redeemed by a prince. In Bridesmaids and Heat director Paul Feig’s universe, friendship saves the day. Sandra Bullock is Murtaugh to Melissa McCarthy’s Riggs, with tidy Bullock angling for a promotion and McCarthy driving a busted hoopty through Boston like she’s in Grand Theft Auto. Circumstances conspire to bring them together on a case, in one of many elements lifted from traditional buddy-cop storylines. But! The jokes are constant, pelting, and whiz by like so much gunfire. In one running gag, a low-rung villain’s worst insult is telling the women they look old — but neither character is bothered by it. It’s refreshing to see embarrassment humor, so beloved by chick flicks, get taken down a peg by female leads who don’t particularly care what anyone thinks of them. (1:57) (Sara Maria Vizcarrondo)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HUwmDqi2kA

Hey Bartender Hey, have you heard of this trendy thing called craft cocktails? Be warned, sophisticated San Francisco drinkers: Douglas Tirola’s upbeat documentary mentions our fair city in passing only a handful of times; instead, it concentrates on New York City’s relatively recent “cocktail revolution,” interviewing movers and (literal) shakers on the scene while giving a brief history of cocktails in America (again, with an emphasis on NYC). Hey Bartender‘s focal points are well-chosen studies in contrast: ex-Marine Scott — tattooed and scrupulously mustached — who’s working his way up the ranks at hipster lounge Employees Only; and middle-aged Steve, who runs a struggling blue-collar bar just outside the city and is slowly coming around to the idea of adding fancier drinks to his menu. Though dive-bar denizens may roll their eyes at some of Hey Bartender‘s more pretentious trappings (the movie doesn’t mention it, but drinks at Employees Only are in the $15-16 range), it does make the case that today’s superstar “mixologists” deserve just as much recognition as superstar restaurateurs. And the film has a point: can a Top Chef spinoff for bartenders be that far off? (1:32) Roxie. (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwDzRzqFaIE

Laurence Anyways Xavier Dolan’s latest is yet another gorgeously-designed love story; it fits perfectly alongside his extremely personal I Killed My Mother (2009) and the devastating Heartbeats (2010). Although some critics have suggested that this young director needs to hire an editor (Laurence Anyways clocks in at two hours and 48 minutes), I would argue that this epic, gender-bending love story needed to take its stylized time to achieve what most films never do: humanize a transgendered lead character. Melvil Poupaud (Raúl Ruiz’s favorite ingénue) is stunning as Laurence; as his longtime lover, Fred, Suzanne Clément performs with a guttural passion that should keep audiences glued to the screen. For those willing to accept a decade’s worth of hypnotic set and costume designs (the film spans 1989-1999); cryptic character development; a crew of campy castaways; and an electric, eclectic soundtrack (Depeche Mode, Celine Dion), Laurence Anyways is well worthy of its epic running time. Could this be the film that elevates Canada’s best-kept secret to being the leader of a post-gender film movement that’s just about to explode? (2:48) Metreon. (Jesse Hawthorne Ficks)

The Secret Disco Revolution Jamie Kaster’s Canadian documentary chronicles the rise and fall of the 70s booty shaking phenomenon — though what with the subsequent developments of house music, rave culture, et al., you might say disco never really went away. It’s got a goldmine of kitschy vintage clips, and plenty of enjoyable interviews with the scene’s erstwhile stars (Thelma Houston, “KC” Casey, etc.), producers, and observers. (The weirdest are scenes with the Village People, who today are staples on the corporate-party circuit and seem bizarrely eager to deny they were ever a subversively gay act.) Unfortunately, Kaster also burdens the film with sometimes overreaching arguments for disco’s sociopolitical radicalism, as mostly articulated by academic Alice Echols. And there’s a labored staged thread in which an arch narrator informs of us the behind-the-scenes mechanizations of three fictive “masterminds” (played by actors) who propagated disco to liberate gays, women and ethnic minorities. It’s a whimsical conceit that falls completely flat. As a result, there’s plenty of fun to be had here, but the conceptual missteps make this less than the definite disco doc it aims to be. (1:25) (Dennis Harvey)

20 Feet From Stardom Singing the praises of those otherwise neglected backup vocalists who put the soul into that Wall of Sound, brought heft to “Young Americans,” and lent real fury to “Gimme Shelter,” 20 Feet From Stardom is doing the rock ‘n’ roll true believer’s good work. Director Morgan Neville follows a handful of mainly female, mostly African American backing vocal legends, charts their skewed career trajectories as they rake in major credits and keep working long after one-hit wonders are forgotten (the Waters family) but fail to make their name known to the public (Merry Clayton), grasp Grammy approval yet somehow fail to follow through (Lisa Fischer), and keep narrowly missing the prize (Judith Hill) as label recording budgets shrivel and the tastes, technology, and the industry shift. Neville gives these industry pros and soulful survivors in a rocked-out, sample-heavy, DIY world their due on many levels, covering the low-coverage minis, Concert for Bangladesh high points, gossipy rumors, and sheer love for the blend that those intertwined voices achieve. One wishes the director had done more than simply touch in the backup successes out there, like Luther Vandross, and dug deeper to break down the reasons Fischer succumbed to the sophomore slump. But one can’t deny the passion in the voices he’s chosen to follow — and the righteous belief the Neville clearly has in his subjects, especially when, like Hill, they are ready to pick themselves up and carry on after being told they’re not “the Voice.” (1:30) (Kimberly Chun)

Unfinished Song A grumpy widower (Terrence Stamp) learns to enjoy life again by joining an unconventional choir group. Vanessa Redgrave, Gemma Arterton, and Christopher Eccleston round out the cast. (1:36)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa5aasz5VXg

White House Down Ah, the mid-1990s: a time when two big-budget movies on the same subject were regularly released within months of each other (1997’s Volcano and Dante’s Peak; 1998’s Armageddon and Deep Impact). When a director named Roland Emmerich ascended into the blockbuster pantheon with Independence Day (1996), a film that’s best-remembered for that iconic shot of the White House exploding under alien death rays. The intervening years have seen Emmerich plunge ever-deeper into various flavors of disaster, and White House Down — which reignites that ’90s copycat-rivalry thing by riding the fumes of March’s Olympus Has Fallen — finds its boogeyman in domestic terrorism. It beings on a triumphant day for President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx), who has just ordered all US troops removed from the Middle East — angering some high-up men in his administration, as well as some ex-military goons with axes of their own to grind. When the White House is compromised, a wannabe Secret Service agent (Channing Tatum), at the Prez’s house for a tour with his precocious daughter, shoulders one-man-army duties. Rockets are launched; there’s a high-speed limo chase across the White House lawn; we learn the truth about Marilyn and JFK; and thanks to evil genius Skip Tyler (Jimmi Simpson), “the greatest hack the world has ever seen” is about to unleash World War III. Yep, that’s right: 17 years after ID4‘s Jeff Goldblum broke into the alien mainframe, thereby saving the White House-less planet, Emmerich has decided that hackers are actually bad guys. It goes with White House Down‘s warning that the enemy is no longer an external threat, but something lurking right under your nose. Better start working out, America — and working on your one-liners. (2:17) (Cheryl Eddy)

Wrongfully terminated Oakland Airport workers still fighting to get their jobs back

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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A year ago, Hakima Arhab, a former Subway employee at Oakland International Airport, spoke up about the restaurant breaking living wage laws that guarantee paid sick days for employees. For this, she believes she was fired.

Since then, a campaign has been launched to raise awareness about Subway and Jamba Juice workers at the Oakland airport who say they were terminated for speaking out. This afternoon, June 27, members of service workers’ union Unite Here will join with Arhab and other terminated employees in picketing outside the Port of Oakland’s Port Commission meeting, from 4 to 6 p.m. 

According to Arhab, “I left for a vacation for a month and a half, and I had told my employers four months before the fact. They were fine with it.” Nevertheless, “When I came back, they said they had no hours for me, and I was fired. I then knew they had fired me not because I took a vacation, but I had complained about them breaking living wage laws.” 

Arhab said Subway had not given paid sick days since 2009. The Port of Oakland’s living wage law requires employers to provide 12 paid sick days per year. 

Last year, the National Labor Relations Board charged the operators of the airport Subway and Jamba Juice with breaking labor laws by terminating workers who had made complaints to the Port of Oakland. According to a report in the East Bay Express, the port conducted its own investigation, and also concluded that the store operators were in violation.

Unite Here representatives filed an appeal earlier this year to demand that Arhab and Diamond Ford, a former Jamba Juice employee, be reinstated to their jobs. Following an appeals hearing, the port agreed and ordered the operators to reinstate the terminated employees. 

But that still hasn’t happened. Though Arhab has participated in the campaign to shed light on unfair labor practices at the Oakland Airport, she says she still feels powerless. 

“I feel mad and un-powerful that these companies were breaking laws, and they had the power to fire me just because I complained,” Arhab said. “I did the right thing. When will they?”

Picketers who plan to gather outside the Port Commission today aim to pressure the agency to compel the fast food restaurants to comply with orders to reinstate the terminated employees.

Sarah Norr, an Organizer for Unite Here, feels that Arhab and the other employees are being served an injustice. “The airport is on public land and is a public resource,” Norr said. “When workers don’t have sick days or job security, there’s something wrong with that.” 

Chatting up Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Chances are, you probably have the Daily Kos blog open on one of your browser tabs right now. The fiercely progressive blog and community hub showcasing an array of liberal activists and organizers has been at the forefront of a number 21st political battles. Markos Moulitsas, founder and publisher of Daily Kos, started Netroots (then known as YearlyKos) as a way to bring an online community together in a shared physical space. Eight years later, Moulitsas attends as a “private citizen.” When I caught sight of him at the conference, I approached him for a conversation on how the conference has changed over the years, the relationship between liberals and Obama, and his take on current voter demographics.

SFBG: What’s your been your experience at Netroots Nation 2013?

Moulitsas: What’s been different than previous ones is, it’s kind of lot younger. There seems to be a sort of a new generation of network activists. And so, we have this new generation of activists that’s emerging, which is to me is kind of cool. Because any movement cannot sustain itself without youth, that new blood and … the skills they’re bringing to the table — this intimate knowledge of social networks — are skills that I can definitely benefit from, and some of these young guys can actually benefit from some of the wisdom that old-timers have.

How has the conference progressed since the first one in 2006?

You know what was amazing about that conference, is that it was organized by the community. I didn’t organize it, it was the community that decided that they wanted to meet in person and then they made it happen. It was truly volunteer and amateur-driven, from day one, but it didn’t feel like an amateur conference. So they accomplished kind of the impossible just by sheer will and desire to make this happen, and so what I would say is … this is going to grow into something much further beyond the Daily Kos community.

What do you say to liberals who are disillusioned and cynical about Obama and other Democratic Party leaders?

You know, change is incremental. It always is in the political realm. A lot of that disappointment with him really stems from the fact that we have a shitty Congress. A lot of that had nothing to do with the shitty Congress. We’re not going to get everything we want and we could never get everything we want. We’ve got to keep creating that space, politically, for people to do so. Obama couldn’t be pro-gay marriage his first term, until the very, very, very end of his first term, when finally the political space has been created, where he could be a better progressive. So to me, that’s what it’s all about, is to continue to create that space and move the American public. I mean, the American public is already there. It’s getting them to realize they’re actually more liberal than they think they are.

It’s making sure that growth demographics that are very democratic are engaged politically, not taken granted but make sure that African Americans, Latino, Asians are engaged politically because there are going to be key components of our future majorities in the direction our nation takes. Conservatives really began their movement, building their movement in 1964, after the Barry Goldwater defeat. From the point, it took them 16 years to win the White house with Ronald Regan. It took him 30 years to win Congress in 1994 with the Newt Gingrich revolution.

But while the Democratic Party has moved left on issues like pot and gay marriage, a lot of people are saying the neoliberals have taken over the Democratic Party.

I actually think some of the most excitement coming from the Democratic Party are people like Elizabeth Warren, who are actually more progressive on economic issues than any democrat I’ve seen on the scene long time.

Do you think the emerging “Democratic Majority” has arrived?

Obama lost the white vote. The white votes were 75 percent of the electorate 2012. Mitt Romney won them 59-39 and Obama didn’t hit 40 percent with white voters. If the election were held in 2016, nothing else changes, same percentages, instead of winning by 5 votes, Obama would win by 9 points. So, not only is it here, but it’s growing at an incredible pace. Right now the only way Republicans can win elections is if our voters stay home. That’s a problem, because our core voters are also the least performing of voters – young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and single women have the worst turnout rates, particularly in midterm elections. 

Normon Solomon: Terminal

Maria Poblet
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Edward Snowden has provided, in my estimation and that of many others, a valuable journalistic and public service. And he has accomplished what he said he wanted to do: start a public debate on the NSA and its heretofore unknown amassing of our emails and phone messages, et al.  Here’s how you can help him.

Images from a big gay victory celebration

Sasha Cuttler
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It was an amazing day of celebration in San Francisco yesterday, from the early morning crowd that gathered in City Hall to hear the ruling legalizing same-sex marriages in California to the evening celebration in the Castro. Here are some of the faces of that celebration by photographer Tim Daw (except the Newsom image, which was taken by Steven T. Jones)

From around the Internet: San Franciscans celebrate marriage equality

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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All around San Francisco yesterday, gay couples, city leaders, and street revelers celebrated the Supreme Court’s rulings striking down Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act. Here’s a glimpse of the how the city reacted to the news on June 26, as told by San Franciscans who uploaded videos to YouTube (video after the jump):

Our video mashup features (in order of appearance) Jay and Bryan Leffew with their two kids, Daniel and Selena; a crowd reacting with cheers as they attended an early-morning gathering at San Francisco City Hall (video uploaded by Will Kivinski); San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, and District 9 Supervisor David Campos (all featured in a video of the press conference produced by the city); Cindy Sunshine and friends (uploaded by Prana Fitte); and scenes of a street-party celebration in the Castro uploaded by HiWorld798 and Elena Olzark.

Solomon: David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Bill Keller wish Snowden had just followed orders

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Solomon: David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Bill Keller wish Snowden had just followed orders

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Edward Snowden’s disclosures, the New York Times reported on Sunday, “have renewed a longstanding concern: that young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyberdefense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security bureaucracy.

Agencies like the NSA and CIA — and private contractors like Booz Allen — can’t be sure that all employees will obey the rules without interference from their own idealism. This is a basic dilemma for the warfare/surveillance state, which must hire and retain a huge pool of young talent to service the digital innards of a growing Big Brother.

With private firms scrambling to recruit workers for top-secret government contracts, the current situation was foreshadowed by novelist John Hersey in his 1960 book The Child Buyer. When the vice president of a contractor named United Lymphomilloid, “in charge of materials procurement,” goes shopping for a very bright ten-year-old, he explains that “my duties have an extremely high national-defense rating.” And he adds: “When a commodity that you need falls in short supply, you have to get out and hustle. I buy brains.”

That’s what Booz Allen and similar outfits do. They buy brains. And obedience.

But despite the best efforts of those contractors and government agencies, the brains still belong to people. And, as the Times put it, an “anti-authority spirit” might not fit “the security bureaucracy.”

In the long run, Edward Snowden didn’t fit. Neither did Bradley Manning. They both had brains that seemed useful to authority. But they also had principles and decided to act on them.

Like the NSA and its contractors, the U.S. military is in constant need of personnel. “According to his superiors . . . Manning was not working out as a soldier, and they discussed keeping him back when his unit was deployed to Iraq,” biographer Chase Madar writes in The Passion of Bradley Manning. “However, in the fall of 2009, the occupation was desperate for intelligence analysts with computer skills, and Private Bradley Manning, his superiors hurriedly concluded, showed signs of improvement as a workable soldier. This is how, on October 10, 2009, Private First Class Bradley Manning was deployed . . . to Iraq as an intelligence analyst.”

In their own ways, with very different backgrounds and circumstances, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have confounded the best-laid plans of the warfare/surveillance state. They worked for “the security bureaucracy,” but as time went on they found a higher calling than just following orders. They leaked information that we all have a right to know.

This month, not only with words but also with actions, Edward Snowden is transcending the moral limits of authority and insisting that we can fully defend the Bill of Rights, emphatically including the Fourth Amendment.

What a contrast with New York Times columnists David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller, who have responded to Snowden’s revelations by siding with the violators of civil liberties at the top of the U.S. government.

Brooks denounced Snowden as “a traitor” during a June 14 appearance on the PBS NewsHour, saying indignantly: “He betrayed his oath, which was given to him and which he took implicitly and explicitly. He betrayed his company, the people who gave him a job, the people who trusted him. . . . He betrayed the democratic process. It’s not up to a lone 29-year-old to decide what’s private and public. We have — actually have procedures for that set down in the Constitution and established by tradition.”

Enthralled with lockstep compliance, Brooks preached the conformist gospel: “When you work for an institution, any institution, a company, a faculty, you don’t get to violate the rules of that institution and decide for your own self what you’re going to do in a unilateral way that no one else can reverse. And that’s exactly what he did. So he betrayed the trust of the institution. He betrayed what creates a government, which is being a civil servant, being a servant to a larger cause, and not going off on some unilateral thing because it makes you feel grandiose.”

In sync with such bombast, Tom Friedman and former Times executive editor Bill Keller have promoted a notably gutless argument for embracing the NSA’s newly revealed surveillance programs. Friedman wrote (on June 12) and Keller agreed (June 17) that our government is correct to curtail privacy rights against surveillance — because if we fully retained those rights and then a big terrorist attack happened, the damage to civil liberties would be worse.

What a contrast between big-name journalists craven enough to toss the Fourth Amendment overboard and whistleblowers courageous enough to risk their lives for civil liberties.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Disillusionment, “Everyman,” and Netroots Nation

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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For nearly the entire Caltrain ride to down San Jose last Thursday morning, my thoughts were fully consumed by the subject of liberal disillusionment and cynicism. I pondered the question, “How much progress have the things that liberals care about made since the start of the new millennium?”

The issue of gay rights was the only glimmer of hope I could conjure up. Since 2000, income inequality has increased astronomically, the military-industrial complex grows unabated, the drug war continues to destroy millions of lives, women are having to protest the same idiotic conservatives policies their mothers protested, we are realizing the tangible repercussions of climate change, the Citizens United ruling and Republicans have become the John Birch Party and Democrats, by and large, have become identical to the Republicans of 30 years ago.

And while it may be true that progressives were responsible for electing the first black president, the Obama Administration has, for the most part, ignored, shunned, and at times insulted progressives. If Obama governed like a progressive, he would have jailed Wall Street executives for their roles in the financial crisis and HSBC bankers for laundering terrorist and drug cartel money, he would have rejected the Keystone pipeline in resounding fashion, he would have fought harder for a public option, he would have ended or at least decreased the surveillance state, and he wouldn’t be prosecuting medical pot dispensaries with extreme vigor.

Like a lot of the other media there, I came in search of demoralized liberals and to see if the Democratic Party leaders and other notable figures in attendance would feel the brunt of this dismay.

Unsurprisingly, the boogeyman of John Boehner, the Koch Brothers, and other rightwing caricatures were paraded out in order to stomp out any reservations you may have had about the president. One of the most notable lines of the conference was Howard Dean’s unfunny salvo of how the president isn’t perfect, “but it sure beats having Bain Capital, oops, I mean Mitt Romney in the White House!”

When our Rep. Nancy Pelosi was booed for saying that Edward Snowden should be prosecuted for his leaks, she tried shouting over the jeers by repeatedly saying that Obama’s second term was not Bush’s fourth. Then she tried to calm the crowd down (in a twist of irony, a man named Marc Peckel was kicked out for voicing objection to a police state), saying she welcomed the booing and debate about privacy. But would we be having this debate now, if it weren’t for Snowden’s leaks?

I attempted to ask Rep. Pelosi some follow-up questions as she exited the building (flanked by numerous aides and security) but oddly enough, my shouts of “I’m with the San Francisco Bay Guardian!” didn’t faze her one bit.

From the dozens of interviews I conducted with a wide range of attendees, the overall consensus seemed to be that Obama, his administration and other Democratic Party leaders are still on their side – though a good number of my interviewees expressed profound disappointment that the president hasn’t been liberal enough. One healthcare organizer from Chicago said he was immensely dissatisfied by Obamacare, but believes that it’s right the step toward implementing universal healthcare.

Obama’s most visible critic for the three days was a man who goes by the name Stan Everyman, who came on behalf of the San Jose Peace & Justice Center and carried a sign everywhere he went that read “OBAMA=CHENEY”. Everyman, who fervently believes that “Netroots is firmly under control of the Democratic party,” saw the conference as an opportunity to connect with other progressives who have gripes with Obama. The majority of reactions to his sign were positive, he said, but he did wind up engaging in some mild confrontations with what he calls “Democrat loyalists.” He was aghast when he encountered someone who came to Netroots on behalf of a liberal dating service, saying, “she didn’t mind if her emails and calls were tapped and didn’t care if there were helicopters hovering over her house as long as it caught the terrorists.” and when it did elicit a reaction, did nothing more than get a thumbs up or an eye-roll.

Meanwhile, some Democratic figures urged progressives to pressure elected leaders as much as possible. Keith Ellison, a Minnesota representative and co-chair of the progressive caucus, stated: “If people who came before us got discouraged because things were hard, we’d still have slavery, have no right to collective bargaining, the air quality would be horrible. The problem isn’t that you’re not involved and you didn’t get what you wanted, the problem is that you got to stay involved.”

When I countered that a big reason behind liberal disillusionment was that our own guy didn’t come through for us, Ellison’s responded, “Let me say this, never ever organize around a personality – even if it’s an awesome personality like Obama’s. Organize around the principles that guide you. Somewhere along the way we stopped saying ‘yes we can’ and started saying ‘yes he can,’ and when he didn’t do certain things we want, we got discouraged. What personality does the Tea Party coalesce around? None! They coalesce around, ‘we hate government, we love guns’ and ‘if you’re not quite like us, you’re not all right.’ So the progressive movement should coalesce around generosity, inclusion, fairness, sustainability, and leaders need to live up to that, and if they do, they’re good, and if they don’t, they’re not. But it shouldn’t be a personality-driven thing.”

If you want change, you have to keep on keeping on, no matter. Sure, town halls, letter campaigns, and protests are great ways to engage your politicians and in democracy, but when you got to go to work or tend to your family, six-figure lobbyists walk through the halls of Congress retracting whatever impact the people’s efforts made. Politicians want us to give them the political will to do what’s right even though we elected them to do what’s right. I don’t naively believe politicians are perfect and that they’re our friends and that we can sit back and relax after we pull the voting lever. However I do have a problem with “I’ll fight for you!” during the campaign season and “Fight for me!” during the legislative sessions. The latter due to this being a non-election year, was the unofficial theme of Netroots Nation 2013, which also possessed a palpable feeling that the reason why many of the big names showed up was to throw the progressive wing a bone and quell whatever qualms they have.

I do admit that Netroots, in the past, has resulted in a concrete impact (namely, helping to get Obama elected and being instrumental in manufacturing a 21st century online campaign apparatus). However, the chances that it will be able to pull Hillary Clinton—who’s just as hawkish as Dianne Feinstein— to the left beyond the duration of the conference are lower than the probability of Obama appointing Angela Davis as his Chief of Staff. A piece on Salon.com a couple days ago reported that progressives are open to a Clinton run, which should come as no surprise to given how good the left is at reconciling their beliefs with that of their leaders.

So between now and NN14 (which is in Detroit), when the Democratic Leadership will come begging for the left’s help to return the Speakership crown back to Pelosi, pretty much everything the left holds dear will wallow in purgatory or regress to hell. But cheer up: At least Bain Capital isn’t president!

Religious leaders celebrate Supreme Court decision upholding marriage equality

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Photos by Rebecca Bowe

While proponents of the now-unenforceable Proposition 8 might have pointed to scripture to justify opposition to same-sex marriage, a group of religious leaders from throughout the Bay Area came together this afternoon to celebrate an historic Supreme Court ruling upholding marriage equality.

Clergy from a variety of faiths including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and the Church of Latter Day Saints gathered on the steps of Grace Cathedral on San Francisco’s Nob Hill on June 26 for a buoyant press conference held in celebration of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Prop. 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

“The lies of separate but equal have no place on this holy hill,” said the Rev. Marc Handley Andrus of Episcopal Bishop of California. “Gay marriage is marriage, gay parents are parents, and all people are people.”

“For 20 years I’ve been marrying gay and lesbian couples, because in the eyes of God, that love and commitment was real, even when it wasn’t in the eyes of the state,” said Rabbi Michael Lerner of the Beyt Tikkun Synagogue. “We as religious people have to apologize to the gay community,” he added, for religious texts that gave opponents of gay marriage ammunition to advance an agenda of discrimination.

He added that the take-home message of the long fight for marriage equality is, “don’t be ‘realistic.’ Thank God the gay community vigorously fought for the right to be married – because they were not ‘realistic,’ the reality changed. Do not limit your vision to what the politicians and the media tell you is possible.” Their message caught on, he said, because “The theme of love touched people who had stony hearts in other respects.”

Mitch Mayne’s presence was especially significant.“I am an openly gay, active Mormon,” he explained to the crowd. “I am an optimist. I think you have to be, to be a gay Mormon,” he added, eliciting some chuckling from the crowd. “As a gay man, and as a Mormon, I believe Prop. 8 was one of the most un-Christlike things we have ever done as a religion,” Mayne stated. But he said he’d witnessed an unexpected outcome as a result. “Out of this troubling time has come a mighty change in heart from inside the Mormon community, with greater tolerance than ever before,” he said, adding that many Mormons had marched in solidary with gay and lesbian couples.

Rev. Kamal Hassan, pastor of Sojourner Truth Presbyterian in Richmond, said, “I am glad that DOMA was struck down, because it did not defend marriage – it exclusivized it, and defended heterosexual privilege.” But Hassan, like many other clergy members who spoke, seized on the Supreme Court’s decision striking down part of the Voting Rights Act the day before its ruling on same-sex marriage as yet another civil rights cause that needed to be fought.

“The work is not finished – it continues until the rights of all people are protected and defended,” he said. Referencing the famous quote by Dr. Martin Luther King that the arc of history is long but bends toward justice, Hassan said, “We’ve got to be some arc drivers. We should not be as patient as we’ve been so far. We have to push in order for these things to move forward.”

….and here’s your full freedom to marry dance mix, Mary

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….and here’s your full freedom to marry dance mix, Mary

Today already has an amazing (and in one case sad) soundtrack of excellent tunes. But Honey Soundsystem are first on the stick with an excellent mix of underground house and techno (and indie and acid and minimal synth) picks to play as you get ready for your big fat gay wedding, called, yes, “Marry in Ecstasy.”

Go ahead and jam out as you desperately try to locate your musty rainbow feather boa (NO RAINBOW FEATHER BOAS!) for the huge celebration in the Castro tonight. Or let it float through your headphones as you float through Pride Week’s insane amount of events — culminating, of course, in Honey Soundsystem’s extended dance party. (Sun/30, 10pm-4am, $10. Holy Cow, 1535 Folsom, SF. More info.) 

Small Business Commissioners support Pet Food Express over local stores

Sasha Cuttler
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San Francisco’s Small Business Commission has recently come under fire for its promotion of corporate interests and, most recently, advocating for an allegedly predatory pet store chain known as Pet Food Express.

In 2009, the Small Business Commission voted in favor of denying Pet Food Express’ application for a location on Lombard Street in the Marina District. Subsequently, the Planning Commission also denied the request, seemingly blocking Pet Food Express’ efforts to set up shop in the Marina. 

San Francisco’s formula retail legislation requires chain stores like Pet Food Express to apply for a conditional use permit in order to receive approval for opening new locations.

But now, Pet Food Express is back after recently filing another identical application with the SBC for the exact same spot on Lombard Street, and this time some members of the SBC are oddly supporting the chain.

As Pam Habel, owner of local Marina pet store Catnip & Bones, pointed out at the commission meeting on June 10, Pet Food Express already has a location on California Street just one mile away. At the same meeting, Susan Landry, owner of another Marina pet store, Animal Connection, added that nothing has changed in the past four years that would point toward the Marina community needing or wanting this Pet Food Express, since four pet-related stores exist within a mile of the proposed Lombard Street location.

“We were really surprised and disappointed that the commission no longer seemed to be an advocate of small business and even made comments indicating sympathy for the big chain pet store,” Habel and Landry, told the Bay Guardian jointly via email. “Commissioner Adams even said it seemed unfair to him to penalize a business that had started out small and now are being victimized for their success since they are one of the largest pet store chains in the U.S.”

So what has changed since 2009 that is now making the SBC consider supporting the proposed Pet Food Express? For one, Mayor Ed Lee’s corporate-friendly appointees to the SBC, including developer Luke O’Brien and President Stephen Adams, a manager for Sterling Bank & Trust.

Additionally, San Francisco Animal Care and Control Director Rebecca Katz lobbied for approval of the Pet Food Express while holding a blind Chihuahua adorned with a sweater at the June 10 meeting. Katz cited Pet Food Express’ many financial contributions to her agency as reasoning behind supporting the chain’s new location and expansion. According to Animal Care and Control spokeswoman Deb Campbell, Pet Food Express donates an estimated $50,000 to $70,000 in supplies annually to the city department.

“The more business Pet Food Express does, the more they grow and the more they give back to the community,” Katz told the Bay Guardian. “We take in about 10,000 animals a year on a budget of about $40 million.”

Kathleen Dooley, one of the SBC’s few existing members still in favor of promoting local business over big business, met Katz’s lobbying with criticism.

“She went up and lobbied for Pet Food Express and implied if it wasn’t for them no pets would be adopted and the animal world would be in chaos,” Dooley told the Bay Guardian. “They already have a number of stores in San Francisco, but they act as if this one on Lombard would change the tide.”

But Katz says that her public promotion of Pet Food Express is not lobbying. “I spoke to the Ethics Commission and they told me it is okay for me to talk about what Pet Food Express does for us,” said Katz.

Few of the arguments in favor of the Pet Food Express’s intrusion into the Marina actually acknowledge the store’s potential detrimental impact on the existing local businesses. Katz even publically said she thought it was ironic to protest another corporation coming into the Marina, where so many chain businesses already exist.

“The size of the Lombard location would allow for an adoption center which would have a huge impact,” said Katz. “Whereas residents have to drive to the California Street location, now they could walk.”

Unfortunately for local Marina businesses, the SBC, whose professed goal is to “work to support and enhance an environment where small businesses can succeed and flourish,” may be doing just the opposite by supporting a chain business that will undoubtedly endanger the many locally owned pet stores.

“As small businesses in San Francisco, we rely on the SBC as our voice at City Hall, not as a sympathetic voice for chain stores,” said Habel and Landry. “Because of their response last month, we no longer feel that we can look to the SBC to support small business in San Francisco.”

In her presentation before the commission, Landry drew an analogy to the previous opening of a Blockbuster on Lombard Street. Following the corporation’s entrance into the community, all four independent video stores in Cow Hollow closed within a year.

At the same meeting, Commissioner Mark Dwight acknowledged the predatory nature of Pet Food Express, who has sat on the same property for four years in order to continuously rally support in favor of the proposed location.

The pet supply stores in the Marina could face the same fate as the local video rental shops if Pet Food Express succeeds in opening on Lombard Street.

“When chain stores go in, commercial rents go up and the small mom and pop businesses are priced out of the neighborhood and replaced by even more chain stores as they are the only ones who, with their corporate structures, can easily afford high rents,” said Landry and Habel. “This is about more than one Pet Food Express application on Lombard, this is part of our battle to retain the heart and soul of our neighborhood commercial corridors.”

BART workers authorize strike

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Note: This post has been updated from an earlier version.

Bay Area Rapid Transit workers, whose contract expires June 30, have authorized a strike if negotiations with the transit agency do not result in renewed contract terms that are acceptable to both sides.

“They just announced it. Both unions overwhelmingly supported a strike vote,” Leah Berlanga, chief negotiating officer for Service Employees International Union 1021, told the Guardian in a phone call this morning. Votes were cast yesterday, and the results have just come in.

SEIU represents about 1,400 BART inspectors and maintenance workers. The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, which has also voted to authorize a strike, represents BART drivers.

For now, Berlanga said, SEIU and ATU remain at the negotiating table, and “we’re just focusing on reaching an agreement.” The contract is valid throughout June 30, so the earliest the transit workers could go out on strike would be Monday morning.

Contentious issues in the contract negotiations include workers’ request for raises, which haven’t been granted in years despite an uptick in ridership, and the agency’s insistence that employees pick up a share of their pension contributions.

Union representatives have emphasized that their primary concern is worker safety. Last week, SEIU filed an unfair practices labor lawsuit alleging that BART was not negotiating in good faith, pointing to worker safety as a central concern. “We’ve been talking about health and safety for the last four years. By law, health and safety is a mandatory subject of bargaining. Management has rejected every proposal we’ve put forward that addresses safety, and they are not bargaining in good faith,” Berlanga said. On June 25, unionized workers and supporters held a press conference outside the 24th Street BART station, nearby where an employee was struck and killed by a train in 2001. SEIU representatives have said this death was preventable, blaming it on poor lighting inside BART tunnels.

Antonette Bryant, president of ATU 1555, also emphasized safety issues. “We’ve had over 1,000 passengers assaulted and 99 workers assaulted,” she told the Guardian. “That’s something that we take very seriously. We want our work environment and riding environment on the BART to be safe.”

The agency is also trying to make changes to workers’ compensation programs, Bryant added, an issue that goes hand in hand with safety concerns. “They just give [compensation] to people that are hurt, they don’t make efforts to rehabilitate and bring these people back to work,” Bryant said. “We are trying to start a new program for this and they just don’t want to deal with it.”

Reached by phone, BART spokesperson Rick Rice told the Guardian, “We’re still confident there’s a deal to be had at the negotiating table. As far as I know, they are back at the table” after taking a break from negotiations yesterday, he said.

As of the morning of June 26, “We’ve gotten no notice from them” about when a strike could start, but “they’ve said publicly they’ll give 72 hours warning, and we would hope they would, for the sake of the riders.”

With regard to safety concerns, Rice said BART management meets weekly with union leaders on these issues and that the agency is planning to spend $4.5 million to replace lighting in train tunnels and had budgeted for “hundreds of new security cameras.” He said BART is asking employees to make higher contributions to their health care, and pay into their pension plans. He added that workers are requesting the equivalent of a 23.2 percent wage increase over the duration of the new contract. Rice did not have information about how this requested wage increase compares with the expected rise in the cost of living in the Bay Area, but said this was almost certainly a part of the conversation at the negotiating table.

Asked about the unfair labor practices suit, Rice declined to comment specifically on the allegations raised but stated, “We’re definitely at the table negotiating in good faith.”

Supreme Court same-sex marriage decisions: DOMA invalidated, Prop 8 case dismissed, SF reacts [UPDATED]

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Supreme Court same-sex marriage decisions: DOMA invalidated, Prop 8 case dismissed, SF reacts [UPDATED]

Watch this space throughout the day for breaking news on the decision and reactions. Tonight there will be a celebration of the Court’s decisions at Castro and Market Streets at 6:30pm. (Join  the Guardian beforehand, 6-9 at the Pilsner in the castro, at its annual pre-Pride event.) 

DOMA INVALIDATED

The Supreme Court released its ruling this morning that the Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal recognition of same-sex marriage, “is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment.”

“DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty,” according to the majority opinion. “DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state sanctioned marriages and make them unequal.” The Court voted 5-4, with Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, as the decisive vote along the usual liberal/conservative lines. You can read the full opinion here. 

This means that same-sex marriages performed in states that have legalized such marriages will be recognized by federal law.  

PROP 8 DISMISSED ON STANDING

As for Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Prop 8 case, it was dismissed on standing, due to the fact that the State of California refused to defend the case that would uphold Prop 8 (which denied same-sex marriage).That meant private citizens were left to defend a state statute, which was unprecedented, and the Court refused to rule on those grounds.

“We have never before upheld the standing of a private party to defend the constitutionality of a state statute when state officials have chosen not to. We decline to do so for the first time here,” the majority Court statement (which broke along the typical 5-4 line) said. That means there is no specific decision from the Court regarding Prop 8, and the previous ruling, by Judge Vaughan Walker and upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court, that invalidated Prop 8 as discriminatory, stands.

This may mean that same-sex marriages in California can resume as early as July.

You can read the full Prop 8 ruling here.

Scene this morrning at SF City Hall, with Mayor Ed Lee and Lt. Gov. Newsom. Photo by Dan Bernal.

[UPDATE] REACTIONS AT CITY HALL

Steven T. Jones reports from SF City Hall:

City Hall was totally packed at 7am when the US Supreme Court convened — tons of journalists, lots of couples, many signs in the crowd. Two screens were set up, one with a live blog from court chamber, the other with the CNN live feed. Huge cheers erupted at 7:11 when the decision was announced striking down DOMA and forcing the federal government to recognize the rights of same-sex married couples.  Then at 7:38, when the Prop 8 statement came down, the room went nuts. 

A moment later, an array of current and former city officials appeared at the top of the City Hall main staircase. Mayor Ed Lee and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom escorted a fragile Phyllis Lyon down the stairs — she, along with the late Del Martin, were the first same-sex couple to get legally married in California in 2004 — flanked by the rest of the city family, all with big smiles.

“Welcome to the people’s house of San Francisco,” Mayor Lee said, thanking the crowd “for sharing in this historic moment.”

“It feels good to have love triumph over ignorance,” he said.

At 7:44, City Attorney Dennis Herrera and Chief Deputy City Attorney Terry Stewart, who had been on the City Hall steps addressed reporters’ question on the legal details of the ruling, joined the crew to sustained applause as Lee recognized them. He then introduced Newsom, who in 2004 as San Francisco mayor allowed same-sex marriages to be performed, as “one person who used the power of this office to make history and show his love for the city.”

“San Francisco is not a city of dreamers, but a city of doers,” Newsom said. “Here we don’t just tolerate diversity, we celebrate our diversity.” He thanked Herrera and everyone who contributed to this moment. “It’s people with a true commitment to equality that brought us here.”

Newsom introduced Kate Kendall with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who has led the coalition of groups that have push for marriage equality. She looked around the crowd and said, “Fuck you, Prop 8!”

The crowd roared, and she said that she had scanned the room for children, and promised to “put a dollar in the swear jar” if necessary. But she said that, “We have lived for too many years under that stigmatizing piece of crap.”

Then Herrera took the podium, turned to Newsom, and said, “Now you can say, ‘Whether you like it or not!'” — a joking reference to Newsom’s same-sex marriage rallying cry, which some blamed for boosting the anti-same-sex marriage cause.

“We wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Gavin Newsom’s leadership,” Herrera continued. ““I remember in 2004 when people were saying it was too fast, too soon, too much.”

But today, that long effort has been vindicated, Now, he said, “It’s about changing the hearts and minds of people and educating them.” He also pledged to continue the fight that began here in City Hall more than nine years ago: “We will not rest until we have marriage equality throughout this country.”

Gavin Newsom being interviewed inside City Hall. Photo by Steve Jones

Finally Stewart, who has argued cases related to San Francisco’s stand before both the US and California Supreme Courts, praised both the Prop. 8 and DOMA rulings and the precedents they set. “In the DOMA case decision, the Supreme Court expressed a stong equal protection philosophy…that will help legalize same sex marriage in other states.”

Three members of the Board of Supervisors were also invited by Kendell to address the huge City Hall crowd: Board President David Chiu and Sups. David Campos and Scott Wiener, the only two current supervisors who are gay.

Chiu noted that the bust of slain Sup. Harvey Milk is prominently positioned outside the Board Chambers, a reminder of the long struggle for gay rights that San Franciscans have led. “That work lives on today,” he said.

He added the hope that the work done here will ripple out of across the country because, he said, “As goes San Francisco, so goes California, so goes the rest of the country.”

Campos, an attorney who has long been in a committed relationship, said, “It’s a very emotional moment for those of us who are part of the LGBT community.” He said this Supreme Court ruling is the first time it has really acknowledged “that we are people and we have dignity,” and that the rulings sends a clear message to Congress that legislation like DOMA is unconstitionally discriminatory.

Wiener praised the resilience of the LGBT community, from the early days of enduring the AIDS crisis and fighting for federal support through the current campaign for marriage equality. And he cheered the fact that, “Those marriages that we see under the rotunda [in City Hall] will get a little more diverse.”

11:30 AM UPDATE: Style and substance

While Newsom strutted around like a proud peacock in front of City Hall — clearly the leading man in this epic story with the happy ending, much in demand by the television crews — Herrera and Stewart briefed various reporters on the details of the case that they had just won.

Gavin Newsom outside City Hall. Photo by Steve Jones.

“I wanted a merits ruling, but a standing ruling is a victory too,” Herrera told us, making the distinction between the court ruling that banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional on the grounds of equal protection under the law — which it did not do — and the 5-4 ruling it did issue: that those who appealed the Ninth Circuit Court ruling invalidating Prop. 8 lack proper legal standing to do so.

The standing ruling leaves same-sex marriage opponents more wiggle room to argue that the ruling might only apply to the couples named in the suit, or in just the counties that took part, which also included Alameda and Los Angeles, positions they were already signaling in press statements.

But Herrera said that he would vigorously contest that kind of challenge, which he considers to be without merit, telling us, “The injunction is not limited in its scope.”

UPDATE: SFPD isn’t worried

Police Chief Greg Suhr, who attended the City Hall event, said the timing on the ruling during Pride Week couldn’t be better. “It’s nice that it all lined up for us,” he told us. “This town is going to rock ‘til the wheels come off.”

Asked whether he has any heightened security concerns about the Pride Parade in the wake of a ruling that is controversial to some, Suhr said that he’s not worried. He said SFPD is now fully staffed and all available personnel working this weekend, although he will try allow many of his gay and lesbian officers to join the celebration if they want.

“We’re going to police what’s likely to be the biggest party this city has ever seen,” Suhr said, adding that his policing philosophy is, “We plan for the worst and hope for the best.”

 

Sadik-Khan and her groupies urge bold action on the streets of San Francisco

Sasha Cuttler
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San Francisco and our timid Mayor Ed Lee could learn a few things from New York City, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan — who became a national hero to urban cycling advocates while being villified by some in NYC — have quickly created hundreds of miles of new bike lanes and the nation’s biggest bike sharing program.

That was the enthusiastic (if more diplomatically worded) message delivered on June 20 during the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition’s annual Golden Wheel Awards, where Sadik-Khan gave the keynote speech to a large, rapt crowd. She was introduced by SFBC Director Leah Shahum and Municipal Transportation Agency Director Ed Reiskin, who almost upstaged Sadik-Khan and one another in their calls for San Francisco to take more aggressive action.    

“Cities need to try new things on their streets and public spaces,” Shahum said, echoing the message Sadik-Khan regularly delivers. “We need to try new things and we need to do it now.”

It was a message that became a mantra, as she repeated it again and again, urging the city to do more experimentation on the streets and less long analysis. Part of that is slowing down cars to “actually prioritize the safety and health of our citizens on every street in the city.”

Shahum and Reiskin both admitted being star-struck by Sadik-Khan, with Reiskin saying his intro was “like my teenaged daughter introducing Brittany Spears.” Shahum said she’s often guided by the acronym WWJSKD: What Would Janette Sadik-Khan Do?

Reiskin, a regular cyclist, told the story of moving to New York City in 1991, selling the last car he owned (cue the applause by the large crowd of cyclists), but that he didn’t bring a bike because at that time, the common thinking was, “Who’d be crazy enough to ride a bike in Manhattan?”

But in just the last few years, Sadik-Khan has led the transformation of New York City into one of the most bike-friendly cities in the country. “If she can do that there, why can’t we do that here?” Reiskin asked, later adding, “It’s phenomenal what’s happened there.”

He called Sadik-Khan a cross between famed urbanist Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, who was responsible for more public development projects than any New Yorker. “She’s got the Jane Jacobs sensibility, but getting shit done like Robert Moses,” Reiskin said.

When Sadik-Khan took the stage, humbled by an introduction that she said could only be followed by turning water into wine, she gave credit for her accomplishments to the leadership of Mayor Bloomberg and the “unbelievable political courage” it took to build 350 miles of bike lanes in six years despite sometimes strong opposition.

In the process, Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan started an alternative transportation arms races of sorts, prodding Chicago, Washington DC, San Francisco, and other cities to also beef up their bike infrastructure. “I think it’s great that there’s this national competition on who can be the greenest,” she said, later adding, “The future of cities is the key to our planet.”

She showed slides of various streetscape improvements that she led, often replacing lanes of parked cars with protected cycle tracks, including along tony Prospect Park, which she called, “the most controversial piece of land outside the Gaza Strip” for the backlash and lawsuits it sparked.

“When you push the status quo, the status quo often pushes back on you,” she said.

What has given Sadik-Khan such rock star status in the urban cycling world is her willingness to tough out the criticisms and let the results speak for themselves, noting that if some idea doesn’t work, it’s usually fairly easy to undo. Yet she arrived armed with stats showing her approach works, for both bicyclists and the business community.

She fought through arguments that cycle tracks along 8th and 9th avenues would hurt business, and she said those same businesses report a 50 percent increase in revenue since they went in three years ago. Same thing on 1st Avenue, where commercial vacancies dropped 47 percent. Citywide, 70 new bike shops opened during the recession to serve a burgeoning population of cyclists in the city.

She also talked about her latest and greatest innovation, the CitiBike sharing program that offers more than 6,000 bikes at locations densely spread along the bike network throughout the city, all with no public funds involved. “We think density is destiny in this instance,” she said. By contrast, San Francisco has taken years to launch its anemic bike-sharing program with just 350 bikes.  

Sadik-Khan called bike sharing “a gateway drug” that encourages more urban cycling in cities around the country, with all the environmental benefits that creates. Her studies have shown the new bike network and sharing program have added an average of 15,000 new cyclists to the city each day, and that it’s become a major tourist draw.   

Some of her slides also showed how elegant some of the improvements have been, from the cycle tracks to the bike racks that have sprouted up all over the city. “We brought good design into the public realm,” she said, encouraging San Francisco, with his reputation for innovation and good design, to do the same thing. “You have such design talent in San Francisco and I look forward to seeing what you come up with.”

But as Sadik-Khan and Shahum both repeatedly emphasized, it takes bold political leadership that is also pushed by civic groups like SFBC and the public in general, prodding on timid elected officials. As Sadik-Khan said, “People are way far ahead of public officials in understanding what works.”

Indeed, two days later on the streets of San Francisco, bike activists demonstrated that reality, staging an amazing Bicycle Music Festival that drew thousands of people to Golden Gate Park for a day of music from its pedal-powered stages.

Then, from 5-6pm, a colorful crowd of more than 1,000 people mounted their bikes and followed lounge singer Jason Brock on a bike-pulled stage that wound through the city to the next stop for the festival in the Mission District, a sort of musical, organized Critical Mass that produced big grins on everyone involved.

Led by key festival organizer Fossil Fool and his Rock the Bike comrades, and taking a cue from Sadik-Khan and fervent supporters that she’s developed here and across the country, perhaps it’s still possible to create a parade that our leaders can be persuaded to step in front of.

WWJSKD?

Examiner sues Chronicle, alleging predatory ad-pricing scheme

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Today the San Francisco Newspaper Company, which owns the Bay Guardian, announced it was suing the Chronicle, accusing it of below-cost competition. You can read the story, by Joe Eskenazi, below. –Ed.

The parent company of the San Francisco Examiner sued the Hearst Corporation Tuesday, accusing its San Francisco Chronicle of illegally targeting Examiner advertisers with secret, below-cost rates in an attempt to bleed the smaller paper.

The San Francisco Newspaper Company, which owns the Examiner, SF Weekly, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, alleges that the Chronicle offered ad space to advertisers for a fraction of its cost on the condition that the advertisers not buy ads in the Examiner

“Hearst has demanded and obtained agreements from key advertising customers, which preclude those customers from purchasing any advertising space from the Examiner for a period of a year or more,” the suit said. “In many cases, these discounts were specifically conditioned on the advertiser agreeing to purchase advertising services exclusively from Hearst and requiring it to stop doing business with the Examiner. The suit calls for an injunction prohibiting the Chronicle from selling below-cost ads. The suit also requests financial damages “in an amount to be proven at trial.” Per the law, that dollar figure could then be tripled.

The California Unfair Practices Act limits a business’ ability to sell goods or advertising below cost. It also prohibits secretly offering varying rates to different customers for the same services, or doling out “loss leaders. A loss leader is a giveaway or deep discount on additional services used as an incentive to sweeten a separate deal. In one such instance, the suit says the Chronicle threw in $200,000 worth of free ad space in a deal with one advertiser.

The Examiner claims that Hearst engaged in all three of these activities, which are proscribed by the state’s Unfair Practices Act.

This is the same state law that SF Weekly’s former owner, New Times, was found to have violated in selling ads below cost with a purported intent to sink the then-independent Bay Guardian. The Guardian ultimately was awarded $15.6 million — though later accepted a much smaller, undisclosed settlement. Ironically, both the Weekly and Guardian were subsequently obtained by the San Francisco Newspaper Company.

The allegations against the Chronicle are reminiscent of those made against New Times: The larger company is accused of using profits from its other cash-generating properties to subsidize below-cost competition against the Examiner, which lacks similar resources. Some of the players are even the same: The Examiner’s lead counsel Ralph Alldredge helmed the Guardian’s successful case.

Greg Gilchrist, another Examiner attorney, claims the paper can produce material evidence proving the Chronicle not only targeted Examiner advertisers with deep discounts — as low as $1,000 “or even less” for full-page ads listed at between $59,000 and $92,000 on the Chronicle’s advertising rate card — but, on occasion, demanded exclusivity in return for secret and preferential rates.

“We believe they are backing up their below-cost pricing with exclusivity obligations — and that makes it very hard to compete,” Gilchrist said. Who’s getting a deal and who’s paying retail isn’t coincidental, the suit alleges. “We believe when discriminating and charging secretly low prices, they were particularly apt to do that when they were identifying past, current, or prospective Examiner advertisers,” Gilchrist said.

When advertisers purportedly informed Examiner executives that they’d received Chronicle offers too good to refuse — and they could no longer work with the Examiner — management at the papers started talking. Examiner President Todd Vogt met with the Chronicle’s Frank Vega, Mark Adkins, and Jeff Bergin. The suit claims that the Chronicle executives professed ignorance of the alleged scheme.

In mid-May, Adkins, the Chronicle’s former president, was transferred to Hearst’s paper in Beaumont, Texas. This move was characterized as a “promotion” by Vega, the paper’s publisher — who abruptly retired one week later. Bergin remains the paper’s vice president of advertising. All three are named as co-defendants in the case.


The Performant: A Declaration of Independence

Sue Vaughan
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Taking the road less traveled with the Independent Eye

In a cozy living room in Cole Valley, a small but attentive oddience gathers to watch a trio of short theatrical vignettes performed by maverick theater-makers the Independent Eye.

Entitled Gifts, the three pieces have been performed over the years in previous incarnations, but never together, and the subtle commonalities that bind them are elegant and startling in equal measure. Focused primarily on human relationships, the complexity of desire, and the precarious yet universal nature of a journey into the unknown, Gifts follows three couples on their respective paths as they encounter all the unexpected complications and mysterious rewards that life throws at them along the way.

For Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller, who have been both the creative partnership behind the Independent Eye and also life partners for over 50 years, revisiting these pieces with a deepened perspective honed by the implications of entering their final decades has been a process as revelatory to them as when they were created the first time.

“Everything resonates differently,” points out Fuller, with a gracious smile.
After celebrating their Quinquagenary touring their joint memoir of the life artistic, Co-creation, holding readings in the private homes of friends and acquaintances scattered around the country as well as the usual arts venues, the two began developing a show that could be toured in the same way, in order to utilize the unique intimacy that only a house concert-style performance can capture. A way to demystify and decommodify the theatrical experience, as well as a way to inexpensively return to their touring roots, during which they would perform upward of 200 performances a year, criss-crossing the country in a van, kids and puppets in tow.

What they ended up with was Gifts, a series of tenuously-linked duets, compressed enough in form and expansive enough in intention that Bishop refers to them as “dramatic haikus”.

Completely contained within the parameters of a throw rug, a small table and a pair of stools form the entirety of stage and set, while an array of props and puppets issue forth from a modest pair of suitcases, transforming the small space into an endless series of freeways, the tree of life, an amorphous dreamscape, a three-story walk-up, and the ephemeral realm of a pair of hungry gods. In fluid succession, a wrong turn on the freeway becomes a 40-year commitment to a path that feels as much like a mistake as a destination, the prospect of receiving a major award becomes a bittersweet comitragedy of errors, a couple facing the erosion of their golden years by the leaden weight of market forces experience a visitation from the gods — forces much more powerful than the merely mortal ones that have previously formed their trajectory.

And through it all, the almost subversive notion simmering, that a life lived creatively is a life worth whatever the material drawbacks, and that the transformative nature of the journey is by far the greatest reward.

Or, as Fuller succinctly puts it, “these pieces are a validation of different ways of getting ‘there’.”

See Gifts at the Garden Gate Creativity Center:

Fri/28, 8 p.m.
Garden Gate Creativity Center
2911 Claremont Ave, Berk.
www.gardengatecreate.com
www.independenteye.org

Embarcadero Center Cinema closing (temporarily) for renovations

Sue Vaughan
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Embarcadero Center Cinema closing (temporarily) for renovations

Don’t panic, art-house fans: you can still get your subtitle fix at Landmark‘s other San Francisco theaters (the Clay, the Opera Plaza) or at any of the chain’s East Bay outposts (the Shattuck has the most screens, and it shows mainstream Hollywood stuff, too).

The 18-year-old Embarcadero is one of Landmark’s busiest and most-profitable theaters, according to the chain. It will close starting June 28, with a targeted return of “early November” — so it’ll be dark during much of the summer movie craze, but ready to receive any and all Oscar-type movies in the fall.

Here’s what the improvements will entail, per a press release sent out by Senior Regional Publicist Steve Indig:

 “Each of the theater’s five auditoriums will undergo a total makeover, including plush seating, new flooring, paint, and wall coverings.  The lobby will also undergo a transformation, complete with a new wine bar and lounge, as well as a remodeled concierge desk and concession stand. The stand will now feature digital signage with large LED screens showcasing the new menu with a broad array of food and beverage options.  Print-at-home ticketing and mobile ticketing will be available at the theatre when it re-opens this fall.”

Once more with feeling: WINE BAR. See you at the movies this fall, Embarcadero!

Heads Up: 7 must-see concerts this week

Tony Robles
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Pride Week is upon us y’all, and with those excited, proud, rainbow-waving masses, come awesome live acts, DJs, bands, you know the drill by now; there are official shows, tangential nights, and underground events (check out Mykki Blanco at Mezzanine, or Magic Mouth with THEESatisfaction at Hard French Hearts Los Homos). Many more Pride listings will be in the paper this week.

And of course, there’s also some unrelated live rock‘n’roll you should be checking out right now as well, including two doubled-headlined shows of high-quality locals; there’s the Warm Soda/Midnite Snaxxx night at Brick and Mortar, along with the White Barons/Wild Eyes SF shakedown at Bender’s. Plus, Deltron 3030 plays the free summer series at Stern Grove this weekend.

There’s plenty to do and see in San Francisco at the moment, so buckle up. An aside: I’d also recommend Austra at the Independent Wed/26, debuting its new album Olympia; the show is sold out but I know you creative types have ways around this.

Here are your must-see Bay Area concerts this week/end:

Warm Soda and Midnite Snaxxx
This should make for a fizzy summer combo: both local to Oakland and full of vigor, Warm Soda’s glistening ‘80s pop will be matched in this Brick and Mortar lineup to Midnite Snaxxx’s leather-jacket-babe rock‘n’roll bubblegum smash. The results should be explosive, like a shaking up a two-liter bottle of cola and showering those around you with its sticky sweetness. Plus, it’s your last chance to see Warm Soda this summer — the group’s about to head out on its first European tour.
With Primitive Hearts, the Wild Ones
Thu/26, 9pm, $8
Brick and Mortar
1710 Mission, SF
www.brickandmortarmusic.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUQQDb4fkmo

Mykki Blanco
The self-described “Acid Punk Rapper” behind debut mixtape Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss brings his global nightlife pulse to San Francisco this week, (once again — when he performed here last year, Marke B. called Blanco a “Dark and fierce queer rapper from the future”). The hyperreal, multifaceted rapper is a supporter of underground arts and a rather busy one; he’s written books, recorded albums, posed as a fashion muse, and served as a nightclub dignitary, once telling Interview mag: “I didn’t plan for it, but everyday in the morning, for extra energy, I drink a raw garlic smoothie with fruit. I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by working hard. To have this be the beginning of my career and receive this much positive support — I cannot waste a fucking minute, and I’d be a fool to waste a minute.”
Thu/27, 9pm, $15
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
www.mezzaninesf.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w39Fxx10CEI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSgVZEGpo6U

Y La Bamba
“Indie-folk rocker group Y La Bamba has been steadily building a fan base over the past couple of years, earning high praise from NPR and loaning songs to television programs such as Bones. The Portland-based band’s hauntingly rich and ethereal sound is propelled by singer-songwriter Luzelena Mendoza, whose vocals float and weave tales above Latin-inspired rhythms and unique backing vocals. Its latest full-length album, last year’s Court The Stormwas produced by Los Lobos member Steve Berlin, and an excellent EP, Oh February was released this January.” — Sean McCourt
Fri/28, 9pm, $12–$15
Chapel
777 Valencia, SF
(415) 551-5157
www.thechapelsf.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP9U4tm8xJc

The Juan MacLean (DJ Set)
“After years of producing quality electro-disco-club music for DFA Records (home to legendary sometimes-retired LCD Soundsystem), DJ and producer the Juan MacLean (stage name for John Maclean) has leapt head first into a stripped-down, nu-house sound. With vocalist and longtime collaborator Nancy Whang, MacLean released the cool, classy “You Are My Destiny” this March, completing a shift that may have taken root as far back as 2011 with his Peach Melba side project. Transitions are standard practice for the former hardcore guitarist turned electronic music artist, who has collaborated with LCD Soundsystem, !!!, and Holy Ghost! and remixed Yoko Ono and Stevie Nicks. In the midst of a relentless international tour schedule, MacLean signaled his return to dance music prominence earlier this month with a set on BBC Radio 1’s prestigious Essential Mix program.” — Kevin Lee
With Kim Ann Foxman, Blacksheep
Sat/29, 9pm, $10–<\d>$20
Monarch
101 Sixth St., SF
(415) 284-9774
www.monarchsf.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwf31pKvGc4

The White Barons and Wild Eyes SF
Some background: local Southern fried rock group (“by way of Atlanta, Jakarta, and two Midwest podunk towns”) the White Barons includes members of Thee Merry Widows, Winter Teeth, and Whiskey Dick Darryls, and SF’s Wild Eyes recently opened for King Khan and BBQ Show at Slim’s. This Bender’s show is a party for a few things: it’s the birthday of Bender’s doorperson and Subliminal SF booker Mikey Madfes, it’s a split seven-inch release celebration for the White Barons and Wild Eyes, and lastly, there’s a band vs. band chili cook-off (if you buy a record, you’ll get a chili sample). So you know it’s going to be a messy mix of raucous rock’n’roll and tender cooked meats.
Sat/29, 10pm, $5
Bender’s Bar and Grill
806 S. Van Ness, SF
www.bendersbar.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UXOSZPocks

Deltron 3030
“If you’ve lived in SF for at least a year, then you probably know about Stern Grove’s awesomely free and diverse ongoing music festival. But if not, this summer-long (June 16-Aug.18) series offers the community a chance to get outside and enjoy nature while picnicking with live musical accompaniment. This Sunday’s lineup features dance hip-hip super group Deltron 3030. Rapping about evil corporate Goliaths and space battles, often alongside an orchestral band, Deltron 3030’s performance is anything but typical.” — Hillary Smith
Sun/30, 2pm, free
Stern Grove
19th Avenue and Sloat, SF
www.sterngrove.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijPE7fe4XTg

Magic Mouth
To get a taste of the soulful energy Magic Mouth exudes, check the YouTube video “MAGIC MOUTH LIVE: MISSISSIPPI STUDIOS,” (below); it’s like watching James Brown front a garage-punk band. The lively Portland, Ore. queer soul-punk quartet will play Hard French Hearts Los Homos (an event described by DJ Carnita as “an intergalactic Pride Party for all the gayliens who love to dance in outer space”), opening up for THEESatisfaction.
Sun/30, 4-11pm, $20
Roccapulco
3140 Mission, SF
hardfrenchpride2013.eventbrite.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otA5i0Y6wlE

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