SFBG Blogs

Tale of two cities

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Interesting piece in the LA Times a few days ago, Our new mayor, Eric Garcetti, wants to bring raves back to Los Angeles. After the death of a 15 year old that snuck into the Electric Daisy Carnival event at the Coliseum, the raves have gone to Vegas, where they’re pulling in 100K in attendance. The mayor sees dollar signs in those numbers, not to mention OT for city employees that have been hurting the last five years from budget cuts. A sensible idea.

It got me to thinking, as these things do, about a more general policy of bringing lucrative businesses and events to LA. After all, downtown business rents are cheaper than New York or Tokyo and there is far more space here as well. The city’s soon to be highest high rise will be a Korean owned hotel, so LA has already demonstrated a cooperation with Asian interests that cannot be matched. Not by New York or any other American city, even those on the West Coast. Like Seattle, Portland or erm, San Francisco.

If Garcetti and the city council decided to offer up better deals for high-tech than exist 390 miles to the Northwest, there is precious little Mayor Lee could do to match. LA has a lot more money and of greater importance, much more space. 49 square miles cannot compete with 480 square miles. And with the Internet making high tech jobs doable anywhere, why wouldn’t tech start ups decide to opt for LA?

Let’s face it, San Francisco has priced itself right off the grid. For all of Mayor Lee’s tax incentives, the city is incredibly expensive to rent or buy in. It is still possible to find a decent 1 BR in Silver Lake or Eagle Rock or Highland Park for under 1200 a month–where is that in SF, Bayview (if at all)? And no 82K parking spaces or multi million dollar Manhattan sized condos either–for 3 million bucks, you can buy a reasonable property in the West Side’s swankest hoods–what does that get you in Pacific Heights?

LA is a very expensive city to live in by dint of car ownership as necessity and driving distances. It’s also nowhere near as pretty as San Francisco is. But as SF approaches Tokyo-like exclusivity, it would take very little to pry high tech firms south–where it’s always warm, the beaches and ski resorts both near and best of all–the entertainment business and its attendant pleasures and power are nearby. 

Let’s face it, SF has screwed up–their biggest business for eons is tourism and that would never change were the city not so insistant on wrecking same with crack downs on clubs and “1984”-like scare tactics. Los Angeles–with its money and power can offer incentives that Mr. Lee and his cromies could only dream of–and with a forward thinker like Garcetti at the wheel, this may be inevitable.

 

Brighten your Monday with the awesome new trailer for “The Wolf of Wall Street”

Sue Vaughan
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Brighten your Monday with the awesome new trailer for “The Wolf of Wall Street”

You just gotta watch it, and you’ll agree: November 15 can’t come soon enough. Can Scorsese do what Soderbergh couldn’t and get Matthew McConaughey an Oscar nom? Plus: smarmy Jonah Hill in a polo shirt, a DeLorean (?), decadent yacht parties, DiCaprio cradling a chimp (and not uttering the words “Old Sport”)…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iszwuX1AK6A

Crapitalism

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Crapitalism

Happy Father’s Day! Be good to your dad (assuming he’s alive/you know who he is) and enjoy your kids (assuming you have any/know who they are).

A remarkable story crossed my monitor this week. From back in the sacred Motherland of Massachusetts. Apparently, a pair of tandem parking spaces were auctioned off behind a toney Commonwealth Ave (Boston) condo for a whopping 560K–they’re shown in the photo. That’s over a half a million dollars in prime real estate yer gazing at.

Bid up from a sort of reasonable 42K and sold to a party that allegedly owns three spaces there already, this is the kind of story that makes one’s eyes glaze over in amazement. As primo as the location is, that tiny and stained bit of asphalt you’re looking at is not worth that price under any circumstances.

As that part of Boston is tightly zoned, it isn’t like it was bought to expand a brownstone. Nope, this is conspicuous consumption run completely amok or as a friend of mine back there put it, ”this could only have happened to people for whom money has no meaning”. (I suspect that the purchase was made as a “business expense” for a corporation, more to be revealed).

For 560 grand, you can still buy a modest home in Boston’s most desirable suburbs (all of which have better public schools than Boston and are cleaner and not plagued with unbearable traffic). And the property is but ten minutes on foot from downtown and the business district, cabs and car services are plentiful, therefore, why bother? As a possible long term investment? (Not a great idea as you will see).

This neighborhood, the Back Bay, was the first place I had my own digs. Adjusted for inflation, that apartment should go for about 420.00. It is now a million dollar and up condo and what was it? One gigantic room, likely the dining room of a three story home back in the 1800’s. And I still have friends in that neighborhood. Tellingly, all of them have been there at least 25 years and they could never afford it now.

By pricing all but the top of the top out of what once was an artist friendly neighborhood, the same neighborhood has the ripple effect of driving real estate values in adjacent neighborhoods past reason. Boston and San Francisco–joined at the hip by being the satellite cities to America’s twin powerhouses–are now unaffordable. 

A piece in the same paper that ran this story last year said it all. People aged 35-54 –which used to be an enormous demographic in Boston–no longer live there in large numbers. After university they just up and go because first jobs don’t pay enough to raise the scratch for a down payment. When a slab of concrete not even big enough to be a bedroom in a rooming house goes for 560K, it says that “what the market will bear” is not applicable.

This isn’t “free market capitalism”, it’s “crapitalism”. The laws of supply and demand have been so perverted by so few having so much, they almost don’t apply anymore. And my beautiful hometown–once a funky seaport with the best local music scene outside CB’s/Max’s–is now an overly exclusive playpen for folks that have brought back the Brahmin Age, only on ‘roids. Same as in SF—two small peninsulas whose essential character is being clobbered by venal plutocrats. Crapitalism couldn’t exist without tacit aid from the government–in SF, it’s in the form of tax breaks, in Boston, tax free academia is swallowing their city whole, reducing the amount of living units and artificially raising land value. That isn’t “supply and demand”.

The utlimate irony of this ridiculous transaction is that the Back Bay, like the Marina, is atop a landfill. The Charles River already overflows its banks and floods the basements of these expensive edifices more than it used to–so the parking spaces in question may be useless a fair amount of the time (of course, crapitalism being what it is, MA taxpayers will surely be stuck for the bill of seawalls and the like).

Bailouts, cronyism, loopholes–instead of an economic boom, we have Marie Antoinette style madness in our major cities. Pretty pitiful.

 

Jerry Garcia Street

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This spring, me and the missus brought our kids up to the City from LA for the first time, via Big Sur, Monterey and Santa Cruz. It was our best family trip ever–wild turkeys and great hikes in the Sur, hanging on the boardwalk in Cruz and finally, SF. Stayed a few nights in Japantown, climbed Mt Tam, watched the fog envelope the Golden Gate–touristy stuff (I passed on the cable cars, however–they loved them).

Naturally, we had to show our children where we once lived and as we’d been up to Twin Peaks already, the Haight was nice and easy. Plus, I had to make a stop at Amoeba to consign some music.

Our old neighborhood has changed since the middle 90’s, but mostly in subtle ways. Still a bunch of panhandlers about (carrying banjos and ukes now as opposed to guitars), the wonderful Pork Store and the panhandle itself. The biggest change is the proliferation of parents–I don’t recall many strollers back in the Clinton era, but there was much pram pushing down Haight Street (sorry, Mick) all the same. Saw lots of that in SoMa parks, too–kiddie city.

When I was dropping off the discs at Amoeba, me and the counterman started jawing about the changes underway and he shocked me by saying that a great deal of the shop’s foot traffic was tourist based. People that came up to that neck of the woods solely for the history. And I got to thinking and I wondered–why is there almost nothing named after the area’s most famous export and certainly its magnet, John Jerome “Jerry” Garcia?

The Dead and their compatriots made this little corner of SF the most famous place in the world for a spell and yet very little commemorates the fact. That they carried on for 28 years past the “summer of love” spreading their loping groove around the world means that the rest of the world (a lot of it) comes to SF to try and absorb a little of that long gone good feeling. In other words, more tourism and more business.

I wonder, wouldn’t it be something if upper Haight Street–from Divisidero to the terminus at Golden Gate Park (I would say Cala Foods, but that too is gone) be renamed “Jerry Garcia Boulevard?” If Army Street can become Cesar Chavez, why not? 

And please spare me the incoming crapola about “honoring junkies”. Garcia’s personal habits have nothing to do with his work and the idea that he represented the “corruption of youth” gives someone that eschewed being a role model way too much power. 

There’s already a “Joey Ramone Place” in the Bowery in NYC. As there should be. It’s high time (no pun) that San Francisco did the same for the creator of its underground scene as well. 

 

A statement about the Guardian

Marke B. and Tim Redmond
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Today I named veteran Bay Area journalist Stephen Buel publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

And following the resignation of Editor and Publisher Tim Redmond, I named longtime Bay Guardian editor Marke Bieschke interim editor of the paper.


Buel, editorial vice president of the San Francisco Newspaper Company, will bolster the paper’s fortunes while upholding its long tradition of investigative journalism, progressive values and cultural coverage. Bieschke, the paper’s managing editor, nightlife columnist and long-time San Francisco resident and activist will help provide vision and leadership on the print and digital editions of the Guardian.

“The Guardian has been losing money, and we were forced to contemplate some editorial layoffs,” Buel said. “Tim decided to resign rather than follow through with what we were discussing. I am dedicated to reversing the Guardian’s fortunes and helping it grow again.

“While we will all miss Tim’s skills as a journalist, I would like to assure the Guardian faithful that it will remain the progressive newspaper of record in San Francisco. I suspect there will be some skepticism about that, but over time, I am confident that readers will not be disappointed.”

— Todd Vogt, president and publisher of the San Francisco Newspaper Company, parent company of the Guardian, SF Weekly and The San Francisco Examiner.

Guardian forum on Plan Bay Area draws big, engaged crowd

Sasha Cuttler
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San Franciscans who want to help shape how this city grows — rather than just leaving it up to regional planners and market forces — packed a large conference room last night for a community forum presented by the Bay Guardian: “Whose Future? What Does the Regional ‘Plan Bay Area’ Really Mean for San Francisco?”

Moderated and organized by Guardian Editor/Publisher Tim Redmond, and co-sponsored by the Council of Community Housing Organizations (CCHO) and Urban Institute for Development and Economic Alternatives (UrbanIDEA), the session began with a overview of what’s now being planned for the San Francisco of 2040.

Gen Fujoika of the Chinatown Community Development Center said that Plan Bay Area, which is being jointly developed by the Association of Bay Area Governments and Metropolitan Transportation Commission (which will hold a hearing on the plan tomorrow, Fri/14, at 9:30am in Oakland), doesn’t pay for itself yet it will include strong incentives that will shape development in the region.

“It is in some sense a plan and I think we need to critique the hell out of that plan,” he said. “As we think of Plan Bay Area as a vision statement, we need to think about whether it’s our vision.”

As illustrated by the Plan Bay Area maps that the lined the walls of the LGBT Center conference room, the plan’s “priority development areas” that are slated for dense, streamlined development are also the same areas identified as “communities of concern” with vulnerable, low-income populations, making the plan a recipe for mass displacement.

Fujoika quoted a comment that Mayor Ed Lee made on Tuesday when asked by Sup. Eric Mar about the issue: “San Francisco has some of the toughest anti-displacements laws in the country.” While that may be true, Fujoika said that the plummeting numbers of African-Americans in the city and Plan Bay Area’s displacement projections for San Francisco show those laws simply aren’t up the challenge.

“If we have the toughest anti-displacement position in the country, then we are in some trouble,” he said, calculating that the affordable housing needed to prevent extreme gentrification in the city would total $6.8 billion, and that the affordable housing fund created by voters last year is only projected to raise $1.3 billion by 2030.

Fujoika said that he and the other panelists aren’t against growth and development, “but we are for equitable growth,” which would involve more community buy-in for the plan, more money for affordable housing and infrastructure needs, and more of the growth burden being shared by other Bay Area communities.

San Francisco Planning Commission Chair Cindy Wu cited growth projections for Chinatown as a good example of the problem, noting that is already a dense, complete neighborhood that would suffer from the greatly increased traffic that would be funneled through it and other negative impacts of unfettered growth.

“It’s not just growth for growth’s sake, it’s who gets to live there and who gets those jobs,” she said. Wu called for more community organizing around this and other development plans, citing as a good example the coalition-building that forced California Pacific Medical Center to agree to a multi-hospital project with far better community benefits than the deal it originally cut with the Mayor’s Office.

It was a point echoed by Maria Zamudio with Causa Justa, who said Plan Bay Area will worsen pressures that are already displacing the Mission District residents she works with, or forcing them to live in unsafe housing. “They’re going to push our families out of the city and maybe out of the region,” she said.

To combat the power that this plan and profit-minded property owners will exert over how San Francisco grows, San Francisco Labor Council President Mike Casey, head of UNITE-HERE Local 2, said that progressive San Franciscans will need to work cooperatively with organized labor, a relationship that has suffered during these tough economic times.

“Unfortunately, I think we’ve become alienated and marginalized from each other,” Casey said, calling on activists to not let differences over individual projects or issues interfere with solidarity over the larger, longer struggle for equity and justice.

“Not everyone agrees that a strong labor movement is the cornerstone of a more progressive vision,” Casey said, arguing that displacement of working class people from the city has a cascading effect in gentrifying the city. “The demographics of a city shape very much what the politics of protest look like.”

And those politics of protest will be more crucial than ever in resisting the demands that powerful capitalists will make on San Francisco in the coming years, a point that all seven panelists seemed to agree on.

Bob Allen of Urban Habitat said the planning research groups represented on the panel need to find ways to funnel more funding into grassroots organizing, both in San Francisco and regionally. Otherwise, we’ll see the “suburbanization of poverty,” with Plan Bay Area funneling the best jobs and most expensive housing into urban areas and leaving everyone else to fend for themselves in communities that don’t have the tenant protections and other hard-won social justice programs that San Franciscans have struggled for.

“Local control can be a way of saying ‘I don’t want black or brown people to live in my suburban community,” Allen said.

Ironically, Plan Bay Area is ostensibly driven by concerns over climate change and the argument that it’s better to concentrate development along transit corridors, which is why almost all of San Francisco and much of Oakland is proposed for development that would be given waivers from some California Environmental Quality Act scrutiny.

Yet the plan doesn’t fund the transit upgrades that would be needed to serve that growth or create restrictions on automobile use that might encourage more transit use. Instead, Fujoika said low-income people who actually use transit would be the diplaced in favor of wealthier residents who might not.

“Transit has become an amenity rather than a necessity,” Wu said.

The forum, which was attended by more than 130 people, included a lively discussion that involved dozens of audience members who offered their own views, ideas, and strategies for how to move forward. Among them was Brian Basinger of the AIDS Housing Alliance, who said that he is working with a coalition to reform the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict tenants from rent-controlled apartments.

“We could move this as early as January,” Basinger said of the reform legislation now being developed with allies in the Legislature, urging attendees to get involved.

After the audience discussion, the meeting closed with Peter Cohen of the CCHO summarizing the high points and getting people to sign up on lists that were circulated to be involved with next steps. And Rachel Brahinsky, a former Guardian staff writer who is now a professor at USF’s Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good, urged attendees to fight for San Francisco to remain inclusive and diverse: “San Francisco is the place it is because people have kept fighting.”

The Return of the Replacements

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Word from somewhere outta the Midwest is that the Replacements–in many ways the quintessential American indie band–are reuniting for a trio of festival shows. In Denver, Chicago and Toronto. Whether or not the band will add more dates is uncertain, as is the band’s lineup. The band’s best known living principals, Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson are on board. Their last lead guitar player, Slim Dunlap suffered a stroke and is unable to play, drummer Chris Mars is now a fine artist and may be unwilling to play (their notorious feuds ended when they recorded tracks to raise cash for Dunlap). 

Their evolution as a band, detailed in Michael Azzerad’s wonderful tome Our Band Could be Your Life is almost the story of Amerindie itself. Beginning on a tiny Minneapolis independant label Twin Tone as a not really hardcore at all band that played the same circuit as their city mates Husker Du, the Replacements 1984 album Let It Be ranks with any of the great classic blues based rock discs ever made–without any hint of the blues. Signing with Warner Brothers in the wake of the masterpiece, they continued to their evolution into more cerebral roots music. Perched between the underground that birthed them and the commercial success that eluded them, they called it a day 22 years ago.

Whether or not their motives for returning are financial (bassist Stinson has made a good living as Duff McKagan’s “replacement” in Guns N Roses) or artistic (they ain’t sayin’), it is unlikely that they will play enormous festivals with the same shambling, shit-faced style that they were notorious for in the 80’s. Prone to being barely vertical, playing whatever songs came to Westerberg’s pickled cerebellum, from bubblegum oldies to metal, their gigs weren’t even uneven, they were almost upside down–unlike most of their fans from that era, I didn’t really dig the drunken stumble-bunny schtick because I loved their songs. 

I hope they’ll stick to them, from all of their discs and I guess I hope they come to California as well (by way of semi-disclaimer, Stinson and I are former bandmates in a short-lived “punk cover band” called Strap On Baster). At their peak, they were the open and honest bards of the dark ages known as the middle 80’s, at their nadir, comatose. Let’s hope for the former and not the latter from these truly American originals.   

Holding out for a hero…or an antihero…or the Antichrist: this week’s new movies!

Sue Vaughan
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Holding out for a hero…or an antihero…or the Antichrist: this week’s new movies!

Already in theaters, Seth Rogen and his bro posse take on doomsday in This Is the End. I got the chance to talk with Mr. Rogen, his co-director and co-writer Evan Goldberg, and co-star Craig Robinson when they visited San Francisco a few days back. (Fun fact: Rogen really does laugh like that in real life.) Check the interview here!

In rep news, this weekend at the Castro Theatre heralds the San Francisco Silent Film Festival‘s “Hitchcock 9” event, spotlighting nine silent films by the guy who would later claim the title “Master of Suspense,” direct some of the greatest thrillers of all time, etc. You can’t go wrong with any of the films, but just for kicks, here’s my take on the series here. And at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s dark Paradise Trilogy continues its bummer-summer run this weekend; Dennis Harvey breaks ’em down here.

Plus! That Superman movie you’ve been hearing a thing or two about, and the rest of the week’s new offerings, after the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq6ffF8QLsQ

Becoming Traviata Philippe Béziat’s backstage doc offers an absorbing look at a particularly innovative production of Verdi’s La Traviata, directed by Jean-François Sivadier and starring the luminous Natalie Dessay (currently appearing in SF Opera‘s production of Tales of Hoffman). Béziat eschews narration or interviews; instead, his camera simply tracks artists at work, moving from rehearsal room to stage as Sivadier and Dessay (along with her co-stars) block scenes, make suggestions, practice gestures, and engage in the hit-and-miss experimentation that defines the creative process. The film is edited so that La Traviata progresses chronologically, with the earliest scenes unfolding on a spartan set (Dessay’s practice attire: yoga clothes), and the tragic climax taking place onstage, with an orchestra in the pit and sparkly make-up in full effect. Dessay will appear in person at San Francisco screenings Sat/15 at 7pm and Sun/16 at 2pm. (1:53) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWnrk35qYMs

Dirty Wars Subtitled “the world is a battlefield,” this doc follows author and Nation magazine writer Jeremy Scahill as he probes the disturbing underbelly of America’s ongoing counterterrorism campaign. After he gets wind of a deadly nighttime raid on a home in rural Afghanistan, Scahill does his best to investigate what really happened, though what he hears from eyewitnesses doesn’t line up with the military explanation — and nobody from the official side of things cares to discuss it any further, thank you very much. With its talk of cover-ups and covert military units, and interviewees who appear in silhouette with their voices disguised, Dirty Wars plays like a thriller until Osama bin Laden’s death shifts certain (but not all) elements of the story Scahill’s chasing into the mainstream-news spotlight. The journalist makes valid points about how an utter lack of accountability or regard for consequences (that will reverberate for generations to come) means the “war on terror” will never end, but Dirty Wars suffers a bit from too much voice-over. Even the film’s gorgeous cinematography — director Rick Rowley won a prize for it at Sundance earlier this year — can’t alleviate the sensation that Dirty Wars is mostly an illustrated-lecture version of Scahill’s source-material book. Still, it’s a compelling lecture. (1:26) (Cheryl Eddy)

The Guillotines Why yes, that is Jimmy Wang Yu, director and star of 1976 cult classic Master of the Flying Guillotine, in a small but pivotal role commanding a team of assassins who specialize in dispatching heads with airborne versions of you-know-which weapon. Unfortunately, this latest from Andrew Lau (best-known stateside for 2002’s Infernal Affairs, remade into Martin Scorsese’s 2006 Oscar-winner The Departed) doesn’t have nearly as much fun as it should; dudes be chopping heads off in a flurry of CG’d-up steampunky whirlygigs, but The Guillotines‘ tone is possibly even more deadly, as in deadly serious. When a rebellious prophet-folk hero known as Wolf (Xiaoming Huang) runs afoul of the Emperor’s top-secret Guillotine brotherhood, led in the field by Leng (Ethan Juan), the squad travels in disguise to a rural, smallpox-afflicted village to track him down. Along for the journey is the Emperor’s top operative, ruthless Agent Du (Shawn Yue), a boyhood friend of Leng’s. Leng and Du share a dark secret: the Guillotines have been deemed expendable — yep, in the Stallone sense — and the Emperor has decided to kill them off and replace them with armies toting guns and cannons in the name of progress. Lau is no stranger to tales of men grappling with betrayals, misplaced loyalties, and hidden personal agendas — and as historical martial-arts fantasies go, The Guillotines has higher production values than most, with sweeping, luscious photography. Too bad all the action scenes are punctuated by episodes of moody brooding — replete with slo-mo gazing off into the distance, dramatically falling tears, solemn heart-to-hearts, swelling strings, and the occasional howl of anguish. (1:53) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6DJcgm3wNY

Man of Steel As beloved as he is, Superman is a tough superhero to crack — or otherwise bend into anything resembling a modern character. Director Zack Snyder and writer David S. Goyer, working with producer Christopher Nolan on the initial story, do their best to nuance this reboot, which focuses primarily on Supe’s alien origins and takes its zoom-happy space battles from Battlestar Galactica. The story begins with Kal-El’s birth on a Krypton that’s rapidly going into the shitter: the exploited planet is about to explode and wayward General Zod (Michael Shannon) is staging a coup, killing Kal-El’s father, Jor-El (Russell Crowe), the Kryptonians’ lead scientist, and being conveniently put on ice in order to battle yet another day. That day comes as Kal-El, now a 20-something earthling named Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) — resigned to his status as an outsider, a role dreamed up by his protective adoptive dad (Kevin Costner) — has turned into a bit of a (dharma) bum, looking like a buff Jack Kerouac, working Deadliest Catch-style rigs, and rescuing people along the way to finding himself. Spunky Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is the key to his, erm, coming-out party, necessitated by a certain special someone looking to reboot the Kryptonian race on earth. The greatest danger here lies in the fact that all the leached-of-color quasi-sepia tone action can turn into a bit of a Kryptonian-US Army demolition derby, making for a mess of rubble and tricky-to-parse fight sequences that, of course, will satisfy the fanboys and -girls, but will likely glaze the eyes of many others. Nevertheless, the effort Snyder and crew pack into this lengthy artifact — with its chronology-scrambling flashbacks and multiple platforms for Shannon, Diane Lane, Christopher Meloni, Laurence Fishburne, and the like — pays off on the level of sheer scale, adding up to what feels like the best Superman on film or TV to date — though that bar seems pretty easy to leap over in a single bound. (2:23) (Kimberly Chun)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V1E2IgXeuI

Pandora’s Promise Filmmaker Robert Stone has traveled far from his first film, 1988’s Oscar-nominated anti-nuke Radio Bikini, to today, with the release of Pandora’s Promise, a detailed and guaranteed-to-be-controversial examination of nuclear power and the environmentalists who have transitioned from fervently anti- to pro-nuclear. Interviewing activists and authors like Stewart Brand, Gwyneth Cravens, Mark Lynas, and Michael Shellenberger, among others, Stone eloquently visualizes all angles of their discussion with media, industrial, and newly shot footage, starting with a visit to the largest nuclear disaster of recent years, Fukushima, which he visits with the hazmat-suited environmental activist and journalist Lynas and continuing to Chernobyl and its current denizens. Couching the debate in cultural and political context going back to World War II, Stone builds a case for nuclear energy as a viable method to provide clean, safe power for planet in the throes of climate change that will nonetheless need double or triple the current amount of energy by 2050, as billions in the developing world emerge from poverty. In a practical sense, as The Death of Environmentalism author Shellenberger asserts, “The idea that we’re going to replace oil and coal with solar and wind and nothing else is a hallucinatory delusion.” Stone and his subjects put together an enticing argument to turn to nuclear as a way forward from coal, made compelling by the idea that designs for safer alternative reactors that produce less waste are out there. (1:27) (Kimberly Chun)

Know my desktop, know me: The rise of the screen grab confessional

Andrew Lam
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A realization reached this morning while Google (or in this case, Froogal) Hanging with Houston rapper’s Fat Tony video for “Hood Party”: A look at someone’s desktop can tell you more about a certain breed of 2013 person than watching them speed hunt-‘n’-peck their way through their inbox on the other bar stool. Small wonder then, that the screen grab confessional is now a thing. Thanks in part goes to local goth-hop promotor Marco de la Vega’s current video installation, viewable IRL through June 30 at Little Paper Planes‘ Owl Cave Books video installation space. Viewing instructions to my Guardianistas: play loud af in your headphones.

Watch the clip above for the real life daytime dealings of a club promotor, including the inner workings of Ticketfly, kitty cuddles, email inbox exposure, and cameos by some real cute videos-within-video: Mykki Blanco’s latest headturner and a compilation of death drops by vogue legend Erica Kane. Disclosing fully: De la Vega is not only a Guardian posterchild, but also a FB chat buddy of mine. Of course, that’ll be obvious to anyone who makes it to the 4:11 mark in the video. You can check out a whole bunch of other hip-to-the-minute clips made for Owl Cave’s video series on its Youtube channel. 

Another victory for the champions of the “unborn”

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In a grand piece of political theater, Wisconsin Republicans passed a measure 17-15 in their senate that would require an ultrasound prior to an abortion. “Theater” because they had the votes already and because it gave them the chance to grandstand “passionately” about this particularly ridiculous law (the idea being that if the uninformed baby vessel got to see what she was killing, no abortions–like she didn’t know what she was doing and wandered into a clinic looking for a bagel and cream cheese and walked out sans fetus).

Or maybe that the idea being that if you make the already ugly and gruesome abortion procedure into a humiliating, painful, degrading and drawn out marathon of misery, the wimmens will be less likely to “kill their babies”. 

OK. That does make sense in its way. But…….

The male half of these pregnancies don’t seem to have a parallel punishment. Why is that? Why not a law that requires that a physician stick a biopsy needle down the ureter to let the “offending party feel the pain of a baby’s death?”

Makes sense to me.


 

 

NSA surveillance scandal goes full tilt clown

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The domestic eavesdropping scandal is now entering week three in the news (it’s existed for real a lot longer) and as these things tend to do, the political posturing is headed into Clownland.

Yesterday, Congressman Peter King (R-NY) demanded that UK Guardian journalist (and attorney) Glenn Greenwald be arrested. Not because of anything Greenwald has done, but because Greenwald is threatening to expose CIA assets around the world (Greenwald denies this). Odd that a lawmaker wouldn’t be able to make this distinction and even odder that when a CIA asset was actually exposed in rhe last decade (by an employee of the Bush Administration), King wasn’t this vociferous.Greenwald, fairly consistent on the matter of civil liberties, is a pretty bright guy and snarkily responded that King’s newfound enthusiasm for prosecuting terrorists is somewhat of a joke. King has been a long time supporter of the IRA. You’d think that as a congressman whose Long Island district was impacted hard by 9/11 would be fairly tough on domestic terror, but it hasn’t hurt King electorally at all.

For two reasons. One is the obvious one–The IRA’s membership does bear a strong physical resemblance to King’s constituency, ie, both white and not Muslim, ergo, not terrorists. The second is that the IRA doesn’t bomb New York. London, yes, Manhattan, no. In fact, the US has been a source of IRA cash, donated by people that don’t see the group as terrorists.

Roll that over in your head. The US doesn’t meddle in the affairs of Northern Ireland by planting military bases there (there has been a slight flap over the use of Irish airports for US military purposes). Mostly, American involvement has been muted and even handed, especially in the late 90’s. Therefore the IRA has never attacked the US. Which wouldn’t be all that difficult, given the huge number of Irish-Americans and the ease that an IRA asset or two could fit in.

Because the US doesn’t militarily meddle in Ireland’s affairs, The IRA has no interest in America. 

Perhaps if the same philosophy extended to the Middle East, eh? Nah, better that the clown show go into overdrive, right?

 

 

John Dwyer’s Thee Fuzz Warr Overload pedal

Tony Robles
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John Dwyer’s Thee Fuzz Warr Overload pedal

You can file this under: sure, why not? Spirited Thee Oh Sees frontperson John Dwyer has “inspired” a new custom pedal for Death By Audio, called Thee Fuzz Warr Overload.

The pedal is limited to 500, and so says Death by Audio, once they’re gone, they’re gone. The Brooklyn-based effects pedal company also put out a signature Ty Segall pedal (Sunshine Reverb) which sold out in a day.

Thee Fuzz Warr Overload is available now for pre-order on the Death by Audio site ($225, like whoa), and ships June 30. 

I’ll let Death by Audio excitedly describe the pedal in all its fuzzy glory:

“This pedal is based on the super powerful circuit of the Fuzz War combined with a switchable hot-rodded treble boost. The Fuzz circuit controls include Gain, Level, Tone and the Boost circuit has a Level control. Combining these circuits unlocks new and virtually endless guitar tone possibilities. The specialized Tone knob allows you to sweep between rumbling low end, scooped out mid section and sizzling highs. The Gain knob can go from a smooth overdrive through distortion and up into uncharted territories. Thee Fuzz Warr Overload combines raucous fuzz and a killer treble boost to bring your sound to the next dimension.”

Here’s Dwyer demoing the pedal (plus a real cute turtle and some kids):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPDYcA9kG1k

The next local Thee Oh Sees show is the Phono Del Sol fest July 13 in Potrero Del Sol Park ($25).

Projection

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One of the more hilarious aspects of the back and forth in “Mr Redmond’s Cyber Playpen” is the inevitable scream from Redmond’s adversaries of “envy” every time Redmond posts anything critical of SF’s moneyed class. Imputing motive into why someone says something as a way of derailing a discussion is old hat as is. Who cares why something is written, it’s there, debate its merits. But the automatic assumption that Redmond’s bitterness over his failure in business leads him to muck-rake isn’t even asinine, it’s borderline demented.

As Redmond (and I) came from a relatively privileged background and yet voluntarily chose a profession where getting rich isn’t part of the reward at all, why would we envy those whose ranks we could easily have joined? Journalism, even when print media was thriving, isn’t lucrative. Neither is music/radio work. I can’t speak for him, but as someone that actually turned down a career in brokerage to play rock and roll, accumulating money didn’t seem anywhere near as gratifying. As Earl Butz pointed out many years ago, there are more important things in life.

An investigative reporter in any major city is gonna find lots and lots of sweetheart deals between City Hall and developers or landlords or any business interest. And would be remiss to not report them. It’s part of the gig they love. And lordy be, giving voice to people that don’t have one is satisfying if not fiscally rewarding. Claiming that Redmond must be envious of people he has nothing in common with is like claiming a gay man would envy the straight guy with the beautiful woman on his arm–she isn’t something he’d ever want, so it would never occur to him to be envious.

No, trollsky’s, the “envy of the rich” doesn’t come from Tim, Marke, Steve or I–but from you. All day every day planted on the lefty website hurling puerile broadsides like a cafeteria food fight–the idea that the rich and their government enablers are skeevy enrages you, because you wish so desperately to be part of a group of people that have no need for you (and recognizing that you’re a peon is too painful to accept). How dare anyone knock the people that are living YOUR dream? 

Hate to say it, but this is classic projection, or in layman’s terms “if you spot it, you got it”. Screaming “you’re jealous” at someone else when the big green globs of same are rolling off your brow like algae-laden sweat. It can be sort of funny in a pitiful manner at first but it’s gotten tedious–the hand that has the finger pointing outward has four pointing back at you. Next time you feel the urge to project, take four quarters off mama’s dresser and buy a lottery ticket. It’s healthier. 

Everyone but Mayor Lee sees SF’s worsening “housing affordability crisis”

Sasha Cuttler
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There was a clear theme that ran through yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting from beginning to end, something understood equally by renters, homeowners, and politicians from across the political spectrum: San Francisco has a crisis of housing affordability that is forcing people from the city.

And the only person who doesn’t seem to understand or care about that is the person with the most power to deal with the situation, Mayor Ed Lee, who opened the meeting by essentially dismissing both short- and long-term gentrification forces and claiming “our city has some of the toughest anti-displacement laws in the country.”

It was a claim that Lee made twice, first in response to a question by Sup. Eric Mar about Plan Bay Area and the massive displacement of current San Franciscans that it would create by 2040. And it was also how he answered a question by Sup. John Avalos about rents that are now skyrocketing beyond what most San Franciscans can afford.

I followed Mayor Lee back to his office, asking him to explain his claim, and he cited the city’s “elaborate” rent control laws and the Rent Board recently hiring new personnel as he briskly retreated toward his office. But surely he’s aware that displacement is already happening and getting worse, I told him, citing Rent Board figures showing that evictions are now at a 12-year high.

Lee looked at me dubiously and said, “I’ll have to check the figures on that.” I followed up today with Press Secretary Christine Falvey to ask whether Lee did check those figures — which show 1,757 evictions in the last year, up from 1,395 the previous, both numbers representing returns to the mass displacement of the last dot-com boom — and I’ll update this post if/when I hear back.

“It shows he’s out of touch with what’s happening in San Francisco,” Avalos told me in response to the mayor’s remarks.

Lee seemed to bristle at the suggestion that his aggressive economic development policies might have a downside that he’s going to have to deal with at some point. He touts the 44,000 jobs the city has added during his mayoral tenure, even deflecting criticism that he’s too focused on the technology industry by citing estimates that every tech job creates at least four other jobs (seemingly oblivious to the fact that most of these are low-wage service sector jobs, the very people who are being forced from the city).

“I’m just hoping you’re not blaming the 44,000 jobs we helped created,” Lee told Avalos, saying that he understands the concern about the rising cost of living, “but those are 44,000 people drawing a paycheck and taking care of their families.”

Yes, Mr. Mayor, but those paychecks are having an increasingly tough time paying for housing in San Francisco. That concern animated the condo conversion debate that took place later in the meeting, voiced by those focused on the lack of affordable homeownership opportunities and those focused on reducing the city’s rental stock to create those opportunities.

“I don’t think saying ‘it’s good that we have a growing economy’ is enough to address the issue,” Sup. David Campos said during the condo debate, referring to Lee’s earlier remarks.

Speaking near the end that discussion, Campos summarized the concerns expressed by both sides and sought to put the legislation into perspective: while important, the condo deal is a drop in the anti-displacement bucket. “We are only dealing with the issue of affordability in San Francisco on the margins,” he said, later adding, “I don’t think we’re doing enough to deal with the fundamental issue of who gets to live in San Francisco.”

The debate on the condo conversion began with its original author — Sup. Mark Farrell, who represents District 2, the wealthiest and most conservative in the city — explaining his desire to help middle class people who want to own homes remain in the San Francisco.

“This is the most affordable form of home ownership in San Francisco today,” Farrell said of tenancies-in-common, the fiscally and legally precarious middle step between an apartment and condominium. Later, he said, “We need more affordable homeownership opportunities and not less.”

Farrell argued that “this didn’t need to be a zero sum game,” but that’s exactly what the stock of rent-controlled apartments is in San Francisco, where only housing built before 1979 is protected from the market forces that can drive rents up to whatever a landlord demands.

“We have a fixed rent control stock. Every apartment that converts to a a condo is one less unit,” said Board President David Chiu, who worked with Sups. Jane Kim and Norman Yee and tenant group to amend Farrell’s legislation to help both renters and homeowners.  

“These units were once the homes of tenants who were displaced,” Kim said, objecting to the notion that one person’s apartment should be another person’s affordable homeownership opportunity and arguing that the city should be building more condos for first-time homebuyers instead of cannabalizing the homes of the nearly two-thirds of city residents who rent.

Like Chiu and Kim, Yee said that he wanted to help the TIC owners of today without simply clearing out of the backlog and letting the condo lottery continue unabated, which would green-light even more conversion of apartments. “We want to curb the speculation,” Yee said.

That idea that the city should help people who live in the city, without simply feeding the speculative investors who profiteer off of housing in San Francisco, was a strong theme among critics of condo conversion.

A pro-tenant crowd packed the Board Chambers. Although barred by board rules from addressing the condo legislation directly (that occurred at the committee level), one commenter said, “Giving any more power to the real estate market in San Francisco should be considered a crime.”

To help ward off real estate speculators once the annual condo conversion lottery resumes in 2024, the legisation also limited future conversions to buildings of less than four units, instead of the current cap of six units, a change that Farrell resisted.

“This is not an academic exercise anymore,” Farrell said of the condo conversion restrictions that were added to the legislation. “This will negatively impact thousands of TIC owners in the city.”

Farrell’s original co-sponsor, Sup. Scott Wiener, had a more pro-tenant point-of-view, objecting to the changes that Chiu inserted on more narrow grounds. In his comments, he noted how close the two sides were and how they share the same basic goal: preventing displacement of current city residents.  

“The one thing we can all agree with is we have a housing affordability crisis,” Wiener said, praising the city’s rent control and tenant protection laws, but adding, “TIC owners are also part of this city.”

The price of dealing with the rapid growth in the city — whether it comes to infrastructure or housing affordability — was also a point that Wiener made earlier in the meeting as the board approved the term sheet for a massive office and residential development project proposed at Pier 70.

“We are not doing what we need to do to support the public transportation needed for those projects,” Wiener said, also referring to other projects along the waterfront (the Warrior Arena at Pier 30 and the Giants/Anchor Steam project at Pier 46) and in the southeastern part of the city. “We don’t have the transit infrastructure to support our current population, let alone new growth.”

It’s about striking a balance, as Chiu said he did with the condo legislation, and not just a balance between renters and TIC owners. It’s about striking a balance between how to protect the San Francisco of today while planning for the San Francisco of tomorrow.

Yes, that means working with market rate housing developers, and it also means diverting some of their would-be profits into the city’s affordable housing fund and its infrastructure needs. Yes, it means private-sector job creation, but it also means more public sector jobs and providing a safety net for people without jobs or who work as artists or social workers or other professions that are being driven from the city. And it means beefing up our public housing and turning around the exodus of African-Americans, concerns raised at the meeting by Sup. Malia Cohen.

We at the Guardian last year looked at how Oakland has become cooler than San Francisco, largely because of the displacement from here. And now, even many people within the tech community have begun to decry the gentrifiction that is being driven by Mayor Lee’s narrow economic development vision.

“Plan Bay Area is an opportunity to think regionally and strategically about planned growth,” Lee said when addressing Mar’s question, sidestepping the direct answer that Mar sought on a set of specific proposals for mitigating some of the displacement planned for San Francisco and maintaining this city’s diversity.

Yes, we do have an opportunity to think strategically about the city we’re becoming and who gets to live in it, but only if we don’t think “jobs” is the answer to every question.

Behind the scenes with Magic Fight and the Music Video Race

Tony Robles
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All photos by Chris Stevens

By now you’ve read all about the second annual Music Video Race. No? Well get on that. And then check out these additional photos, all shot on location at the SUB-Mission space by Chris Stevens.

The gist: 20 bands were paired with 20 filmmakers this past weekend, and each team created a brand new music video over the course of 48 hours. This is a peek at just one of those shoots, set up by filmmaker Cory K. Riley, and starring the Bay Area band Magic Fight.

The screening (and winner announcements) with live bands will take place this Sat/15 at the Rickshaw Stop. And there’ll be an additional screening, minus the live acts, Sun/16 at Opera Plaza Cinemas. Check the Music Video Race site for more details.

David Chiu’s flextime

Zelda Bronstein
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David Chiu’s flextime

I’m not surprised that the folks at the Chamber of Commerce are all agitated about Sup. David Chiu’s proposal to expand family-friendly scheduling at local businesses. The Chamber’s Jim Lazarus is typically out of control:

“At some point, people are not going to want to create businesses in San Francisco when they have to go up to City Hall for a hearing every time an employee doesn’t like their reason for not agreeing to a shorter workweek,” Lazarus said. “Are we going to close for the month of August like France? Is that the next one?”

For the record, I’m all in favor of the French way of thinking about work. But you already know that.

Here’s the crazy thing, though: The Chiu legislation is actually remarkably mild. All it says is that a worker at a company with more than 10 employees has the right to request a different work schedule. The word here is “request.” The company can deny the request if would “create an undue hardship for the company or organization, including an increase in costs or a detrimental effect on the ability to meet customer or client demands.”

Folks: That’s a huge, broad exemption. If giving an employee the right to work at home sometimes (actually, a good idea for lots of reasons, including climate change) or the right to start or end a shift early or late, costs any money or causes any real disruption in the business, then management is exempt and can deny the request.

All the law would really do is elevate the idea of flextime to something that has to be considered if someone asks for it. And you can’t be fired for asking.

If the Chamber is going to go ballistic about this, it’s way out of step. A lot of businesses in the city already comply with at least the spirit of the Chiu law. I don’t see this as a huge issue for anyone.

Explaining Osama and 9/11

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My oldest son just graduated elemetary school and so my wife and I gave him an IPad as gift. He loves the thing. Unlike his gadget n geegaw loathing father, he takes to that stuff with a vengeance.

As an internet scouring curiosity-laden child, he’s gotta be watched carefully. Sometimes he finds “acceptable” videos on YouTube that scare him, however. Today he saw for the first time the footage of the World Trade Center being hit by plane and collapsing on September 11th, 2001. I was on an errand when his mother called me and told me how upset he’d been, seeing the people jump hand in hand to their deaths. 

When I returned home, I explained to him what had happened. And why New York had been attacked and how it had affected our family directly (his uncle’s boss was flown into the towers killing her). I explained to him that human beings were capable of incredible cold blooded cruelty but also kindness and love. He still wanted to know why Bin Laden had planned and executed the attacks and I replied that the motive may have been to force American troops off the holy Saudi soil or maybe that as a former CIA employee, he’d been stiffed for cash. We don’t really know.

What I do figure, I explained to him, is that Bin Laden had a history of being part of suckering Western powers into unwinnable wars. By knocking down the World Trade Center, America would be dragged into a bloody morass like the Red Army was and we’d collapse like the USSR did. And then something hit me that I’d never thought of.

When Bin Laden was laying out this grand scheme of destruction, how come no one ever said anything like “well, it’s true that the Americans are infidels, dude–but this retaliation of theirs that you’re hoping for? That’s gonna be thousands and thousands of our people that get snuffed in a war that really doesn’t have to take place. Like, they may be imperialistic whatevers, man, but this provocation means lots of dead civilians, kids. That’s not really a great idea–got anything else?”

Of course that never happened and not because of Islamofascism or whatever other completely human trait is laid on one group of people as opposed to all of them. It never seems to keep the Bin Laden’s of the world up at night that they’re responsible for death and carnage nor does anyone ever tell them that this isn’t heroism or martyrdom but murder. 

So I explained this to my boy and he nodded by way of “OK, dad–cool”. I dunno if it sank in but if I ever get word back that he walked away from a fight because he knew it never leads to anything but pain, that’s a job well done.

 

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