This just in from Dinosaur Jr. label home Fat Possom: Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis – a real-life guitar hero who is going frickin’ blind for his loud, loud art – takes on comedian and vid game playah David Cross on AOL/the DL’s Guitar Hero II Challenge.
Who takes home the riffage troph? Ax me later.
By Tim Redmond
Nancy Pelosi has stuck a $231,000 earmark in the federal budget to help the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association build a new Urban Center in San Francisco. The move stirred up some controversy on the floor of the House today, when Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who likes to criticize earmarks, asked whether federal money ought to be going to a private nonprofit think tank.
It’s a relatively tiny amount of money — the who-really-gives-a-shit level — and some good progressive people love the idea of a SPUR Urban Center — a downtown building that could be a community center of sorts for city planning issues. I’m not sure I hate it myself.
“We want to become much more public and democratic,” Jim Chappell, SPUR’s president, told me when I called him just now about the earmark. Pelosi’s money, he said, “is a statement of confidence in our cities and our program by a federal government that has declared war on cities.”
But SPUR has over the years been way on the wrong side of a lot of important planning issues, and is still dominated by developers and their architects, and … I don’t know. It struck me a worth noting.
By Tim Redmond
Another sign that Bush has shifted the Supreme Court successfully in his direction: The Court just ruled that schools can’t use race in school assignments. Everyone at SFUSD was waiting for this ruling, most of us hoping that the court would allow some consideration of race in placing students. Since the district stopped using race, the level of segretation in the schools has climbed.
So now the new superintendent has another big challenge.
By Tim Redmond
The San Francisco Chronicle apparently thinks a retired Wall Street Journal reporter who now lives in Berkeley and who wrote a remarkably homophobic piece on San Francisco politics way back in 1995 is the perfect persion to comment on the current Board of Supervisors. His piece, on SFGate, has the headline “Clown Show: The Board of Supervisors SF deserves? His point, it appears, is that the large queer community in San Francisco and the looney liberals here have elected a bunch of crazies to the board.
I would ignore this shit, except that it comes in the wake of all the Chris Daly bashing (much of which is factually inaccurate — Daly never accused the mayor of doing cocaine) and will, no doubt, fuel a new attack on district elections.
So let’s be real here: This district-elected board is hardly a crew of wackos. The board has done exceptional work over the past few years, passing landmark legislation that has put San Francisco in the forefront of American cities on progressive policy.
By Tim Redmond
Now here’s a fascinating harm-reduction (and crime-reduction) idea. Drug sales are happening anyway; why not regulate them in one designated area?
By Steven T. Jones
Sup. Chris Daly has been getting beat up by Team Newsom, the Chronicle, the Examiner, and Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, but at today’s Board of Supervisors meeting, he showed no sign of retreat or remorse. In fact, he’s giving as good as he gets in some hilarious and poignant ways. As the meeting began, he distributed to the press copies of a letter to Mayor Gavin Newsom making clear “I did not accuse you of using cocaine” and asking for an apology, and handed out a printout of his latest blog post, in which he labels the concerted attack on him “Operation Eric Jaye” and chides Alioto-Pier for being an out-of-touch elitist who only seems to show up for work when it’s time to carry water for the mayor.
Journalists chuckled and pointed out the funniest passages to one another as the board rapidly fired through its business. But the real fun began when it came time for the supervisors to introduce new legislation and Alioto-Pier announced her previously announced proposal to create a code of conduct for supervisors.
Guardian photo by Charles Russo
By Tim Redmond
The Chron buried the news deep in the local section, but a June 22 state Court of Appeal decision on the validity of the Housing Element of the city’s General Plan was a huge slap in the face to the mayor and the planning director.
In essence, the court ruled that the city can’t adopt the new Housing Element without doing an environmental impact report. You can read the decision here.
I’ll admit: The folks who sued, a group of West side homeowners who don’t want more density in their neighborhoods, are not my favorite activists. I’ve never thought it was fair that all the density had to go on the East side of town, and that nobody West of 19th Ave. even had to think about it.
That’s the essence of the suit: The Housing Element might encourage more housing on the West side of town, and might allow housing without a lot of parking, and that might lead to congestion and traffic issues. As my old friend Ron Curran used to say, Boo Fucking Hoo: The rest of us in town have lived with those issues for years, and anyone with any sense knows that new housing in this overdeveloped town will need to be transit-oriented and not car-oriented.
Still, the plaintiffs made an excellent point: The Planning Department should have done an EIR on the Housing Element. IN fact, the Planning Department should do a lot better in the environmental review department generally. You just go forawrd with these big projects and zoning changes and refuse to acknowledge the impacts, and you’re eventually going to get smacked.
Marc McGuire, a tile contractor from San Diego, and CALPASC’s Brad Diede on CNBC this spring to discuss accusations that Lennar has been extorting its contractors
A few months ago, we reported how Lennar had been giving contractors a choice between a rock or a hard place: reduce their unpaid invoices by up to 20 percent—or be excluded from bidding work for a minimum of six months.
Today comes word that the company, which is poised to build condos on most of San Francisco’s underdeveloped lands, including Bayview Hunter’s Point and the decommissioned Hunters Point Shipyard, has just posted a second quarter loss–and it is expecting more losses this year.
Blaming high inventories and dropping real estate prices, and with his company reporting losses of $1.55 per share, Lennar President and Chief Executive Stuart Miller announced, “As we look to our third quarter and the remainder of 2007, we continue to see weak, and perhaps deteriorating, market conditions.”
This time last year, the nation’s biggest home builder was posting a profit of $324.7 million, or $2 per share. But Lennar not alone in its real estate woes. As its quarterly revenue slips 37 percent to $2.88 billion (compared to $4.58 billion this time last year,) the National Association of Realtors reports that sales of existing homes fell for a third straight month in May, the median sales price declined for a record 10th consecutive month and the inventory of unsold homes reached its highest level in 15 years.
Or as Miller put it, ” The supply of new and existing homes has continued to increase resulting in declining home prices across our markets.”
And here comes the part that should really sound the alarms in San Francisco, where a large number of subcontractors look to Lennar for their daily bread. Asked what Lennar intends to do about its financial picture, Miller said his company is “focused on expenses, reducing construction costs and pushing sales to manage inventory.”
With Mayor Gavin Newsom having hastily amended the BVHP redevelopment plan so the Navy could hand the hazardous shipyard over to Lennar for clean up, (despite the company’s ongoing problems monitoring asbestos dust on an adjacent parcel of land), all so he can try and keep the 49ers in town, here’s hoping all the agencies that regulate and oversee Lennar, and not just the local impacted communities, will be watching this project like hawks.
A whole lot of PBR-guzzling, pizza-chomping, pork rind-inhaling folks came out for Phantom Surfer Mike Lucas’s birthday get-down a few weeks back at the Stork Club. The Flakes, Harold Ray Live in Concert, Knights of the New Crusade and so many more garage rock combos got our their best – and worst – jokes to toast the dude. Good times? You bet.
By Bruce B. Brugmann
I ask this question week after week when I read Rich’s splendid column in the Sunday NewYork Times.
Perhaps, if he were on the Sunday talk shows or in the White House press corps, he would be asking the tough questions that are so painfully needed nowadays as the surge doesn’t surge and the Iraq war escalates. .
For example, he writes in his lead, “By this late date, we should know the fix is in when the White House’s top factotums fan out on the Sunday morning talk shows singing the same lyrics, often verbatim, from the same hymnal of spin. The pattern was set way back on Sept. 8, 2002, when in simultaneous appearances three cabinet members and the vice president warned darkly of Saddam’s aluminum tubes. ‘We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,’ said Condi Rice, in a scripted line. The hard sell of the war in Iraq–the hyping of a (fictional) nuclear threat to America–had officially begun.
Emergency fund-raiser!
Hello,
I would first like to thank everyone in the community for the support we
have received over the past 6 years we have existed. We have always
maintained ourselves as a group run by artists and for artists.
The problem that we are facing now is a financial one.
1. S. Slater and Son are trying to collect $4,300 for our percentage of
building maintenance costs for October – December 2006
2. We are unable to make a payment plan with the landlord and must pay
this bill in one lump sum.
3. We are certain that the landlord will give us a similar bill, for the
first half of 2007, at the begining of next month or in September, so we
need to raise an additional $4000.
Art SF has provided a space for local emerging artists for years. We have
never charged artists any commission for any art sold through us. We are
an all volunteer run organization and have dedicated ourselves to our
local art scene. All money raised goes directly to keep our space open to
the public. We have been here for the community, and now we are asking
the community to be here for us. We are in a crisis situation and need
our community support more than ever.
To donate to help save Art SF or for more information, email:
joemama@spaz.org
Please help to spread the word.
Below is an announcement about our emergency gallery opening coming up
this Friday:
our last show???????
hey everyone, the community art space, ARTsf, that we run in the mission,
is in danger of going under!!!!!! we are throwing a party to raise money
to keep the space alive, right now there are 8 artists in residence and a
number of community events constantly taking place here. If we lose the
space, it would be horrible!!! please stop by this gallery opening and
show your
support, its going to be good, i promise….
Friday, July 27th
Doors @730 Music@800
110 Capp St @ 16th
sliding scale $7-$7 million
with over 40 artists including:
Alphonso Entrada
Allyson Dutra
Andrew Beals McPherson
Cami Willis
Casper
Chamille Estrada
Claire Hummel
Cuba
Donna Wood
Erin D’silva
Faith Allen
G.T. Singh
Ian Hill
Ian Mullen
Jai Carrillo
Joan Zamora
Joe Ertl
Joe Mama
Joe Twistie
Joseph Heren
Josh and Scott
Judy Berberian
Kara Marie
K2
Marisa Rocke
Nate Orman
Pete Doolittle
Philip Milic
Pierre Pressure
Ralph Granich
Ryan Coffey
Sadie Mellerio
Scott Williams
Sholeh Asagary
Steve Bird
Tanya
Vi Hoang
Music with:
Tiger Honey Pot
Ferocious Few
Fluff Gurl
Sugar Butt Tiger
People People (featuring members of Two Gallants and Trainwreck Riders)
Baby bear tiger bear (featuring members of All My Pretty Ones)
DJ Mochipet and friends (Daly City Records)
DJ Coma
help keep art in the mission!!!
peace
joe mama
“Vatican warns against driving under the influence of gay. Oh, my God. That hat. Those shoes.” B3
“Vatican warns against driving under the influence of gay. Oh, my God. That hat. Those shoes.” B3
By Molly Freedenberg
Because all we need is another magazine telling us how thin, young, and Caucasian we’re not, a group of editors and doctors have decided to bring us a new mag, New Beauty. What’s new about New Beauty, you ask? Basically, this is a mag that does for lipo and Botox what InStyle does for lipstick and Lucky Jeans. Including the part where it reminds us we’re not rich enough to actually get what we need to be less flawed than we so clearly are.
Now, to be fair, I have to admit the magazine is well designed, and it’s refreshingly text heavy for a mag targeting women (though the font’s a bit small for my aging eyes). And New Beauty does have a panel of actual doctors, dermatologists, and scientists acting as some kind of official resource, so at least they’re not approaching such serious subjects as surgery and implants in an irresponsibly fluffy way. I also have to concede that this could be a great resource for people already interested in getting these procedures and wanting to know more about them.
But Jesus. Is this what it’s coming to? Facelifts for 20 somethings? Preventative Botox? And treating these kinds of procedures as normally as we’d treat self-tanners or slimming pantyhose? I know it’s just a reflection of our culture and all, so perhaps I should be complaining about that, not the fact that the magazine is (wisely, from a financial standpoint) capitalizing on it.
But I believe the role of the media is to shape culture as much as reflect it. And by its very existence, this magazine is pushing us even more in the direction of age-phobic, superficial self-loathing. Sigh. I guess it’s back to Bitch and Bust and Cunt for me.
By Sarah Phelan
Photo by Charles Russo
Mayor Gavin Newsom only shows up to self congratulatory budget events that seek to make him look good
Mayor Gavin Newsom is happy to be center stage when it comes to attacking Sup. Chris Daly. At last week’s budget rally, Newsom made it look as if Daly had unilaterally decided to cut funding to pothole repairs and police academies. (In reality Daly was responding to Newsom’s cuts to affordable housing and public health.)
This week, Newsom made it look as if Daly had randomly decided to talk about unsubstantiated allegations that the mayor was doing cocaine, while sleeping with the wife of his campaign manager. (In reality, Daly was referring, in the context of Newsom’s proposed cuts to substance abuse treatment programs, to the mayor’s self-professed alcohol problem, as well as his refusal to deal head on with widespread whisperings about cocaine use.)
Either way, and without a declared challenger in the mayor’s race this fall, bashing Daly is a far easier for the Mayor than say, explaining to poor folks why you are proposing cutting funding for programs that help poor poeople, such as affordable rental housing in favor of increasing funding for programs that help the middle class, such as affordable homeownership. Or explaining why you are cutting the only 24-hour homeless shelter in town, when your proposal to add rangers to Golden Gate Park strongly suggests the homeless situation is getting worse.
So it came as no surprise that Mayor Gavin Newsom chose not to mingle with the hundreds of poor folks that lined up last night at City Hall to talk about the damage that his proposed cuts to affordable housing and public health will inflict on them and their already fragile communities.
As the rules stand, the Mayor doesn’t have to attend such hearings, but his absence from the trenches (he wasn’t around for Tuesday night’s Beilensen hearings either, when 300 people showed up to talk about the true cost of cutting substance abuse treatment and other public health programs–a hearing which has received almost no media coverage other than a fixation with Daly’s “cocaine” remarks) led Sup. Tom Ammiano to observe, “I think there is not a full accounting by the mayor himself to this budget when he does not have to attend these meetings.”
With Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier cooking up Ms. Manners rules of engagement for the Board of Supervisors following what she deems “offensive” comments by her colleague Sup.Chris Daly, how about her also asking the Mayor to be present for the annual budget hearings, during which folks wait for hours, just to speak on the record for a couple minutes?
Because Newsom’s absence, in the face of all this budgetary angst among people of very limited means, is beginning to come across as more than a tad offensive.
Ooops. We missed an Ammianoliner earlier this week.
“49ers reject Ed Jew’s bid for stadium in Burlingame.” (The message on Tom Ammiano’s home telephone.)
By Bruce B. Brugmann
On the front page of today’s San Francisco Chronicle, June 2l, Mayor Gavin Newsom is pictured, grim, scowling, arms clenched, over this caption:
“Mayor Gavin Newsom denies Supervisor Chris Daly’s suggestion that he has used cocaine. “That’s how low politics now has gotten in this city, and I seriously thought it couldn’t get much worse.”
The story by City Hall Reporter Cecilia M. Vega had this head: “CITY HALL UPROAR AT COCAINE CLAIM,” with this subhead, “Angry Newsom blasts Daly for bringing politics to a new low.”
This jolly back and forth, I submit, is far from a new low. (See City Editor Steve Jones’s blog in our politics blog.)
For starters, I would submit there is a new new low and a most timely new new low at that. This new new low is the fact that Newsom, despite the public power mandates of the federal Raker Act, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the crucial Ammiano/Mirkarimi CCA legislation approved by the Supervisors only last Tuesday, reversed his public pledges supporting CCA and public power and clambered into bed in hot embrace on Tuesday with PG&E. (See my previous blog.) He allowed PG&E to call the shots in a PG&E-arranged and PG&E- promoted press conference at the Presidio announcing that the city in effect was turning over its public study of tidal power to the private utility that has perpetuated the PG&E/Raker Act scandal for decades.
This is the new new low: the scandal of how the mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, after PG&E has privatized and stolen the city’s cheap, green Hetch Hetchy power, and after PG&E helped privatize and steal the Presidio, was in effect turning over the choppy waters of the bay and the ocean to PG&E to privatize and steal. Incredible. Newsom was doing his damndest to put PG&E in the catbird seat on the next giant step on power generation and to further entrench the illegal private utility in City Hall. No wonder Newsom gets so “agitated” over the handy dandy issue of whether he did or did not use cocaine.
Click here for Chronicle coverage of tidal power study.
Click here for Examiner coverage of tidal power study.
By Steven T. Jones
Sup. Chris Daly may have crossed a line by suggesting during a budget hearing that Mayor Gavin Newsom uses cocaine, but the mayor isn’t entitled to his overblown righteous indignation. Why? Because he’s the one who left open this question earlier this year when he responded to revelations of his sexual improprieties and alcohol abuse with the blanket dismissal “that everything you’ve heard and read is true and I’m deeply sorry about that.” Then he refused to answer any questions on either issue, with only a couple exceptions weeks later involving friendly journalists (including CBS’s Hank Plante, who asked about cocaine and Newsom didn’t directly answer, something Daly rightly called an “artful dodge”). Newsom is now simply reaping what he has sown. He has proven himself to be untrustworthy and willing to say or do anything to get out of a jam — or to simply avoid answering questions not to his liking — so it’s hard to put too much stock in statements like, “I am associated with something that I don’t do, never have, not even in the realm of reason should someone even accuse me of this.”
By Sarah Phelan
with editorial research by Joseph Plaster
photo by Terrie Frye
Admit it! Would you even be reading this story if Daly hadn’t said “allegations of cocaine use”?
For those few running dogs of the press who actually hung around for Tuesday night’s four-hour hearing on proposed cuts to public health programs, Sup. Chris Daly’s comments on Newsom’s substance abuse problems seemed, well, entirely appropriate.
As the two reporters who were actually there know full well, Daly’s speech, which lasted eight minutes, only spent 30 seconds referring to allegations of Newsom’s cocaine use. The rest of the speech focused on the reality that there’s been an annual ping-pong match going on between the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors, ever sinceNewsom came to power. In this match, Newsom proposes making cuts to public health programs–and the Board objects. Then those impacted have to show up to protest at City Hall. At which point, the Board’s Budget Committee responds by restoring funding to the programs that Newsom has once again targeted.
“In honor of gay pride, Supervisor Daly and Mayor Newsom will have makeup sex.” B3
By Stephen Torres
Having my education more in the school of life than actual school, I sometimes get tripped up by the people I’ve chosen to run with when they start talking about grown-up things. A lot of my friends and acquaintances have made it their life’s work to fight the good fight in the non-profit field, or to explore the nuance and complexity of such studies as sexuality. The beauty part about living in San Francisco, and about my friends here, is that if I’m curious enough to learn something new, there’s usually someone there willing to school me.
I recently saw the one night only performance of Noise: a (Micro)Biopolitics of Masculinity at Counter Pulse. The title alone made my head hurt. Jesse Hewit, who was putting up the piece as his master’s thesis, took some time to give some explanation in the program, but it was the performance that he and his cast gave that provided the most illumination.
