SFBG Blogs

The vanishing Tenderloin

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Casey Mills in beyond Chron has a nice little tidbit on how Gavin Newsom’s press release endorsing the little-known Rob Black for District Six supervisor conveniently omits any mention of the Tenderloin.

mark pickerel aug 8

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>
>CHICAGO, IL: From Seattle Grunge to spooky Country: EX-SCREAMING TREES
>MARK PICKEREL (Nirvana, Neko Case) embarks on SOLO CD RELEASE TOUR of West
>Coast in support of debut Bloodshot Records release, “Snake in the Radio”,
>beginning Saturday, August 8, 2006 in Portland, OR.
>
>INTERVIEW REQUESTS RE: Mark Pickerel at Town Lounge (Portland OR.) 8-5-06:
>angie@bloodshotrecords.com
>
>Seattle staple MARK PICKEREL, former SCREAMING TREES drummer/NIRVANA
>session man who has most recently collaborated with MARK LANEGHAN, BRANDI
>CARLILE, and NEKO CASE, sets out on his first ever solo CD Release Tour
>immediately following his debut performance at the “ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES”
>festival in the UK.
>
>Mark’s full band (billed as Mark Pickerel and His Praying Hands) will
>accompany him on the last date of his summer CD Release Tour at Seattle’s
>BUMBERSHOOT festival on September 2, 2006. Mark is also scheduled to
>headline BLOODSHOT RECORDS CMJ PARTY in New York City on Saturday, November
>4, 2006.
>
>”Snake in the Radio” reunites Mark with longtime ally and legendary
>producer STEVE FRISK (Nirvana, Low, Posies, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees).
>The result: quirky phrasing, charming lyrics, and an uncanny record not
>unlike the works of the Magnetic Fields. According to NO DEPRESSION, Mark
>Pickerel’s new release “is music as perfectly suited for those late-night
>hours as a classic cult film.”
>
>Mark Pickerel has moved from behind the kit and, with his band The Praying
>Hands, he’s ready to start the next chapter in his musical life.
>
>****MARK PICKEREL LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO:****
>
>ANNIE’S SOCIAL CLUB
>Tuesday August 8, 2006:
>Mark Pickerel Bloodshot CD Release show, solo-acoustic!
>9:00pm
>http://www.anniessocialclub.com/august06.html
>
>MARK PICKEREL BLOODSHOT CD RELEASE (solo acoustic):
>
>Sat 8-5-06 Portland, OR Towne Lounge w/ Johnny Dowd
>Tue 8-8-06 San Francisco, CA Annie’s Social Club
>Wed 8-9-06 Sacramento, CA Marilyn’s
>Thu 8-10-06 Los Angeles, CA Hotel Cafe
>Fri 8-11-06 Tuscon, AZ Hotel Congress
>Sat 8-12-06 Albuquerque, NM Burt’s Tiki Lounge
>Mon 8-14-06 Houston, TX Rudyard’s British Pub
>Tue 8-15-06 New Orleans, LA One Eyed Jacks
>Wed 8-16-06 New Orleans, LA House of Blues
>Sun 8-20-06 Austin, TX Longbranch Inn
>Thu 8-24-06 Albuquerque, NM Atomic Cantina
>Sat 8-26-06 San Francisco, CA Hotel Utah
>Mon 8-28-06 San Francisco, CA Makeout Room
>Sat 9-2-06 Seattle, WA Bumbershoot Festival w/ Shooter Jennings,
>Alejandro Escovedo, Laura Veirs
>
>
> >For more information, email angie@bloodshotrecords.com
> >Mark Pickerel promo pics, bio, MP3’s, and tour dates here:
> >http://www.bloodshotrecords.com/artists/markpickerel/
>
>

More on the Case of the Uncovered Bay Area Newspaper Monopoly

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1. It was good to see today’s Chronicle run a big front page, above the fold story on a 24-year-old freelance cameraman (Josh Wolfe) upholding journalistic principle and going to jail rather than disclosing unaired tapes of a 2005 anarchist demonstrations in which protestors clashed with police. This once again shows the power a daily paper can wield in punching up a serious Freedom of Information/First Amendment issue. Wolfe’s courageous decision as an individual contrasts nicely with the institutional moves by the nation’s biggest newspaper chains to impose quietly on the Bay Area a Singleton/Hearst regional monopoly conglomerate, with McClatchy, Gannett and Stephens aiding and abetting, no competition allowed, for the duration. (See Bay Guardian editorials and my previous blogs).

Since these publishers have mangled and blacked out the coverage of this story, let me lay out the documents below in the Clint Reilly court filings for you to judge for yourself. Pay particular attention to the Alioto filings, which detail the real monopolizing strategy of the publishers:

Read the Alioto Legal Documents:
Complaint.pdf

Gannett-Stephens_Opp_to_ TRO.pdf

Hearst_Opp_to_TRO.pdf

McClatchy_opp_to_TRO.pdf

MediaNews-Calif_Newspaper_Partnership_Opp_to_TRO.pdf

Memo-Supp_of_Mtn_for_TRO.pdf

Order_denying_TRO.pdf

Plaintiff’s_Reply_to_Mtn_for_TRO.pdf

2. Just in: A breathless editorial in today’s Contra Costa Times (“Times’ bright future”), welcoming Dean Singleton and his brand of journalism, by some folks who want to keep their jobs. Click here. Their line is presented without blushing: “…the joining of these suburban newspapers under the Media/News flag creates a Bay Area publishing constellation that makes each paper stronger by giving it access to the best that the others have to offer. This is another chapter in a classic American success story: how MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton grew his enterprise from a single, small daily newspaper in New Jersey to the fourth largest publishing company in the country.” The rousing conclusion: “As we said, it has been a difficult eight months for everyone at the Times, but all of that is about to be behind us which allows us to turn our attention fully to the job at hand. Creating informative, entertaining and compelling content for the Times dailies, our weeklies and Contra Costa Times.”

Impertinent question: we always thought the CCT was a damn good community newspaper, so recognized by the California Newspaper Publishers Association with its 2002 and 2003 General Excellence awards. Does anyone over there really think the paper will get better under Singleton? Which Bay Area paper has Singleton made better after he took it over? Let me say for the record: I like Dean Singleton personally and have had some dealings with him and I would like to hope for the best but…Keep me posted on developments in Singletonland.

3. The nation’s journalism and mass communications professors are communing this week at the Marriott Hotel under the banner of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Will any of the professors or panels take up the issue of accelerating media concentration, perhaps the most serious problem in the newspaper business, and in particular the issue of the emerging Hearst/Singleton conglomerate right here in San Francisco? This is a tough one for journalism/mass com departments who depend on newspaper and broadcast companies for money and jobs. B3

The press censors the press

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Well, well. Today’s Chronicle/Hearst had some big stories on its front page, including a story by its City Hall reporter headed “SF Residents asked to volunteer for a day.” The lead: “Mayor Gavin Newsom today will call on all San Francisco residents to take time out and give a day to their city.” And there were at the top of the page some teaser heads, “After 25 years-still want your MTV? C. W. Nevius on Mel Gibson’s tirade. Bruce Jenkins on baseball’s busy day.” And a big across- the- front – page story, framed in yellow with a white sun, saying, “If you thought last week was hot…More heat, rising ocean, loss of snowpack forecast by the state for 2l00.” Nifty. All legitimate stories.

But way inside on the business page was the hottest local story for San Francisco, the region, and the newspaper business. It was Hearst’s joyful policy announcement story headlined “Bay Area papers cleared for sale to MediaNews, Federal agency’s antitrust review ends with approval.” Our earlier two blogs pointing out the lousy Hearst coverage (and lousy coverage by the other papers involved in the deal) must have done a bit of good. I emailed the obvious questions in my blog to Hearst, but Hearst didn’t reply and Hearst and the other participating papers didn’t answer the questions in their stories, but they did do a bit better with the DOJ story. At least, after I chided them for leaving out a key point in their minimalist stories reporting how a federal judge refused to grant a temporary restraining order in the Clint Reilly/Joe Alioto suit, they asked Alioto if he and Reilly were going to press on with their suit. They are, as I reported exclusively on my blogs. Finally, Hearst et al did publish this fact in their stories. The Mercury-News put it as the last paragraph to its story.

However, the stories by Hearst and the other participant papers read as if nobody ever bothered to check the court documents in the case or at least the Alioto reply memorandum in support of his motion for a temporary restraining order.
What Alioto argued is that Hearst and MediaNews (Singleton), and the other billionaire partners (Gannett and Stephens), have no use for facts nor principles in their move to regional monopoly. Case in point: Back in 2000, when Reilly tried to block Hearst from buying the family-owned Chronicle and shutting down its own Examiner and establish a morning monopoly, Hearst argued that there was no reason to fear a newspaper monopoly in San Francisco because competitors from other Bay Area cities, such as the San Jose Mercury-News and Contra Costa Times, would provide serious competition.

“Specifically,” Alioto stated, “Hearst argued that all of the Bay Area newspapers compete with each other in the Greater Bay Area, and that this competition, both actual and potential, has a tempering effect on the behavior of the competing papers.”

Now, of course, Hearst is arguing the opposite-that these outlying papers are not competitors with the Chronicle and never will be. Alioto pointed out that Federal Judge Vaughn Walker, in ruling against Reilly and for Hearst in that case, agreed with Hearst’s argument and quoted extensively from Walker’s decision. Alioto continued that, “at the very least, this court ought to hold a hearing on a motion for a preliminary injunction, if not a trial, to find out why Hearst and the other defendants are now ignoring and running away from the position taken by Hearst in the prior lawsuit.”

Alioto also pointed out why the contention of Hearst et al that there will be no allocation of markets and anti-competitive behavior is “ludicrous on its face.” Let me give you the precise quote that ought to have been in every honest story on this case:

“Although defendants disclaim the existence of their agreement to allocate markets, and Hearst professes that it will have no role in the combination’s subsequent stewardship of Bay Area newspapers, the claim is ludicrous on it face. Hearst cannot expect this court or anyone else to believe that it is shelling out $263,200,000 simply to buy and deliver the Monterey Herald to its Bay Area competitors to gain an interest in its competitors’ markets outside the Bay Area, without receiving any assurance or reaching any understanding that it will be protected against future competition in the Bay Area from its new partners. Such a claim strains credibility to say the least. Indeed, the role of Hearst in this combination, coming to the aid of its competitor MediaNews, can be explained most logically and cogently only by Hearst’s participation in the combination alleged in the complaint. Otherwise, Hearst’s motivation is truly mystyifying and Byzantine. If ever Occam’s razor ought to be applied, it is here.”

Let’s have a show of hands. Has anyone seen this quote and point, or a summary thereof, in any Chronicle, Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News, Monterey Herald or Associated Press story, or any other Hearst/Singleton/Gannett/Stephens/McClatchy paper anywhere in the country? The larger question: will you ever see this quote as the suit plays out and the messy facts begin to emerge about one of the sorriest chapters in American journalism?

Today, John Simerman of the Contra Costa Times reported breathlessly, in a story headlined “MediaNews looks to set standard for papers online,” that Media News “hopes to harness its newfound Bay Area newspaper dominance on the internet into a regional website that aims to be a model for how old guard newspapers can work and make money online.” He also reported that MediaNews was in “very preliminary” talks with Hearst “about a joint Internet venture that could be run under the BayArea.com name.”

I suggest they first learn to cover local news.

Repeating: one city monopoly is now becoming regional monopoly and the monopolizing powers are now censoring the news toward that end. Alas, that is a terrible harbinger for Bay Area communities, for journalism, and for the free press provisions of the First Amendment. Let us all hoist a Potrero Hill martini for Clint Reilly and Attorneys Joe Alioto and Daniel Shulman.
Check the story yourself and in particular the Alioto/Shulman filings. Click here. B3

Crawler space

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Complete interview: The Descent director Neil Marshall on phallic caves, Iggy Pop-like troglobites, and good old-fashioned horror

(Caution: slight spoilers ahead!)

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Director Neil Marshall (kneeling, left) on the set of The Descent. Photo credit: Alex Bailey

Doing publicity rounds for The Descent (in Bay Area theaters Fri/4), British writer-director Neil Marshall called from — appropriately enough — a cave-like environment somewhere deep within darkest Hollywood. (“I’m just stuck in a small room with no windows at the moment. Serving my time.”)

SFBG: You’ve said that you don’t want The Descent to be seen as a chick flick — which it’s clearly not, of course. What inspired you to make a horror film with an all-female cast?

NM: It’s unique in this genre, certainly. It was very contemporary, and nobody’s tried it before in an action-horror movie. The story wasn’t about them being women, it didn’t hinge on them being women — it just, simply, they were. It’s perfectly believable in this day and age that women would go off climbing, go off caving. Why not? I didn’t think it threatened the believability in any kind of way. I just thought it’d be interesting, and be a lot of fun to do. It had the potential to be a lot of fun, but it also had the potential to be a complete nightmare.

Does a Hello Kitty car justify carjacking?

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If you drive through the Mission in one of these supercute babies, you are on notice, my friend.

princesskitty1.jpg

Image from www.carview.co.jp.

Bomb the dailies

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By G.W. Schulz

If top-promoted San Francisco Examiner columnist Ken Garcia was a graffiti artist, his moniker might be “Myopia,” or perhaps, “Screed.”

He often serves as a bullhorn for the city’s conservative and wealthy elite. I should state for the record that there are times when I feel he’s genuinely insightful and informative. He can occasionally present a complex issue in a way that’s relatively easy to digest; a challenge every reporter struggles with.

But when he becomes rhetorical and stretches a theme or idea in order to attack the city’s “wacky” Board of Supervisors, I grow uncomfortable. In a July 25 piece, he managed to connect the phrase “social crusade” to the board amid a disjointed analysis of a settlement the city had arranged with a particularly aggressive 20-year-old graffiti artist named Carlos Romero.

If you live to be a hundred you will never be as smart as me!

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“I believe that you are a mother who is pretty desperate.
Not only are you not a very nice person, you’re also a slob.
You’re a hustler.
What happened in April?
And you were incarcerated for 3 years’ time, is that right?
Right!
Of course!
Outrageous!
Why don’t ya pay attention?!”

Nothing makes listening to my voice mail more enjoyable than when N and C prank me using a Judge Judy soundboard.

judy2.jpg

Except maybe when I get a similar call from (remember her?) Miss Cleo.

Mel Gibson is responsible for all the wars in the world!

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While major media outlets like the New York Times and the SF Chronicle are busy interviewing PR agents to see if good ol’ smelly Mel’s antisemitic tirade is going to affect his career (now there’s an angle for some real investigative reporting!!), we here at the Guardian have uncovered our own global Gibson conspiracy: Mel Gibson himself is responsible for starting almost every war known to man! Think about it.

dd_gibsonarrest119.jpg

Braveheart = Tribal warfare.
Apocalypto = Indigenous warfare
Signs = Alien wars/Crisis of faith
Pocahontas = Colonial wars (bonus “war is hell” points for singing)
Tequila Sunrise = War against Michelle Pfeiffer
Chicken Run = Interspecies war
Conspiracy Theory = War of THE MIND
What Women Want = War of the sexes
Lethal weapon = Race war
Mad Max = War of THE FUTURE
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome = Tina Turner

and pretty much every other movie (Gallipoli, The Patriot, Air America, Passion, Year of Living Dangerously, The Chili Con Carne Club) — all about WAR!!! And he started them all! OMG!!! —Marke B.

A true radical thinker dies at 85

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By Tim Redmond

t’s hard for me to imagine talking about leftist political theory in the early 1980s without the works of Murray Bookchin. His ideas were new, fresh, sometimes to radical for the radicals I hung out with — but always inspiring. Back in the days when I was working with some serious malcontents at the Abalone Alliance, Bookchin referred to our newspaper, It’s About Times, as “the only antinuclear publication that doesn’t make me puke.” We were so proud.

Bookchin, who died July 30 in Burlington, VT at 85, was known as the founder of social ecology, and one of the people who first inspired me (an economics major) to think about economics and ecology as potential partners in a new kind of political theory. (Hazel Henderson and Jane Jacobs were the others.) His base concept, laid out in a book called “Post-Scarcity Anarchism,” went like this: The reason that human beings institute powerful government, with powerful military and police forces, is that we’ve always been engaged in a struggle for survival, fighting each other for scarce resources. In the modern era, for the first time in human history, we have the capability to eliminate scarcity as a basic part of human life — to provide the basics of food, clothing, shelter, education and freedom to all. At some point, Bookchin argued (he was forever an optimist) the entire concept of scarcity would be meaningless — and at that point, the whole idea of a powerful, centralized state would become meaningless, too.

He was often cranky and generally impractical, and never fully accepted by mainstream academia, and I haven’t heard much from him in about a decade, but once upon a time, he was a force in a lot of our lives.

Celebrity drunks — they’re just like us!

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Except we’re not mean drunks who hurl offensive slurs at the cops when they pull us over

Nor are we holding up the production of our latest major motion picture with our underage shenanigans …

We were, however, enticed into some unfortunate wedding reception dance-floor antics after tipping back multiple pints of the charmingly-named Polygamy Porter (pretty tasty, actually) during our recent visit to Salt Lake City. And by “we” I mean me. No use denying it. Photos were taken. How Star of me.

label_poly.gif

Stop the presses

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July 31, 2006

Here are the developments following my “monopolies are forever” blog of last Friday:

1. Today, Monday, July 31, The Department of Justice decided, “to close its investigation” into the Singleton/Hearst monopoly deal. It said, in a terse two-page press release, “the Antitrust Division determined that the transaction is not likely to reduce competition substantially.” How in the world could the DOJ—even the DOJ of Bush and Gonzales— make such a finding on a transaction that in effect destroys daily competition in the Bay Area and establishes a Denver billionaire as the Baron on the Crag for the duration? It is obvious to anyone who knows anything about the history of local journalism just how bad this deal will be for the public, readers, advertisers, and the free press provision of the First Amendment.

2. Hearst has in effect thrown in the towel and says it doesn’t want to compete with Singleton—by announcing it is facilitating the deal by investing undisclosed millions of dollars in Singleton properties outside the Bay Area. Singleton is widely known as hating competition and doing everything he can to eliminate or coopt it. Justice did not even address this crucial point but did state: “The division’s investigation did not address the effects of potential future transactions involving MediaNews (Singleton) and Hearst. The Division is aware that Hearst has announced plans to invest in MediaNews—ostensibly limited to its non-California newspapers—and may be considering other collaborative arrangements with MediaNews involving San Francisco area newspapers. If and when any such arrangements is proposed, the Division will investigate whether it would adversely affect competition.” This crucial statement, wimpy as it is, was omitted from the Hearst coverage in its minimalist story on SF Gate on Monday—and omitted from the Contra Costa Times story.

3. The DOJ said that it did a “careful investigation” and interviewed more than 80 people, “including newspaper advertisers, subscribers, labor leaders, and industry experts.” Guess what? They didn’t interview anybody from the Bay Guardian or anybody from any other competitive papers to my knowledge. If anybody was interviewed, or knows of anybody who was interviewed, please let me know.

4. As you will remember, I sent my story of last Friday and a batch of obvious unanswered questions to the Hearst executives and staff, asking for answers or a statement or asking that they be answered in subsequent stories. They weren’t. Saturday’s Chronicle story, reporting that a federal judge denied a temporary restraining order in the Clint Reilly antitrust case, was again buried, this time on page 3 in the Bay Area section. There was nothing in the Sunday Chronicle. And, on Monday, when DOJ made its announcement, the story on SF Gate was again minimalist and didn’t even get in the key public interest points from the DOJ statement.

5. To make my point crystal clear: the Chronicle didn’t even report the critical point: were Reilly and his attorney Joe Alioto going to continue on with the case? Or was it all over, as their coverage tried to show. Reilly and Alioto plan to continue on with their case, as Alioto told us this afternoon.

6. Meanwhile, the Guardian has demanded that Justice, since it has closed its investigation, open its investigative files to the Guardian and the public. We are asking the publishers, who often bellow loudly for government to release documents, to support this proposal publicly. Alioto says he, too, has asked for the files and that he plans to start a website and perform the ultimate journalistic and public service: make everything public that he comes up with through the suit as quickly as possible. The Guardian will do so as well on this site at sfbg.com. Stay tuned. B3

Distorted lens

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By G.W. Schulz

The press has been quite candid in its portrayals of civilian deaths in southern Lebanon and northern Israel. I’d be shocked if the major media organizations from the United States were slammed with the same vitriol leveled at Al-Jazeera during its coverage of the war in Iraq. Al-Jazeera has been repeatedly indicted for “aiding terrorists” by revealing to the world gruesome portraits of war in the Mideast.

Newsom’s loser

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By Tim Redmond

Gavin Newsom is endorsing Rob Black, a former aide to Michela Alioto-Pier, for supervisor in District Six. That’s an obvious — and entirely predictable — slap at the incumbent, Chris Daly. But I’m with Randy Shaw on this one; he points out in Beyond Chron that Daly is still immensely popular in the district and that almost nobody in the South of Market area has ever heard of Rob Black.

The San Francisco Sentinel reported somethat effusively on Black’s press conference with the mayor. There’s also an interesting (again, effusive) story about Black and a response from Daly’s office that makes it look like Black shot off his mouth without checking his facts.

NOISE: Lindsay gets spanked

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Wow, I’m not sure this even qualifies as a music item, but check Lindsay Lohan’s written spanking from the Morgan Creek studio boss, on the Smoking Gun Friday:

lohan2.jpg

‘Lindsay Lohan’s hard-partying antics and recent bout of “heat exhaustion” has left one Hollywood big shot steamed, The Smoking Gun has learned. In a blistering July 26 letter to the 20-year-old actress, James G. Robinson, who heads the L.A. firm producing Lohan’s current movie, calls her recent erratic behavior “discourteous, irresponsible and unprofessional.” Robinson, the 70-year-old chief executive of Morgan Creek Productions, writes that Lohan has “acted like a spoiled child and in doing so have alienated many of your co-workers and endangered the quality” of “Georgia Rule,” a movie now being filmed and which stars Lohan, Jane Fonda, and Felicity Huffman.’

And now her mom has weighed in defending her daughter. I guess you’d support your gravy train’s, whoops, offspring’s clubbing too if you were in her shoes…?

This is chilling

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By Tim Redmond

Check this out, which I first saw on Daily Kos. Watch all the way through to the end; it’s only a couple of minutes.

Another Potrero Hill journalist

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Bob Rezak, a journalist for many years and a Potrero Hill native, chimes in with this tale:

Your item on the 13 year old publisher makes me think there is something in the air on Potrero Hill that causes the veins of youngsters to be infused with printer’s ink.

I was 13, perhaps even 12, when I started producing my own newspaper on Potrero Hill (18th and Kansas). But the circulation was limited to family members.

I produced headlines by tracing letters from a stencil that contained the alphabet. Stories were “typed” on a toy typewriter made of tin (no plastic in those days). The instrument did not have a keyboard. The letters were on a wheel that you had to spin to the right letter, then press a button that tipped the letter over a felt pad and then impressed the image on paper. It was a painstaking process. Letter by letter, word by word. It took hours. But I did not know any differently. It must have been a little like the way Guttenberg operated. But the more papers I produced (single copies), the more convinced I was, even at that early age, that I wanted to be a reporter. Of course, my stories were about family activities–my dad painting the house, my brother getting engaged–that sort of thing.

It must have been good reading. I recall them all laughing. My sister -in-law still has some editions but will not relinquish them to me or anyone else.

Maybe that is for the better.

Clearly, the good shit’s happening THIS week

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Pardon the slow post, but last week’s Project Runway was kinda on the ho-hum side. (Of course, it’s still the best reality show currently on the airwaves, so a ho-hum Runway is still better than the greatest-ever Rock Star: Supernova, if in fact a greatest-ever ep of that show ever existed. Sorry, can’t get past the weirdly sculpted facial hair of one Dave Navarro.)
pug-dog-dressed-up.jpg
Anyway, the challenge was to design for a woman and her purse-dog … Uli made a slinky dress for her human model, and her canine model was a pug, so it was a no-brainer that she’d win (though Alison‘s pair o’ ensembles were pretty cute too). There are still so many contestants that the editors have no choice but to highlight the folks who’ll have the top and bottom scores. Basically, if you don’t get a lot of airtime prior to the runway show, you’re IN.

Despite the puppy presence, special Guardian correspondent Max the dog — who would fit in no one’s handbag, and would certainly not appreciate it if you tried to shove him in one, anyway — snoozed through most of the episode. Well, there’s always this week — the promos hinted at the BIGGEST CONTROVERSY IN RUNWAY HISTORY. Tim Gunn is gonna bring the hammer down! (Could it be due to a certain alleged rip-off artist?) In your face, last season’s motherfucking walk-off!

NOISE: Manu Chao at the Greek

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Guardian art director Mirissa Neff checked out Manu Chao and Kinky at the Greek Theater on Friday, July 28… here’s what she saw and heard:

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All images by Mirissa Neff

After only playing LA and NYC when he’s made it to the states, Manu Chao finally played a Bay Area show last night. He didn’t disappoint…

A few of us did a Q+A with Manu before Kinky went on. One of the highlights was when the Chronicle’s Delfin Vigil asked Manu about the World Cup and whether he sided with France or Spain. Manu replied, “I am not a nationalist. I have a passport for both countries but I don’t understand this mentality of seeing that someone is from a different place than you and wanting them to die.”

I asked Manu if he had plans to release Siberie M’etait Contee [a French only release] here and he said, “No… maybe someday. But I have a new album that just needs to be mixed. Then it will be ready for release.” Hmmmm…

Kinky opened the night with their unique Norteno-flavored electronic funk. Ulises Lozano and Gil Cerezo got the crowd going:

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People just lost their shit when Manu Chao’s Radio Bemba Sound System hit the stage. Here’s sexy guitarist Madjid Fahem:

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Meanwhile bassist Gambeat held down stage right with lots and lots of reverb:

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After about five encores the crowd was still screaming for more…

Monopolies are forever

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July 28, 2006

By Bruce B. Brugmann
(henceforth to be known as B3 in this Bruce blog)

Earlier this week I dropped by Christopher’s Books on Potrero Hill, my favorite neighborhood bookstore, and was delighted to find a new grassroots newspaper that is published, written, edited, and distributed by a l3-year-old young lady.

Oona Robertson calls her paper “The hill, a Potrero Hill Kids newspaper.” She writes that she has “lived on Potrero Hill all my life. I like to read, write, fence, play sports and be in nature. I live with my mom, dad, sister, brother, fish and cats. I hope you enjoy my newspaper.”

She says her paper is “for kids of all ages.” The current issue has a poem titled
”Ode to my cat,” an essay headlined “The benefits of not owning a car,” part two of a serial about l5-year-old kids spying on a rich man in a mansion in Napa, four “fun summer recipes,” a synopsis of two kids movies (“Cars” and “Garfield, a Tale of Two Kitties”), a review of “The Alex Rider series,” a “Corn Cake Monster” comic strip, advice for bored kids during the summer (“try the ultimate water fight: invite all your friends and kids from your block to come to your house for the ultimate water fight…bring water balloons, water guns, water bottles, buckets, soakers, anything they can think of…Then go into your backyard or out front and either organize teams or have a free for all.”

The monthly paper is sold for $l at Christopher’s Books, but Oona says for an extra $3 she will hand-deliver her paper, but only to the houses of Potrero Hill kids. She will also take ads for $l. And she will take editorial submissions from kids. (Send ads and submissions to the hill, %Christopher’s Books, 1400 l8th St., SF 94l07.)

The hill is an amazing bit of entrepreneurial journalism, which I was reading as an email came in from my source in Contra Costa County, a news junkie and First Amendment warrior, who regularly alerts me to news in the Contra Costa Times that doesn’t appear in the San Francisco Chronicle. Did you see that the judge is going against Clint Reilly on his antitrust suit, he asked. No, I replied, I didn’t see the story. So I checked and sure enough, buried on page 9 in the Bay Area section, with a wimpy little head “Early ruling denies bid to halt big media sale,” was a story in the classic Chronicle tradition of minimalist and pock-holed media and power structure reporting. For attentive Guardian readers, you know our competitive-paper line. But this story had major whoppers and raised in 96 point Tempo Bold a new flurry of unanswered questions about a media monopoly move that will (a) allow Denver billionaire Dean Singleton to buy the Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury-News and Monterey Herald, plus a batch of weeklies and free dailies, and pile them up in his existing stable of papers that ring the bay, and (b) thereby gain a chokehold on Bay Area journalism for the duration, and (c) destroy the last remaining daily competition in the Bay Area–with the Chronicle– by getting Chronicle owner Hearst to assist and invest in the deal with undisclosed multi-million dollar stakes in other Singleton properties outside the Bay Area.

Whopper No. l: “In issuing the preliminary ruling (against Riley and for the Hearst/Singleton consortium), U.S. District Judge Susan Illston said the defendants faced greater harm than Riley if the sale of the San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times was halted. ’I don’t see imminent irreparable harm to the plaintiffs,’ she said.”

Whopper No. 2: “Alan Marx, an attorney for MediaNews (Singleton), said there will be no cooperation between Hearst and MediaNews after the transaction. He said serious delays to the sale could force MediaNews to incur interest rate penalties of at least $22 million on loans that MediaNews has arranged to finance the purchase.”

Pow! Pow! Pow! If this single ownership chokehold on the Bay Area is not “irreparable damage,” then what is? Why is the federal judge worried about “irreparable damage” to billionaires in New York (Hearst) and Denver (Singleton), as well as the other billionaire partners to the deal in Sacramento (McClatchy) and MClean, Va. (Gannett) and Las Vegas (Stephens), and not worried about “irreparable damage” to the public, to readers, to advertisers, to competitive papers, to the health and welfare of their local communities, and to the marketplace of ideas principle underlying the First Amendment?

Some other key questions that the Chronicle and the other participants in the deal aren’t raising and answering: How can the publishers proceed before the Justice Department and the Attorney Generals approve and sign off on the deal? Why don’t they ask Attorney General Bill Lockyer about the status of his investigation? Lockyer, after all, is running for state treasurer and is on the campaign trail, as is Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, who is running for Attorney General. Lockyer appeared on the Will and Willie show on the Quake last week and left the room, just before Guardian executive editor Tim Redmond came on. Redmond opened up his remarks by saying that he wished he had known Lockyer was on the show, because he would have asked him about his investigation. And then Tim and Will Durst and Willie Brown discussed the impact of the Hearst/Singleton issues in an open and lively way almost never done in the mainstream media. Why are Lockyer and Brown on the lam, and allowed to be on the lam, when they are once again running for major statewide offices? Let me note that they refuse to answer our repeated questions on the deal.

More questions: why, if Hearst and the other publishers feel they can’t cover themselves, don’t they get comments and op ed pieces from journalism or law professors at nearby UC-Berkeley, Cal-State Hayward, Stanford, San Jose State, SF State, USF? Why don’t they check with other independent experts such as Ben Bagdikian of “Media Monopoly” fame, who is living in Berkeley? Why don’t they quote Norman Solomon, a local media critic who writes a nationally syndicated column? Or Jeff Perlstein, executive director of Media Alliance or the Grade the News media reporting operation housed at San Jose State University? Why don’t they quote union representatives at the Chronicle and Merc? Why don’t they quote any one of the six U.S. representatives from the Bay Area that called on Justice and the AG to carefully scrutinize the sale? Why don’t they call on Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who introduced a local resolution opposing the sale, or any of the other supervisors who approved it unanimously? (Note: the Chronicle refused to run the Mirkarimi resolution even though I personally hand-carried it to the Chronicle City Hall reporters in the City Hall pressroom.) Why is it left to the handful of remaining independent voices to raise these critical questions?

I’m sending these questions to the local publishers, and I’ll let you know what they say.

Hearst has never been much good on local power structure issues (witness its blackout of the PG&E-Raker Act scandal), but things will only get worse when it is comfied and liquored up with Singleton and there is no real daily competition in the Bay Area. The way Hearst and the other billionaire publishers blacked out and minimalized this critical story–a story critical to their future credibility and influence–is a harbinger of the future of journalism in the Bay Area and beyond. Alas. Alas.

I sometimes think that Oona Robertson and the hill can do better.

This is my first blog, so please be kind until I get the hang of it and get safely out of my Royal typewriter past. I have much to say, in a journalism career that started at age 12 on the famous Lyon County Reporter in my hometown of Rock Rapids, Iowa. I wrote a rousing story about catching a trout in the Black Hills on a vacation with my parents. I wrote a column for four years during high school, wrote off and on through the years and even worked a summer as the only reporter on the paper. I learned a couple of key things in the College of Community Journalism in Rock Rapids: that it is important to be accurate, and good spirited, because the locals know the story and read the paper to see if you got it right. And that, when you write about somebody, you write knowing you may seeing them later that day at the Grill Cafe or Brower’s Pool Hall or the golf club.

In Rock Rapids, I always felt I was having an ongoing conversation with the the people in town and on the farms. And, for the past 40 years at the Guardian, I have felt that the Guardian staff and I were conversing with our readers and the people of San Francisco. So now, with the magic of the internet and the blog, I hope to converse even more directly with our readers. Join the conversation. Join the fun. B3

The Secretary of State

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Today is as good a day as any to look at Luc Tuymans‘ much-debated 2005 oil-on-canvas portrait The Secretary of State.

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In a 2005 top ten for Artforum, Studio Museum curator Thelma Golden noted that Condoleeza Rice’s mouth is “resolutely shut” in this portrait. This image has also been interpreted as a political critique (in which case, Tuymans’ viewpoint is usually the writer’s), as proof that the painter is turned on by his subject, or simply as one of the latest in a long line of portraits of people who have had Rice’s job. But what would Dave Chappelle’s blind white supremacist character say?

NOISE: The immutable Os Mutantes

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Guardian art director Mirissa Neff checked out Os Mutantes on Monday, July 24, at the Fillmore and sent back these words and images.

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All photos: Mirissa Neff

Reuniting for their first tour since 1973, Os Mutantes were greeted by a ravenous SF crowd ranging from hipster admirers to rowdy Brazilians. Here, Zelia Duncan and Sergio Dias have a moment during the Tropicalia legends’ set at the Fillmore.

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The word on the street is that they are planning to put out a new release — perhaps targeting the US market? Maybe that’s why so many songs that were originally in Portuguese were performed in English.

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Sick days

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By Steven T. Jones
In Sacramento, Washingon D.C., and most of the rest of this country, politicians and the electorate shrink in the face of Chamber of Commerce complaints that some regulation or piece of legislation will hurt the economy and cost jobs. It doesn’t matter that it often isn’t true, or that the benefits outweigh the costs, or that such comments are clearly driven by naked self-interest. The fact is, in this fearful country, it’s a tactic that works over and over again. The boy keeps crying wolf and we keep running for cover.
San Francisco is proving to be different. The living wage law passed a couple years ago has proven to be a huge success with little downside and this summer’s health care mandate is also filling a troubling void left by the much hallowed market. Next comes a measure by those scrappy and effective activists over at Young Workers United: a measure for the fall ballot requiring employers to provide their workers with paid sick days.
The Chamber is already howling — surprise, surprise — but the reality is this measure will be good for both employers and employees, it’s almost sure to pass, and it will help boost progressive voting power this November.

Now THIS is scary

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By Tim Redmond

THe Bush Administration is quietly moving to give an eight-member panel appointed by the president the ability to kill any federal program or agency — unlilaterally. I’m not joking; Rollling Stone broke the story, and there’s a post on Daily Kos that lays it out and offers ways to fight back.

Here’s how RS describes it:

“[T]he commission would enable the Bush administration to achieve what Ronald Reagan only dreamed of: the end of government regulation as we know it. With a simple vote of five commissioners — many of them likely to be lobbyists and executives from major corporations currently subject to federal oversight — the president could terminate any program or agency he dislikes. No more Environmental Protection Agency. No more Food and Drug Administration. No more Securities and Exchange Commission.”

I’ve found very little other press on this, but it’s one of the more frightening things I’ve seen in a while.