By Sarah Phelan
Someone needs to take the UPS Poster that says “What Can Brown Do For You” and seriously adbust it, in the light of all the crazy posturing around “illegal” immigration.
Not that I’m inciting anyone, but speaking as a “legal” immigrant, it’s hard to stay silent as Americans build a fence to keep out the people who they underpay to prop up the American “white picket fence” dream.
Good luck with that surreality…
By Steven T. Jones
Big but buried news from today’s Examiner: Clint Reilly (with help from attorney Joseph Alioto) is suing to block the big newspaper merger that put most Bay Areas rags under the tight-fisted control of MediaNews (and the unsettling business partnership role in the Hearst Corp., owner of the Chronicle, in the deal). This is a still developing big deal that we’ll have more on next week, but in the meantime, here’s where you can access lots of stories on a business deal that’s bad for journalism in the Bay Area and beyond.
To have a bicycle-like contraption under your desk that you have to pedal to keep your monitor/screen lit. It could have different gears for challenge and variety. It could be called a Screen Master or a Moniped or something. This handy device would keep your blood flowing and allow you to burn some googling calories. It could even store up energy in a battery for later use. Plus: all the folks who obsessively cruise online dating sites and Myspace would get better bodies. Maybe we wouldn’t want this at work tho…. somebody call Ron Popeil!
By Sarah Phelan
Gotta love that unfortunate “Oympic” typo on the front page of the Chronicle’s article about Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Olympics.
Especially since “oympic” is an anagram for “Myopic”.
Oymp, oymp.
By G.W. Schulz
When the controversial journalist Jason Leopold botched a story last May for lefty media purveyors Truthout.org, the Columbia Journalism Review took him out to the woodshed. Ironically, however, CJR was forced to make a correction to their own story in a later editor’s note placed at the bottom of the piece.
Leopold used what he stated were multiple anonymous sources to report that Karl Rove would indeed be indicted for his role in leaking the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to the press. But Leopold got the story all wrong, it appeared, because a month later, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald told Rove’s lawyer that he “did not anticipate” seeking charges against Rove in the scandal.
Praised be to the gods of fashion and addictive reality television … season three of Project Runway is here.
First challenge: create a look using only materials found in the designers’ apartments (think IKEA … lots of IKEA). Alas, San Francisco’s own Stacy Estrella was OUT. Blame her creation, an ill-fitting shower-curtain gown, or blame her personality, which didn’t seem quite hysterical enough to generate train-wreck television (for that, turn to C.C. DeVille-voiced Vincent Libretti, whose high-drama potential explains why he’s still on the show after making a hat out of a fruit basket).
The early favorite, design-wise, is Barbie doll dress diva Robert Best — but so much of this show is about the characters, not the occasionally alarming garments they turn out. Can’t wait to see who’ll be the Santino of Season 3 — my money’s on snooty Malan Breton. I’m also fond of Kayne Gallaspie, he of the Mommie Dearest -quoting, who makes pageant gowns for Midwestern beauty queens, and Jewel-esque Alison Kelly, the show’s token hipster.
Needless to say, next Wednesday can’t come soon enough. Now, where the hell is my chiffon?
Radical queers? Radical sluts? Radical. It’s time to get out for Debasement, “a Radical Queer Social and Slut Dance” and benefit for Arab Queer groups ASWAT and Helem, on Friday, July 14.
Your friendly waitstaff.
They sayeth:
“It’s time to debase Israeli Terror (and maybe even each other) at a radical queer dance party and sultry soiree. DEBASEMENT will happen at De Basement, a dark and sleazy subterranean speakeasy below the Baker’s
Dozen. Enjoy the sizzling sounds of your fave local DJs Gary Fembot (The Clap), Brontez (Gravy Train, Pussyboys) and Reaganomixxx (Pussyboys). Come thirsty, darling, because some of SF’s most babealicious barmaids have
concocted some delectable cocktails and mocktails for your enjoyment. We invite you to dress up, dress down, cruise, network, dance, prance, make out, and make trouble in support of Helem and ASWAT, two queer
organizations whose members have spoken out against the hypocritical World Pride event in Israeli Jerusalem this August. 9 p.m.-2 a.m. at 733 Baker St. at McAllister, SF. $5-$25.
You have been warned.
By Steven T. Jones
For anyone who could sort through the sometimes mind-numbing minutiae of land use economics and regulation, today’s Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee contained some interesting insights. Sup. Chris Daly has been trying to strengthen the city’s inclusionary housing ordinance — which now requires most developers build some below market rate units in their projects (12 percent if done on-site, 17 percent for off-site, or an in-lieu fee) — by increasing the percentages to 20-25, changing who qualifies to buy them and how they’re sold, and a few other tweaks. But a consultant report that came out Friday concluded that developers wouldn’t build at that level because that would drop their take below their minimum required 28 percent profit margin for big high rises (or a profit of around $250 million). Daly and housing activists who worked on the ordinance, including Calvin Welch, expressed astonishment developers required that much profit before they’d build, but they read the political handwriting and lowered their percentages to 15 and 20 percent, which pencil out. “What we were confronted with last Friday was political death,” Welch told me. But now, after that and a change grandfathering in current projects, the ordinance has the support from both the Mayor’s Office and leaders in the development community, although the committee punted it for a week to deal with a few details. There’s lots more to say about all this, but I’ll save most of it for my article in next week’s paper.
So I guess this is the big hard rock week that y’all have been waiting for, huh? Portland, Ore.’s Danava – ’70s crunch meets ’80s keys and schizo shenanny-gans ensue – happens Friday, July 14, along with Parchman Farm and Snow Foxxes at Bottom of the Hill. Tonight, July 12: Austin, Texas’s Sword slashes its way through the underbrush, wielding its debut, Age of Winters (Kemado), like a silver chalice. Saviours and Akimbo round out the bill nicely at Slim’s. Danava and the Sword – both on Kemado Records; so what dya think of them apples?
The Sword, good Lord…
Akimbo descends on the city.
Oh yes, and incidentally, Flying Luttenbachers and Zs ain’t hard rock in the conventional sense – but damn, they do. That they do.
Flying Luttenbachers mock those silly photos you took back in elementary school.
Both bands tore it up at 21 Grand last night, July 11 (7-11 Day, free slurpies at 7-11 – you missed out). Zs sat before sheet music and descended into a frenzy of jazzed-based drone, thrash, and chicken-fried repetition. Nice. And then Weasel Walter’s between-song commentary was worth the admission alone – Mick Barr might not have been in the haus but the entire band raged nonetheless. Go see ’em both tonight, July 12, with the Sword and Sandal (a new John Dwyer project) at Hemlock Tavern.
Sup. Tom Ammiano and Mayor Gavin Newsom took another step today towards making health care accessible to all uninsured San Franciscans.
The San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance, which Ammiano and Newsom announced their joint support for July 11, offers access to comprehensive medical services, while requiring that medium and large business meet minimum spending requirement on employees’ health care.
While the agreement is optimsitic, it wasn’t reached without compromise on the employer spending mandate.
From July ’07, when the ordinance would become law, until Jan. 2008, employers will have to provide healthcare for employees who work 12 hours or more. That requirement tightens to 10 and then 8 hours, in Jan. ’08 and Jan.’09, respectively.
Meanwhile, medium sized businesses, (20-50 employees) have until March 31 2007, to start making mandatory payments, (which amounts to about a $1 an hour per worker.
Other tweaks: employers won’t have to make health insurance payments, if their employee has coverage elsewhere (through a parent, a spouse, or presumably another job), but the employee decides who pays.
Of all three compromises, the 12-10-8 compromise spells the greatest danger for the local labor pol (what if stores cut workers’ hours to 11 each per week?)
A special Budget and Finance Committee meeting is set for Monday July 17 at 1pm, and the full Board will discuss it July 18, with a final vote expected on July 25.
With Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Michela Alioto-Pier continue to stand on the sidelines? Will Mayor Gavin Newson step inside the county supes’ chambersn? and How many signatures does the business community need to get a referendum on this matter launched by August 9? Stay tuned.
By Tim Redmond
This is front-page news in the Chronicle? A weeks-old story that an assistant to a department head was convicted of stealing a $100 necklace 15 years ago?
Let’s check out the facts. The man, Tristan Bettencourt, is now the assistant to the director of the Taxi Commission. He’s filling in as acting director because the commission fired director Heidi Machen in a politically motivated move June 28th.
Back in 1989, Bettencourt was a cab driver when a woman he’d taken to a movie later realized her house had been burglarized and a necklace stolen. She accused Bettencourt. An overworked public defender told Bettencourt that he could be facing six years in prison, and urged him to plead. The way Bettencourt described it to me, he was a 130-pound kid, terrified about doing hard time. He took a deal that kept him out of the violence of the California prison system.
Maybe he’s telling the truth, and he’s innocent. He was poorly advised by a lawyer and took a felony rap. These things happen all the time.
But what if he was actually guilty? Should anyone really care 15 years later?
There’s no doubt that he’s been free from legal trouble since that episode. His conviction was erased from the record because he’d fulfilled his probation. He’s gone on to get a decent job and is supporting himself and contributing to society. Isn’t that something we should all be proud of?
And what possible connection could a small-time burglary bust all those years ago have to do with his qualifications to work for the Taxi Commission?
There’s no secret what’s happening here. The big cab companies are pissed that Machen is cracking down on all their permit scams, and they’re trying to smear her staff. It’s disgraceful that the Chron is playing along.
By G.W. Schulz
Jane Mayer’s exceptional profile of David Addington in the July 3 New Yorker admittedly confirms much of what we already knew about this presidential administration. But Addington for some time has managed somehow to fly below the radar despite his clear and aggressive leadership role among neoconservatives in the White House.
By Steven T. Jones
So, Mayor Gavin Newsom tells the dailies that San Francisco is going to pull out all the stops to snag the 2016 Olympics, using Hunter’s Point to house the athletes and staging the games at a delux Candlestick Park (ie public subsidies for the 49ers new stadium). No wonder so many people worried that the new Bayview Hunter’s Point Redevelopment Area might be used to line the pockets of big corporations and developers instead of benefitting the people of the southeast. But Newsom tries some win-win spin by offering to let poor folks have the 4,000 apartments he wants to build when the athletes are all done — 10 years from now. A question: if we have the resources to build a bunch of publicly subsidized apartments, why don’t we do so now? Make no mistake, this is about our mayor’s ego and political ambitions more than the interests of city residents, particularly those of the southeast, which have already endured more than their share of capitalism’s hidden costs.
Guardian intern Michael Harkin throws down on the occasion of Syd Barrett’s passing, announced today, July 11:
The “Madcap” back in the day.
Alas! Word around the hood is that Syd Barrett has passed away—sad news for Pink Floyd fans and psych enthusiasts everywhere. Nobody was expecting new material anytime soon from Barrett, who never attempted to reappear after vanishing into an unproductive, drug-induced haze. It was, however, always oddly reassuring to know that he was around…somewhere.
Bless him for avoiding reunion cash grabs and cameos at laser-light shows, but one has to wonder what it’d be like if he ended up even half as productive as, say, Robyn Hitchcock. There’s no question that his epic silence is a large part of what makes him legendary: he burned out damn quick, but left what is perhaps the best of Floyd’s output in The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. You can also thank Barrett for thematically fueling what followed in Floyd’s bombastic concept-album parade, but it seems more appropriate to remember him for his actual tenure with the group, as well as his stellar solo records.
Older Syd out to grab some air — rather than cash?
Okay, so if Barrett and Howard Hughes were to get in a fight, I’m pretty sure that SB would emerge the prizewinner for the title of “most awesome departed recluse of the century.” Hats off to you, Syd.
By Tim Redmond
I don’t really know where this comes from; do people have nothing better to do than whine about their neighbors? But I know that in neighbhorhoods like Chinatown, North Beach and yeah, Bernal Heights, where I live, it’s going to be tough on some people who have neither garages nor alleys and could be asked to stick their trash cans in the front hall.
But I have an answer: Paint them wild colors, and call them public art.
By Steven T. Jones
The rancorous debate over providing health care to all San Franciscans finally comes to the Board of Supervisors for a vote tomorrow, culminating a truly ugly political spectacle. The business community has aggressively gone after the measure’s sponsor, Tom Ammiano, angrily accusing him of not listening and not caring.
Now, it’s understandable that some small business people on the verge of going under would be upset about having to give health coverage to their employees. It’s a legitimate concern, but it’s also a valid point that Ammiano’s measure makes: providing a living wage and health coverage to employees is a reasonable cost of doing business in this city, and if you can’t afford to do these things, then your business plan doesn’t really pencil out, sorry.
This might have been a good political debate to have, but unfortunately, the issue has been sullied and convoluted by the intentional deceptions of a few downtown groups (notably the Committee on Jobs, Golden Gate Restaurant Association, and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce), distorted and inaccurate presentations of the issue by the Chronicle and Examiner, and the political cowardice of Mayor Gavin Newsom.
If you’ve been reading the Guardian then you know that the “Newsom plan” was simply one component of the “Ammiano plan,” not the workable stand-alone plan that the dailies and business elites tried to present it as (by itself, Newsom’s plan didn’t pay for itself and it threatened to make the number of uninsured in the city grow by providing the perverse incentive for businesses to drop their employees’ health insurance in favor of cheaper but less comprehensive access to city clinics). Even the dailies finally got around to saying the two plans relied on one another last week after playing up the deceptive competition for weeks.
Here’s the bottom line: Ammiano’s plan got eight co-sponsors because it was an honest attempt to deal with a serious problem using an approach (employer mandates) popular with most citizens (as shown by 69 percent of the people voting for a statewide mandate in Prop. 72). But downtown has done nothing but obstruct and obfuscate the issue. And they’re loud and have tons of money, so they’ve managed to bring out Newsom’s most cowardly instincts and they’ve cowed the media into bearing false witness to what’s going on.
Will they also peel off a supervisor or two who have already pledged their support? I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.
Welcome to the Bruce Blog, where editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann (B3) will be giving you his thoughts on everything from his home town in Rock Rapids Iowa to his 40 years publishing the nation’s premier West Coast alternative newsweekly.
Oh, and PG&E, sunshine, international press freedom, the Potrero Hill martini, the decline and fall of the great gin and tonic and few other things you need to know about.
He’s on vacation until July 25th; check back then. And talk back to him, dammit.
By Cheryl Eddy
Kudos to Peaches Christ and the Midnight Mass gang for, like, totally freaking us out with this past weekend’s excellently trashy Beyond the Valley of the Dolls event. (Read our breathless pre-show coverage here.)
The Whoa Nellies kicked off the show with Carrie Nations covers, including a smokin’ “Sweet Talkin’ Candy Man,” and Peaches’ Z-Man ensemble was to die for (and maybe even cut heads off for). In attendance: the quite well-preserved trio of Marcia “Petronella” McBroom, Erica “Roxanne” Gavin, and the original Z-Man himself, John La Zar (a San Francisco native, as it turns out).
The Friday night crowd was awesome, as Midnight Mass crowds always are…the film looked spectacular on the big screen, as it always does.
P.S. In case you were wondering (and you know you were), the most famous boobs ever to appear in a Russ Meyer movie — yep, Z-Man’s! — are now framed and hanging on McBroom’s NYC living room wall.
By Steven T. Jones
I just wanted to throw in an “amen brother” to Tim’s post below about the great coming-together of community at Dolores Park yesterday for the World Cup finals. It was a glorious day and half the staff here have sunburns and hangovers from attending. It was the ideal antidote to the city’s recent crackdowns on public fun. But in addition to our German hosts and the hordes of happy fans, one other group deserves a shout-out: the Space Cowboys. They kept a party of thousands rocking for hours after the game ended, turning the park into a fun outdoor dance party and serving up a subtle reminder that it’s Burning Man season in San Francisco. Theme camp applications were due July 1, so much of the city’s counterculture has officially divided up into tribes working on building Black Rock City on the event’s 20th birthday in late August.
I’ll have more to come on Burning Man throughout the summer, so check back.
By Tim Redmond
The Chron picked up the New York Times story on the world cup, by Jere Longman, which includes this line:”star midfielder Zinedine Zidane was ejected in overtime for committing an astonishing act of unsportsmanlike behavior.” Longman later described the head-butt as “a flagrant abuse of any notion of fair play and perhaps permanently stained a soccer career that many considered to be the world’s pre-eminent of the past 20 years.”
I mean, hasn’t Longman ever been to a hockey game?? Or a real soccer game?
I wouldn’t give Monseiur Zidane any medals for sportsmanship, but come on. In the annals of sports history, this was pretty modest stuff.
The vast reservoirs of affection we have for Devendra Banhart never quite run dry – and that goes triple for visual artist Chris Cobb.
Cobb, the guy in charge of the color-coding book trick at Adobe Books a year and a half ago, is exhibiting art revolving around Banhart, a former SF Art Institute student, at New Langton Arts in San Francisco. The show opens tomorrow, July 11, and will be up through July 15.
A Chris Cobb image of Devendra Banhart and his band in action.
The artist e-mails: “I asked Devendra to send me some relics from his tour for my show and he did. I will also be showing a bunch of photos of him with the Hairy Fairy Band…. I know Devendra from when I did the Adobe Books installation where I rearranged all of the books by the color of their spine.”
Chris Cobb redesigns Adobe Books. Courtesy of www.chriscobbstudios.com.
Yeh! Fetishizing rock stars! That wonderful Banhart can stomp on our spines any time. Whoops, did I just write that? Oh well, we can guess that Karl Lagerfeld probably seconds that emotion — word has it he has accumulated quite a portfolio of Banhart pics and that’s why he asked him to play the recent Chanel runway show. Ooh la la.
Other artists to look out for at that New Langton show, titled “Five Habitats: Squatting at Langton” and curated by former CCA curator, now White Columns director Matthew Higgs: writer Dodie Bellamy will exhibit a selection of the late writer Kathy Acker’s clothes. Bellamy will discuss “Digging Through Kathy Acker’s Stuff” on July 12 at 7 p.m. – promising to meditate “upon relics, ghosts, compulsive shopping, archives, make-up, our drive to mythologize the dead, Acker’s own self-mythologizing, the struggle among followers to define Acker, bitch fights, and the numina of DNA.”
Additionally Tussle’s Alexis Georgopoulos will present ARP in the smallest space at New Langton. The gallery offers: “Georgopoulos has chosen the intimate idea of getting together with a friend or acquaintance to share a cup of tea, to take a moment, to slow down, and perhaps, reflect. Georgopoulos places a table, a tea set for two, and two speakers in the space. In this intimate, almost cocoon-like setting, the music Georgopoulos has composed as ARP will play as a backdrop. The music itself is minimal in its use of drone, repetition, inertia, tranquility/tension and is informed by a wide variety of composers, among them Charlemagne Palestine, Ralf Hutter & Florian Schneider-Esleben, Terry Riley, and Franco Battiatio.”
By Tim Redmond
That was one great party Sunday in Dolores Park. Some former teacher from Germany named Jens-Peter Jungclaussen organized it, and with nothing (as far as I could tell) except word-of-mouth and email promotion, at least 10,000 people showed up.
So yeah, soccer has hit the big time in San Francisco. But I have to wonder: why did some guy whose life’s work is called Teacher With the Bus have to organize this? What do they do all day at the Department of Recreation and Parks, anyway?
by Tim Redmond
Gack! I just turned on the TV and saw Barbara Taylor interviewing Sup. Gerardo Sandoval on the City Desk Newshour program. She felt the need to beat him up (like most of the rest of the media) for the not-so-radical-at-all idea of demilitarizing America, which is to be expected, but she went way, way beyond. In times like these, when North Korea is shooting off missiles, she said, we all should be glad for a military with missiles that can shoot them down.
Uhhh….. we don’t actually have any missiles that can shoot anything down. They don’t work. And just about every sane person in the world agrees that the Star Wars-style anti-ballistic missile shield is destabilizing, fabulously expensive and a scientific fantasy.
Everyone, that is, except Barbara.
By Tim Redmond
Alix Rosenthal, who is challenging Bevan Dufty in District eight, has been getting some (electronic) press; BeyondChron has interview in which, among other things, she talks about keeping San Francisco weird. A sample quote: “I love how freaky it is. I love the freaks, and I include myself in the freaks.”
She also talks about real issues, about affordable housing, condo conversions, the loss of the city’s middle class. And she clearly has Dufty at least a little freaked; Pat Murphy over at the San Francisco Sentinel claims that he’s heard that “progressive big footers” leaned on Dufty to support Ammiano’s health-care legislation, threatening to pour money in to Rosenthal’s campaign if he didn’t.
I’m not sure the “big footers,” whoever they are, had to push much; I think Dufty sees that this won’t be a cakewalk of a re-election, and I think he also wants to run for state Assembly when Mark Leno is termed out, and he can’t really do it without some left credibility. On economic issues, particularly tenant issues, he’s out of touch with his district, and I think we’ll see him move to the left on a few select issues over the next few months to try to present some kind of case to win progressive support.
The “freaky” quote will no doubt get used to make Rosenthal sound flaky, but the truth is, she’s got a good point: When San Francisco gets too expensive, all the people who make it so special have to leave.
