Berkeley Archives — Page 86 of 96 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Slow down the Laguna project

November 21, 2007

EDITORIAL The 440-unit housing development slated for the Laguna Street site of the old UC Berkeley Extension campus is suddenly on the fast track. The Planning Department has calendared a vote on the project for Dec. 20 in what appears to be a desperate effort to get it approved before the end of the year. That may be in the interests of developer A.F. Evans, but it’s not in the interests of San Francisco, and the commissioners should be in no rush to go along.

This isn’t a typical commercial project: the land has been in the public sector for a century and has always been used for public projects. Until the 1950s it was home to San Francisco State University, and it became a UC campus in 1958. Turning public land over for private use should raise alarms anywhere, and in the middle of a dense city, where public land is scarce and affordable housing desperately needed, those alarms ought to be ringing loud and long.

In this case Evans has done a brilliant bit of political maneuvering: the market-rate housing project is paired with an 80-unit development that will be designed as retirement housing for queer seniors. That’s clearly something the city needs, and that aspect of the plan has won widespread support — and helped divert or eliminate opposition to the overall project.

But there are real issues here. For one thing, Evans plans to tear down two historic buildings (while saving three others). That was a compromise the Board of Supervisors accepted in August, but we still find it dubious. We also find dubious the notion that the developer will create public space by reopening a section of Waller Street — a public thoroughfare — that was part of the old campus.

The biggest problem, however, is the lack of affordable housing. Evans is planning to make 20 percent of the units available below market rate — but that’s a fairly small number considering that this is public land. Remember: at that ratio only 16 of the queer retirement apartments will be available to anyone who isn’t wealthy. While we agree that queer seniors of all income levels need this style of housing, which will feature community amenities and on-site services for the aging, 16 lower-cost units hardly seems like enough of a benefit to justify shifting 5.4 acres of public property into a private project. "How can the queer community settle for this, in San Francisco of all places?" queer housing activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca asks. "I think that we can do much better."

Evans is in a rush — and thus the Mayor’s Office and the City Planning Department are in a rush — because the developer’s contract with the university expires if the project isn’t approved by Jan. 1, 2008. Almost everyone involved agrees that the UC and Evans can easily reach terms on an extension, so there’s no real threat here. But it doesn’t matter — that’s not the city’s problem. San Francisco has a responsibility to ensure that big new projects serve the public interest; the developer’s deadline doesn’t trump that.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is asking that the affordable-housing component be increased to around 40 percent. That may take a little work: the UC, which wants to make as much money as possible off this, is charging Evans a stiff fee for the land. But with the proper pressure, including pressure on the UC from Assemblymember Mark Leno and state senator Carole Migden, a much higher ratio of low-cost housing ought to be possible.

It’s too early to approve what’s still a bad deal. The planning commissioners should turn it down, and if they don’t, the supervisors should demand more from Evans before allowing the property to go from public to private use. *

Disaster preparedness

November 20, 2007

Above a semicircle of wooden crates arranged on a weathered wooden stage, two tattered flags of New Orleans and the United States are projected on a back screen. The flags appear to flutter in the rotating series of overlapping still images. This shifting perspective implicitly signals the living and composite nature of the history (recent and long-term, local and national) we are about to hear, as the 11 members of the ensemble representing survivors of Hurricane Katrina’s inundation of New Orleans in 2005 slowly assemble onstage and introduce themselves.

As they tell their individual stories — with charming, informal demeanors — and relate the story of their city, the flags give way to a steady stream of projected images (designed by Daniel Gamberg), including old snapshots, local landscapes, memorabilia, bits of relevant text, a pregnant cloudscape, and, finally, images of an unprecedented natural and human disaster. The social breakdown, government malfeasance, and open racism attendant on the Katrina disaster are balanced by stories of courage, compassion, camaraderie, and resolve — human capacities grounded in individual character and familial and communal solidarity, as well as the resources of a specific cultural life and history made manifest in the play’s wise and winning emphasis on New Orleans’s African American musical heritage.

While not uniformly strong, the cast includes some formidable talents (including Mujahid Abdul-Rashid, Velina Brown, L. Peter Callender, and Elizabeth Carter) and has another actor playing herself: Federal Emergency Management Agency inspector Linda Rose McCoy (whose unique and surprisingly sympathetic perspective makes up for some awkward and rather abrupt entrances and exits). Although the unevenness brings unintended lulls to the show’s pith and pacing, in general these down-to-earth stories and alternately quiet and harrowing disaster testimonials — together with a solid mix of a cappella song, recorded music (from the irresistibly joyful Hot 8 Brass Band), and the occasional burst of movement — bring much life to a relatively spare stage. Amid a growing cult of catastrophe, Stardust reminds us poignantly of the culture of survival.

ARGOS, OR NOT

On dramatically turbulent waters of its own, the latest Mary Zimmerman extravaganza, a retelling of Jason and the Argonauts’ search for the Golden Fleece, sails smoothly into a West Coast premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Bay Area berth for the director’s previous work, including the Tony Award–winning Metamorphoses. Zimmerman runs a tight ship and knows how to rig a stage — first of all, with cleverly intricate mise-en-scènes, including a dynamic, even acrobatic ensemble of actors (led by Jake Suffian as an average-dude Jason), beautiful sets (Daniel Ostling’s enormous and pristine wood plank walls and ceiling, with a matching wooden catwalk and a mast rising like a firehouse pole through an aperture, look like the environs of a high-priced New York art gallery), and the playful use of stage properties (including Michael Montenegro’s buoyantly rough-and-ready puppets).

But the play also feels rigged. With humor pitched low (from an occasionally clever angle) and a forced sense of wonder, the spectacle has a vaguely didactic, children’s-theater aspect, as if some assigned learning were being dressed up and played down as "fun." Some episodes work well dramatically, the story of Hercules and Hylas in particular. But in the end, the long (two and a half hours) journey, which scrawls a timely (if wishful) moral about mad missions abroad "to put an end to evil" ending miserably for their instigators, is a short hop, emotionally and intellectually.

STARDUST AND EMPTY WAGONS: STORIES FROM THE KATRINA DIASPORA

Wed/21 and Fri/23–Sat/24, 8 p.m.; Sun/25, 3 p.m.; $18–$50

Brava Theater Center

2789 24th St., SF

(415) 647-2822

www.brava.org

ARGONAUTIKA

Through Dec. 16, $27–$69

See Web site for schedule

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

2015 Addison, Roda Theatre, Berk.

(510) 647-2949

www.berkeleyrep.org

Pick up the beat

November 14, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Bop City. The Blackhawk. The Jazz Workshop. The Both/And. Keystone Korner. Kimball’s.

San Francisco’s world-renowned jazz club heritage has always been a part of the city’s matchless cultural identity. But the je ne sais quoi’s been missing for decades, because there hasn’t been a jazz club regularly booking national and international touring musicians into the city for more than 20 years.

That all changes this month with the Nov. 28 opening of Yoshi’s San Francisco. There’s been a Yoshi’s in Jack London Square for 10 years, the descendant of a North Berkeley sushi bar that morphed into a restaurant and music venue on Claremont Avenue in Oakland. Down by the waterfront, Yoshi’s became synonymous with jazz and was revered as both an artist- and an audience-friendly venue.

The brand-new club and restaurant at 1330 Fillmore holds down the ground floor of the freshly minted Fillmore Heritage Center, a 13-story mixed-use development that hopes to jump-start a renaissance in the scuffling Western Addition historic area. "Truthfully, I really don’t know why there hasn’t been another jazz club in San Francisco," says Yoshi’s artistic director, Peter Williams, the man charged with making sure the music part of the business stays in business. He’s been booking the artists at Yoshi’s for the past eight years. "Jazz is very risky," he continues, "and maybe people were feeling like they didn’t want to take the chance. These owners felt there was an opportunity."

The owners are Kaz Kajimura, one of Yoshi’s founders, and developer Michael Johnson. Their opportunity is costing $10 million, with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency kicking in a $4.4 million loan as part of the total $75 million redevelopment project helmed by Em Johnson Interest, Johnson’s company.

Their idea of a new jazz club in the Fillmore District took shape four years ago, after a series of false starts with other developers and other discussed flagship venues, such as the Blue Note. Johnson sent out requests for proposals to jazz clubs around the country; Kajimura received one, and when he met with Johnson, the two hit it off. "Michael could see Kaz’s vision, and vice versa. That made it happen," Williams says. The building, designed by Morimoto, Matano, and Kang Architects, has a performance venue of 417 seats, 317 on the ground level and 100 more on a mezzanine. The restaurant, serving a modern Japanese cuisine created by executive chef Shotaro "Sho" Kamio, seats 370 in its combined dining and lounge areas. Success on the food side is a likely slam dunk — it’s in jazz presenting, much like three-point shooting, that percentages decline.

Williams is counting on Yoshi’s reputation among jazz professionals — musicians, managers, and agents — as a starting point. "We’ve put a lot of care into presenting the music in as respectful a setting as possible," he says. "I think that’s paid off for us."

CLUB DECLINE?

But jazz club culture has receded in the past 20 years, with the music finding support from institutions like SFJAZZ, which stepped into the developing void in the city 25 years ago. SFJAZZ executive director Randall Kline has always looked to organizational models like the San Francisco Symphony in terms of sustaining and growing the jazz art form. "What has happened is jazz has moved more into the concert hall and into more of a special-events format than a club format," Kline says. "There hasn’t been a great growth of jazz clubs in the country. But there’s a proliferation of festivals."

There are jazz clubs — Jazz at Pearl’s, under the strong stewardship of Kim Nalley and Steve Sheraton, is certainly a necessary element of North Beach, and farther north on Fillmore is Rasselas — but Kline believes there just aren’t as many live music clubs as there once were.

Still, despite the fierce competition for eyes, ears, and dollars, the fact remains that musicians need to play. Performance has always been one of the most effective ways for jazz artists to sustain themselves and build their audience. Not only is there no substitute for hearing the music live, but venue sales have also become a larger part of the overall sales picture, observes Cem Kurosman, director of publicity for Blue Note Records.

"Now, with fewer and fewer TV, radio, and mainstream press outlets covering new jazz artists, touring has become more important than ever," Kurosman says, "although there are fewer jazz clubs on the national circuit than ever before."

The Bay Area is one of the top four jazz markets in the country, and it behooves artists to gain exposure here. That wasn’t really a problem while the region was consistently supporting the music, when the music was here in the clubs and jazz seemed to swing up from the streets.

But times have changed, and no one recognizes that better than Todd Barkan, who ran Keystone Korner in North Beach. When Keystone closed in 1983, it was one of the last San Francisco clubs to regularly book national and international touring jazz groups. Barkan is now the artistic director of Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the jazz club operated by Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, and he’s also a highly regarded producer who works with numerous domestic and European jazz labels.

"The reason there hasn’t been anything in San Francisco proper for some 20 years is that it’s a new era," Barkan says. "San Francisco is not the bohemian place that it was when I started the Keystone in the early ’70s, which itself was a holdover from the psychedelic era."

While Barkan’s place could not rightly be called a dive, it was a funky little crowded club. From the stage to the bar, the setup at Keystone was significantly removed from the state-of-the-art amenities at Yoshi’s. In some ways, Yoshi’s splits the difference between the club and the concert experience, the hope being that the artists and the audience get the best of both worlds.

Barkan says the primary jazz audience now has different expectations than it used to. "It took a number of years to get the business set up to have the right kind of a club that could really be competitive and cater to a much more upscale audience, which is where the real jazz audience is now overall," he says. "For better or worse that’s where it’s at."

That audience is also spread throughout the Bay Area, which is important for a San Francisco–situated club to keep in mind. "San Francisco’s a little town," Barkan says. "With all due respect, ‘the city’ is only about 800,000. The Bay Area is 4.5 to 5 million people, but it’s very spread out." His North Beach club got a tremendous benefit from the freeway off-ramp at Broadway, which made getting into that part of the city from the Bay Bridge simpler.

But Yoshi’s San Francisco won’t survive on jazz alone, as Barkan and Williams acknowledge. "To do the kind of numbers and volume Yoshi’s needs, you have to have a diversified musical program," Barkan says.

Williams spins the challenge of putting butts in the seats as an opportunity to be creative. "I’ll have to branch out a little bit in what we do," he agrees. "I don’t think we’ll be able to do just jazz all the time." At Yoshi’s Oakland, Williams has added salsa dance nights on Mondays, and he consistently books fusion and smooth jazz performers like Keiko Matsui and neosoul acts like Rashaan Patterson.

The San Francisco spot will likely see a similar mix, though the inaugural performers are a mainstream ensemble called the Yoshi’s Birds of a Feather Super Band, which includes vibraphonist Gary Burton, saxophonists Ravi Coltrane and Kenny Garrett, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, and bassist John Patitucci. Veteran drummer Roy Haynes leads the band, which Williams created specially for the club’s opening.

Taj Mahal and the Phantom Blues Band follow, and later in December, Chick Corea, Charlie Hunter, and Rebeca Mauleón will perform. Next year will see guitarist Pat Metheny, pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, vocalist Cassandra Wilson, and guitarist Bill Frisell in multinight runs at the club. Williams will try various things, particularly in the early months. "December is mostly artists coming to San Francisco with one band and then going to Oakland with another," he says. Corea, Hunter, and Taj Mahal will all pull double Yoshi’s duty.

"It’s gonna be a learning experience to find out what works and what doesn’t and how the two clubs can work together," Williams says. He will also have bands play the first part of the week in San Francisco and then Thursday through Sunday in Oakland, reasoning that San Franciscans are looking for more things to do early in the week. And he wants the club to be a platform for local artists — probably early in the week as well — but says Yoshi’s will have to focus on national touring acts simply to get people into the club.

Local saxophonist Howard Wiley is bullish on the new club, hoping that, if nothing else, it brings some notice to jazz instead of more exploitative forms of expression. "I’m so tired of hearing about Britney [Spears] and strippers and all that stuff," he says. "I’m hoping and praying the pendulum will swing back and people will cherish things of value again. I always love it when more attention can be brought to the music."

Currently Intersection for the Arts’ composer in residence, Wiley put out the self-released Angola Project earlier this year. The music is based on African American prison spirituals with roots primarily in songs and stories from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La. While Wiley hopes Yoshi’s can bring in artists like Billy Harper and David Murray, not necessarily household names even in mainstream jazz homes, he recognizes the reality of booking the club. "I’m not so into Rick Braun, but I understand," he says with a laugh, referencing the smooth jazz trumpet icon. "I just hope the club represents the music to its fullest, because it’s the only American contribution to global art."

ACCESSIBLE AVENUES

Former club owner Barkan hopes the new Yoshi’s anchors a reinvigorated jazz scene in San Francisco, one that can support another, smaller club as well, something with around 150 seats and less of an overhead, which a savvy veteran promoter like, say, himself might book. A smaller room certainly would make music more accessible to audiences. It might also underscore the notion that there just aren’t the headliners in jazz that there once were — the names needed to fill a room the size of the new Yoshi’s. "When the Keystone was up and running, we had Dexter Gordon, Elvin Jones, Gene Ammons, Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderly, Rashaan Roland Kirk, Freddie Hubbard," Barkan says. "The list was pretty inexhaustible.

"More than anything, jazz needs committed, dedicated presenters," he continues. "Yoshi’s is to be commended for what it does. They’re unsung heroes of this whole scenario."

The long-ago memories from San Francisco’s jazz club past sound like misty urban legends. Bop City, for instance, was the spot where Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker played. Saxophonist John Handy was just 18 when he joined John Coltrane onstage. Across town in North Beach, Miles Davis recorded his first live album at the Blackhawk. Charles Mingus recorded one of his best live LPs at the Jazz Workshop, and Adderly got famous from the one he recorded there. Do you remember Sun Ra’s expansive band flowing off the tiny stage at Keystone Korner? Jazz fans may have to resign themselves to the fact that it may never be like that again.

But there’s a San Francisco jazz continuum that includes those clubs, writers like the late Phil Elwood, producers such as Orrin Keepnews, and musicians including Joe Henderson, to name just a few. There have been many other forgotten heroes and great moments. And even though CD sales have slumped in recent years, reflecting the faltering music industry as a whole, there are as many good musicians around as ever, and most observers think an audience is there as well. For any live music scene to work, there have to be the players, the audience, and the venue to bring them together, and Yoshi’s hopes to do that for the Fillmore. "I just hope the Bay Area jazz community will band together, check this out, and make it work," Williams says. "It’s a huge undertaking. It’s going to be a beautiful room, there’ll be beautiful music, and if people come, it’ll be a success."

ROY HAYNES AND YOSHI’S BIRDS OF A FEATHER SUPER BAND

Nov. 28, 8 and 10 p.m., $100

Yoshi’s

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

Behind the Bey empire

November 14, 2007

Editor’s Note: The Chauncey Bailey Project, a collaboration of local media outlets including the Guardian, is investigating the circumstances surrounding the Aug. 2 murder of Bailey, an Oakland journalist who was reporting on the financial dealings of the Bey family’s Your Black Muslim Bakery at the time he was killed. For more information, including audio, video, and updates on the case, click here.

Since 2003, Esperanza Johnson, a former key figure within Oakland’s Bey organization, and her husband, Antron Thurman, have acquired nearly $2 million worth of East Bay real estate through a string of controversial deals tainted with allegations of deceit.

In five cases those deals led to litigation. Johnson, of Antioch, who also goes by the name Noor Jehan Bey, has twice been accused of fraud. Court records indicate that one of those transactions involved falsified documents.

One sale involving Johnson, a licensed real estate broker, led to criminal charges: Alameda County prosecutors in 2006 convicted a Johnson associate on fraud charges stemming from a deal that cost an East Oakland couple their home.

A broad array of characters have tangled with Johnson and Thurman in court, including a disabled Berkeley bus porter forced from his family home, an Antioch couple now facing foreclosure, and East Bay Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that builds homes for the poor and struggling. Combined, they claim to have lost at least $1.77 million in property, cash and equity in the deals.

The revelations about Johnson and Thurman come as authorities scrutinize the extensive real estate dealings of the Bey family and their bankrupt business, Your Black Muslim Bakery, including Johnson’s role as the broker for an Oakland woman named Paulette Arbuckle who is attempting to buy the bakery’s San Pablo Avenue headquarters. Johnson bore four of the Bey family patriarch’s dozens of children.

Bakery CEO Yusuf Ali Bey IV, 21, jailed without bail on kidnapping and torture charges, also is charged with real estate fraud: prosecutors say he bought an Oakland property under a false identity.

And bankruptcy trustee Tevis Thompson, who is overseeing the liquidation of Your Black Muslim Bakery’s assets, has claimed in court papers that Bey IV transferred $2.28 million in bakery properties to his mother, Daulet Bey, in a bid to “defraud creditors.” The trustee has sued for those properties’ return.

Devaughndre Broussard, a 20-year-old bakery associate, is charged with the Aug. 2 shotgun slaying of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey as he walked to work in downtown Oakland. Police say Broussard made a confession – later recanted – that he killed Bailey because the journalist was working on a story about the bakery’s finances and bankruptcy case.

Johnson, whose state business registration was suspended more than a year ago for failure to pay taxes and who with Thurman has more than $1 million in state and federal tax liens recorded against them, didn’t return numerous telephone calls and emails, and didn’t answer the gate at her Antioch home on two recent occasions.

Thurman refused to speak to reporters who approached him recently in Oakland.

A Los Angeles real estate consultant who reviewed Johnson’s transactions for the Chauncey Bailey Project said the trustee and judge handling the bakery’s bankruptcy should examine Johnson’s record.

They “should be made aware that a realtor on a transaction which requires the trustee’s approval has a murky… background,” said Eric Forster.

The attorney for the court appointed bankruptcy trustee charged with liquidating the bakery said Johnson’s transaction history would be probed.

“Obviously it is of some concern to us and we’re looking into it,” Eric Nyberg, attorney for trustee Tevis Thompson, said when informed of the cases.

He also noted that Arbuckle may not, in the end, be the highest bidder for the bakery. A hearing on her offer is scheduled for Nov. 29. If the $899,999 bid of Johnson’s client, Arbuckle, is successful and Johnson is “entitled to receive the commission, then we really don’t have an issue with it,” Nyberg said.

A spokesperson for the state Department of Real Estate, Tom Pool, wouldn’t discuss the Johnson and Thurman transactions.

Machado

Markus Machado and Gail Mateo said that when they wanted to buy a newer and bigger home in 2005, they went to a real estate broker they thought they could trust: Esperanza Johnson.

A Compton native, Johnson became involved with the Bey organization, a spin-off of the Nation of Islam, at the age of 12, taking the name Noor Jehan Bey.

She’s returned to using the name Esperanza Johnson, though she’s been listed in judgments against her by banks and credit-card companies as Nellie Bey, Nuri Bey, Noojean Bey and Noor Jehan Esperanza, a review of records by the Chauncey Bailey Project shows. And, in 2005 testimony, she said she still occasionally uses the name Noor Jehan Bey.

Johnson had hired Machado, a graphic artist, to create flyers for her Signature One Mortgage and Real Estate.

In a recent interview at his lawyer’s office, Machado described her as warm and gregarious – at first, anyway. Machado said Johnson arranged what seemed like an incredible deal: the couple could sell their 50-year-old Pittsburg house and move into a spacious four-bedroom home in a verdant Antioch subdivision, an ideal place to raise their three children and grow old together.

Johnson promised they’d pay about $1,600 a month for the new home, only a little more than their mortgage at the time. Machado said Johnson even agreed to forgo her usual commissions “because we were like family.”

They said Johnson had told them their credit was poor, and talked them into selling their Pittsburg house to one of her employees, Araceli Moreno, for $350,000 while putting the new home and mortgage in Moreno’s name as well. They expected to refinance the loan in about a year, when Moreno would sign the house over to them.

It seemed perfect – until the bills arrived.

The payments were $2,700 a month and soon ballooned higher, they now say in court records. And then Johnson – who in sealing the deal had diverted almost $58,000 of equity from their old home to others, and had won large commissions for herself by getting them an unfavorable mortgage – stopped taking their calls, Machado said as his wife sat next to him weeping.

The couple had trouble making the payments almost immediately and Moreno began receiving calls from the mortgage company. She sued Machado and Mateo last year.

“The point of (Moreno’s) lawsuit was to get them to refinance to get my client’s name off the loan and for her to go ahead and salvage what of her credit picture she could,” said Moreno’s attorney, Richard G. Hyppa of Tracy.

The couple counter-sued in November 2006, naming Moreno and Johnson as defendants, claiming that Johnson defrauded them. They are now months behind on the payments and stressed to exhaustion.

“I don’t sleep. Gail doesn’t sleep,” Machado said. “I was very naive. We were led down this primrose path because I trusted (Johnson) implicitly.”

After paying off what they owed on the Pittsburg house, about $190,000 was left over that should have been used for the down payment on the Antioch house. But the suit alleges that Moreno used only $77,973 toward the down payment.

Meanwhile, court records say Johnson arranged for another $10,000 to be paid out to Moreno, and for someone named Harry Hawkins to get $45,830 as “repayment of loans.” Machado’s lawyer, Ken Koenen, said attempts to locate Hawkins have been fruitless.

The suit also claims Johnson structured the Antioch mortgage so monthly payments would increase dramatically after a year, and so Machado and Mateo would have to pay an $18,000 penalty in order to refinance – thereby earning her a much larger commission.

Machado and Mateo now are several months in arrears on the mortgage in Moreno’s name. Default notices have arrived at the house.

“It’s an extremely painful thing,” Machado said. “We have been robbed of our peace of mind. We have to make decisions about whether to put food in the refrigerator or gas in the car. We’ve not even sure we’re going to have a place to live.”

Johnson hasn’t responded to the couple’s lawsuit and will likely be subject to a default judgment, Koenen said.

Chicago D&P
Johnson and Thurman in 2004 acquired a Hercules home after a federal judge had ordered it frozen as an asset of an investment company, Chicago D&P, that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had accused of fraud.
The property was supposed to be sold to help pay back investors – reportedly including at least 30 active-duty Marines and several churches – which had been cheated out of millions through Chicago D&P’s pyramid schemes.
The daughter of the company’s president had bought the property years earlier using a straw purchaser – a friend with better credit – as a front, according to court records.
That friend had been trying to get her name off the title for some time, and the daughter’s attorney – Githaiga Ramsey, who also worked for Thurman and Johnson on another case – persuaded her to sign the house over to them. Records shows Ramsey offered the friend $20,500 to complete the transaction but that the payment was never made.
The transfer of the house occurred after U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer ordered the property frozen. Thurman then turned around and sold it a month later to one of the employees of his bail bond business, Jamie Bonilla, for $460,000. Johnson filed Bonilla’s loan application.
Most of that money appears to have eventually gone to pay mortgages against the property when Thurman and Johnson acquired it for free. But first, Thurman received $60,213 from the deal’s escrow; and Ramsey got $31,000.
It remains unclear who lived in the house after Bonilla bought it.
Stephen Anderson, the receiver representing Chicago D&P’s bilked investors, wrote in April 2005 that he believed Johnson’s daughter, Nisa Bey, had lived there.
Other documents show Madeeah Bey – another mother to several of patriarch Yusuf Bey’s children – used it as her mailing address in two December 2004 real estate deals.
It’s also unclear whether Thurman and Johnson knew of the court order freezing the house when they took possession of it. But in February 2005 Breyer held Ramsey in contempt of court for defying his order.
Ramsey and Thurman both repaid the money they received from the escrow when Thurman sold the house to Bonilla.
Bonilla, within a few months, then sold the house for $625,000 – a profit of $211,690 from a property that the receiver had originally wanted to sell to help repay the defrauded investors.
Anderson said a long legal battle to regain title to the house would’ve been too costly.
“We made an economic decision,” he said. “The objective of the receiver is to return as much money as possible back to the investors, and it was not difficult to determine we were going to get more money” by taking the $91,000 from Thurman and Ramsey than by “trying to unscramble that whole mess.”
Ramsey, who surrendered his law license while facing disciplinary charges from an unrelated case, wouldn’t discuss this case or others in which he was involved with Johnson and Thurman.
“My God, am I never going to get away from this?” he said. “I’m not involved and I don’t want to be. I’m not in contact with these people anymore.”
Bonilla could not be located.
Habitat for Humanity house
Antron Thurman married a woman named Sharon Clements in December 1987. Records show they separated seven months later and eventually filed for a divorce that was never made final.

In early 2000, Clements, as a single mother, moved into a home on 105th Avenue in Oakland built by the low-income housing nonprofit East Bay Habitat for Humanity. It gave Clements a no-interest $112,000 loan with no down payment.

Clements died in April 2003, leaving no will. Usually either there’s a clear legal inheritance, or else the nonprofit passes the deed to someone qualified for low-income aid, executive director Janice Jensen said. But Clements’ son was still a minor.

Clements’ home stood vacant for three years while her estate was sorted out in Alameda County Probate Court.

Then, in mid-2006, Thurman argued he was entitled to the low-income property as Clements’ surviving spouse, records show – even as he listed his address as Johnson’s Antioch home, and other records showed that in the previous few years he had bought and sold in excess of $1 million in East Bay real estate.

“Frankly, I didn’t even know about Mr. Thurman,” Habitat’s Jensen said. “I had no idea who he was or that he even existed until the attorneys got involved. When we looked at the deed, she was the only signature, so she bought that home herself.”

Still, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Marshall L. Whitley awarded Thurman the house, which had restrictions in place to preserve its affordability for low income people.

Thurman then sold it back to Habitat for Humanity for the $13,500 in equity that had accrued during the three years Clements owned it.

Alana Conner, an attorney for Thurman at the time, said she couldn’t independently recall details of the case and declined to discuss it.

Stewart

Mitzie Peters befriended Brandy Stewart in 2001, studying the Bible with her eventual victim, court records say.

Peters persuaded the cash-strapped AC Transit bus driver to deed the home at 1565 77th Ave. – which Stewart had inherited from her mother, and in which she, her husband and her three children lived – into Peters name and use Peters’ credit to get an equity loan. Peters promised to return the deed after a few days, keeping $12,000 from the loan as a fee.

“She said that because she loved me so much, she would never, ever think about doing this for anyone else, but she would help me to get the house refinanced,” Stewart would later testify.

Stewart deeded the house to Peters on March 11, 2003. But rather than sticking to the deal, Peters drained the property of all equity and gave nothing to Stewart, court records show.

Peters couldn’t have conducted the transaction without Johnson and her family.

As Peters’ broker, Johnson submitted a series of loan applications reporting Peters’ income as increasingly higher until the bank accepted the deal; she also allegedly coached Stewart in writing to the title company and falsely claiming Peters was her cousin.

Johnson’s sister, Ruquayya Jasmine Pennix, prepared Peters’ tax returns to send to the loan company, showing self-employment income that Peters later admitted was bogus; it’s unclear if Pennix knew that at the time.

Another of Johnson’s sisters – Fatima Ismail, who worked in Johnson’s office – drew up a phony lease showing Peters had derived rental income from Stewart’s house, according to court records.

Three months after she took title to Stewart’s house, Peters sold it to one of Johnson’s sons, Amir Bey. Under oath, Amir Bey later admitted he was just a straw buyer for his mother.

When arrested and charged with unrelated public benefits fraud, perjury and grand theft in July 2004, Peters made bail with Thurman’s Sinbad’s Bail Bonds.

As investigators also began probing her real estate activities, Peters gifted her Hayward condo to Johnson’s daughter, Nisa Bey, who sold it a month later for about $400,000.

Peters then lived with Nisa Bey in Pittsburg until going to prison. Because her bail had been secured with the condo, Thurman later asked a judge to exonerate the bail and return more than $50,000 – to Nisa Bey.

The Alameda County District Attorney’s office interviewed Johnson, Thurman, and their attorney, Githaiga Ramsey – who had represented Peters until just two months earlier, and who had just arranged the Chicago D&P deal for them – in September 2004.

“Johnson seemed evasive when questioned about irregularities in the loan and application process,” inspector Paul Wallace wrote in court papers.

But Johnson wasn’t charged.

“We didn’t think we could prove the case against her beyond a reasonable doubt,” Deputy District Attorney Alyce Sandbach said. “We didn’t have enough to make her on a case of fraud… of having made knowing misrepresentations.”

Among additional charges filed against Peters in November 2004 was a felony grand-theft count for equity and title to the Stewarts’ home; she pleaded no contest to that and 15 other, unrelated counts a year later, and was sentenced in February 2006.

The Stewarts got the $50,374.10 bail money Thurman had tried to direct to Nisa Bey. A judge in January ordered Peters to pay $486,083.90 in the Stewarts’ civil lawsuit, but they haven’t seen a dime, their lawyers say.

Amir Bey and Johnson tried to evict the Stewarts, court documents show, but backed off when the couple obtained free legal help.

The Stewarts then sued Johnson, Peters and Amir Bey; Johnson eventually offered to deed the house back to Stewart, but with the equity drained, the Stewarts couldn’t afford the higher mortgage payments.

A judge in September 2006 ordered Johnson and Amir Bey to pay the Stewarts $100,000 – $20,000 up front and $1,667 per month for 48 months.

Rebecca Saelao, the Stewarts’ attorney, said this civil judgment became a lien on the house, and was subordinated to massive mortgages Johnson and Amir Bey had taken on the property and eventually defaulted on. The house was sold at auction last year for $80,900, public records show.

The Stewarts got only about $5,000 from the sale of the home they’d lost. They no longer live in the Bay Area, and couldn’t be reached for comment.

Taylor

Wrapped in a thin, sea-green blanket, Donald Taylor lay in a narrow bed at a Stockton nursing home recently, his frail 61-year-old body ravaged by diabetes and hypertension. His wheelchair was parked at his bedside, a walker he wants to learn to use, a few feet away.

Taylor is broke and relies on Medi-Cal, the state insurance program for the indigent, to bankroll his care and board at the Elm Haven Care Center.

His room is dingy and, fluorescent-lit with peeling blue wallpaper and a television, foil wrapped around its rabbit-ear antennae, issuing forth static-filled sound. He spends his days “just doing nothing.”

He said he wonders what his life might be like now if he never encountered Antron Thurman. “I think about it quite often, but there’s nothing I can do… I think about how they took the house from me,” Taylor said haltingly in a soft, gravelly voice that contained little emotion.

In the 1950s Taylor’s parents bought a cozy two-bedroom home on a tree-shaded street in north Berkeley. He grew up there and lived there still as an adult, while working as a bus-station porter. When his parents died, he and his sister, Loretta Alexander, inherited the house; the mortgage was paid off.

In early 2001, according to interviews and court documents, stepbrother Frederick Myers Jr., approached the siblings with a plan: He would help them form a company to manage the house and another property they had inherited, an undeveloped Lake County parcel.

Myers asked them to transfer the two deeds to the new corporation, which he would helm for them. Taylor said he agreed at his sister’s urging, believing the three of them could profit from development of the Lake County parcel.

But Myers suddenly sold the Berkeley house to Thurman, pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars and disappeared, court documents say, catching Taylor and Alexander completely off guard.

“I felt I had been cheated,” Taylor said, adding that he believes Thurman and Myers worked in concert. “Fred Jr. took the house and sold it to (Thurman) and it’s been downhill ever since. He sold it out from underneath us.”

Myers could not be located. Thurman, asked if he remembered Taylor, refused to answer as he climbed into a Cadillac Escalade outside a home in the Oakland hills.

Alexander’s son, Tony Cole, expressed disgust at the way his mother and uncle were played. “That property slipped right out from underneath them,” he said in a phone interview. “They didn’t have the business sense to know what was going on.”

Taylor and Alexander in 2004 sued to reclaim the house. Myers never appeared in court, but Thurman – represented by Githaiga Ramsey – responded by filing his own suit, claiming he had legitimately bought the property for $374,388 and demanding that Taylor pay $1,500 in monthly rent or get out.

Taylor and Alexander eventually settled the case for $55,000; it took Thurman 10 months to pay them, court records indicate. Taylor’s attorney, Frederic Harvey, refused to discuss the case.

The two-story, beige stucco house with a large garage has steadily appreciated in value. Public records show Thurman sold it in 2004 to Madeeah Bey – the same relative who used the Chicago D&P house in Hercules as her address – for $520,000; she sold it for $850,000 less than a year later. The house is now assessed at $867,000.

Alexander died last year. Taylor lost most of his possessions including photos of his mother when he left the property.

“I’d like to tell him to go (screw) himself,” Taylor said of Thurman, his legs twitching quietly under the blanket.

University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students Lisa Pickoff-White, Robert Lewis, Nick Kusnetz, Vianna Risa Davila, Marnette Federis and Lucie Schwartz contributed to this story.

Thomas Peele and Josh Richman are staff writers for the Bay Area News Group; A.C. Thompson is a free-lance reporter working for New America Media and Bay Area News Group-East Bay; Bob Butler is a freelance reporter and president of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association.

Green City: Solar solutions

November 13, 2007

› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY When Berkeley mayor Tom Bates recently announced a creative city plan to financially assist homeowners who want to dress their roofs in solar panels, people across the Bay wondered if San Francisco could come up with something similar.

It’s happening. Sup. Gerardo Sandoval is working with the City Attorney’s Office on legislation to make solar panels more affordable for property owners. "The idea with my proposal is the city would use its very high credit rating to borrow money at almost zero cost," the District 11 supervisor said. That money would be turned over to citizens as low-interest loans to be paid back through a monthly assessment, similar to a property tax, with a very low interest rate. "It’s going to be a lot cheaper than what homeowners can do on their own."

A photovoltaic array for a typical home can cost the owner as much as $40,000, though state and federal incentives can reduce the cost by about $10,000. Systems are typically guaranteed by the manufacturers for 20 to 25 years, and the cost is recouped over time in reduced energy bills.

But the initial investment is high enough to discourage many would-be solar users. "The main challenge for many homeowners is the substantial upfront cost. It could easily cost you up to $50,000 to upgrade your home," Sandoval said of the bill for items like insulation, solar panels, and wind generators that can help modify a building to use less energy more efficiently.

Under this new financial program, the entire city would be declared a tax assessment district — similar to a Mello-Roos, or community benefit, district — with a resident opting in by deciding to buy solar panels. Both Berkeley and San Francisco are charter cities, which gives them the ability to tweak state laws, like the one that permits the creation of Mello-Roos districts, to meet local needs.

The plan to help private property owners has a number of public benefits. By generating most of their power on their roofs, homeowners will draw less juice from the grid, which is heavily dependent on fossil fuels (and is ultimately inefficient, as much energy is lost through transmission from distant power plants).

San Francisco is fast closing in on its 2012 deadline to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels, and a July Civil Grand Jury report found the city would have to triple its current reduction rate to meet that goal. Sandoval’s plan would help. According to a federal study, one kilowatt of solar electricity offsets about 217,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per year. Additionally, the city is aiming to provide 31 megawatts of solar power capacity through Community Choice Aggregation, which Sandoval sees as part of his plan.

"Both programs are about organizing our city to get off the grid and get off fossil fuels," he said, adding that he hopes this financing model will expand to all renewable-energy and efficiency upgrades to homes and businesses.

The plan is still in its nascent stages, and a few administrative and legal questions remain.

It’s unclear which city department would administer the program, although San Francisco Public Utilities Commission spokesperson Tony Winnicker said, "We already have a framework to administer something like this," citing the management infrastructure of the city’s water and sewer systems. The Department of the Environment has also been suggested. Sandoval said, "There are a lot of different city agencies who see benefits of administering the program." He was clear that it should remain in the public sector, with the possible assistance of community-based nonprofits that understand the local needs of their neighborhoods.

Sandoval also sees his proposed program as a way to foster the right kind of industry in San Francisco. The volume of solar business could bring more manufacturing companies, and City College of San Francisco and other educational programs could partner with manufacturers to train consultants and installers.

Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Akeena Solar, a Los Gatos PV installer, expressed enthusiasm and support for the plan. "It’s really commendable that cities like San Francisco and Berkeley are trying to find ways to do this."

Sandoval hopes to see the program up and running within a year, and said, "If no one accuses me of conflict of interest, I’ll be among the first to sign up."

Goldie winner — Visual art: Jenifer K. Wofford

November 7, 2007

Hey framer, don’t try to frame Jenifer K. Wofford. She’ll turn that frame into a threshold. Her creative identity ricochets from teacher to student to painter to performer to director to curator with a self-determining force that exposes the mutability of such labels.

In May, Point of Departure, Wofford’s evolving series of postcard-size portraits of Filipina nurses, was a highlight (along with understated contributions by Bill Jenkins and Alicia McCarthy) of the UC Berkeley MFA show at the Berkeley Art Museum. In late July and early August, Wofford and 8 of 14 other participating Bay Area artists — including 2007 Goldie winner Michael Arcega — journeyed to Manila, the Philippines, for the first of three installments of the traveling exhibition "Galleon Trade," which she conceived and organized. (The show’s next stop will be at San Francisco’s Luggage Store, and from there it will venture to Mexico City.)

It usually takes a large institution with major funding to assemble a project of "Galleon Trade"<0x2009>‘s scope, but Wofford can not only skewer a museum’s lust for colonialist decoration (as one third of the performance mob known as Mail Order Brides and in solo pieces such as 2005’s Chicksilog) but also do the cultural exchange work that these establishments somehow fail to achieve with all of their resources. "The word that came up for all of us was serendipity," she says, discussing "Galleon Trade"<0x2009>‘s Manila manifestation, which required last-minute scrambling between the city’s thriving visual art and experimental film and video venues. "The entire time we were there, there was just one intersection after another where things fell into place."

The community goals of Wofford’s "Galleon Trade" are counterpointed by her solo art endeavors, which repeatedly tap into transitional spaces and isolated states of being. Hospitals (in Point of Departure and 2006’s drawing-video project Nurse) and motels (in 2005’s installation Motel Cucaracha) are just two liminal zones that Wofford is drawn to as if they were magnetic fields. She explores both in a manner that pinches people’s assumptions about privilege and servitude and what makes an insider or an outsider. "I’m fascinated by borders, or places where people don’t belong," she says. In fact, for her next solo show (at Southern Exposure) Wofford plans to spotlight and perhaps parodically re-create metal detectors in order to tap into their tragicomic potential. This idea takes on another facet when Wofford mentions that her "bullshit detector" goes off anytime that she reenters the art world just after teaching in high school.

"I just can’t not be inappropriate," Wofford jokes, the triple negative demonstrating her affinity for the truth that often resides in awkwardness. "Comedians of color like Dave Chappelle know that you get heard by being funny — the court jester gets to stay in the court. Also, humor can be disarming for a lot of people." This quality, partly forged through her work with fellow MOB artists Eliza Barrios and Reanne Estrada, is present whether she’s displaying the absurdist properties of the Flip-Flop on a Stick (in a hilarious video homage to a hand-fashioned bug-killing contraption she found at a market in Manila’s Quiapo District) or proving Yma Sumac will have her revenge on Hollywood. "Most of my projects have been born from some infantile Beavis and Butthead moment," Wofford goes on to confess, the pop-cult reference pinging off the gray-hoodie poses she and her sister Camille adopted for the 2006 performance-painting Woffords, Paint. "After I stop laughing, I start thinking about why I was snickering."

Where do we come from, and where the hell are we going? Wofford has a keen sense of just how impossible it is to answer those questions, which means she’s as good a person as any to follow into the future.

www.wofflehouse.com

Goldie winner — Music: Kirby Dominant

November 7, 2007

In hip-hop the path to wisdom passes through comedy. It’s been that way since Biz Markie got people thinking about romance and friendship and De la Soul got touchy-feely over Steely Dan samples. Think of Prince Paul, who could teach Woody Allen a thing or two about using psychoanalysis as a filter for funny societal commentary. Think of Kool Keith, a man of many masks who has riffed on medical authority as creatively as Prince Paul. Kirby Dominant is adding hot-like-fuchsia chapters to this tradition. He’s got the wisdom: having been through lockup and UC Berkeley, from which he received a degree in urban economic development, he knows the block from every angle. He’s definitely got the comedy: his Kirb and Chris mixtape Niggaz and White Girlz and second solo effort, Starr: Contemplations of a Dominator (Rapitalism), are the funniest and most imaginative recordings — in and out of hip-hop — of the past two years.

"I like to shock you with words, put them where they’re not supposed to be," says Dominant, who defines domination as living life on one’s own terms. "I’m into wordplay. I like Shakespeare. I like lyricists from Joni Mitchell to Kool Keith. A lot of times people in hip-hop try to tell their whole life in one fucking song. I study songs and think, ‘How come you can’t write a song about waking up in the morning and how the sun looks right before your girl wakes up?’<0x2009>"

The sun rises on the latest chapter of Dominant’s story during Starr‘s "Come Outside," the kind of effortlessly loose jam OutKast struggled to make after hitting crossover pay dirt. Before the track segues into a distorted guitar freak-out Cody Chesnutt might covet, Dominant delivers a singsong threat to smack talkers that’s plain irresistible. If the already classic Niggaz and White Girlz — with its genius new wave thug revisions of tracks by the Smiths, Talking Heads, the B-52’s, and more — is irreverent toward everyone, Starr is, as the title states, more contemplative. (Though on Daddie Flaire in White World, one of the album’s DVD video-skit extras, Dominant flips the script of Niggaz and White Girlz, sparking laughs while showing that racism is uptight and in effect.) In Dominant’s world, hip-hop is maturing more interestingly and unpredictably than it does on an MTV or VH1 reality sitcom.

"I want to release music as much as I want to, when I want to," Dominant says in an interview segment of Starr‘s DVD. Free from the sample fees that dog so many MCs because he knows how to make the keys of a Korg or a white Yamaha piano sing, he’s doing just that through his label, Rapitalism, which takes its name from his first solo collection, 1998’s Rapitalism: Philosophies of Dominant Pimpin‘. On that recording from what his peer Lyrics Born on Starr‘s DVD calls the "Telegraph [Ave.] era," Dominant sometimes appealingly drops knowledge with a flow akin to Dr. Octagon over DJ Krush–like grooves. Today he’s developed a style and sound wholly his own, which allow him to rhyme freely about joy and pain over live sounds from Roy Hargrove.

On the new compilation Rapitalism Records Presents Poppin Alwayz (Rapitalism), Dominant relinquishes total control in the name of friendship, allowing his labelmates Stephen Padmore, Chris Sinister (of Kirb and Chris), and the Kevin Riley Experiment to take the mic, though his track "Nauzeated" is an undeniable highlight. As for the days ahead, he knows the full workings of the city lurking in the title of his next solo venture, The Dominator: A Psychological Journey through Egocentricity. Kirby Dominant: he’s what French people call stylistic.

www.rapitalism.com

www.myspace.com/kirbydominant

Goldie winner — Lifetime Achievement: Creative Growth

November 7, 2007

The second I step into Creative Growth one late Friday morning, I feel slightly elated. It may have something to do with the sunlight streaming through the ceiling windows of the wide-open space, a white-walled relative of the equally amazing (in an entirely different manner) Paramount Theatre a few blocks away. It may have something to do with the fact that almost 100 people are making art at the same time and instead of hearing snippy criticisms, I’m meeting a guy named Jorge Gomez, who likes to hug. Whatever it is, it isn’t an accident. A few hours later I read an excellent profile of Creative Growth by Cheryl Dunn in ANP Quarterly, and she describes the same overwhelming and singular sensation that comes with encountering "the ferocious energy of intense art-making and creative energy being mined from the deepest levels of human consciousness."

Since 1974, Creative Growth has served artists with physical, mental, and developmental disabilities. It’s the oldest and largest studio of its kind in the world. It has not only exerted a deep influence on today’s Bay Area visual art (to cite an immediate example, at least two other 2007 Goldie winners have connections to Creative Growth) but also been the home studio of artists such as George Kellogg, Dwight Mackintosh, Donald Mitchell, William Scott, and the late Judith Scott, each one distinctively visionary. Creative Growth and all of its artists, past and present, deserve the Lifetime Achievement Award, though the world has yet to catch up with what’s happening at 355 24th St. in downtown Oakland.

"Working in the midst of 150 living artists making things every day has been an incredible experience," Jennifer O’Neal, Creative Growth’s gallery director, says to me as we sit at a table within the gallery, which is connected to the space’s studio in a manner completely at odds with the sterile insularity of commercial art spots. "It’s art doing something very real. Art can be a privilege, and this place turns privilege on its ear."

In the seven years since Creative Growth’s executive director Tom di Maria arrived from the Berkeley Art Museum — and the five years since O’Neal ventured over from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — the Creative Growth force field has extended across the country and around the world; for example, both the space and William Scott have had shows at New York’s White Columns gallery space, just two of at least a dozen such shows happening in different cities and countries this year. "William’s mother and sister traveled with him," O’Neal says, remembering Scott’s solo exhibition, every piece of which was sold. "Now, at the age of 40, he can start to take care of them."

Scott may or may not be at the studio the day I’m at Creative Growth. After admiring his fantastic paintings of San Francisco and the Bay Area since 2004, when local painter Timothy Buckwalter first told me about them, I’m a bit starstruck — especially when Creative Growth teacher Spike Milliken (after waving hello to fellow practicing artist Tara Tucker) shows me some of Scott’s latest large-scale, increasingly intricate paintings of a penthouse-free Frisco, where sites such as Orlando Towers and Hallelujah Village thrive. "Check out the depth of feeling," Milliken says, pointing to the individually nuanced lights within the windows of a Scott-rendered building that looks uncannily like Fox Plaza. Ten minutes later I marvel at some enormous Frankenstein’s monster heads in the corner of a storage space. It turns out that Scott, who loves Halloween, made them.

Milliken gives me a whirlwind tour of Creative Growth, showing me Stanley Rexwinkle’s narratively complicated yet spare work, Chuck Nagle’s big sculptures, some dessert-themed art by the witty Terri Bowden, a T-shirt featuring John Martin’s drawing of a fly ("It might represent wildlife in his landscape"), and William Tyler’s ’50s-sensibility interiors. All of these people are featured in One Is Adam, One Is Superman: The Outsider Artists of Creative Growth (Chronicle Books), which pairs their pieces with deeply candid photo portraits by Leon Borensztein, but to see their art in person is something else entirely. I’m momentarily hypnotized by stacks and stacks of Mackintosh’s and Mitchell’s drawings. Then Milliken opens a drawer filled with the NECCO-shaded, gender-bending glam dandies of Aurie Ramirez, and I’m wowed once more.

"If we considered alcoholism a disability, there would be no more distinction between artists and artists with disabilities," Milliken says as we once again cross from the gallery back to the studio and check in with Nick Pagan as he works in Creative Growth’s ceramic space. That type of thought is one I’ve entertained often in recent years, after making art with many of the same materials found at Creative Growth played a huge role in digging me out of the depressive side of manic depression. Within the art world and the academy there has been a lot of writing about definitions of and responses to outsider art, but much of it usually makes me want to simply go straight to the source — the art itself — and to early texts such as Roger Cardinal’s sadly out-of-print 1972 book Outsider Art (Praeger), which engages with Jean Dubuffet and art brut while presenting pieces by Adolf Wölfli and others that cry out for color-plate treatment. Who is outside and who is inside, anyway?

Outside Creative Growth, many if not all of the space’s artists are treated like outsiders; inside Creative Growth they’re in touch with their selves in a manner that exposes the ignorance of increasingly automated urban ways of being. "Matthew Higgs has said something [in an article by Buckwalter] that stuck with me," O’Neal relates at the end of our conversation. "Creative Growth serves a 24-mile radius of persons with disabilities around the East Bay. If you were to take a compass and trace a similar circle around any urban center, you’d find that talent."

Get out your compass and start tracing.

www.creativegrowth.org

Rent control under attack

November 7, 2007

› news@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s rent-control and affordable-housing laws could be struck down by a statewide initiative that appears to be headed for the June 2008 ballot.

The measure is sponsored by a coalition of conservative property rights advocates under the guise of limiting the government’s ability to seize property by eminent domain.

Cities and progressive organizations are fighting back by trying to qualify a competing ballot measure that would restrict the ability of governments to seize owner-occupied homes but would invalidate the more radical initiative. Groups from the San Francisco Tenants Union to the League of California Cities are actively mobilizing to gather the needed signatures by the Dec. 3 deadline.

SFTU director Ted Gullicksen told the Guardian, “180,000 rental units stand to be affected in San Francisco,” and argued that the invalidation of rent-control laws would rapidly gentrify the city. He noted that environmental groups have lined up against the measure because of ambiguous wording that “could also impact the revamping of the Hetch Hetchy Dam as well as the work on the levees and the delta.”

His group is mobilizing volunteer signature gatherers to qualify the competing measure — which would need more votes than the right-wing measure to quash the latter — and trying to educate the public through the Web site www.eminentdomainreform.com and a Nov. 14 rally planned for noon at the State Building at Van Ness and McAllister.

Eminent domain laws have been a hot-button political issue since 2005, when the US Supreme Court ruled in Kelo vs. City of New London that the Connecticut city could use eminent domain to seize land for a private development project. The furor over that decision triggered last year’s Proposition 90, which would have restricted eminent domain and defined “regulatory takings” so as to cripple local governments’ ability to enforce environmental laws and other restrictions on property use.

Prop. 90 was narrowly defeated (by 47.6 to 52.4 percent of voters statewide, but 29 percent in San Francisco), and advocates for the constitutional amendment titled Government Acquisition, Regulation of Private Property hoped to learn from the experience in crafting this new measure, for which they say they’ve gathered 850,000 signatures and plan to have one million by the Nov. 26 deadline for turning in 694,354 valid signatures of registered voters.

That measure “had a substantial amount of baggage in that it delved into regulatory takings,” Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, told the Guardian. The latest proposal, he said, “is a fairly tightly drafted measure that deals with eminent domain.”

Actually, as the Attorney General’s Office has concluded in its summary of the measure, it would also strike down rent-control laws, a key source of affordable housing in San Francisco, Berkeley, and a couple of other California cities. The measure’s broad prohibition on laws that “transfer an economic benefit to one or more private persons at the expense of the private owner” could also be interpreted as invalidating inclusionary housing laws, which require developers to create a set percentage of below-market-rate units, and other laws that regulate property.

Coupal admitted the measure attacks rent control and told us, “We think that’s part and parcel of complete property rights protection.” But he noted that units are only removed from rent-control protection when existing tenants move out. And he denied that the proposed act would affect inclusionary housing laws, citing a section that reads, “Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit or impair voluntary agreements between a property owner and a public agency to develop or rehabilitate affordable housing.”

Yet he also admits that it’s an open question whether affordable-housing requirements for developers will always be deemed voluntary. He said, “The issue of what is voluntary is currently being litigated in a number of courts.”

Finfine Ethiopian Restaurant

November 6, 2007

PREVIEW There’s only one thing better than a mimosa brunch: a mimosa brunch you get to in time to eat. Which is not what happened when my friend K. and I attended a morning birthday celebration in Berkeley on a recent Sunday morning. Yes, we got there in time to see our friends in their pajamas — and one particularly fabulous pair of car-shaped slippers — although, alas, no matching Underoos. And yes, we got there in time for both mimosas and fantastic Bloody Marys. But we completely missed the breakfast train, as everyone was already full and lazy by the time we got our asses across the bridge.

So when K. and I left the daytime slumber party, we were famished. Enter Finfiné, an Ethiopian restaurant we happened to pass on our rambling path (read: we were lost) back to the freeway. To be fair, we were so hungry that an Egg McMuffin might’ve satisfied us. But Finfiné was so much better than melted cheese product on microwaved eggs. The Ye-Tsom Beyaynetu vegetarian sampler came with six different dishes, including savory collard greens, a spicy red lentil stew, a garlicky green lentil salad, and a chickpea concoction resembling hearty hummus. And the Ye-Doro Tibs proved to be perfectly cooked, high-quality cubed chicken in a spicy, but not overwhelming, sauce.

Plus, the combination platter featured enough food to provide K. and me with nearly two meals apiece. Show me a brunch that does that.

FINFINÉ ETHIOPIAN RESTAURANT Mon. and Wed.–Sat., 5–10 p.m.; Sun., noon–10 p.m. 2556 Telegraph, Berk. (510) 883-0167, www.finfine.com

Romania dreamin’

October 31, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Programmers in the film festival, cinematheque, and rep-house exhibition worlds are forever hunting for undiscovered cinematic flavors. They are like truffle-sniffing pigs. No offense intended — after all, truffles are valuable for their rarity. During the past few years, such programmers have witnessed a stunning renaissance of native film activity in Romania, which has no business being so exciting onscreen because (a) it’s Romania, for god’s sake, still hobbling out of Nicolae Ceausescu’s 20th-century dark ages, and (b) it only produces six features per year. They can’t all be good, can they?

Oh yes, they can. Romanian movies are sweeping international prizes and have even scored a couple of theatrical releases in a US art-house market resistant to intelligent, complex, starless films in a foreign tongue. Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days reaches US theaters next year, and Cristian Nemescu’s California Dreamin’ is likely to follow.

You can catch California Dreamin’ now in the Pacific Film Archive’s "Revolutions in Romanian Cinema" series. The process of severance from the Ceausescu dictatorship — Communist Eastern Europe’s most paranoiac and corrupt — is, naturally, a frequent subject. Catalin Mitulescu’s warmly observed The Way I Spent the End of the World (2006) views the regime’s final chapter in 1989 from a teenage girl’s perspective. Radu Muntean’s The Paper Will Be Blue (2006) is a gritty you-are-there reenactment of the street chaos and random shootings that occurred on the night of the government’s overthrow. Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08: East of Bucharest (2006) ingeniously reexamines the same events as antiheroic satire, with the contradictory recollections of a TV call-in show’s guests making hash of the revolution’s already mythologized story. Another fascinating flashback, Alexandru Solomon’s The Great Communist Bank Robbery (2004), provides documentary scrutiny of an infamous crime in a nation where folks were too terrified to rob anyone, let alone the all-powerful government, suggesting that the case was quite likely a frame-up designed to rid the party of its high-ranking Jewish members.

Other films look beyond Ceausescu to the more recent past and still-problematic present. Cristi Puiu’s acclaimed The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) is like Sicko as directed by Aki Kaurismäki, a deepest-black comedy whose hapless elderly protagonist complains of chest pains — though it’s his endless, Kafkaesque odyssey through a broken-down public health system that kills him. California Dreamin’, subtitled Endless because it will never truly be finished (its 27-year-old writer-director died in a car crash before completing the final edit), is nonetheless a marvelously accomplished, sprawling, affectionate, barbed canvas. Set in 1999, it finds a top-priority NATO mission commanded by gung ho veteran jarhead Cpt. Jones (Armand Assante) waylaid by provincial officials who stubbornly demand paperwork, even if the bureaucratic logjam creates an international incident. Forced to cool heels, the visiting soldiers enjoy free-flowing local booze and celebrations in their honor. This cross-cultural tragicomedy might have been shorter had Nemescu lived to complete postproduction. As is, it’s close to perfection.

These new Romanian films are special for their attentiveness to individual characters and larger social scales, for their balance of rueful humor and genuine sympathy, and for the unpredictable yet organic intricacy of their narrative courses. Technically, they’re all highly polished, without a whiff of the stylistically self-indulgent territorial pissing typical of young filmmakers. The new Romanian cinema isn’t personal in the familiar auteurist sense. It’s populist — a term not to be confused with stupid in this case — storytelling, accessible to anyone willing to brave the Balkan barrier of subtitles. *

REVOLUTIONS IN ROMANIAN CINEMA

Nov. 3–Dec. 9, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Are high-rises green?

October 30, 2007

› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY High-rises are popping up fast in San Francisco, altering the skyline from one month to the next. But are these giants environmentally friendly? Do they make San Francisco more green or less?

One of the major advantages of using tall buildings in city design is the potential to reduce suburban sprawl: building up instead of out lessens the demand for single-family homes, creates dense neighborhoods where cars aren’t needed, and allows for more open spaces to be preserved.

Additionally, the concentration of people in high-rise clusters encourages the creation of acceptable transit systems. "The high density of high-rise neighborhoods — whether residential, office, or mixed-use — creates the necessary population density to support efficient transit service, allowing people to take transit rather than drive," said Lisa M. Feldstein, a local affordable-housing consultant who grew up in a residential high-rise in New York City’s East Harlem. "The reason that bus service is poor in suburbs and rural areas is not that people in those areas don’t like transit. It’s that the population isn’t sufficiently dense to support a fast, frequent, and efficient transit system, so people can’t rely on it."

Density puts demands on transportation, but that doesn’t guarantee public transit use. When people working in city centers like San Francisco can’t afford to live there, that can create cross-commute situations that clog big-city roadways, which may be even more environmentally damaging than suburban-style development. In fact, San Franciscans drive to work alone more than they use public transportation to get there, according to a 2006 US Census Bureau study.

High-density residents tend to use fewer resources than their low-density counterparts. Because walls, pipes, and other materials are shared, it can take less energy, for example, to heat a high-rise unit than a single family home.

But high-rises use energy in ways that single-family homes don’t — for example, in thousands of elevator trips from top to bottom every day. According to a study found on the US Department of Energy’s Web site, elevators consume up to 10 percent of the total energy used to maintain tall buildings. Furthermore, these buildings are usually climate controlled (in part to counteract the heat created by their elevators), whereas opening and closing windows can more effectively regulate temperatures in single-family houses and low-rise units. High-rise buildings also include common areas that often leave lights burning 24 hours a day.

Not having private yards in high-rises reduces the water and the toxic chemicals used to maintain them and forces people into public spaces. But there is another environmental cost to this void, said Lisa Katz, a planner with Design, Community and Environment in Berkeley. "People living in high-rises have less connection to the land; for example, they can’t grow their own food," she said. Raising food sources in agricultural communities and exporting them to cities uses exorbitant amounts of energy in the form of fuel and packaging.

High-rises, however, have the potential to achieve the highest level of green building ratings, according to Maria Ayerdi, executive director of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, which on Sept. 20 approved the proposal for the new Transbay Transit tower, which will be the tallest building on the West Coast. "In tall buildings there are creative efficiency, recycling, and energy-generating opportunities that may not be possible in smaller buildings," she said. In fact, several high-rises around the country have been built according to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification standards, which demand energy and resource efficiency.

But Calvin Welch, a local housing activist, said it is "virtually impossible to conceive a green-materials building of any sort" that would meet the seismic requirements of high-rises in San Francisco. These include the use of "heroic construction techniques" involving extraenforced foundations to build on "Bay Area mud," high-tinsel steel, which is packed with carbon and takes loads of energy to produce (often using coal or gas ovens), and thousands of gallons of diesel for the transportation of materials to the city center.

"This is one of the most disastrous building techniques of mankind," Welch said of high-rise housing, noting that "the environmental debt, even if compensated by solar panels, etc., is too great." *

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Shorts

October 30, 2007

FORESKIN’S LAMENT

By Shalom Auslander

Riverhead Books

320 pages, $24.95

It’s possible that one of the 613 commandments in the Torah is "Thou shall not read Foreskin’s Lament." Which of course means read it. If you’ve got the time, read it twice, once from right to left. You’ll still laugh. It’s that funny.

Shalom Auslander’s memoir of life as a black sheep in a black hat picks up where his first book, the short-story collection Beware of God (Simon and Schuster, 2005), left off, taking a well-hewed ax to the image of the Almighty. But unlike God bashers du jour Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, Auslander believes in the pie maker in the sky. And as his worn punch line goes, it’s been a real problem for him.

It was a problem while he was growing up in the Orthodox community of Monsey, NY, where he developed a penchant for pornography and junk food. It was a problem throughout his teens, as he padded his résumé of sin with lots of pot smoking and shoplifting. And it was even more of a problem, years later, after his wife became pregnant with their first child, a son no less. Having a family aggravated Auslander’s deep-seated religious paranoia. God, the wrathful stalker who smites first and asks questions later, was surely going to murder his family. It would be payback for years of vioutf8g the laws of Judaism. As his second-most-tired punch line goes, that would be so God.

Auslander plays the alienation and theological abuse (his wife’s words, not mine) for laughs, defiling his religious upbringing in ways that will win him friends and enemies in equal measure. But his paranoia — the idea that God will get him and his family — casts some very dark shadows over the book, not so dismal as to ruin a good time, but grave enough to bring the story to its supplicant knees. Still, Foreskin’s Lament is a romp — relentlessly unrepentant and irreverent. Auslander may be a weak man and a bad Jew, tempted by tits and traif, but he’s a better writer for it. Here’s hoping he has enough raw material for future laments over other parts of the body. (Scott Steinberg)

CONVERSATION

With Steve Almond

SF Jewish BookFest

Sun/4, 12:45–2 p.m., free

Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Kanbar Hall

3200 California, SF

(415) 292-1233, www.jccsf.org

SENTENCES: THE LIFE OF MF GRIMM

Written by Percy Carey; illustrated by Ronald Wimberly

Vertigo

128 pages, $19.99

While reading Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm, Percy Carey’s graphic-memoir debut, it comes in handy to know a bit of the backstory — such as the recent controversy surrounding Carey, a.k.a. MF Grimm, and his former artistic partner MF Doom, onetime tight collaborators who have fallen out publicly through dis tracks. Familiarity with the innovative rapper’s street life–meets–transcendence flows is also a plus. Readers who come to Sentences fresh may be taken aback by Carey’s grittiness and what seems to be an argument that people don’t really change — they either calm down or die.

And yet Sentences, more HBO drama than MTV interview, will get you in the end. As we follow Carey, a gifted rapper but a natural fighter, from a rebellious Upper West Side youth through drug dealing, a paralyzing gunshot attack, and harsh jail time, he never stops believing that hip-hop is the most positive outlet for his particular type of raucous energy. And when he finally makes it — albeit in a wheelchair — starting multimedia label Day by Day Entertainment, we are right there with him.

Ronald Wimberly’s black-and-white artwork calls to mind Paul Chadwick’s careful inkings in Concrete (Dark Horse), with its use of shadows and silhouettes to emphasize emotional relationships. Although Wimberly has worked on fanciful Vertigo titles such as Swamp Thing and Lucifer, Sentences proves he has a knack for human antiheroics. Carey’s wandering storytelling style fits perfectly with the fluid, figurative scenes, which depict an urban reality full of countless ups and downs: watching a friend get set up by the cops; losing at the MC Battle for World Supremacy; standing face-to-face with Dr. Dre and Suge Knight, laying dreams on the table. When Carey presents his journal-style thoughts, the result is weirdly intimate, as when he admits that "in the end, it was my own stupidity that sent me to prison." Carey is usually less gushy, but be prepared: even the shoot-outs are heartfelt. (Ari Messer)

HONORABLE BANDIT: A WALK ACROSS CORSICA

By Brian Bouldrey

Terrace Books/University of Wisconsin Press

296 pages, $26.95

If narratives are like hikes, best begun in lighthearted whimsy before the climb to bleak summits and bracing vistas both earned and unexpected, then Brian Bouldrey’s narrative of a hike, Honorable Bandit: A Walk across Corsica, could well be a model of its kind. The book recounts a journey by foot that Bouldrey and a friend made a few years ago across the enchanted Mediterranean island (ethnically Italian but politically part of France) where Napoleon was born. And while the tale is full of vivid detail about the expedition’s joys and travails (soaked shoes, crowded tents, sharp rocks, bad weather, wild boar, comically strange fellow travelers, the occasional glass of local wine), it also becomes, through a series of interpolated "why I walk" personal essays, a meditation on its author’s life.

Bouldrey (a former Guardian contributor) spent his young adulthood in the plague-ridden San Francisco of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the loss of a beloved to AIDS plainly still aches. Serious walking, then, is an occasion for remembering and reflecting and also, in its very meanderingness, a form of redemption: we save ourselves simply by making the effort to do so. Although most pilgrimages end up at some holy site, the literary value and interest of any pilgrimage has less to do with the destination than with the getting there, and in this sense Honorable Bandit joins a long line that begins with The Canterbury Tales.

Bouldrey has for some time been among our cheeriest bards of sorrow. As in an earlier collection of essays, Monster: Adventures in American Machismo (Council Oak Books, 2001), he is candid about his griefs and losses without descending into self-pity over them, and his sense of the ridiculous never fails him. He is especially sensitive about his Americanness, to his being "a representative of the prevailing power" in a restive Europe. He doesn’t want to be outed as a Yank, and at the same time he is impatient with his native land and its bizarre Francophobia: "And you Americans," he thinks, "you have only one kind of mustard — and you call it French’s!" Vive les moutards. (Paul Reidinger)

READING WITH SLIDE SHOW

Nov. 13, 7 p.m., free

Get Lost Travel Books

1825 Market, SF

(415) 437-0529, www.getlostbooks.com

SHORTCOMINGS

By Adrian Tomine

Drawn and Quarterly

112 pages, $19.95

Ben Tanaka, the protagonist of Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel Shortcomings, is an ambitionless Berkeley cinema manager who attributes his outsider status not to race but to his being "a nerd with a bad personality and no social skills"; his girlfriend, Miko, is a successful organizer of an Asian American film festival who resents Ben’s attraction to Caucasian women. Every conversation between the two becomes an argument, and Ben sees every argument as a personal attack on him. So it’s with some relief that the two "take a break" while Miko’s in New York, leaving Ben free to pursue a pair of blonds.

But the girls he idealizes turn out to be just as flawed as he is, as revealed by one’s earnest but ridiculous art projects and the other’s passive-aggressive cruelty. Even Miko proves to be a hypocrite, shacking up with a "rice king" designer in Manhattan.

Compiled from the past three issues of Tomine’s Optic Nerve comic, Shortcomings isn’t all heartache and betrayal. There’s subtle comedy in small details like Crepe Expectations, the name of the café where Ben holds venting sessions with his friend Alice, a wisecracking womanizer, as well as moments of outright hilarity, as when Miko’s new white boyfriend (sorry, I mean half Jewish, half Native American) busts out a defensive karate stance when confronted by Ben on the street. And Ben’s recurring tirades about how shitty a place New York is (Tomine recently moved from the Bay Area to Brooklyn) might even be a nod to Woody Allen, the ultimate geek-cum-lothario whose wit, charm, and, above all, ability to laugh at himself are passable currency for his own shortcomings.

The thing is, Ben doesn’t seem to possess these qualities, except perhaps when courting the ladies, and we don’t get to see what he was like before his relationship went sour. So is he a sarcastic but sweet loner in need of understanding, or is he a superficial, insensitive creep who deserves a life of rejection and loneliness? Ultimately, Shortcomings is an honestly told story about the ugly end to a relationship that isn’t that black and white. (Hane C. Lee)

EVENTS

Conversation with Glen David Gold

Nov. 14, 7 p.m., free

Booksmith

1644 Haight, SF

(415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com

Visual presentation and signing

Nov. 15, 7 p.m., free

Cody’s Books

1730 Fourth St., Berk.

(510) 559-9500, www.codysbooks.com

TWO HISTORIES OF ENGLAND

By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens

Ecco

192 pages, $16.95

Jane Austen wrote her History of England when she was 16, in 1791, and she intended it to be read aloud at home. Her sister, Cassandra, drew pictures for it. These have not been reproduced in Ecco’s new edition of the history, one of several odd choices here. Various collections of Austen juvenilia include this work, and Algonquin Books published a facsimile and transcription in 1993. Why wouldn’t her fans just buy one of those? And why is her history twinned with an excerpt from Charles Dickens’s 1851–53 A Child’s History of England?

Austen’s recent pop-cultural upsurge no doubt explains this volume’s publication. And David Starkey makes a plausible case for reading both histories in his introduction, an apologia that’s longer than Austen’s entry. But he’s less convincing regarding their appearance in one volume, and Dickens’s inclusion calls to mind the useless (but equally space-consuming) footnotes T.S. Eliot provided to make The Waste Land book length. His contribution here covers a shorter period than Austen’s (although they both end with Charles I’s reign), and it’s hard to imagine Dickens devotees not searching out the complete text.

This book, then, seems suited primarily for the dabbler in English literature or history. Austen ascribes her work to "a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian"; the first two adjectives certainly apply to Dickens. The description is tongue-in-cheek, but the approach it suggests does allow these authors to write with, as Starkey says, "freshness and wit," producing unforgettable scenes and characters. Although Austen’s work is a satire of boring contemporary histories, it is amusing enough to spark the interest of a modern reader in the period she covers; meanwhile, Dickens’s was written for his Household Words journal and was meant to appeal to a broad audience — and was used in British schools until the 1950s. These writings make history interesting and even entertaining, and whatever they lack in scholarship can be picked up elsewhere. Whatever its failings, Two Histories has the potential to be an excellent gateway drug. (Juliana Froggatt)

From Norway to Our Bay: A Q&A with Dominique Leone

October 25, 2007

Yeah, this week’s cover story on Oslo-San Francisco beyond-disco connections is pretty damn long. But there wasn’t enough room to note all of Dominique Leone’s activities. In addition to his November EP on Lindstrom’s Feedelity label, Leone is also readying an LP for release next year. He has another project, Paul and Diane, which pairs him with MaryClare Brzytwa. He’s also working with Katie Vida – the Local Artist featured in this week’s issue – on a dream world installation for Maybeck House in Berkeley.

Guardian: How did you and Lindstrom get in contact with one another?
Dominique Leone: We first communicated around a year and a half ago. I wanted him to a remix of one of my tunes, so I just wrote [to] him. He asked me to send some music, so I sent him a few songs. When he came back to me he was really positive. He’d sent one email that I never got, and then wrote me again weeks later to ask if I’d received what he’d written.

Door-to-door “education”

October 23, 2007

Correction:

In “Door-to-Door Education” [10/24/07], we reported on a group called the San Francisco Homeless Services Coalition. Our story stated that 25 percent of the group’s income goes to overhead and in-kind donations. In fact, Daniel Rotman, the group’s director, says 10 percent of the income goes to overhead, 54 percent to “public education” (which includes door-to-door canvassing and fundraising), 13.5 percent to financial donations to local shelters, and 22.5 percent to in-kind donations. Our article also stated that the San Francisco Police Department was considering revoking the group’s charitable-solicitations permit and that department staff recommended the permit be revoked. In fact, the permit was extended for another six months while a decision on revocation is pending. The literature that the group was handing out early in its operation included the SFHSC name, address, and phone number.

› amanda@sfbg.com

While San Francisco’s problem of homelessness rages in the local streets and broadsheets, a Los Angeles–based organization that raises money for homeless people has set up a new shop in town. Situated in the high-traffic area of Seventh and Market streets, where the down-and-out regularly nap, panhandle, and hawk their wares, the San Francisco Homeless Services Coalition seems perfectly placed to lend a hand.

But a recent afternoon visit to its headquarters found the gate pulled shut, the door locked, and a person inside working at a computer while half a dozen homeless people loitered outside. Nothing, save a small piece of paper reading "SFHSC" posted in the window, indicated this was a place to give money or assist homeless individuals.

During another impromptu visit the gate was open and the room full of people — potential canvassers receiving instructions on going door-to-door to ask for $150 donations, which is how the group’s fellow organization, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Coalition, has raised more than $2 million in two years, according to its Web site.

When we asked for more information about the group, we were told it doesn’t print brochures or any kind of literature, in order to save money. A handmade business card with the phone number and Web site was given with an aside that we were "lucky to be getting that."

Concerns about the SFHSC have reached the San Francisco Police Department, which is investigating whether the door-to-door canvassers are carrying the proper identification and if that form of fundraising violates the group’s city-issued charitable-solicitations permit. The permit forbids soliciting within 10 feet of doors. A certificate of registration issued to the SFHSC on April 11 clearly states, "This does not authorize your organization to go door to door for solicitation. Public property only for charitable solicitation."

But the group has been knocking on doors in San Francisco for the past six months, telling people that "the best way to make a difference is by making a $150 tax-deductible donation," according to the script it gives its canvassers. It’s raised at least $100,000 so far in the name of helping the homeless, but its work has managed to alienate some of the local leaders it intended to support.

"There isn’t a relationship any longer," Erica Kisch, executive director of Compass Community Services, told us when asked about the three-month arrangement between the two groups during which the SFHSC agreed to donate 15 percent of its take to Compass. "We knew nothing about them. We met with the director. They said they were raising money for homeless services," Kisch said. "It was an opportunity, and it seemed aboveboard at the time."

Canvassers solicited with flyers clearly showing Compass’s name, federal tax-exempt identification number, and statistics but lacking the same details about the SFHSC. That caused concerned citizens to call Kisch. "We were getting inquiries from the community about what they were doing, their tactics. They were kind of aggressive, going up to people’s doors asking for a lot of money…. It wasn’t really clear to the people they were soliciting that money was going to direct services," she said.

In fact, most of it wasn’t. The SFHSC says only 15 percent of the money it raises makes it to the shelters and service centers. Most of the money raised goes to raising more money door-to-door — either to canvassers or their support staff — an effort the group calls "education." Kisch did some more research and ultimately decided "it wasn’t worth it to us to be attached to a controversial organization like that." Compass ended up receiving a total of $11,250 from the SFHSC.

Daniel Rotman, founder and executive director of both the SF and the LAHSC, said of the breakup, "Maybe they didn’t realize we’d be reaching so many people. I think we were just too new for them."

Rotman, a 27-year-old LA resident and UC Berkeley graduate with a degree in political science, used to work for the Democratic National Committee but decided politics wasn’t for him. He transferred the grassroots machinery of fundraising for politics to the particular issue of homelessness, he told us, "because I care. I’ve always been taken by the issue."

He confirmed to us that the SFHSC does not interface with needy folks — it just gathers money in their name. Homeless people who stop by the office are referred to other locations in the neighborhood and escorted out. Rotman said 15 percent of the net money raised is given to local groups, 60 percent goes to education, and 25 percent is for overhead, as well as a plan to buy delivery trucks for ferrying donated goods from homes to shelters.

"Our main goal is educating the community," Rotman said. "We don’t just raise money and give it to other groups. It costs money to set up speaking engagements and pay for field managers." But he admitted the SFHSC hadn’t done or set up any speaking gigs yet. The 10 to 11 canvassers employed at the SFHSC are paid minimum wage and earn a 30 percent bonus if they exceed a weekly office average. "They get that for going out into the community and informing people about the issue and about us. At the end we ask them to make a donation," Rotman said.

So the point of the canvassing is to educate, not raise money, but those who have received the pitch are dubious.

"It was not educational at all," one Bernal Heights resident said of her interaction with an SFHSC canvasser. "My husband works in that field, and I was surprised I’d never heard of them." She asked for a business card so she could do more research, but the canvasser had no printed materials. "Just a clipboard with names and addresses and a very vague petition." No envelope, no card, no pamphlet. "Basically, he was just asking for donations. I didn’t know what to think."

Besides the soliciting foot soldiers and an office at 1135 Market that’s so discreet it’s easy to miss, the group’s only public face is its Web site, www.sfhsc.org — a copy of the LAHSC site. "Who is homeless in San Francisco?" the Web site asks, but its answers don’t inspire a lot of confidence — they were clearly imported from our southerly neighbor. "50% of homeless adults are African American, compared to 9% of LA’s total population."

Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project and former head of the Coalition on Homelessness, said he found out about the SFHSC from people who thought its canvassers were from COH. Boden, who’s been working on homeless issues since 1983, said none of his peers in LA had heard of the group, further raising his suspicions. "This group has to have one legitimate provider," Boden said. "One pimp group as the basis for all this funding — it’s a scam that’s as old as poverty."

Boden and Seth Katzman, director of Conard House, filed complaints with the SFPD that the SFHSC was vioutf8g the terms of its charitable-solicitations permit. An SFPD permitting officer confirmed the department had received concerned calls and a revocation hearing was held Aug. 15. Capt. Tom O’Neill said a backlog of work has kept him from releasing the final decision, but his staff has recommended the permit be revoked.

"Find out more before a gift is made," Bennett Weiner, chief operating officer of the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, told us. He said legitimate nonprofits should make their annual report and other financial details publicly available and posted on a Web site.

And at the very least, they should have some flyers. "Not to have any literature available does raise potential concerns in donors’ minds," Weiner said. "It is something we encourage people to ask for."

Rotman told us the lack of literature was a fluke and the SFHSC always sends its canvassers out with four packets of envelopes to give to citizens. They’re required to knock on 75 doors, so it’s easy to imagine they might run out of envelopes.

The BBB also recommends that any such group be overseen by a board that meets three times a year, composed of at least five members, who should not make more than 10 percent of the organization’s total take. Rotman told us his board has three members — the IRS’s minimum legal requirement — and that he makes $36,000 a year. He could not provide annual reports or financial statements, explaining that the SFHSC is new and has had to rely on partnerships with fiscal sponsors.

Lisa Watson, executive director of the Downtown Women’s Center, said her group’s 17-member board of directors decided to terminate its relationship with the SFHSC after receiving $30,000. "Our board decided they didn’t think the canvassing was the way they wanted to go, because a certain percentage went to canvassing. Only a certain percentage went to us."

The LA Youth Network is the LAHSC’s current beneficiary, and director of administration Katherine McMahon expressed satisfaction with the relationship. "We work with homeless teens, and they’ve been an awesome advocate for us." The group has received more than $600,000 during the past two years.

Both Watson and McMahon said one of the benefits of the relationship with the LAHSC had been access to a new pool of donors, something that can be as important to many groups as money. "It’s more than raising money. Its building brand identity," Rotman said. In this case the "brand" is the problem of homelessness. "We have found more than anything that people in the community, based on our canvassing and talking to people one-on-one, there’s a general aggression from citizens and residents in the Bay Area towards the homeless." He wants to "talk to people on a one-on-one basis and say, ‘Hey look, it’s not necessarily what you think.’<0x2009>"

He said they’re raising empathy and support for public policy measures and "try to build up a little support for homeless services themselves." The SFHSC now partners with a different group every month, which will receive 15 percent of the net of its canvassing fruits.

"That specific setup, going door to door … this isn’t the way nonprofits in San Francisco raise money," Kisch said. "They’re pressing people to give $150 off the street. I would never give anyone that kind of money without more background on them. We were getting 15 percent after expenses. Where’s the rest of it going?"

Deth to false metal!

October 23, 2007

HORNS UP Dethklok, "the most brutal band in the world" and stars of Adult Swim’s juggernaut of animated murder, Metalocalypse, are touring in support of their recently released Dethalbum (Williams Street), which peaked at number three on the Billboard hard rock album chart and reached number 21 on the Billboard 200, making it the best-selling death metal album of all time. The fact that a cartoon band bested Slayer’s Reign in Blood (Def Jam, 1986) might bum out old-time metalists, but facts have to be faced here: not even Slayer are more brutal than the almighty ‘Klok. Even when tackling stand-up comedy or band therapy, they’re unquestionably dark and unrelenting (and hilarious).

Metalocalypse creator Brendon Small started playing guitar by learning the riff to Black Sabbath’s "Iron Man" and went on to Boston’s prestigious Berklee School of Music. He later took comedy writing classes at Berklee’s sister school, Emerson College, which led to stand-up and ultimately the Adult Swim show Home Movies. When that show was canceled, Small got together with his friend Tommy Blacha — "the only guy in comedy who would go and see death metal shows with me," Small told me over the phone during a recent San Francisco visit — and they came up with the following pitch: "We’ve got a TV show. It’s going to be about a metal band, and there’s going to be tons of murder. And we’re not interested in having anyone understand anything anyone says."

Metalocalypse openly acknowledges the humor inherent in the more-doom-laden-than-thou world of metal while paying homage to music that Small clearly loves and respects. "I look at it this way," Small said. "You go to a Cannibal Corpse concert, and they look like five serial killers onstage. And their songs are about murder, about how you — how you — are going to die. You’re in a pit of zombies, you’re bent over backwards, and you’re going to be fucked with a knife. And I’m, like, ‘Oh, fuck yeah.’ That’s the same kind of appreciation I have for horror movies. In a serious way and in a very kind of fun, audience way, where you see in a movie a face splatters, and the audience goes, ‘Yeah!’ It’s that kind of dynamic. There’s still a lot of people who don’t really get metal and kind of make fun of it. It’s like when you go and see a Broadway performance of Rent or Wicked or something. It’s like laughing at the fact that they learned their lines and got in character. It’s the same exact thing — these guys nail their parts."

Despite being anchored in an alternate reality where the most popular entertainment act in the world — and the 12th-largest economy — is a death-metal band, Metalocalypse is "not even about a metal band," Small said. Rather, "it’s about celebrityism. We’re making fun of celebrities and our country’s fascination with them." Small and Blacha use this allure to highlight the brutality of the everyday bummer. "It’s not ‘fucked with a knife’ or anything, but there’s shit that really fucks up your life all the time, and that’s fuckin’ brutal. Like, I don’t know…." He paused for a second or two before coming up with things that are truly inhumane: "Humidity. Going to the dentist. Going to the DMV. People not making up their mind in front of you at Starbucks. It’s fucking brutal. That’s all a metal song. Every one of those are lyrics."

DETHKLOK

With … And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead

Nov. 2, 5–7 p.m., free

Lower Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley, near Bancroft at Telegraph, Berk.

events.berkeley.edu

For the complete interview with Brendon Small, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/noise.

41st Anniversary Special: The perils of privatization

October 16, 2007

Click here for Amanda Witherell’s exclusive interview with Columbia professor Elliott Sclar

› amanda@sfbg.com

Over the past few weeks almost every major news outlet in the country has reported on Blackwater, a private company the US government hired to do work in Iraq that was once the exclusive province of soldiers.

The deal hasn’t gone so well: on Sept. 16, Blackwater guards opened fire and, according to the Iraqi government, shot 25 civilians. The incident set off an international furor and has brought into focus the breadth of the company’s work for the US government. It’s prompted an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which showed that since 2001, Blackwater’s federal contracts have increased 80,000 percent. It’s revealed the massive pay inequalities between private security guards and US soldiers — the cost of one private guard could pay the salaries of six soldiers.

And it’s raised a question that’s critical to understanding how government increasingly works in the United States: should a private company be doing the work of the military?

Privatization of public services is all the rage in this country now, at all levels of government, from Washington DC to San Francisco. Supporters say the private sector can often work better and more efficiently than the old, bureaucratic, much-maligned government.

But Blackwater is a great example of the perils of privatization. And there are many more.

STARVE THE BEAST

Over the past few decades governments at all levels in this country have been in a near-perpetual state of deficit. Taxes are way down from their historic post–World War II levels, and except for a brief period during the tech boom, there is rarely enough money for even basic social services.

"It’s been a strategy since the ’70s to, as Grover Norquist calls it, ‘starve the beast,’<0x2009>" Robert Haaland, an organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 1021, told us.

And because politicians, even Democrats, are terrified of tax hikes, they’ve been looking for more efficient ways to use the money they have. The magic bullet goes by many names — privatization, public-private partnerships, competitive outsourcing, creative financing solutions — but the basic idea is to allow the power of competition, set free in an unregulated market, to provide the public with the best services at the lowest cost.

"To do or to buy is the question that all governments face," says Ken Jacobs, director of UC Berkeley’s Labor Center.

We’ve been buying. Since 2000, outsourcing of federal dollars has increased 100 percent, to $422 billion in taxpayer funds in 2006, according to a September study by the Washington DC US Public Interest Research Group. The US government is now the private sector’s largest customer.

San Francisco may be known as one of the most progressive cities in the country, but this town has also been wooed by public-private partnerships with promises of improvements to the golf courses, construction of a new power plant, and funding for the many civic needs we have.

PRIVATIZE MUNI?

Cheerleaders for privatization look at someone like Nathaniel Ford, executive director of San Francisco’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, and see everything that’s wrong with the public sector. Ford’s salary is nearly $300,000, plenty high enough to attract a talented leader. But the Muni system he runs keeps the average San Franciscan waiting on the corner in the morning, delivers that person to work at an unpredictable hour, and lurches them homeward every night aboard a standing-room-only bus. Nobody thinks Muni is performing well.

That makes the case for privatization seem almost appealing.

"The public has been schooled to think that government is the problem, not the solution," Elliott Sclar, professor of economics at Columbia University, told us. In his 2000 book on privatization, You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization (Cornell University), he writes, "American folk wisdom holds that, by and large, public service is uncaring, unbending, bureaucratic, and expensive, whereas competitively supplied private services such as FedEx are efficient and responsive."

Competition, the privatizers say, drives innovation. Less red tape means more efficiency. A lack of unions and collective bargaining agreements translates to lower labor costs. Large-scale multinational operations can reduce redundancy and streamline their processes — all of which adds up to a lean-running machine.

But this country has a lot of experience with privatization, and the record isn’t good.

One hundred years ago private companies did a lot of what we now call government work. "Contracting out was the way American cities carried out their governmental business ever since they grew beyond their small village beginnings," writes Moshe Adler, a Columbia professor of economics, in his 1999 paper The Origins of Governmental Production: Cleaning the Streets of New York by Contract During the 19th Century. At one time private companies provided firefighting, trash collection, and water supplies, to name just a few essential services.

But according to Adler, "By the end of the 19th century contracting out was a mature system that was already as good as it could possibly be. And it was precisely then that governmental production came to America. The realization that every possible improvement to contracting out had been tried led city after city to declare its failure."

For example, the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires in San Francisco were what prodded the city to municipalize water service after the company charged with the task, Spring Valley Water, failed to deliver while the fires raged.

In Philadelphia as well as San Francisco, the business of firefighting was once very lucrative — for both the firefighting companies and the arsonists who were paid to set fires for the former to fight. And corruption was rampant. "Large amounts of public contracting out historically created lots of opportunities for fraud and nepotism," Jacobs said.

So public agencies stepped in to provide basic services as cheaply and uniformly as possible. Towns and cities took on the tasks of security with police and firefighting, education with schools and libraries, and sanitation with trash collection and wastewater treatment. Nationally, the federal government improved roads and transit, enacted Social Security benefits, and established a National Park System, among many other things.

And then, about 30 years ago, the pendulum started to swing the other way. Driven by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, enacted in a massive policy shift by Ronald Reagan, proliferated by Grover Norquist and the neocon agenda, and fully appreciated by corporations and private companies, privatization came back.

In Reagan’s first term, he cut taxes 25 percent overall; the rich got a 40 percent cut. Domestic spending fell by half a trillion dollars in the 1980s, although any savings were countered by a rise in the defense budget.

Harvard economist Lawrence Summers, quoted in Looking Back on the Reagan Presidency (Johns Hopkins University), put it this way: "The Reagan budgets will influence the government for the rest of this century. Just as the Great Society left an imprint of Federal commitment to help the indigent and equality of opportunity, the Reagan budget deficits will leave an imprint of non-involvement."

Such a massive realignment of money coupled with tax breaks too politically painful to reinstate led to a boom in the outsourcing of public services. Private companies began doing more municipal work, while nonprofit organizations tried to fill the gaps in funding for social services, welfare, housing, health care, and the environment.

The George W. Bush era has seen even more overt outsourcing. These days no-bid contracts are preferred, and at times government services are completely turned over to the private sector in "direct conversions," and the public agency that once did the job is not allowed to compete to keep it. The Washington Post recently reported that no-bid government contracts have tripled in the past six years.

This doesn’t really sound like the competitive free market espoused by the theory of privatization.

FLUNKING THE TEST

To field-test the primacy of privatization, the Reagan administration sponsored a transportation experiment in the early ’80s: Miami’s Metro-Dade Transit Agency got to compete against Greyhound. The two providers were each given five comparable transit routes to manage over three years, and 80 new buses were bought with a $7.5 million grant from the federal government.

After 18 months 30 of the Greyhound buses were so badly damaged that they had to be permanently pulled from service. Passenger complaints on the Greyhound line were up 100 percent, and ridership was down 31 percent over the course of a year.

Why? There was no incentive in Greyhound’s contract to maintain the equipment or retain riders. The company’s only goal was to deliver the cheapest service possible.

The Miami transit contract could have contained clauses calling for regular inspections or guaranteed ridership, but that would have significantly increased the cost of the work — perhaps to the point where it would have been competitive with what the city provided.

That’s an important lesson in privatization politics: when you add the cost of adequately protecting the public’s interest and monitoring contract compliance, the private sector doesn’t look so efficient.

Which is why many say privatization only succeeds as a theory — and why, for all the problems with Muni, no private company is likely to be able to do a better job.

"Market fundamentalists present an idealized, simpleminded notion of competitive markets in which buyers and sellers have equal knowledge," Sclar told us. "Anyone can be a buyer, anyone can be a seller, everyone can evaluate the quality of the good. In this never-never land, that’s often the way the case is made for privatization by this particular group of economists."

In the real world a number of issues arise when a service goes private. "Accountability gets to be a really big problem," Ellen Dannin, professor of law at Penn State University, said in an interview. "There are predictions about how much money will get saved through privatization, but no one ever goes back to check."

The September study by the US Public Interest Research Group profiled several companies that do government work, including Bank of America, LexisNexis, ChoicePoint, KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown, and Root), General Electric, and Raytheon, and found instances of illegal behavior in all cases. There were often massive errors in the companies’ work.

Bank of America and LexisNexis had security breaches compromising the data of at least 1.5 million customers they were handling for the government. ChoicePoint allowed identity-theft scams amounting to more than $1 million in fraud. KBR overcharged the government millions of dollars for work in Iraq and Kuwait. GE made defective helicopter blades for the US military. Raytheon failed to fully test the systems of new aircraft. These companies are all still employed by the government.

When companies take over services that aren’t typically part of a competitive market, all sorts of unexpected problems occur. Jacobs points to the rash of contracting for busing services in cash-strapped school districts. Not only did costs eventually rise in many places, but when schools tried to go back to providing their own service, the skilled drivers who knew the routes, knew the kids, and were able to do much more than drive a bus were gone.

Sclar and Dannin agree that any service that lacks competition should be public. Sclar presented the example of electricity. "It’s a natural monopoly," he said. "Essentially it’s either going to be a well-regulated industry or it’s got to be done publicly."

Corporations exist to make money. And although graft, mismanagement, and scandal have always been present in City Halls around the country, in the end the legislative, judicial, and executive branches were not designed to generate profits. That alone means contracting out is financially dubious.

Hiring mercenaries is a classic example. "It costs the US government a lot more to hire contract employees as security guards in Iraq than to use American troops," Walter Pincus wrote in an Oct. 1 article in the Washington Post. "It comes down to the simple business equation of every transaction requiring a profit."

As Pincus details one of the many contracts between the security firm and the US, "Blackwater was a subcontractor to Regency, which was a subcontractor to another company, ESS, which was a subcontractor to Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary, the prime contractor for the Pentagon — and each company along the way was in the business to make a profit."

Blackwater charged Regency between $815 and $1,075 per day per security operative. Regency turned around and charged ESS a slightly higher average of $1,100. After that, the costs dissolve into the enormous bill that KBR regularly hands the federal government.

When the US Army is paying the bill the costs are far lower. An unmarried sergeant earns less than $100 a day. If you’re married, it’s less than $200. If you’re Gen. David H. Petraeus, it’s about $500 — less than Blackwater’s lowest-paid workers.

Very little about the Blackwater contracts would be known by anyone outside the company if it weren’t for the federal investigation, since private businesses are not subject to the same public-records laws as the federal government. They don’t have to open their books or publicize the details of their bids and contracts, and they often fiercely lobby against any regulations requiring this, which leaves the door wide open for corruption — which is what brought sunshine laws to government in the first place.

Sclar said that when it’s a good call to contract out, corporations, private companies, and nonprofits should be required to abide by public-records laws in addition to adhering to a five-year wait for employees departing the public sector for the private. "I think transparency should always be the goal," he said. "As much information as possible." If a company doesn’t want to make its records public, he told us, "[it shouldn’t] go after public work."

THE AIDS LESSON

Privatization comes in many forms and emerges for what often seem like good reasons.

In the early 1980s gay men in San Francisco were starting to get sick and die in large numbers — and the federal government didn’t care. There was no government agency addressing the AIDS crisis and almost no government funding. So the community came together and created a network of nonprofits that funded services, education, and research.

"The AIDS Foundation was founded in response to the epidemic at a time when there wasn’t a response from the federal government," Jeff Sheehy of the AIDS Research Center at UC San Francisco told us.

At first, activists all over the country praised the San Francisco model of AIDS services. Over time the nonprofits began to get government grants and contracts. But by the 1990s some realized that the nonprofit network was utterly lacking in public accountability. The same activists who had helped create the network had to struggle to get the organizations to hold public meetings, make records public, and answer community concerns.

That, Sheehy said, shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

"There isn’t that same degree of accountability that you would have" with the public sector, he told us. "SF General is not going to turn you away at the emergency room, but nonprofit hospitals are less and less interested in running ERs."

Sheehy said he’s seen cases where difficult clients have been banned from accessing help from nonprofits. Unlike at public institutions, "the burden is not on the agency to provide the service. It is with the client to get along with the agency," he said.

Sheehy outlines other issues: nonprofits run lean and are more apt to make cuts and resist unionization, which means workers are often paid less, there can be higher turnover, and upper management is often tasked with fundraising and grant writing and distanced from the fundamental work of the group. There’s no access to records or board meetings. "If service takes a sudden downward shift, what can you do?" Sheehy asks. "You can’t go to board meetings. You can’t access records. What’s your redress?"

And that perpetuates the problem of government not stepping up to the plate. More than half of the social services in San Francisco are run by nonprofits, a trend that isn’t abating.

"When the services are shifted from the public sector to the nonprofit sector," Sheehy said, "that capacity is lost forever from government."

THE LOTTERY TICKET

When Dannin teaches her students about privatization, she uses the analogy of personal finance. "If I find my income does not meet my expenses, I can cut my expenses, but there are certain things I have to have," she said. To meet those needs a person can get a second job. In the case of the government, it can raise taxes.

But "that is not an option governments see anymore," she told us. "So the third option is to buy a lottery ticket — and that’s what privatization is."

When a publicly owned road is leased for 99 years to a private company, the politician who cut the deal gets a huge chunk of cash up front to balance the local budget or meet another need. When the new owner of the road puts in a tollbooth to recoup costs, that’s the tax the politician, who may be long gone, refused to impose. What option does the voting driver have now?

Public goods, from which everyone presumably benefits, are frequently and easily falling out of the hands of government and into the hands of profit-driven companies. In New Orleans, charter schools have replaced all but four public schools. In about 15 municipalities public libraries are now managed by the privately owned Library Systems and Services. (In Jackson County, Ore., it’s being done for half the cost, but with half the staff and open half the hours.) At least 21 states are considering public-private partnerships to finance massive improvements to aging roads and bridges. User fees have increased in the national parks as rangers have been laid off and some of the work of park interpretation is picked up by private companies, as is the case with Alcatraz Island.

Dannin also asks her students to consider who really owns a job. The easy answer is the employer. "But there is another claimant of ownership of that job," she says. "That is the public. Employers depend on roads for their employees to drive to work, a public education system to train their workers. They depend on housing, police, the court system, the system of laws. That is a huge amount of infrastructure we tend not to think about.

"We live within an ecosystem. We’re having a hard time seeing that ecosystem, that infrastructure that we’re all in. That’s what your taxes pay for."

Fast, cheap, and out of control

October 13, 2007

tredmond@sfbg.com

Click here for the Guardian‘s interview with Robert Reich.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led a lot of pundits to talk about “the end of History.” The big battle of our lives, the defining philosophical and political conflict of the century, was over. Communism lost. Capitalism won.

But in the United States, the real war was just getting under way, a conflict between two visions of society: in one, the public sector, operating under a democratic system, dominated economic and political life; in the other, the central players in the game of life were private corporations. This war, which drags on today, poses a profound question: does the capitalist economy work for us — or are we slaves to its whims? The answer continues to transform almost every aspect of American life.

Clinton-era labor secretary Robert Reich, now a professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, takes on a big piece of this epic struggle in his new book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life. The cogent, well-documented, and critically important argument he makes is that the American people have prospered as consumers and investors at the expense of their role as citizens.

And in the end, we’ve been hurting ourselves.
This is the essential paradox of modern global capitalism: you can buy high-end electronics cheap, get amazing bargains at Wal-Mart, enjoy the growth of your 401(k) plan — and in the process, become poorer. Because the race to the bottom of the price chain and the top of the market has costs, and in the end, we’re all paying them. The only solution, Reich says, is a more aggressive government: more regulation, higher taxes, and, quite possibly, some consumer and investor sacrifices.

Reich goes back to what he calls the “Not Quite Golden Age,” the roughly 25 years after the end of World War II that were marked by continuous economic growth, relative prosperity, and remarkable (compared with today) economic equality. The top tax rate, for the very rich, was 91 percent (compared with 35 percent today). American industry was controlled by an oligopoly, in which a handful of businesses held the reins — and because they faced little competition, they were able to share their profits with labor. Back then, companies didn’t distribute their wealth to investors; it went to the employees.

For all the denunciation of socialism and idolization of the free market that goes on in American politics today, Reich points out that cold war America was defined by centralized economic planning. It just wasn’t the government doing that job; it was private industry.

He doesn’t contend that the model in operation back then was perfect — and anyone who has followed the postwar transformation of San Francisco, driven by secret private-sector planning, knows the painful impacts of such policies. But public resources were adequate to pay for massive infrastructure advances (the interstate highway system), gigantic educational benefits (the GI bill), and phenomenal tax breaks for home ownership. Labor unions, dealing with domestic companies that didn’t face competitors with cheaper offshore labor, were able to negotiate a division of the wealth that helped create the modern American middle class.

The gap between rich and poor was much, much smaller during that period than it is today; as Reich notes, “the potent incentive of great wealth was often absent,” so the economy was far more equitable and stable. High taxes on the rich didn’t slow a period of remarkable economic growth. And in 1964, 75 percent of the American public thought the government could be trusted to do the right thing most of the time — a statistic that seems inconceivable today.

That was, of course, before Vietnam, before Watergate, before the (first) energy crisis, stagflation, the California tax revolt, and cultural disillusion with the public sector, factors Reich doesn’t discuss in great detail.

But he does point to the changes that came in the 1980s and later: Deregulation, which transformed the banking industry, turning savers into investors. Globalization, which created a cutthroat type of capitalism promoting low prices and high returns at any cost. And government policies — such as the creation of private retirement plans and the promotion of the stock market as the central tool of investment — that encouraged Americans to focus on their own bottom line and ignore the larger issues facing society.

The result today, Reich says, is a supercapitalist world, in which you can fill your house with amazing piles of cheap stuff — but in the end those bargains wind up hurting you. “Consumers get great deals because workers get shafted,” he notes. “Ironically, they’re often the same people.”

Unlike a lot of people on the left, Reich doesn’t go around bashing big corporations and blaming them for society’s ills. In today’s ultracompetitive world, he says, corporations are simply doing what they have to do to survive: cutting costs, fighting for the bottom line, striving for the best possible returns for investors. There is no such thing as corporate social responsibility, he argues; under supercapitalism, it’s all about making money.
Instead of complaining about corporate greed, he says, we need to think as citizens and demand new rules, new laws and regulations, that force companies to do what we want them to do. We have to take back control of the American economy — and to do that, we have to reclaim democracy.

Reich places a large part of the blame on the role money has assumed in politics. He suggests that corporations, which are in reality just paper constructs, should be stripped of any rights to legal standing, any rights to participate in the public process — any rights to act as anything but pieces of paper. Campaign contributions should all be put into blind trusts: anyone could give money to a candidate, but that candidate would never be allowed to know who gave what.

Those reforms would be tough, and they might not happen anytime soon. But the value of this book isn’t in promoting any specific policy prescription. It’s about waking up and educating several generations of Americans who can’t seem to understand that you can’t have it all for free: that a decent society with universal health care, good public education, safe cities, and a commitment to protecting the environment requires some sacrifice; that the very rich (and even the run-of-the-mill well-off) among us have to pay taxes and accept responsibility for a decent nation and a decent world. That means creating a public sector we can trust — and not dismissing out of hand the notion that government has a positive role to play.

It’s the most important message anyone can impart today to the deluded, selfish population that makes up so much of modern America.

READING
Oct. 16, 7:30 p.m., free
Moe’s Books
2476 Telegraph, Berk.
(510) 849-2087, www.moesbooks.com

SUPERCAPITALISM: THE TRANSFORMATION OF BUSINESS, DEMOCRACY AND EVERYDAY LIFE
By Robert Reich
Knopf
272 pages
$25

The Chauncey Bailey Project

October 10, 2007

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Just as the Chauncey Bailey Project makes its presence known in Oakland and in the U.S. media,
I am off to Miami for an assembly of the InterAmerican Press Association (IAPA), the international free press association for the Americas.

For years, the hardy U.S. journalistic souls who are members of IAPA have helped do resolutions, go on free press missions throughout the Americas, and support impunity projects to investigate the murders of journalists and turn the evidence over to prosecutors and then push for successful prosecutions.

This year, for the first time, I will be pushing the IAPA for help on the deaths of two U.S. journalists who were killed in the line of duty. The first is Brad Will, the New York video journalist who filmed his own assassination last fall while filming violent demonstrations in Oaxaca province in Mexico. The second is Chauncey Bailey, the Oakland editor who was gunned down in August on his way to work at the Oakland Post by a man wearing a ski mask.

The good news is that an impressive array of journalists, news organizations, and journalism schools have come together to form the Chauncey Bailey Project and to take on the job of finishing his reporting on the suspicious activities of the Your Black Muslim Bakery. This coalition has already had some success. The San Francisco Chronicle was asked to join the project, but declined and said that it preferred to do its own reporting.
And so, for the last four days, anticipating the project’s investigative reports, the Chronicle has rolled out extensive and detailed front page stories on the murder.

The investigative team plans to go further and deeper and research the activities of the Bey family empire, which operates the bakery, and their thuggish operations for the past two decades and the protection they have gotten from the Oakland political establishment. “This is a unique collaboration and we hope our work goes beyond Bailey’s murder and reveals broader issues that impact the lives of Oakland’s citizens,” said Robert J. Rosenthal, editorial coordinator for the project and former managing editor of the Chronicle.

This amounts to an unprecedented collaboration among competing news organizations and promises to be the largest collective journalistic project since the Arizona Project was formed 31 years ago following the murder of Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles for his reporting on the tangled Arizona underworld.

The resulting collaboration and story led to the formation of the group called Investigative Reporters and Editors. But significantly, the Arizona Republic in Phoenix didn’t run the story and a Tucson daily was the only daily in the state to run the story. The New Times, the local Phoenix alternative paper, ran the story, as did the Guardian in San Francisco. The story was widely run in other papers throughout the country.

This time around in Oakland, the hometown media stand fully and publicly behind the Bailey Project. “We cannot stand for a reporter to be murdered while working on behalf of the public,” vowed Dori J. Maynard, president and CEO of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland. “Chauncey’s death is a threat to democracy, journalists will not be intimidated. This type of crime cast a chilling effect over our community. We will not be bullied. We have to prove that there is no gain, and hell to pay, when the very structure of society is challenged.”

Moreover, Maynard said that the team would insure that “Chauncey did not die in vain.”

Pete Wevurski, executive editor of the Oakland Tribune, said, “I’m happy that the Oakland Tribune, and our Bay Area News Group-East Bay partners the Contra Costa Times and San Jose Mercury News, are involved in this noble effort and extremely pleased that the Tribune has been able to take a lead role.” Wevurski is also managing editor of BANG-EB. “Chauncey Bailey was a colleague and friend to many of us and we want to honor his work and our profession by picking up the standard that fell the morning he was assassinated. I’m extremely gratified by the numbers and caliber of journalists who have joined the coalition, and I’m astounded by the work they are turning in already.

“The project is essential to Oakland and essential to us as journalists who wish to emphasize the point that you can kill the messenger, but the message is still going to get through. Based on this alone, I believe this will be the most important work any of us have ever done and ever will do.” Let me add, as an occasional critic of Dean Singleton, owner of the Media News Group, that this project may be the most important work that he or any of his papers have ever done or will do. I congratulate him for allowing his troops to plow forward on a tough story that everyone involved knows how high the stakes are.

The coalition’s message is profound and dramatic: you can’t kill a journalist, in the Bay Area, in California, in the United States, and get away with it. Because the best reporters and editors and news organizations in the area are going to go after you and see that the story is told and justice is done.

Journalists from the following organizations are working on the project:

Bay Area Black Journalists Association
Bay Area News Group
Center for Investigative Reporting
KGO-AM
KPIX-TV
KQED Public Radio
KTVU-TV
Maynard Institute for Journalism Education
National Association of Black Journalists
New America Media
New Voices in Independent Journalism
San Francisco State Journalism Department
San Francisco Bay Guardian
San Jose State University Journalism Department
Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California chapter
University of California, Berkeley; Graduate School of Journalism

I’ll keep you posted from IAPA in Miami. Continue reading to learn more about IAPA. B3

Click here to read the Guardian’s story on the Chauncey Bailey project.

Local media form the Chauncey Bailey Project

October 10, 2007

When journalist Chauncey Wendell Bailey Jr. was murdered Aug. 2, questions arose as to who could have committed such an act, in broad daylight, and what could have motivated the killing. Shortly after the slaying, police arrested Your Black Muslim Bakery handyman Devaughndre Broussard, 19, and charged him with the crime. But deep questions remain, starting with who really called the shots in the killing — and what they were trying to cover up.

In an effort to pick up where Bailey left off, a rare coalition of media rivals and scholastic colleagues — more than two dozen reporters, photographers, and editors from print, broadcast, and electronic media — have formed the Chauncey Bailey Project, an investigative team that will continue and expand on the reporting Bailey was pursuing at the time of his death.

"We as an industry cannot stand for a member of the press to be gunned down in the course of doing his job. That’s a threat to democracy; that’s a threat to journalism," said Dori J. Maynard, president and chief executive officer of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

Although several local media outlets have reported on the circumstances that may have led to Bailey’s death and his connection to Your Black Muslim Bakery, this project will delve deeper into his investigative work prior to his death.

The project promises to be the largest communal journalistic endeavor since the Arizona Project was formed 31 years ago in the aftermath of the murder of Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles. The Guardian is committing the efforts of award-winning reporter G.W. Schulz and other resources to the project. Our media partners include the Bay Area Black Journalists Association, Bay Area News Group (including the Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, and San Jose Mercury News), Center for Investigative Reporting, KGO-AM, KQED Public Radio, KTVU-TV, KPIX-TV, Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, National Association of Black Journalists, New America Media, New Voices in Independent Journalism, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, San Francisco State University Journalism Department, San Jose State University Journalism Department, and Society of Professional Journalists (Northern California Chapter).

"This project is essential to Oakland and essential to us as journalists who wish to emphasize the point that you can kill the messenger but the message is still going to get through," said Pete Wevurski, executive editor of the Oakland Tribune.

The first stories from the Chauncey Bailey Project will be available at www.sfbg.com. For more information about the project and its collaborators, contact the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education at (510) 891-9202.

Green City: Plugging into what’s next

October 9, 2007

› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Hybrid cars — those that run on a combination of gasoline and electricity — are all the rage among drivers looking to go green. But imagine a car that could drive 100 miles on one gallon of gas. That’s what a hybrid could get if converted into a plug-in version, something Bay Area residents are starting to do themselves, filling a void left by the auto industry.

The California Car Initiative (a.k.a. CalCars) is on a mission to make plug-in hybrid electric vehicles widely available. In collaboration with organizations like Plug-In Partners and Plug-In Bay Area, CalCars is on a mission to persuade carmakers to mass-produce plug-in hybrid vehicles. The technology already exists, allowing our cars to be much more fuel efficient.

The first prototype PHEV was created by CalCars in 2004. This Palo Alto nonprofit converted a Toyota Prius into a Prius+, a plug-in hybrid able to travel more than 100 miles using only one gallon of fuel.

A PHEV is essentially a hybrid that has additional battery capacity and can be recharged from a household 120-volt electrical outlet. CalCars promotional materials explain the way a plug-in hybrid works: "It’s like having a second fuel tank that you always use first — only you fill up at home, from a regular outlet, at an equivalent cost of under $1 per gallon."

"Conversions are a strategy, not an end in themselves," Felix Kramer, CalCars founder, told the Guardian. "The game is all about getting hundreds of thousands of PHEVs on the road from carmakers."

Toyota recently announced it will be testing PHEV prototypes this fall in Japan, Europe, and the United States. General Motors has also announced it is working on a plug-in hybrid called the Volt, to be publicly released in 2010. A handful of other car companies have expressed their intention to produce PHEVs but haven’t given release dates.

Public support by municipalities — including San Francisco, which passed a resolution to support PHEVs in 2006 — is also putting pressure on car manufacturers. Until plug-in hybrids are put on the market, PHEV advocates are keeping the pressure on. CalCars has posted its Prius conversion method on EAA-PHEV.org, a wiki dedicated to discussing and documenting plug-in hybrid conversions.

The step-by-step instructions are continually being improved, part of the beauty of open-source material. Only 2004 or newer Priuses are capable of being converted with this process. And for now, only do-it-yourselfers who are "comfortable around high-voltage batteries and automotive workshops" should attempt to convert their cars.

One such person is Daniel Sherwood, an electrical engineer living in Berkeley. He is in the process of converting his Prius into a plug-in hybrid using CalCars’ open-source instructions.

"In a regular hybrid car, I couldn’t go two blocks without using gas," he told us. "With this conversion, I’ll be able to drive about 12 miles using only electricity." When he needs to drive longer distances or needs to drive faster than the 35 miles per hour allowed by the battery-only power, the gas engine will kick in.

Darren Overby, who operates a hostel in San Francisco (and has previously worked as an electrical technician), is also in the process of converting his Prius. He is thrilled at the prospect of owning a vehicle that relies mostly on electricity. "Electricity is the only alternative fuel that is both sustainable and scalable. It could actually grow to meet the needs of everyone in the country. "

Plug-In Supply of Petaluma is also creating conversion kits that have all of the necessary components already assembled. Everybody agrees that the conversion process isn’t cheap. But the price of oil — including greenhouse gas emissions and war — makes plug-ins an increasingly attractive option, at least until the car companies get in gear.

"Had it not been for the grassroots effort," Sherwood said, "backyard conversions wouldn’t be possible. Car companies wouldn’t even be thinking about making plug-in hybrids." But they’re thinking about it now.

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Atmosphere and an actress

-

October 3, 2007
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Olivier Assayas’s films are both strange and engrossing, so much so that they may evade broad comprehension on the first go-round. Whereas instigating French new wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut played fast and loose with tone and narrative structure to create jarring juxtapositions, Assayas does so to effect a subtler, more mysterious sense of illumination. We frequently lose our bearings in cinema Assayas — as in two poetic refractions of the same scene in Irma Vep (1996) and Demonlover (2002): the female lead donning an alter ego, scurrying through hallways, committing a crime in a space that seems to overlap reality, dream, and fantasy — but there is always an underlying trust in the director’s guiding hand, earned by his hyperkinetic narration and apparent devotion to his actors. Assayas’s résumé does indeed resemble the archetypal new wave trajectory (from Cahiers du Cinéma critic to what Manny Farber calls a termite filmmaker), but the connection runs deeper still: like his forebears, he makes films about what it means to live in the modern world.

It’s a world that invariably entails the restless confusion and complex social systems of the globalized marketplace. He arrives in this slipstream through any number of inputs. For starters, his films are multilingual, multilocation affairs (in this respect they resemble spy thrillers, though it’s only Assayas’s most recent film, Boarding Gate, that feels pointedly designed along genre lines). Second, his plots usually revolve around business people. Even in Les Destinées (2000), an intimate fin de siècle period piece, a lapsed minister struggles for "new methods and new machines" to capture the American market for porcelain. This concern for France’s mediated role in global trade — it supplies luxury items in Les Destinées, film production in Irma Vep, and Internet pornography in Demonlover — is a constant in Assayas’s work, as are characters who are swallowed whole by an abstract marketplace. In Irma Vep, the film that still seems like Assayas’s most intuitive work, it’s a film director (played by new wave favorite Jean-Pierre Léaud) who succumbs to the impossibilities of postmodern enterprise, in this case remaking a French classic (Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires) with an actress from Hong Kong (Maggie Cheung).

Film Comment critic Amy Taubin is right to point out that Boarding Gate is "closer to Feuillade than [Assayas’s] Irma Vep," though it seems to me that this is as much a matter of the film’s riveting embodiment of Feuillade’s metaphor of society as so many trapdoors and secret passageways as it is "because [Boarding Gate‘s Asia] Argento is a contemporary Musidora [the star of Les Vampires]." Feuillade confined his lucid vision to the backstreets of Paris, whereas Assayas snaps between the City of Light and Hong Kong. More disconcertingly, he evokes virtual realities as well. In Irma Vep and Demonlover, alter egos take on a confusing, extrareal presence befitting the Internet age. Compulsively drawn to modern, floating spaces, Assayas frequently sets his action in glassy airports and offices. In this respect, the director’s use of Brian Eno’s ambient music, in Boarding Gate, seemed a long time coming, though Sonic Youth’s harmonics had previously supplied the same glide to Irma Vep and Demonlover.

Of course, all of these touches are only so much window dressing for Assayas’s mesmerizing female leads. Godard’s dictum that cinema is a matter of "a girl and a gun" falls short with Assayas: for this director it takes atmosphere and an actress. Irma Vep, Demonlover, and Boarding Gate all abide by the "a woman in trouble" scheme espoused by David Lynch, but with cleaner lines and punchier scrambles. Is there any doubt that Irma Vep conveys the plight of an actress lost in the marketplace with greater grace and acuity than Lynch’s slogging Inland Empire (2006)?

Because really, cinema Assayas could hardly be called glum or even despairing in spite of its heavy themes. Indeed, some of the filmmaker’s champions were upset with Demonlover for crossing that line into David Cronenberg country (the film is being screened at the PFA with the Canadian director’s 1983 Videodrome), but in Irma Vep and Cold Water (1994) it’s striking just how light Assayas’s touch remains even when he broaches oceans of malaise. Some of this, of course, is simply a matter of finely honed cinematic storytelling: fluid editing, detailed soundscapes, and restless handheld-camera work all give his films a stylishness that seems miles away from Dogma austerity.

Despite lacking the dreamlike depths of Irma Vep and Demonlover and the closely observed social mores of Les Destinées and Cold Water, Boarding Gate might just be the smoothest machine Assayas has built yet. The film’s minimalist, on-the-run scenario allows the director to intensify his stylistic template — the cutting has never been more electric, the natural light never so beautifully pale. And to return to Taubin’s point, Argento may well be the perfect Assayas heroine for all of her different looks — in Boarding Gate she’s alternately terrifying and terrified, spasmodic and inert, in control and at a loss. Unlike so many damsels in distress, she’s essentially active — as is cinema Assayas.

OLIVIER ASSAYAS IN RESIDENCE: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA WEEK

Oct. 4–11, $5.50–$9.50

See Rep Clock for schedule

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

These charming men

-

September 18, 2007
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Last night I dreamed that Morrissey played San Francisco. And waking, stumbling out of the top bunk, and triggering an avalanche of promo CDs, I was happy in the haze of that Estaban-drunken hour, but heaven knows I’m wondering, what difference does it make when that charming man has teased us so often before? Now I know how Joan of Arc felt, charging into Mr. Steven Patrick Morrissey’s onetime Los Angeles hood to flyer his street with mash notes. And on the cusp of Mr. Smith’s first San Francisco–<\d>proper shows since his two-night stand at concrete box Maritime Hall in 1999, I can’t help but wonder, my PETA poster child, why you have ignored your acolytes so, playing seemingly everywhere but here since canceling your 2004 Now and Zen Fest turn due to sinusitis and laryngitis. Do we make you sick? Is it my forlorn fashion sense? Our inability to untangle your artful Gordian knots of pop-song allusion? Is it my Kahlua breath?

Pop professionalism is such touchy subject these days — poke it with a stick and turn it over to find the now-chastened Britney Spears. Give it another nudge and find, on the other shining side, perhaps Prince and Morrissey, who’s fired away at his share of prefab stars who have no business fingering the hem of his tear-away dress shirt. Regardless of his latent music- and cultural-crit tendencies, Mr. So-Called Bigmouth is one of the greatest performers alive. I finally saw him in 2002 at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, opening for Los Jaguares and utterly besotting the seething mass with "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores," "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," and plenty of scrumptious previews of his You Are the Quarry tunes, and his magnificent feints and swoons, his fetal and Christlike poses during "Meat Is Murder," his heartfelt "Mexico," and the moment he tossed his shirt to the snatching crowd made me badger anyone who’d listen to give Morrissey a regular Vegas gig, years before Prince held down a brief lounge act there. So all those who have been missing the King (or are so green they don’t even remember one) or never believed he left the building, take (Irish blood, English) heart — Morrissey carries forth his flaming rock ‘n’ roll torch, embodying all the sexiness, expressionism, originality, professionalism, and subversion of long-gone rock regents like Elvis Presley. If you are a follower, this will only fan the fire. If you’re not a fan, you will be. Maybe Brit would have been forgiven if she had mumbled, "Gimme Moz," instead.

SOUNDING OFF James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem knows of what I speak, rasping amiably from New York City before embarking on a tour with the Arcade Fire. Hot on the heels on the infectious electro rock ‘n’ disco of Sound of Silver (DFA/Capitol), Murphy talked up the forthcoming vinyl and CD release of his "Nike thing," 45:33 (DFA) ("It was just a download thing, which infuriates me because MP3s sound like shit!") and a comp EP of remixes evocatively titled A Bunch of Stuff (EMI). Why the release frenzy — add in a Fabriclive mix CD by Murphy and LCD drummer Pat Mahoney — when the DFA Records cofounder could be enjoying his downtime watching The Fashionista Diaries and Ultimate Fighting with the missus?

"I don’t like things coming out on difficult formats," Murphy, 37, grumbles. "I don’t like it if something’s not on vinyl or CD, so I kinda regularly remember my roots as a big Smiths fan, scrabbling around. I know they put out [Louder Than] Bombs and Hatful of Hollow, where they compile all the little things so that you can find them on the right format. I try to diligently do that."

At least he can look forward to some carefree, cutthroat fun with the Arcade Fire. "We have band crush!" raves Murphy, who’s expecting to battle Win and Will Butler over a steaming croquet set. "Win is very competitive — there’s no i in team, but there is one in ‘Win’!"

Not to mention a declarative "Win." But what does the a in "James" stand for? "Aaayiii!"

MORRISSEY

Sun/23–Mon/24 and Sept. 26–27, 8 p.m., $65

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM

With the Arcade Fire

Fri/21, 6 p.m., $26–$46

Shoreline Amphitheatre

1 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View

www.ticketmaster.com

For more of the interview with James Murphy, go to the Noise blog at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

PARTY WITH ME, PETA

SAMARA LUBELSKI

The mind-morphing NYC psych songstress partners with Tom Carter and Christian Kiefer in Oakland and Giant Skyflower Band, Glenn Donaldson’s "bummer psych" outing, in San Francisco. Wed/19, 9 p.m., sliding scale. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. www.21grand.org. Thurs/20, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

DIPLO

After editing the film Favela on Blast, Wesley Pentz touches down in Jessie Alley with collaborator Switch. Sat/22, 10 p.m., $20 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN

The fusion guitar maestro offers a taste of the SFJAZZ fall season. Sat/22, 8 p.m., $25–$80. Nob Hill Masonic Center, 1111 California, SF. www.sfjazz.org

OAKLEY HALL AND MIST AND MAST

The Dead live! Brooklyn’s bucolic sing-alongers strum along with Oakland’s indie chantey rockers Mist and Mast. Sat/22, 10 p.m., $10–$12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

1...858687...96 Page 86 of 96