California

SF voters to weigh in on Beach Chalet turf war

Sasha Cuttler
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SF voters to weigh in on Beach Chalet turf war

A city project that would install artificial turf and stadium lighting at the Beach Chalet soccer fields at the west end of Golden Gate Park has survived numerous challenges over the last four years, including appeals to the California Coastal Commision and the courts. But this November, San Francisco voters will have the final say.

A citizens’ initiative that would block the project this week qualified for the ballot after turning in more than 16,000 signatures, collected by the Coalition to Save Golden Gate Park. Yet city officials and supporters of the project — including the City Fields Foundation, which has been installing artificial turf on playing fields around the city in recent years — aren’t taking any chances, creating a rival measure sponsored by six members of the Board of Supervisors.

Not only would the supervisors’ measure invalidate the citizens’ initiative if it gets more votes — it contains a so-called poison pill, an increasingly common electoral tactic — but it would make it more difficult to challenge future trail, playground, and playing field projects that would increase the number of users by 50 percent or more.
“We think it’s a terrible measure that disenfranchises voters all over the city,” Jean Barish, a spokesperson for the Coalition to Protect Golden Gate Park, told the Guardian. “It would give the Recreation and Park Department a lot more authority than they have now.”

Patrick Hannan, a spokesperson for the City Fields Foundation, worked with supervisors on the rival measure and he denies that it would limit citizens’ rights to challenge future projects.

“The legislation in no way curtails any kind of appeals process,” Hannan said. “It says you can’t pass a law to stop projects from going forward after they’ve been approved.”

But Hannan couldn’t cite any examples of approved projects being later stopped by legislation, and the vaguely worded measure doesn’t make clear whether it would preclude citizens from challenging approved projects by initiative or referendum.

Mike Murphy, the official proponent behind the iniative that seeks to stop the Beach Chalet project, said the intent of the supervisors’ measure seems to be to limit the public’s right to challenge artificial turf projects, which the city measure explicitly said city bodies “shall approve” if they increase playing time and have an approved environmental impact report.

He called on the supervisors sponsoring the measure — Sups. David Chiu, Eric Mar, Mark Farrell, Katy Tang, Scott Wiener, and London Breed — to remove their names before next week’s electoral deadline.   

“This is a highly politicized issue and it always has been,” Murphy said. “We need to refocus the debate not on why [the city needs more playing fields] but on what’s being done at this site.”

Opponents of the Beach Chalet project say articificial turf can be toxic and unhealthy and that it shouldn’t replace natural grass. But supporters of this and other artificial turf projects say that they substantially increase the available playing time on fields that are desperately need to keep up with demand, particularly by youth sports.

“Artificial turf is safe and this project is cleared to proceed,” Hannan said. “The question is whether the city wants to give more kids more fields they can use.”

He cited studies showing that because the artificial turf his group has installed on city-owned fields since 2011, available playing time on fields has increased by 30 percent: “That’s a direct result of our project.”

And now, voters will get their chance to weigh in on this ongoing, highly charged turf war. 

Carletta Sue Kay on strip clubs, literature, and dumpster-diving after art exhibits

Steven T. Jones
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Carletta Sue Kay on strip clubs, literature, and dumpster-diving after art exhibits

Not long after I sat down with Randy Walker, the male, non-performing ego of one of San Francisco’s most undefinable musical acts, vocal powerhouse Carletta Sue Kay (who performs at The Chapel this Fri/25), we talked a bit about college. Walker asked me the prerequisite questions about the social scene and my major, perking up at the sound of a humanities-centric discipline. I asked if he’d done the whole college thing. Walker chuckled, a glint in his eye, and said he had. “I went to Redlands College but didn’t graduate. Started out in Theater Arts, ended up switching over to English…but what are you really going to do with an English degree?”

As the conversation continued, however, Walker’s dismissal of the formal literary arts became increasingly incongruous with his mastery of language, the modern canon (from David Foster Wallace to Elizabeth McCracken), and allusion in his performances. The singer, whose music is a deft blend of Joplin-esque blues and far more cerebral and melodic existential examination, is anything but simplistic. As Walker’s mind opened up, we twisted and turned through a deliciously intellectual and sordid discourse about strip clubs, eccentric cousins, and the Swiss conceptual artist Thomas Hirschhorn. By the time we left the coffee shop, me with Carletta Sue Kay’s debut album Incongruent in hand, it was clear that Walker and his alter ego were far more complex (and hilarious) than the average wigged, pastichy, four octave-ranged singer-songwriter.

Carletta is a real person, says Walker. So was Walker’s last singing character, a plastic surgery-obsessed Belgian who Walker often presented with a variety of gauze pads and other bandages preferred by convalescents of cosmetic procedures. Both Carletta and the Belgian are Walker’s cousins (his last project was called Mon Cousin Belge). “While I was doing Mon Cousin Belge, I was writing songs at home that I thought needed to be sung by a girl. I thought, ‘I’m going to find some great female singers to record this stuff.’ But then I thought, ‘Hold on…’”

Carletta Sue Kay, Walker’s eccentric, ex-criminal cousin, was an ideal persona that he could put on to present his new works. “Carletta is a very troubled girl. She was involved with a guy and became very obsessed with him. She found out that this guy was sleeping with another girl and constructed a pipe bomb with the intent of killing him in his apartment.” Walker, clearly embracing the macabre underpinnings of the story, smiled and spoke with a bounce in his tone as he recounted her his cousin’s homicidal urges. “Well, they busted her and she went to prison. So the band became Carletta Sue Kay.” The more sorrowful of the band’s songs, which often focus on lost love and sadness, evoke the woeful tale. Now a free woman, the real Carletta has never agreed to see a performance by the band. “She’s completely chill with it. She’s a funny girl.”

The band’s inaugural performance is just as legendary as its naming. Mon Cousin Belge needed an opening act for a headlining gig at Bottom of the Hill, so Walker decided to unveil his new group. He crafted a Grecian arch, covered it in autumn leaves, sprayed it with glitter, and enlisted his friend, artist Greg Gardner, to create a cartoon rendering of his burgeoning alter ego on a piece of fabric curtain that hung down from the arch. “He drew a big fat naked girl. Her nipples were painted with pink glitter. They do the intro music (strum, strum) and I pull the curtain up to reveal myself standing there. The birth of Carletta!”

Throughout his contextualization of Carletta, Walker dropped hilarious one-liners and unexpected anecdotes about culture. I wasn’t surprised to hear The Magnetic Fields’ frontman Stephin Merritt’s name come up a few times, as Carletta Sue Kay has provided back-up vocals for several songs by the group. More surprising, however, was Walker’s invocation of Stephen Sondheim as a primary influence. And when a shirtless, seemingly inebriated man with an unruly mullet danced by in the front window of the café, Walker looked up and, without missing a beat, said, in questionably PC fashion, “It’s a character out of a James Fenimore Cooper book!”

While Walker sprinkled our conversation with bands, authors, and artists, his charisma was not so much in his prolific knowledge of and interaction with the art world, but rather how he used his experiences as a means of telling remarkably funny and compelling stories. In one such story, Walker told of his love for Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation “Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress.”

The exhibit, which showed at the CCA Wattis Instiute of Art a few years back, included juxtapositions of camouflage wear in fashion and the military alongside globes with small camo-tinged tumors growing on them. “After the exhibition ended, they were tossing 80 percent of the work into the trash. So we’re like…dumpster dive!” After snatching nine of the globes used in the exhibition, Walker began to sell them off. “It’s ephemeral,” Walker retorted when I suggested that he was dealing in the conceptual art black market.

Walker informs his new songs, which he’s collecting for an upcoming record called Monsters (much of which he will sing on Friday), with a similarly diverse range of artistic interests as his stories. “It’s influenced by Hammer classic horror films — Creature from the Black Lagoon — anywhere from comical to kitschy, but always with a dark theme. But then it’s going to mixed with a lot of genuine sadness.” Stylistically, Carletta Sue Kay continues to move towards more piano-heavy, lyrical wandering in comparison to the high-octane blues of its initial incarnation. Walker is seemingly aiming, both in his tales and his music, for the intersection between poking fun at cultural elements and emotionally engaging with their deeper messages.

How we ended up talking about strip clubs I may never know (and I have a complete recording of the conversation). Seemingly, it branched out of a conversation about Walker’s boyhood home, Fontana, Calif., which he cited for its high methamphetamine rates and large Pentacostal population. Before we knew it, however, we were talking about a wide range of California strip clubs, from the sketchier SoCal ones that he saw as a younger man and more upscale ones like Mitchell Brothers. Walker, who is gay and has been with his partner for more than 20 years, goes with his straight friends seemingly as a means of understanding the culture and to have fun. His stories, however, soon entered surreal realms of aggressive strippers, extreme money-spending binges by his friends, and abstract deconstruction of the vibes inside various clubs.

Whatever the reason for the digression, it perfectly captured Walker’s unabashedly entertaining form of communication — simultaneously intellectual, pulpy, and laugh-out-loud funny. For a man with such powerful personae, Randy Walker is wholly himself. 

CARLETTA SUE KAY

With The Dead Ships and Titan Ups

The Chapel

777 Valencia, SF

www.thechapelsf.com

Why Brian Wilson’s next album will probably be a masterpiece

Steven T. Jones
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Why Brian Wilson’s next album will probably be a masterpiece

The name “Beach Boys” can refer to either of two bands.  The first is the happy-go-lucky surf rock band that does songs about cars and California, led by the conservative Mike Love; the second is one of the most audacious and avant-garde bands of the psychedelic era, led by the mad Zen master Brian Wilson. Though most of the music-listening world knows them primarily as the former, the latter has proven far more influential, pushing the Beatles’ creativity to breaking point out of rivalry as well as serving as a major touchstone for the last decade or so of indie rock.

This latter influence, coinciding with Wilson’s 2004 solo revival of his aborted 1967 album Smile, has allowed the psychedelic Beach Boys to enjoy a greater cultural standing among a younger, hipper generation. Wilson’s reunion with Smile lyricist Van Dyke Parks on 2008’s That Lucky Old Sun was much-hyped by the music press; their previous collaboration, 1995’s Orange Crate Art, was barely even noticed by critics or audiences. Audiences want another psychedelic masterwork from Brian Wilson. And I would be unsurprised if he made one — in fact, I would be surprised if he didn’t.

There’s no doubt he still has the capacity to make music every bit as beautiful and daring as the pocket symphonies that graced Pet Sounds and Smile. The Wilson-written suite that ends the 2012 Beach Boys album That’s Why God Made The Radio is nearly as good as the one that ended Surf’s Up more than 40 years prior. And the version of “Live Let Live” Wilson recorded for the post-March Of The Penguins cash-in An Arctic Tale contains some of the most gorgeous backing vocals I’ve heard on any song, Wilson-penned or otherwise.

Since the 2004 solo Smile, Brian’s released a Christmas album, two covers albums, and That Lucky Old Sun. The latter is the only true Wilson album among these, and its song-cycle structure and bursts of experimental caprice make it undoubtedly the progeny of Smile. But its flaws are common to many, if not most, latter-day albums by aging rock stars. His vocals haven’t aged well; the production is sterile; he makes a lot of ill-advised tributes to the music and culture of his childhood (sample line: “Every girl’s the next Marilyn/every guy Errol Flynn”). There’s a strong sense he’s pandering to the crowd who grew up on “Surfin’ U.S.A.” (or God help us, “Kokomo”), and he tempers his far-out tendencies accordingly. 

But two events have happened since the release that should encourage Wilson to let his creative energy loose.  The first is the 2011 release of The Smile Sessions, a collection of incomplete Smile takes that’s the closest we’ll likely ever get to hearing the finished album. The second is the release of That’s Why God Made The Radio, purportedly the final Beach Boys album and universally acclaimed for the Wilson songs but nothing else. Without the commitment of The Beach Boys, Wilson never needs to write another song about cars and girls again; if he does, it’s up to choice. His fanbase is shifting from older nostalgics to younger music nerds, and it would be advisable for him to target that audience. 

Wilson’s currently working on his first new album since the release of The Smile Sessions. It appears to be a collaborative effort; Lana Del Rey, Kacey Musgraves, Zooey Deschanel, and Frank Ocean are all slated to appear on it. All of these artists but Musgraves are Los Angelenos, and Del Rey and Ocean explicitly tap into L.A. mythology in their music. The melancholy those latter two artists bring to their portrayal of the City of Angels is very much in line with the wistful nostalgia of Wilson’s best recent work. 

They’re also artists more in line with the indie world — the world that eats up Wilson’s poignant Pet Sounds-era work and disavows anything with even the most casual reference to surfing. They’ve more likely signed on to work with the man who made those great Sixties albums. And if they end up having any influence beyond merely contributing vocals, they’ll likely skew the album in that direction. If not, it’s still promising that Wilson would choose to work with these artists in the first place. It would be his first attempt to market himself to a younger audience since he loaded up Love You with synths back in 1977. And so far, he’s looking in the right place.

The current incarnation of the Beach Boys (sans Wilson, Al Jardine, and David Marks) play the Mountain Winery on August 1. Wilson’s new album does not yet have a release date, but much of it is complete according to Rolling Stone.

Grown-up GRMLN

Steven T. Jones
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Grown-up GRMLN

esilvers@sfbg.com

LEFT OF THE DIAL Yoodoo Park is the kind of musician who might make some people — people who didn’t find their calling until well into their 40s, or 50s, or 60s, aka lots of people — a little angry.

As GRMLN — a band name he chose when he realized the word “Gremlin” wasn’t Google search-friendly — the singer-guitarist’s new album, Soon Away (out Sept. 16 on Carpark records), is 10 tracks packed into 45 minutes of introspective yet confident, caffeine- and hormone-fueled energy, with nods to power pop and an eye toward the grittier side of the ’90s punk spectrum.

A follow-up to Park’s full-length, 2013’s far dreamier, poppier Empire, GRMLN’s sophomore effort (if you don’t count the self-produced EP he put out in 2011) still contains fairly simple songwriting, is still maybe a little overly concerned with being catchy — but on the whole, the album reads like evidence of maturation, of a songwriter stepping off the suburban curb and tentatively into the street; it’s the sound of someone picking up speed, realizing potential, realizing he’s just getting started. (He’ll debut songs from the record July 30 at the Rickshaw Stop.)

In the meantime, Park turned 21 last month.

“You know, we were in the van driving back from Texas, and it was, like, barren,” says Park, who’s Korean-American, but grew up splitting time between Japan and Orange County, of how he spent the milestone birthday. “I would’ve stopped somewhere to get a couple drinks just because, but there was really nothing.”

If the new weight and levels of distortion on this album (recorded and mixed at a breakneck pace at SF’s Different Fur) speak to the familiar pains of growing up — “Go, go, go outside/be the one you want,” Park urges in the album’s first single, “Jaded,” over the peal of an electric guitar hook that lodged itself in my head the first time I heard it — Park, the person, seems far less angst-ridden. Either that, or he doesn’t believe in showing it.

Still, there’s a musical genealogy here that calls to mind Weezer’s most jagged, honest (best) stuff, a little Teenage Fanclub here and there, with a breezy understanding of pop-punk structure that he seems to have learned by osmosis (Orange County tap water?) and a tone that could maybe be described as “what you sound like when you grow up thinking of Social Distortion as senior citizens and then start a punk band. “

“I guess writing-wise I got way more darker and aggressive on this one,” he muses in the easy, sunny, pseudo-stoned drawl of which only kids who grow up in Southern California are truly capable. “This album is about how a lot of things don’t work out the way you want to, and how in life in general, getting attached to things really isn’t good, emotionally or materialistically. I’ve been reading about Krishna, and how the best thing you can do to make yourself a better person has to do with letting things go…so, yeah.”

What kind of things is he letting go of at the moment? Well, there’s school, for one. He just talked to his counselor from UC Santa Cruz, and it turns out he could graduate in one quarter but he’d have to take a lot of credits, which sounds like a lot on top of touring. So the plan right now is to move to SF and take the whole next year off for playing live, which is, he says, “way more fun” than any other aspect of being a musician (especially now that he and his friends can drink legally). It probably helps that his band is made up of his brother, Tae San Park, on bass, and a friend from high school, Keith Frerichs, on drums.

To be fair, he knows he has it good. “Part of what I wanted with this record was to send a message about how life really isn’t that bad,” says Park. “Life is great in California, but if you pay attention to what’s happening in the world, you watch any documentaries, see how people live other places&ldots;I’m really blessed. I think people take it for granted.”

GRMLN

With Everyone Is Dirty, Mall Walk (Different Fur showcase)

July 30, 8pm, $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstop.com

 

Fests, fests, fests

Just like the line for Bi-Rite ice cream on a day when the temperature climbs above 70 degrees, summer festival season seems to be getting longer all the time. This past week brought the announcement of two different festivals that promise solid lineups of local acts alongside serious grub, hopefully warm weather (as is usually the case when fall begins) and, of course, fine excuses for day drinking. The 20th Street Block Party, a free food and music festival brought to you by Noise Pop and the darlings of the SF culinary world (Thomas McNaughton and David White’s love-child of a restaurant group, made up of flour + water, Central Kitchen, Salumeria, and Trick Dog), will take over, yes, 20th Street in the Mission on August 23 for performances by Rogue Wave, Melted Toys (whose new release we highly recommend), Cayucas, The Bilinda Butchers, Myron & E, and more. Oh yeah, did we mention it’s all free? www.20thstreetblockparty.com

And on Oct. 14 – 15, the Culture Collide Fest, a long-running favorite in LA, will debut its first Bay Area event, with a thoroughly international lineup of bands from the US, Korea, the Netherlands, and Costa Rica: Cloud Nothings, Beat Connection, GRMLN, Go Back to the Zoo, Glen Check, Glass Towers, Alphabetics, KLP, and more. Participating venues include The Chapel and the Elbo Room; we’ll have more as the party gets closer. www.culturecollide.com

Alerts: July 23 – 29, 2014

Michael Redmond
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THURSDAY 24

 

Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress

First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco, 1187 Franklin, SF. steveearly.org/book. 7-9pm, free. Drawing on his 40 years of experience as a labor reporter, Steve Early has compiled his personal experiences into a new book, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress. He’ll speak at the Unitarian Universalist Society, exploring the question of what strategies labor can and should employ in 2014.

 

 

Community forum with SF Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguía

Modern Times Bookstore Collective, 2919 24th,SF. moderntimesboostore.com. 7-9pm, free. Alejandro Murguía, longtime literary activist and San Francisco’s sixth Poet Laureate, has dedicated 40 years to writing about the Mission District. His nonfiction book, Medicine for Memory, chronicles the 1970s Nicaraguan Solidarity movement. In addition to his literary accolades—three other novels, numerous poetry collections, and two American Book Awards—he founded the Mission Cultural Center and the Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade. In other words, nobody is better qualified to head a panel of authors and activists confronting resident displacement in San Francisco’s most culturally vibrant areas. He will be joined by Representatives from San Francisco Community Land Trust (SFCLT) and Californian’s for Community Empowerment (ACCE).

 

SUNDAY 27

 

Seventh annual Laborfest Bookfair

Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF. laborfest.net. 10:30am-9pm, free. Spend the day soaking up the knowledge and wisdom shared by authors and labor leaders, and participate in discussion about workers’ rights. Speakers include Al Rojas, a founder of the United Farmworkers who grew up as an agricultural worker in California; Seth Holmes, author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, who conducted five years of research in the fields following migrant workers from Oaxaca to their agricultural jobs in the U.S.; and Professor Bu-Wei, of the Beijing Institute For Journalism and Communication with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who studies migrant workers in China.

Refugee crisis hits home

Michael Redmond
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joe@sfbg.com

In the small, colorful Precita Valley Community Center, a woman clutches a black ceramic goblet, circling a teenage girl with wisps of incense, and repeats the act with the 60 or so attendees. The spiritual cleansing ritual is much needed. Afterward, the San Franciscans will set their minds to saving the lives of children.

Nearly 50,000 Central American children crossed the Mexican border since October, according to federal data, fleeing targeted violence in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. This recent surge has hit home, as hundreds of those young refugees, often unaccompanied, seek asylum through immigration courts in San Francisco.

The courts often decide between life and death: Do the children stay in the safety of our sanctuary city, or return to countries from which they fled violence and chaos?

Jose Artiga, executive director of the Salvadoran Humanitarian Aid, Research and Education Foundation, told the crowd a story of life in El Salvador.

“A boy of only 11 years old waited for his grandfather one day,” he said, in Spanish. “A gang captured him, and the community organized to search for the boy. They found the child, but in six parts. The grandfather said, ‘How can I bring my grandchild back to his mother in six parts?’ This was a child. The gang showed up at the funeral, and would not let the community bury him.”

Some say the rising power of gangs sparked this surge in immigration. As President Barack Obama struggles with a bitterly partisan and gridlocked Congress to find a solution, US cities are dealing with the impacts of the overburdened immigration court system.

Now politicians of all partisan stripes, activists, and families are coming together to help the child refugees. Just last week, Sup. David Campos’ resolution to find additional aid for overburdened immigration services unanimously passed the Board of Supervisors. The next step, he told the Guardian, is to determine how best to use funds to help these children.

At the Precita Valley Community Center and beyond, activists call for that funding to reach attorneys, without which these kids will almost certainly be sent home into harm’s way.

 

OVERBURDENED

The refugees travel far. Children fleeing violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala trek through Mexico to cross the US border, and some die in the attempt. Those who live and are discovered by Border Patrol officers along the Southwest border are held temporarily in crowded, cold detention centers in McAllen, Texas, or Nogales, Ariz.

Images of these detention centers show groups of children lying on hard floors in thin blankets, and some advocates for the refugees reported feces and urine soaking the floors. The young refugees tell officials where they have family connections, and are flown to immigration courts across the country.

One such court is in San Francisco.

In 2005, San Francisco had 227 new active deportation proceedings for unaccompanied children, according to federal data obtained by Syracuse University’s TRAC Immigration project. That number was stable until 2012 when it jumped to 450 new cases. In 2013, the number jumped again, to 820.

San Francisco now has over 1,900 pending juvenile immigration cases, according to TRAC. Most of those children are Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan. The surge is pushing organizations that help these children to the breaking point.

Lariza Dugan-Cuadra, executive director of the Central American Resource Center, knows one thing for sure: “Things have been crazy.”

CARECEN is one of many organizations providing legal representation to Central American child refugees in San Francisco. Two attorneys and two paralegals handle the bulk of cases, which jumped from 20 children a month to 60.

“All a child is given is a court date,” Dugan-Cuadra told the Guardian. “While the US guarantees the right to court, it does not guarantee the right to representation.”

While US citizens have a constitutional right to representation by an attorney, noncitizens in Immigration Court do not. And when organizations like CARECEN can’t provide an attorney, the child loses.

“We’ve heard cases where a 6-year-old will go before a judge having to represent themselves,” she said. “The judges are throwing their hands up saying ‘Are you serious!?'”

Data obtained by TRAC Immigration backs up her claim.

Nationwide, only 52 percent of unaccompanied children are represented by an attorney in deportation court proceedings.

With an attorney, judges rule in a juvenile’s favor to stay about half the time, TRAC’s research found. Without an attorney? Only one in 10 children are granted asylum.

No legal representation means no hope. The ACLU filed a class-action suit against the United States earlier this month on behalf of unrepresented child immigrants, alleging just that.

“The onus has been hard on nonprofit providers and pro-bono attorneys,” Dugan-Cuadra said, because they know the stakes. Legal Services for Children, Catholic Charities, and the Asian Law Caucus are among the organizations calling for more aid.

Many of the attorneys are experiencing burnout. One we talked to was on a vacation for her mental health. Studies by the American Bar Association show judges are burning out too, and things are only getting worse: California has 77,000 pending immigration cases backlogged in its courts.

But locally, the children bear the worst of this: TRAC Immigration’s data shows only 71 of the new 830 unaccompanied children in San Francisco were represented by an attorney as of June 2014.

And without representation, many will be sent home to violence.

 

REFUGEES OR IMMIGRANTS?

The United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, said the children fleeing Central American countries should officially be considered refugees in need of asylum, a claim with legal ramifications President Obama so far has hesitated to make.

“We’re witnessing a complex situation in which children are leaving home for a variety of reasons, including poverty, the desire to join family, and the growing influence of trafficking networks,” Shelly Pitterman, UNHCR’s regional representative in the United States, said in a press statement. “Within this movement there are also children who are fleeing situations of violence at the hands of transnational organized criminal groups and powerful local gangs.”

Those fleeing violence and persecution, said Pitterman, will require access to asylum determination procedures and will need long-term protection. Others should be sent home, she said, and assisted with reintegration.

But some can’t find refuge anywhere at home, no matter where they go.

“My brother’s son was kidnapped eight years ago by extortionists,” one Salvadoran woman at the Precita center told the Guardian, declining to give her name out of fear for her family’s safety. Her brother moved to other cities, but the gangs continued to harass him and his family in provinces throughout El Salvador.

“He got letters threatening to kidnap his child. ‘We know where you live, we know where your child goes to school,'” she said. Her nephew is now 14. The last time she visited him she saw something that chilled her.

“He was approached by gangs to be recruited. I witnessed that. One day after when we were in the car, my nephew saw the gangs in another car. He hid on the floor and started to shake.”

The woman turned her head away and held back tears.

“My brother said ‘I have to take you out of here.'”

Now her nephew is somewhere safe in the United States, she said, though she would not say where. But the reason he left is clear.

“These kids don’t want to be the next dead body on the street,” Clarisa Sanchez, a Board of Immigration’s representative from Catholic Charities CYO told the Guardian.

Nationally, Republicans are calling for the mass deportation of these children. “I won’t stand idly by while our citizens are under assault and little children from Central America are detained in squalor,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said this week, as he announced deployment of 1,000 National Guard troops along the Texas border.

But many pin the origins of the crisis squarely on the United States.

 

DRUG LEGACY

Salvadorans are familiar with violence and cruelty. In 1932, more than 30,000 Salvadorans were slaughtered in a peasant revolt called la matanza: the slaughter. Nearly 75,000 civilians died in El Salvador’s bloody civil war, from 1980-1992.

The US government intervened in that war, sending government aid to the Salvadoran government. Now the US has a hand in today’s violence in Central America, some say, as our country’s drug habits fuel cartels throughout the region. Those cartels are arming Central American gangs, whichObama admitted in a press conference last year.

“The United States recognizes that we’ve got responsibilities; that much of the violence in the region is fueled by demand for illegal drugs, including in the United States,” the president said.

Obama requested $3.7 billion emergency funding that would bring at least $64 million to immigration courts, but also at least $1.5 billion to border security and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a troubling addition to needed funding.

Back at the Precita Valley Community Center, Jose Cartagena pled for legal aid at the border. Cartagena is intimately familiar with the need: He fled El Salvador’s civil war over 30 years ago. As he crossed the Tucson desert, 13 of his fellow border-crossers died in the blazing southwestern heat. Only Cartagena survived. Now he’s a representative for the National Network of Salvadorans in the Exterior in San Francisco.

He called for justice.

“We have to help these kids find their families or sponsors,” he said. “If we don’t provide legal support now, the Obama administration may deport all of them. We can’t wait until it’s too late.”

If you’d like to help the efforts around the Central American child refugees, you can contact CARECEN, Catholic Charities, or Superivsor David Campos’ office.

Appealing to San Francisco values

Michael Redmond
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4

EDITORIAL When lawyers become politicians, and when those politicians assume offices where they can exercise discretion about when to appeal judicial rulings, the decision to do nothing can be as big and impactful as the decision to file a lawsuit.

Luckily for California, it is progressive-minded attorneys from the Bay Area who have found themselves in the position of advancing public policy through wise decisions about when to let rulings stand and when to challenge them. And it is our hope that Attorney General Kamala Harris remembers her Bay Area roots when making a couple of important pending decisions on appealing some high-profile recent rulings.

Harris was already weighing whether to appeal a judge’s ruling striking down teacher tenure laws (see “Pride and prejudice,” June 24) when another judge ruled that California’s death penalty is unconstitutional (see “Death sentence for executions?” Page 16).

Her opponent in fall runoff election, Republican Ron Gold, has called for Harris not to appeal the teacher tenure ruling — and he would almost certainly make great political hay of a decision by Harris not to challenge the death penalty ruling. But Harris should easily defeat this also-ran challenger in November and she should maintain the courage of her convictions in making these decisions.

We urge Harris to aggressively appeal the teacher tenure ruling and not be swayed by the judge’s fallacious argument that teacher tenure hurts urban schoolchildren. And on the death penalty, which Harris has long opposed, we urge her to help end the barbaric, expensive, and ineffective executions (which could mean appealing the recent ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and then not appealing a favorable ruling there, which would serve to end capital punishment in California).

That kind of selective use of the Attorney General’s Office discretion on appeals would follow in the tradition of Gov. Jerry Brown, when he was attorney general, choosing not to appeal the ruling striking down Prop. 8 and instead helping to legalize same-sex marriage.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, we’re happy that City Attorney Dennis Herrera decided to “aggressively defend” Prop. B, which requires voter approval for projects that exceed current height restrictions on the San Francisco waterfront, against a lawsuit by the State Lands Commission.

Likely prompted by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of three members of that commission and someone who has long been friendly to big investors and developers, this lawsuit should have never been filed — and Herrera was right to say so and pledge a vigorous defense of the measure.

The people of San Francisco and California are lucky to have Harris and Herrera in the position to make these important decisions.

Last chapters?

Michael Redmond
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Last chapters?

news@sfbg.com

The tale of the threatened independent bookstore, quivering under the might of Amazon, is nothing new.

It’s only been two months since Marcus Books was evicted from its Fillmore District location. Both Adobe and Forest bookstores fled the Mission’s 16thh Street last year. But ebook sales growth is shrinking, and sales for many of San Francisco bookstores are up.

Instead, the tale of the struggling indie bookstore has become less about Amazon and more about a different monster: gentrification. San Francisco’s rising rents, demand for commercial space by deep-pocketed chains, and lack of commercial rent control are putting the squeeze on the city’s remaining bookstores.

Take Bibliohead, for instance. Its owner has recently been forced to relocate in spite of her bookstore’s success. Bibliohead is an easily navigable, highly curated, and tiny book jungle — more like a carefully manicured garden, really. The whole store can be explored in minutes, and there’s a gumball machine that dispenses poetry out in front once the book-happy are satisfied.

Its size has served it well. Sales at Bibliohead — Hayes Valley’s only bookstore — have risen solidly 7 percent each year since the store opened 10 years ago.

“We’re small, but mighty,” Melissa Richmond, Bibliohead’s owner, told the Guardian. “Although recently we haven’t been feeling so mighty. I’m kind of a wreck.”

In May, Richmond learned that she has until January 2015 to leave her store for four months while her building undergoes mandatory earthquake retrofitting. The landlord will double Richmond’s rent after the retrofitting, and has asked Richmond to pay for further renovations to the building when she returns.

“It’s off the table that I can stay here,” Richmond said. “I will not be offered a new lease. I don’t hate landlords, but I want a landlord who will contribute to the spirit and creativity of San Francisco.”

On June 22, Richmond launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise the $60,000 she’ll need to move and attract new customers. So far, with a little less than a month to go, she’s raised almost $3,000.

“What really breaks my heart is when a new customer walks in,” Richmond said. “They ask you how you’re doing after they’ve fallen in love with the place a little bit. Then you have to break their hearts by saying you don’t know what’s in store for your future right now.”

 

DISPLACEMENT TREND

Richmond is not the only bookseller in San Francisco forced to relocate. Last year, Adobe Books and Forest Books were forced out of 16th Street within three months of each other when their rents increased. Forest Books slipped quietly off to Japantown, and has since experienced an increase in sales. Adobe Books’ anticipated closure was met with an invigorating Kickstarter campaign that raised $60,000. It was enough to keep the store alive, but not on gentrifying 16th Street.

Nowadays, Adobe is re-branded as Adobe Books and Art Cooperative at its 24th Street location. The original Adobe’s charming, lackadaisical, and no- structured structure has been traded for alphabetized and carefully curated books. There are only two staff members, and its used books are selling far faster than in the old location, despite its shrunken size.

“It’s strange. A lot of the times I was not sure if it would work at all, and now here we are in this shop,” Brett Lockspeiser, a member of the Adobe Books and Art Cooperative, told us. “Things are running differently, but it’s still Adobe.”

Adobe will soon be celebrating its first anniversary in the new spot. The store might not be making any profits, according to Lockspeiser, but the cause for celebration is that it’s survived.

There has been discussion among the collective members about whether or not Adobe should try to sell eReading devices, like Green Apple Books has done without much success for almost two years with the Kobo eReader. Adobe’s collective voted against Kobo, preferring not to use the same weapons as its competitor.

“I’m pretty technology positive, but I think some people in the group thought it was an ‘us or them’ kind of thing,” said Lockspeiser. “Like either you’re a book reader or you’re a techie who reads on a Kindle.”

Besides, it seems that ebooks’ incredible growth rate has finally simmered down. According to the Association of American Publishers, ebooks accounted for 27 percent of all adult trade sales in 2013. While that was up from 23 percent in 2012, it marked the first year ebook growth was down to the single digits. In January, a Pew study reported that among adults who read at least one book in the past year, just 5 percent said they read only an ebook.

Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, reports that book sales throughout San Francisco bookstores have increased overall in the past two years. Green Apple Books, an expanding bookstore with an growing collection of books and records, is even poised to open another location in the Sunset below beloved video rental store Le Video on Aug. 1.

Pete Mulvihill, co-owner of Green Apple Books, said he recently got a call from Bibliohead’s owner asking for advice on potential neighborhoods and techniques for negotiating with landlords. But he can’t always explain his own store’s success.

“Some of it is just the economy. All that money floating around South of Market is maybe trickling over here,” he told us. “Or maybe the waiters are getting better tips. I don’t know what it is, but things have been better for us.”

The growth of bookstore sales, Landon said, is mainly because Barnes & Noble has been cast out of San Francisco. Last year, Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, reported that its revenue decreased by 8 percent in the final quarter. The company’s Nook division, meanwhile, slid down 32 percent.

Yet Joe Marchione, who owns Mission Street’s Valhalla Books, still places the blame for his diminishing foot traffic on Amazon, which has made his hard-to-find books pretty easy to locate online. In 1998, when his store opened, 90 percent of Valhalla’s business came from people browsing through his odd and unique assortment of rare and used books. Now, 95 percent of his business is online.

“People forgot the joy of browsing,” Marchione told us.

As soon as his landlord makes him commit to a lease, he says he’s going to have to leave the business. “When we first opened, we were smug. We said there was no way trendy was ever going to come to Mission between 17th and 18th [streets]. Get real!” he said. “But trendy creeps in closer by the week. There’s no problem with that, except it’s forcing us out.”

 

“TRENDY CREEPS IN”

It’s even forcing successful booksellers, like Bibliohead’s owner, to worry. Her faith in the printed word remains strong. “I find that there’s a whole core of people who are relieved to feel something in their hands, to flip the pages of really cool, beautiful books and kind of remember with their bodies what reading is like,” Richmond said.

When Kate Rosenberger opened a fourth bookstore in 2011 — Alleycat Books on 24th Street — many questioned her sanity, the owner said. The store has only recently been able to pay its own bills, having been relying on Rosenberger’s other store, Dog Eared Books, for survival. But the rent at Dog Eared Books is set to increase, and that means trouble.

“You can talk about e-readers, and people being distracted. You can talk about people slipping out since the Gutenberg press was invented, and all that’s true, sure,” Rosenberger told us. “But when you get hit with a huge increase in your rent, how do you deal with that? When the lease is up, you can pretty much figure you’re gone.”

These days, you deal with it by setting up a crowdsourcing campaign, and crossing your fingers that people with money like you. Or maybe you transform into an art cooperative. Or you just go somewhere else. But Richmond doesn’t want to leave San Francisco.

“I would like to preserve the culture of the city,” Richmond said. “I still think there’s something really special here.”

Barnes & Noble might be gone, ebook sales might have stabilized, and the printed word might just still be alive — but for San Francisco’s booksellers, that no longer means anyone in the book business is safe.

SF and UC systems dragging their feet on fossil fuel divestment

Sasha Cuttler
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56
SF and UC systems dragging their feet on fossil fuel divestment

The San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System and University of California Board of Regents — two local entities targeted by campaigns urging them to divest of their fossil fuel investments — remain resistant to the change despite official statements of support.

In April of last year, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to push SFERS to divest from fossil fuels. Now, more than a year later, sponsoring Sup. John Avalos questioned Mayor Ed Lee during the July 15 Board of Supervisors meeting about what needs to happen to move toward divestment. Groups such as Fossil Free SF and 350 SF are asking the same question since the issue of climate change is nearing a critical threshold.

Kimberly Pikul and Jed Holtzman of 350 SF told the Guardian that now is the time for action. “There is only so much carbon that we can release before we cook the planet beyond a level to which we can adapt,” Holtzman told the Guardian.

Pikul and Holtzman explained that carbon reserves owned by publicly traded fossil fuel companies represent five times what would be required to “cook the planet.” Only 20 percent of owned reserves can actually be used without massive environmental consequences, so they say stock in a fossil fuel companies is overvalued, making it a risky investment.

“To protect the long-term financial health of the pension fund and the benefits of city workers and retirees, it is a certainty that SFERS needs to divest from its fossil fuel holdings,” said Holtzman.

Despite the unstable investments and risk of environmental change, Mayor Lee seemed more concerned with jobs and green projects when Avalos questioned him about the Retirement Board’s progress at the Board of Supervisors meeting.

Lee told Avalos: “Our commitment of $4.5 million a year to GoSolarSF will continue to create local green collar jobs and … contribute [to] the creation of locally produced 100 percent green energy. These are the kinds of meaningful investments that actually deploy dollars, create jobs, and move the needle on green energy.”

Despite SF’s support of green jobs, Avalos, Fossil Free UC and 350 SF see divestment as one of the pathways toward long-term environmental change and more sustainable energy projects.

But, as Avalos pointed out, the Retirement Board has “yet to take any steps to divest from fossil fuels or limit the retirement fund’s exposure to the financial risks posed by climate change.”

The only step taken so far is to initiate “Level 1” shareholder engagement with fossil fuel companies. Pikul and Holtzman explained that Level 1 engagement “is largely cosmetic and only calls for SFERS to vote their proxies on climate-related shareholder votes.” The next step is Level 2: shareholder advocacy and engagement with fossil fuel companies. The ideal is Level 3, or investment restriction/divestment.

SF isn’t the only city to seek divestment. Oakland and Berkeley are also pursuing the cause, as are Portland and Seattle. The University of California has also been deliberating the issue and plans to vote on divestment in September.  

But the UC Board of Regents seems skeptical, despite the push from students. UC President Janet Napolitano told the Daily Bruin, “Using divestment as a tool is something that should be done rarely, if at all.”

An open letter from faculty to the UC Regents, posted on Fossil Free UC’s website, bases the argument for divestment on students’ well-being: “Current students will be at the peak of life in 2050, identified by numerous studies as a point at which the global community will have either adequately responded to climate change, or will be suffering horribly from it.”

When Harvard rejected divestment in 2013, University President Drew Faust told the San Francisco Chronicle that she found “a troubling inconsistency in the notion that, as an investor, we should boycott a whole class of companies at the same time that, as individuals and as a community, we are extensively relying on those companies’ products and services for so much of what we do every day.”

Stanford University had a similar dependence issue, which is why it compromised by divesting from coal companies, instead of all fossil fuel companies. Before divestment, the university received $19 billion from coal-related investments, money that will now be invested in other things.

While the partial divestment is a step in the right direction, Fossil Free UC student organizer Silver Hannon said, in a press release following July 16 Regents meeting, “While partial divestment could stigmatize the dirtiest energy source, we need to see the Regents take a real leadership position on the issue by adopting a comprehensive fossil-free investment strategy.”

As for SF, Mayor Lee promises that divestment will happen after the Retirement Board has considered the consequences. Since there doesn’t seem to be a study currently underway, the best course of action is to keep Lee and other officials accountable for SF’s climate and clean energy goals, said Pukil and Holtzman.

Lee seems confident that SFERs will divest, even if the timeline is currently unclear.

“I know the commission does seriously consider the fiscal consequences of divestment, and sometimes they decide the benefits outweigh the costs,” Lee told the supervisors. “I trust the Retirement Board and staff to make the right decisions in this regard.”

Anti-Eviction Mapping Project highlights Urban Green’s record of displacement

Sasha Cuttler
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5
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project highlights Urban Green’s record of displacement

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s latest creation illustrates the eviction history of Urban Green Investments, a San Francisco-based real estate company that was recently put in the spotlight with its controversial attempted eviction of 98-year-old Mary Elizabeth Phillips.

The Mapping Project’s graphic shows the properties owned by Urban Green and its affiliates, assets that number 385 units in more than 15 buildings. According to the Mapping Project, they have displaced “numerous tenants in the San Francisco Bay Area,” led by the efforts of CEO David McCloskey.

“The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project created this map to expose how large and interconnected the Urban Green and McCloskey network is,” said Erin McElroy of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. “We have been shocked at how many tenants they have pushed out and in how many cities they are flipping properties.”

Urban Green’s website advertises the company as a “fully integrated real estate company with brokerage, property management and development capacities.” The company’s strategy is to acquire property, then add value by “increasing efficiencies, enhancing entitlements, and employing carefully calibrated green renovations.”

In recent years, Urban Green has been busy displacing tenants, including in October 2012, when it purchased a multi-family portfolio with 130 units in San Francisco. According to the Mapping Project, the company is involved in around 40 LLCs, “many of which they use to evict tenants and then flip buildings.”

“Companies like Urban Green wouldn’t be evicting tenants like Mary Phillips if we stopped the profiting of buying up then evicting whole buildings just to sell them quickly,” San Francisco Tenants Union Director Ted Gullicksen said in a statement. “We need to pass a surtax on transfers of apartment buildings within five years of last sale this November if we are to stop these displacement practices of speculators like Urban Green.”

Gullicksen referred to the anti-speculation tax that tenant activists and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors has place on the November ballot. Representatives of Urban Green have not returned Guardian calls for comment, but we’ll update this post if and when we hear back.  

Even residents outside the Bay Area have not escaped the reach of the McCloskey family, which has a long history of evictions. Urban Green is currently a subsidiary of the business run by David McCloskey’s Thomas McCloskey: Cornerstone Holdings. The family owns property in Colorado (where Cornerstone is based), New York, Hawaii, and California, according to the Mapping Project. Perhaps most controversially, the family owns 300 acres of land in Hawaii, called Kealia Kai, which greatly angered the Kaua`i people in the 1990s. After buying the land for $17 million, McCloskey unsuccessfully attempted to build a private beach community with his land.

More than 2,000 miles of sea separate Hawaii from Phillips’ apartment, but the residents of both areas are suffering similar fates at the hands of the McCloskeys. And though Urban Green stated last week that it would not continue its attempt to evict Phillips, attorney Steve Collier of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic issued a statement making it clear that the company’s efforts are not over. According to Collier, Urban Green’s new strategy is to force out Brant, which would remove Phillips by default because she relies on Brant’s care.

“This has been my home for over 40 years and I don’t want to leave. . . I am just too old,” said Phillips, according to the Mapping Project’s website. “I didn’t sit down and cry, I just refused to believe it. They’re going to have to take me out of here feet first. Just because of your age, don’t let people push you around.”

Jimmy Cliff high-kicks his way through 50 years of music at the Fillmore

Steven T. Jones
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Jimmy Cliff high-kicks his way through 50 years of music at the Fillmore

Jimmy Cliff is a goddamn maniac. It’s about 45 minutes into his 90-minute set at the Fillmore on Saturday night [July 19], and while the sheer volume of ganja smoke in the packed room is making real movement — beyond the standard shuffle/sidestep, white reggae fan head-bob, and occasional 30-second pogo accompanied by the triumphant fist-in-the-air move — seem an insurmountable challenge for most everyone on the dancefloor, 66-year-old Jimmy Cliff is onstage in matching bright yellow-and-red pants, a robe, and a hat, quite literally running circles around everyone.

He’s high-kicking. He’s goose-stepping. He’s pouring buckets of sweat, but his stage presence is magnetic, his control of the room masterful. He never stops grinning. And, supported by a guitarist, a drummer, a bass player, a saxophone player, two keyboard players, two backup singers, and the Fillmore’s very dialed-in sound system, Jimmy Cliff sounds better than the last dozen 25- to 34-year-old rock stars I’ve heard live. He definitely has more energy.

jimmy

His voice is strong and somehow heartbreakingly clear, whether on songs from his most recent album, 2012’s Tim Armstrong-produced Rebirth — like “Afghanistan,” an update on the classic “Vietnam,” or the upbeat, surprisingly modern-sounding “One More” — or on theclassics, which are almost too many to list: “The Harder They Come,” of course, “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” a chill-inducing “Many Rivers To Cross,” “Sitting In Limbo,” etc., etc., etc. —  Cliff stomped and shouted through the last 50 years, darting back and forth not only throughout, you know, linear time and political movements, but the evolution of reggae and Jamaican music itself, tracing the genre from from ska to rocksteady to dancehall. Forget your knowledge of or even affinity for these genres; the weight of the air feels different in the presence of an artist who’s been through, and influenced, so much of what you take for granted as musical history. And I’m pretty sure that wasn’t just the ganja.

 

Jimmy Cliff “One More” from dan sampson on Vimeo.

In between songs, he bantered (fan: “We love you Jimmy!” Jimmy: “I love you more!” Another fan two minutes later: “We still love you Jimmy!” Jimmy: “I love you double!”), gave history lessons (focused mostly on artists he claims responsibility for discovering: Sam Cooke, Bob Marley), led an audience-participation section for a new song he’s working on, and pretended the show was over and he wouldn’t be coming back on at least three times. And then he came back, three times. The encore fake-out was such that by the time the band walked off stage for real and the house music came over the speakers, the stoned, smiling masses didn’t believe it, chanting “one more,” for a good 10 minutes, until a stage hand who looked like she hated life at that moment walked on to unplug something; she was greeted with a collective groan.

jimmy

It should be said here: I do not generally identify as a “reggae fan.” Having grown up in the Bay Area and having gone to Reggae on the River once when I was 10 (long story) and having attended a public California university full of dudes with board shorts and blacklight posters, I do not have fantastic associations with large throngs of mainly white people dancing to reggae music.

And yet: I found it difficult to dislike the bro-y, backward cap-sporting contingent at this show, which is a really weird feeling for me. They all just seemed too damn happy. Whatever Jimmy Cliff’s doing at age 66 to keep on doing what he did on Saturday, it’s keeping him healthy, and joyful, and it’s clearly catching. We should all be so lucky.

 

Betty Yee cleared for November runoff after Perez halts Controller’s race recount

Sasha Cuttler
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10
Betty Yee cleared for November runoff after Perez halts Controller’s race recount

California Controller candidate Betty Yee, a San Francisco Democrat, will officially square off against Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin, a Republican, in the November runoff election after rival Democrat John Perez today called off a recount request. Perez finished in third place, just 481 votes behind Yee.

Perez, formerly the first openly gay speaker of the California Assembly, had asked for recounts in Kern, Imperial, and San Bernardino counties on July 6. But as those counts dragged on and the deadlines for printing fall ballots neared, the California Democratic Party was pressuring Perez to withdraw, last week contributing $50,000 to her campaign.

The Perez campaign released the following statement just before 5pm today:

“Today I have made the decision to bring the recount process to an end, and pledge my full support to Betty Yee to be California’s next Controller.  

While I strongly believe that completing this process would result in me advancing to the General Election, it is clear that there are significant deficiencies in the process itself which make continuing the recount problematic. Even in the effort so far, we have found uncounted ballots, but there is simply not enough time to see this process through to the end, given the fact that counties must begin printing ballots in the next few weeks in order to ensure that overseas and military voters can receive their ballots in a timely manner. 

I began this process because every vote deserves to be counted fairly and accurately, and as the recount has made clear, California needs to rethink our approach and incorporate best practices from across the nation. This effort was not about the outcome of a particular election, but the integrity of every election, and the issues brought to the light over the last two weeks need to be addressed in a comprehensive and thoughtful manner. 

It has been an honor and a privilege to serve in the Assembly these last six years, and to have led the Assembly at a time when we’ve turned multi-billion dollar deficits into multi-billion dollar reserves, expanded healthcare for more than three million Californians and made college affordable again by enacting the Middle Class Scholarship Act. I am grateful for the support my campaign has received from everyday Californians who have seen the work my colleagues and I have done in the Legislature, and embraced our vision of fiscally responsible and progressive government which expands opportunity for all Californians. We built a tremendous record of accomplishment together, and I look forward to making contributions to build on that record of progress in the future.

In the immediate term, I will be continuing my service in the Assembly, and working hard to help elect Democrats up and down California.”

San Franciscans could make death penalty ruling stick

Sasha Cuttler
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24
San Franciscans could make death penalty ruling stick

In the wake of yesterday’s [Wed/16] judicial ruling that California’s death penalty system is unconstitutional — with federal District Judge Cormac Carney calling it arbitrary and so subject to endless delay that it “serves no penological purpose” — San Franciscans could play a key role in converting the ruling into an abolition of capital punishment.

Right now, the ruling applies only to the execution of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was sentenced to death in 1995 for a rape and murder, and not all 748 inmates now on Death Row in California. But yesterday’s ruling would end the death penalty in California if appealed to and upheld by the SF-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The decision about whether to file that appeal and possibly a subsequent appeal to the US Supreme Court falls to Attorney General Kamala Harris, who has maintained her opposition to capital punishment since her days as San Francisco’s district attorney, where she bravely endured lots of political heat for refusing to file capital murder charges in the death of San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza.  

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi today issued a public statement praising yesterday’s ruling and calling for Harris not to appeal it: “Today’s ruling, which found California’s death penalty unconstitutional, is a monumental victory for justice. I commend U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney for his courage and wisdom. Not only is the death penalty arbitrarily imposed, as the judge noted, its history is fraught with racial bias and haunted by the hundreds of death row inmates who were later exonerated. I am hopeful that California Attorney General Kamala Harris will choose not to appeal this decision.” 

Harris spokesperson David Beltran told the Guardian that she hasn’t yet made a decision whether to appeal the case: “We are reviewing the ruling.”

Yet former Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti, who worked with SF-based Death Penalty Focus on the 2012 initiative campaign to repeal the death penalty (losing by less than 4 percentage points), told the Guardian that Harris has a tough choice to make.

“It’s an interesting decision. If the Attorney General doesn’t appeal it, then it applies just to this case, period,” Garcetti told us.

Although appeals in other cases could cite the logic of yesterday’s ruling, it has no precedent value unless affirmed by the Ninth Circuit. And Garcetti called Carney’s ruling “a pretty persuasive decision” that could be easily be affirmed, depending on which judges are assigned to the case. If so, that ruling would end the death penalty in California, just as 17 other states have already done.   

“The more interesting question is whether she would then appeal that ruling [to the US Supreme Court],” Garcetti said.

California voters have affirmed their support for the death penalty three times at the ballot, but those results and public opinion polling show that support for executions has been steadily eroding, in much the same way that generational change has led to overturning bans on same-sex marriage across the country.

Garcetti said he regularly speaks publicly about capital punishment, often to very conservative groups, and he said that the arguments against it have become so strong — including its high cost, racial and class bias, and lack of deterrent effect — that “over 95 percent of [death penalty supporters] change their opinions by the end of my talks.”

As for why the 2012 initiative fell about 250,000 votes short of success, Garcetti said, “We simply ran out of money to get the facts out. Once people hear the facts, it wins them over.”

Carney’s ruling reinforced many of the arguments that opponents have been made against the death penalty, noting that federal guarantees of due process create such long delays that a death sentence has become something “no rational jury or legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

Aside from this ruling, California is also currently under a federal moratorium on executing prisoners until it can reform its lethal injection procedures, which a federal judge has said now amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

“Justice requires that we end this charade once and for all,” Death Penalty Focus Executive Director Matt Cherry said in a prepared statement. “It’s time to replace California’s broken death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole. That’s the best way to ensure that convicted killers remain behind bars until they die, without wasting tens of millions of tax dollars every year on needless appeals. That’s justice that works, for everyone.”

#TBT: That time we called for California’s break-up

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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13
#TBT: That time we called for California’s break-up

So another scheme — in a long and rich history of such schemes — is attempting to break California into more digestible parts, and gaining national attention. Venture capitalist Tim Draper’s Six Californias is all but on the ballot, attempting to rechristen the Bay Area as Silicon Valley. Good luck with that! (Although we have to say, it might create the first openly weed-driven state economy — Northern California — which would be fun to see.)

In 2009, we, too, put forth a proposal to split California up — building on an idea from conservative Central California, and echoed in Daily Kos. It was a doozy, but a logical one, with some actual Six Californias affinity.

Our May 27 cover story, written by Rebecca Bowe and Tim Redmond, proposed to split Cali up for better management, representation, and economic/social justice, creating the playfully named states of Greenland, Sierrastan, Pinkostan, Coastland, Palm Sprawl, North Mexico, and Disney. (The accompanying cover, designed by Ben Hopfer and shown above, aped the New Yorker’s famous “New Yorkistan” cover.)  

The cover story itself grew from a Politics Blog post Tim Redmond had written in March of 2009, asking “Should California be split up?” — read the post below. As for creating states, we’ll be dreaming of Puerto Rico …

SHOULD CALIFORNIA BE SPLIT UP?

By Tim Redmond

It’s an interesting question. Nothing new, really — folks up in the northern part of the state have been talking about secession since the 1940s.

But these days, the talk has shifted from North-South to Central Valley-Coast.

There’s plenty of discussion going on — the New York Times
reports on a move by farmers in Visalia, who say those of us in the more liberal western regions don’t understand what it’s like in the center of the state:

Frustrated by what they call uninformed urban voters dictating faulty farm policy, Mr. Rogers and the other members of the movement have proposed splitting off 13 counties on the state’s coast, leaving the remaining 45, mostly inland, counties as the “real” California.

The reason, they say, is that people in those coastal counties, which include San Francisco and Los Angeles, simply do not understand what life is like in areas where the sea breezes do not reach.
“They think fish are more important than people, that pigs are treated mean and chickens should run loose,” said Mr. Rogers, who said he hitched a ride in 1940 to Visalia from Oklahoma to escape the Dust Bowl, with his wife and baby son in tow. “City people just don’t know what it takes to get food on their table.”

A former Assembly member is pushing a vertical split, too :

“Citizens of our once Golden State are frustrated and desperately concerned about the imposition of burdensome regulations, taxation, fees, fees and more fees, and bureaucratic intrusion into our daily lives and businesses,” declares downsizeca.org, the movement’s website.

And all of this comes as reformers form both the left and the right are talking about a new Constitutional Convention.

Athough some of the proponents are clearly nutty, the idea isn’t. As the noted political economist Gar Alperovitz wrote two years ago

The United States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy. What does “participatory democracy” mean in a continent? Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization of the federal system may be all but inevitable.

He was talking about California becoming its own nation, but I’d argue that the same problem applies here. The budget crisis, the gridlock in Sacramento … all of it suggests that maybe California itself is too big to govern. There’s also clear evidence of dramatic regional differences. If you take the Central Valley from about Redding on down, and wrap in Orange County, you have a red state within a blue state where most of the residents say they want lower taxes and smaller government. Along the coast from about Sonoma County down to the southern part of Los Angeles County, you have people who generally would like to see taxes pay for public services. If the coast were a state, we could repeal Prop. 13 and build world-class schools. We’d have same-sex marriage and single-payer health insurance. And we’d still be one of the biggest states in America.

Now, I’m not sure the people in the central valley quite realize the problem with their plans, which is illustrated in this wonderful chart that comes from the office of Assemblywoman Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa (PDF).

The chart shows that the people who dislike and distrust government and don’t want to pay taxes are in fact the beneficiaries of the tax dollars that the rest of us pay. In California, tax money from the coast winds up paying for services in the central valley.

But that’s okay — if they don’t want our money any more, maybe we should tell them we’re fine with that. Maybe we should split the state not just in two but into three: Let the northern counties become the state of Jefferson, where pot will be legal and the residents will be so wealthy from taxes and exports of that cash crop that they’ll make oil-richAlaskans seem like paupers. Pot will be legal in the coastal communities, too, and will generate tax revenue.

We’ll have a Democratic governor, and overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, fewer prisons, better schools, cleaner air, no Ellis Act, rent controls on vacant apartments, more money for transit, strict gun control, support for immigrant rights … and no more of these ugly battles over budgets held hostage by right-wing Republicans.

And in the central valley, they can have their low taxes and conservative values, and watch their roads, schools, and public services go to hell. Maybe eventually they’ll figure it out.

Of course, we’d have to figure out the water rights. The folks in Jefferson would have control over much of the water that now goes South, and there would have to be some long-term water contracts between the states, but that shouldn’t be an insurmountable roadblock.

And the solution would create its own problems; The GOP would control the central state, and would move to abolish the Agricultural Labor Relations Act and make life even more miserable for farmworkers. But then, maybe Jefferson would turn off the water and big agribusiness would be SOL anyway.

As part of the break-up, all parties would have to agree to create a special relocation fund to help lonely, sad liberals from Modesto come west and to help lonely, sad Republicans in San Francisco to move east. I wonder which way the net migration would go.

Meanwhile, Evans has introduced my favorite tax bill of the year, AB 1342, and it’s related to this entire discussion. She wants to allow counties to levy their own income taxes and vehicle license fees. “We went through this difficult process of trying to arrive at a budget,” her spokesperson, Anthony Matthews, told me. “For those communities that have a different view of government [than the Republicans], this bill would let them raise their own taxes to fund their priorities.”

 

San Francisco to study dropping speed limit to 20 mph for pedestrian safety

Erica Hanna
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San Francisco to study dropping speed limit to 20 mph for pedestrian safety

As a part of a citywide effort to eliminate all pedestrian deaths by 2024, San Francisco will study the impact of reducing speed limits to 20 mph. 

“This is a reasonable issue to look into making San Francisco streets safer,” Sup. Eric Mar said, in a public statement. “There is too much excellent work and research going into it nationally and internationally to ignore.” 

The study was proposed by Mar as part of Vision Zero – a Swedish concept adopted by San Francisco at the behest of Sup. Jane Kim earlier this year. The initiative aims to reduce pedestrian deaths to zero within 10 years, with a focus on educating drivers, engineering roads for safety, and enforcing traffic laws (which the SFPD agreed to reform ealrier this year). Data from the study should be available in early fall. 

Where the speed changes would occur is the subject of the study. “We’re going to the experts,” Peter Lauterborn, Mar’s aide, told the Guardian. That’s the whole point of the study, he said, to figure out where and by how much speed could be reduced in the city to save lives. 

Modest adjustment to speed limits lowered pedestrian mortality rates in cities across the world.

Paris, London, cities in Sweden, and New York all implemented speed limit reductions to save pedestrian lives. According to the British Medical Journal, serious traffic-related fatalities or injuries decreased by 46 percent in 20 mph zones in London. 

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and the San Francisco Police Department got on board with the Vision Zero pedestrian safety plan, proposed by Sup. Jane Kim, earlier this year. 

According to California’s Office of Traffic Safety, San Francisco was ranked number one for traffic fatalities and injuries in 2011, compared to other similarly sized cities. 

“The overall frequency of traffic fatalities in the City of San Francisco constitutes a public health crisis,” the SFMTA warned in its Vision Zero web post. 

The statistics the SFMTA presented may seem dry, but tell the tale of preventable pain pedestrians suffered at the mercy of autos: Over the ten years from 2002 to 2011 the City lost a total of 310 lives to traffic fatalities. Each year alone on average 800 people are injured and 100 severely injured or killed while walking in San Francisco.

Sweden also saw fewer pedestrian crashes, despite increased traffic density. 

Walk SF has repeatedly advocated to fix intersections that are known to be especially dangerous, as only six percent of SF intersections are responsible for 60 percent of pedestrian crashes. Most of these areas are located in SoMa and the Tenderloin districts, the latter is where 6-year-old Sofia Liu was killed on New Year’ Eve. 

Walk SF’s Executive Director Nicole Schneider told us 20 mph zones would make it easier for cars to stop, expand drivers’ view of streets, and decrease the force of impact. 

In 2011 the city instituted 15 mph school zones after strong advocacy from Walk SF and other groups. While Schneider didn’t have any statistics about the impact of the speed limit on hand, she did say that there is a “perception of change” in these zones. 

But there are environmental benefits of slower speeds as well, Lauterborn told us: driving slower uses less gas. 

The U.S. Department of Energy says that speeding, rapidly accelerating, and frequently braking can decrease gas mileage by 33 percent. A lower speed limit would decrease driving costs as well as protect pedestrians. 

Lauterborn said even if the study shows a 20 mph speed limit would be beneficial, there are state laws that might prevent SF from lowering the speed limit. Local governments can only set the speed limit lower than 25mph on streets smaller than 25 feet wide or in business, residential, or school zones. To lower the speed limit to 20mph on a street like Sunset, the city would likely need state permission. 

At a fiery Board of Supervisors hearing on Vision Zero in January, a pedestrian who was hit by a car in 2013 named Jikaiah Stevens offered a scathing critique of current vehicle collision policies. “What is their incentive to drive safely when there are no consequences?” Stevens asked the board that night. A 20 mph limit may go a long way towards preventing pedestrian injuries like Stevens’.

“Let’s Elect Our Elected Officials” rejected at the Board of Supes

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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“Let’s Elect Our Elected Officials” rejected at the Board of Supes

At today’s (Tue/15) Board of Supervisors’ meeting, members of the board voted 6-5 against placing a proposal on the November ballot that would create special elections when vacancies arise on the Board or in the Mayor’s Office.

If approved by voters, the measure would have immediate impacts on San Francisco’s political landscape. Board President David Chiu is vying for a seat in the California Assembly against Sup. David Campos, which will leave a vacancy on the board one way or another. 

But Sup. John Avalos, who authored the charter amendment proposal, noted that “this measure is not about any existing mayor or any existing supervisor.” Instead, Avalos described the measure as a bid to make city policy more democratic. 

“It will allow voters to decide who fills vacancies in special elections,” Avalos said.

As things stand, when a supervisor’s seat is vacated, it’s up to the mayor to appoint that official’s replacement. When a mayor’s seat is vacated, a much more rare occurrence, it’s up to “a small minority of people – us,” to appoint the city’s top elected official, Avalos said. “This shapes how decisions are made, often behind closed doors.”

Taking this question to voters via special election would ultimately be more democratic, he added. “If you are on the fence on this measure, I hope you can still send this ballot measure over to the voters,” Avalos told his colleagues.

Sups. London Breed, Katy Tang, and Scott Wiener each spoke in opposition to the idea.

“It’s not a perfect system, but no system ever is,” Breed said. “I’m not sure what problem we’re trying to solve with changing the charter.”

Wiener sounded a similar note. “There are various ways you can do it, and no way is necessarily better or worse,” he said of the current system for appointing vacancies. “I don’t see how the system that we have is in any way broken.”

But Sup. David Campos chimed in to challenge that framing. “The question before this board is not, what is the best system? … The question is a lot simpler than that,” Campos said, “Since we are talking about democracy. The question is: Will we give voters in SF the opportunity to decide for themselves what the best system is? Let’s not you and I pre-judge what the voters are going to say.”

In the end the measure failed six to five, with Sups. Mar, Avalos, Campos, Chiu, and Jane Kim voting in favor.

Treading water

Steven T. Jones
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Treading water

esilvers@sfbg.com

LEFT OF THE DIAL In a parable that opens one of the best-known speeches by the late great David Foster Wallace, two young fish are swimming along when an older fish passes them. “Morning boys,” says the (sentient, verbal) fish. “How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a while, until one of them looks over at the other and says “What the hell is water?”

Living in the Bay Area, especially, water is a constant: Our travel routes often entail tunneling under or gliding over the Bay; white sheets of fog roll out in a damp coat over city daily, even in June; the Pacific, with its cold, gray version of the beach imagery most Midwesterners probably think of as “Californian,” provides our most obvious grounding point — I can’t un-learn directions based on the way I learned them growing up here. “Well, the ocean’s that way, so that’s west.” This was problematic when I lived in New York.

The ubiquity of water in our lives — and the corresponding ease with which we take it for granted, until, you know, we’re in a major drought that severely threatens California’s agricultural and therefore economic well-being — is part of what made H20 such a natural theme for this year’s Soundwave Biennial, a festival of music, science, visual and performance art thrown by the arts nonprofit Mediate every other year. Throughout July, August, and September, in museums and music venues throughout the Bay Area, on beaches, in bunkers and even aboard a boat or two, more than 100 different artists across all different media will explore water and its relationship to sound.

“We’re the city by the bay; water’s all around us, literally, but we don’t really talk about it, or what that means to us,” says Alan So, the festival’s executive and artistic director. “We’ll talk about drought or climate change, but it can be myopic — water makes up 70 percent of our world, and there are so many kinds of life we don’t get to see; there’s still so much that’s mysterious about it.”

After kicking off the evening of July 10 with a party at the California Academy of Sciences’ Nightlife featuring special interactive water life exhibits and live music from Rogue Wave (get it?) and Kasey Johansing, the festival continues with a somewhat overwhelming menu of happenings.

On July 19, SOMArts will host Pool, a video installation by Fernanda D’Agostino that plays off the idea of pairing memory with place, projecting watery images — a choreographer, Linda Johnson, submerged in water; salmon swimming upstream — via a two-channel generative video system.

July 26 will mark the opening night of Water World and no, that doesn’t mean you have to sit through any Kevin Costner dialogue. A multi-media exhibition that will take over SOMA’s Alter Space gallery through Aug. 30, Water World is a combination of sound and light installations, a collaboration between seven artists, designed to take the visitor through different sea levels that mirror humans’ levels of consciousness.

Viewers begin with “Ark and Surroundings,” a foggy seashore designed by Jeff Ray that features boats and bridges as interactive beings, including a 15-foot sailboat that’s been outfitted with a pipe organ. “Sirens,” by Reenie Charriere, aims to connect ocean pollution with the siren songs that nearly did in Odysseus, using sounds and fabric and barnacles and man-made tapestries, while “El Odor del Agua” explores the importance of access to clean water from the perspective of women living in rural Mexico. On Aug. 26, a musical performance called Flooded at Intersection for the Arts will see, among other artists, SF’s experimental musician Daniel Blomquist exploring the experiences of floods and flood victims, using video footage and audio from tapes that have literally been flooded — recordings that were discarded after being exposed to water.

Maybe most interesting, however, are this year’s site-specific installations. Those willing to bundle up for a trek out to Ocean Beach on July 27 will hear “music for a changing tide,” listening to an original composition by Seattle composer Nat Evans (attendees are encouraged to download the music ahead of time onto an iPod) whose ebbs and flows were designed specifically for watching the tide recede, with one group listening scheduled for twilight and one at sunset.

And on Aug. 3, a program that has Soundwave partnered with the National Parks Service will explore the potential water actually has to create music and art. Travis Johns’ hydroprinting instrument features an invented instrument that makes prints using a sonograph, measuring underwater sound reverberations in the battleship gun pool to create the water-equivalent of a seismograph line, while Jim Haynes — an artist whose bio often begins with “I rust things” — will delve into water as a chemical agent and sound conductor, making music out of amplifying processes like water turning to steam.

The festival will wrap up in late September with what So called “without being cheesy — a love letter to San Francisco,” featuring concerts (artists still TBA) on board an “audioboat” that takes participants around the Bay, with a cruise by the Bay Lights. Soundwave has done concerts on buses since about 2008, says So; this time it was only nature to make the jump to water. (This event is especially worth noting if other offerings like, say, Sept. 21’s Exploratorium performance that includes a meditation on the fear of water and/or drowning isn’t for you.)

“I’m always surprised by what comes back [from the open call for artists’ submissions],” says the director. “I think we don’t want to tell people what to do. There are some social, political pieces here, and some that aren’t at all. But if we can get people to appreciate water, what it means in terms of our daily lives — we drink it, we buy it, we swim in it — we can appreciate it for what it is, and not take it for granted. And we have researchers and city planners and scientists and artists of all kinds coming together for the closing symposium [at CCA Sept. 27-28]. I think the exciting part for a lot of people is ‘Where do we go from here?'”

Soundwave ((6)) Water

Through Sept. 28

www.soundwavesf.com

Events: July 16 – 22, 2014

Michael Redmond
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0

Listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Selector.

WEDNESDAY 16

“The James Webb Space Telescope: Science Potential and Project Status” Randall Museum Theater, 199 Museum Way, SF; www.randallmuseum.org. 7:30pm, free. Tom Greene of NASA Ames Research Center discusses the highly advanced James Webb Space Telescope.

“Lyrics and Dirges” Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck, Berk; www.pegasusbookstore.com. 7:30pm, free. Monthly reading series curated by Sharon Coleman, with Joyce E. Young, Monica Zarazua, Joshua McKinney, Katayoon Zandvakili, Rusty Morrison.

Celeste Ng Book Passage, 1 Ferry Bldg, SF; www.bookpassage.com. 6pm, free. The author shares Everything I Never Told You, her debut novel about a mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio.

THURSDAY 17

“The Heights of Birding in Colombia” First Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin, SF; www.goldengateaudobon.com. 7-9pm, $5. Photographer and birding instructor Bob Lewis shows images of birds he observed in the Colombian mountains. Sponsored by the Golden Gate Audobon Society.

LaborFest 2014 Meet at M stop at 19th and Holloway, SF; www.laborfest.net. 2-3pm, free. Park Merced Housing Walk led by members of the Park Merced Action Committee. Also 518 Valencia, SF. 7pm, donations accepted. “FilmWorks United: International Working Class Film and Video Festival:” “The Plundering” (Ressler, 2013), “Made in the USA: Tom Hudak’s Plan to Cut Your Wages” (Gillespie, 2013), “Judith, Portrait of a Street Vendor” (Pirana, 2013),” and “High Power” (Indulkar).

FRIDAY 18

“Bay Area Now 7” opening night party Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. 8-11pm, $12-15. Celebrate the opening of YBCA’s signature triennial, an exhibit highlighting works by local artists who capture “the spirit of now,” with tunes by Honey Soundsystem.

LaborFest 2014 First Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin, SF; www.laborfest.net. 7pm, donations accepted. “FilmWorks United:” Empire of Shame (Hong, 2013).

SATURDAY 19

“East Bay SPCA Pet Adopt-a-Thon” Jack London Square, Washington at Embarcadero, Oakl; www.jacklondonsquare.com. 10am-3pm, free. Meet your new best friend at this event highlighting East Bay adoption agencies — and the dogs, cats, bunnies, rats, guinea pigs, birds, and reptiles they care for that need new homes. The event also features canine demos and $10 microchip implants.

“GeekGasm” Club OMG, 43 Sixth St, SF; geekGasm.eventbrite.com. 9pm-2am, $5 (free with advance RSVP and before 11pm). Let your inner geek out with fellow nerds, dorks, cosplayers, furries, sci-fi fans, gamers, and gaymers at this party, which features dancing, a costume contest, drink specials, and more.

LaborFest 2014 ILWU Local 34 Hall, 801 Second St, SF; www.laborfest.net. 10am-1pm, free. “Life and Death! The Attack on OSHA, Workers Health and Safety, and Injured Workers” public forum. Also National Japanese American Historical Society, 1684 Post, SF. 2pm, free. “ILWU and Japanese Americans” presentation. Also ILWU Local 34 Hall. 7:30pm, donation. “Movement Energy: A History of May Day and the Eight Hour Day,” performance by the Rockin’ Solidarity Chorus, Sat, 7:30.

Sara Lautman Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission, SF; www.cartoonart.org. 1-3pm, free. The July cartoonist-in-residence shares and discusses her work.

“Meet Your Maker” David Brower Center, 2150 Allston, Berk; www.browercenter.org. Noon-6pm. Free. Celebrate the alternative economies of the Bay Area at this event featuring artisans from Treasure Island Flea, educators from Institute of Urban Homesteading, Urban Ore scavengers, and more, plus a craft market, food trucks, workshops, presentations, and more.

SUNDAY 20

“How a Chinese Game Shaped Modern America” Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF; www.thecjm.org. 1-2pm, free with museum admission ($10-12). Stanford’s Annelise Heinz discusses mah jongg’s journey from China to America’s Jewish community, with a focus on the Catskills and San Francisco. Part of the CJM’s new exhibit, “Project Mah Jongg.”

LaborFest 2014 First Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin, SF; www.laborfest.net. Noon-2pm, free. Reception for “Union Artists and Labor Art,” with works by Attila Cziglenyi, Carol Denny, David Duckworth, and others. Also 240 Second St, SF. Noon, free. “Irish Labor History Walk.” Also Niles Station, 37001 Mission, Fremont. 2pm, $7-12. “All Aboard the Niles Canyon Train and Films,” train ride and film screening at the Edison Theater.

TUESDAY 22

“We Are CA: Glen Denny and Yosemite in the Sixties” California Historical Society, 678 Mission, SF; www.californiahistoricalsociety.org. 6-8pm, $5. Veteran Yosemite climber Denny shares photographs and recounts his experiences climbing with the 1960s icons of “Camp Four.”

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