By Steven T. Jones
These are busy days, so I suppose I’ll just have to dump out the District 6 dirt just a little at a time. That’s cool, considering tomorrow’s deadline for filing pre-election campaign statement will allow me to plow into the freshest compost for y’all. We’re also having a few technical difficulties in getting the audio from Rob Black’s endorsement interview with us online, but that problem should be solved in the next couple days. And it’s worth the wait to hear him squirm in his seat over tough and legitimate questions about how he’s been doing the bidding of the wrong people for awhile now. Stay tuned.
For now, let’s recap yesterday’s Black press conference (which was held in the City Hall Press Room, despite state laws against campaigning in government offices not open to the general public, and just as the Board of Supervisors meeting was starting down the hall).
City Hall
Back to Black
Escape pods
› superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space. Moonlight kisses the city’s knockoff gold metallic Fendi slingbacks, the ones with the sparkly diamantine heels, and slides up the back of its dime-store disco-ball dress — a little slap here, a little tickle there — until it reaches the ragged sunburst of hair at the nape of its neck and launches into daylight, where the real party is these days. And here we all are in our hot-pink neon escape pods, canoodling with the oceanic music, zipping past the anguished twists and turns, the endless downs and downers of the real world, with all the trashy grace and alien style we can muster. Because really, what else can we do? The real world’s moving on without us, easing its oily fingers into annihilation’s tight black hole, ringing torture’s doorbell, its xanthochroous eyes frothing like a million zillion bubbles of electronic beer shampoo. Kure kure takora! Gimme, gimme octopus!
Whoa. What was in that magic truffle? Oh, that’s right. Drugs. Never trust a tranny dressed as Little Bo Creep bearing gifts at a street fair.
Thing is, I’m pretty sure I never ate it — too many empty calories. But in the past month I really wouldn’t have had to. With LoveFest, the Folsom Street Fair, the new Summer Music Conference, and umpteen outdoor parties, we’ve finally found a way to stretch the wondrous, hallucinatory panties of Burning Man across an entire month.
Suits me just fine. Hey, some of us ain’t rich enough to spend a whole week toodling around the high desert in a crotch-scented sarong. Better we get the Man delivered right to our back door. (Oh, and to all you fabulous burners: I’m still waiting for my thank-you gifts. While you were out spiritually saving the universe, I was covering for your sandy, goddess-loving cracks at work.)
So with all the amazing things going on — the herd of giraffes raving outside City Hall, the leather corsets winking in the sunshine like semaphore come-ons, the perverts and the children joining hands — it was easy to let one’s mind wander, to drift like a sea monkey up to the top of the tank and climb out for a better look.
Was there any meaning to it all? Thousands and thousands of shiny, happy lovers taking to the streets again and again, completely unencumbered, it seemed, by any overt political message. Totally stripped of any frustrated protest. After a while it got kinda weird. I admit, I’m a little old-school. When people used to tell me it was foolish to think parties could change the world in a practical way, I’d hand my two good earrings to the sister standing next to me and tear into their skinny, cynical asses like a wet gremlin. But the whole “change the world” pie in the sky no longer seems on the menu.
I raised a brow this year when one of the LoveFest organizers told me the party’s big ambition was to be a “shining star of love in the current night.” I howled with laughter at the folks who paid $90-plus to go to one of the giant Folsom-oriented leather parties. (Guess we’re not all in this together.) And hardly a single call to any real-world revolution did my Cuervo-crossed eyes see, not even an artistic one. (What a horrible drag all that political stuff is. Embarrassing.)
Was it too much to ask for even just one giant Bush puppet? There was a time not long ago when you couldn’t climb out of the Dumpster without the papier-mache fingers of one of those goddamn things getting caught in your brand-new used wig.
Of course things happened behind the scenes. Folsom donates thousands of dollars to organizations for people in need. Burning Man and LoveFest and all the rest “keep the creativity flowing.” And who would argue that no greater good can come from a monthlong blast of mind-blowing music or a tattooed musclebear from Paris trying to pick you up? (Too bad I’d seen his pornos. I just couldn’t deal with his “sex face.”)
But I had some classic grumpy-hippie flashbacks: Where was all the anger!? What the heck are we fighting for!? Fuck the man! Have we become so disillusioned with our own outspokenness after six long years of virtual political ineffectiveness that we now channel all our practical energy into the personal realm? Or did we just need, for once, to escape the endless fighting and get it on? Are parties now just cosmic battery rechargers? I wondered: what exactly is “the love”?
Then I threw on my banana yellow poncho and break-danced with a blue gorilla, sparkling like a Texan’s sequined chaps. Truffle, anyone? SFBG
MONDAY
Aug. 21
Hearing
Animal vs. vegetable
Say yay or nay to off-leash areas and protecting native plants in one minute or less at the Recreation and Park Commission’s continued hearing from last week on its Natural Areas Plan. (Deborah Giattina)
8:30 a.m.
City Hall
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, room 416, SF
www.parks.sfgov.org
Music
Thor
Actor-bodybuilder-heavy metal warrior Thor gets his share of kitschy, ironic press coverage, and that’s to be expected when you go around wearing codpieces, bending steel rods with your teeth, and belting out songs called “Thunder on the Tundra” and “We Are Body Rock.” Yes, Thor’s act – which also tends to involve exploding hot water bottles, broken cinder blocks, and multiple costume changes – is over the top, but it’s also one of the more oddly uplifting experiences in rock these days. Now 30-plus years into his career, Thor has a new, improved band, as well as a new album, Devastation of Musculation (Smog Veil). (Will York)
With Zolar X
9 p.m.
12 Galaxies
2565 Mission, SF
$12
(415) 970-9777
www.12galaxies.com
The press censors the press
Well, well. Today’s Chronicle/Hearst had some big stories on its front page, including a story by its City Hall reporter headed “SF Residents asked to volunteer for a day.” The lead: “Mayor Gavin Newsom today will call on all San Francisco residents to take time out and give a day to their city.” And there were at the top of the page some teaser heads, “After 25 years-still want your MTV? C. W. Nevius on Mel Gibson’s tirade. Bruce Jenkins on baseball’s busy day.” And a big across- the- front – page story, framed in yellow with a white sun, saying, “If you thought last week was hot…More heat, rising ocean, loss of snowpack forecast by the state for 2l00.” Nifty. All legitimate stories.
But way inside on the business page was the hottest local story for San Francisco, the region, and the newspaper business. It was Hearst’s joyful policy announcement story headlined “Bay Area papers cleared for sale to MediaNews, Federal agency’s antitrust review ends with approval.” Our earlier two blogs pointing out the lousy Hearst coverage (and lousy coverage by the other papers involved in the deal) must have done a bit of good. I emailed the obvious questions in my blog to Hearst, but Hearst didn’t reply and Hearst and the other participating papers didn’t answer the questions in their stories, but they did do a bit better with the DOJ story. At least, after I chided them for leaving out a key point in their minimalist stories reporting how a federal judge refused to grant a temporary restraining order in the Clint Reilly/Joe Alioto suit, they asked Alioto if he and Reilly were going to press on with their suit. They are, as I reported exclusively on my blogs. Finally, Hearst et al did publish this fact in their stories. The Mercury-News put it as the last paragraph to its story.
However, the stories by Hearst and the other participant papers read as if nobody ever bothered to check the court documents in the case or at least the Alioto reply memorandum in support of his motion for a temporary restraining order.
What Alioto argued is that Hearst and MediaNews (Singleton), and the other billionaire partners (Gannett and Stephens), have no use for facts nor principles in their move to regional monopoly. Case in point: Back in 2000, when Reilly tried to block Hearst from buying the family-owned Chronicle and shutting down its own Examiner and establish a morning monopoly, Hearst argued that there was no reason to fear a newspaper monopoly in San Francisco because competitors from other Bay Area cities, such as the San Jose Mercury-News and Contra Costa Times, would provide serious competition.
“Specifically,” Alioto stated, “Hearst argued that all of the Bay Area newspapers compete with each other in the Greater Bay Area, and that this competition, both actual and potential, has a tempering effect on the behavior of the competing papers.”
Now, of course, Hearst is arguing the opposite-that these outlying papers are not competitors with the Chronicle and never will be. Alioto pointed out that Federal Judge Vaughn Walker, in ruling against Reilly and for Hearst in that case, agreed with Hearst’s argument and quoted extensively from Walker’s decision. Alioto continued that, “at the very least, this court ought to hold a hearing on a motion for a preliminary injunction, if not a trial, to find out why Hearst and the other defendants are now ignoring and running away from the position taken by Hearst in the prior lawsuit.”
Alioto also pointed out why the contention of Hearst et al that there will be no allocation of markets and anti-competitive behavior is “ludicrous on its face.” Let me give you the precise quote that ought to have been in every honest story on this case:
“Although defendants disclaim the existence of their agreement to allocate markets, and Hearst professes that it will have no role in the combination’s subsequent stewardship of Bay Area newspapers, the claim is ludicrous on it face. Hearst cannot expect this court or anyone else to believe that it is shelling out $263,200,000 simply to buy and deliver the Monterey Herald to its Bay Area competitors to gain an interest in its competitors’ markets outside the Bay Area, without receiving any assurance or reaching any understanding that it will be protected against future competition in the Bay Area from its new partners. Such a claim strains credibility to say the least. Indeed, the role of Hearst in this combination, coming to the aid of its competitor MediaNews, can be explained most logically and cogently only by Hearst’s participation in the combination alleged in the complaint. Otherwise, Hearst’s motivation is truly mystyifying and Byzantine. If ever Occam’s razor ought to be applied, it is here.”
Let’s have a show of hands. Has anyone seen this quote and point, or a summary thereof, in any Chronicle, Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News, Monterey Herald or Associated Press story, or any other Hearst/Singleton/Gannett/Stephens/McClatchy paper anywhere in the country? The larger question: will you ever see this quote as the suit plays out and the messy facts begin to emerge about one of the sorriest chapters in American journalism?
Today, John Simerman of the Contra Costa Times reported breathlessly, in a story headlined “MediaNews looks to set standard for papers online,” that Media News “hopes to harness its newfound Bay Area newspaper dominance on the internet into a regional website that aims to be a model for how old guard newspapers can work and make money online.” He also reported that MediaNews was in “very preliminary” talks with Hearst “about a joint Internet venture that could be run under the BayArea.com name.”
I suggest they first learn to cover local news.
Repeating: one city monopoly is now becoming regional monopoly and the monopolizing powers are now censoring the news toward that end. Alas, that is a terrible harbinger for Bay Area communities, for journalism, and for the free press provisions of the First Amendment. Let us all hoist a Potrero Hill martini for Clint Reilly and Attorneys Joe Alioto and Daniel Shulman.
Check the story yourself and in particular the Alioto/Shulman filings. Click here. B3
WEDNESDAY
JUlY 26
EVENT
Disabilities Act anniversary
Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco, and the Mayor’s Office on Disablility invite you to a celebration of the 16th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, with keynote speaker Mayor Gavin Newsom, food, fun, and entertainment. (Deborah Giattina)
11 a.m.-1 p.m.
City Hall, South Light Court
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF
Free
(415) 554-6789
MUsic
Will Bernard Trio
Kicking off the North Beach Jazz Festival on Wednesday evening are 20-plus free jazz performances. My pick for opening night is the funky jazz trio led by guitarist Will Bernard, who has worked with the best of the best in jazz and funk including T.J. Kirk and Robert Walter. His work in Walter’s 20th Congress made the keyboard master opine that “he is one of the greatest musicians I’ve come into contact with.” (Joseph DeFranceschi)
8 p.m.
Magnet
1402 Grant, SF
Free
(415) 271-5760
www.nbjazzfest.com
Saving local industry
EDITORIAL It’s almost an axiom in San Francisco planning policy: High-end housing drives out industry. That’s only logical: When people buy million-dollar condos, they don’t expect to get woken up in the middle of the night by delivery trucks or deal with the smell of diesel fuel or look out their windows at barrels of chemicals. When the dot-com boom turned parts of South of Market into a housing mecca for the newly rich and hip, the problem became serious: Businesses (including some nightclubs) that had been around for years and were operating entirely within the law, conducting operations that were well within the existing zoning, found themselves under attack from an influx of residents who considered many of the traditional uses of the area to be nuisances.
As high-end housing creeps farther and farther into San Francisco’s industrial areas and the Planning Department continues to push for expensive housing in the southeast neighborhoods, the potential for even more clashes — which tend to end with an industrial business being forced either to leave or to spend a fortune revamping its operations — just grows.
The simple answer, of course, is to stop building pricey condos in industrial areas. But it’s unlikely that anyone at City Hall is going to put a total halt to housing construction in or near industrial areas, so at the very least there ought to be some protection for existing businesses. Sup. Sophie Maxwell has introduced legislation that would bar newcomers to an area from taking legal action to define existing legal industrial activities as public or private nuisances. That means people who move within 150 feet of a business that’s been around for two or more years and conforms to the local zoning laws would simply have to deal with the regular impacts of living next to industry. The law would also require that anyone selling a housing unit adjacent to an industrial area inform the buyers in clear language that there might be noise, odor, or visual issues. If that brings down the price of condos in the southeast, so much the better.
It’s a simple proposal that makes perfect sense. The supervisors ought to approve it. SFBG
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› tredmond@sfbg.com
Wow: A little more drunkenness and a bit of public nudity, and San Francisco could have had a real world-class soccer party Sunday. As it was, things were pretty darn festive: I was too busy chasing the kids around and watching the game to get a good count, but I bet there were 15,000 people at Dolores Park, more than I’ve seen in one place in the Mission for anything short of a big antiwar rally. The sun was shining, the mood was upbeat, people waved French and Italian flags around and cheered when either side scored a goal… what a great event.
And it only happened because a German-born former teacher named Jens-Peter Jungclaussen, who is traveling around in a bus trying to bring the world to local kids, decided to get the permits, line up a big-screen TV and a huge forklift, and pull it off.
And as I stood there and marveled at how one motivated person could create a massive civic event, I had to wonder: Why can’t the Recreation and Park Department do stuff like this?
How hard would it have been for the city to rent the TV screen (or better, three or four screens; there were so many people the ones in the back could barely see), put out the word (Jungclaussen did, as far as I can tell, no advertising — the whole thing was by e-mail and word of mouth), and maybe even do this in half a dozen places around town?
It’s funny, when you think of it: So much of the fun stuff that happens in San Francisco is done by private groups. The street fairs, the festivals, the concerts… the city does almost none of this. Even the Fourth of July fireworks are run by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Rec-Park spends a lot of time pissing people off, making dumb rules about permits that make even the private events harder to finance. It’s a nest of bureaucrats without any vision.
This ought to be a wake-up call: There are all sorts of things that can bring people together. There are all sorts of ways to spend the public’s money helping the public have fun (and along the way, reminding people why we pay taxes).
You want to cough up extra money every year to pay someone to tell you that you can’t drink beer in North Beach? I don’t either — but a few events like Sunday’s impromptu festival in Dolores Park, and one of the most loathed agencies at City Hall could become one of the most loved.
Think about it, folks.
Now this: I think just about every Guardian reader in the world has noticed that we’ve had some serious Web problems in the past few weeks. We got hit with something — maybe an attack, we’re still not sure — on Election Day, and whatever it was pretty much fried sfbg.com, and we’ve been limping along ever since.
But we’re back now and way better with a bunch of big changes that we’d been planning anyway. Sfbg.com now has a new design, a (much, much) faster user interface — and several new blogs that will be updated daily and full of everything you need to know about politics, arts, culture, and the unconventional wisdom of San Francisco.
It’s still a work in progress, but it’s going to be a lot easier to tell us what you think. SFBG
WEDNESDAY
Ex-Boyfriends
Sobering up and tucking our rainbow gear safely away for next year, we should reflect on Pride’s flamboyant declarations of unconditional love and acceptance during a time of right-wing political backlash by thinking about the struggles that Bay Area queers are faced with on a daily basis – which are, of course, endless breakups and the makeups that follow. All drama aside, you can be sure that the trio of Colin, Chriso, and Peter is one set of Ex-Boyfriends that you’ll actually be happy to see in a bar with your new honey on your hip, as the boys return with their own special brand of “more-fuckable- than-thou” queer pop rock. (Jenny Miyasaki)
With Music for Animals and Sholi
9:30 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$8
(415) 861-5016
EVENT
LaborFest 2006 opening night
Come to the first event of LaborFest 2006, which celebrates laborers through film, art, tours, and talks. This year’s monthlong event focuses on the workers who rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, beginning with a reception for “1906/2006 Rebuilding: Then and Now Workers Building the Bay Area,” an exhibit of images from a new collection of photographs of the workers. (Deborah Giattina)
5 p.m.
San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery
City Hall, Lower Level
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF
Free
(415) 867-0628
Bad news for Prop. A
By Tim Redmond
City Hall
Prop. A seems to be falling behind, although an hour ago it looked like a winner. A very sound measure addressing a real civic crisis — and it goes down because the cops try to make it about Chris Daly (who had a bad night, too).
Ugh.
What it all means
By Tim Redmond
At City Hall
This was an excellent night for labor and tenants, and to a certain extent, for Gavin Newsom. It was a lousy night for Carole Migden, Tony Hall, Joe O’Donoghue, and Clint Reilly.
more fun at City Hall
By Tim Redmond
Well, we keep crunching numbers here, and they keep looking grim for Janet Reilly. The latest, with more than half the votes in, shows Ma getting almost 60 percent of the election-day vote. Combined with her strong absentees, I think Ma is the clear winner here.
Fun facts: In San Francisco, Angelides is at 51 percent, and Westly is at 43 percent, so Carole Migden’s guy is getting trounced on her home turf.
more results — DCCC
By Tim Redmond
At City Hall
More than half the precincts are in, and we know what the 13th AD Democratic County Central Committee will look like, more or less.
The top 12 right now:
Bierman, Campos, Katz, Wiener, Thier, Spanjian, Goldstein, Haaland, Barnes, Crowley, Mandleman, Julian.
On the cusp: Cassiol, Paulson, Martinez, and Galbreath.
Pretty close to the Guardian slate.
The winners are
By Tim Redmond
At City Hall
OK, we can now fairly safely project most of the local races. Leland Yee is way ahead in SF, and trailing only slightly in San Mateo, so Yee will be our next state senator. Janet Reilly isn’t looking good at all, so we may be facing Assemblymember Fiona Ma (ick, I’m voting for the Green Party candidate, Barry Hermanson).
On the props:
Prop. A, the violence-prevention measure, is coming up fast, winning the election-day vote by 51 percent, and will almost certainly prevail.
Prop. B, the eviction-disclosure measure, is a winner.
Prop. C, the Transbay Terminal governance plan, is toast.
Prop. D, the Laguna Honda measure, is burnt toast.
We will be back shortly with the county central committee.
Not good for Reilly
By Tim Redmond
At City Hall
Well, with a little over 10 percent of the precincts counted, the numbers don’t look good for Janet Reilly. After you back out the absentees, the election-day votes are running 59 percent in favor of Fiona Ma. Things will have to change pretty quick for Reilly to have a chance at all.
It appears at this point that the high-powered, well-funded negative attack ads have taken their toll.