By Steven T. Jones
The next Board of Supervisors race would appear to be only a faint blip on the horizon — coming as it does after this year’s mayor’s race, the presidential primary a year from now, and the state primary fight in June ’08 that will feature the Leno-Migden battle royale — but contenders are already starting to position themselves. Nowhere is that happening quicker than in District 9, where Tom Ammiano will vacate his seat and try to smoothly hand it over to the man he considers his heir apparent, David Campos, who has been quietly lining up support all over town. Police reform advocates were happy to see Police Commissioner Campos hold out for a tougher early intervention system, a bold move that showed he’s not as afraid of the Police Officers Association as too many pols are here in town. And Campos is likely to have the queer community solidly behind him. But the heart of Dist. 9 is in the Mission and Campos is likely to face a strong challenger from longtime Mission activist Eric Quezada, and maybe day laborer advocate Renee Saucedo, who ran against Ammiano last time. And from the more conservative side of the equation, Miguel Bustos will also likely throw his hat into the ring, although this is one of the city’s most lefty districts. So, almost two years early, this is already looking like it’s going to be a Campos-Quezada slugfest. Dontcha just love politics?
Conservative
Fast start in 9
Bad day for board conservatives
By Steven T. Jones
Sup. Sean Elsbernd is the smartest conservative on the Board of Supervisors, but he may now be regretting his latest effort to challenge city spending. This afternoon, he took issue with a $642,000 budget appropriation intended to offset federal cuts in funding for AIDS programs. Given the city’s commitment to provide universal health care this year, Elsbernd said, “We need to be very cognizant of how we spend Department of Public Health money.” He wasn’t convinced that the programs actually needed the money, a stand that drew impassioned replies from several supervisors in defense of the city’s barely adequate response to this deadly epidemic. Ultimately, only newbie Sup. Ed Jew joined Elsbernd in voting against giving more money to help fight AIDS in San Francisco, a stand that probably took more balls than brains.
It wasn’t a banner day for the board conservatives. Jew also lost on his effort to send back to committee a proposal by Sup. Jake McGoldrick to ask the Municipal Transportation Agency to reduce the price of MUNI Fast Passes for 18-24 year olds. On Feb. 21, Jew and McGoldrick were the only members present on the City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee because Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier was absent once again. The two men deadlocked on whether to pass the measure on the full board, so McGoldrick later exercised his right to get the signatures of three other supervisors and call the measure to the full board. This prompted Jew to write a petulant commentary in today’s Examiner. McGoldrick was willing to continue the matter for a week (which the board ultimately did) so there wouldn’t be an appearance of trying to avoid a full public debate, but Jew and Alioto-Pier insisted on sending it back to committee. It was a fairly audacious stand for Alioto-Pier, who has by far the worst attendance record on the board, but hardly surprising. Jew, for his part, once again proved himself a quixotic and ineffective rookie. But hopefully he’s learning his lessons.
Views of Iwo Jima
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima has been met with near-unanimous stateside praise for its humanistic portrayal of the infamous 1945 battle. It became the first film primarily in the Japanese language to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar — on Feb. 25 it vies for an Academy Award in that category and three others. Eastwood himself has called it a "Japanese film." But how have Japanese audiences and critics responded?
There’s been a spate of Hollywood productions set in Japan in recent years — Lost in Translation, The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, to name a few. Each film scored various degrees of commercial success in the United States, but most Japanese audiences agreed that the portrayals of Japanese ranged from well-meaning but a little bit off to downright offensive. With the exception of The Last Samurai, which rode Tom Cruise’s popularity, none performed particularly well at the Japanese box office.
Letters was met with considerable anticipation as soon as the production was announced. Word spread that Eastwood was considering having a Japanese filmmaker direct the project. (He reportedly muttered, "Akira Kurosawa would’ve been perfect.") Once it was confirmed that Eastwood would be taking the helm himself, there were equal amounts of excitement and skepticism. In Japan, Eastwood had been one of the most highly regarded American filmmakers for many years, particularly after Unforgiven, whose fresh treatment of the western genre resonated with samurai movie fans. Yet given the track record of American directors taking on Japan, some suspicion was inevitable.
Letters‘ companion piece, Flags of Our Fathers, opened first, to generally rave reviews, with solid if unspectacular box office numbers. Letters made its world premiere in Tokyo on Nov. 15, 2006, and opened theatrically Dec. 9, 11 days ahead of the US release. To date it’s grossed more than $41 million in Japan (and still going strong), as opposed to a mere $10 million in the US, despite the Oscar nomination and the praise heaped on the film. (Flags, by comparison, grossed $33 million here and $29 million in Japan.) Pop star Kazunari Ninomiya, one of the notable cast members, helped draw a younger audience, many of whom reported having been averse to war movies until taking the leap with this film.
A quick survey of published reviews and blogs in Japan indicated that critics and audiences alike have responded with extremely, if not unanimously, positive comments. Historians have indicated that with the exception of some minor inaccuracies, the film is well researched and essentially true to the events that occurred, while film reviewers have already anointed it a masterpiece for our times. Here’s a sampling of some comments found:
"If one were to see this film without any prior knowledge of its director or production team, there would be no reason to believe this isn’t a bona fide Japanese film."
"When the two films are seen together, there’s a chemical reaction that’s never before seen in the history of cinema."
"Seeing the American soldiers fill the beach, I’d wonder if Doc [from Flags] is somewhere in that crowd. That’s when I realized the effect that seeing both films can have."
"Japanese American writer Iris Yamashita deserves tremendous praise for the incredible detail with which she depicts what is, for her, essentially a foreign story."
"My generation grew up watching films that showed the ugliness and cruelty of Japanese Imperial soldiers, so I didn’t know how to respond to seeing such proud and beautiful Japanese soldiers in Letters."
To be sure, some have also pointed out blemishes. Chief among them is lead Ninomiya’s all-too-modern speech, which for some Japanese viewers sticks out awkwardly from an otherwise well-executed deployment of the language used during World War II. Cast members Tsuyoshi Ihara and Ryo Kase (who delivers the finest, most underrated performance in the film as the former military police officer Shimizu) have mentioned in interviews that the tight time frame from casting to filming prevented them from being fully prepared for their period-specific roles, and they admit details of the era were missed. Many of the cast members reportedly crowded inside Ihara’s hotel room to watch a DVD demonstrating proper Imperial soldier salutes.
That said, those same actors praise Eastwood for keeping his eye on the big picture and focusing more on the characters’ emotions than the period details. They also give him credit for being extremely open to ideas from the cast. "He’s always standing next to the actors," Kase says. "And if we suggest trying something different, he would always say, ‘OK, let’s try it.’ " Ken Watanabe is said to have personally taken on the task of adjusting the translated dialogue on set to sound more natural and accurate.
It’s not surprising, then, that one of the most often heard comments from Japanese viewers was the following: "Tough to admit, but this is a more Japanese film than even a Japanese director might create." More than a few critics and bloggers have pointed out their mixed feelings that such a remarkable "Japanese film" was made by an American filmmaker. The comments range from expressions of frustration and embarrassment — "Why couldn’t this masterpiece of a portrait about the Japanese experience have been made in Japan?" — to one of gratitude: "The film was made possible only because of an outside perspective like Eastwood’s."
The comments are similar to those I heard while traveling to Japan five times during the past two years as a coproducer of the new HBO documentary White Light/Black Rain, directed by Steven Okazaki. We were there to shoot interviews with survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many documentaries — both in Japan and the US — have tackled the subject before, but surprisingly few have focused on the stories of survivors. Filmmakers, peace activists, and survivors all expressed appreciation for our endeavors but admitted embarrassment that an American production was taking on the important duty.
Indeed, many seem to concede the Japanese film industry is currently incapable of producing films like Letters or White Light that dare to expose the horrific consequences of war. The increasingly conservative society has seen a recent surge in the movement to remove Article 9 of the Constitution, which forbids the nation from maintaining an army, navy, or air force. Reflecting the growing nationalism and the call for remilitarization, recent Japanese blockbusters such as Aegis, Yamato, and Lorelei depict the Japanese military defending the nation in war or against terrorism, though they stop just short of glorifying battle. Even warriors from a different age — the samurai — appear to be gaining in onscreen popularity once again.
In this climate, Letters appears to have had a cathartic effect on the Japanese audience. What many had felt yet couldn’t fully voice, the film spoke loud and clear. Though the awareness of the Pacific War had been waning among the younger generations, the success of the film has spawned new books and TV documentaries renewing interest in the period and sending people rushing to try to visit Iwo Jima. (Because of the US military presence on the island, access is extremely limited.) Most important, Eastwood’s dual-film concept has more than accomplished its objective of offering a perspective from both sides of the battle. Japanese reviews of Flags often mentioned some degree of surprise at seeing the hardships encountered by American soldiers during the war and their ability to emotionally identify with the American characters. And Letters, in turn, has been embraced in Japan. As one blogger wrote, "That the film’s creators broke down the walls of race and language to make this film that has moved so many people on both sides may be the best response to war yet." *
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
Now playing in Bay Area theaters
For a discussion between Taro Goto and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa about Letters from Iwo Jima and the films of Clint Eastwood, please go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
Singleton buys another daily paper and further locks up the Bay Area market .Where’s the U.S. Attorney General and the California Attorney General?
By Bruce B. Brugmann
And so it comes to pass that Dean Singleton, already weighted down with 56 daily newspapers and l20 non-dailies in l3 states, including a virtual monopoly of the Bay Area daily market, is buying the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
The story in the San Jose Mercury News/Singleton paper is a snapshot of how things stand in California journalism.The announcement came from out of state (Singleton himself from his Denver headquarters). The paper was bought in a quick shuffle aimed at giving Singleton an even tighter lock on the Bay Area market: Ottaway of New York, a subsidiary of Dow Jones, sells to another New York-based firm (Community Newspaper Holdings Inc) two months ago. And then CNHI sells to Singleton and Singleton says without blushing in a house press release, “We are delighted to accquire the Santa Cruz Sentinel and expand our reach in this very competitive region. The Sentinel is a fine newspaper today but it will be strengthened by the resources of our existing papers.” Chop, chop, whack, whack.
Technically, the Sentinel will be acquired by a Singleton-controlled entity called the California Newspaper Partnership, with the Gannett chain headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, and Stephens Media, out of Las Vegas and Little Rock, Arkansas, as the remaining partners. Meanwhile, as the newly unsealed federal court documents show, Singleton out of Denver and Hearst out of New York have been collaborating on several levels and Hearst is now a major investor with Singleton and helping finance his acquisitions.
This is Singleton’s modus operandi: he doesn’t compete, he clusters and collaborates. I once asked him, back when the old Hearst Examiner was up for sale, why he didn’t come to town and buy it. “Dean,” I said, “come to San Francisco and compete with the Chronicle and we’ll make a real man out of you.” Nope, he replied in five words, “Too much energy, no profit.” And that was that. In short, Singleton and his “competitors” are now partners and there will be no real daily newspaper competition in the Bay area. Why is the only major impediment to this monopoly mess Clint Reilly and his attorneys Joe Alioto and Dan Shulman? Where is the outrage?
Repeating: where is the U.S. Attorney General and the California Attorney General as the monopoly noose of ever more conservative newspapers tightens on one of the world’s most liberal and civilized areas?
Not a peep from former AG Bill Lockyer, who lived under the thumb of Singleton in Hayward with the Hayward Review, and not a peep from current AG Jerrry Brown, who lives under the Singleton thumb in Oakland with the
Tribune and an East Bay monopoly now stretching all the way south to Santa Cruz and Monterey and north to Vallejo. Thank God there are three lively alternative newspapers in the area: the Santa Cruz Good Times and the Santa Cruz Metro and the Monterey County Weekly in nearby Seaside. There’s now even more for them to do. B3
No joy
By Steven T. Jones
Contrary to the demented hopes of conservative ideologues like the Examiner’s Ken Garcia, there is no joy on the left over the sordid sex scandal that has now engulfed Mayor Gavin Newsom. Sure, it opens up this year’s mayor’s race and illustrates some of the character flaws of Newsom’s administration, which have manifested themselves in how he conducts himself professionally, not just personally. But nobody’s happy to see this, not the Guardian (which has also heard these rumors for the last six months but couldn’t confirm the story enough to print it) nor the politicians and activists on the left. Several of them happened to be gathered last night when the news hit, and I can tell you there was no glee in that room. Sup. Chris Daly’s public comments have been respectful and reserved and in private, he genuinely felt bad for Alex Tourk. Everybody did. Matt Gonzalez, who has been rumored to be considering a run for mayor, spent more time considering how this incident places City Hall in a bad light and in legal jeopardy than he did calculating his own prospects. And my sweetie Alix Rosenthal, who is president of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the other women in the room are bracing for attempts to inappropriately delve into Ruby Tourk’s private life and are ready to fight back if Newsom’s people or their proxies go that route.
In the coming days or weeks, after the shock of this wears off and it becomes acceptable to make jokes or calculate its political implications, we’ll rejoin the battle for this city’s soul and actively try to help point the way forward from here. But today, we’re all just shaking our heads.
Who’s the poseur at City Hall?
By G.W. Schulz
San Francisco has always been notoriously behind statewide on skatepark construction, despite the relatively small monetary investment they require and the high civic value they produce. One spot already exists at Crocker Amazon Park, but it’s largely regarded as mediocre. Conservative states years ago were funding the construction of skateparks through their public works departments and allowing young skaters to participate in the designs. Shit, rural Kansas was doing it a long time ago.
Taking on term limits
EDITORIAL It’s time to take a look at what legislative term limits are doing to San Francisco. Assemblymember Mark Leno, who is really just hitting his stride as one of the most effective members of the state legislature, is in his last term in office. Supervisors Chris Daly and Aaron Peskin, who are two of the most effective members of the Board of Supervisors, are in their final terms. Supervisor Tom Ammiano, who is the institutional memory of the left in city hall, will be gone in another two years.
In fact, Ammiano is a good case study for what’s wrong with term limits. The supervisor from District 9 has always been strong on the issues, but in his first few years on the board, he had trouble getting his bills through. That was in part due to a hostile board majority, but it was also, frankly, a matter of inexperience: over time Ammiano has convinced even some of his harshest critics that he’s a capable, reasonable lawmaker who can hammer out compromises that make good public policy. The recent universal health care bill is an example, something that might have been very difficult for a newbie supervisor to negotiate.
Ammiano has announced he’s running for State Assembly (when Leno is termed out), which is fine for him, but the board will lose an important presence when he’s gone. And losing Peskin and Daly (along with Sophie Maxwell, Gerardo Sandoval, and Jake McGoldrick) all within the next four years will shake up a board that has become the center of progressive policy development in San Francisco.
Term limits have been, by and large, the creature of conservative activists who want to increase the power of the executive branch and get rid of longtime liberal legislators, who, by virtue of representing safe urban districts, can often accumulate considerable seniority and power. (Witness Ron Dellums, Maxine Waters, and yes, Nancy Pelosi.) On a national level it’s well established that a strong (often too strong) chief executive can only be tempered by allowing members of Congress to serve long enough to develop the skills, contacts, and political bases to keep the presidency in check. On the state level six-year limits in the assembly and eight-year limits in the State Senate have shifted enormous political clout to the governor — and to the lobbyists, who have no term limits and now often know more about issues than newly minted legislators.
We’ve always been against term limits. If former assembly speaker Willie Brown hadn’t been so arrogant and corrupt, term limits for the legislature might never have passed in California. Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez is working on a proposal to soften the limits slightly (possibly to allow 14 years of service in either house), and that’s a good idea.
Here in San Francisco, the board ought to start work on a charter amendment to modify term limits for supervisors. Ideally, we’d like to see an end to term limits altogether, but at the very least, the two-term limit should be extended to three terms.
The only credible argument for term limits was the threat of unaccountable incumbents running rampant. But with district elections and public financing, that’s not much of a threat in San Francisco. And San Francisco voters seem quite willing these days to vote people out who aren’t doing the job: it didn’t take term limits to get Dan Kelly off the school board.
It’s always tricky for incumbent politicians to do something that smacks of extending their own job security, but the truth is, term limits are bad for the public. The supervisors shouldn’t be afraid to come out and say that. *
A new “golden age?”
By Tim Redmond
The bloggers are having a bit of fun with The Chronicle’s front-page New Year’s Eve assertion that San Francisco’s Golden Age is here again. I have to agree with Beyond Chron — the story was an embarassment that quoted only conservative, wealthy San Franciscans and ignored much of the city.
Yeah, reporter Carl Nolte, who is a good guy (and my neighbor in Bernal Heights) made the point that there have always been problems in San Francisco, including today. But his overall theme — that all this new development and soaring housing costs are somehow good for the city — is a crock.
I’m always the optimist, and I think that 2006 was a great year for local politics. But a “Golden Age?” No: what’s happening in the local economy is that San Francisco is becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. We are building housing for people who don’t live here, and destroying jobs for people who do.
I’ve argued in the past that in a boom-band-bust city, the busts are often better than the booms. That’s because the single greatest quality-of-life issue for most people (the non-rich) in San Francisco is the cost of housing. This boom is only golden for a very few.
F stands for family …
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
It is not — finally — a good moment to be a social conservative, as the Republicans have finally failed enough on so many fronts that their failure is being acknowledged. Evidence increasingly suggests large segments of the population don’t really care that much about the terrifying threat of gay marriage, don’t want to turn the clock way back on abortion rights, and prefer keeping church and state as they’re supposed to be: separate. Whatever happened to "family values"?
Maybe folks outside such crazy-liberal enclaves as our own have at last realized that the old mom–dad–2.5 children under one roof equation is an outdated ideal simply because so few people are living it anymore. (Statistics recently confirmed that two-parent households are now indeed in the minority nationally.)
If the movies generally reflect how the public wants to see itself, then 2006 suggested to a large extent that few viewers see the point of happy traditional-family portraiture, even as fantasy material. It used to be that conflict often arose when external circumstances yanked characters from their snug, supposedly normal domestic setup. Now things are usually unstable from the get-go: parents (if both are present) at each other’s throats, kids in alienated crisis, any contented people likely to be delusional (and probably well medicated).
Thus it shouldn’t have been such a surprise, maybe, that the year’s big sleeper was Little Miss Sunshine — a family road trip movie in which everybody who’s old enough to have an opinion loathes everyone else, mostly for good reason. Saddling each relationship with maximum dysfunction, winking at attempted suicide and the appearance of pederasty, the smugly clever script allowed audiences to feel superior to the hapless Hoover clan even as they bought into caring about them. (I didn’t dislike the movie, but it seemed more cynically manipulative than was acknowledged.) Maybe medium-black comedy is the new warm-and-fuzzy comedy for jaded urbanites. If so, it was a surprise that the film adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’s memoir Running with Scissors didn’t do better, since it offered more spectacular bad parenting, growing pains appallingly handled, mockery of basic room and board issues, terrible sexual initiations — and was based on a purportedly true story.
Less-farcical treatment of multihousehold toxicity drives the excellent Little Children, which not only sports the year’s strongest treatment of a pederast (apart from the documentary Deliver Us from Evil) but sees nearly every parent-child and spousal relationship in it unravel in a humid miasma of discontent. Ditto the little-seen but admirable 12 and Holding, whose juvenile protagonists act out in all the wrong ways after one of their friends is accidentally killed. Still, they’re in better mental health than the adults supposedly minding them. Then there are those House of Windsor inbreds who stick together through The Queen. Not that they have any alternatives: in contrast to normal folk, they seem as odd, unnerving, and extinction-bound as a herd of dodoes.
Just about the only nuclear family units onscreen in 2006 were in full-on peril: a mutant clan laying siege to the suburban one (whose members only stop arguing once they start getting killed) in The Hills Have Eyes; Gael García Bernal as a malicious usurper avenging himself on deadbeat dad William Hurt’s new, improved family in The King; Judi Dench acting as a flying wedge to drive apart school colleague Cate Blanchett’s home in Notes on a Scandal; Babel seeing danger everywhere for reckless children and the grown-ups who fail to protect them. Even without kids to worry about, the couples in antiromantic comedy The Break-Up, current upscale drama The Painted Veil, and French marital fry-up Gabrielle can hardly get away from each other fast enough.
What little sentimentality there was to be found in these areas came in suspect packages. Aaron Eckhart’s divorced tobacco industry public relations whiz in Thank You for Smoking may be a slimebag and a tool (and know it), but hey, he still wants his kid to look up to him. It’s the one plot point this movie doesn’t treat with total sarcasm — which only makes the ersatz heartwarmingness queasier. Fairly straight-up family values could be found in movies as diverse as World Trade Center, Apocalypto, The Fountain, and Rocky Balboa — but the one thing uniting those titles is that in important ways they’re all psychologically bogus.
Things look a lot better in the realm of alternative family setups, which this year encompassed such genuinely adventuresome movies as Quinceañera and Shortbus. In less politically correct realms, substitute dads were where you found them — in the mob boss (The Departed), crackhead teacher (Half Nelson), or suicidal gay uncle (Little Miss Sunshine) — but despite their flaws, they were still better than the real, biological item. On the other hand, sometimes the replacement parent is bad enough to make a child’s mind disappear into CGI fantasyland (see Pan’s Labyrinth). As far as the ’60s and ’70s went, institutionalized alternative families don’t look so hot in retrospect: check out the documentaries Commune and Finding Sean. Not to mention the one about a little place called Jonestown.
Children are the future, natch, and no movie made that future look scarier than Jesus Camp — whose little Christian soldiers are being homeschooled into a rigidity of science denial, social intolerance, and street-hassling recruitment. It was also the film, fictive or documentary, that saw narrow-gauge family values in their most aggressive practice. When and if these kids start questioning their parents’ judgment, we may see nuclear family meltdowns of hitherto unknown toxicity. Or worse, if they don’t: god help the rest of us when these know-nothings with a programmed agenda reach voting age. *
DENNIS HARVEY’S TOP 10 THEATRICAL RELEASES
(1) Quinceañera (Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, US)
(2) Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, US)
(3) Little Children (Todd Field, US)
(4) Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, US)
(5) The Queen (Stephen Frears, UK/France/Italy)
(6) Ondskan (Evil) (Mikael Hafström, Sweden)
(7) El Cielo Dividido (Broken Sky) (Julián Hernández, Mexico)
(8) United 93 (Paul Greengrass, US/UK/France)
(9) The Puffy Chair (Jay Duplass, US)
(10) Evil Aliens (Jake West, UK)
Of Hearst, Singleton, the WLSBs, and the documents of collaboration
By Bruce B. Brugmann
To get the citizen’s point of view, I have long maintained that every reporter and every editor and every publisher ought sooner or later to be the center of a story and see how the media works.
I found the exercise most instructive when the Media Alliance and the Guardian, represented by the First Amendment Project (Attys. James Wheaton, David Greene, and Pondra Perkins), went into federal court on Thursday to intervene and seek to unseal key records in the Reilly vs. Hearst/Singleton antitrust trial. Our three P.S. organizations put out a press release with the spokespersons listed for contact (Jeff Perlstein from the Media Alliance, James Wheaton and David Greene from FAP, and myself from the Guardian.)
I got several calls from the Associated Press (Terence Chea, who did an excellent story that ran around the country), Kate Williamson of the Examiner, James Allen from the alternative paper Random Lengths in San Pedro (who was rightly agitated about the Hearst/ Singleton deal to buy the Daily Breeze in Torrance and further encroach on his turf), Mark Fitzgerald of Editor and Publisher was in touch, and others. Significantly, even though Hearst and Singleton have a lock on the Bay Area press, not one of their many reporters nor editors contacted me. (Subtle point: that is the wave of the future with these folks). Nobody from Hearst or Singleton even called or checked in to try to make the point that, even though they have five law firms and l2 or so attorneys in federal court heaving and sweating mightily to argue they really aren’t collaborating, they don’t even have to make a show of doing the journalistic minimum of doing an honest story. More: they didn’t even have to put on a show even though the lawsuit was aimed at their Achilles heel: their secret documents of collaboration. And of course they didn’t quote me or, when they did in the case of the Examiner, they mangled my point about why we were suing.
For the record, I said in the press release and in interviews with reporters: “Our intent here is to ensure that the naton’s biggest chains (Hearst, Singleton, McClatchy, Gannett, Stephens), as they move to destroy daily competition and impose regional monopoly in the Bay Area, cannot do so in the dark of night with sealed records that set a terrible precedent for the free press, the First Amendment, and open government.”
And so the two big papers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, gave us two more wimpy little stories buried deep in their business section. Those who are attentive readers of the Bruce blog would know how to find them. For example, the Chronicle put its wimpy little story in the Daily Digest column just above the fold on page two of the business section under the rousing head, “Media groups want documents unsealed.”
Its last paragraph is classic monopolyese: “(Judge) Illston issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday barring MediaNews and Hearst Corp. from collaborating until at least April 30, when Reilly’s case is expected to go to trial. (B3: Is this premature collaboration? Is it like premature ejaculation?) Attorneys for MediaNews and Hearst have argued that no collaboration plan is in the works but that should one emerge in the future, it would not be illegal.” Repeating for emphasis: “Attorneys for MediaNews and Hearst have argued that no collaboration plan is in the works but that should one emerge in the future, it would not be illegal.”
Marvelous. Simply marvelous. That is Hearst boilerplate corporate policy and it is a classic of self-immolation. Compare it with AP’s version: “On Tuesday, Illston barred Bay Area newspapers owned by MediaNews and Hearst from consolidating some of their business operations until the lawsuit is resolved. When she issued a temporary restraining order against the alliance in November, Illston said she had been under the impression that Hearst’s investment was solely an equity stake, but an April 26 memo had surfaced suggesting it actually was a bid to merge some of their business operations.” Alioto got this scarlet letter in discovery and used it in his brief to show that Hearst was in effect lying in court about its documents of collaboration. The judge quoted from this critical letter, but it is still under seal and so are other key documents that would likely show the Hearst/Singleton plans for regional monopoly. Significantly, the AP story ran in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a Hearst paper.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the bay, the Mercury News
was doing its own wimpy little story in the “Business Digest” in its business section, a two paragraph story with the rousing head “Plaintiffs seek records in antitrust media case.” The story was not even a Merc story, it was pinched without attribution from the AP story (another wave of the future). From now on, I shall refer to these stories as WLSBs.
Over in the near East Bay, Josh Richman did a much better story that appeared in both the Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times (a one reporter-covers-it-all concept that is another wave of the future.) Richman got some good quotes, including a notable one from Joseph Alioto, Reilly’s attorney.
“‘Oh, good, it’s about time,'” Alioto said of the lawsuit filing, adding that it was crucial for all details of an antitrust case. ‘It’s the archetypal example of hypocrisy when major newspapers take the right of the people to know applies to everyone except themselves.'”(Note the copy editing issues, another wave of the future with the staff cutbacks).
Significantly, none of the Hearst/Singleton reporters could get a single Hearst nor Singleton executive to comment on the lawsuit in their own papers. The ducking was delicious. Richman wrote: “Alan Marx, MediaNews’ attorney, declined comment. A Hearst spokesman could not be reached.” The Merc/AP reported: “Hearst officials were reviewing the motion and could not comment Thursday, said spokesman Paul Luthringer. Representatives at MediaNews did not immediately respond to a request for comment.” In short, the nation’s biggest chains are seeking to impose an ever more conservative news, editorial and endorsement line on one of the most liberal and civilized areas of the world, just as they ought to be raising holy hell about Bush, the Patriot Act, and the unending war in Iraq. And they are stonewalling like hell, in federal court and in their own papers, to keep secret the documents of collaboration.
And so there you have it: the state of daily journalism in the Bay Area, Friday, Dec. 22, 2007. There is much more to come. Follow our stories and editorials in the Guardian, on our website, and in the Bruce blog. Things of great moment are in the making.
P.S. Repeating: where the hell are the antitrust attorneys in the U.S. Justice Department? And where the hell is outgoing Attorney General Bill Lockyer and incoming Attorney General Jerry Brown? B3
Unholy spirit
› cheryl@sfbg.com
It was dark and stormy the night I journeyed to Oakland to meet the Saviours — a perfect weather match for their music, which I’ve had on constant ear blast since picking up their Tim Green–<\d>produced debut, Crucifire (Level Plane, 2006). These guys are fucking serious. They proffer fierce, hard-driving metal so metal you could pronounce it me-tal, spreading their gospel with lyrics such as “All crosses burn into the sky, and their ashes fall to serve as hell’s floor.” Live — forget it: heads involuntarily bang when the Saviours unleash their thunder.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I knocked on the door of the Saviours’ lair (the Telegraph Avenue digs of singer-guitarist Austin Barber, guitarist Dean Tyler Morris, and drummer Scott Batiste). A giant, fiery pentagram? A life-size diorama of Slayer’s Reign in Blood album cover?
Actually, it was a pretty normal apartment, all things considered. Barber, Batiste, and Morris were chilling around a coffee table that displayed evidence of a post-Thanksgiving weekend winding to a boozy end. (Bassist Cyrus Comiskey, the only member who doesn’t live there and who also plays with Drunk Horse, was stuck at work.) We settled in to chat about the band and expand on the latest update posted on their Web site, www.killforsaviours.com: “We’re writing new songs and partying.”
The members all have pre-Saviours history: Barber and Batiste played in screamo outfit Yaphet Kotto, while Batiste and Morris have known each other since junior high.
“Me and Scott had the idea to start the band a couple of years ago. We got together, started jamming, and we were on tour a month later,” said Barber, who at 24 is the youngest Saviour and the only one who isn’t from Santa Cruz. (He hails from Fort Smith, Ark.) “We just wanted to start a killer heavy band. Now we’re trying to chill out and write a new record — and not play very many shows until spring.”
Their music may visit dark places, but the guys share an easygoing chemistry that extends to their songwriting technique.
“Pretty much everything starts with something that Scott writes, and then everybody adds to it until we decide it’s done,” Morris said. “A lot of times he’ll do stuff musically that I would never do, so of course it makes me think about something new and forces me to figure out a way to work myself into it. Everybody does that — Austin does that with his parts, and Cyrus does that with all his bass parts, and Scott does that with the drums too. It’s very collaborative.”
Batiste added, “This band’s pretty amicable. Like, at the end of 42 days of tour, we were all hanging out and drinking and not sick of each other.”
The Saviours have also found support in the Bay Area metal scene, where peers include High on Fire and Green’s band, the Fucking Champs. Of course, they’re also fans of the genre gods: Slayer, Black Sabbath, and Metallica. The anti-Christian imagery that appears in their lyrics and album artwork is owed to Barber, who grew up surrounded by conservative types. In other words, he’s not a Satan worshipper.
Christianity, he explained, “has always been such a bummer in my life. I just always identified with the dark — partying, do whatever the fuck you want, just living your life. And they’re trying to not live life. All that shit’s representative of doing your own thing, and fuck everybody else.”
Doing their own thing is important for the Saviours, who said they’ll never hook into Ozzfest-style bullshit. They’ve just settled into a new practice space and have plans for a live album (possibly to be recorded at their upcoming Hemlock Tavern show) as well as their next studio full-length, which will be “an extension of the first album,” Barber said.
“It’s gonna sound different, though, ’cause we only have two guitar players now and we used to have three,” Morris noted. (Fifth member Mag Delana, a Yaphet Kotto vet, left the band after Crucifire was recorded.) “I think the songs are getting more intricate.”
“They’ll also stay kinda raw, though,” Batiste added. “Consciously, we try to stay simple.”
Though they joke that they only do “extreme tours,” owing to past jaunts that saw them navigating icy highways in the Midwest and sweltering in East Coast summer heat, the Saviours are eager to hit the road next year. This year they traveled across America playing songs from Crucifire and their 2005 EP, Warship (Level Plane), recorded soon after the band formed, and they’ve picked up fans everywhere.
In New Orleans, Barber recalled, “We were partying all night after the show. I’m out front eating some food, and I hear our band blasting out of some car. And it’s the sheriff — literally the sheriff of New Orleans. He’s all, ‘Fuckin’ Saviours! Aaaah!’ Just screaming at me. He was blasting our CD from the cop car. It was fucking awesome.”<\!s>
SAVIOURS
With California Love
Dec. 29, 9:30 p.m.
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
$6
www.hemlocktavern.com
Unseal the court files
The lawsuit that seeks to stop the monopolization of daily newspapers in the Bay Area isn’t just a business dispute. Real estate investor Clint Reilly argues that he would be personally harmed by the deal (which gives him standing to sue), but in reality, this is about the future of mainstream news media in one of the nation’s largest and most politically active markets. If the Hearst Corp. and Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group have their way, it’s entirely possible one corporate entity could effectively control every single significant daily paper in San Francisco, southern Marin, the East Bay, the South Bay, and the Peninsula. And since TV and radio news stations tend to take their cues from the daily papers, that means one corporate entity would decide, to a great extent, what sort of local news will be available to several million people.
It’s more than a legal issue. It’s a major public policy issue — and that’s why the papers shouldn’t be allowed to fight this out in secret.
On Dec. 21 the Guardian and Media Alliance, a nonprofit media activism organization, filed a motion in federal court seeking to intervene in the Reilly lawsuit and asking Judge Susan Illston to unseal the key records in the case. Our point: this is a huge national story, and the public interest in knowing what the biggest and most powerful newspaper chains in the country are planning for the Bay Area is clear and overwhelming.
But the way the big chains have set things up, there’s no way for the public to find out much of anything — except what Hearst and MediaNews want us to know. Under the terms of a court order the chains wrote and got approved, anything — evidence, briefs, depositions, even legal motions — the newspaper barons want to mark secret is automatically sealed. Of course, the newspaper lawyers can decide to publicize anything they want to put out to bolster their side of the story. In other words, the newspapers — which, after all, are accused of trying to violate antitrust laws and create a media monopoly in the region — have complete control of what information does and doesn’t come out of the trial. That’s exactly how they want it — and exactly how things will go if they get away with their merger plans.
It’s hard to fight the big chains. Almost every experienced media lawyer in town works for or has partners who work for one of the chains, so they all have conflicts of interest. The news media organizations, like the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the California First Amendment Coalition, and the Society of Professional Journalists, all have board members who work for the chains.
And of course, the big newspapers themselves, which love to fight to unseal court records in other cases (like billionaire Ron Burkle’s divorce case), are all either involved or have allies who are involved, so they won’t touch the case.
So it’s fallen to the Guardian, an independent paper, and Media Alliance, an independent activist group, to work with the First Amendment Project, an independent public interest law firm, to promote the public interest in unsealing the records.
We know there’s a lot of information that ought to be out in the light of day. Already, one document discussed in open court shows that Hearst, which owns the Chronicle, has discussed ad sales, printing, and distribution deals with Singleton’s group — which is supposedly a competitor. What else do these companies have planned for the Bay Area? Will Hearst and Singleton wind up in some sort of joint operating agreement? Is this the end of daily newspaper competition? Will one billionaire publisher be able to put a conservative spin on all editorial coverage in the region? The public has a right to know.
Court documents are presumed public, and the newspaper chains have shown no reason why anything other than a few narrowly defined records should be kept secret. Judge Illston should revoke the secrecy order and open up the key documents in the Reilly case.
PS Where is the federal Justice Department? Where is outgoing state attorney general Bill Lockyer or incoming AG Jerry Brown? We haven’t heard a word from any of the public officials who ought to be intervening in this case. At the very least, they should support our efforts to open the records.
PPS: If Hearst and the big chains get away with sealing these documents, it will set a terrible precedent for future cases in which business interests want to keep secret information that ought to be in the public domain. How can any of these big media companies ever go into court in the future (as they have done in the past) to push for unsealing court record when they have gone to such lengths to seal their own records?
PPPS To see our legal brief, press release, and links to media coverage, go to www.sfbg.com.
A memo to constituents of Rep. Nancy Pelosi
By Bruce B. Brugmann
To fellow San Franciscans:
Now that even the San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst has declared in a lead front page story that Pelosi will legislate
“from the middle,” the Guardian recommends at minimum three specific proposals for her constituents to push theincoming speaker of the house to do to seriously represent San Francisco values.
l. Pelosi needs to allow Congress to start impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. Bush has rejected the modest recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and Friday’s New York Times reported in one story that Sen. John McCain as saying in Baghdad that the “military considers sending as many as 35,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq” and another story that “Top commanders appear set to urge larger U.S. military.” Only impeachment proceedings will provide the leverage to halt the terrible losses of blood and treasure. See current Guardian editorial link above “Impeachment is now the only option.”
2. Pelosi needs to use the power of her new office to help pass a federal shield law that would uphold the rights of journalists and news outlets to protect the identity of their sources and to keep possession of their unpublished/unaired material. In the meantime, she needs to help push the Bush administration to stop wrongfully persecuting Joshua Wolfe, a 24-year-old freelance videophotograher now in federal prison in Dublin for refusing to give up his unedited tapes of a 2005 demonstration in San Francisco. He is the only journalist in jail in the U.S., has been in jail longer than any U.S. journalist ever and may stay in jail until the new federal grand jury is impaneled next July. She ought to also help push the Bush administration to hold its fire against two reporters from the Chronicle who face l8 months in jail for refusing to reveal the sources of a grand jury investigation in the Balco scandal. My feeling is that these abusive actions against the press in San Francisco by the Bush adminstration have targeted our city because of its San Francisco values, in this case its tradition of dissent and anti-war activity. Pelosi could start on this issue and promote lots of good will by meeting with the mother and supporters of Wolf. (See link below.)
3. Pelosi needs to introduce and push a a bill to eliminate the Presidio Trust, return the land to the National Park Service where it belongs, and overturn the precedent that is leading to a conservative movement to privatize the National Park system. She made the original mistake of leading the move to privatize the Presidio, on the phony argument of saving it from the Republicans, but now her Democrats are in power and it is time for her to right the wrong. Otherwise, the private Presidio Trust will keep asking for and getting tens of millions of federal money to subsidize a private, commercially driven, ruinous park operation, without sunshine and accountability, without any city zoning control, in growing opposition to neighborhors. Most important, the Pelosi park principle will further fuel the move to privatize the national park system. In effect, Pelosi created the model for the theft of one of our greatest resources, the national park system. (See Guardian editorial link, “A key test for Pelosi.”)
These are some real San Francisco values for Pelsoi to support. If she doesn’t, she risks leaving a legacy for failing to stop the Iraq War and selling off the Presidio and establishing the precedent for selling of our national parks. B3, celebrating San Francisco values since l966
PS: How to help Josh after the jump
Is the USA the Center of the World?
Some things don’t seem to change. Five years after I wrote this column in the form of a news dispatch, it seems more relevant than ever:
WASHINGTON — There were unconfirmed reports yesterday that the United States is not the center of the world.
The White House had no immediate comment on the reports, which set off a firestorm of controversy in the nation’s capital.
Speaking on background, a high-ranking official at the State Department discounted the possibility that the reports would turn out to be true. “If that were the case,” he said, “don’t you think we would have known about it a long time ago?”
On Capitol Hill, leaders of both parties were quick to rebut the assertion. “That certain news organizations would run with such a poorly sourced and obviously slanted story tells us that the liberal media are still up to their old tricks, despite the current crisis,” a GOP lawmaker fumed. A prominent Democrat, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that classified briefings to congressional intelligence panels had disproved such claims long ago.
Scholars at leading think tanks were more restrained, and some said there was a certain amount of literal truth to the essence of the reports. But they pointed out that while it included factual accuracy in a narrow sense, the assertion was out of context and had the potential to damage national unity at a time when the United States could ill afford such a disruption.
The claim evidently originated with a piece by a Lebanese journalist that appeared several days ago in a Beirut magazine. It was then picked up by a pair of left-leaning daily newspapers in London. From there, the story quickly made its way across the Atlantic via the Internet.
“It just goes to show how much we need seasoned, professional gatekeepers to separate the journalistic wheat from the chaff before it gains wide attention,” remarked the managing editor of one news program at a major U.S. television network. “This is the kind of stuff you see on ideologically driven websites, but that hardly means it belongs on the evening news.” A newsmagazine editor agreed, calling the reports “the worst kind of geographical correctness.”
None of the major cable networks devoted much air time to reporting the story. At one outlet, a news executive’s memo told staffers that any reference to the controversy should include mention of the fact that the United States continues to lead the globe in scientific discoveries. At a more conservative network, anchors and correspondents reminded viewers that English is widely acknowledged to be the international language — and more people speak English in the U.S. than in any other nation.
While government officials voiced acute skepticism about the notion that the United States is not the center of the world, they declined to speak for attribution. “If lightning strikes and it turns out this report has real substance to it,” explained one policymaker at the State Department, “we could look very bad, at least in the short run. Until it can be clearly refuted, no one wants to take the chance of leading with their chin and ending up with a hefty serving of Egg McMuffin on their face.”
An informal survey of intellectuals with ties to influential magazines of political opinion, running the gamut from The Weekly Standard to The New Republic, indicated that the report was likely to gain little currency in Washington’s elite media forums.
“The problem with this kind of shoddy impersonation of reporting is that it’s hard to knock down because there are grains of truth,” one editor commented. “Sure, who doesn’t know that our country includes only small percentages of the planet’s land mass and population? But to draw an inference from those isolated facts that somehow the United States of America is not central to the world and its future — well, that carries postmodernism to a nonsensical extreme.”
Another well-known American journalist speculated that the controversy will soon pass: “Moral relativism remains a pernicious force in our society, but overall it holds less appeal than ever, even on American campuses. It’s not just that we’re the only superpower — we happen to also be the light onto the nations and the key to the world’s fate. People who can’t accept that reality are not going to have much credibility.”
_____________________________
Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback. For information, go to www.WarMadeEasy.com
Impeachment is now the only option
EDITORIAL We can all stop hoping and pretending now: the facts are in. No matter what anyone right, left, or center says, no matter what the truth is on the ground, no matter how clear and powerful public opinion has become, President George W. Bush isn’t going to change anything about the war in Iraq.
That’s what we saw from the president’s press conference with British prime minister Tony Blair on Dec. 7 and from his statements since. He’s not going to start withdrawing troops, and he’s not going to negotiate with other regional powers.
The Iraq Study Group report has its flaws. It talks about diplomatic discussions with Iran and Syria, but it stops short of describing the real reason the United States is bogged down in the Middle East (the lack of a coherent energy policy that doesn’t rely on foreign oil). It suggests that the United States should leave the job of rebuilding Iraq to Iraqis but fails to state that the country responsible for all the problems should play a role in paying for its solutions. And it would leave thousands of US soldiers in Iraq as advisers for the long term, putting them in serious jeopardy.
Still, it’s at least a dose of badly needed reality. The report acknowledges that the Bush administration’s current policies have made an awful mess of Iraq, that the situation is deteriorating, and that continuing the current path isn’t an acceptable option. And it recommends that all combat forces leave Iraq by 2008.
That such a broad-based, bipartisan panel would reach that conclusion unanimously isn’t really that much of a surprise. Everyone with any sense in Washington and around the world these days agrees that the United States needs to set a timetable for withdrawal. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who initially supported the war and has long argued that some good could still come out of it, wrote Dec. 8 that the group’s recommendations “will only have a chance of being effective if we go one notch further and set a fixed date — now — for Americans to leave Iraq.” Even conservative syndicated columnist George Will noted the same day that “the deterioration is beyond much remediation.”
As long as the United States retains combat troops in Iraq, they will be the target of sectarian violence and the focus of that war. When they leave, the Iraqis will have no obvious villain, and there might be an actual hope for a long-term resolution.
The notion of an all-out Kurd versus Shiite versus Sunni civil war isn’t going to make anyone in Damascus or Tehran happy, since those two governments will be caught in the middle. And a clear statement from the United States that American troops will be leaving on a specific date not too far in the future is, the majority of experts agree, the only way to bring all the parties to the table for a serious and meaningful discussion.
And yet Bush and Dick Cheney remain alone, aloof, refusing to acknowledge that military victory in Iraq is utterly impossible and that the old mission of establishing a US client state in the Middle East will never be accomplished.
The death toll for US troops is approaching 3,000. The cost is running at $250 million a day. This simply can’t be allowed to continue. If Bush and Cheney refuse to begin a withdrawal program, then Congress needs to act decisively on two fronts.
The first is to inform the president that under the Constitution, Congress has the sole power to declare war and this Congress will no longer pay for Bush’s military adventure in Iraq.
But there’s a larger problem here. Bush and Cheney have lied to the American people, taken us into war on the basis of fraudulent information, and violated their oaths of office. Back in January we called on Congress to begin debating articles of impeachment; the GOP-controlled House wasn’t about to do that. But things are different now. The voters have made it very clear that they don’t like the president’s war, and the Democrats have a clear mandate for change.
Impeachment is serious business, but Bush has left us no alternative. We can’t simply allow the war to continue as it has been, year after bloody year, until Bush’s term expires.
The only thing holding up impeachment hearings is the word of the incoming speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who said during the campaign that option was “not on the table.” Well, it ought to be on the table now. Pelosi should publicly inform Democratic leaders in the House who support impeachment that she won’t block an impeachment effort. And her constituents in San Francisco need to keep the pressure on her to allow Congress to move forward on its most important responsibility in decades.
This isn’t going to be easy. Even the San Francisco Chronicle now acknowledges that Pelosi is governing like a moderate. It will take a reenergized peace movement and a huge new national mobilization to put pressure on her and every member of Congress. But the stakes are too high to wait. It’s time to start, today. SFBG
Taking on Tauscher
By Tim Redmond
Ellen Tascher, the conservative East Bay Democrat, is under fire all over the web and there are signs that she will face a primary challenge next year.
Robert Haaland has a good line on why she’s already in trouble with progressive Dems. A district to watch.
Gay guys get gavels
By Steven T. Jones
I have a prediction for the new session of the California Legislature, which begins on Monday: there won’t be as much anti-gay rhetoric as we sometimes hear from the social conservatives in Sacramento. Why? Because the Assembly’s two remaining gay men — John Laird from Santa Cruz and our own Mark Leno — have risen to the chairs of two of the most powerful committee. Leno will chair the Appropriations Committee, through which most bills must pass, and Laird will chair the Budget Committee. Or as one insider told me, the word have gone out: you gotta deal with the gay guys. And that might not be easy to do if some loudmouth legislator is out there railing against the “homosexual agenda” because he thinks such nastiness plays well with his conservative constituents.
Compounding that reality will be Leno’s latest bill legalizing gay marriage, which he said he will introduce on the first day of the session. Last time, the Legislature passed it only to have it vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said the issue was a matter for the courts. Then, a month later, the Court of Appeals ruled against San Francisco’s effort to legalize gay marriage by saying it was a matter for the legislature. Stay tuned, folks, this could get interesting.
Mexico City, mi amor
› johnny@sfbg.com
If you live in the city and you’ve been blessed, you’ve had the experience of meeting a lover on a favorite street corner, in an open square, or by a favorite vista or shadowy and partially hidden place. The opening scenes of Julián Hernández’s Broken Sky tap precisely into this hide-and-seek game for grown-ups — and the heightened expectations and disappointments it can create. Plaintive college student Gerardo (Miguel Ángel Hoppe) has the rare type of exaggeratedly masculine-feminine features — eyes wide and almost crossed — that are made for melodrama. As he waits over and over in different settings for the arrival of his boyfriend, Jonas (Fernando Arroyo), a variety of excited emotions flutter across his rapt face.
This dance of expectation and eventual pleasure is just one of the urban pas des deux within Hernández’s second feature. Broken Sky might very well be a four-way chain of pas de deux pieces, tracing the gradual breakup of a first love. At its very best, the movie creates something hauntingly, intuitively perceptive from these portraits of everyday urban movement. Near the end of the film, when Hernández and cinematographer Alejandro Cantú return to one such repeated pattern — Gerardo’s movement around an apartment bed that once had a magnetic force for Jonas and him but now only seems to repel them from each other — the effect is heartbreaking.
But who will have the patience to reach that moment? At nearly two and a half hours, Broken Sky would have benefited from a rigorous edit that not only reduced its run time by 40 to 60 minutes but also removed the voice-over passages that provide virtually its only dialogue. (This suggestion is from someone who can comprehend, let alone appreciate, the languid rhythms and unconfined eros of Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul — in other words, it isn’t the conservative miscomprehension of a New Times–era Village Voice.) By even occasionally imposing heavy-handed and pseudopoetic narration on the proceedings, Hernández seems to doubt his core instinct that the words of pop songs, the semiotics of T-shirts, and the looks on Gerardo’s and Jonas’s faces are — aside from a classroom lecture on Aristophanes — all that is needed to tell their story.
That’s a shame, especially because the director has an extraordinary collaborator in Cantú. Together their camerawork charts, colors, and most of all cruises Mexico City with a flamboyant fluidity equal to that of Diego Martínez Vignatti’s cinematography for Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven — another recent movie from Mexico that (along with Ricardo Benet’s News from Afar and Fernando Eimbcke’s Duck Season) trumps the efforts of better-known contemporaries who’ve ventured to Hollywood. Like Battle in Heaven, Broken Sky contains enough 360-degree pans to make even Brian de Palma spin-dizzy. However, compared to Reygadas’s baroque nationalist allegory (or the urbane sensuality of Night Watch, Edgardo Cozarinsky’s recent hustler’s-eye view of Buenos Aires society), its young love narrative seems trite. Strip away the potent combination of Hoppe’s puppy dog pathos and Arroyo’s pout, and the message seems to be that you should never wreck your relationship for a dude with a tacky rat-tail hairdo.
Had Hernández’s presentation remained mute save for the lyricism of ballads and Dvorak-or-disco-beat instrumental passages, Gerardo’s and Jonas’s archetypal qualities might be as convincing and layered as their embodiment of — and struggles against — the callow surfaces of contemporary gay life. That latter friction took on black-and-white overt outsider form in the director’s first full-length film (after almost a decade of shorts), 2003’s Jean Cocteau–influenced A Thousand Clouds of Peace. Shot in color, Broken Sky resides closer to gay mainstream consumerist codes, while still critiquing them via a defiant romanticism. In a sense, its extended length could be seen as a direct antithesis to the increasing length of gay porn movies in the DVD age, with each protracted chapter straining toward a skipped heartbeat instead of an orgasm.
Quoting Marguerite Duras at the outset, semisuccessfully treating a twink’s misbegotten nightclub hookup as the stuff of epic tragedy, and taking even more time than Duras might to tell a simple story (not to mention one that involves characters she would’ve found silly), Hernández can’t be accused of lacking audacity. He knows how to ravish the viewer — an excellent quality in a director who loves to choreograph love. The fact that Broken Sky’s title credit doesn’t arrive until nearly an hour into its action — or stasis — more than hints he’s influenced by Apichatpong’s revelatory Blissfully Yours, but unlike that innovative director, he’s still working, conflictedly, within the framework of contemporary gay identity and its attendant commercialism. He and João Pedro Rodrigues (O Fantasma; Two Drifters) are the standout moviemakers in this restrictive realm, but as of now, lacking Rodrigues’s devil-may-care imagination, Hernández will have to settle for number two — with a Bullitt T-shirt. SFBG
BROKEN SKY
Dec. 1 and Dec. 3–7
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
(415) 621-6120
Clint Reilly wins a big one against Hearst and Singleton. Fighting to keep one newspaper towns from becoming a one newspaper region.
By Bruce B. Brugmann
On April 26, 2006, the McClatchy newspapers and the Chronicle/Hearst and MediaNews/Singleton publicly announced a complex series of transactions that resulted in Singleton owning three major Bay Area dailies (Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News, and the Monterey Herald) that had been previously owned by Knight-Ridder and then McClatchy.
On the same day, April 26, 2006, Hearst and Singleton secretly signed a key centerpiece deal that set up a secret arrangement between Hearst and Singleton that in effect would allow them to join forces, destroy daily competition in the Bay Area, and establish a regional monopoly for the duration.
The key point: the two big publishing chains from New York and Denver lied in effect about the monopolizing features of their deal, and in effect concealed key evidence in the Clint Reilly antitrust case, according to Federal Judge Susan Illston. And then the two chains, who love to holler about freedom of the press and government suppression of documents, moved to keep the documents under seal, including the incriminating letter outlining the monopoly agreement. Their coverage amounts largely to rummy little business stories buried deep in their papers.
Illston neatly skewered the Hearst/Singleton lie that their deal was harmless and would not interfere with vigorous competition between the two companies. Illston quoted the April 26 letter, which she pointed out was not disclosed in the first hearing on a request for a temporary restraining order. (Alioto got the letter in discovery. It is an even bigger bombshell than his charge in the first Reilly trial that Hearst was “horesetrading” favorable coverage for political favors with then Mayor Willie Brown and others to get political help on its moves to create a morning monopoly.)
The letter of agreement was from Hearst Corporation Vice President James Asher to Joseph Lodovic, president of MediaNews. She quoted “in pertiment part” these statements: “The Hearst Corporation and Media News Group agree that they shall negotiate in good faith agreements to offer national advertising and internet advertising sales for their San Francisco Bay Area newspapers on a joint basis, and to consolidate the San Francisco Bay area distribution networks of such newspapers, all on mutually satisfactory terms and conditions, and in each case subject to any limitations required to ensure compliance with applicable law.
“In addition, Hearst and MediaNews agree that, with respect to the newspapers owned by each of them on the date of this letter, they shall work together in good faith to become affiliated with the networks operated by Career Builder…and Classified Ventures) on the same terms, and each of Hearst and MediaNews further agrees that neither of them shall enter into any agreement, arrangement, or understanding to participate in Career Builder or
Classified Ventures or their respective networks with respect to such newspapers unless the other party is offered the opportunity to participate on identical terms…”
Illston quoted extensively from the “secret” letter, but the Guardian and nobody else can see the letter, oor the supporting documents and depositions, that would further flesh out monopoly deal. That is a terrible position, let me emphasize, for big daily chains to be taking in federal court these days.
Illston said the letter “casts serious doubt on several key findings underlying” her previous order denying a temporary restraining order. She said that she had previously accepted Hearst arguments that “Hearst’s involvement in the transactions was solely that of a passive investor.” But she continued, “Though (Hearst and Singleton) offered no explanation why Hearst was willing to finance an acquisition that would only make competition stronger, the Court did not understand that Hearst expected, or would receive, any quid pro quo. However, the April 26 letter suggests, at the very least, that Hearst’s involvement was specifically tied to an agreement by MediaNews to limit its competition with Hearst in certain ways.”
This “cooperation” between Hearst and Singleton, she said, was “in fact, quid pro quo for Hearst’s assistance to MediaNews in acquiring two of the Bay Area papers.” (The quid pro quo was also a $300 million Hearst investment in Singleton, which I think might evaporate should Illston ultimately nix or water down the deal.) Illston also said the letter indicated that the Chronicle may not continue to be “strong competition” for the other Bay Area papers.
Had the letter been disclosed to the court, she said, it would have “affected the court’s analysis of the McClatchy-MediaNews-Hearst transactions in this case.” Summing up, she stated that “such agreements, the mere existence of the letter, and the cooperation between Hearst and MediaNews they reflect, increase the likelihood that the transactions at issue here were anti-competitive and illegal.”
And so she granted a temporary restraining order in part and temporarily restrained and enjoined Hearst and Singleton from entering into any agreements “of the nature described in the April 26 letter, including agreements to offer national advertising sales for their San Francisco Bay Area newspapers on a joint basis, and consolidation of the Bay Area distribution networks for their papers.” She ordered Hearst and Singleton to show cause at a Dec. 6 hearing why she should not impose a preliminary injunction. Quite an opinion.
As an antitrust attorney told us after reading the opinion, “How the hell does Joe Jr. keep getting the Hearst people to lie under oath, then cough up the documents that prove it? Haven’t they figured out that judges don’t react well to that little character flaw?”
Implicit in all of this is Brugmann’s Law of Journalism: where there is no economic competition, there is no news or editorial competition. Suddenly,for the first time ever by the terms of the proposed deal, daily competition would be eliminated and one of the most liberal and civilized areas of the world would be firmly under the monopoly thumb of conservative billionaires from New York and Denver. The result would give ad rates a monopoly boost, gut and centralize editorial staffs, make editorials and endorsements ever more uniform and conservative, and send all profits out of town on a conveyor belt to headquarters to buy more properties. The carnage is well underway (note our stories and those carried on ChainLinks, the newspaper guild publication)
Illston should disclose the letter and other documents in open court. And the U.S. Justice Department and California Attorney General should awake from their long naps and jump into this case and stop this secretive march to regional monopoly. Meanwhile, thank the Lord for Reilly and Alioto. Keep on rolling. B3, celebrating San Francisco values since l966
P.S. We are running lots of material on this story, including the judge’s order, because it amounts to a “censored” story in the mainstream media. Each year, as the local part of our Project Censored package, we cite the monopolization of the press story. We will follow the current version along in the Guardian and the Bruce blog. Send us your comments and evidence of Eurekas or Censored material. (See previous blogs)
The morning after by G.W. Schulz
While drunk on big newspaper purchases, Dean Singleton promised competitive papers and no layoffs. Now he’s swinging the ax, cutting deals with Hearst, and decimating local news coverage
Judge slams daily-paper chains by Tim Redmond
With a federal court ruling exposing a secret plan by Hearst and Singleton to join forces and end competition, the federal and state Justice Departments should intervene – and all records in the case should now be open
More on Singleton by G.W. Schulz
Read the judge’s decision
Judge Susan Illston’s ruling on Hearst-MediaNews collaboration