History

Destroying the California dream

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By Steven T. Jones

A front page story in today’s New York Times correctly notes that California’s political leaders have abandoned the “California Dream” that made this such a great state: a social safety net that prevented the economic system’s losers from falling too far, a high-quality and affordable education system to give people the skills and knowledge needed to succeed, reliable and efficient infrastructure, and an appreciation for diversity.

“The California dream is, for now, delayed, as demonstrated by the budget state lawmakers and the governor agreed upon late Monday,” Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer wrote. “At no point in modern history has the state dealt with its fiscal issues by retreating so deeply in its services, beginning this spring with a round of multibillion-dollar budget cuts and continuing with, in total, some $30 billion in cuts over two fiscal years to schools, colleges, health care, welfare, corrections, recreation and more.”

Anti-government conservatives including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and just about every Republican in the Legislature (and many of the Democrats) have succeeded in destroying California as we know it with their mindless “no new taxes” mantra (which even our own Mayor Gavin Newsom pays fealty to as he runs for governor). They need to be recognized for what they are — a hostile threat to civil society, to the basic bargain among people on which government is based — and I’m happy to see the Times help with this analysis.

Things have already gone too far. It’s time to ease our way out of this abyss, and for San Francisco’s leaders to point the way. Some already are. Assessor Phil Ting is pushing for reform of Prop. 13 so commercial property taxes can be based on what the land is actually worth, Sen. Mark Leno is leading the single-payer health reform fight, and Assemblymember Tom Ammiano is trying to legalize and tax marijuana, which would bring in about $1.4 billion in annual revenue and save billions more in decreased enforcement costs.

That’s a pretty good start, but it’s just the beginning of a long slog back from oblivion.

Yoo-hoo, Gertrude Berg!

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Even ginormous pop phenomena disappear from the collective consciousness faster than seemed possible during their heyday. Still, it’s surprising that The Goldbergs doesn’t loom larger in television history or general cultural awareness.

Admittedly, the show’s heyday came in TV’s early years as a mass medium. In 1949, when it commenced as a CBS half-hour, there were about 1 million television sets in use here. By 1954, at its run’s end, nearly three-quarters of U.S. households owned their own boob tube. One reason for that radical expansion was the vast popularity of I Love Lucy — which grabbed The Goldbergs‘ time slot and sitcom supremacy. Everybody still loves Lucy. But who remembers Mrs. Goldberg?

This year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival certainly does. Its 2009 Freedom of Expression Award goes to Aviva Kempner, director of Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, which makes its local premiere at the fest prior to its theatrical release on Aug. 7. In addition to the doc, SFJFF is screening four Goldbergs episodes.

Even more than a largely forgotten popular institution, Yoo-Hoo commemorates the one-woman dynamo who created and sustained it. Known to millions as humble Molly Goldberg, in real life Gertrude Berg (née Tilly Edelstein) developed performing ambitions and organizational chops from an early age, deploying both in her career despite an engineer husband’s ample means (he invented instant coffee) and a father’s harsh disapproval.

She pitched what became The Rise of the Goldbergs — after a first series about shopgirls was yanked for being too protofeminist — in 1929, the 15-minute radio show making its debut just after the Wall Street crash that triggered the Great Depression. Its portrait of a working-class immigrant Jewish family, idealizing Berg’s own, seemed dubious in appeal at first to the higher-ups. Yet soon it trailed only Amos ‘n’ Andy in national popularity, managing that without Amos ‘n’ Andy‘s degrading minority stereotyping. The Goldbergs were humorous, but not clowns — a warm, stable, relatable clan who looked out for each other and their close-knit community.

The center of both, it seemed, was Molly herself, whose homely homebody demeanor (not to mention the ESL malapropisms that embarrassed some assimilationist Jewish listeners) belied the breadth of progressive, non-saccharine wisdoms she doled out to one and all. She had her ditzy moments, but was nevertheless a very modern matriarch — quite unlike Lucy Ricardo, domestic ninny par excellence.

Berg masterminded this long-term success not just as star and head writer, but producer, mogul, and hard-driving perfectionist. She also had a clothing line, penned books, toured the vaudeville circuit and acted on Broadway. At one point she was named "Most Respected Woman in America" — following Eleanor Roosevelt, though in income their positions were reversed.

Despite all this, The Goldbergs died something of a slow, ignoble death. In 1951, actor Philip "Mr. Goldberg" Loeb was named as one among many "Communist influences" in the entertainment field by right-wing ideologues. The network wanted him out — and when Berg balked, a Top Three show was suddenly canceled for lack of commercial sponsorship. It returned later, the role recast — I Love Lucy launching in the interim — but some alchemy was lost. Blackballed and disconsolate, Loeb shot himself in 1955.

Berg soldiered on, driven as ever, until her death in 1966. The Goldbergs disappeared from syndication, then from memory. It would be decades before demonstrably Jewish characters (as opposed to gentile-fied Jewish performers) would again be so prominent on television. It’s worth noting that 60-plus years after Molly G. made her reluctantly-greenlit bow, Seinfeld almost didn’t make it on-air for fear it was likewise "too Jewish."

YOO-HOO, MRS. GOLDBERG

Tues/28, 6:30 p.m., Castro; Aug. 1, noon, Roda;

Aug. 2, 3 p.m., CineArts; Aug. 8, 2 p.m., Smith Rafael

THE GOLDBERGS

Tues/28, 3:30 p.m., Castro; Aug. 2, 12:30, CineArts;

Aug. 4, 2 p.m., Roda

See film listings for complete SFJFF info

www.sfjff.org

Celluloid Nation

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Unsurprisingly, Israeli films have been a big part of each San Francisco Jewish Film Festival program from the beginning. Yet despite that annual local sampling, occasional theatrical exports, and Oscar’s devotion (seven Israeli features have been nominated for Best Foreign Film so far, including 2008’s highway-robbery loser Waltz with Bashir), the general narrative of how that industry got where it is today has remained hazy. It clears up quite a bit after three and a half hours spent with Raphael Nadjari’s A History of Israeli Cinema, the new two-part documentary screening at SFJFF.

Nadjari’s choice of article is apt — this is a history, not any attempt at creating "the" definitive one, and no doubt seasoned viewers will be left scratching their heads over an omission or eight. (The weirdest being M.I.A. Eytan Fox, of 2002’s Yossi and Jagger, 2004’s Walk on Water, and 2006’s The Bubble.) But the myriad clips and commentators he assembles nonetheless piece together a cogent overview that will have you running to check DVD availabilities (usually in vain, alas).

Early features, before and after nationhood was declared in 1948, mostly sold the "Zionist utopia" that would unite millennia of Jewish diaspora, often using filmic language reminiscent of Soviet propagandist cinema. When audiences no longer needed that basic affirmation, more escapist forms emerged, notably the broad "bourekas" comedies and sentimental dramas depicting struggling ethnic groups (mostly Mizrahi Jews). Alongside these in the 1960s there developed a "New Sensitivity" school indebted to European art film that appealed to the intelligentsia if not the wider public. A gradual shift from collective to individual concerns affected everything from the omnipresent military dramas to dissenting political content, plus depictions of hitherto ignored or stereotyped figures whether Arab, gay, Georgian émigré, or simply female.

SFJFF 2009 continues this history with a sizable range of new Israeli screen work. Home-turf hit Lost Islands is a seriocomic family saga played to the big-hair beat of early ’80s New Wave (come back, Flock of Seagulls!). The excellent Zion and His Brother provides darker domestic strife amidst Haifa’s meanest housing-project streets. Coming highly recommended for a good time is A Matter of Size, which is pretty much The Full Monty (1997) of sumo wrestling. (Dennis Harvey)

A HISTORY OF ISRAELI CINEMA

Aug 1, 11:45 a.m., CineArts

Aug 8, 11:30 a.m., JCCSF

Bitter medicine

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news@sfbg.com

The Democratic Party has been promising a major overhaul of the health care system for a generation or more. Now, with President Barack Obama and his party’s congressional leaders in a strong position to finally reach that elusive goal by next month, this should be a momentous time for the reform movement.

So why are so many health reform advocacy groups unhappy?

The answer involves policy and process. Rather than pushing for the single-payer system that many progressive groups demand and say is needed, Democratic leaders immediately opted for a compromise plan they hoped would be acceptable to economic conservatives and the insurance industry.

But Republicans are still calling them socialists for doing it, while the insurance industry — which loves the portion of the legislation that requires everyone to buy coverage — is still spending $1.4 million a day to either kill the complicated bills or turn them to its advantage.

When congressional Democrats unveiled America’s Affordable Health Choices Act (HR 3200) on July 14, many reformists thought a long-awaited, dramatic overhaul to a broken system was close at hand. The insurance companies would finally be made to adhere to ethical practices, and the Democrats would defend their plan to establish a government-run health insurance option that could compete with private insurers and keep them in check.

“American families cannot afford for Washington to say no once again to comprehensive health care reform,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), who chairs the crucial House Education and Labor Committee.

The Democrats’ bill does address some critical flaws in the health care system. It would greatly expand Medicare to ensure coverage for low-income individuals, and would subsidize coverage for those earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, defined as $43,320 for an individual and $88,200 for a family of four. The bill would forbid insurance companies from denying coverage to patients based on a preexisting condition, age, race, or gender. It would eliminate co-pays for preventative care and establish a cap on annual out-of-pocket expenses. To pay for it, the proposal would create a graduated tax on households earning more than $350,000 a year, with the top bracket being a 5.4 percent levy on incomes of more than $1 million.

Progressive members of Congress threw their support behind the bill because — and only because — it included the public option. “The public option is central to our support of health care reform,” read a statement from the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), who chairs the CPC, was quoted in the Huffington Post as saying, “We have already compromised. More than 90 percent of the progressive caucus would vote today for a single-payer system. And so for us to compromise and get behind a really good strong public plan, I mean that’s as far as we’re going.”

While that statement indicates the precarious nature of the current legislation — which will likely be weakened further as it works its way through the process and merges with legislation from the more conservative U.S. Senate — many progressive groups aren’t even willing to go that far.

 

COVERAGE ISN’T CARE

Many single-payer supporters say some reform is better than none, and that the passage of HR 3200 would represent a major win. “We can advance many of the principles that we support with the House bill,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California and an organizer for the national reform advocacy group Health Care for America Now. The nation, he believes, needs to endorse principles such as universally covering Americans and making sure patients aren’t left alone “at the mercy of the private insurance industry.”

Yet other groups fear this cure would be worse than the disease, sending millions of new customers into a private insurance system that simply doesn’t work, and compounding existing problems.

“We’re still pushing for a national single-payer bill,” Dr. James Floyd, a health reform researcher with the nonprofit group Public Citizen, told the Guardian. “While we’re open to other options, we haven’t seen anything [in proposals by Democratic congressional leaders] yet that is acceptable.”

That position has plenty of support among the general public and reform-minded organizations, for whom single-payer continues to be the holy grail.

The current proposal “doesn’t change the system one bit,” said Leonard Rodberg, a member of Physicians for a National Health Program, who works in health policy. “These bills are requiring that people buy insurance, but there are no numbers about how much the insurance would cost. And if the cost of the insurance is still too high, you can remain uninsured.”

And as negotiations center on the government-run insurance option, the concept of scratching the status quo and offering free Medicare-like health care to every American instead has fallen to the wayside.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) got 84 co-sponsors for his single-payer bill, HR 676, and hearings were held in June to explore the option. But congressional leaders then took it off the table. The reasons why seem to be as much about political will as they are about campaign contributions from the insurance industry. As one high-level congressional staffer told us, many lawmakers won’t back a single-payer system in part because they “don’t want to have to respond to being accused of being a socialist by the right wing.”

Then there’s the insurance lobby. “They spend hundreds of millions,” the staffer said. “They lobby Congress, and they provide millions to campaigns. They have Fox News. But the single-payer movement is growing leaps and bounds.”

Rodberg said the insurance industry would love to see a mandate to buy insurance approved at a time when insurers are losing customers because the economy is shedding thousands of jobs each month. “This is a bailout for the insurance companies,” Rodberg told us. “But there’s absolutely nothing in this legislation that will control costs, because it just leaves it to the insurance companies and the market.”

Dr. Jim G. Kahn, president of the California Physicians’ Alliance and a professor at UCSF with expertise in health policy, told us he believes the proposed bill falls short of the goal of comprehensive, universal coverage. “‘Universal’ was recently redefined by [Montana Sen. Max] Baucus as 95 percent — i.e., 15 million uninsured,” Kahn told us via e-mail. “Reaching even that level will be hard, due to the complexity of enforcing an ‘individual mandate’ on families with only modest income (and hence no subsidies). And in eagerness to reach that level, more and more people will become underinsured, with inadequate coverage and a further boost in already high medical bankruptcy.”

Medical debt contributed to nearly two-thirds of all bankruptcies in 2007, according to a study in the American Journal of Medicine. The majority of those afflicted were solidly middle-class homeowners at the start of their illness, and most had private health insurance.

Health Care Now, a hub for single-payer grassroots groups, is planning a large rally in Washington, D.C., for July 30, the anniversary of the founding of Medicare, on which many single-payer plans would be based. “Single-payer is the only plan that would truly be universal and contain costs,” said Katie Robbins of Health Care Now, arguing that the current plan pushed by congressional leaders “doesn’t protect us from the ills of the insurance-based system as we know it.”

Other progressive groups are withholding judgment for now, hoping the good aspects will ultimately outweigh the bad. “We’re digging through them now. We support a bill that has a true public option, and the House bill has that,” said Consumer Watchdog’s Jerry Flanagan. “But we really dislike the individual mandate [to purchase health insurance]. The insurance companies really don’t want the public option, but they really want the mandate.”

 

LEAVING OPTIONS OPEN

Even if single-payer isn’t going to be the national model yet, advocates say it’s crucial that states such as California be allowed to experiment with the option anyway. Single-payer advocates in Congress have insisted the health care legislation be amended to explicitly allow states to do single-payer (otherwise, federal preemption laws and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act might prevent states from doing so).

On July 17, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) successfully inserted such an amendment into the bill that cleared the House Committee on Education and Labor with a 25-19 vote, which included significant Republican support. The amendment was opposed by Miller, indicating Democratic Party leaders oppose the change and may ultimately succeed in stripping it from the bill.

“George Miller is a longtime supporter of a national single-payer plan and health care reform. The truth is, however, there are not enough votes in the House or the Senate to pass a final bill that contains single-payer language. That is unfortunate but it is also the truth,” Miller spokesperson Rachel Racusen told the Guardian.

California is a hotbed of single-payer activism. Even a leading candidate for state insurance commissioner, Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) — who appeared on the steps of San Francisco City Hall on July 15 to receive the endorsements of a long list of local elected officials — has made single-payer advocacy a central plank in his campaign.

The movement is so strong in California that it actually had legislators vying for who would get to carry its banner. San Francisco’s own state senator Mark Leno, a longtime single-payer supporter, was selected this year to take over the landmark single-payer legislation previously sponsored by termed-out legislator Sheila Kuehl, which has passed twice, only to be vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“The more I dive into this issue, the more convinced I am that the answer has to be single-payer,” Leno told us. “The only reform that truly contains costs is single-payer.”

Leno doesn’t fault Obama for taking a more cautious stance — but he does believe the federal government shouldn’t block states like California from creating single-payer systems. “States should be incubators of trying different proposals. We have a great history with that,” Leno said.

But even with a Democratic governor, there’s no guarantee that single-payer would be approved. Mayor Gavin Newsom is running for governor, featuring health care reform in his platform. He chairs the U.S. Conference of Mayors National Health Care Reform Task Force, which is pushing for approval of the Obama plan. But even Newsom won’t promise to back the Leno plan.

“He doesn’t think single-payer is the best option now,” Newsom’s campaign manager Eric Jaye told us when asked whether Newsom would sign the legislation as governor. “He hopes and believes that as governor he will be supporting a national public option.”

But in the end, the governor may not matter. Leno said the political reality in California is that voters, rather than legislators, will need to approve the single-payer system. The funding mechanism for any ambitious health care plan would require a two-thirds vote in the legislature, a political impossibility.

“The difference in California is the voters will have the final say. And I’m excited about that. The voters of California will be able to say to the insurance companies, ‘We’ve had enough, now go away,'” Leno told us. He said he expects a ballot campaign in 2012.

Of course, it won’t be that simple. Leno knows that the insurance industry will spend untold millions of dollars to defend itself and a “status quo that is only working for them, not for anyone else. This is an enormously powerful industry and they control the debates.”

“Our effort here in California is an educational one. We have from now until the election in 2012 to make the arguments,” Leno said.

 

THE COST OF INSURANCE

Testifying at a hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee in June, Geri Jenkins, a registered nurse and the co-president of the California Nurses Association, related the story of Nataline Sarkisyan. The 17-year-old girl needed a life-saving liver transplant, Jenkins explained to Congress members. “But CIGNA would not approve it,” she told them, “until I, and hundreds of others, protested. During one of the protests, I was with Hilda, Nataline’s mother, when she got the call of approval.”

Hilda’s relief didn’t last long. By the time the hurdle had been cleared, Jenkins testified, “it was too late. Nataline died an hour later.”

Nataline’s story sparked national outrage, and it has since become a flagship tale highlighting all that is wrong with this country’s health care system. But as the debate about health care reform continues inside House and Senate committee chambers, discussion about “universal health care” — a phrase with a simple ring to it — has grown murkier.

“We have a universal health care system now,” Flanagan said, referring to how all Americans with serious medical conditions have a right to treatment — even if that treatment comes with great expense in an overcrowded public hospital emergency room. “It’s just the most inefficient system imaginable.”

With the August congressional recess coming up fast and Obama leaning on Capitol Hill to shift into high gear on an issue that was a hallmark of his campaign, the pressure is on to vote on the historic health care reform legislation within weeks.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee passed a health care reform bill July 16 that is similar to the House bill, with the vote split along party lines. Now, national attention has turned to the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Baucus, which continued its efforts last week to achieve a bipartisan bill.

Many of progressive reform advocates simply don’t trust the players in Washington, D.C., to get this right, particularly Baucus. “He’s the voice of the insurance companies in the Senate,” Flanagan said.

A recent article in the Washington Post estimated that the insurance industry is spending an estimated $1.4 million per day to influence the outcome of the health care legislation, and pointed out that many of the lobbyists were Washington insiders who had previously worked for key legislators, such as Baucus.

The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group that tracks money in U.S. politics and operates the Web site opensecrets.org, launched an intensive study of health care sector lobbyist spending, including cataloguing industry contributions to individual candidates from 1989 to the present. Baucus received more industry campaign contributions in that time than any other Democrat, the CRP study reveals, with a total of $3.8 million. Henry Waxman (D-<\d>Los Angeles), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, received a total of $1.4 million in that same time, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) received $1.2 million.

Starting in the 2008 election cycle, the health sector gave more to Democrats than to Republicans, according to the CRP’s analysis.

To overcome that kind of money and influence, advocates say it was crucial to wield a credible single-payer option — a sort of death penalty for the insurance industry — for as long as possible.

“Having single-payer discussions on the table really informs the debate over the public option,” Flanagan said. “But by removing single-payer, it made the public option the left flank.”

Flanagan, like many, is worried about how a 900-page bill will turn out. “There are a thousands ways to get it wrong,” he said. “An easy way to get it right would be to just do a single-payer system.” ————

HEALTH CARE BY THE NUMBERS

• Uninsured Americans: 47 million

• Uninsured Californians: More than 6.7 million (about one in six)

• African Americans without health insurance in California: 19 percent

• Latinos without health insurance in California: 31 percent

• Whites without health insurance in California: 12 percent

• San Franciscans without health insurance: 15.3 percent

• Rise in health-insurance premiums from 2000 to 2007 in California: 96 percent

• Projected rise in health care costs per family without reform: $1,800 per year

• Percentage of bankruptcies attributed to an individual’s inability to pay medical bills: 62 percent

• Percentage of Americans who skip doctor visits because of the cost: 25 percent

• U.S. rank of 19 industrialized nations on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions: 19

• Jobs that would be created by extending Medicare to all Americans: 2.6 million

• Annual U.S. spending on billing and insurance-related administrative costs for health care: $400 billion

Sources: Health Care for America Now, American Journal of Medicine, Physicians for a National Health Program

Clutch

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PREVIEW To survive two decades in the music business, a band must learn to tolerate change. Clutch has prospered by embracing it. Since its beginnings as a shotgun marriage between East Coast hardcore and Southern rock, the Maryland four-piece has constantly retooled its elastic, blues-metal sound. Easily bored and eager to explore their prolific, improvisatory talents, the band members never perform the same set twice — they take turns surprising each other.

This year’s Strange Cousins From the West (Weathermaker Music) abandons the harmonica and keyboard accents that proliferated on 2007’s From Beale Street to Oblivion (DRT Records). Though the band has been on a bluesy, mellow trajectory since 2004’s Blast Tyrant (DRT), the pendulum is now swinging in the other direction, back toward the muscular guitar rock that comprised its definitive mid-1990s output.

The stand-out track "Abraham Lincoln" sounds appropriately like a funeral march, and the lyrics showcase singer Neil Fallon’s talent for making American history into motor-mouthed rock and roll genius. The album’s lead single "50,000 Unstoppable Watts" boasts a trademark non sequitur sing-along ("Anthrax/ham radio/and liquor"), underpinned by one of Tim Sult’s inimitable guitar leads. Neither shredding nor chugging, the licks glide along with the assured, unpredictable grace of a hopscotch expert.

On tour, Clutch is supported by Lionize, Sult’s reggae side project — bored, prolific, remember? — along with Baroness, a group that rivals the headlining godfathers in combining distorted guitars with Southern flavor and a vast range of influences. Extemporaneous and explosive in concert, Clutch is only skipped by the unwise.

CLUTCH With Lionize, Baroness. Wed/22, 8 p.m., $23. Regency Ballroom, 1290 Sutter, SF.

(415) 673-5716. www.theregencyballroom.com

Art Listings

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Art listings are compiled by Johnny Ray Huston. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

MUSEUMS

Asian Art Museum 200 Larkin; 581-3500, www.asianart.org. Tues-Wed, Fri-Sun, 10am-5pm; Thurs, 10am-9pm. $10 ($5 Thurs after 5pm), $7 seniors, $6 for ages 12 to 17, free for 11 and under. "In a New Light: The Asian Art Museum Collection." Ongoing.

California Palace of the Legion of Honor Lincoln Park (near 34th Ave and Clement); 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5pm. $8, $6 seniors, $5 for ages 12 to 17, free for 10 and under (free Tues). "Surrealism: Selections from the Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books." Work by surrealist poets and artists. Ongoing.

Cartoon Art Museum 655 Mission; CAR-TOON. Tues-Sun, 11am-5pm. $6, $4 students and seniors, $2 for ages 6 to 12, free for five and under and members. "The Brinkley Girls." Retrospective devoted to early 20th century illustrator Nell Brinkley. Through August 23.

Contemporary Jewish Museum 736 Mission; www.thecjm.org. Mon-Tues, Fri-Sun, 11am-5:30pm; Thurs, 1-8pm. $10, $8 seniors and students, free for 12 and under and members. "Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater." An exhibition of 200 works of art and ephemera. Through Sept 7. "Being Jewish: A Bay Area Portrait." Ongoing.

De Young Museum Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive (near Fulton and 10th Ave); 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5:15pm (Fri, 9:30am-8:45pm). $10 ($27.50 for "Tutankhamun"), $7 seniors, $6 for ages 13 to 17 and college students with ID (free first Tues). "Art and Power in the Central African Savannah." Survey show. Through Oct 11, 2009. "Towards Abstraction: Photographs and Photograms." Survey show. Through Nov 15. "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs." The return of the boy king. Through March 28, 2010. "The Fauna and Flora of the Pacific." Mural by Miguel Covarrubias. Ongoing.

Legion of Honor Lincoln Park, 34th Ave and Clement; 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5:15pm. $20 adults, $7 seniors, $6 youths and students, free 12 and under. "Waking Dreams: Max Klinger and the Symbolist Print." Survey show. Through Sept 6. "John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation." Retrospective exhibition. Through Nov 8.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 151 Third St; 357-4000. Mon-Tues, Fri-Sun, 11am-5:45pm; Thurs, 10am-8:45pm. $12.50, $8 seniors, $7 students, free for members and 12 and under (free first Tues; half price Thurs, 6-8:45pm). "Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’." Exhibition devoted to the photographic classic. Through August 23. "Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities." Show dedicated to the two popular American artists. Through Sept 7. "Matisse and Beyond: The Painting and Sculpture Collection." Museum survey. Through Nov 8. "Paul Klee: Social Creatures." Early line drawings by the artist. Through Nov 8. "Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004." Show dedicated to the iconic photographer. Through Nov 29. "Between Art and Life: The Contemporary Painting and Sculpure Collection." Museum survey. Through Jan 3, 2010. "Art in the Atrium: Kerry James Marshall." Monumental murals. Ongoing.

San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness, fourth floor; 255-4800, www.sfpalm.org. Tues-Fri, 11am-5pm; Sat, 1-5pm. Free. "Star Quality: The World of Noel Coward." Exhibition dedicated to the icon. Through August 29. "Maestro: Photographic Portraits of Tom Zimberoff." Portraits of national and international conductors. Ongoing. "150 Years of Dance in California." Ongoing. "San Francisco in Song." Ongoing. "San Francisco 1900: On Stage." Ongoing.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 701 Mission; 978-ARTS. Tues-Wed, Fri-Sun, noon-5pm; Thurs, noon-8pm. $6, $3 seniors, students, and youths, free for members (free first Tues). "Wallworks." Exhibition of local, regional, and international artists, curated by Betti-Sue Hertz. Through Oct. 25.


BAY AREA

Cantor Arts Center Lomita and Museum, Stanford University, Stanford; (650) 723-4177. Wed, Fri-Sun, 11am-5pm; Thurs, 11am-8pm. "Appellations to Antiquity." 19th and 20th century works from the museum collection. Through July 26. "Pop to Present." Survey from the 1960s to the present. Through August 16. "Contemporary Glass." Modern glass works. Ongoing. "Rodin! The Complete Stanford Collection." Ongoing.

Judah L. Magnes Museum 2911 Russell, Berk; (510) 549-6950. Mon-Wed, Sun, 11am-4pm. $4, $3 students and seniors. "Memory Lab." Interactive installation allowing visitors to make family albums from their documents, photographs, and memories. Ongoing. "Projections." Multimedia works from the museums archival, documentary, and experimental films. Ongoing.

Oakland Museum of California 1000 Oak, Oakl; (510) 238-2200. Wed-Sat, 10am-5pm (first Fri, 10am-9pm); Sun, noon-5pm. $8, $5 seniors and students (free second Sun). "Future of Sequoias: Sustaining Parklands in the 21st Century." Panoramic photos with commentary. Through August 23. "Squeak Carnwath: Painting is No Ordinary Object." A solo exhibition dedicated to the Oakland artist. Through August 23. "The Art and History of Early California." The story of California from the first inhabitants through the Gold Rush. Ongoing.

Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology UC Berkeley, 103 Kroeber Hall, room 3712, Bancroft and Bowditch, Berk; (510) 643-1193. Wed-Sat, 10am-4:30pm; Sun, noon-4pm. $4, $3 seniors, $1 students, free for 12 and under. "From the Maker’s Hand: Selections from the Permanent Collection." An exploration of human ingenuity found in living and historic cultures around the world. Ongoing.

UC Berkeley Art Museum 2626 Bancroft Way, Berk; (510) 642-0808. Wed-Sun, 11am-5pm. $8 adults, $5 seniors and young adults, free for members and 12 and under. "Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye." Museum survey curated by Lawrence Rinder. Through August 30. "Human Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet." Collaborative exhibition. Through Sept. 27. *

Solomon: Beyon the hype: Cronkite and Vietnam

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By Norman Solomon

Media eulogies for Walter Cronkite — including from progressive commentators — rarely talk about his coverage of the Vietnam War before 1968. This obit omit is essential to the myth of Cronkite as a courageous truth-teller.

But facts are facts, and history is history — including what Cronkite actually did as TV’s most influential journalist during the first years of the Vietnam War. Despite all the posthumous praise for Cronkite’s February 1968 telecast that dubbed the war “a stalemate,” the facts of history show that the broadcast came only after Cronkite’s protracted support for the war.

In 1965, reporting from Vietnam, Cronkite dramatized the murderous war effort with enthusiasm. “B-57s — the British call them Canberra jets — we’re using them very effectively here in this war in Vietnam to dive-bomb the Vietcong in these jungles beyond Da Nang here,” he reported, standing in front of a plane. Cronkite then turned to a U.S. Air Force officer next to him and said: “Colonel, what’s our mission we’re about to embark on?”

Art Listings

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Art listings are compiled by Johnny Ray Huston. See Picks for information on how to submit items to the listings. For more art listings go to sfbg.com.

MUSEUMS

Asian Art Museum 200 Larkin; 581-3500, www.asianart.org. Tues-Wed, Fri-Sun, 10am-5pm; Thurs, 10am-9pm. $10 ($5 Thurs after 5pm), $7 seniors, $6 for ages 12 to 17, free for 11 and under. "In a New Light: The Asian Art Museum Collection." Ongoing.

California Palace of the Legion of Honor Lincoln Park (near 34th Ave and Clement); 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5pm. $8, $6 seniors, $5 for ages 12 to 17, free for 10 and under (free Tues). "Surrealism: Selections from the Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books." Work by surrealist poets and artists. Ongoing.

Cartoon Art Museum 655 Mission; CAR-TOON. Tues-Sun, 11am-5pm. $6, $4 students and seniors, $2 for ages 6 to 12, free for five and under and members. "Watchmen." Illustrations, sketches, and comic book pages by Dave Gibbons. Through Sun/19. "The Brinkley Girls." Retrospective devoted to early 20th century illustrator Nell Brinkley. Through August 23.

Contemporary Jewish Museum 736 Mission; www.thecjm.org. Mon-Tues, Fri-Sun, 11am-5:30pm; Thurs, 1-8pm. $10, $8 seniors and students, free for 12 and under and members. "Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater." An exhibition of 200 works of art and ephemera. Through Sept 7. "Being Jewish: A Bay Area Portrait." Ongoing.

De Young Museum Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive (near Fulton and 10th Ave); 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5:15pm (Fri, 9:30am-8:45pm). $10 ($27.50 for "Tutankhamun"), $7 seniors, $6 for ages 13 to 17 and college students with ID (free first Tues). "Art and Power in the Central African Savannah." Survey show. Through Oct 11, 2009. "Towards Abstraction: Photographs and Photograms." Survey show. Through Nov 15. "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs." The return of the boy king. Through March 28, 2010. "The Fauna and Flora of the Pacific." Mural by Miguel Covarrubias. Ongoing.

Legion of Honor Lincoln Park, 34th Ave and Clement; 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5:15pm. $20 adults, $7 seniors, $6 youths and students, free 12 and under. "Waking Dreams: Max Klinger and the Symbolist Print." Survey show. Through Sept 6. "John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation." Retrospective exhibition. Through Nov 8.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 151 Third St; 357-4000. Mon-Tues, Fri-Sun, 11am-5:45pm; Thurs, 10am-8:45pm. $12.50, $8 seniors, $7 students, free for members and 12 and under (free first Tues; half price Thurs, 6-8:45pm). "Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’." Exhibition devoted to the photographic classic. Through August 23. "Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities." Show dedicated to the two popular American artists. Through Sept 7. "Matisse and Beyond: The Painting and Sculpture Collection." Museum survey. Through Nov 8. "Paul Klee: Social Creatures." Early line drawings by the artist. Through Nov 8. "Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004." Show dedicated to the iconic photographer. Through Nov 29. "Between Art and Life: The Contemporary Painting and Sculpure Collection." Museum survey. Through Jan 3, 2010. "Art in the Atrium: Kerry James Marshall." Monumental murals. Ongoing.

San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness, fourth floor; 255-4800, www.sfpalm.org. Tues-Fri, 11am-5pm; Sat, 1-5pm. Free. "Star Quality: The World of Noel Coward." Exhibition dedicated to the icon. Through August 29. "Maestro: Photographic Portraits of Tom Zimberoff." Portraits of national and international conductors. Ongoing. "150 Years of Dance in California." Ongoing. "San Francisco in Song." Ongoing. "San Francisco 1900: On Stage." Ongoing.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 701 Mission; 978-ARTS. Tues-Wed, Fri-Sun, noon-5pm; Thurs, noon-8pm. $6, $3 seniors, students, and youths, free for members (free first Tues). "Wallworks." Exhibition of local, regional, and international artists, curated by Betti-Sue Hertz. Sat/18 through Oct. 25.


BAY AREA

Cantor Arts Center Lomita and Museum, Stanford University, Stanford; (650) 723-4177. Wed, Fri-Sun, 11am-5pm; Thurs, 11am-8pm. "Appellations to Antiquity." 19th and 20th century works from the museum collection. Through July 26. "Pop to Present." Survey from the 1960s to the present. Through August 16. "Contemporary Glass." Modern glass works. Ongoing. "Rodin! The Complete Stanford Collection." Ongoing.

Judah L. Magnes Museum 2911 Russell, Berk; (510) 549-6950. Mon-Wed, Sun, 11am-4pm. $4, $3 students and seniors. "Memory Lab." Interactive installation allowing visitors to make family albums from their documents, photographs, and memories. Ongoing. "Projections." Multimedia works from the museums archival, documentary, and experimental films. Ongoing.

Oakland Museum of California 1000 Oak, Oakl; (510) 238-2200. Wed-Sat, 10am-5pm (first Fri, 10am-9pm); Sun, noon-5pm. $8, $5 seniors and students (free second Sun). "Future of Sequoias: Sustaining Parklands in the 21st Century." Panoramic photos with commentary. Through August 23. "Squeak Carnwath: Painting is No Ordinary Object." A solo exhibition dedicated to the Oakland artist. Through August 23. "The Art and History of Early California." The story of California from the first inhabitants through the Gold Rush. Ongoing.

Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology UC Berkeley, 103 Kroeber Hall, room 3712, Bancroft and Bowditch, Berk; (510) 643-1193. Wed-Sat, 10am-4:30pm; Sun, noon-4pm. $4, $3 seniors, $1 students, free for 12 and under. "From the Maker’s Hand: Selections from the Permanent Collection." An exploration of human ingenuity found in living and historic cultures around the world. Ongoing.

UC Berkeley Art Museum 2626 Bancroft Way, Berk; (510) 642-0808. Wed-Sun, 11am-5pm. $8 adults, $5 seniors and young adults, free for members and 12 and under. "Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye." Museum survey curated by Lawrence Rinder. Through August 30. "Human Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet." Collaborative exhibition. Through Sept. 27. *

Prison report: Special edition

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By Just A Guy

Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His blogs typically appear Mondays and Thursdays. However, he sent over a special report today on a recent incident in Solano State Prison.

Let me tell you where your tax dollars are going — something the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation doesn’t tell you about, and its secretary, Matt Cate, and spokesperson Lance Corcoran neglect to tell you about in their disingenuous double-speak about inmates, prison, rehabilitation and spending.

Right now the California state prison in Solano is on modified program because on one of the four yards that prison, an anonymous note was found in the mail by a corrections officer. It said:

“The blacks have a zip gun and three shells.”

Because of this anonymous note, the normal program for the entire institution has been modified so that the inmates get no yard activities because the staff has been redirected to search the building in which this unsubstantiated note was discovered.

Now, in normal investigative law-enforcement practices, would it be standard operating procedure to redirect significant resources and funding based on unsubstantiated information? I highly doubt it.

Bear in mind that this is the third time since April, 2008 that an anonymous note has been discovered indicating that a zip gun was in the possession of an inmate. In April 2008, the entire institution was searched, resulting in lots of overtime for the guards, but a zip gun was never found. In the second instance, a similar note was discovered but no search was performed — but this was likely a function of senior administration in Sacramento not allowing the massive expenditure of resources and loss of revenue (from the Prison Industry Authority) that a search causes. In this most recent instance, CDCR administration is making sure that revenue-generating functions like PIA are still going strong, which is indicative of how seriously the note was taken by the administration.

Think about what the alleged anonymous note said:

“three shells.”

Now, I find it very unlikely than an inmate would us the word “shells.” We would much more likely say “bullets.” It seems to me that a person who would use that terminology has either law-enforcement or military experience, which supports the argument that it was a staff member who planted the anonymous note. I would be curious to know whether or not CDCR will try and lift fingerprints from the note to see whether or not an inmate actually touched the paper — or are they afraid of what the fingerprint results may turn up?

At the end of the day, the CDCR has a long-standing history of only instituting measures detrimental to the inmate population when unsubstantiated and unverified information crosses the staff’s desk. Such information serves their purpose, which is to redirect staff and implement overtime situations that are beneficial to CDCR employees. That information becomes gospel.

Remember the swine flu? CDCR discontinued visiting for fear of spreading the disease — yet continued transfers between institutions and had every other program running, specifically the PIA — which, of course, makes CDCR money.

I would really like to see Sen. Mark Leno or Assemblymember Tom Ammiano or some media outlet call CSP Solano and question their “modified” program. After all, it’s your money that’s being wasted.

Hmm … I wonder if they could have paid the salary of a grade-school teacher for a year with the money that was wasted on this one “modified” program?

Writers’ Block: In Defense of The Tag

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By Michael Krimper

The tag is the essence of graffiti. The craft begins with and grows from the aesthetics of the tag. Without it, there would be no two colored throw-ups or top to bottom burners breathing life into abandoned parking lots. No Goliath productions and finely orchestrated murals ushering thousands into Clarion Alley. And no multi-million dollar industry building upon and capitalizing on graffiti’s provocative aesthetic legacy. The tag is literally the ABC’s of the art practice. But in the eye of the mass public, the tag gets the worst wrap out of all of graffiti’s many articulations.

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Photo by Michael Krimper

I have engaged in countless conversations with detesters of the tag who confess more often than not a rapturous appreciation for its more colorful, larger than life offspring. Nonetheless, they cannot stand graffiti’s more ubiquitous and less evolved ancestors. The detesters envision city streets completely devoid of drippy marked signatures but magnificently filled with vibrantly painted walls. An urban landscape thoughtfully curated with the latex polish of expertly trained artists, but missing the gritty, grassroots democracy of the tag. A pleasant but curiously vacuous or ghostly urban picture.

In defense of the tag, it has many upstanding virtues as a serious art form. At rock bottom, the shape of the letters express raw feeling and the organization of the name tells a cohesive narrative. At its most experimental, the tag stretches the conceptual basis of letter forms and the autograph beyond their pragmatic usage into the more abstract territory of geometric notions and relations. At any level of skill whatsoever, the writer demonstrates a grasp on “hand styles”, the calligraphic interpretation of form and personality by way of stylizing a dynamic signature. However, considering that much of today’s (and history’s) broadly venerated visual art and pervasive commercial art employs aesthetic qualities similar or identical to those inherent in the graffiti tag, I have come to doubt that most people’s disgust is fundamentally conditioned by the tag’s surface appearance.

Screw design: Jimmyjane’s Ethan Imboden works the vibe

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Ethan Imboden, center. Photo from the blog of Rose Apodaca. The vibrator, in its evolution, has come a long, long way. The first vibrators, which debuted in the late 19th century, look nothing like sex toys as we know them today and everything like like the kind of power tools you’d find in the basement lair of a serial killer. They also came with sexy names like the “Shelton Deluxe-Wayne Vibrator” and “Dr. Ocara’s Pulsocon,” though more appropriate names for these toys run along the lines of the “Pleasure of Pain” and “Use me if you don’t want a clitoris by the time we’re through”. As the decades progressed, vibrator manufacturers continued to struggle with design. The design of 1950s-era vibrators were not a great improvement on the vibrators of the 1890s, as evidenced by this toaster on wheels-made-of-hot-rollers known as the Chic Glorifier. Though utilitarian vibrators have existed for over a century, it hasn’t been until recently that sex toy manufacturers have started realizing that while having an orgasm is sexy, having an orgasm with a something that looks like a power drill is not. Having sex with a person is generally more satisfying if you are attracted to the person in the first place, so why can’t the same philosophy be applied to the act of having sex with a toy? So along came Jimmyjane. Founded by Ethan Imboden in 2003, Jimmyjane is a local company headquartered in Potrero Hill that sells high design vibrators, with price points starting from around $100 to an almost inconceivable $2,750 for the Little Gold Eternity, a gold vibrator adorned in diamonds and etched with hearts that looks like something you’d find on rich cougar’s bedside table (if you were lucky). An expensive vibrator isn’t for everyone (I myself cannot fathom spending over $100 on anything that doesn’t involve a week’s worth of groceries or a plane ticket), but for those who want an aesthetically pleasing vibrator and have the money to spend, Jimmyjane is a nice little oasis in a world of scary vibrators. Even for this skinflint blogger, spending over a hundred dollars on Jimmyjane’s beautifully designed Form 6 is not beyond the realm of possible futures. Ethan sat down with the SFBG to talk about Jimmyjane and the changing future of vibrators. jimmycase0709.jpg

SFBG: You went to Johns Hopkins and got your degree in electrical engineering, and then you went to Pratt for industrial design. So it actually really makes sense that you’re doing what you’re doing. But do you recall the first moments, in your history as a designer and engineer, when you realized you wanted to make vibrators?

EI: Yes absolutely. It’s etched indelibly in my memory. I was visiting a sex toy trade show with a potential client. That was really the first time I really entered into the world of sex toys and accessories. I was immediately struck by the fact that design had not touched the category and there was such an opportunity to take the same discipline in my background and apply them here. I had some experience with sex toys, but not a whole lot to be honest. And I had no idea how much experience my peers had with these types of products, but when I got back that’s all anyonen wanted to talk about.

SFBG: Looking at your vibes, there’s a perceptible aesthetic. It’s minimal, it’s modern, and definitely ‘less than more’ when it comes to ornament. But what, in your own words, is Jimmyjane’s design philosophy?

Art Listings

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Art listings are compiled by Johnny Ray Huston. See Picks for information on how to submit items to the listings. For more art listings go to sfbg.com.

MUSEUMS

Asian Art Museum 200 Larkin; 581-3500, www.asianart.org. Tues-Wed, Fri-Sun, 10am-5pm; Thurs, 10am-9pm. $10 ($5 Thurs after 5pm), $7 seniors, $6 for ages 12 to 17, free for 11 and under. "In a New Light: The Asian Art Museum Collection." Ongoing.

California Palace of the Legion of Honor Lincoln Park (near 34th Ave and Clement); 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5pm. $8, $6 seniors, $5 for ages 12 to 17, free for 10 and under (free Tues). "Surrealism: Selections from the Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books." Work by surrealist poets and artists. Ongoing.

Cartoon Art Museum 655 Mission; CAR-TOON. Tues-Sun, 11am-5pm. $6, $4 students and seniors, $2 for ages 6 to 12, free for five and under and members. "Watchmen." Illustrations, sketches, and comic book pages by Dave Gibbons. Through July 19. "The Brinkley Girls." Retrospective devoted to early 20th century illustrator Nell Brinkley. Through August 23.

Contemporary Jewish Museum 736 Mission; www.thecjm.org. Mon-Tues, Fri-Sun, 11am-5:30pm; Thurs, 1-8pm. $10, $8 seniors and students, free for 12 and under and members. "Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater." An exhibition of 200 works of art and ephemera. Through Sept 7. "Being Jewish: A Bay Area Portrait." Ongoing.

De Young Museum Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive (near Fulton and 10th Ave); 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5:15pm (Fri, 9:30am-8:45pm). $10, $7 seniors, $6 for ages 13 to 17 and college students with ID (free first Tues). "The Fauna and Flora of the Pacific." Mural by Miguel Covarrubias. Ongoing.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 151 Third St; 357-4000. Mon-Tues, Fri-Sun, 11am-5:45pm; Thurs, 10am-8:45pm. $12.50, $8 seniors, $7 students, free for members and 12 and under (free first Tues; half price Thurs, 6-8:45pm). "Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’." Exhibition devoted to the photographic classic. Through August 23. "Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities." Show dedicated to the two popular American artists. Through Sept 7. "Art in the Atrium: Kerry James Marshall." Monumental murals. Ongoing.

San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness, fourth floor; 255-4800, www.sfpalm.org. Tues-Fri, 11am-5pm; Sat, 1-5pm. Free. "Star Quality: The World of Noel Coward." Exhibition dedicated to the icon. Through August 29. "Maestro: Photographic Portraits of Tom Zimberoff." Portraits of national and international conductors. Ongoing. "150 Years of Dance in California." Ongoing. "San Francisco in Song." Ongoing. "San Francisco 1900: On Stage." Ongoing.


BAY AREA

Cantor Arts Center Lomita and Museum, Stanford University, Stanford; (650) 723-4177. Wed, Fri-Sun, 11am-5pm; Thurs, 11am-8pm. "Appellations to Antiquity." 19th and 20th century works from the museum collection. Through July 26. "Pop to Present." Survey from the 1960s to the present. Through August 16. "Contemporary Glass." Modern glass works. Ongoing. "Rodin! The Complete Stanford Collection." Ongoing.

Judah L. Magnes Museum 2911 Russell, Berk; (510) 549-6950. Mon-Wed, Sun, 11am-4pm. $4, $3 students and seniors. "Memory Lab." Interactive installation allowing visitors to make family albums from their documents, photographs, and memories. Ongoing. "Projections." Multimedia works from the museums archival, documentary, and experimental films. Ongoing.

Oakland Museum of California 1000 Oak, Oakl; (510) 238-2200. Wed-Sat, 10am-5pm (first Fri, 10am-9pm); Sun, noon-5pm. $8, $5 seniors and students (free second Sun). "Future of Sequoias: Sustaining Parklands in the 21st Century." Panoramic photos with commentary. Through August 23. "Squeak Carnwath: Painting is No Ordinary Object." A solo exhibition dedicated to the Oakland artist. Through August 23. "The Art and History of Early California." The story of California from the first inhabitants through the Gold Rush. Ongoing.

Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology UC Berkeley, 103 Kroeber Hall, room 3712, Bancroft and Bowditch, Berk; (510) 643-1193. Wed-Sat, 10am-4:30pm; Sun, noon-4pm. $4, $3 seniors, $1 students, free for 12 and under. "From the Maker’s Hand: Selections from the Permanent Collection." An exploration of human ingenuity found in living and historic cultures around the world. Ongoing.

UC Berkeley Art Museum 2626 Bancroft Way, Berk; (510) 642-0808. Wed-Sun, 11am-5pm. $8 adults, $5 seniors and young adults, free for members and 12 and under. "Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye." Museum survey curated by Lawrence Rinder. Through August 30. "Human Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet." Collaborative exhibition. Through Sept. 27.

Nip it in the bud

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Imagine if San Franciscans had the choice of sending the check for their monthly electricity fees to one of two places. Option A is a massive private utility company, serving up fossil fuel-fired and nuclear-powered energy, presided over by a CEO who got paid nearly $9 million last year. Option B is a publicly-owned program run by local government that offers a substantial percentage of green electricity from sources such as wind, solar, and tidal power. In San Francisco, which one would people be more likely to pick?

The intent behind community choice aggregation (CCA) programs, which in San Francisco is known as Clean Power SF, is to make Option B a reality. If successful, the program would signify not just a major advance on the green front, but a dent in Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s longstanding monopoly in the Bay Area.

The program development is inching along under the direction of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo). Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who chairs LAFCo, has poured a tremendous amount of time and energy into the city’s fledgling CCA program.

So when a proposed state ballot initiative surfaced that threatens to thwart statewide CCA programs before they launch, Mirkarimi came out swinging hard.

Titled the "Taxpayers Right to Vote Act," the proposed initiative would require that any effort to create or fund a CCA program be ratified by two-thirds of the voters. The measure would erect an almost impossibly high barrier to CCA development around the state, effectively snuffing out PG&E’s would-be competition and sullying local governments’ plans to embrace publicly-owned, cleaner energy alternatives.

Mirkarimi wasted no time in drafting a resolution against the measure and submitting it to the Board of Supervisors, telling his colleagues that the utility’s proposal undermines years of effort "to allow municipalities to go ahead and chart their own energy destiny so they don’t have to be on the syringe of fossil fuel-driven corporations like PG&E."

He also took issue with the name of the proposal, calling it deceptive and misleading. "The point is that we should not be manipulated by measures such as this, where voters would be required to have a two-thirds vote on something the state Legislature has already allowed us to pursue," Mirkarimi said. "It’s our own right, and corporate special interests shouldn’t dictate otherwise." The state law that grants local governments the right to pursue community choice aggregation, which was sponsored by then-Sen. Carole Migden, specifically prohibits actions that impede the progress of a CCA.

PG&E’s name does not appear anywhere on the ballot-initiative proposal, but a spokesperson for the initiative confirmed that the utility had paid the submission fee. The law firm listed as a contact for the proposal, meanwhile, has been enlisted by PG&E before. And Robert Lee Pence, who is named as the proponent of the initiative, has teamed up with PG&E ally Townsend, Raimundo, Besler and Usher on campaign measures in the past. That Sacramento-based political consulting firm describes its strategic consulting services online with this brazen slogan: "Moving opinions is what we do best."

PG&E did not return calls for comment.

At the June 30 Board of Supervisors meeting, supervisors approved Mirkarimi’s resolution on a 10 to 1 vote, with Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier voting no. And while a resolution does little more than create a formal record of the board’s position on a matter, Mirkarimi seemed to suggest that it was only the start of a battle mounting against this proposal. "Don’t be surprised [if] a number of municipalities align themselves in potential litigation against this," he said.

Sup. David Campos, an attorney who also sits on LAFCo, hinted that the city could enter into litigation on the issue. "I hope the city is carefully looking at legal issues that might be raised by the actions of PG&E," he noted at the June 30 Board meeting. "I think that there are legal protections we need to avail ourselves of, and I hope the City Attorney’s Office, working with the Board of Supervisors, can make sure that the city takes all steps that it needs to take to protect its legal rights."

Campos later told the Guardian that he had not yet spoken with the City Attorney’s Office about it.

When asked about pursuing legal action, the City Attorney’s Office would only say that "we’re aware of it, and we’re evaluating what we will be doing," according to spokesperson Jack Song.

Barbara Hale, general manager for power at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, told the Guardian, "We have certainly been talking with other cities about the initiative." But Hale added that the agency hadn’t taken a formal position yet because it is so early in the process. "It hasn’t actually been placed on any ballots yet."

Since the initiative was submitted, public power activists across the state have taken notice. Jeff Shields, general manager of the South San Joaquin Irrigation District, has gone toe-to-toe with PG&E on public power issues before. One of the most memorable battles occurred when a political consulting firm hired by PG&E hacked into SSJID’s computers in the midst of a tug-of-war over control of the area’s electricity infrastructure — only to get caught by the FBI and publicly denounced by PG&E. "Obfuscation is PG&E’s middle name," Shields says. "I know there are lots of people looking at this initiative, but I don’t know that there’s a specific organizational effort against it at this time."

Jerry Jordan, executive director of the Sacramento-based California Municipal Utilities Association — a statewide organization representing 70 public utilities — told the Guardian that CMUA would oppose the initiative. However, "we may wait until it qualifies," Jordan said. The initiative is still in its earliest stages, and the attorney general has yet to certify it as legal to the secretary of state.

Meanwhile, efforts to move forward with the CCA model in other regions are floundering in these tough fiscal times. The San Joaquin Valley Power Authority voted June 25 to temporarily suspend its CCA, an effort in the works for years that had a goal of offering electricity to customers at lower and more stable rates.

Spokeswoman Cristel Tufenkjian said the greatest obstacle was a contract with CitiGroup’s energy branch that was marred by tight credit markets. "When things started to go south with the markets, CitiGroup said it could not execute that contract," Tufenkjian explained. She also added, "We are opposed to the initiative."

The SJVPA bid to create a CCA was also hindered by opposition from PG&E. "For the last few years, PG&E has continually placed roadblocks in front of our program in an attempt to stop us from implementing community choice and ultimately not providing residents and businesses the opportunity to have a choice about who will provide them electrical energy," said Ron Manfredi, city manager of Kerman and chair of the San Joaquin Valley Power Authority.

The Board of Supervisors’ resolution against the ballot initiative condemns such roadblocks and vows to push through this one. "PG&E has a history of acting to maintain its monopoly in its service region, including opposing public power initiatives at the ballot and lobbying officials of California cities [and] counties against community choice aggregation in apparent violation of the provisions [of state law]," the text of the resolution reads.

As this ballot initiative moves through the approval process, it’s clear that a battle is going to heat up very quickly. "I think we have to fight this as hard as we can," Campos told us. "PG&E has been unsuccessful in killing [CCA] here in San Francisco, but they have certainly delayed it. Now they’re trying to make sure it doesn’t happen anywhere else."

We walk with a zombie

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PHENOM In our heads, in our heads: zombies, zombies, zombies.

Don’t blame me for taking a bite out of your brain and inserting an annoying tune in its place — once again, not long after the last onslaught of undead trends, our culture is totally zombie mad.

The phrase "zombie bank" is multiplying at a disturbing rate within economic circles. In music, the group Zombi — hailing from the zombie capitol Pittsburgh — is reviving the analogue electronics of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead while the British act Zomby brings dubstep to postapocalyptic dance floors. A comedy of manners possessed by ultraviolent urges, Seth Grahame-Smith’s "unmentionable" Jane Austen update Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Quirk Books, 320 pages, $12.95) has set up camp on the trade paperback New York Times best sellers list, with S.G. Browne’s Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament — currently being movie-ized by Diablo Cody — on its trail. On a smaller scale, Yusaka Hanakuma’s manga Tokyo Zombie (Last Gasp, 164 pages, $9.95) has caught a zombie plane over to the United States.

Most of all, posthumous Michael Jackson mania is bringing the corpse choreography of the 1983 video for "Thriller" to life, as the media and masses fluctuate between the worst facets of grave-robbing and best facets of revival and death celebration. A Friday, July 3 party in Seattle that aimed to top the 3,370-participant world record for largest "zombie walk" included a mass dance performance to the song.

When journalist Lev Grossman first noted the shift in bloodlust from vampirism to zombiedom in a Time trend piece this April, he ticked off some of these activities but steered clear of visual art. Zombies are around in galleries and museums, too. In Los Angeles last month, Peres Projects presented Bruce LaBruce’s "Untitled Hardcore Zombie Project" in which stills from a forthcoming movie by the director of last year’s Otto; or, Up with Dead People were blown up, framed, and hung on the space’s blood-spattered white cube walls. Here in San Francisco, Michael Rosenthal Gallery is hosting a variety of zombified works by another Canadian artist, Jillian Mcdonald.

Active revisions of cinema are central to Mcdonald, whose past projects find her staring down, mimicking and making out with male screen icons such as Billy Bob Thornton. "Monstrosities" makes room for vampires, but hunger for flesh is dominant over thirst for blood. The five-minute video Zombie Apocalypse brings the zombie back to the beach, its eerily effective primary haunting ground in Jacques Tourneur’s classic 1943 Val Lewton production I Walked with a Zombie — which, incidentally, is being remade, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre now explicitly cited as its source material. In 2006’s Horror Make-up, Mcdonald plays with the image of a woman putting on makeup in public by using her compact to turn herself into a zombie while raiding the New York subway. "Monstrosities" also includes zombie wall portraits that aren’t exactly static. Through lenticular photography, Mcdonald taps into the zombie within an acquaintance, a creature that often appears more animated than its "living" counterpart.

"Monstrosities" and much of Mcdonald’s current work mines horror as a source of catharsis. The tactic is most overt in 2007’s The Scream, where her screams scare off a variety of slasher killers and monstrous adversaries. Art world attempts at tapping into filmic horror can be dreadful in the sterile and blah sense (see Cindy Sherman’s 1997’s Office Killer — or better, don’t see it). But when Mcdonald bites zombies, she gives them love bites, borne out of and energized by genuine appreciation. (Johnny Ray Huston)

JILLIAN MCDONALD: MONSTROSITIES

Through July 22

Michael Rosenthal Gallery

365 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-1010

www.jillianmcdonald.net

www.rostenthalgallery.com

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Brain appetit: Fine reading and viewing for the discriminating zombie lover

Twilight (haven’t read it) and True Blood (haven’t seen it) are grabbing all the headlines, including a fawning New York Times story entitled "A Trend with Teeth." But fuck this newfangled passion for vampires. (Apologies to Let the Right One In: you are awesome, despite the massive English subtitle fail on your DVD.) Go back to the graveyard, sexy supernatural critters. There’s a far more terrifying and fiendishly disgusting army of coffin-rockers afoot these days. And though they’ll happily drink your blood, they’ll also help themselves to the rest of your delicious mortal flesh.

Granted, zombie movies are almost as old as cinema itself. Glenn Kay’s recent Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide (Chicago Review Press, 352 pages, $25.95), which features a forward by Stuart Gordon, director of 1985’s Re-Animator, is a pretty good jumping-off point for the uninitiated — and a steal for anyone who’s shy about paying $280 on eBay for Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci (FAB Press). Generously illustrated chapters — with a full-color photo section in the book’s center — cover the genre’s history, starting with 1932’s White Zombie (fun fact: star Bela Lugosi earned $500-ish dollars for playing the sinister plantation owner improbably named "Murder.") There are spotlights on the turbulent 1960s (the era that spawned 1968’s immortal Night of the Living Dead), the insane 1970s (with an index of "the weirdest/funniest/most disturbing things" seen in zombie films, including my own personal fave: the underwater shark vs. zombie battle in 1979’s Zombie), Italy’s reign of terror in the 1980s (the decade that also brought us, lest we forget, "Thriller"), and the rise of video game zombies in the 1990s. Sprinkled throughout are interviews with horror luminaries like makeup master Tom Savini.

Zombie Movies‘ biggest chapter is devoted to the new millennium, with shout-outs to Asian entries like Versus (2000), cult hits like 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, and mainstream moneymakers — 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake brought in $59 million. Less successful (in my book, if not apparent George Romero fanatic Kay’s) was 2007’s Diary of the Dead, the least-enjoyable entry in Romero’s esteemed zombie series. Blame it on an annoying cast, and an even more annoying reliance on the hot-for-five-minutes "self-filming" technique. Aside from producing a Crazies remake (nooo!), Romero’s next project is titled simply … of the Dead, release date unknown, zombie subject matter an absolute certainty.

Still, ammo enough for walking-dead fans sick of all this fang-banging comes in two forms: the hilarious trailer for Zombieland (due in October), featuring Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg as slayers of the undead, and the eagerly-anticipated arrival of Dead Snow. Currently available as an On-Demand selection for Comcast customers (in crappy dubbed form), this Norwegian import — a comedy with plenty of satisfying gore — opens July 17 at the Roxie (in presumably superior, subtitled form). Nazi zombies, y’all. Get some! (Cheryl Eddy)

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Zombie playlist: Music to eat flesh by

For whatever reason, America is possessed by a another wave of fascination with the living dead. Is increased anxiety about a devastated economy manifesting as comic book fantasy? Or do we just think zombies are kinda neat? Either way, like so many (or few) survivors barricaded inside an abandoned country home, we’re captivated by the brainless hordes. In the mood for some mood music? Here’s a brief celebration of zombiedom in the world of rock. It ain’t authoritative — no self-respecting zombie respects authority.

MISFITS

"Braineaters"

(from Walk Among Us, Slash, 1982)

Yes, Walk Among Us also features "Night of the Living Dead" and "Astro Zombies," but neither of those tracks captures the profound ennui of existence as a walking corpse. Democratically sung from a zombie’s perspective, "Braineaters" laments a repetitive diet of brains. (Why can’t a zombie have some tasty guts instead?) The Misfits actually made a primitive music video for "Braineaters" that shows the band engaged in what has to be the most disgusting food fight ever filmed. If you’ve ever wanted to see a young Glenn Danzig covered in what appear to be cow brains, have I got a YouTube link for you!

ANNIHILATION TIME

"Fast Forward to the Gore"

(from II, Six Weeks, 2005)

One of the standout tracks from II, "Fast Forward to the Gore" makes excellent use of singer Jimmy Rose’s frantic vocal delivery. Rose’s raw lyrics, belted out over the hardcore guitar assault of Graham Clise and Jamie Sanitate, celebrate the subtle artistry at play when zombie meets chainsaw. In the event of an actual zombie apocalypse, this song should serve as nostalgic reminder of simpler times, when zombies were merely a source of entertainment that didn’t leave the TV screen.

THE ZOMBIES

Entire discography

Self-explanatory.

DEATH

"Zombie Ritual"

(from Scream Bloody Gore, Combat, 1987)

The second track on the seminal Scream Bloody Gore, "Zombie Ritual" helped establish the nascent death metal scene’s predictable love affair with the titular braindead hellspawn. Chuck Schuldiner’s lyrics — as awesomely repulsive as anything the genre has to offer — deal with some sort of zombie creation ceremony, though the only discernable part is the Dylanesque chorus ("Zombie ritual!" screamed four times in succession). While Death’s later albums saw Schuldiner grow by leaps and bounds as a songwriter, "Zombie Ritual" remained a live staple up until the band’s final days. (Tony Papanikolas)

Out of the blue

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

ESSAY This is the briar patch, the place from which all funky thangs flow. On the anniversary of the death of my Afro-Algonquin Southern (re)belle mother, my bare feet are planted in the dirt. Since it’s also the last days of Black Music Month, I am out of my head, thoughts swirling across the amber waves pondering the intersections of family, flesh, and funk, questing after new sounds and cultural concepts even as I journey into my sonic past. The last time it seems I was so enmeshed and empowered by cultural renaissance was just over 21 years ago, when Neil Young first heralded his now released Archives project, and I embraced the notion that Neil Young’s work is black music.

My late mother was a restless adventurer born in Virginia — and I perceive Neil Young as the same via osmosis from his maternal grandfather, Bill Ragland, a Virginian émigré to the Great North and scion of the Southern planter class from Petersburg. The Neil Young I love most is the direct heir of aspects of Daddy Ragland’s personal lore: he had the first radio and gramophone in Winnipeg, Canada; he fiercely retained his American citizenship while big pimpin’ in Manitoba (foreshadowing his grandson’s famous Canadian retentions despite residing in California).

Daddy Ragland boasted that his grandfather had freed the enslaved Africans on the family plantation. But he was also descended from the original British invaders who established Virginia Colony, destroying my people’s lifeways and ecology in process, setting precedents for America’s current crises around violence, resources, and the environment. The glories and tensions in Young’s family fables would appear to be the benefactor of much of his catalog’s leading lights: "Southern Man," "Cortez the Killer," "After the Gold Rush," "Country Girl," "Pocahontas," "Here We Are In the Years," "Alabama," "Broken Arrow," "Powderfinger," and "Down By the River."

Young’s internal narrative of ur-Americana (literally carried on the blood) is enacted again and again and refashioned throughout Reprise’s 10-disc Neil Young Archives — Vol. 1 (1963-1972), a collection that traces his odyssey from Ventures acolyte and early earnest folkie to embryonic trickster of eco-metal. The epic nature of Young’s work, akin to a late modern, machine age substitute for Greek myth — at least for the hippie, Coastopian jet-set — was once lost on me. The voice beaming over the radio waves in "Helpless" and "Sugar Mountain" was repellent to these ears, raised in the 1970s when Mother Nature was on the run and the last universally-recognized golden era of black music abounded with diverse male songbirds (Ronnie Dyson, Carl Anderson) and badass lovemen (Teddy Pendergrass, Eddie Levert). But one day, after yet another wearisome visit to a coffeehouse festooned with Harry Chapin songs and some showoff girl’s fey rendition of "Helpless," I encountered three Neil Young masterpieces that forever altered my hearing: "Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing," "Broken Arrow," and "Cinnamon Girl." I became a Buffalo Springfield devotee for life.

What also went down? Somehow, pre-Web and locked away in the wilds with limited resources, I discovered my favorite bit of rock trivia: Neil Young was in a band with Rick James signed to Motown for a seven-year deal, the Mynah Birds. Young’s engagements with psych, punk, and grunge are well-documented — even if most shirk the challenge of unpacking his electro output — but the lurking presence of the funk in his aesthetic is often ignored. Now, I ain’t saying ole Neil could come down to my former hood and swing with a Chocolate City go-go outfit (maybe he could trouble the funk?), but on "Go Ahead and Cry," the ringing of his unleashed 1970s guitar sound is already evident. The sublime meeting of Young’s thang with "The Sound of Young America" makes one lament how differently (black) rock history might have looked had the Mynah Birds triumphed at Hitsville.

My view is that Young couldn’t have written some of his best songs, like "Cinnamon Girl" and "Mr. Soul," plus freakery I dig such as "Sea of Madness," without that brief spell at Motown. (It’s interesting to imagine former auto-line worker Berry Gordy and car enthusiast Young rapping by chance). In a weird way, the shades of Young that appeared on the pop stage and relentlessly morphed between "Clancy" and "When You Dance I Can Really Love" seem to coexist with turn-of-the-’70s Motown mavericks who also flirted with polemics, space rock, and soul yodeling: Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Eddie Kendricks.

The Mynah Birds are sadly absent from volume one of Archives, despite a fleeting citation in its chronological timeline. But a few months before the box set dropped I acquired my grail of Mynah Birds tracks, and the picture of Young as a potential R&B artist who brought some of the Motown sensibility to bear upon the aesthetics of his next band, the Buffalo Springfield, emerged tantalizingly. Alongside it was the turbulent back story of the striving front man Ricky James Matthews (a Mick Jagger acolyte who later renamed himself), who failed to gain support for his hybrid vision of black rock even as his old bandmate soared from the ashes of Woodstock Nation.

Aside from the future Super Freak, Young’s key ace boons on the funk express were Bruce Palmer (1946-2004) and Danny Whitten (1943-72) — besides Stephen Stills, the stars of this first set. Palmer, a native of Toronto who shared a deep spiritual bond with Young, had been in an all-black Canadian band led by Billy Clarkson even prior to his membership in the Mynah Birds. He subsequently brought his low-end theories to the Springfield; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (before being replaced by young Motown bassist Greg Reeves); and Young’s thwarted revolutionary electronic project Trans (Geffen, 1982). Palmer also reunited with Rick James after the Springfield’s implosion, producing the beautiful psych-jazz classic The Cycle Is Complete (Verve, 1971), a rival to Skip Spence’s Oar (Columbia, 1969).

Columbus, Ga.,-bred Whitten might still be Young’s most fabled collaborator. His premature death by heroin overdose inspired "The Needle and the Damage Done" (included amongst other Harvest tracks on disc eight of Vol. 1) and the dark and stark standout of the "Ditch Trilogy," Tonight’s the Night (Reprise, 1975), which will feature in the next Archives installment. Even before starting the Laurel Canyon-based Rockets (which became Crazy Horse), Whitten had been a live R&B dancer and seems to have restored some genuine Southern rock ‘n’ soul flava to the mix of his boy twice-removed from Dixie. Every time I hear the vainglorious funk bomb that is "Cinnamon Girl," I recognize that element is there and regret Whitten’s passing even more.

I first and foremost swear fealty to Buffalo Springfield. But for all his seemingly mercurial guises, the plaid-and-denim-clad Young who conjured Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (Reprise, 1969) and the songs from the Ditch in company with Crazy Horse and other canyon pickers appears to be the most enduring direct influence on later generations. To try to make sense of Young’s legend, I consulted an amen corner: Harry Weinger, VP of A&R at Universal Motown; famed Harvest producer Elliot Mazer; and young J. Tillman.

I also saw my Alabama-bred friend Patterson Hood at the Bowery Ballroom, bringing an element of Stills and Young’s guitar duels and Young’s volume to the stage, backed by the Screwtopians. Brother Hood’s chief band, Drive-By Truckers, came to most folks’ attention with 2001’s Sept. 12 Soul Dump release Southern Rock Opera, a sprawling masterwork in two acts that dealt with — among other Southern myths — the complex relationship between Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd icon Ronnie Van Zant (see "Ronnie and Neil"). When we discussed the Archives before the gig, Patterson professed to be waiting on tenterhooks for the next volume, due to the Ditch releases: TTN, Time Fades Away (Reprise, 1973), and my favorite, On the Beach (Reprise, 1974).

Tillman — Pacific Northwest-dwelling solo artist and multi-instrumentalist member of Fleet Foxes — was illuminating on the subject of Young as artistic forebear. This year, the Foxes were summoned by Young to tour with him and perform at his annual Bridge School benefit, even as Tillman promoted Vacilando Territory Blues (Bella Union) and began to develop his next solo recording Year In the Kingdom. Kindly, he paused amid all this flurry to speak on Young’s influence when we crossed paths earlier this year:

"Neil is a figure to follow and not follow. Following him is kind of antithetical to the spirit of his music, but it’s hard to resist the mythology …

"Neil’s understanding of the technical side of the recording process, and his obsession with gear and tone, stands in total contrast to his completely intuitive approach to making records." he continued. "Each of his records has an environment that is as big a part of the record as the songs. Recording in a barn, an SIR storage space, doing honey-slides with Rusty Kershaw — he always positions himself for moments of magic."

Despite Young’s great capacity for harnessing magic, what Archives demonstrates beyond the master’s curatorial intent is the vast gulf between the violent-but-halcyon time that begat his earliest works and now, when ever more plastic reigns in our common culture. When I cited surprise at a sudden small surge in younger folk and country-rockin’ artists who profess overt adoration of and respect for Buffalo Springfield and Stills’ Manassas, Tillman voiced skepticism:

"Our generation has been told that we can buy authenticity. Advertising is so enmeshed in our thought life we’ve developed Stockholm syndrome. People buy the idea of the ’60s and ’70s like a product, like it’s something you can own by buying things, or conversely, by becoming a product fashioned in the style of the ’70s. There are plenty of people dying to make a buck off that. It’s sad how commodified music has become, how people just do it to be it, instead of doing it because they are it. Neil refused to be bought or sold or owned in his own time, like any of the greats."

As for Young followers on the blackhand side, they may not be legion but today — more than four decades after he was meant to produce Love’s masterpiece Forever Changes (Elektra, 1967) and long after his road dawgin’ with former Malibu neighbor Booker T. Jones — there are more than you might think. Richie Havens still cut what might rate as the best-ever Young cover: his desperate, electric, heavy metal "The Loner" on Mixed Bag II (Stormy Forest, 1974). The other week I attended a taping of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and after the show, when Roots’ guitarist Kirk Douglas spotted the behemoth Archives box I was toting, he ripped a few blazing riffs from "Cinnamon Girl."

Outlaws don’t always go out in a blaze of glory. Some, like Young, abide, too ornery for entropy to overtake them. I expect him to continue restlessly exploring where he and Sudanese bluenote sound intersect in the eye of the volt. As for the native rights supporter who came off like the inscrutable brave in Buffalo Springfield’s dynamic cowboy movie — but who totes a cigar store Indian onstage? The rebel in me that thrills to Young’s peculiarly suhthuhn quixotic qualities and access to American African’s obsession with freedom wants him to account for these lyrics about my ancestral sovereign Wahunsunacock’s martyred daughter, Matoaka:

I wish I was a trapper

I would give a thousand pelts

To sleep with Pocahontas

And find out how she felt

In the mornin’ on the fields of green

In the homeland we’ve never seen.

Hey now hey … my my my. Aren’t we both, the contested bodies, still looking for America?

Andy Votel, Gaslamp Killer, Free the Robots

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PREVIEW A small portion of music nurtures body, mind, and soul. A minuscule subsect does so by ripping you magnificently out of your familiar musical safety zones with unpredictable and compellingly fresh organizations of sound. Some have baptized the songs that fall under this rarefied territory of music "face-melters," and for good reason. Assiduously dissolving toughened aural skin, face-melting music inspires knowledge of the outer galactic and inner expansive reaches of the embodied mind. Its dangerous allure has solicited varied responses from thinkers, poets, and musicians throughout history. Plato advises to obliterate such enigmatic revelry in The Republic. William Blake seeks to illustrate its destructive purity in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. More recently, Afrika Bambaataa’s "Searching for the Perfect Beat" embodies the infinite quest for mystical rhythms.

The DJ, producer, and deep crate-digger Andy Votel has made a career out of cultivating and archiving the face-melting phenomenon. Conducting the freaked-out, electronic psych epic Styles of The Unexpected (Twisted Nerve Records, 2000), and helping spearhead Finders Keepers Records to reissue international instances of obscure and intensely monstrous tracks from around the world, Votel is a leading expert on the limit zones of post-World War II music. Notable Finders Keepers reissues and compilations that will rewire your neural networks have emerged from Anatolia (Mustafa Özkent, Selda), France (Jean-Pierre Massiera, Jean-Claude Vannier), and Pakistan (this year’s comp Sound of Wonder).

One contemporary contributor to the Keepers catalog is Los Angeles’ feral beatsmith and DJ the Gaslamp Killer. A mad scientist of the Low End Theory collective, GLK psychedel-ifies hypnotic boom bap cuts and mutates vocals into chilling hums and fuzzed out screams locked toward another kind of prayer. But don’t believe me, peep his avant-garde corpse ringer mix I Spit On Your Grave (Obey, 2008). Once you’ve trained your ears on his radiated sewer funk, flip it fresh on Gaslamp’s collaboration with fellow Theorist, Free The Robots, for the jazzier side of the gutter on The Killer Robots (Obey, 2008).

To mark the third birthday of SF funk wizard DJ Centipede’s Catch the Beat party, Votel, GLK, and Free the Robots have come together for a face-melting good time. Leave your mask at home.

CHANGE THE BEAT 3RD YEAR ANNIVERSARY PARTY With Andy Votel, Gaslamp Killer, Free the Robots, DJ Mahssa, DJ Centipede, Citizen Ten. Fri/10, 10 p.m., $10. Paradise Lounge, 1501 Folsom, SF. (415) 252-5017. www.paradisesf.com

What’s wrong with San Francisco?

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EDITORIAL In the end, Mayor Gavin Newsom got his way. The San Francisco supervisors made some significant changes to the budget and saved some $40 million worth of programs that the mayor wanted to cut or privatize, but the Newsom for governor ads will still be able to proclaim that the mayor solved his city’s budget problem without raising taxes or cutting police and firefighters.

Instead, this fall some 1,500 city employees are slated to be laid off, 400 of them in the Department of Public Health. Many recreation directors will get pink slips. Human services will lose at least 100 people. Nonprofit service providers will see much of their city funding disappear. The money to pay for public financing of the upcoming supervisorial and mayoral races is gone. Newsom’s pet (and expensive) 311 service will still be open 24 hours a day (with a lot of the money coming from Muni).

Not one of the city’s hugely redundant fire stations will close, even for a few days at a time. The bloated police budget will see no significant cuts, and the cops and firefighters will still get raises. The mayor will continue to employ five people in his press office.

And the only new revenue in the budget comes from fee increases on Muni, public parks, after-school programs, street fairs, restaurants, and the like.

Sup. John Avalos, chair of the Budget and Finance Committee, told us this was the best deal the supervisors could get, and it’s true that the board forced Newsom to add back a lot of money he wanted to cut. But the committee stopped far short of doing what it should have done — fundamentally changing the priorities of the Newsom budget.

Campos told us that he had "mixed feelings" about the deal and expressed concern about the board’s ability to shape midyear cuts and the lack of commitment from Newsom to support support placing revenue measures on the November ballot. Mirkarimi said he was happy with the dollar amounts of the add-backs but proposed holding in reserve some funding for the mayor’s pet projects — a tool for ensuring that Newsom consults with supervisors on the midyear cuts as promised — but Avalos opposed the idea.

Avalos said he’s relying on Newsom’s commitment to him: "The mayor has given me the assurance that he will not make unilateral decisions." But Newsom has a history of breaking such promises.

And the supervisors have not included any new tax revenue in the budget projections. Which puts San Francisco far behind Oakland.

The Oakland City Council has plenty of problems, and the mayor of Oakland, Ron Dellums, has been missing in action on a lot of the city’s problems lately. But when the mayor and the council had to address the budget problems, they came up with a solution that includes at least $6 million in new taxes. While that sounds like a small number, it’s almost 10 percent of Oakland’s budget shortfall. And the new taxes, which will need voter approval in a special July 21 election, are included as part of the budget plan for fiscal 2009-10.

Two of the new taxes — a levy on pot clubs (which the clubs themselves strongly support) and a loophole-closing measure that forces big businesses to pay their fair share of real estate transfer taxes — require only a simple majority vote to take effect. The reason: the council voted unanimously to declare a fiscal emergency and put the measures on the ballot. That allowed the city to avoid the state law that requires a two-thirds vote on most new taxes.

Measures C, D, F, and H make up a generally progressive package that has the support of Council Members Rebecca Kaplan and Jean Quan and Rep. Barbara Lee. We’re happy to endorse all four.

Measure C is a 3 percent increase in the city’s hotel tax, which would rise from 11 percent to 14 percent. Half the new money would go to the Oakland Convention and Visitors Bureau while the other half would be split between the Oakland Zoo, the Chabot Space and Science Center, and cultural arts programs and festivals in the city. We could argue with the distribution (arts festivals should probably get more money and the Visitors Bureau less) but overall, it raises the hotel tax to the level of most other cities in the area and would raise money for the sorts of programs hotel taxes typically fund.

Measure D is a technical amendment to the Oakland Kids First law that mandates spending on programs for children and youth. It changes the spending requirement from 1.5 percent of total city revenues to 3 percent of the general fund. That’s slightly less money than the program currently gets, but a lot more than it has had over the past decade. The coalition that put Kids First on the ballot in 1996 (and modified it in 2008) supports this modest change.

Measure F is a creative new tax. It would impose a 1.8 percent gross receipts tax ($18 per $1,000 in sales) on medical marijuana businesses. Most efforts to hike business taxes face bitter opposition from business owners, but in this case, the pot clubs are happy to pay. In fact, the four dispensaries in Oakland are among the measure’s strongest supporters. Paying taxes tends to legitimize the clubs — and while it’s going to be tricky to track sales in what is still largely a cash business where records have in the past been kept vague to avoid the threat of federal prosecution, this is a strong step in the right direction.

Measure H would prevent big corporations from cheating Oakland out of real estate transfer taxes. Under current law, a business that owns property in Oakland and is bought by another business (or becomes part of a merger) doesn’t have to pay transfer taxes on the property it owns. Closing that loophole could bring in as much as $4.4 million a year.

There’s a lesson here for the much larger city across the Bay.

San Francisco desperately needs new revenue. And while the mayor has talked, in vague terms, about maybe supporting some sort of tax measures in November, he hasn’t committed to anything. There are several proposals floating around the board, the latest of which is a Labor Council-supported tax on alcohol consumption, but no coherent package. The progressives on the board — both those who support the compromise Newsom budget and those who don’t — need to set aside those differences, now, and get to work on finding ways to bring in enough new money to deal with the impacts of further state cuts and stave off some of the layoffs slated for the fall.

The main obstacles are Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Michela Alioto-Pier. Everyone who cares about saving services in this city needs to pressure them to back away from their GOP-style no-new-taxes stands. If those two would at least agree to let the voters decide on new revenue measures, the city would likely get a unanimous board — and the ability to raise taxes with a simple majority vote.

Oakland’s pot club tax and real estate transfer tax are great ideas that can be directly imported to San Francisco. The city’s business tax could be made more progressive (and bring in new revenue) with a simple change in the tax rates (higher on the big outfits, lower on the small ones). We’re dubious about a sales tax increase — even a half-percent hike would bring the local tax rate to 10 percent. And, even though the alcohol tax isn’t exactly progressive, those ideas could be acceptable as part of a package.

The main thing is that the city will need, at minimum, another $100 million this fall, and probably ought to be looking at raising twice that much. Oakland — a city with far fewer resources, a much smaller business base, and radically less wealth — is managing to fight its deficit with progressive taxes. What’s wrong with San Francisco?

P.S.: Sup. Chris Daly was outspoken in his criticism of the budget deal, blasting Newsom and even taking on his former aide and longtime ally, Avalos. But for all his bluster about the mayor, Daly couldn’t bring himself to oppose Anson Moran, Newsom’s nominee for the Public Utilities Commission. Moran was a staunch ally of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. when he was the PUC’s general manager, and the full board should reject him. *

Editor’s Notes

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Tredmond@sfbg.com

There was plenty in the long New York Times Magazine cover story profile of Gavin Newsom to induce the Technicolor yawn. But the sentence I found most offensive was buried after the jump, down at the bottom of a page of type: "While generally considered a liberal by people outside of San Francisco, Newsom has not shied from confronting the left with tough love."

Say, what?

Whenever you read something in the Almighty Times that uses terms like "generally considered," you need to stop and think. Considered by whom? And what the hell does the Times mean by "liberal?"

You can define that word any way you want — Wikipedia has a long history, and outlines the difference between the classical liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo (much of which we would now call libertarianism) and the social liberalism of the postwar era. I think any honest definition, though, rests in significant part on the notion that unregulated free markets are not always the best way to allocate resources, that government has a role in helping the needy, and, perhaps most important, that one of the primary functions of government is to reallocate income and resources to increase equality — that is, to tax the rich to feed the poor.

Liberalism got a bad name in the 1960s, particularly when it was used to apply to politicians like Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, who had the right ideas about using exceptionally high taxes on the very rich (the marginal rate in that era was more than 70 percent) to fund programs like the Great Society, but were utterly wrong about the Vietnam War and the use of U.S. military force abroad. And in the 1970s and 1980s, liberal politicians like Phil and John Burton in San Francisco became way too close to the real estate developers.

But words have to mean something, or the whole gig is over. And, as far as I’m concerned, a mayor who refuses to raise taxes to cover a huge budget deficit, and instead cuts wholesale from programs that help the poor, is not by any definition a "liberal."

He’s not terribly good at "tough love," either.

The Times uses his implementation of Care Not Cash as an example — the program, the magazine says, "essentially ended direct payments to homeless people and put the money into service agencies instead." Not exactly true — Newsom ended direct payments to homeless people, but the "care" part of the package was never really there. And it’s all gone in this latest budget. That’s not tough love — it’s just tough.

The idea that Mayor Newsom of San Francisco is a good liberal who is still willing to challenge the left every now and then is just mythology. Newsom (generally, to use the Times’ favorite word here) has no relations whatsoever with the left. That fact might help him in the campaign — Californians as a whole are not as progressive as San Franciscans. But let’s at least be honest about it.

And of course, the lavish story is another sign that the Newsom campaign is rolling ahead very nicely. "The fact that a national newspaper of the stature of the Times decides that Gavin Newsom is the story in the governor’s race is certainly a plus," Eric Jaye, Newsom’s chief political advisor, told me. I’d say that’s a bit of an understatement. *

Change the Beat rips off the safety

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By Michael Krimper

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Votel, freakin’ you

A small portion of music nurtures body, mind, and soul. A miniscule subsect does so by ripping you magnificently out of your familiar musical safety zones with unpredictable and compellingly fresh organizations of sound. Some have baptized the songs that fall under this rarefied territory of music "face-melters," and for good reason. Assiduously dissolving toughened aural skin, face-melting music inspires knowledge of the outer galactic and inner expansive reaches of the embodied mind. Its dangerous allure has solicited varied responses from thinkers, poets, and musicians throughout history. Plato advises to obliterate such enigmatic revelry in The Republic. William Blake seeks to illustrate its destructive purity in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. More recently, Afrika Bambaataa’s "Searching for the Perfect Beat" embodies the infinite quest for mystical rhythms.

The DJ, producer, and deep crate-digger Andy Votel has made a career out of cultivating and archiving the face-melting phenomenon. Conducting the freaked-out, electronic psych epic Styles of The Unexpected (Twisted Nerve Records, 2000), and helping spearhead Finders Keepers Records to reissue international instances of obscure and intensely monstrous tracks from around the world, Votel is a leading expert on the limit zones of post-World War II music. Notable Finders Keepers reissues and compilations that will rewire your neural networks have emerged from Anatolia (Mustafa Özkent, Selda), France (Jean-Pierre Massiera, Jean-Claude Vannier), and Pakistan (this year’s comp Sound of Wonder).

One contemporary contributor to the Keepers catalog is Los Angeles’ feral beatsmith and DJ the Gaslamp Killer. A mad scientist of the Low End Theory collective, GLK psychedel-ifies hypnotic boom bap cuts and mutates vocals into chilling hums and fuzzed out screams locked toward another kind of prayer. But don’t believe me, peep his avant-garde corpse ringer mix I Spit On Your Grave (Obey, 2008). Once you’ve trained your ears on his radiated sewer funk, flip it fresh on Gaslamp’s collaboration with fellow Theorist, Free The Robots, for the jazzier side of the gutter on The Killer Robots (Obey, 2008).

To mark the third birthday of SF funk wizard DJ Centipede’s Catch the Beat party, Votel, GLK, and Free the Robots have come together for a face-melting good time. Leave your mask at home.

CHANGE THE BEAT 3RD YEAR ANNIVERSARY PARTY With Andy Votel, Gaslamp Killer, Free the Robots, DJ Mahssa, DJ Centipede, Citizen Ten. Fri/10, 10 p.m., $10. Paradise Lounge, 1501 Folsom, SF. (415) 252-5017. www.paradisesf.com

Michael Jackson, 1958-2009

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It was a strange day. It didn’t start normally, nor did it end that way. It began with a disturbing run-in with one of my roommates. I was getting ready to work at 6 a.m., while he was trying to hook up after pulling an all-nighter. After that awkward encounter, I made my way into work with an uneasy, ill feeling. It was inexplicable. My sour mood took twists and turns and like the onset of what I imagine feels like a nervous breakdown. Something was wrong. Everyone knows peripheral, typical job frustrations, but I had a scowl on my face for my entire shift. I work in a newsroom at an all-news radio station.

Early on, the death of Farrah Fawcett was announced. Hmm, that’s too bad, I thought to myself. I heard it was cancer. She was very much an icon and sex symbol, but her bout with the disease was lengthy, much publicized, and we all saw it coming. Let’s see … Ed McMahon, Farrah … uh oh. Famous people die in threes, right? Something bad was going to happen.

After leaving work, I wanted to stop at a few record stores before going home. In between Rasputin and Rookie Ricardo’s, I got a text from a friend who had dressed as Michael Jackson along with me a few Halloweens ago: "MJ in the hospital!"

My previous inkling about trios of death had now become more of a dark premonition. I thought it was strange that the story had completely evaded the wires in the newsroom. I was off the clock, and I had been scooped. Things soon took a dire turn when the friend called to say she got an IM that TMZ had confirmed his death. Yet I remained skeptical. It was a bit much to process so quickly.

Once I was inside Rookie’s, people came out of the woodwork via text message and I started to believe the unbelievable. I’m not usually one to make a fuss or bring attention to myself, but this was one instance where I just had to know: Did Michael Jackson really die? I was more than moved, compelled even, to make a public announcement. Actually it was more of a question. So I went ahead and shouted out in despair to the clerk and all four customers, "Did you guys hear about Michael Jackson?" Everybody sorta perked up and looked at me strangely. "I think he might be dead." A patron checked his iPhone and the sad truth was revealed. I left soon after. I was in no mood to look at the old soul records that were the primary foundation of Michael’s musical roots.

In the early 1980s, MJ just looked cool. The jherri curl, aviator shades, and that mysterious sequined glove were all signs that someone special was about to do something great. Up on stage (the place where, like many icons, he claimed to be most comfortable), his tall, slender body was perfect for much of the angular choreography he created. He took inspiration from and expanded on the stage moves of his hero, James Brown, to create his own repertoire. He popped and locked in the ’70s to the Jackson 5’s 1973 "Dancing Machine," doing the robot with such precision, I’m convinced to this day that he must have been at least part alien. I don’t need stock footage or YouTube to remember when he debuted his mind-blowing moonwalk at the Motown 25 TV special. His voice had a flair for high notes, but could also make the walls resonate like thunder. Listen to him shudder toward the end of "The Lady in My Life," on Thriller (Epic, 1982), or as the Scarecrow in The Wiz (1978) during his opening number "You Can’t Win." So deep. Quintessential soul. He will probably always be every bit as enigmatic as he was charismatic.

No one will ever truly know the inner turmoil of Michael Jackson. But his decaying exterior over the years is a good clue. People tend to disregard his creative efforts post-Bad (Epic, 1987). But there is much to be said about MJ’s latter-day lyrics. His mood and tone can be cold, agonized, and despairing. On "Will You Be There" from Dangerous (Epic, 1991), almost crying instead of singing, he assures us that he’s only human (despite the monster that we’ve made him out to be) and prone to mistakes — essentially, a child that needs to be held. The lyrics are of a shocking introspective nature, most poignant during a spoken passage at the song’s close where he expresses loneliness and violent frustration. Clearly it is gospel-influenced. He’s singing for salvation.

The opening lines of "Stranger in Moscow" (a new track on the 1995 Epic compilation HIStory) couldn’t have been more clear. I was wanderin’ in the rain / Mask of life feelin’ insane, swift and sudden fall from grace. At that point, MJ was aimless — having achieved uncharted greatness, but the glory behind him. In a sense, his mask, or face, was both his fault and ours. We are the ones who put him on the pedestal since childhood and gave him the fame that would eventually eat him alive, whether he liked it or not. We saw him grow up then blow up and couldn’t get enough. Maybe he didn’t want to be recognized anymore. Maybe he wanted to become a monster so that we would leave him alone. If so, it all backfired and made "Jacko" a laughingstock to the mainstream media for the remainder of his life.

The same song also contains the line "Armageddon of the brain." Those four words always resonate with me when it comes to analyzing MJ’s psyche. They paint a picture of an explosion inside his head, a virtual inferno of the mind. Perhaps a reference to the moment he snapped or reached his breaking point.

Yeah, I am a genuine fan of Michael Jackson. His musical gift, contributions, and accomplishments are unfathomable. I don’t blame people for calling him a freak. I know he’s misunderstood, and if I were in his shoes I’d probably have slit my wrists long ago. I don’t know what he was guilty or innocent of in his private life, but I do know that in death, he’s free of persecution. If anyone believed in magic, it would be MJ, so maybe he knew I was having a shitty day and gave a true fan a final parting gift. He knew I needed all those texts from people checking on me to see if I’d heard the news, showing they cared. I guess you know who your true friends are when Michael Jackson dies. God bless tortured souls.

Forever our kings

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

The simplified, VH1 history of rock music tells us that Black Sabbath’s landmark first two albums Black Sabbath (Warner Bros., 1970) and Paranoid (Warner Bros., 1971) buried the 1960s rock aesthetic with the strength of a thousand Sha-Na-Nas at Woodstock. But Sabbath wasn’t quite the peerless anomaly that popular mythology makes out. Under the group’s massive transatlantic shadow toiled an eclectic assortment of rock bands just as disillusioned with the pop music of the past decade, and just as compelled to forcibly harsh some vibes.

Pentagram has remained the most vital of these groups. The OG southern Hessians have maintained a cult fan base throughout a 38-year career, but the 2002 compilation First Daze Here (Relapse) helped a new generation of metalheads embrace their lo-fi proto-metal. Classic tracks like "Livin’ in a Ram’s Head" and the power chord masterpiece "Forever My Queen" justify Pentagram’s doom legend status, while softer numbers like the garage rock ballad "Last Days Here" and a relatively faithful cover of "Under My Thumb" serve as reminders of the band’s musical roots.

Pentagram is coming to town, and whether or not the various kick-ass opening acts on the bill were influenced by them, there’s a distinctive retro vibe at play. Since 2007’s Instinct: Decay (Southern Lord), Nachtmystium has been experimenting with old school electronic effects, lacing its basement black metal sound with Pink Floyd-like Moog and theremin drones. Last year’s Assassins: Black Meddle Part One (Century Media) finds Blake Judd and company taking their experiments in blackened space rock even further — the headbanging energy of the songs’ traditional verse-chorus structures is complimented by Sanford Parker’s haunting electronic textures. Since Nachtmystium’s current approach is tailor-made for live drone-jams, it’ll be interesting to see how the Chicago black metallers’ set plays out.

Some enterprising dork could probably spend a lifetime documenting all the leftover Summer of Love tidbits that have informed the San Francisco music scene over the years, but trying to fit a band as innovative as Hammers of Misfortune into a greater rock canon is a total cop-out. Peter, Paul, and Mary they ain’t; clean, folky vocal harmonies take on a warped life of their own in the context of Hammers’ elegantly doomy guitar work, making what in lesser hands would be an obnoxious gimmick into an integral part of the group’s sound. They’re also way too fucking metal for their own good.

Be forewarned, indeed.

PENTAGRAM

With Hammers of Misfortune, Nachtmystium, Orchid, DJ Rob Metal

Thurs/2, 8:30 p.m. (doors 8 p.m.), $20–$25

DNA Lounge

375 11th St., SF

(415) 626-1409

www.dnalounge.com

Zine it like you mean it

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johnny@sfbg.com

INTERVIEW Nestled in the corner of the old New College building, true seekers will find Goteblüd. Matt Wobensmith’s zine emporium keeps the building’s dedication to countercultural self-publishing alive. As characterful as it is small, Goteblüd places shelves of photocopied DIY writings amid a brown shag paneling motif that wittily references the cat-scratch antics found within Ed Luce’s comic Wuvable Oaf, the store’s main link to contemporary publications. Currently the space also hosts "Yes I Am, But Who Am I Really?," a showcase of queer zine and queer punk memorabilia: zines, photos, and letters (including a pissy postcard from Henry Rollins) create a terrific one-of-a-kind wallpaper, while t-shirts for bands hang from the ceiling, as if asking to be filled by new rebellious bodies. After scoping out the show, I recently asked Wobensmith about Goteblüd’s origins, its contents, and its future plans.

SFBG How did Goteblüd come about?

MATT WOBENSMITH I’ve been collecting zines since I was a teen. In the past few years, I’ve heard people say things like "I just threw out four boxes of zines," and I say to myself: That is wrong! Why do people think old zines are worthless? They’re priceless. So I began to take zines off peoples’ hands, and started putting them in storage boxes. After a while, this pastime became more of an obsession as I tried to fill gaps in the collections by actively buying from people. When I found the space, I knew it was time to launch a vintage zine store.

SFBG A book titled Queer Zines (Printed Matter, 180 pages, $25) was recently published. As someone who played a major role in an important period of the queer zine and queer punk movements, what did you think of it?

MW I was active in the queer punk and then homohop music scenes for a while, but that’s kind of history. It’s through this weird zine collecting thing that I find myself faced with my past again.

I saw the Queer Zines book that accompanied the show Printed Matter did in New York City last year. It was inspiring and also satisfying that this era of self-publishing was finally getting more exposure. I don’t know who I’d be without some of those zines!

At the same time, I felt that the queercore phenomenon was different from the larger queer zine genre. It’s focused around music and music culture, had lots of young people, and was connected to a radical subculture loosely based on punk rock. The name of the show is paraphrased from a Team Dresch song: "Yes I Am, But Who Am I Really?" It’s a slight dig at Melissa Etheridge, but ultimately sums up the struggle for identity and purpose and survival.

Also, it’s a scene where women played an enormous role in shaping the dialog and aesthetics. The influence of the riot grrrl movement was not insignificant, either. Some people attribute queer zines to things like Straight to Hell or [William S.] Burroughs, but these zines are far more likely to have been inspired by radical music figures: Black Flag, Throbbing Gristle, the Shaggs, Yoko Ono, female rockers, as well as good old 1980s hardcore. In many ways, queercore was an alternative to an alternative. And it had a soundtrack.

SFBG Looking back at the materials in the current show, what surprises you — what do you see anew now, years later, or wish was more present in current society or social currents?

MW What I really value in old zines is this incredible sense of urgency. There’s some insane, obsessive person trying to reach out and find like-minded people, so they make a zine. It’s a search for kindred souls, and an almost desperate bid for creative and intellectual validation. It can be fun, but is ultimately quite serious. It has a lot of integrity. I love that spirit and dedication.

That same feeling is totally lacking in today’s culture. The Internet has released much of the pent-up need to connect, to find information, to really put effort into communication. Today’s pop culture is also highly self-aware and navel-gazing, and people seem more obsessed with mundane actions of others — via tweets, social networking, whatever — than creating original ideas and taking risks. Old zines have original ideas and risks in spades.

SFBG What kinds of zines will people find in Goteblüd?

MW We try to carry a wide assortment of popular and unknown zines; the more DIY, the better. Though we do have some indie glossies, we carry tons of underground music, pop culture, art, skateboarding, graffiti, lowrider, comic, and experimental zines from the past four decades. We try to focus on older stuff because it’s harder to find and it gets people excited. We are always buying and trading too. I love when people challenge me to find a certain zine for them, and I have it!

SFBG One section of Goteblüd is devoted to Ed Luce’s Wuvable Oaf comics and paraphernalia. What do you like about Wuvable Oaf, and what plans do you have in connection with the comic?

MW Ed’s work, in one word, is fun. It’s also really smart and has no small amount of sharp observations on human behaviors and interactions. It’s a "post-bear" comic, but we hate the b-word. It’s set in a city that looks suspiciously like San Francisco and we all write the stories together. We try to juxtapose big and small, human and animal, and we love to show people in awkward situations. It’s not ironic; it’s loving and earnest.

The comic fits into the store — oddly — as it is an encapsulation of so many different sensibilities. Ed’s constantly referencing his icons of fashion, bad horror movies, and music — particularly Morrissey. I think it’s like a gayer Love and Rockets but that doesn’t begin to do it justice. Our next issue will spotlight our house cartoon band, Ejaculoid, and we’ll be releasing a limited edition record of their music — which is "disco grindcore."

GOTEBLÜD is at 766 Valencia in SF and is open weekends only from noon–5 p.m.

The mobility of space

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sarah@sfbg.com

Jason Henderson is standing on Patricia’s Green in Hayes Valley, shielding his eyes from the midsummer sun, as he explains how this area, which once lay in the shadowy underbelly of the Central Freeway, was reclaimed as a pedestrian-friendly park.

"In 1989 the freeway went all the way to Turk Street," said Henderson, an assistant professor of geography at San Francisco State University, describing how the raised concrete roadbed, built in the 1950s, cut across this neighborhood and blocked the sky — until the Loma Prieta earthquake hit and damaged the final section so badly it had to be torn down.

That natural disaster triggered a public discussion about the use of the surrounding space, and a 15-year fight that culminated in 2005 in the dedication of the Green, which is part of the Octavia Boulevard Project. Neighbors and business owners pushed the city to convert a damaged freeway into a landscaped park.

That sort of change fascinates Henderson. "I am interested in how people move around cities, and how urban space is configured for movement," he said.

The young professor was raised in New Orleans and wrote his dissertation on transportation and land use debates in Atlanta — which, as Henderson notes, is "the poster child for sprawl but became a hotbed in the ’90s of a national discourse about how we should grow, which became this very interesting debate about reurbanizing."

Henderson’s research focuses on the politics of mobility. He decided to move to San Francisco in 2003 because he saw it as an opportunity to live in a city where a car is not necessary and to study the history of the city’s freeway revolt, which began in the 1960s.

And while he is proud of this park, which was dedicated as Hayes Green then renamed for the late Patricia Walkup, a Hayes Valley resident who tirelessly advocated for the park until her death in 2006, Henderson thinks the local politics of parking have reached "a spatial stalemate."

"During the freeway revolt of the 1960s, San Francisco rejected the freeway but not the automobile," Henderson explained. "But even as San Francisco residents decided that they did not want big gashes of freeway through their waterfront, the Marina, and Golden Gate Park, the city continued to have laws that said every housing unit was to have one parking space.

"So the city adopted a transit-first policy on paper, but didn’t take space away from cars. And if you don’t do anything, you’re not solving the problem."

The problem in San Francisco is what he called the "essentializing of cars."

"A core idea within the parking debate is that there is a universal love affair with the automobile," Henderson explained. "But Obama is downsizing GM and Chrysler, and for the first time since 1960, vehicle miles traveled have started to go down. Until last year, the mantra was that Americans are going to drive. But then we found out that at $4 a gallon, this country freaks out and changes."

Earlier this year, Henderson published a paper that analyzes the city’s politics of parking through the lens of two ballot initiatives from the November 2007 San Francisco election.

"San Francisco’s parking debate is not just about parking. It is a contest over how the city should be configured and organized, and for whom," Henderson wrote in his paper, titled "The Spaces of Parking: Mapping the Politics of Mobility in San Francisco."

His research led him to conclude that progressives, who want to make the city more bike- and public-transportion friendly, are pitted against the more conservative elements (he calls them neoconservatives), who want to increase space for parking and cars at all costs, with the moderate (or in his words, "neoliberal") factions tangled in between.

Part of Henderson’s critique involves estimating the hidden costs of parking — and as it turns out, that can be done using Google and Craiglist. According to a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency 2008 fact sheet, there are an estimated 320,000 on-street parking spaces in San Francisco, including metered spaces, each consuming, on average, about 160 square feet.

According to a 2002 presentation by Jeffery Tumlin, a national transportation consultant, if the city rented these spaces for the lowball rate of $1,000 a year, San Francisco would rake in $320 million annually.

There would be no shortage of demand — market prices are way higher. Henderson’s review of Craiglist unearthed folks who looking to rent parking spaces in San Francisco and willing to pay from $100 to $500 a month.

But SFMTA — which issues more than 89,000 residential parking permits annually and recently opted to cut Muni service and routes and increase fares on public transit rather than extend parking meter hours to balance its budget shortfall — decided to increase the cost of these parking permits, starting July 1, by only $2, from $72 to $74 — per year. That’s less than 10 percent of market value.

The resulting revenue will be dedicated to the cost of administrating the program — not to offset the hidden costs of parking, which include carbon dioxide emissions, air pollution, congestion, and occupying valuable space.

Henderson is intrigued by the relationship between parking policy and a complex set of factors that include public health, obesity, and the cost of affordable housing. He notes that if a city’s housing policy requires developers to provide a parking space for each housing unit, too often developers don’t build that housing, or build it smaller, or build it as part of a luxury complex.

"The progressive response to this dilemma is to try to get government to eliminate the one parking-space-per-unit goal and cap the total amount of parking built. Meanwhile, the neocons, who believe government should be active in creating more parking, rail against more bus lanes," Henderson said.

As he notes, common to both groups is the desire for government to help them achieve their vision.

"Much as we see San Francisco as a progressive place, it’s also peopled by neoliberals and very conservative folks — and progressive and neoliberals coalesce on the issue of ‘smart growth.’ And there are lot of progressives who have a car and say, ‘I don’t want to be car dependent; I’d like to do city share, but I’d feel stranded.’ And those who say ‘I always want to have my own car, but I only drive it once a month.’"

Conceding that "tweaking the system" will cost money, Henderson cites congestion pricing as an area where the various factions can find agreement.

"The important question is, what will the revenue be used for?" Henderson said, noting that some will argue that if you charge motorists to use roads, then the money should be used to improve the roads, which is what has happened with toll roads in Texas.

But in San Francisco, activist are pushing the opposite approach. "Whereas the sustainable transportation movement in San Francisco wants to use the revenue from congestion pricing to fix Muni and discourage driving," he continued.

In his paper on parking policy, Henderson details exactly how parking allocations push up the price of housing — and change the face of ongoing developments.

A typical off-road parking space takes up 350 square feet when room to move in and out is factored in — and that’s comparable to many offices and living spaces in San Francisco. The parking alone costs $50,000 to $100,000 to develop — a cost that’s passed on to the homebuyer.

But in most neighborhoods, developers can’t avoid parking, because of planning laws. "This means that neighborhoods like the iconic North Beach simply could not be built today," Henderson wrote, noting how mandatory parking provisions mean that the lower floors of new buildings are likely to contain parking garages, not storefronts and cafes, and garage entrances take away street parking and limit where street trees can be planted.

"But at least contesting car space is on the table in San Francisco" Henderson said. "That makes it an intriguing bellwether for other places."

Art listings

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Art listings are compiled by Johnny Ray Huston.

MUSEUMS

Asian Art Museum 200 Larkin; 581-3500, www.asianart.org. Tues-Wed, Fri-Sun, 10am-5pm; Thurs, 10am-9pm. $10 ($5 Thurs after 5pm), $7 seniors, $6 for ages 12 to 17, free for 11 and under. "In a New Light: The Asian Art Museum Collection." Ongoing.

California Palace of the Legion of Honor Lincoln Park (near 34th Ave and Clement); 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5pm. $8, $6 seniors, $5 for ages 12 to 17, free for 10 and under (free Tues). "Surrealism: Selections from the Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books." Work by surrealist poets and artists. Ongoing.

Cartoon Art Museum 655 Mission; CAR-TOON. Tues-Sun, 11am-5pm. $6, $4 students and seniors, $2 for ages 6 to 12, free for five and under and members. "The Art of Stan Sakai: Celebrating 25 Years of Usagi Yojimbo." Through Sun/5. "Watchmen." Illustrations, sketches, and comic book pages by Dave Gibbons. Through July 19. "The Brinkley Girls." Retrospective devoted to early 20th century illustrator Nell Brinkley. Through August 23.

Contemporary Jewish Museum 736 Mission; www.thecjm.org. Mon-Tues, Fri-Sun, 11am-5:30pm; Thurs, 1-8pm. $10, $8 seniors and students, free for 12 and under and members. "Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater." An exhibition of 200 works of art and ephemera. Through Sept 7. "Being Jewish: A Bay Area Portrait." Ongoing.

De Young Museum Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive (near Fulton and 10th Ave); 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5:15pm (Fri, 9:30am-8:45pm). $10, $7 seniors, $6 for ages 13 to 17 and college students with ID (free first Tues). "The Fauna and Flora of the Pacific." Mural by Miguel Covarrubias. Ongoing.

Legion of Honor Lincoln Park, 34th Ave and Clement; 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5:15pm. $20 adults, $7 seniors, $6 youths and students, free 12 and under. "Waking Dreams: Max Klinger and the Symbolist Print." Retrospective of the German Symbolist artist. Through Sat/4.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 151 Third St; 357-4000. Mon-Tues, Fri-Sun, 11am-5:45pm; Thurs, 10am-8:45pm. $12.50, $8 seniors, $7 students, free for members and 12 and under (free first Tues; half price Thurs, 6-8:45pm). "Austere: Selections From the SFMOMA Collection." Photography and architecture and design. Through Tues/7. "Otl Aicher: Munchen 1972." Graphic design. Through Tues/7. "Patterns of Speculation: J. Mayer H." German architectural studio. Through Tues/7. "Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’." Exhibition devoted to the photographic classic. Through August 23. "Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities." Show dedicated to the two popular American artists. Through Sept 7. "Art in the Atrium: Kerry James Marshall." Monumental murals. Ongoing.

San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness, fourth floor; 255-4800, www.sfpalm.org. Tues-Fri, 11am-5pm; Sat, 1-5pm. Free. "Star Quality: The World of Noel Coward." Exhibition dedicated to the icon. Through August 29. "Maestro: Photographic Portraits of Tom Zimberoff." Portraits of national and international conductors. Ongoing. "150 Years of Dance in California." Ongoing. "San Francisco in Song." Ongoing. "San Francisco 1900: On Stage." Ongoing.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 701 Mission; 978-ARTS. Tues-Wed, Fri-Sun, noon-5pm; Thurs, noon-8pm. $6, $3 seniors, students, and youths, free for members (free first Tues). "Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth." Mixed media sculptural "soundsuits" by the Chicago dancer-turned-artist. Through Sun/5. "Through Future Eyes: The Endurance of Humanity." Contemporary work by ten artists, incuding six Young Artists at Work curators. Through Sun/5.

BAY AREA

Cantor Arts Center Lomita and Museum, Stanford University, Stanford; (650) 723-4177. Wed, Fri-Sun, 11am-5pm; Thurs, 11am-8pm. "Appellations to Antiquity." 19th and 20th century works from the museum collection. Through July 26. "Pop to Present." Survey from the 1960s to the present. Through August 16. "Contemporary Glass." Modern glass works. Ongoing. "Rodin! The Complete Stanford Collection." Ongoing.

Judah L. Magnes Museum 2911 Russell, Berk; (510) 549-6950. Mon-Wed, Sun, 11am-4pm. $4, $3 students and seniors. "Memory Lab." Interactive installation allowing visitors to make family albums from their documents, photographs, and memories. Ongoing. "Projections." Multimedia works from the museums archival, documentary, and experimental films. Ongoing.

Oakland Museum of California 1000 Oak, Oakl; (510) 238-2200. Wed-Sat, 10am-5pm (first Fri, 10am-9pm); Sun, noon-5pm. $8, $5 seniors and students (free second Sun). "Future of Sequoias: Sustaining Parklands in the 21st Century." Panoramic photos with commentary. Through August 23. "Squeak Carnwath: Painting is No Ordinary Object." A solo exhibition dedicated to the Oakland artist. Through August 23. "The Art and History of Early California." The story of California from the first inhabitants through the Gold Rush. Ongoing.

Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology UC Berkeley, 103 Kroeber Hall, room 3712, Bancroft and Bowditch, Berk; (510) 643-1193. Wed-Sat, 10am-4:30pm; Sun, noon-4pm. $4, $3 seniors, $1 students, free for 12 and under. "From the Maker’s Hand: Selections from the Permanent Collection." An exploration of human ingenuity found in living and historic cultures around the world. Ongoing.

UC Berkeley Art Museum 2626 Bancroft Way, Berk; (510) 642-0808. Wed-Sun, 11am-5pm. $8 adults, $5 seniors and young adults, free for members and 12 and under. "Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye." Museum survey curated by Lawrence Rinder. Through August 30. "Human Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet." Collaborative exhibition. Through Sept. 27. *

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