History

SPORTS: Are the A’s history?

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If MLB is serious about contraction, Oakland could lose its team

By A.J. Hayes

Several seasons ago, before performance-enhancing drugs started dominating baseball’s off-the-field news, an equally troubling situation was starting to take hold in the perpetually hand-wringing sport – contraction.

In 2001, back when team owners claim they had no clue about baseball’s growing steroids problem, Commissioner Bud Selig floated his scheme to eliminate two major league clubs – his choices at the time were Montreal and Minnesota – to help stave off baseball revenue problems.

For any number of reasons, the contraction plan fizzled and has rarely been heard from since.

But now in 2008 don’t be surprised if talk returns to putting one or more of the game’s 30 clubs on the chopping block – if for no other reason than to divert talk from exactly what pharmaceutical products were injected into Roger Clemens’ buttocks.

The press: Humbled in New Hampshire

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B3 comment:

As I said in my post-election blog, I liked the fact that it was the voters, not the pundits nor the pollsters, who decided the New Hampshire primary and surprised everyone.

I also liked this commentary below by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a national media watchdog group, who asked the Washington Post’s David Broder and NBC’s Tim Russert to explain their embarrassingly wrong predictions, rebuked NBC’s Chris Matthews for horserace coverage, and quoted NBC’s Tom Brokaw offering some good reporting advice, and then giving its own good advice.

FAIR to the campaign reporters: “Reporters should strive for coverage no matter what the results are.”

Brokaw: “Wait for the voters to make their judgment…”

B3 adds: “Reporters should cover the issues and the policy differences between the candidates. And work to keep the war and Bush on the front burner at all times.”

fair.gif

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3242

Media Advisory

Humbled in New Hampshire?
Press Needs to Refocus Campaign Coverage

1/11/08

Leading up to the New Hampshire primary, the storyline on the Democratic side was the disastrous state of the Clinton campaign. Her loss was a given; it seemed the only considerations were the margin of defeat and whether or not she would even continue running at all. The day of the primary, the Washington Post reported (1/8/08) that a second loss to Obama “would leave the New York senator’s candidacy gasping for breath,” and declared that Clinton’s vow to stay in the race

may be more wish than reality. By Wednesday, it may be too late. By then, Obama’s campaign may have inflicted enough damage on the woman-who-was-once-inevitable that no amount of readjusting, recalibrating and rearranging will give her the wherewithal to overcome two big losses in the first contests of the 2008 nomination battle.

Clinton, of course, won the primary–surprising the pundits and contradicting the polls that journalists unwisely use to set the tone of so much of their coverage. In the aftermath, the media were left asking what went “wrong” with the numbers. As the front page of USA Today declared (1/10/08), “For pollsters, N.H. ‘unprecedented.'” But this isn’t so; the actual USA Today story included a state pollster who noted that pre-election polls in 2000 vastly underestimated John McCain’s victory over George W. Bush. Right before the primary, the New York Times reported (1/30/00) that “a series of polls showed the two Republican front-runners in a dead heat.” Given that McCain won by 19 points, journalists and pollsters puzzling over Clinton’s showing are ignoring very recent history.

As the media mea culpas start to pile up, it’s worth considering the unspoken implication–that if the vote had gone the way the polls were predicting, then the press would have been doing a fine job of covering an election. But journalists should not be gamblers, betting that they will be vindicated by voters’ choices that are inherently unpredictable. Reporters should strive for coverage that holds up no matter what the results are.

Expectations and reality
Though they often prefer to think of themselves as mere observers of an election, the media clearly set the tone for much of the campaign, laying out expectations for various candidates and making editorial decisions about who the most “viable” contenders will be–usually long before most actual voters have been given the chance to weigh in.

But beating the expectations doesn’t necessarily guarantee good coverage. Democratic contender John Edwards defied press predictions by finishing second in Iowa, ahead of supposed front-runner Hillary Clinton. But much of the media conversation after the votes were tallied focused on the disappointing Edwards showing. By contrast, Republican John McCain had a great night in Iowa, according to many in the press– despite the fact that he finished fourth, behind Fred Thompson. The obvious difference is not how well the candidates did but how well they are liked by the press corps.

Some in the media point out that the Republican race in New Hampshire went as predicted, so it wasn’t all bad news for the press. But the campaign coverage still included its share of bizarrely confident predictions. NBC’s Tim Russert (1/4/08) declared that “only McCain or Romney can come out of New Hampshire to fight for another day in South Carolina, only one. One stays behind. It is make or break for McCain or Romney in New Hampshire.” Given that both candidates are, by all appearances, continuing to campaign, will Russert explain where his prediction came from? Or as the Washington Post’s David Broder wrote before the New Hampshire vote (1/4/08), “A second Romney loss would effectively end the former Massachusetts governor’s candidacy.”

Horse race
There’s a long trend of media hostility towards so-called “second-tier” candidates (Extra!, 9/10/03). As a recent Wall Street Journal news story put it (1/10/08), “In both parties, second-tier candidates continue to press on and siphon off votes.” But Broder and Russert were not just saying that non-frontrunners have a duty to get out of the way–they were asserting that a loss in New Hampshire would mean that Romney would no longer be a front-runner. This illustrates an important point about mainstream election coverage: Not only do journalists and pundits devote far too much attention to covering the horse race aspect of campaigns, but when they cover the horse race they generally do a poor job of it.

Primary elections and caucuses determine how a state party’s delegates are assigned; if a candidate wins enough delegates, they will almost certainly be their party’s nominee. So a reasonably helpful media would focus on this delegate count. But the mathematics of this process are obscured by the media’s obsession with “wins” and “losses” in highly visible contests.

Consider Barack Obama’s apparently monumental victory in the Iowa caucuses. The distribution of delegates, though, was hardly so dramatic: Obama won 16, Clinton 15 and Edwards 14. In a race to secure a little over 2,000 delegates, the results are of little consequence. In New Hampshire, Clinton’s dramatic comeback netted her nine delegates–the same number awarded to Obama. In the total delegate count tallied on CNN’s website–which counts a large number of party insiders awarded as “superdelegates”–Clinton has more than double the number of delegates as Obama, and Edwards is about 25 delegates behind Obama.

On the Republican side, McCain’s victory in New Hampshire gained him seven delegates; to put that in context, Romney’s second-place finish in Iowa was worth 12 delegates. And Romney’s win in the Wyoming primary–which received almost no media coverage at all–secured him eight delegates. His total delegate count still puts him ahead of all or most his competitors (depending on whether you believe CNN or ABC), though the media coverage would lead you to conclude otherwise.

Given that the process of nominating a presidential candidate is a matter of winning delegates, why does the press assign so much significance to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries? The implicit assumption is that these small states have a big role in determining the eventual party nominees, but they actually have a quite mixed record in projecting overall winners in competitive races. (Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas and Pat Buchanan were all New Hampshire winners.) Neither does losing early primaries necessarily doom a candidacy–in 1992, Bill Clinton lost the first five contests. The media’s decision to place such importance on the small number of delegates in the first two states has little to do with any actual reasonable political determination.

What do we cover now?
Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw offered some helpful commentary during the coverage of the New Hampshire primaries, suggesting to MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews that reporters put less emphasis on trying to predict outcomes and spend more time covering actual policy:

BROKAW: You know what I think we’re going to have to do?

MATTHEWS: Yes sir?

BROKAW: Wait for the voters to make their judgment.

MATTHEWS: Well, what do we do then in the days before the ballot? We must stay home, I guess.

BROKAW: No, no we don’t stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they’re saying. We know from how the people voted today, what moved them to vote. You can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that have not been fully explored during all this.

Matthews’ response is illuminating. Does a political junkie who hosts two national television programs really not have any idea about how to cover politics other than talking about strategy, fundraising and polls? Do campaign journalists really have so little interest in the actual policy positions of the candidates?

As it stands now, the races for the major party nominations are remarkably close. The most valuable service journalists could provide now would be to illustrate the differences between the candidates on the major issues of importance to voters. The press corps seems chastened by their misreading of the New Hampshire electorate, and many are vowing to be more cautious in their assumptions. Will they follow through on their own advice? And will voters ever get campaign reporting that helps them make informed choices about the direction of their democracy?

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Peter Hart on 2008 primaries, Kali Akuno on New Orleans public housing (1/11/08-1/17/08)

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Initials B.B.

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› johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW A few months ago, at a bookstore in another city, I came across a few copies of the ’60s arts and literature journal Kulchur. Scanning them, I discovered that the Bay Area poet Bill Berkson had contributed some film essays and that his writings on cinema were followed an issue or two later by reviews from a fledgling critic named Pauline Kael. The presence of Berkson’s and Kael’s movie notes in Kulchur reflects a time when the boundary between making art and writing about it wasn’t so fixed. Here was Kael, a friend of the poet Robert Duncan, making her first published sojourns into criticism (which were eventually reprinted in I Lost It at the Movies [Little, Brown, 1965]), while Berkson was trying out an essayistic voice that is more vivid and vibrant today, as evidenced by the seven (lucky) pieces in Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981–2006 (Cuneiform Press).

Cinema lights up the poetry of Berkson’s friend and mentor Frank O’Hara, so it is slightly less of a surprise, though no less of a pleasure, when Berkson — in the midst of a Sudden Address essay about the painter Philip Guston — turns a brief mention of the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan into a brief blast of instantly classic film criticism. "It’s as if [Jean-Luc] Godard’s movies had predicted the space of" the assassination footage, Berkson remarks. This comment, while not a direct observation about a particular Godard film, captures — and more important, opens up — the cramped, antic, and absurdly violent energy of Godard’s new wave heyday as well as any of Kael’s great celebrations of the director.

Movies are a tangential subject at most in Sudden Address: Berkson might love Louise Brooks almost as much as O’Hara adored James Dean, but the cast that parades through these pieces is more likely to range from Gertrude Stein and Dante to a number of Berkson’s New York school or new realist peers and then back to Dante (in relation to Kenneth Koch) and Stein again. These artists and writers, harmonizing motifs within the overall text, occupy a living history quite different from the cold terminology of the academy and much contemporary art criticism. Attuned to the poet’s flair for "observation for observation’s sake" rather than dedicated to the tedious assemblage of "frames of judgment," Berkson claims that "pleasure in writing criticism is often connected with the surprise of vernacular…. Most critics are Philistines in the sense that they ignore the cardinal rule of art practice, which is never to give the game away."

It would be a matter of hinting, and not one of giving the game away, to suggest that Berkson’s passionate engagement with the kinship between poetry and painting — a passion that rules Sudden Address‘s first piece and gradually possesses its last one — might have a role in the rise of the Mission school and other painterly Bay Area inspirations of recent years. Certainly a number of musicians and visual artists have looked to Berkson’s onetime home of Bolinas as a source of sustenance, albeit temporarily. Born from teaching gigs and lectures at the San Francisco Art Institute and elsewhere, the oratorical style of this book remains energetic throughout. Berkson’s roving intelligence stops to enjoy the infant nature of Italian phonetics and puzzles over the sublime. It tellingly notes that Walt Whitman and Charles Baudelaire "were the two most-photographed nineteenth-century writers" and places painter-poet Joe Brainard and critic Clement Greenberg at the intersection of Hans Hoffman’s paintings in order to take on Greenberg’s famous good-or-bad mode of attack. It also takes issue with former fellow "poet who also writes about art" Peter Schjeldahl’s gradual abandonment of poetry.

Sudden Address‘s cool enthusiasm sometimes gives way to a passion even more at odds with what Berkson deems "the glacial moraine" of postmodernism. Composed in memory of Berkson’s feelings for O’Hara’s poem "In Memory of My Feelings," the 2006 piece "Frank O’Hara at 30" overcomes the assumed importance and first-name logrolling of many New York school–style remembrances. It exemplifies Berkson’s ability to make one style of criticism function as a rich libretto surrounding the aria that is a particular poem or painting. Virgil Thomson attested that when faced with a choice between work, friendship, and passionate love, finding two out of three ain’t bad. But Berkson wants to have all three. At its best, Sudden Address embodies that possibility.

Tiger tales

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More on the SF Zoo:
>>20 Questions the zoo won’t answer
>>Editorial: Take back the zoo
>>Opinion: Shut down the zoo
>>From 1999: The Zoo Blues

› news@sfbg.com

When I first heard about the attack at the San Francisco Zoo, I felt strangely vindicated to learn that a Siberian tiger had been involved. I am irrationally prejudiced when it comes to big cats: I don’t like Siberians. Of all the tigers, lions, jaguars, and other exotic animals I have known in my day — and I grew up on a wild animal farm, so I have known quite a few — the only ones that truly frightened me were a chimpanzee named Lolita and a pair of Siberians (they’re known as Amurs now) that lived in an old shed about 100 feet from my front door.

When I read in March that two chimps from a California primate sanctuary had attacked a 62-year-old man, biting off much of his face, tearing off his foot, and mutiutf8g his genitals, I thought of Mike’s thumb. And when I heard that Tatiana had attacked three young men, killing one of them, I immediately thought of his ear.

Mike Bleyman was a biologist who built a research and breeding compound outside Pittsboro, NC, and like many exotic-animal fanatics he had a tendency to lose body parts. Fortunately, the surgeons in Chapel Hill were skilled at sewing them back on.

Mike was also my stepfather. My parents divorced when I was in junior high, and when my mother moved in with Mike on "the farm," I went with her.

I was present when Lolita bit Mike’s thumb right through the bone, almost severing it completely. I was away at college when the tiger got him.

Mike had arranged a trade with the Albuquerque Zoo in New Mexico — two Siberians and a Himalayan black bear for a young Sumatran tiger. Mike hit both tigers with tranquilizer darts. But ketamine, the drug of choice for sedating big cats, takes several minutes to work, and being an impatient man who didn’t play by the rules, Mike entered the cage before the recommended time had passed. When he approached the male, the female roused herself. She slashed Mike across the back, dislocated his elbow, and removed his ear.

The fact that Mike was able to extract himself from the cage alive is testament to the fact that the ketamine had at least begun to have an impact. Siberian tigers are not creatures you want to mess with.

Our other tigers, all Bengals, were sociable and playful. As I walked by they would chuffle their hellos. I would chuffle back and reach through the fence to scratch their necks or rub their noses. The Siberians, however, had a flat affect, rarely vocalized, and menacingly tracked passing humans.

I know it’s not fair to judge an entire subspecies by two individuals, and these cats had every reason to be sullen. They had evolved to preside as alpha predators over rugged territories of hundreds of square miles, and they were being forced to live sedentary lives in a gloomy shed probably no bigger than 200 square feet. But fair or not, they freaked me out.

I have been thinking a lot about those cats in the past couple of weeks as I have read the news stories coming from San Francisco. As someone who has bottle-fed several cubs, built my share of tiger cages, and shoveled more than my share of tiger shit, I know more than a little about Felis tigris.

I have been equally fascinated, if not more so, by the behavior of the other species that populates this tragic tale, the one known as Homo sapiens. In addition to being a former tiger farmer, I am also a journalist who once covered San Francisco politics. I still work occasionally as a communications consultant to nonprofits, and in my day job I am a manager of a small state agency and work regularly with elected officials. So when I look at this story through the lens of a behaviorist, I think about the traits of various human subspecies — politicians, bureaucrats, managers, spin doctors, journalists, self-proclaimed experts, and supposed guardians of health and safety. Frankly, I am not impressed.

Tatiana was killed for being a tiger. Tigers have only one self. They are what they are; end of story. Humans are a different order of being: we are capable of self-deception. We can lie to ourselves, we can deny what is right in front of us, we can try to shift blame, and we can avoid the things we know we should face.

And thereon hangs this tiger tale.

TARZAN AND TIGER ISLAND


People have often asked me over the years why my stepfather had all of his animals. I like to tell them it was because he thought he was Tarzan. It’s not the absolute truth, but it is as valid as any other answer.

It started in the 1970s, when he just drove down to Florida one day and came back with a tiger cub.

For her first several months there, Gretchen had the run of the farm. I remember one weekend when Mike was teaching us to shoot: my sister Gwenn was lying in the bed of a battered red Toyota pickup, one eye closed and the other sighting down a rifle barrel at a paper bull’s-eye. She never saw the tiger stalking her from behind. As soon as Gretchen was near enough, she closed in a sudden burst, easily cleared the side of the bed, and landed squarely on Gwenn’s back. Gwenn just huffed, "Gretchen, get off," and calmly squeezed the trigger.

Gretchen, however, was soon too large to be treated like a funny-looking dog. Mike hired a backhoe operator to dig a moat around a knoll where an abandoned farmhouse perched. The man arrived on a day when Mike’s very wild foster daughter, Dianne, had cooked brownies. The backhoe operator didn’t realized they were laced with pot and ate a few. It took a long time to finish the job, in part because the guy kept nodding off, and in the end the moat had a peculiar shape.

Mike didn’t mind. He just put up an acircular fence around the acircular moat and called it Tiger Island.

The fence was 12 feet tall and built of heavy-gauge chain link. A barbed-wire overhang jutted inward from the top at a 45-degree angle. A tiger might be able to leap to the top of a 12-foot fence, but the moat meant there was no solid place from which Gretchen could launch herself.

If she tried to hurdle the fence, she’d have to start at least 10 feet back. And if she crossed the moat and pulled herself onto the narrow bank, she would have to jump straight up. That would mean an encounter with the overhang. She wouldn’t climb the fence because chain link is too wobbly. It was the way the moat and the fence and the overhang worked together that made the compound secure. Even when the moat ran dry in later years, a tiger would still have had to jump from the bottom of the dry moat, making the total leap on the order of 16 or 17 feet.

In other words, a stoned heavy-equipment operator and a somewhat oddball zoologist, with a few thousand dollars’ worth of chain link and barbed wire, managed to make a very secure tiger pen. I have to wonder why the privatized San Francisco Zoo, with millions of dollars in bond money and a director who earns $339,000 a year, couldn’t.

THE MISSING WALL


Early reports from San Francisco described the tiger grotto as having a wall and a moat as if they were separate things and gave dimensions for both — initially 15 feet for the moat and 20 feet for the wall. When I read that, I began examining aerial photos to look for other points of egress. I studied the height and the angle of the side walls.

All tigers can climb trees. Amur habitat includes mountain ranges. They don’t like steep slopes, but they’re capable of scrambling over rocky faces. Perhaps Tatiana got out that way, I thought, but I soon rejected the idea.

The aerials showed me the initial reports were inaccurate. There never was a wall and a moat. Tatiana’s compound was nothing like Gretchen’s. There was only a moat, and the so-called wall was simply the far bank. The moat isn’t, in zoological terms, either a physical or a psychological fail-safe. It’s simply a way of recessing a wall into the earth so it doesn’t block human sight lines.

A dry moat can actually be worse than a wall because the far bank gives a tiger launching points. When the jump-off point is around the same elevation as the top of the far bank, as it is at the San Francisco Zoo, the moat’s depth may not matter. The question becomes not how high the tiger can jump but how far it can leap. History and a close look at pictures of the grotto suggest that is exactly the question San Francisco and zoos everywhere should be asking.

One rule of thumb is that a moat needs to be four times the average body length of the species it is suppose to contain, which for an Amur is just an inch shy of six feet. That means a moat should be at least 24 feet across. I’m skeptical of this calculation. Mean body length for a mountain lion, for example, puts the recommended moat distance at just over 13 feet, yet there are credible reports of mountain lions leaping 35 feet.

An alternative is the cat’s known leaping distance plus 20 percent. The oft-reported leaping distance is 20 feet, so the minimum width would again be 24 feet. There are accounts of tigers leaping 30 to 33 feet, but I have not been able to determine whether these were documented. In China, the Yangtze River runs through Leaping Tiger Gorge, so named because a tiger leaped the river to escape a hunter, according to local lore. The river at its narrowest is about 82 feet wide. The story is a fable, but it gives you a sense of the tiger’s reputation as a prodigious leaper. Based on my years of observing tigers at play, 30 feet does not seem at all out of the question.

Such calculations likely contributed to the standards of two Association of Zoos and Aquarium committees. Both the AZA Felid Technical Advisory Group and the AZA Nutrition Advisory Group recommend a minimum width of 25 feet for a tiger moat.

So imagine my reaction when Zoo director Manuel Mollinedo stated his belief that the tiger could not have escaped from the moat, while also saying that according Zoo records, the moat was 20 feet across. I have never met Mollinedo, and he didn’t return my calls, but in my opinion the man has no idea what he is talking about.

Then came reports that the moat is 33 feet across. Well … sort of, maybe, kind of. It may be 33 feet from wall to wall, but the bank on the grotto side slopes to a flat floor 20 feet across. Some clever bloke decided to make the transition look more natural by placing fake boulders atop the slope. These project out into the moat and in some cases rise above the grotto floor. A tiger that launched from the lip of one of these would have to cross far less than 30 feet.

I asked the Zoo for the narrowest leap between the outside wall and these "rocks." Zoo officials didn’t respond. So I went out there with my tape measure.

The tiger grotto is closed off, and Zoo officials also declined to answer my request for access to the area. But through a side window I was able to study a neighboring lion grotto with a similar design. A rock ledge stuck out into the moat more than seven feet, leaving a gap I measured along the outer wall at about 25 feet. Using aerial photographs and online measuring tools to look at Tatiana’s grotto, I repeatedly got widths of less than 24 feet.

In other words, the width of the moat most likely does not meet AZA standards, which could hardly be described as overly cautious.

NO MARGIN FOR ERROR


The world soon found out the bank of Tatiana’s grotto was less than 12.5 feet high, and experts quickly agreed that a motivated tiger could have surmounted the wall. Yet Mollinedo was still expressing disbelief.

We know tigers pluck monkeys from tree branches, bound over steep rock faces, and jump on the backs of large prey. But how tall do they stand, and how much can they elevate? The best evidence I can find of an Amur’s reach comes from the field studies of Anatolii Grigor’evich Yudakov. One way Amurs mark their territory is by making scratches high in the bark of trees. Yudakov measured these marks at 210 to 290 centimeters, or roughly 7 to 9.5 feet.

For an Amur standing on its hind legs to reach the top of a 12.5 foot wall, it would have to elevate another 3 to 5.5 feet. Remember Gretchen jumping effortlessly over the side rail of a small pickup? Four feet.

A major prey species for Amurs is the Manchurian red deer, which stands up to five feet at the shoulder. Though not sourced, many references report a vertical leap for tigers of six feet. Take a tiger with a reach of almost 10 feet and a vertical leap of six feet, and suddenly the industry standard of a 16-foot wall has no appreciable margin for error.

Then there are the events of May 14, 1994, when a Bengal tiger in India’s Kaziranga National Park attacked a man on the back of an elephant. According to a press release from Wildlife Trust International, executive director Vivek Menon reviewed footage of the attack and exclaimed, "I could never imagine that a tiger could so effortlessly leap from the ground onto an adult elephant’s head, which is at least 12 feet above the ground."

There has been much speculation about whether a captive tiger is capable of matching the jumping ability of a wild cat. Presumably a confined tiger would be sluggish, out of shape, her muscles atrophied. No one to my knowledge, though, has studied the sports physiology of tigers.

I can say from personal experience that even captive tigers are incredibly agile and powerful. We had a Bengal named Engels (the litter was born on May Day) who lived on Tiger Island. One day a female Bengal tried to snatch some food from him. He swiped at her almost casually, hitting her in the side. The force of the blow immediately stopped the young tiger’s heart, and she fell over dead.

THE LONG JUMP


So what happened that day at the Zoo? So far, none of the witnesses are talking. Media accounts suggest one scenario: Tatiana may have stood on her hind legs against the wall, pushed off from the bottom of the moat, grabbed the top of the wall with her front paws, and leveraged herself up and over by digging her hind claws into the wall. That’s conceivable, I guess. Tatiana may even have escaped before the attack and waited for her prey in the tall grass beside the moat.

I have a very hard time imagining that, though. For one thing, the wall curves outward at the top. For another, such methodical, incremental movement is not typical of a tiger. They stalk their prey slowly, but in a brutal burst, they close with amazing speed. I am convinced Tatiana exploded from the grotto, landed on the lip, and then powered her way up. Whether she sprang from one of the protruding rocks, the sloped bank, or the moat floor is almost immaterial, but I am inclined to believe she jumped over the moat.

Strangely, Mollinedo may have been on the right track at a Dec. 28 press conference when he said, "How she jumped that high is beyond me." She may not have jumped high at all; I suspect she just jumped long.

I base this on my observations of tigers and my study of grotto photographs, but it is supported by history. There are three known escapes from Tatiana’s grotto and one near escape. In one case the escape went unwitnessed.

Keepers Jack Castor and John Alcaraz walked by the grotto one day a few years back and saw a Bengal named Jack wandering outside, Alcaraz told me by phone. They yelled at him, and he jumped back in.

David Rentz witnessed another escape in 1959, when he was a young Zoo volunteer. He’s an entomologist in Australia now, and he recently wrote in his blog that the tiger "flew across the moat from his position on the other side … and sprung back to the grotto all in one graceful movement." There had been previous reports this same tiger could jump the moat.

Then there’s the near escape witnessed by Marian Roth-Cramer in 1997. In an interview in the Dec. 27 San Francisco Chronicle, she said, "I saw the tiger leap over the moat." This makes me wonder why so much coverage has focused on the height of the wall and not the width of the moat.

Media coverage has also focused on whether the men taunted or teased Tatiana. I find this discussion ludicrous. Zoos know animal abuse comes with the territory. They must anticipate it, prevent it, and prepare for its consequences. It’s part of the job. And besides, how does one taunt a tiger?

When I think of taunting, I think of the French kibitzers and King Arthur’s men in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a scene reprised in Spamalot. I imagine some kids shouting into the grotto, "Your mother was a wild boar, and you father smelt of porcelainberries. I scent-mark in your general direction."

Teasing a confined animal means tempting it with something it can’t have — a ball, say, or your throat.

Tatiana wasn’t teased. She got what she wanted.

Tigers attack for limited reasons — they see you as prey, they see you as a threat to them, their cubs, or their food, or they dislike you because of something you did to them. Perhaps Tatiana saw the young men as a threat. Perhaps they pissed her off. But a simpler explanation is that their behavior got the cat’s attention, and perhaps they crossed the fence and got too close to the edge, until at some point Tatiana identified Kulbir Dhaliwal as prey that had come within range. It seems significant that the attack occurred at twilight, since tigers are crepuscular, meaning they are most active then. It’s their favorite time to hunt.

Naturalist and western novelist Dane Coolidge wrote in 1901 that Indians classify tigers as game killers, cattle lifters, or man killers. People have suggested tigers become human killers because they develop a taste for human flesh. I believe tigers will eat almost anything — but they’re wary of taking on prey that might fight back effectively. They lose any hesitancy when they discover just how vulnerable we humans are. Tatiana proved she had no inhibitions about dining on human flesh when she attacked keeper Lori Kamejan in 2006.

Carlos Sousa Jr. apparently tried to distract Tatiana from her attempted "kill," and I use that term loosely since tigers naturally feed on prey that is still alive, and captive tigers are in-between creatures, psychologically speaking. Wild cubs learn from their mothers to dispatch prey effectively, but captive-bred tigers are never taught that skill. In terms of hardware, they may be the world’s finest killers, but their software is buggier than Windows Vista.

Tigers often have to protect their prey after an attack. They are followed by wild dogs and bears that try to scavenge their kills, and herd animals will sometimes try to rescue a herdmate. Tatiana most likely fought off the threat from Sousa, slashing his throat in the process, then tracked her wounded prey to finish what she started. It wasn’t a rampage, a vicious and angry outburst, as media reports have described it, just the methodical, instinctive actions of a top-of-the-line predator.

THE BIPED PROBLEM


If you look at what led up to Tatiana’s escape, you follow a trail of denial and avoidance.

Consider the players, starting with Zoo management and keepers.

Zoo staffers have known for almost a half century that a tiger could jump out of that grotto. Carey Baldwin, then the Zoo director, witnessed the escape with Rentz in 1959. His solution, according to Rentz’s blog, was to post instructions to keep the offending tiger indoors. Castor’s solution to Jack’s escape was to fill the moat with water, according to Alcaraz, but that practice ended after Jack died. Neither solution was permanent or designed to deal with the next strong-legged, strong-willed tiger to come along.

When Roth-Cramer witnessed the near escape, a passing keeper apparently laughed it off. She reportedly wrote a letter to then–Zoo director David Anderson, but there is no evidence her letter produced any response.

As far as we can tell, no one ever tried to convince the AZA or federal regulators that they needed tougher standards or tougher enforcement. No one took the story to the press or published a journal article to warn other Zoo professionals. No one posted public warnings, ordered changes to the grotto, banned tigers from the exhibit, or shut the lion house.

Mollinedo should have known about the problem if his keepers knew. But there seems to be a lot he doesn’t know, and previous Guardian reports and a recent Chronicle article suggest communication has broken down between employees, particularly keepers, and Zoo management. Lower-level staff complain of not being heard, not being consulted. Morale is low. Institutional knowledge is being lost as keepers quit in frustration.

And what about the regulators? Ron Tilson, the conservation director of the Minnesota Zoo, said in a Dec. 27 Chronicle story that the AZA standard, which he said was seven meters (closer to 23 feet), is "very conservative." Yet this has less than a 20 percent safety margin when you consider the conventional wisdom about how far a tiger can jump, and it is far less than reported leaps of 30 feet or more.

The day after the attack, the AZA issued a statement that "AZA accreditation standards contain no specific dimensions for big cat enclosures." The AZA did not return calls seeking comment, but what it provides is really a set of guidelines produced by advisory committees for a voluntary association composed of the very institutions being regulated. The guidelines aren’t consistently known and have never been fully implemented.

We know the AZA accredited the San Francisco Zoo despite a wall almost four feet shorter than the recommended height.

In 1974 the Philadelphia Zoo surveyed 10 other zoos about their tiger moats. It published the findings in the 1976 International Zoo Yearbook. San Francisco reported its moat was 13.5 feet deep. Detroit said its moat was 15.5 feet deep. Chicago’s moat was only 21 feet wide, and Tulsa reported between 15 and 20 feet. Oklahoma’s moat was only 17 feet wide. Half of the surveyed zoos couldn’t meet AZA recommendations.

There are signs the San Francisco Zoo did not meet other AZA standards. For example, the AZA’s 2008 Accreditation Standards and Related Policies states, "A written protocol should be developed involving local police or other emergency agencies." On Jan. 3, I e-mailed 20 questions to the Zoo’s public relations firm, many of which related to AZA standards. For example, I asked about the last emergency drill and about gun training. I also asked for copies of related Zoo policies. The Zoo never responded. But the next day Mollinedo announced that the Zoo is working with police at Taraval Station on a coordinated emergency response and that police and Zoo shooters will be training together.

The United States Department of Agriculture regulates zoos as exhibitors under the Animal Welfare Act. That act and the rules written to implement it are primarily meant to ensure healthy conditions for the animals. They contain specifications for the size of the fences around the outside of a zoo facility to keep unauthorized people out, not for the fences separating the animals from visitors.

And local oversight? The city owns the grounds and the animals. Zoo employees are part of the city employees union. But since 1993 the nonprofit San Francisco Zoological Society has owned the institution and operated it under a contract with the city. There were problems at the Zoo when the city ran it, but, as Sup. Tom Ammiano told me, "Nobody died."

The contract retains a role for the city through a Joint Zoo Committee of society board members and Recreation and Park Department commissioners. I have gone though the minutes of that committee going back several years, and I have to say the committee provides as much oversight as the stuffed animals in the Zoo’s gift ship. As Ammiano put it, "It’s all lip service."

The employee relations problems, the animal injuries and deaths (see Opinion, page 7), and other management issues at the Zoo are nothing new. Savannah Blackwell reported on these same sets of issues for the Guardian twice — see "The Zoo Blues" (5/19/99) and "The Zoo’s Losers" (5/7/03) — and there is no indication anything has been done.

The city’s contract with the Zoological Society and the Joint Zoo Committee should mean Zoo documents are public under the city’s sunshine laws. But the Zoo has not been forthcoming with key documents requested by the media. Sup. Sean Elsbernd has called for hearings, and Ammiano said there will be multiple hearings. "I think the key issues are accountability and transparency," he said.

The Zoo’s high-priced director has demonstrated that his knowledge of the animals under his care, the condition of his facilities, and the concerns of his staff are embarrassingly limited. In press conferences he looked befuddled, evaded questions, broke every rule of crisis communication, and speculated about the victims without clear information.

The Zoo hired Sam Singer, supposedly a crisis communication specialist, but I have attended multiple trainings in crisis communication, and I have to say he seems more like a fixer to me. And despite this, Mayor Gavin Newsom and the society’s board publicly support Mollinedo.

Mollinedo and his PR people have tried to direct blame toward the victims. Perhaps they were drunk, stoned, rowdy, throwing things — but if Tatiana was killed for being a tiger, it could also be argued that Sousa was killed for being a young man.

There’s a whole process of brain development that scientists are now beginning to understand. The maturation of brain cells through something called myelination starts from the back of the brain. The front of the brain, the seat of executive functions like judgment, matures last. Young people often don’t make good decisions. Boys, in particular, take unnecessary risks.

In the public health world, we understand this and concentrate on policies that control risk and reduce harm. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold the survivors accountable for anything they might have done, but it does mean the Zoo has no business shifting the blame.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with more avoidance than a tiger has stripes.

In the end, this was a human problem. People weren’t doing their jobs. They had not taken action when it was clearly needed. And in the end, the only innocent creature in this drama was the one that had no choice other than to be what she was. Her name was Tatiana.

And now she is dead, along with a young man whose parents loved and miss him very much.

Craig McLaughlin is a former Guardian managing editor. He is coauthor of Health Policy Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Jones and Bartlett, 2008).

Media to Voters: It’s Over

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

The media organization called FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) makes a timely point on the day of the New Hampshire primary: the media is declaring the presidential race is all but over, preempting some 98 per cent of the voters who will have no say in who becomes the two presidential nominees.

FAIR notes that the Washington Post’s David Broder, the dean of political reporters, wrote on Jan. 4 that “New Hampshire is poised to close down the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.”

Broder, as I like to recall, popped up on a Sunday morning news show shortly after the Iraq invasion and said, almost proudly, it looks as if the President has won himself a war.

FAIR concludes its piece with the admonition that “history would suggest that, at a very minimum, campaign reporters refrain from handicapping the outcome of the nominating process in early January. After all, it’s voters, not the news media, who are supposed to elect the new president.” There must be a better way. B3

fair.gif

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=146

Media Advisory

Media to Voters: It’s Over

Pundits rushing to end primaries and preempt voter choices

1/8/08

As the results of the Republican and Democratic primaries in New Hampshire are reported tonight, it’s a good bet that many prominent pundits and journalists will declare the race for the White House all but over–long before 98 percent of voters have had any say in the matter.

The Washington Post’s David Broder wrote on January 4 that “New Hampshire is poised to close down the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.” Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter (1/3/08) likewise declared Obama to be the new inevitable after he won the Iowa caucus:

With his victory tonight, Barack Obama is now the strong favorite to be the Democratic nominee for president. The only one who can stop Obama from making history is Obama…. Unless he makes a terrible mistake in this weekend’s WMUR debate in New Hampshire, Obama will be the strong favorite to win in the Granite State…. Should the Illinois senator win New Hampshire and South Carolina, it will be next to impossible to prevent him from becoming the nominee on February 5, Super Tuesday.

Actually, it’s easy to imagine at least three Democratic candidates still having substantial support on February 5, meaning that Super Tuesday could produce no clear winner. The Republican race has much the same dynamic; though it hasn’t happened in decades, one or both of the major parties could go into their conventions not knowing who their nominee is.

By any reasonable standard, then, the race for either major party’s presidential nomination is far from settled. But Broder nonetheless argued that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s campaign was virtually finished: “A second Romney loss would effectively end the former Massachusetts governor’s candidacy.”

NBC anchor Tim Russert sounded a similar alarm (1/4/08): “Bottom line, Brian, only McCain or Romney can come out of New Hampshire to fight for another day in South Carolina, only one. One stays behind. It is make or break for McCain or Romney in New Hampshire.”

Why are the media rushing to end the primary season just as it’s begun? It’s sometimes difficult to follow the logic. Consider a USA Today report from January 7:

The Democratic contest is a two-person race, dominated by Clinton and Obama. That leaves Edwards, a former North Carolina senator who is a close third, and Richardson, New Mexico’s governor who is a distant fourth, waiting for a stumble or a political earthquake to create an opening for them.

How are four candidates participating in a “two-person race”–especially given that one of the lesser candidates–John Edwards–finished ahead of Hillary Clinton? Similarly, the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney (1/5/08) argued that “the results in Iowa…suggested that the Democratic and Republican contests were to a considerable extent two-way races: Mrs. Clinton and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois for the Democrats, and Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney for the Republicans.” How Mike Huckabee coming in first in his race and Edwards coming in second “suggested” that their candidacies should be dismissed, Nagourney didn’t explain.

The press has been more harshly critical of Edwards’ campaign, so it could be the case that many in the media would be happy to see him out of the picture. (See Action Alert, 12/21/07.) Indeed, much of the conventional wisdom after Edwards’ second-place finish in Iowa suggested that his campaign for the White House was all but over. As New York Times columnist David Brooks (New York Times, 1/4/08) boldly pronounced, “Edwards’s political career is probably over.” David Gergen agreed (CNN, 1/3/08): “John Edwards I think has nowhere to go now…even with a second-place win, because he has no money.”

In an interview with Edwards, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann (1/4/08) expressed bewilderment:

I didn’t understand the conventional wisdom last night…. If you finish second in Iowa with more support from the previous national front-runner, who dropped from first to third, many of the pundits, many of the so-called experts, are describing you as being in trouble, rather than Senator Clinton. Do you know why that is?

It’d be nice if more in the media asked such questions about what passes for conventional wisdom in their election coverage. Indeed, some articles have noted that winning early primaries isn’t necessary to winning the nomination; in 1992, Bill Clinton lost the first five contests, but somehow managed to win the White House nonetheless. This very recent history would suggest that, at a very minimum, campaign reporters refrain from handicapping the outcome of the nominating process in early January. After all, it’s voters, not the news media, who are supposed to elect the next president.

Click here to subscribe!

by Noam Chomsky

Open Media Series: City Lights Books, 232 pages

Interventions collects Chomsky’s essays and writings for the New York Times Syndicate, works published all around the globe, but rarely in major U.S. media, and certainly not in the New York Times. Chomsky, America’s foremost political intellectual and dissident, tackles the Bush administration, the Iraq War and more. Foreword written by FAIR’s Peter Hart.

Best of CounterSpin, 2007 (1/4/08-1/10/08)

Feel free to respond to FAIR ( fair@fair.org ). We can’t reply to everything, but we will look at each message. We especially appreciate documented examples of media bias or censorship. And please send copies of your correspondence with media outlets, including any responses, to fair@fair.org.

George McGovern: Impeach Bush & Cheney!

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B3 note: Good for George McGovern. Good for the Washington Post for running this important timely commentary
in its Sunday edition. Question: how many other papers will run it?

The McGovern piece reminds me of a major political point: that a big reason the Pelosi Democrats in
Washington have so cravenly caved in to the Bush initiatives, on the war and much else, is because Pelosi wrongheadly pulled the impeachment issue off the table before the last election. This meant, among other things, that the Democrats at the first bugle lost their most important bit of muscle and leverage. The result has been disastrous and the war is now surging.

It’s good that Cindy Sheehan is running against Pelosi and will force these issues into the public arena. Maybe, just maybe, Pelosi will be forced to debate Sheehan and will be forced in the November election to conduct a real campaign for the first time in her home territory to keep her Speaker of the House post.

Personal note about McGovern: he comes from South Dakota, a state so conservative that it has outlawed abortions. Its eastern border is l7 miles or so from my northwestern Iowa hometown of Rock Rapids. I have followed him closely through the years. I still marvel that a liberal of his force and eloquence could represent South Dakota for so many years in Congress. Imagine if he were the Speaker of the House.

Why I Believe Bush Must Go

By George McGovern

The Washington Post
Sunday 06 January 2008

Nixon was bad. These guys are worse.

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have
belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is
to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach
President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign.

I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an
expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment.

The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial
partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and
statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the
chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising.

But what are the facts?

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses.

They have repeatedly violated the Constitution.

They have transgressed national and international law.

They have lied to the American people time after time.

Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country
to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world.

These are truly “high crimes and misdemeanors,” to use the constitutional
standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team’s assumption of power was the
product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially
challenged – perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed
throughout the Bush-Cheney regime.

The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous,
illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq.

That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many
times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an
estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from
the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their
country.

The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is
expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed
from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9
trillion – by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that
the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in
violation of international law.

This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional
law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic
torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon
administration.

But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the
case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election.

The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon
presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national
history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of
killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived
Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had
nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an “imminent
threat” to the United States.

The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in
the 9/11 attacks – another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I
have recalled Jefferson’s observation: “Indeed I tremble for my country
when I reflect that God is just.”

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of
fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the
invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the
illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents.

The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative
members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and
Muslim world – more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off
the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries
without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August
that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to
the country and the world.

This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the
Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran.

I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush
invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S.
influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of
their administration, their policies – especially the war in Iraq – have
increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States.

Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush
and those of his son.

When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George
H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United
Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel
Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost.

Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration
established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international
arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions.

Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten
others.

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military
occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil
strife.

It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James
A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all
opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral
responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the
Hurricane Katrina catastrophe.

The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: “I
have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this
situation in New Orleans.”

Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the
collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst
natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course.

But we must still urge Congress to act.

Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution
to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land.

It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some
of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to
support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray.

This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the
Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, “it wasn’t until the
most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of
hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) – and argued that, as Commander in
Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override
our country’s laws – that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as
I did during Watergate…

A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law – and
repeatedly violates the law – thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors.”

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in
the opening decade of the 21st century.

This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a
series of rational presidents and Congresses.

At age 85, I won’t be around to witness the completion of the difficult
rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I’d like to hold on long
enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have
sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as
the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II.

We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic
blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010608C.shtml

Obama, hope .. and fighting

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Everybody loves Barack Obama today. That’s good; he’s generating tremendous hope and energy in the Democratic Party, he’s got young people excited about politics, he’s given Hillary Clinton a wallop … and of course, of course, this country could do way worse than President Barack Obama.

His speech last night in Iowa was inspirational, full of the sort of stirring rhetoric that makes you want to drop everything and go to New Hampshire to knock on doors.

But I’m still a little nervous. Here’s the line, the one we’ve heard over and over again:

“The time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington; to end the political strategy that’s been all about division and instead make it about addition – to build a coalition for change that stretches through Red States and Blue States. … We’re choosing unity over division, and sending a powerful message that change is coming to America.”

But see, I don’t want to come together in grand unity with the religious right. I don’t want to end my bitterness and anger toward Dick Cheney. I have nothing in common with Don Fisher. I think there are some real evil villains in this country, and I want a president who’s willing to say that, and who wants to defeat them and consign them to the dustbin of history.

Can Obama get beyond his desire for consensus and be tough enough to go in and kick ass and take names? Cause that’s what the next president has to do.

Edwards Reconsidered

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There have been good reasons not to support John Edwards for president. For years, his foreign-policy outlook has been a hodgepodge of insights and dangerous conventional wisdom; his health-care prescriptions have not taken the leap to single payer; and all told, from a progressive standpoint, his positions have been inferior to those of Dennis Kucinich.

But Edwards was the most improved presidential candidate of 2007. He sharpened his attacks on corporate power and honed his calls for economic justice. He laid down a clear position against nuclear power. He explicitly challenged the power of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical giants.

And he improved his position on Iraq to the point that, in an interview with the New York Times at the start of January, he said: “The continued occupation of Iraq undermines everything America has to do to reestablish ourselves as a country that should be followed, that should be a leader.” Later in the interview, Edwards added: “I would plan to have all combat troops out of Iraq at the end of nine to ten months, certainly within the first year.”

Now, apparently, Edwards is one of three people with a chance to become the Democratic presidential nominee this year. If so, he would be the most progressive Democrat to top the national ticket in more than half a century.

The main causes of John Edwards’ biggest problems with the media establishment have been tied in with his firm stands for economic justice instead of corporate power.

Several weeks ago, when the Gannett-chain-owned Des Moines Register opted to endorse Hillary Clinton this time around, the newspaper’s editorial threw down the corporate gauntlet: “Edwards was our pick for the 2004 nomination. But this is a different race, with different candidates. We too seldom saw the positive, optimistic campaign we found appealing in 2004. His harsh anti-corporate rhetoric would make it difficult to work with the business community to forge change.”

Many in big media have soured on Edwards and his “harsh anti-corporate rhetoric.” As a result, we’re now in the midst of a classic conflict between corporate media sensibilities and grassroots left-leaning populism.

On Jan. 2, Edwards launched a TV ad in New Hampshire with him saying at a
rally: “Corporate greed has infiltrated everything that’s happening in this democracy. It’s time for us to say, ‘We’re not going to let our children’s future be stolen by these people.’ I have never taken a dime from a Washington lobbyist or a special interest PAC and I’m proud of that.”

But, when it comes to policy positions, he’s still no Dennis Kucinich. And that’s why, as 2007 neared its end, I planned to vote for Kucinich when punching my primary ballot.

Reasons for a Kucinich vote remain. The caucuses and primaries are a time to make a clear statement about what we believe in — and to signal a choice for the best available candidate. Ironically, history may show that the person who did the most to undermine such reasoning for a Dennis Kucinich vote at the start of 2008 was… Dennis Kucinich.

In a written statement released on Jan. 1, he said: “I hope Iowans will caucus for me as their first choice this Thursday, because of my singular positions on the war, on health care, and trade. This is an opportunity for people to stand up for themselves. But in those caucuses locations where my support doesn’t reach the necessary [15 percent] threshold, I strongly encourage all of my supporters to make Barack Obama their second choice. Sen. Obama and I have one thing in common: Change.”

This statement doesn’t seem to respect the intelligence of those of us who have planned to vote for Dennis Kucinich.

It’s hard to think of a single major issue — including “the war,” “health care” and “trade” — for which Obama has a more progressive position than Edwards. But there are many issues, including those three, for which Edwards has a decidedly more progressive position than Obama.

But the most disturbing part of Dennis’ statement was this: “Sen. Obama and I have one thing in common: Change.” This doesn’t seem like a reasoned argument for Obama. It seems like an exercise in smoke-blowing.

I write these words unhappily. I was a strong advocate for Kucinich during the race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. In late December, I spoke at an event for his campaign in Northern California. I believe there is no one in Congress today with a more brilliant analysis of key problems facing humankind or a more solid progressive political program for how to overcome them.

As of the first of this year, Dennis has urged Iowa caucusers to do exactly what he spent the last year telling us not to do — skip over a candidate with more progressive politics in order to support a candidate with less progressive politics.

The best argument for voting for Dennis Kucinich in caucuses and primaries has been what he aptly describes as his “singular positions on the war, on health care, and trade.” But his support for Obama over Edwards indicates that he’s willing to allow some opaque and illogical priorities to trump maximizing the momentum of our common progressive agendas.

Presidential candidates have to be considered in the context of the current historical crossroads. No matter how much we admire or revere an individual, there’s too much at stake to pursue faith-based politics at the expense of reality-based politics. There’s no reason to support Obama over Edwards on Kucinich’s say-so. And now, I can’t think of reasons good enough to support Kucinich rather than Edwards in the weeks ahead.

_____________________________

Norman Solomon’s latest book is “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.” For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

Whatever!?

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Does post-postirony still really translate as … irony? Or does any freaking thing matter at all, because the smirking, snarky ’80s are so very back that we’re backpedaling madly in our kooky plastic-and-who-really-cares-about-that-legendary-flotilla-of-plastic-in-the-Pacific-Ocean kiddie pool with what-the-hell carelessness, basking in apathy and gloss? Does that mean we’re ready to embrace our inner bigot? The jerkiest, knee-jerk reactionary responses from back in Grandpappy’s day, namely the Ronald Reagan era? Can our dingiest backward notions give us edge cred, convince us that we’re getting down as hard as those bad boys and girls of Vice et al., and provide fodder for schoolyard taunts, barroom brawls, dirty limericks, and — sweet — even songs? Aw, you’re so cute when you’re smug as a bug.

It’s hard to know what to think or feel or which cheek to plunge one’s tongue into while listening to Katy Perry’s "UR So Gay," off her self-titled digital EP and 12-inch (Capitol). Amazement or repulsion? Gay bashing in song can get as overt and stomach turning as Jamaica’s so-called murder music: see Buju Banton’s entreaties, on "Boom Bye Bye," to shoot gay men in the head and burn them alive. But it’s hard to parse the goofy novelty of "UR So Gay": it rides the new wave deca-dance rail between mild offense — for metrosexuals, gay straight men, gay men who want to own the word gay, and folks in favor of good music — and milky outrage. Has there been such a borderline-bashing Cali pop case since Josie Cotton’s 1980 "Johnny Are You Queer"? The Rizzo look-alike spun ’50s girl group tearjerker motifs — from the True Romance–style single cover art to her nyah-nyah-wah-wah plaintive bad-girl character’s delivery. "Why are you so weird, boy? / Johnny, are you queer boy? / When I make a play / You’re pushing me away," Cotton pouts. Oh, the perils of falling for someone who doesn’t flog for you — and never will. The conflicted "Johnny" hinged on tweaking the highly codified conventions of ’60s pop and doing the dirty by speaking the unspoken, even as an undercurrent of rage from a straight woman scorned surged beneath the number’s carefree contours.

In contrast, the blogged ‘n’ buzzed "UR So Gay" — riding on word of mouth for the woman who told me, "My mouth never shuts up, unfortunately" — references pop history, filtered somewhat through the ’80s, in Perry’s Cyndi Lauper–esque prom-queen styling. Apart from displaying a thick vein of social conservatism that disapproves of a metrosexual muddying of waters, songwriter Perry purveys all-’90s pop, swamped with an over-the-top arrangement, as the track’s heroine slags her ex: "I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf / While jacking off listening to Mozart / You bitch and moan about LA / Wishing you were in the rain reading Hemingway / You don’t eat meat / And drive electric cars / You’re so indie rock it’s almost an art / You need SPF 45 just to stay alive. You’re so gay and you don’t even like boys…. I can’t believe I fell in love with someone that wears more makeup than …"

Perry’s litany of insults, backed by a loping, going-nowhere beat, isn’t stereotypically gay — doit, what self-respecting stylish homosexual swain would get stuck on Mozart, Hemingway, and H&M? If anything, the list reveals the general throwaway nature of the tune and the cluelessness of the singer. Nonetheless, the "you’re so gay" chorus rankles, ever so softly, ever so wispily homophobically, in the way it detaches gayness from sexuality and attaches it firmly to notions of pretension, aloofness, and inaccessibility — under the guise of harmless good fun and quasi truth telling. It’s dumb and juvenile, and it makes straight women who watch their homophobia emerge when they lash out at men look bad. And much like Howard Stern and his ilk’s supposedly playful trash talking, that doesn’t mean it’s not hateful.

Of course, that’s not how Perry, a 23-year-old Santa Barbara native and star of Gym Class Heroes’ "Cupid’s Chokehold" video, whose music has appeared on MTV’s The Hills and Oxygen’s Fight Girls, sees it. The song, she said in a phone interview, is "provocative, and my mouth is a loose cannon. I speak my mind. I get into trouble." She sees herself in line with Lauper, Joan Jett, and "girls who aren’t afraid to take chances" — though you can’t ever imagine Lauper or Jett warbling "UR So Gay"<0x2009>‘s lines.

Perry wrote the song, she said, after "I was finally dumped by my ex shortly after a breakup that lasted twice as long as the relationship — you know how that goes." Stymied for a chorus, she said, she just blurted in frustration, "Oh, he’s so gay!" and at the urging of her roommate she made that the hook. "If you listen to the song, it’s not associated with sexuality," Perry said. "It’s about guys who use flatirons and gayliner. The general feeling when I play that song is that everyone’s laughing and singing along, and I’ve had girls come up to me and say, ‘I’ve had that boyfriend — thank you, homegirl, for writing that song!’ The positivity of the song means it’s not a negative thing."

It’s all positivity when you’re not gay, of course, and Perry isn’t suffering negatively on any level: this spring the song will usher in a full-length, which the songwriter worked on with Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette, No Doubt), Dave Stewart (the Eurythmics), and Dr. Luke (Kelly Clarkson, Avril Lavigne), among others. "Having a record release is a phenomenon these days because the music industry is a crumbling Babylon," Perry explained. Whatever it takes to rise above The Hills.

Bubblin’ crude

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› johnny@sfbg.com

The Kodak Theatre is no country for old women — or for young women, based on the most archetypal American movies of this awards season. A few months after a Coen brothers’ bro-down brought the silencer heard ’round the world and the bowl cut seen ’round the world, Paul Thomas Anderson returns with There Will Be Blood, an even more male-dominated, United States–is–his story. False prophets and fatal oil profits entwine with murderous intent in Anderson’s latest act of three-act bravado: oligarch Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) engage in territorial pissings that span decades, while women are scarcely seen and heard from even less. In fact, No Country for Old Men almost qualifies as Douglas Sirk–ian melodrama next to Anderson’s maverick revision of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!

My, what a big movie Anderson has made. There will be no doubt among viewers that this 158-minute epic has Orson Welles–ian aspirations, from its Citizen Kane–like dedication to the rise and fall of a megalomaniac to its less-focused portrait of a not-so-magnificent or Ambersonian family line. These are the post–Robert Altman years of Anderson’s relatively fledgling career, in strictly literal terms. Now that Altman is dead, Anderson no longer treats him as a prime well of auteur inspiration, instead favoring the sprawling likes of Welles, Elia Kazan, Terrence Malick, and Stanley Kubrick. He presides over some bizarre marriage of Welles’s and Kubrick’s spirits in There Will Be Blood‘s worst moment — a finale that searches for a version of Rosebud in a mansion that resembles the Overlook Hotel, only to find plentiful redrum in a bowling alley instead. Set between cowardly quotation marks, this garbled conclusion seems to prove a colleague’s remark that Anderson doesn’t trust his instincts as a filmmaker.

Yet Anderson taps into an instinctive talent in many, if far from all, of the mute passages and dialogue duels that precede that coda. He’s aided by the sick pull of Jonny Greenwood’s vanguard score and gonzo performances from both of his lead actors. While Day-Lewis is more consistently successful, it’s Dano who stokes the film’s intrigue, through subtle smiles during their characters’ early jousts, a brief spell of deflated defeat when he’s betrayed, and a hilarious (if only temporary) victory in his home court of the pulpit. When There Will Be Blood is a marriage or battle between Day-Lewis’s performance and Anderson’s imagery, it’s even better. The potent isolation and claustrophobia of the film’s first half hour are outdone by a tour de force sequence in which oil and its elemental force paint the future black.

There Will Be Blood is sneaking into theaters in a manner consistent with that of recent butt-numbing epics, such as Malick’s 2005 The New World, which appear more concerned about their potential place in film history than with what statuettes they might pick up in the spring. This outlook isn’t necessarily a virtue, nor does it automatically result in better cinema, as Malick’s goofy yet haunting recent effort proved. Anderson has made another great leap forward, or at least away from, the putrid stench of 1999’s god-awful Magnolia, but only those with a penchant for fanboy prose are claiming he’s used oil to paint an instant masterpiece. Amid the empty promises of Todd Haynes and others, it’s easy to see why they’re raving, though. Anderson’s audacity here is worth puzzling over — and probably praising more — in times to come. *

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters

www.therewillbeblood.com

Offies!

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s gotten to the point where you don’t have to make fun of the president anymore — the rest of the country has gotten so insane that George W. Bush almost looks normal. Just think about 2007:

One presidential candidate said aborted fetuses could have replaced immigrant workers. One said he wanted to be sure to shoot Osama bin Laden with American-made bullets. One said he’d seen a UFO. One said he wanted to deport 400,000 immigrants but was too busy.

A prominent conservative writer said Jewish people need to be "perfected." A bathroom stall in Minneapolis became a tourist attraction.

And Gavin Newsom screwed his secretary, Ed Jew didn’t know where he lived, people ran naked for mayor, Halloween was cancelled … It was, by any standard, a banner year for the Offies.

YES, I SLEPT WITH MY SECRETARY. YES, SHE WAS MARRIED TO MY CAMPAIGN MANAGER. YES, I AM AN ASSHOLE. THE NEWSPAPERS GOT THAT RIGHT.

Gavin Newsom, faced with news of his sordid affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk, told reporters that "everything you’ve read is true."

SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL

Jennifer Siebel, Newsom’s girlfriend who said "the woman is the culprit" in the mayor’s notorious affair, posted a message on SFist.com insisting she’s a "gal’s gal."

GOOD ONE, JEN — WAY TO ACCUSE YOUR BOYFRIEND OF DATE RAPE

Siebel said Newsom’s affair with Rippey-Tourk "was nothing but a few incidents when she showed up passed out outside of his door."

THE TRUTH, NEWSOM STYLE

Newsom’s press secretary, Peter Ragone, admitted to posting fake pro-Newsom comments on the SFist blog under a friend’s name.

AND NOW HE CAN CLAIM HE’S REALLY A CELEBRITY

Newsom announced he would go into rehab.

YOU’D THINK A SECRETIVE MAYOR WHOSE PRESS SECRETARY LIES COULD AT LEAST MAKE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME

The Muni Metro T line opened for business with delays that crashed the entire underground train system.

JEEZ, CAN’T YOU TV PEOPLE FIND A REPORTER WHO WILL STOP ASKING THE MAYOR SO MANY EMBARRASSING QUESTIONS?

Newsom announced on camera that he wasn’t going to talk to ABC’s Dan Noyes anymore, saying, "You just send some other reporters. It’s going to be a lot easier now."

WAIT — ISN’T THERE SOME STATE LAW ABOUT USING YOUR CELL PHONE WHEN YOU’RE DRIVING?

State senator Carole Migden crashed her state-owned SUV into another car in Marin when she took her eyes off the road to answer a cell phone call.

COME TO THINK OF IT, HE DOES HAVE THAT HOLLYWOOD SMILE GOING ON. AND THOSE EYES …

Sup. Chris Daly set off a press furor when he said Newsom was refusing to answer questions about his alleged cocaine use.

THAT’S OK — IT’S HARD TO GET THOSE COSTUMES OFF TO PEE ANYWAY

Newsom’s press office announced that Halloween was cancelled, and the mayor refused until the last minute to allow portable toilets to be set up in the Castro.

CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS NEED A LITTLE BRIBERY MONEY TOO

Suspended Sup. Ed Jew, who was charged with accepting $40,000 in cash from a tapioca store chain, insisted he was going to give half the money to a neighborhood parks program.

APPARENTLY, THE MONEY WASN’T THE ONLY THING THAT SMELLED

Jew insisted he lived in a Sunset District house that had no water service and said he showered at his flower store (where reporters were never shown an actual shower).

BY SAN FRANCISCO STANDARDS, HE’S EMINENTLY QUALIFIED FOR PUBLIC OFFICE

Mayoral candidate Grasshopper Alec Kaplan stole Jew’s house numbers, was arrested for playing his guitar naked on top of his purple taxicab, and was sentenced to nine months in jail for threatening a passenger.

AND FRANKLY, IT’S JUST AS WELL THEY GOT HIM OFF THE STREET; NOBODY WANTS TO LOOK AT THAT SHIT

Yoga instructor George Davis was arrested four times while campaigning for mayor in the nude.

UNFORTUNATELY, HE CAME IN FIFTH

Chicken John Rinaldi insisted he was running for second place and considered using the slogan "The other white mayor."

YOU HAVE TO GIVE IT TO HIM: THE GUY CAN PICK HIS ICONS

Paul David Addis was arrested for setting fire to the Burning Man icon four days before it was supposed to be burned, then was later charged with attempting to burn down Grace Cathedral.

POOR JERRY — CAN’T SOMEBODY DONATE SOME MONEY TO HAVE HIM PUT IN A HOME FOR THE TERMINALLY MORONIC?

Jerry Lewis created an imaginary character for his muscular dystrophy telethon called Jesse the illiterate fag.

UNLIKE LUNATIC RIGHT-WING CHRISTIANS, WHO SEEM TO BE DOING JUST FINE

Ann Colbert said that Jews need to be "perfected."

HEY MARTHA, CHECK IT OUT! LET ME POSE FOR A PHOTO! I GOT MY WIDE STANCE ALL READY!

The bathroom stall where Larry Craig was arrested for public sex became a tourist attraction.

AND NOW, THE CELEBRITY NEWS FOR THE SEVEN OR EIGHT PEOPLE WHO STILL ACTUALLY CARE

Britney Spears shaved her head. Paris Hilton went to jail.

THE WORLD JUST GOT A TINY BIT SAFER FOR HUMANITY

Spears’s mother lost her contract for a book on parenting after her 16-year-old daughter Jamie Lynn became pregnant.

NOW IF THE SCALPERS COULD JUST DO A JOB ON THAT WIG

Tickets to the Hannah Montana concert in Oakland were sold for as much as $1,000.

OF COURSE, SHE MAY HAVE SIMPLY BEEN TRYING TO FIT IN THOSE TINY SEATS

Southwest Airlines kicked a woman off a flight for wearing too short a skirt.

WAIT, WE MISSED THE ONE ABOUT FUCKING THINE OWN GENDER. MAYBE HE LEFT IT IN THE TENT

Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said he would oppose same-sex marriage "until Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback Mountain saying he’s changed the rules."

WHY EXPLOIT IMMIGRANTS WHEN WE CAN EXPLOIT KIDS OF OUR OWN?

Huckabee announced that if all of the nation’s aborted fetuses had gone to term, the United States wouldn’t need low-cost immigrant labor.

OF COURSE, IF HE’D BEEN GAY OR HAD AN ABORTION, HE WOULD HAVE WOUND UP IN PRISON

Huckabee told Rolling Stone he’d pardoned Keith Richards for a 1975 traffic ticket.

WE LIKE A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE WHO HAS HIS PRIORITIES STRAIGHT

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said he would have liked to have kicked all 400,000 undocumented immigrants out of the city, but he was too busy fighting crime.

OF MAYBE IT WAS JUST THE VULCANS, COME TO MAKE FIRST CONTACT AND CONVINCE US TO SUPPORT SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE

Rep. Dennis Kucinich said he’d seen a UFO.

WE’D HAPPILY PAY $999 NOT TO HAVE TO KNOW

A Los Angeles company called 23andMe offered to test your DNA for $999 and tell you if you’re related to Marie Antoinette, Jesse James, or Jimmy Buffet.

WITH THE CUBAN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM, HE’LL PROBABLY OUTLIVE US ALL

Police in south Florida were put on alert after blogger Perez Hilton falsely announced the death of Fidel Castro.

KILL THE BASTARDS — BUY AMERICAN

Sen. John McCain told workers at a small-arms factory in New Hampshire he would "follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell" and "shoot him with your products."

OF COURSE NOT — THEY’VE ALL BEEN TORTURED, BEATEN, OR STONED TO DEATH

Iran’s president said there are no homosexuals in his country.

BUT THEN, SHE TORTURED US FOR 10 YEARS AS MAYOR

Sen. Dianne Feinstein voted to confirm Michael Mukasey as attorney general even though he refused to say that waterboarding is torture.

IT’S NOT IN YOURS EITHER

President Bush said democracy might not be in the "Russian DNA."

WHEN A SIMPLE "CUNT" OR "PUSSY" JUST ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH

A Florida production of The Vagina Monologues sought to avoid controversy by changing its name to The Hoohaa Monologues.

THE 41ST PRESIDENT STARTS WORKING ON HIS PLACE IN HISTORY

President Bush predicted a "nuclear holocaust" if Iran develops weapons of mass destruction.

QUICK, GIVE ME THE BUTTON BEFORE THE BOSS GETS THAT PROBE OUT OF HIS ASS

Vice President Dick Cheney had executive power for two hours and five minutes while President Bush was under sedation for a colonoscopy.

GREAT MOMENTS IN FOREIGN CINEMA

The European Commission put a video clip on YouTube promoting European films by showing 18 couples having sex with the tagline "Let’s come together."

STANCE IS TOO WIDE … STANCE IS TOO WIDE … MALFUNCTION … DOES NOT COMPUTE …

The mayor of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., suggested the city create a robot toilet to combat gay sex in public bathrooms.

COME ON, YOUR HOLINESS — THEY JUST NEED TO BE "PERFECTED"

Pope Benedict XVI declared that Protestants don’t have real churches and their ministers are all phonies.

PERHAPS THE KID CAN’T GO TO SCHOOL ANYMORE, BUT AT LEAST HE WON’T HAVE TO BE PERFECTED BY ANN COULTER

The Supreme Court ruled that a high school student could be suspended for displaying a sign that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."

THE OFFIES, OF COURSE, ARE PRODUCED LOCALLY, AND YOU CAN SEE THE QUALITY CONTROL …

A news Web site in Pasadena outsourced its local reporting to India.

BOOM GOES LONDON, BOOM PAREE

Former senator Mike Gravel announced during a presidential candidates debate that the other Democrats frightened him and asked Barack Obama whom he wanted to nuke.

WELL, AT LEAST WE KNOW WHO THE REPUBLICANS ARE GOING TO NUKE

Sen. McCain changed the lyrics of the Beach Boy’s "Barbara Ann" to "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."

APPARENTLY, MEMBERS OF THE US SENATE DON’T GET OUT MUCH

Sen. Joe Biden declared Obama is "the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Year in Film: Cinema 2007

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COVER STAR RICHARD WONG’S VIEW OF 2007


I feel like I’ve only seen about 10 films this year, so my list would basically be No Country For Old Men, I’m Not There, and Beowulf (two of those movies were painful, they were so aesthetically pleasing — guess which ones). But I’m going to say Paranoid Park was a huge influence on me this year. The risks it took and its loose narrative and utter disregard for convention were extremely inspiring. I saw it in Toronto at a press screening, among all the jabbering sales agents and distribution reps, and it still managed to drop my jaw — despite the guy next to me answering his phone midway through, telling the guy on the other line how "half baked" the movie was. Afterward I talked to a fellow aspiring filmmaker about the film, and he told me how much he disliked it because he thought it was a "mess." Exactly. It feels like a rough cut, only not — a work in progress, but that’s the point. Perhaps that’s why I identified with it so much. Besides, maybe a little messiness is not such a bad thing to embrace right now.

Richard Wong is the director and producer of Colma: The Musical.

JEM COHEN’S FAVORITE MOVIE MOMENT


James Benning’s Ten Skies at New York’s invaluable Anthology Film Archives: with a description like a parody of avant-garde impenetrability ("Ten shots of the sky — feature length"), it sounds daunting. Instead, it was an experience of mysterious joy that brought me back to why movies are entertaining and why seeing them can be so communal. After a few restless, fidgety minutes, both audience and film hit a groove so sublime that I kept laughing with pleasure. Each sky has its revelations and dramas, each viewer "makes" their own film, but in a shared hallucination that filmmakers and venues rarely allow, much less encourage. Sure, we’ve all seen the sky before, but when’s the last time you fell in so deeply and for so long, undistracted yet free to drift, stunned by both the thing itself and the amazing mirror of moving pictures? And I love that Benning says it’s a political film, "the opposite of war."

Jem Cohen (www.jemcohenfilms.com) is the director of Instrument, Benjamin Smoke, Chain, Building a Broken Mousetrap, and other films.

VAGINAL DAVIS’S FLESH FOR LULU: A LETTER FROM TEUTONIA


So glad I live in Berlin as an expat, far away from icky, tired Los Ang, that sad, pathetic film industry towne. When I worked for the Sundance Film Festival in programming I watched what seemed like a zillion of the same kinds of films. This year I created (with the art kollective Cheap) the Cheap Gossip Studio installation as part of the Berlin Film Festival. It was housed in the atrium of the Kino Arsenal. Film historian Marc Siegel brought Callie Angel out to show some rare, seldom-screened Andy Warhol films, as well as Jerry Tartaglia, who restored Jack Smith’s noted oeuvre. I even got to meet my sexy feminist heroine, Jackie Reynal of the Zanzibar movement, and Phillip Garrel, who brought his delicious young thrombone of a son, the actor Louis Garrel.

During the year, I started a new monthly performative series at Kino Arsenal called "Rising Stars, Falling Stars." It featured experimental silent classics from filmmakers like Louis Delluc, Man Ray, and the grandmama of the avant-garde, Germaine Deluc.

A lot of filmmakers send me rough cuts of their new films hoping I will write something on my blog, which gets a million readers a day. I just saw Bruce La Bruce’s allegorical zombie flick Otto; or Up with Dead People, and it’s beyond brilliant, and I am not saying that just because I have starred in Bruce’s other films Super 8 1/2 and Hustler White or because he directed my latest performance piece, Cheap Blacky. I am harsh on my filmmaker friends. I told Bruce that he shouldn’t act in his own movies anymore, just like Woody Allen and Spike Lee shouldn’t act in theirs. I even scolded Todd Haynes that Far From Heaven was overrated, but I adored Velvet Goldmine and his latest, I’m Not There. (Though I can’t stand Cate Blanchett; after seeing her as Queen Elizabeth yet again all I could say was, "Glenda Jackson, Glenda Jackson.")

I watched Superbad twice with the 14-year-old twins of my Cheap Blacky costar Susanne Sachsee, and I even got off on the ‘roid rage of Gerard Butler in the epic 300. No one does brittle white lady like my Tales of the City costar Laura Linney in The Savages. Tony Leung is so elegant and sensuous in Lust, Caution that everyone will want a Chinese boyfriend as the hot new fashion accessory this year. And if Sweeney Todd doesn’t bring back the musical genre, nothing will.

Vaginal Davis (www.vaginaldavis.com), who now lives in exile in Berlin, will be in the Bay Area on March 29, 2008, for the opening of her installation Present Penicative at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; it will also feature her performances "Bilitis — A Lesbian Separatist Feminist State" and "Colonize Me."

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALPHABETICAL DOCUMENTARY TOP 10

1. Absolute Wilson (Katharina Otto-Bernstein, US/Germany)

2. All in This Tea (Les Blank, US)

3. King Corn (Aaron Wolf, US)

4. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, US)

5. Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, Canada)

6. My Kid Could Paint That (Ami Bar-Lev, US)

7. No End in Sight (Charles Ferguson, US)

8. Protagonist (Jessica Yu, US)

9. Romántico (Mark Becker, US)

10. Zoo (Robinson Devor, US)

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALARMING PORN TITLES, 2007 EDITION


All thanks to the Internet Movie Database, without which we would remain in blessed ignorance.

Brad McGuire’s 20 Hole Weekend

5 Guy Cream Pie 29

Abominable Black Man 8

Ahh Shit! White Mama 4

Anal Chic

Apple Bottom Snow Bunnies

Be Here Now

Blondes have More Squirt!

Bore My Asshole 3

Bring’um Young 23

Campus Pizza

Catch Her in the Eye

Even More Bang for Your Buck

Go Fuck Yourself

I Scored a Soccer Mom 3

Old Geezers, Young Teasers

Seduced by a Cougar 4

Swallow My Children

Thanks for the Mammaries

Trantasm

You’ve Got a Mother Thing Coming

Dennis Harvey is a Guardian contributor.

JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS’S PICKS


1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania). This debut feature possesses a nonjudgmental flow reminiscent of a Dardenne brothers film as it follows two young women who negotiate for an illegal abortion during the final days of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist regime.

2. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US). Uncovering the layers of human identity has been a career-long, disturbing theme of Cronenberg’s. But with his most recent films he’s figured out how to deconstruct our psychotic and schizophrenic patriarchal society in a minimal, confrontational manner.

3. Cassandra’s Dream (Woody Allen, US/UK). This minimasterpiece follows the downward spiral of two nice, middle-class brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell), both of whom loosen their moral codes just to better their lifestyles. Striking camera work (by Vilmos Zsigmond) encloses the characters in an unrelenting nightmare.

4. "Made in America," The Sopranos (David Chase, US). Forever you’ll be able to bust out the statement "What did you think of the end of The Sopranos?" and people will get all lit up.

5. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US). Thanks to audacious writing and powerful acting (especially by Jennifer Jason Leigh), the bittersweet sincerity is pitch-perfect.

6. Californication, season 1 (various directors, US). David Duchovny is alive and hilarious. Creator Tom Kapinos cuts right through our progressive relationship era, devilishly developing each character over 12 episodes. This is heavy-duty stuff mixed with dirty, dirty sex.

7. Year of the Dog (Mike White, US). White brings heartfelt storytelling to his directorial debut.

8. Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, Canada)

9. The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Martin Weisz, US). This Wes Craven–produced Iraq war allegory deserves more attention than Brian De Palma’s patronizing Redacted.

10. Hostel 2 (Eli Roth, US). Baddie Roth again makes social commentary on America’s xenophobic world colonization by torturing the pathetic children of the apathetic parents who make our lovely world go round.

11. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany). Reygadas updates the transcendental religious overtones of Carl Theodor Dreyer by way of a Mennonite community.

12. At Long Last Love (Peter Bogdanovich, US). Never released on VHS or DVD, this throwback to the musicals of Ernst Lubitsch — featuring Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, and Eileen Brennan — was dismissed and despised on its only theatrical release in 1975. All of the Cole Porter musical numbers were filmed live, with the actors using their own voices. Not only are these numbers brilliantly executed (inspiring realistic musicals like Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark), but the film also attains the rapid-fire interaction and casual kookiness of late ’30s screwball comedies. Did critics really overlook the fact that this is clever cheekiness? It’s a true treasure that serves as a ’70s time capsule and should inspire future filmmakers to take their chances all the way. It may have taken 32 years, but your time has come, Mr. Bogdanovich. Thank you.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks teaches film history at the Academy of Art University and curates Midnites for Maniacs (www.midnitesformaniacs.com) at the Castro Theatre.

JAMES T. HONG’S TOP 11, STARTING FROM 0


0. The 70th anniversary memorial of the Nanjing Massacre in Nanjing, China, and especially survivor Xia Shuqin’s reaction to her re-created wartime house, where most of her family was raped and killed by Japanese soldiers.

1. The passing of House Resolution 121 (the "Comfort Women" resolution) on C-Span, July 30.

2. Yasukuni (Li Ying, China/Japan). The power of the shrine isn’t fully captured, but this is the closest an outsider has come to doing so that I’ve seen. All captured on a Japanese mini-DV video camera, in American NTSC.

3. Nanking (Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, US). AOL + Iris Chang = Woody Harrelson and the Nanjing Massacre.

4. A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila (various, US). The alpha and omega of Asian America. For those with the required assets and skills, Playboy and the Internet can make you, regardless of race, a bisexual American celebrity — the end and a new beginning for all the so-called angry Asian Americans.

5. Summer Special Olympics in Shanghai, China. Globalization was transformed into music by Kenny G during the opening ceremony.

6. Pride: The Moment of Destiny, or Puraido: Unmei no Toki (Shunya Ito, Japan). Finally found a good DVD copy of this, in Canada of all places. This could also be called Tojo: The Hero.

7. Inside the Brookhaven Obesity Clinic (various, US). Pride and Prejudice for the heavyset, on the Learning Channel.

8. Major League Eating’s Thanksgiving Chowdown (various, US). The purest American professional sport and the fall of Japan’s greatest hero, Takeru Kobayashi, on Spike TV.

9. Mock Up on Mu, in progress (Craig Baldwin, US)

10. Blockade (Sergey Loznitsa, Russia)

The works of San Francisco filmmaker James T. Hong (www.zukunftsmusik.com) include Behold the Asian: How One Becomes What One Is, The Form of the Good, Taipei 101: A Travelogue of Symptoms, 731: Two Versions of Hell, and This Shall Be a Sign.

JONATHAN L. KNAPP’S TOP 10


1. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands/Germany/Belgium)

2. Brand upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, Canada/US)

3. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

4. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, Malaysia/China/Taiwan/France/Austria)

5. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, US)

6. In Between Days (So Yong Kim, South Korea/US/Canada)

7. Makeshift 2007 grindhouse double feature: The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Martin Weisz, US) and Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, US)

8. The Wire, season four (various, US)

9. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

10. Zodiac (David Fincher, US)

Jonathan L. Knapp is a Guardian contributor.

MARIA KOMODORE’S 10 WORST


In addition to bringing some very good movies to the screen, 2007 was also a really good year for bad films. But among them all, these are the ones I feel had lack of intelligence, conservatism, and conventionality on a whole different level:

1. Hitman (Xavier Gens, France/US)

2. Good Luck Chuck (Mark Helfrich, US/Canada)

3. License to Wed (Ken Kwapis, US)

4. The Brothers Solomon (Bob Odenkirk, US)

5. Hot Rod (Akiva Schaffer, US)

6. P.S. I Love You (Richard LaGravenese, US)

7. The Final Season (David M. Evans, US)

8. The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Jay Russell, UK/US)

9. The Perfect Holiday (Lance Rivera, US)

10. P2 (Franck Khalfoun, US)

Maria Komodore is a Guardian contributor.

CHRIS METZLER AND JEFF SPRINGER’S TOP 10 DOCS


With a very special mention and heavy props for the fantastic TV doc series Nimrod Nation.

1. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (Jason Kohn, Brazil/US)

2. Lake of Fire (Tony Kaye, US)

3. Summercamp (Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price, US)

4. This Filthy World (Jeff Garlin, US)

5. A Man Named Pearl (Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson, US)

6. King Corn (Aaron Wolf, US)

7. An Audience of One (Mike Jacobs, US)

8. Crazy Love (Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens, US)

9. Big Rig (Doug Pray, US)

10. Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa (Jeremy Stulberg and Randy Stulberg, US)

San Francisco filmmakers Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer codirected the award-winning documentary Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea (www.saltonseadocumentary.com).

SYLVIA MILES’S TALES OF GO GO TALES


Go Go Tales was filmed at Cinecittà, so I had a location like I did in the ’60s. Cinecittà was thrilling. When the film premiered in Cannes, you would have thought I was the lead from the reviews. What’s her name in the New York Times gave it a wonderful review that got picked up by the International Herald Tribune.

Abel [Ferrara] got mad at Burt Young, who played my husband, and cut him out of the film. Be that as it may, we still managed to keep that story together The irony is that the rap that I do [at the end of the movie] was ad-libbed at 10 o’clock on the last night of filming. I give my all and know that something good will happen.

From what I hear, [Bernardo] Bertolucci is the one who chooses the film from Italy that gets into the New York Film Festival. Because they were renovating Alice Tully Hall, Go Go Tales had one of its screenings at the Jazz Center. It was exciting to look out my apartment window and see the lines of people outside [Frederick P.] Rose Hall waiting to see the movie. People even came to the 4 p.m. Sunday screening. At 4 p.m. on a Sunday they should have been out to tea instead of at that film!

Two-time Academy Award nominee Sylvia Miles has starred in Midnight Cowboy, Andy Warhol’s Heat, Evil Under the Sun, She-Devil, and Abel Ferrara’s soon to be released Go Go Tales.

JACQUES NOLOT’S TOP 10


1. The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akim, Germany/Turkey)

2. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)

3. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany)

4. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

5. Le Dernier des Fous (Laurent Achard, France)

6. The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy)

7. Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/US)

8. Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, France)

9. La Graine et le Mulet (Abdel Kechiche, France)

10. Love Songs (Christophe Honoré, France)

Actor-director Jacques Nolot’s latest film, Before I Forget — John Waters’s second-favorite film of 2007 — will be released theatrically in 2008.

DAMON PACKARD’S TOP 10


I have no shortage of rants about the sad state of cinema. Of the 25,000-plus films released each year, it’s impossible to keep track or be aware of anything above the overrated Oscar contenders or mindless mainstream crap that floods the market. Anything slightly worthwhile not on this list would be a smaller independent (foreign or documentary) film, such as Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter or The Life of Reilly.

1. Paris, Je T’Aime (various, France/Liechtenstein)

2. No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US)

3. Notes on a Scandal (Richard Eyre, UK)

4. Sicko (Michael Moore, US)

5. Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, US)

6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, US)

7. Goya’s Ghosts (Milos Forman, US/Spain)

8. Ratatouille (Brad Bird, US)

9. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, US)

10. Death Proof, driving sequences only! (Quentin Tarantino, US)

Damon Packard (www.myspace.com/choogo) is the director of SpaceDisco One, Reflections of Evil, and other films.

JOEL SHEPARD’S TOP 11


1. Bug (William Friedkin, US)

2. The Kingdom trailer (Peter Berg, US; editors Colby Parker Jr. and Kevin Stitt)

3. Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, China)

4. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany)

5. Into the Wild (Sean Penn, US)

6. An Engineer’s Assistant (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Japan)

7. Saw IV (Darren Lynn Bousman, US)

8. "Made in America," The Sopranos (David Chase, US)

9. The Pastor and the Hobo (Phil Chambliss, US)

10. You and I, Horizontal (Anthony McCall, UK)

11. Kara Tai in the Front and the Back (Bangbros.com, US)

Joel Shepard is the film and video curator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

MATT WOLF’S TOP 5


1. Following Sean (Ralph Arlyck, US). Thirty years after making a legendary short film about Sean, the lawless four-year-old son of Haight-Ashbury hippies, filmmaker Arlyck reconnects with his subjects. The result is the most complicated study of baby boomers and their kin ever made.

2. Artist Statement (Daniel Barrow, Canada). Winnipeg artist Barrow uses an old-school overhead projector and layers of transparent drawings to create manual animations with music and live narration. His second US performance brought to life his imaginative, queer, literary, and delicate personal manifesto.

3. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Austria). Apichatpong’s latest radical narrative film focuses on a rural Thai hospital and its inhabitants. Among its meditative episodes is an unresolved love story between a female physician and an orchid farmer.

4. Real Housewives of Orange Country (various directors, US). Bravo’s reality television program about a contrived community of rich middle-aged women living in Coto de Caza is unexpectedly compelling. Because their lives are so boring, there’s nothing left to explore in this show except their complex emotions.

5. Zodiac (David Fincher, US). Crushworthy Jake Gyllenhaal, genius cinematography from legend-to-be Harris Savides, and incredible reconstructions of a beautiful and scary San Francisco in the 1970s.

Matt Wolf (www.mattwolf.info ) is the director of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (premiering at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival) and Smalltown Boys.

A lousy casino deal

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OPINION After spending millions in campaign contributions, four of the state’s wealthiest and most powerful tribes — Pechanga, Morongo, Agua Caliente, and Sycuan — have cut themselves sweetheart deals for one of the largest expansions of casino gambling in United States history.

As a California Indian and vice-chairman of the American Indian Rights and Resources Organization, an organization working to protect the civil rights of Native Americans, I am deeply concerned that the deals on the February ballot — Propositions 94, 95, 96, and 97 — benefit four tribes at the expense of other tribes, the workers at these tribes’ casinos, and California taxpayers.

The big four tribes bring in huge profits from their existing casinos and spend heavily to influence state laws. Yet they are eager to deny California voters their right to decide this issue and have fought to keep these deals off the ballot and prevent the voters from having their say. Could it be that the big four tribes know their sweetheart deals may not hold up to voter scrutiny?

Here are a few reasons to vote no on Props. 94, 95, 96, and 97.

Labor unions oppose the measures because the deals would shower four wealthy tribes with billions in profits but fail to ensure the most basic rights for casino workers, including affordable health insurance. A study conducted by David Farris, a University of California at Riverside professor of economics, found that Agua Caliente’s health coverage is so expensive that 56 percent of the dependent children of casino workers are forced into taxpayer-funded health care programs.

In addition, the expansion of tribal gaming in California has seen an increase in the number of human and civil rights violations, especially within tribes that have gaming operations. These abuses have resulted in thousands of disenfranchised Indians being cut off from or denied health care benefits, elder benefits, education assistance, and other social services provided by their tribal governments.

Other tribes also oppose the deals. Just four of California’s 108 tribes would get control over one-third of the state’s Indian gaming pie. The deals would create dominant casinos that could economically devastate smaller tribes and local businesses. Moreover, the big four deals fail to adhere to the purpose and intent of previous gaming initiatives, which led California voters to believe there would be modest casino expansion and that Indian gaming would benefit all California Indians and taxpayers.

The big four deals would give these tribes an additional 17,000 slot machines. That’s more than all of the slots at a dozen big Las Vegas casinos. As a result, California would become home to some of the largest casinos in the world.

While the big four would make billions of dollars from these new deals, promises to taxpayers would fall short. The claims about the amount of money the state would get under these deals are wildly exaggerated, and the state’s independent, nonpartisan legislative analyst called the tribes’ figures unrealistic. In fact, under these deals the big four tribes themselves would determine how much revenue they would pay to the state.

Join labor unions, educators, public safety officials, tribes, taxpayers, senior groups, and civil rights and environmental organizations and vote no on 94, 95, 96, and 97. *

John Gomez Sr.

John Gomez Sr. is vice-chairman of the American Indian Rights and Resources Organization.

Why I am not a foodie

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› paulr@sfbg.com


As the year dwindles and we start to see our breath in the evening cold, we don our scarves and indulge in little sentimentalities and considerable amounts of alcohol. Also, it’s time to clean out the e-mail box. Now or never. I find a note, half buried in a drift of messages slowly composting into cybermulch, announcing a new foodie Web site, www.foodiebytes.com, which is there to assist you when you crave a particular dish and need to locate a restaurant that serves it. You just type in the name of the dish, and the Web site quickly returns a list of nearby places where you can find it and at what price. A Google Maps or MapQuest feature seems inevitable.

Even sheathed in a pun — an obvious one at that — the word foodie provokes a shiver, and I am a wearer of scarves. Some of my best friends are, or I suspect them of being, foodies; it is important to distinguish between the self-confessed types and the latents and cryptos. We are able to converse about food, these foodies and I, often to our mutual pleasure and benefit, but I am not one of them, and they know it.

Through some quirk of temperament, I am not able to go ice-skating over the smooth surfaces of foodie Web sites that cater to people’s cravings. It is my fate instead, as a wonderer and a ponderer, to find myself needing to know the history of a particular dish or technique. And how did it get here? And can I do it, or something like it, at home? All of this is part of my experience of buying, cooking, and eating food.

Food separated from the past, from the ligaments and other connective tissues of culture and custom — food flattened to one dimension — loses much of its power to nourish our souls, our whole human selves, in much the same way that nutrients packed into pills don’t do us the same kind of good as nutrients eaten as part of the foods in which they naturally occur.

We live in a culture that exalts monomania, pops pills for every ailment, and tirelessly resists the past, and in such a context a foodie obsession (got a craving? get a fix!) is hardly unusual. But like most other forms of monomania, it isn’t necessarily all that interesting either.

PG&E contracts: an $80 million legacy

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EDITORIAL The San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a modest item the other week described on the agenda as "Agreement to Implement a Term Sheet … between the City and County of San Francisco … and the Modesto Irrigation District." There wasn’t much discussion, the action received no notice in the press, and few people outside the office of the Budget Analyst realize just how significant this scrap of legislation really is.

But the vote brought to a close (for now, anyway) one of the most rotten chapters in San Francisco history, a story of corruption, waste, and raw political power that makes many of today’s scandals look like cornflakes. Since 1988, when the city attorney, the mayor, and the supervisors bowed down to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and signed one of the worst deals in the city’s history, San Francisco has lost more than $80 million.

And with public power back on the agenda and activists discussing the potential for a ballot measure in November 2008, it’s worth reviewing a bit of the history. There are plenty of lessons.

The story goes back to 1983, when city staffers began negotiating a series of long-term contracts with PG&E and the Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts. San Francisco had an obligation under federal law to sell some of the electric power from its Hetch Hetchy dam to the two districts; PG&E would carry that power over its lines and guarantee its supply if low water kept the dam from generating at full capacity.

The negotiations were immensely complex and generated tens of thousands of pieces of paper. The city wanted to raise the bargain-basement rates it had been charging the districts; PG&E wanted to raise the rates it charged for transmitting the power.

Then a Central Valley congressional representative named Tony Coelho got involved. Coelho (who was later forced out of office in a scandal) started talking about the Raker Act — the federal law that gave San Francisco the right to build the dam but also required the city to create a public power system — and suddenly, official San Francisco freaked. If Coelho were to make too much noise about the feds enforcing the Raker Act, the city, which had been in violation of the law for 70 years, could have lost the dam.

So then-mayor Dianne Feinstein cut a backroom deal with Coelho: the city would be allowed to raise rates but had to sell almost all of its power (aside from basic municipal needs) to the districts. That, of course, would ensure that the city had little power left for a full-scale public power system. Feinstein promised that her staff would work out the final details of a 30-year contract.

The negotiations on that contract dragged on, however, as PG&E and the districts kept demanding more. The talks were conducted in secret, at PG&E headquarters. By 1987 city staffers were writing memos calling PG&E’s demands "ridiculous" and "excessive" and stating that the proposed deals would "impose many risks on the city." The negotiations stalled — until Feinstein intervened, overruled her staff, and agreed hands down to the deal PG&E wanted. That was one of the last acts of her administration; Art Agnos was elected to replace her that November and took office in January 1988.

The contracts had to be approved by the Board of Supervisors, and (after the Guardian broke the story and denounced the deals) discussions were heated. Budget analyst Harvey Rose took a hard look at the proposed contracts and, using strong and decisive language, told the board the deals were terrible for the city, would cost taxpayers a fortune, and should be rejected.

Right before the final vote we obtained public records that outlined Feinstein’s sellout — but the documents from the key negotiating period had somehow mysteriously disappeared.

Then a team of seven PG&E lobbyists descended on City Hall, and Louise Renne, a PG&E ally who was then the city attorney, privately advised the supervisors that they would be in legal trouble if they didn’t do PG&E’s bidding. The contracts were approved, with only Sups. Harry Britt and Richard Hongisto voting no. Our front-page headline of Feb. 24, 1988, told the story: "PG&E 8, SF 2." Although Agnos had run as a public power candidate, he buckled too and signed the contracts — without ever so much as searching for the missing records.

The Dec. 5, 2007, budget analyst’s report notes that the city lost between $2.5 million and $3 million per year on the deals — and during the two years of the energy crisis, when the true downside of what Feinstein, Renne, Agnos, and the Board of Supervisors did became apparent, the tab was $27 million. That’s a total of as much as $87 million of city money thrown away on sweetheart deals with PG&E and the two districts.

After the energy crisis — and after Renne left office — the current city attorney, Dennis Herrera, went to court to renegotiate the deals. The new agreements are much better and will save San Francisco millions. That’s what the board quietly approved this month.

But much of San Francisco’s power is still tied up for another 10 years, and huge damage has been done.

Meanwhile, PG&E is suing the city to keep public power out of the Ferry Building, is trying to corner the market on wave and tidal power in the bay and along the coast, is trying to undermine community choice aggregation, and remains an entrenched, illegal monopoly with far too much clout at City Hall.

The good news is that there’s real talk of a new public power push in San Francisco, and it can’t come too soon. And the lessons from the fiasco of 1988 can and should guide any future efforts.

For starters, nobody — no city attorney, no department head, no mayor — should ever again be allowed to negotiate with PG&E in secret. Any talks with the utility should be recorded and all documents and memos made public before any city agency votes on any contract or deal.

PG&E loves to argue that public power is an expensive proposition and that taxpayers will be on the hook for a lot of money to buy out or create a municipal power grid. But advocates can accurately point to the history of private power in San Francisco: dealing with PG&E has cost the city (and the taxpayers and the ratepayers) far more than the price of creating a municipal grid. The 1988 contracts are a particularly visible example. And 20 years later, the overall lesson is clear: as long as a private company is running the city’s energy policy, the public is going to get screwed.

Editor’s Notes

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› Tredmond@sfbg.com

A friend of mine used to play defensive end for one of the big football schools, one of those places that are constantly in the top 10, win a few national championships, and send a couple of people to the NFL every year. The football players had their own dorm, far away from everyone else on campus. The mirrors in the bathrooms were stainless steel instead of glass, so they wouldn’t get broken when the guys got a bit out of control.

Everybody juiced. That’s what my friend told me. If you wanted to star at the national level and you thought you had a chance at the pros, you took steroids. You just did. It was part of the deal.

So I had a hard time getting agitated about the Barry Bonds scandal, and I’m still having a hard time getting agitated about the Mitchell Report. What, nobody knew there were drugs in major-league baseball? Does anyone believe the owners weren’t encouraging it? Buffed-up players sell tickets.

And now there’s talk of asterisks — the idea that anyone who may have used steroids shouldn’t remain in the record books or in the Hall of Fame without some sort of formal indication that the milestones might be tainted — which strikes me as silly. How will we know for sure who did what when? Are we basing all of this on Mitchell Report–style hearsay? How about the people who may have juiced or may have just worked out harder and suddenly started performing better?

How about the fact that almost every professional athlete today has the advantage of better nutrition, better training, and better medical care than even the most lucky and privileged had 50 years ago?

Besides, steroids are chickenshit.

See, when I look out the window of my office near Mission Bay, I see this fancy new University of California complex that’s going to be home to a huge, brand-new industry based on genetic technology. I’m in favor of stem-cell research, and I have no problem with using embryonic cells, but I think we need to understand what we’re doing here before unregulated private and public sector researchers start doing some truly funky stuff.

Tali Woodward wrote about this in the Guardian three years ago, and plenty of others have been talking about it. It’s going to be possible pretty soon (in 10 years? 20?) to alter the genetic makeup of a fetus to select for or enhance certain characteristics. Some couples may want a boy or a girl. Some may want to avoid a family history of hemophilia or heart disease.

And some may want a kid who can run really, really fast or has exceptional vision, lightning reflexes, and the strength to hit a baseball 500 feet.

Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton, talked about this in 1997 in a book titled Remaking Eden (Avon Books). His thesis, in part, was that certain human beings — the "GenRich" — will be born with powers and abilities far beyond those of the weaker "Natural" class.

And which people do you suppose will play professional sports?

When there’s so much money at stake and the private sector is running the game, steroids are going to seem like lemonade. That’s what we should be getting agitated about.

Feeding the food brainiac

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› paulr@sfbg.com


Amid the agonies and anxieties of last-minute holiday shopping can be found at least one sure stocking stuffer, provided your list includes a food brainiac (with a Christmas stocking). You’ll know one when you meet one; a large clue will be a passionate interest in not merely recipes and restaurants but also the cultural story they help tell.

And what is that sure thing, in a world where many a gift goes astray like a bad JDAM? A book, of course, since the reports of print’s death have been greatly exaggerated and the food brainiac loves books. One of the better food brainiac–friendly books available is Lilia Zaouali’s Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World (University of California Press, $24.95), whose subtitle, A Concise History with 174 Recipes, suggests that we aren’t talking about a volume with a companion Saturday-morning, how-to-cook-it series on public television.

No, Zaouali’s book dwells more on the history than the recipes, which are interesting though possibly too vague to be of much use in the contemporary, anal-retentive kitchen. Even a reasonably competent home cook is likely to be uneasy about such instructions as "put some red meat cut into small pieces in a pot with some water. When it is cooked, strain it and brown it in fat" (from a recipe for rutabiyya, or meat with dates).

But even if your brainiac never boils a dollop of honey in a splash of vinegar (medieval Islamic cooking being rich in sweet-sour effects), pleasurable sustenance can be had from the book’s many fascinating historical nuggets: the migratory route of couscous from North Africa through Sicily into Tuscany, for instance, or the Moorish roots (culinary and linguistic) of the dish the Spanish call escabeche, or the religious importance to Muslims of eating meat (other than pork) with most meals. As Zaouali puts it, "One may wonder whether a vegetarian could be admitted to the community of believers."

Of transcendent interest is not the bequest of medieval Islamic cooks to their modern heirs in both the Middle East and Europe but their own debt to the Romans, many of whose ingredients and flavor patterns they adopted and continued. The Roman gastronome Apicius, who lived at the time of Christ, is especially relevant here. For details, consult your stocking.

Under their black sun

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

I have a fantasy that 100 years from now all formalized history as we know it will be lost. Museums will lose funding and fall by the wayside. Libraries will find their contents spontaneously dumped onto city streets. And those curious enough to wonder what came before will be left with the chunks of culture that have outlasted apartment moves and world wars: personal detritus and castaway junk. Eventually, this future generation will stumble upon faded photos of a queen in a tiara and a potato-sack dress. Her king had a pompadour, and their soldiers were regal. Her name was Exene Cervenka, and she was the queen of Los Angeles. Would it really be so bad for a band to be remembered as royalty?

X is usually remembered as the collaboration between vocalist Cervenka and bassist John Doe, but the band was actually founded by guitarist Billy Zoom. Already an accomplished musician who had toured with the likes of Gene Vincent and mastered his own special blend of elaborately structured punkabilly, Zoom placed an ad looking for musicians in the Los Angeles Recycler in 1977. The guitarist, in his typically wry fashion, is reluctant to sprinkle the golden dust of nostalgia over his initial meeting with Doe and merely cracks via e-mail that the latter "had really cool shoes, clever lyrics, and looked OK."

Doe brought more than his songs and his shoes to the table, though. He had met budding poet Exene Cervenka at a writing workshop and, impressed by her work, had encouraged her to join a band. Although the distance between poetry recitals and fronting a punk group might seem like a quantum leap, Cervenka soon realized that the two are quite similar. "It was more like punk poetry," she explains over the phone on her way to Milwaukee with the Knitters. "You would allow yourself to get really angry while you were reading. It wasn’t rigid sitting down. It was a free-for-all!" Cervenka exceeded the boundaries of her diminutive stature, evolving into a lyrical punk princess — a heady mix of tiaras, anger, and lipstick decades before the so-called kinderwhore girl bands of the ’90s aspired to do the same.

Cervenka and Doe forged the initial, inescapable hallmark of an X song: their vocal interplay. Untethered by formal training, Cervenka developed her plaintive counterpoint to Doe’s growling tenor: his smooth, cool bark had just enough glissando to sail up, through, and over their songs of love, barflies, and the politics in the sprawling metropolis they called home. Cervenka acknowledges that as collaborators, the couple — who married and divorced during the band’s lifetime — had a connection that surpassed the ordinary. "I was in the kitchen writing, and he was in living room playing the bass," she remembers. "I came into the living room and said, ‘I’ve got some lyrics here for a song,’ and he goes, ‘Well, that’s good, because I just wrote a song.’ And I swear to god that those words just fit that music." She laughs and reveals the rigors of a long, storied career. "I don’t even remember what song it was. That’s the kind of thing that can happen when you collaborate with someone for a long time."

Doe and Zoom had been on the lookout to complete their rhythm section and found X’s fourth member in the form of DJ Bonebrake (his real name, not a punk-inspired moniker), a drummer with local band the Eyes. His decision to join X proved fateful not just for him but also for Eyes bandmate Charlotte Caffey, who took his departure as the opportunity to join her next band, the Go-Go’s. The all-girl band was equally active in the early LA punk scene and would share a rehearsal space and several bills with X, while Go-Go’s guitarist Jane Wiedlin even credits Zoom as a teacher of sorts. "He taught me my first bar chords and how to use an amplifier," she writes in an e-mail. "He was by far the best guitarist on the scene." Zoom’s finesse stood out during those early years, when disintegration and chaos were at times the status quo in the scene. Bonebrake recalls over the phone from the road that other legendary bands that weren’t so eager for polish: "Some bands would make a career or a show out of acting like they weren’t together. The Germs were a perfect example. Pat Smear would show up and go, ‘Hey, does anyone have some strings? I only have two strings.’<0x2009>"

What Zoom brought to X was a firebrand guitar — equal parts carefree rockabilly and complex melodic riffage — that came to represent X on each successive album until he left the band in 1985 and was replaced by Tony Gilkyson. "John wrote all of his songs with his bass, so there were no chords," Zoom explains. "That gave me a lot of freedom to experiment with more complex chords and unusual voicings." Although he has gone on record as being displeased with the production on almost all of the X albums he appeared on, he cites their first, Los Angeles (Slash, 1980), as his favorite because it was recorded almost entirely live and thus sounds the most like the group. Asked the same question, Cervenka chooses their third full-length, Under the Big Black Sun (Elektra, 1982), calling it "the purest X album. To me, it’s like the cover. It’s a very black-and-white album. That was a really weird time. My sister had died. The second album had come out, but I hadn’t really written about it. Wild Gift [Slash, 1981] came out, and then Under the Big Black Sun was more about death."

In the end, after eight studio albums and innumerous hiatuses, X still see fit to reunite and tour sporadically. Three decades on, Cervenka is still content to perform X’s catalog of love-stained, liquor-soaked rebellion — future libraries and galleries notwithstanding: "Life is doing something to be remembered for, whether it’s building your grandkids a tree house that they pass on to their kids or making a record that changes people’s lives." In my version of the future, those are the records that rise up to claim history, in a giant blazing X obscuring all else, symbols of a feisty queen with a wink and a cigarette and her court of angry, vagabond cavaliers. *

X

With the Hooks

Dec. 28–29, 9 p.m., $30

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

Check it twice

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ALEXIS GEORGOPOULOS’S TOP 10


WRITER/EDITOR, ARP


•<\!s><0x0007>Panda Bear, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks). One of the few albums that deserved the hype, Person Pitch delivered what Animal Collective could not.

•<\!s><0x0007>Various artists, Zanzibara, Volume 3: Ujamaa (Buda Musique). Ujamaa focuses on 1960s Tanzania and recalls the ecstatic languidity of Tabu Ley Rocehrau and the imprint’s Angola ’60s compilations.

•<\!s><0x0007>Various artists, Dirty Space Disco (Tigersushi). Parisians Pilooski and Dirty Sound System are some of the most exciting discoveries of the year.

•<\!s><0x0007>Thomas Fehlmann, Honigpumpe (Kompakt). This was the year I got back into minimal techno after a few years away. Lodged somewhere between Kompakt’s "Pop Ambient" series and Superpitcher, Fehlmann made his strongest album since 2004’s Visions of Blah.

•<\!s><0x0007>Lilith Records. In 2007 the enigmatic new label that appears to come from the Russian Federation reissued lavish vinyl versions of Caetano Veloso’s Araca Azul, Harmonia’s De Luxe, Tim Hardin 2, No New York, Claudine Longet’s Colours, Black Merda’s Black Merda, and Cluster’s Zuckerzeit. The only reissue imprint that rivals them in scope and quality is the Bay Area’s Water Records.

•<\!s><0x0007>Iasos, Inter-Dimensional Music (Iasos Unity/Em, 1975). With so many new artists taking the easy electronic-prog route, it’s good to realize there’s much more where that came from — in the place between space rock and new age. This makes me think of Alice Coltrane and Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s Evening Star (Editions Eg) but doesn’t really sound like any of them. The sleeve is incredible.

•<\!s><0x0007>Niger: Magic and Ecstasy in the Sahel DVD (Sublime Frequencies). The last 15 minutes, focusing on Tuareg musicians, contain some of the most ecstatic and tranced-out jams I’ve heard or seen.

•<\!s><0x0007>Various artists, Brazil 70 (Soul Jazz). No longer borrowing from John Cage or the Beatles, Jards Mascale, and Novos Baianos ushered in what may be the most exciting time in Brazil’s musical history.

•<\!s><0x0007>Frank Bretschneider, Rhythm (Raster-Noton). He may be working in the domain of clicks and cuts, but instead of pursuing pure sine wave research, Bretschneider — picking up where SND left off but surpassing them — mimics the rhythms of dubstep, minimal techno, and hip-hop. Listen loud and your mind will be rearranged.

•<\!s><0x0007>Shit Robot, "Chasm"/"Wrong Galaxy" (DFA). Yes, the name is awful. Nevertheless, DFA’s recent signing of this Markus Lambkin project is too good to pass over. Lambkin has been learning from the best of Carl Craig and Berlin and Cologne techno, and his full-length is eagerly awaited.

WILL YORK’S TOP 10


WRITER


(1) <0x0007>Miles Davis: The Complete On the Corner Sessions (Sony Legacy)

(2) <0x0007>Ace Records: Bob Lind, Elusive Butterfly: The Complete Jack Nitzsche Sessions; various artists, Phil’s Spectre III: A Third Wall of Soundalikes; and various artists, Hard Workin’ Man: The Jack Nitzsche Story, Vol. 2

(3) <0x0007>Bloodcount, Seconds CD/DVD (Screwgun)

(4) <0x0007>Clockcleaner, Babylon Rules (Load)

(5) <0x0007>Terminal Sound System, Compressor (Extreme)

(6) <0x0007>ugEXPLODE label: Nondor Nevai, The Wooden Machine Music, and Flying Luttenbachers, Incarceration by Abstraction

(7) <0x0007>Down, Over the Under (Down)

(8) <0x0007>The Pipettes, We Are the Pipettes (Cherry Tree/Interscope)

(9) <0x0007>Slough Feg, "Tiger! Tiger!," Hardworlder (Cruz del Sur)

(10) <0x0007>Tesla, "Ball of Confusion," Real to Reel (Tesla Electric Co.)

MARCUS CROWDER’S TOP 10-PLUS


WRITER


•<\!s><0x0007>Aretha Franklin, Aretha Live at Fillmore West (deluxe edition) (Rhino). So electric you’ll get goose bumps.

•<\!s><0x0007>Jason Lindner Big Band, Live at the Jazz Gallery (Anzic)

•<\!s><0x0007>Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy, Cornell 1964 (Blue Note)

•<\!s><0x0007>Sam Yahel Trio, Truth and Beauty (Origin). Talented friends get into the groove of a young man and his keyboard.

•<\!s><0x0007>Joshua Redman Trio, Back East (Nonesuch)

•<\!s><0x0007>Joe Henry, Civilians (Anti-). Fiercely literate adult rock without acronyms.

•<\!s><0x0007>Wayne Shorter Quartet at the Mondavi Center, UC Davis, Feb. 2.

•<\!s><0x0007>Jason Moran with T.S. Monk and ensemble, the Monk Town Hall Concert, Herbst Theatre, May 19. A large band swings very, very hard.

•<\!s><0x0007>SFJAZZ Collective, Live 2007: Fourth Annual Concert Tour (SFJAZZ). Smart arrangements with the necessary new blood of underrated pianist Renee Rosnes.

•<\!s><0x0007>Kiki and Herb, American Conservatory Theater, July 13. We need their holiday show.

•<\!s><0x0007>The Sea and Cake, "Up on Crutches," Everybody (Thrill Jockey). The song I couldn’t stop playing.

AMANDA MARIA MORRISON


WRITER


•<\!s><0x0007>MIA, Kala (Interscope)

•<\!s><0x0007>Feist, The Reminder (Cherry Tree/Interscope)

•<\!s><0x0007>Calle 13, Residente o Visitante (Sony)

•<\!s><0x0007>Chamillionaire, Ultimate Victory (Motown)

•<\!s><0x0007>Kanye West, Graduation (Roc-A-Fella)

•<\!s><0x0007>Apostle of Hustle, National Anthem of Nowhere (Arts and Crafts)

•<\!s><0x0007>Jose Gonzalez, "In Our Nature" (Mute)

•<\!s><0x0007>El-P, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead (Definitive Jux)

•<\!s><0x0007>The Federation, "It’s Whateva" (Southwest Federation/Reprise)

•<\!s><0x0007>Chingo Bling, They Can’t Deport Us All (Asylum)

THEO SCHELL-LAMBERT


WRITER


(1) <0x0007>Aaron Ross, Shapeshifter (Grass Roots Record Co.). The Hella member’s solo LP is ragged singer-songwriter stuff that seems to do everything wrong. It’s strident, too long, and too loud; it’s chirpy and pained; it must have broken a guitar’s worth of strings. And then, somewhere around the point it stops being ugly, it becomes transcendent — an album with more heart than any I’ve heard in a while.

(2) <0x0007>The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible (Merge). How quickly you realize the stunning last song, "My Body Is a Cage," will be a testament to the trust the Montreal group has built, understood, and not yet defaulted on. Few groups have a better sense of what they are and mean, and the Arcade Fire know what they do right: write hymns.

(3) <0x0007>MIA, Kala (Interscope). On her second album, Maya Arulpragasam turned a government-forced world tour into an excuse to make her music even better traveled.

(4) <0x0007>Ferraby Lionheart, Ferraby Lionheart EP (Nettwerk). Lush, antique, richly sung pop that plays like an argument for Jon Brion. Wes Anderson will one day base an entire script on a Lionheart disc.

(5) <0x0007>Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand (Rounder). The best moments on this gorgeous, out-of-nowhere release are when you’ve been listening to sweetheart old-time country pop, then realize you are listening to Robert Plant. There’s a whisper of "Gallows Pole" in "Fortune Teller" and "Going to California" in "Please Read the Letter," and that’s the great pleasure here: an almost mystical Led Zeppelin overlay in music that’s nowhere near classic rock.

(6) <0x0007>Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dandelion Gum (Graveface). Psychedelia wouldn’t have a bad name if more of it were like this. The rural Pennsylvania group counters séance vocals and guitar and keyboard spazz-outs with focus and snappy drums.

(7) <0x0007>St. Vincent, Marry Me (Beggars Banquet). Anne Clark is a Sufjan Stevens crony, but Marry Me is eventually hers alone. Sinister electrofuzz, deft polyrhythms, and scarily chameleonic vocals give her indie pop a postmodern turn.

(8) <0x0007>Blitzen Trapper, Wild Mountain Nation (Lidkercow). At turns pure classic rock — all jammy blues riffs and sun-dappled vocals — countrified songwriter stuff, and something loudly proggy and textural, Wild Mountain Nation sends salvos in several directions.

(9) <0x0007>UGK, UGK: Underground Kingz (Jive). Bun B and Pimp C sound ecstatic to be back at it, and they turn in a two-disc Southern hip-hop epic with cameos that are actually exciting. André 3000 is drawly and perfect on "Int’l Players Anthem," and hearing Dizzee Rascal over this beat is a treat.

(10) <0x0007>Miracle Fortress, Five Roses (Secret City). Montreal’s Graham Van Pelt shoots straight for the Beach Boys here, which means his songs sound a little derivative and a lot lovely. Pop’s melodic purism, dressed up for audiophiles.

BROLIN WINNING’S TOP 10


442 RECORDS, MP3.COM


•<\!s><0x0007>Percee P, Perseverance (Stones Throw)

The long-awaited solo album from Bronx legend Percee P does not disappoint, with its intricate rhyme schemes and exceptional production from Stones Throw’s resident maestro Madlib. Alarmingly dope from start to finish, with collabos with Diamond D and Vinnie Paz. Look for the remix album in January.

•<\!s><0x0007>Prodigy, Return of the Mac (Koch)

A lot of older fans gave up on Mobb Deep years ago, and their horrible last record seemed to be the final nail in the coffin. But on this independent release, Prodigy comes alive, spitting flagrant murder raps over Alchemist’s outstanding blaxploitation-style beats. Unfortunately, P is heading into a three-and-a-half-year bid — I hope he finishes his new solo joint first.

•<\!s><0x0007>Kamackeris, Artz and Craftz (Mindbenda)

Also known as Kwite Def or KD, Kamackeris is a New York rapper best known for his work with Monsta Island Czars and a show-stealing appearance on the first MF Doom album. He’s blessed with one of the grimiest voices in hip-hop, and his rugged yet introspective wordplay shines over X-Ray’s cinematic tracks. Completely slept on but crazy good.

•<\!s><0x0007>Camp Lo, "Ticket For 2" (self-released)

These cats have been MIA for a minute, and it’s been a full decade since their classic debut, but Cheeba and Suede come back something serious on this ultrasmooth single produced by longtime homey Ski Beatz. Unfortunately, it’s not on their recent album, but it’s all over the Internet.

•<\!s><0x0007>Snoop Dogg, "Sexual Eruption, a.k.a. Sensual Seduction" (unreleased)

Man! While T-Pain, Akon, and countless others assault the airwaves with their hypercomputerized, later-era Cher-style "R&B," Big Snoop takes it back to the Roger Troutman essence, freaking the (virtual) talk box on this ode to female orgasm. The song is awesome enough, but the throwback video, complete with flying saucers and a keytar, is something to behold.

•<\!s><0x0007>50 Cent, "I Get Money," Curtis (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope)

He lost the sales battle with Kanye West, G Unit is fading fast, and Curtis is his worst LP to date. However, even his millions of haters have to admit: this song is a banger.

•<\!s><0x0007>Devin the Dude, live at South by Southwest, March 14

Mild-mannered but funny as hell, Devin has been putting it down for a long time now, winning fans with his mellow storytelling rhymes, low-key singing, and affinity for all weed and women. I saw him live three times this year, but this show in his home state was the best: he rolled with the Coughee Brothaz and injected some much-needed funk into the indie-centric convention.

•<\!s><0x0007>Third annual Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival

Unlike the more hyped-up "Rock the Bells," this festival got everything right. Free show, great location on the water in BK, and all-day performances from Ghostface, Sean P, Large Professor, El Michaels Affair, Dres from Black Sheep, and others. Throw in surprise appearances from Chubb Rock and Jeru, and you’ve got middle-aged rap fan heaven.

•<\!s><0x0007>Sonic Youth at the Berkeley Community Theatre, July 19

As part of the "Don’t Look Back" concert series, in which artists perform a classic album in its entirety, Thurston Moore and the gang revisited their 1988 epic Daydream Nation (DGC) to the delight of a sold-out crowd. Next time I hope they do Bad Moon Rising.

•<\!s><0x0007>ZZ Top at Konocti Harbor, April 21

All I can say is "wow." Despite my driving several hours to and from Clear Lake and getting rained on the entire time, this was amazing. These dudes are mad old, but they put on a better show than most kids a fraction of their age.

KANDIA CRAZY HORSE’S TOP 10


WRITER


(1) <0x0007>Rufus Wainwright, Release the Stars (Geffen)

(2) <0x0007>Tinariwen, Aman Iman (World Village)

(3) <0x0007>Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand (Rounder)

(4) <0x0007>Betty Davis, Betty Davis (Light in the Attic)

(5) <0x0007>Miles Davis, The Complete On the Corner Sessions (Sony Legacy)

(6) <0x0007>Donnie, The Daily News (SoulThought Entertainment)

(7) <0x0007>Gogol Bordello, Super Taranta! (Side One Dummy)

(8) <0x0007>Hanson, The Walk (Three Car Garage)

(9) <0x0007>Babyshambles, Shotter’s Nation (Astralwerks)

(10) <0x0007>Beirut, The Flying Club Cup (Ba Da Bing)

VICE COOLER’S TOP GIGS


XBXRX, HAWNAY TROOF, KIT


•<\!s><0x0007>Playing to a confused crowd in Beijing, China, then riding on the back of a motorcycle cab. The next day I was eating at a vegan buffet in a mall where you paid not by what you ate but by how quickly you finished.

•<\!s><0x0007>In the Netherlands, I performed to 550,000 people on drugs who think that camping out in sewage is "awesome." Lots of moms and dads with huge glazed eyes, hula-hooping and juggling glow sticks at 4 a.m.

•<\!s><0x0007>XBXRX having to sleep at a (dirty and unkempt) brothel. There were bloodstains and tire treads (?) on my pillow. *

For more lists, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Humans are dogs

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Two new studies of animal intelligence caught my attention last week because they prove that humans are no better than dogs and monkeys. This is something I’ve always felt to be true on an anecdotal level, and now cognitive science backs me up.

A researcher in Vienna, Austria, trained dogs to sort photographs into two categories: pictures of other dogs and pictures of landscapes. This is big news because it means that dogs not only recognize what’s happening in symbolic visual representations (photos) but can also figure out how to translate an abstract concept ("dog") into a category of pictures. Previously, nobody thought dogs could categorize photographs or even abstract concepts other than "food" and "enemy."

The other study is even better, partly because it’s called "Basic Math in Monkeys and College Students" (oh, those zany editors at PloS Biology). In this study, cognitive scientists gave monkeys and college students a series of very simple tests to determine how quickly and accurately they could add up the number of dots on a screen. On average, the monkeys and students answered in the same amount of time. The students were 94 percent accurate in their answers, while the monkeys were 76 percent accurate. So monkeys are nearly as good as humans at adding dots, even without the benefit of a college education.

What struck me first on contemputf8g these studies is that cognitive science has taken us in an unforeseen direction. This is a field that promises to study consciousness as if it were a machine, to look at thoughts as electrical impulses and biological structures rather than sublime metaphysics. It would seem, therefore, to run the risk of dehumanizing us, of converting all of our crazy, ambivalent feelings into mere blips on a chart. Instead, what cognitive science has done, at least in these studies, is show us how deeply connected we are to the living creatures around us.

By breaking down our thought processes into their component parts — pattern recognition, counting — we are able to see that the building blocks of thought are not unique to Homo sapiens. Dogs and monkeys are doing this shit too. In fact, there is a monkey out there who can add better than a college student (some of the humans did in fact score lower than some of the monkeys in the study).

So what do we do now that we know dogs and monkeys are capable of humanlike intelligence? Shall we test more animals and discover what we already knew about elephants and dolphins having language? I hope so.

If nothing else, this should teach humans to be a lot more damn humble about our supposed niftiness.

Of course, there are dangers in taking this scenario too far. Instead of seeing ourselves as having something in common with animals, we might use this information to make animals into better slaves. Science fiction author David Brin’s Uplift series is partly about this. He describes humans using biotech and genetic engineering to "uplift" chimps and dolphins, giving them human-equivalent intelligence. The creatures become fully intelligent, but socially they remain second-class citizens.

The two transformed species are in a constant struggle to prove themselves to the humans, and often fail; Brin portrays the dolphins as liable to slip back into incoherent animalness when threatened.

Still, we have not yet appointed ourselves uplifters. Humans are at a moment in our history when we are still in awe of animals who can think the way we do. Now we have to figure out the appropriate next steps.

Obviously, we need to test more animals for intelligence, using a variety of methods.

Probably the most oddly hopeful news to come out of all of this is the fact that both of these tests were done without any killing or brain invading. The researchers who did the dog test even invented a special paw-operated touch-screen computer for the dogs to use. I like that. Not only have we discovered that dogs are like us, but we’ve also invented the first dog-friendly user interface. What next? Wii for dogs? That would pave the way for true interspecies bonding. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd whose cat is unfortunately not among the mentally gifted creatures who can add, sort, or even recognize food.

Reining in the UC

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EDITORIAL The deal that’s slated to turn a former University of California campus into a private housing development in San Francisco is another demonstration of a long pattern of problems between the UC and local governments. Put simply, the university is a bad neighbor and a bad actor — and it’s time the State Legislature did something about it.

The history of local communities fighting the UC is legend in this state, dating back at least to the People’s Park battles in Berkeley in the 1960s, and today that city is fighting the school’s plan to build a new sports stadium. In San Francisco the UC has tried to run over local planning laws to build a garage at Hastings College of the Law, is angering neighbors with its expansion plans at Mission Bay — and is now in the spotlight at 55 Laguna Street, the site of an old UC Extension campus.

The university wants to let A.F. Evans Co. build 440 units of housing — much of it high-end, with an average rent of $4,000 per month — on the 5.8-acre site. Only 15 percent of the units would be available below market rate.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has been trying to increase the number of affordable units but has run into a giant obstacle: the UC is demanding $18 million for the land, and it won’t budge an inch. In fact, the university has told him it’s prepared to drop the whole deal and walk away (leaving the campus empty and crime-infested and angering its neighbors) if the city tries to get a penny of that lease money.

We recognize that, like every other state agency, the UC desperately needs cash — but we’re sick of university officials acting arrogant, refusing to deal in good faith, and threatening to use the power of a state agency to bypass local land-use laws. While San Francisco struggles to make the 55 Laguna project work, the State Legislature ought to find a way to force the UC to work with local governments — and remove its ability to circumvent local laws.

Murdoched: the Stockton Record is next

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

As things get tougher and tougher in the newspaper business, there are two jobs that are the toughest of all. One is writing the obituary for your own paper and your own job. The other is writing the story that tries to explain why the daily paper you work on keeps getting peddled about like the stakes in a Las Vegas poker game.

The latest example of the second story appeared in today’s Stockton Record by an unlucky soul by the name of Mike Klocke. He starts out as these stories usually do, citing the honor that came once upon a time to the paper when it was owned by a local family.

“The Irving Martin Assembly Room at the Record is named for the newspaper’s founder, whose family owned the business for its first 74 years,” Klock wrote. “Ironically, if the day comes when The Record once again is sold, employees will get the news in the upstairs room that honors one of Stockton’s historic figures.

“I bring this up because of last week’s $5 billion offer by publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch to purchase Dow Jones @ Co. The community newspaper division of Dow Jones, Ottaway Newspapers Inc., owns the Record.”

Wait a moment. There is a telling detail: the date on the story is May 6, 2007, the date of Murdoch’s offer to buy Dow Jones, and the Record is running the exact same story six months later on the day that the sale is finalized back on Wall Street.

Bravely, Klocke goes through the Record history of five owners since Loretta Martin ended the family’s association with the Record in l969. The Record, he says, “has been somewhat akin to a baton in a track meet relay.
The Martin family sold to Speidel Newspapers Inc. (l969: which merged with Gannett Newspapers Inc (l977), which sold the Record to the Omaha World-Herald (l994), which sold to Ottaway (2003).

Still more bravely, Klocke writes that “uncertainty can be draining on employees at all levels. If you’re not careful, it can make you lose your focus. I’Ive always believed working in the newspaper business is a mission. We cover news aggressively, help you decide where to shop with advertisements and put the newspaper on your driveway each morning.

“We also now put news and advertising at your fingertips online throughout the day. We also have a bit of the chameleon in our DNA. We embrace challenges and adapt to new environments. The future? Who knows?

“The Record could be sold again, or Ottaway (Dow Jones) still could own the company for decades. Our business model, news-gathering approach and company makeup likely will continue to change.

“Our commitment to the mission and the communities we serve will not falter.”

Idle question: Why can’t reporters who think like this, and editors who allow this kind of story to run when their papers are in play, end up running our valuable community daily papers?

Well, the word from my sources out in the valley is that there are only two real possible buyers: Singleton or McClatchy newspapers, both of whom already own a dangerously huge chunk of the California newspaper business.

They are members in what I call the Galloping Conglomerati. And they are poised to pounce at the very same time that the Big Media are blacking out or marginalizing the major Big Media story that the FCC is about to open the floodgates to even more local media consolidation and even more junk news. (See my blow below.)

Where it all will end knows only God. B3

Owners might change — but not the mission

The Irving Martin Assembly Room at The Record is named for the newspaper’s founder, whose family owned the business for its first 74 years.

Ironically, if the day comes when The Record once again is sold, employees will get the news in the upstairs room that honors one of Stockton’s historic figures.

I bring this up because of last week’s $5 billion offer by publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch to purchase Dow Jones & Co. The community newspaper division of Dow Jones, Ottaway Newspapers Inc., owns The Record.

Murdoch’s eyes, of course, are on The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones’ myriad successful online ventures. For now, he’s been rebuffed by Dow Jones’ controlling shareholders.

News industry speculation is intensifying about whether this is a first foray by Murdoch and whether other potential buyers will materialize.

As for The Record? Editor and Publisher magazine’s online site reports that New England-based GateHouse Media Inc., a very active recent buyer of newspapers, would be a likely bidder for Ottaway.

GateHouse doesn’t have a West Coast presence, so The Record could in turn be sold to a company with successful California “clustering” of newspapers such as McClatchy (Sacramento, Modesto, Merced and Fresno) or MediaNews (Bay Area papers).

McClatchy and MediaNews both have pursued buying The Record in the past.

Sure, it’s speculation at this point. It’s difficult not to ponder the future when there’s the potential for a fifth different owner since Loretta Martin decided to end the family’s association with The Record in 1969.

In the past 38 years, The Record has been somewhat akin to a baton in a track-meet relay.

The Martin family sold to Speidel Newspapers Inc. (1969), which merged with Gannett Newspapers Inc. (1977), which sold The Record to the Omaha World-Herald (1994), which sold it to Ottaway (2003).

I’ve worked for three of the owners, and they’ve all contributed in positive ways to the company and community.

Ottaway – with excellent guidance and financial support from Dow Jones – made the dream of a new press facility a reality.

Company executives didn’t waste any time, telling us within 30 days of their ownership to get moving on the long-overdue project. The new press became a reality less than two years later.

Ottaway has given us – and Record readers – something we’ve needed for decades. Our Web site development also has been an Ottaway initiative.

The Omaha company proved to be a very good newspaper steward in its nine years of ownership. Omaha executives invested in The Record, and I believe the newspaper truly reconnected with the community during that time.

The Gannett years were, at times, tumultuous. Some excellent longtime employees were hired in various departments back then, and The Record benefited from the opportunities presented by a large, national chain.

Speidel was before my time.

Business uncertainty can be draining on employees at all levels. If you’re not careful, it can make you lose your focus.

I’ve always believed working in the newspaper business is a mission. We cover news aggressively, help you decide where to shop with advertisements and put the newspaper on your driveway each morning.

We also now put news and advertising at your fingertips online throughout the day.

We also have a bit of the chameleon in our DNA. We embrace challenges and adapt to new environments.

The future? Who knows?

The Record could be sold again, or Ottaway (Dow Jones) still could own the company for decades.

Our business model, news-gathering approach and company makeup likely will continue to change.

Our commitment to the mission and the communities we serve will not falter.

Contact Klocke at (209) 546-8250 or mklocke@recordnet.com.

Click here for article.

Year in Music: Tinny bubbles

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The first time I heard it was in Peru. The pea-colored haze of la garúa — the fog of polluted drizzle that swallows Lima — fell about the airport as I waited in line for my preflight pat-down last spring. Suddenly, a fake-Baped tweener cut to the front, blaring a bootleg Kanye MP3 on his dinky Motorola cell. Poor Ms. West sounded like she’d been graduated into a bigger, stronger, faster chipmunk. Kaaan-yeee!

Yeah, we’ve all been privy to the public toucan trills of ringtones, those arpeggiated chest thumps that whistle, "Listen to my life choice, bitches. Doodle-oodle-doo!" But this was different. This was a whole freakin’ song. And it worked. Whether from sheer awe or pity — Kanye? Come on! — we all made way for the speaker creeper to skate right through. If he’d dialed up some leaked Keak Da Sneak back then, who knows? He probably could’ve flown us home.

In canny San Franny, ringtunes raged and enraged on Muni all summer, boosting the type of hip-hop hits formerly known as "regional" — see DJ UNK’s "Walk It Out" and Huey’s "Pop Drop and Lock It" — into the top 20 stratosphere (billboards on our foreheads, Billboard on our phones). Hip-hop — why not? Status ain’t hood, but it sure is glue, and the buses’ backseats bumped the bleats. Hyphy on the lo-fi tore it up, and public-listening history jumped: from boom box hiss to boomin’ system to bleeding earbuds to cellular blips.

I’m lovin’ the latest apex of the lo-fi revolution, despite the fact that ringtunes are the new rude. I’d been primed for it for years by the skips and squawks of samples, the wear and tear of classic vinyl dance floor tracks, and practically every experimental rock band of the past decade with an animal in its name. Besides defutf8g our culture’s mad lust for higher def, static always spirals me back. I hear it in my fondest past — bopping with my dad before grade school to a shitty TDK cassette of Erasure’s "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man after Midnight)," recorded off a late-night AM broadcast; raising my hands at a rave as DJ Derrick May pushed all the levels into the tweeters, blowing out the system; shimmying next to my neighbors’ kidney-shaped pool while Don Ho (RIP) crooned from their oak-encased Thorens turntable, a grass skirt made of trash bags wrapped round my pin-thin kiddie hips.

Some folks argue that cell phones, iPods, the Internet, and what have you drown people in personal bubbles, smothering the social instinct to interact. Others moan that compressed files, cheap headphones, and puny bandwidth have made listeners trade quality for quantity. Maybe — although maybe not. When Mary or Alicia screeches on the 33, the music pierces through me. But where’s the indie ironist fronting Verizonized Vampire Weekend, the emo kid blasting ancient Pinback on his Blast, the Rihanna-loaded Nokia wantonly flaunted by a twirling drag queen, also named Nokia? Better keep my fuzzy ears open — I hear technology’s the great equalizer.

TOP 10 GUILTLESS PLEASURES


•Jill Scott, "Hate on Me," The Real Thing: Words and Sounds, Vol. 3 (Hidden Beach)

•Cool Kids, "Black Mags," Black Mags (Chocolate Industries)

•Honey Soundsystem DJs

•Foals, "Hummer," Hummer EP (Transgressive)

•Santogold, "You’ll Find a Way (Switch and Graeme Sinden Remix)" (Lizard King)

•Jose Gonzalez, "Teardrop" (Imperial Recordings)

•DJ David Harness’s Super Soul Sundayz

•Richard Strauss, "An Alpine Symphony," performed by San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Oct. 26

•Leslie and the Lys, "How We Go Out Version 2" video (self-released)

•Cannibal Corpse, Vile (Enhanced) (Metal Blade)

Year in Music: Lady day and night

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Judging from the hoo-ha on the message boards and the late-blooming stories coursing through the mainstream media, this may have been the year the music industry business model truly broke. In a boldly utopian and rawly realistic mood, Radiohead took their music and declared they didn’t want play with major labels any more — let the PayPal bucks fall where they may into the passed digital hat; Kanye West and 50 Cent allowed a gamers’ pseudo–sales war to eclipse any artistic statements they might’ve been making; and Britney Spears’s family-court and fashion disasters climaxed in a widely televised moment of lambasted lacklusterness before she was left, well, alone. Music sales slumped further as live music sales stirred. No wonder Madonna signed with Live Nation — save that black concert T for the Karl Stockhausen memorial, RIP.

It’s tough to find obsession material amid the music business coverage: the sounds that set you dreaming, the blood pounding, the ankles caving, and the thrills coursing down the mosh pit–spindled spine. Speaking to Nick Cave came close to triggering dry heaves for yours truly, but his all-too-human, literate gentleman–degenerate charm simply lanced a boil of long-festering obsession rather than sent me off on reveries of rabid fandom. Better to wrap my flaming neuroses around the highly visible good girl–bad girl archetypes embedded in the Alicia (Keys) and Amy (Winehouse) Show. Here’s to AA — let’s have another guzzle of Wino’s "Rehab."

Keys and Winehouse plugged into some deep doo-doo down in my teenage doghouse: I was the good-girl grind who chomped Chopin piano études when I wasn’t biting AP credits. OK, I never wept openly when I got a B, nor did I turn down a Columbia acceptance letter like the Keys-ter, but I could relate to the snippet of Nocturne no. 20 in C-sharp Minor that opens this month’s guilty obsession, As I Am (J). All about uplift and upholstered with a-mite-too-pristine, carefully calibrated R&B pop, AIA slides seductively through the holiday hokum with its anthemic, Linda Perry–cowritten "Superwoman," the Prince-like "Like You’ll Never See Me Again," and the no-muss lustiness of "I Need You." AIA lacks overall heat and inspired originality; the fact that Keys locks in with that other do-right prodigy, John Mayer, speaks volumes. Rather than hook into her natural-woman, way earthy, baby-blues-mama fire live, the type that threatened to softly blast Beyoncé off the Oracle Arena stage three years ago, La Keys is much too good a girl, making all the right moves, to break with the machine. Tellingly, she’s framed by a music-box mechanism in the video for AIA‘s first single, "No One." Agonizingly, ecstatically curled to within an inch of Diana Ross’s Mahogany, Keys stares into the distance like an anesthetized, perfectly blank, pretty doll.

Likewise, I can completely identify with the bad-girl train wreck embodied by Winehouse, howling in a red bra on the street and perpetually hiking up her low-riding denim in concert. Who hasn’t dreamed of cutting class, reviving trash, and dropping the high-achiever act? It’s far more dramatic to star in your own disaster movie, all puffy and tatted with throwback cuties, teased like girl–grouped Ronnie Spector and girl gang–inspired Priscilla Presley by way of Tura Satana, while tacked out in yesterday’s greaser girl garb. Winehouse is the politically incorrect, highly visible dark side of the feminine pop principle; she’s both original and so very not — what with her borrowed looks, band, and sound. Embroiled in a destructo-dance with her Pete Doherty–ish bad-boy hubby, Blake Fielder-Civil, Winehouse has been imploding in the spotlight since the year began with a bang of hype for Back to Black (Island/Universal). Like Spears, she caters to our obsession with woman as time bomb — all foibles, frailties, and fuckery — and helpfully provides a textbook case in cultural appropriation and modern day blackface, from her style to her album title to her lyrics. What are the uses of visualizing and verbalizing postfeminist shame and self-hatred while looking back at pop history, à la Winehouse’s "You Know I’m No Good"? Are these ways to inject new danger — or backhanded authenticity — into the predictable girl group–girl singer machination? Just turn to this fall’s Aretha Franklin compilation, Rare and Unreleased Recordings from the Golden Reign of the Queen of Soul (Rhino/Atlantic), to find that bad can ring as contrived as good. True soul just sings for itself.

TOPS IN 2007


•Rhythm method: Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass (Definitive Jux); Battles, Mirrored (Warp); OOIOO, Taiga (Thrill Jockey)

•Soft shuffle: Bill Callahan, Woke on a Whaleheart (Drag City); Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55 (Vice), Mariee Sioux, live

•Popping out: the Besnard Lakes, The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse (Jagjaguwar); Lavender Diamond, Imagine Our Love (Matador); Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (Polyvinyl)

•I hear rainbows: Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dandelion Gum (Graveface); Radiohead, In Rainbows (self-released); White Rainbow, Prism of Eternal Now (Kranky)

•The Davis family reissue korner: Betty Davis, Betty Davis (Light in the Attic); Miles Davis, The Complete On the Corner Sessions (Sony Legacy)

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