History

Sexy beast

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

My ex-boyfriend won’t give me back my stuff! I’ve e-mailed him repeatedly but gotten no response. I broke up with him because he just couldn’t be bothered to show up or call. After three months of him flaking, I ended things.

He was also impotent, but couldn’t have an adult conversation about it. He was tired, or his grandmother was dying … After lots of excuses and frustration, I began to feel a little insecure, even though I’m smart and healthy, I exercise, I have a nice figure, and I make reasonable efforts on my appearance.

Anyway, pencil dick (think: roll of quarters) decides to let me know one night when we’re out drinking that he thinks my pussy smells. I am, of course, shocked and horrified (I should also mention that I’ve had nothing but compliments from other exes). But quarter dick says he’s sensitive to smell. I try to initiate an adult conversation. Is pubic hair an issue? He says yes, and that all of his girlfriends have been completely shaved.

This was difficult for me, because although I shave my legs and pits and trim my pubes, I think shaving your pussy is just masochistic. I also have some history with not-too-cool stuff that happened to me before I’d even grown any pubic hair. He’d been saying that he wanted me to open up to him more, so I told him I was having a tough week after our conversation. He said he’d come over but never showed, never called.

I left a bag with his stuff and a note tied to his front door. So maybe me not getting my stuff back is just karma for taking the easy way out. But I feel he owes me something for all of the bullshit he put me through! Because what I’m left with, more than the absence of my stuff, is this feeling that I never had before — that maybe, somehow, because I don’t shave I’ll be unattractive to future partners. What I really want back is my sense of self-confidence. I’m not afraid to be a psycho hose beast on this, so feel free to make outlandish suggestions.

Love,

Stuff Waiter

Dear Stuff:

Sorry, can’t. The giant revenge scene in which people (usually women) cut up Prada ties and throw entire bedroom suites from upper-floor windows and set fire to Cadillacs is a staple of a certain type of cozy, girlfriendy fiction, but truly, we are all better off keeping it fictional. These dramatics are, as I say, usually carried out by women (real or fictional), and all we have to do to get a clearer look at the phenomenon (is it kinda cute-when-you’re-angry or just plain psycho?) is switch the genders: what if a vengeful man took a knife to your stuff or set pictures of you on fire outside your office? Would you perhaps find his behavior a touch … threatening? I think any ex in his or her right mind would, and should. Sorry to go all your mother on you, but do you really want to be that sort of person? The sort of person others in your circle will be warning new people about ("Yeah, she’s cute, but that bitch is crazy")? Sound familiar, would-be psycho hose beast? Of course it does. Don’t do it. Enlist a mutual friend to go get your stupid stuff, or just e-mail the guy and tell him you’ll be there at X o’clock on Y day and show up without waiting for his response. And if that doesn’t work, remember: it’s just stuff. You can get some other stuff.

I have no doubt that you are nicely groomed and nicely shaped and smell nice too (most women do unless bacteria are involved somehow). What I don’t believe is that pencil dick (think of him that way, and the words "no great loss" come easily to mind and stay there, do they not?) was ever really your boyfriend or even ever all that into you. If he’d been more into you, he might have tried a little harder to have sex with you, for one thing. People who are into you also tend to return phone calls and show up for dates and comfort you when they inadvertently hurt your feelings. Oh, and nobody nice inadvertently hurts your feelings by telling you your most intimate parts smell bad.

Actually, that last part is not necessarily true. People who love us sometimes have to tell us hard and inconvenient truths. Nice people will do anything to avoid that kind of thing, and if we have to do it, we don’t do it all suddenly and brutally at the bar, for god’s sake, and we don’t then refuse to comfort or even call. Only a pig-dog would do that. Putting it that way is, I realize, unfair to pig-dogs, and nice people don’t do that either. Neither, however, need we allow pig-dogs to determine our worth or define us in any other way. We do that ourselves. Buck up now, and don’t set anything on fire.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Polishing SPUR

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› amanda@sfbg.com

Wedged among the commerce, tourism, and white-collar businesses north of Market Street is the slim entry to 312 Sutter, easy to miss unless you happen to be searching for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. SPUR occupies the fourth and fifth floors of the building — and occupies them completely. Cubicles are close and overstuffed. Conversations compete. Space for meetings is a hot commodity. Four bicycles, ridden to work by staff members, are crammed in a side room where languish a half century’s worth of policy papers, photographs, and planning documents generated by the active public interest think tank.

It looks more like a struggling nonprofit than one of the most influential policy organizations in town, one supported by the city’s richest and most powerful interests.

"This is why we’re building the Urban Center," said Gabriel Metcalf, the youthful executive director of the 48-year-old organization, clad in a dark suit and sipping from a Starbucks coffee cup while he roams the fourth floor office space searching for any available real estate to sit and talk.

He settles on an open-faced workroom with empty seats. They circle a table covered with a thick ledger of plans for SPUR’s new Urban Center, a $16.5 million, 12,000-square-foot four-story building at 654 Mission that the group is building with more than $8 million in public money.

Plans for the center include a free exhibition space, a lending library, and an evolution of the group’s current public education program, now consisting of noontime forums, to include evening lectures and accredited classes. Though the center will house meeting rooms for SPUR’s committees and offices for its staff, the suggestion is that the new space will be a more public place.

And SPUR seems to be searching for a new public image.

For years the organization was synonymous with anything-goes development, ruinous urban renewal, and an economy policy that favored big business and growth at all costs. Today SPUR’s staffers and some board members present a different face. The new SPUR features open debate and seeks consensus; phrases like sustainability and public interest are bandied about more than tax cuts and urban renewal.

But San Francisco progressives are a tough crowd, and SPUR’s history — and, frankly, most of its current political stands — makes a lot of activists wonder: Has SPUR really changed its spurs? And can a group whose board is still overwhelmingly dominated by big business and whose biggest funders are some of the most powerful businesses in town ever be a voice of political reason?

As one observer wryly noted, "I’ve yet to see SPUR publicly denounce a development project."

SPUR considers itself a public policy think tank, a term that conjures an impression of lofty independence. But the group has, and has always had, a visible agenda. SPUR members regularly advocate positions at public meetings, and the group takes stands on ballot measures.

And it has a painful legacy. "We have a dark history," Metcalf admits, referring to the days when "UR" stood for "urban renewal," often called "urban removal" by the thousands of low-income, elderly, and disabled people, many African American and Asian, who were displaced by redevelopment in San Francisco.

That history — and the fact that SPUR’s membership is largely a who’s who of corporations, developers, and financiers — has caused some to raise questions about the public money the group has received for the new Urban Center.

"They’re not an academic institution," said Marc Salomon, a member of the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force who’s butted heads with the group. "There’s no academic peer review going on here. The only peer review is coming from the people who fund them."

Yet prominent local progressives like artist and planning activist Debra Walker, veteran development warrior Brad Paul, and architect and small-business owner Paul Okamoto have joined the SPUR board in recent years. "There’s a bunch of us that have come in under the new regime of Gabriel Metcalf because there’s a real aching need for a progressive dialogue about planning," said Walker, who thinks SPUR is making concerted efforts to inform its policies with the points of view of a broader constituency. "I think SPUR is engaged in those conversations more than anyone."

SPUR defines its mission as a commitment to "good planning and good government." Though a wide range of issues can and does fall under that rubric, the 71 board members and 14 staff tend to focus on housing, transportation, economics, sustainability, governmental reform, and local and regional planning, and their agenda has a dogged pro-growth tinge.

SPUR likes to trace its history to the post–1906 earthquake era, when the literal collapse of housing left many people settling in squalid conditions. The San Francisco Housing Association was formed "to educate the public about the need for housing regulations and to lobby Sacramento for anti-tenement legislation." A 1999 SPUR history of itself places its genesis in the Housing Association, though other versions of the group’s history suggest a slightly different taproot.

According to Chester Hartman’s history of redevelopment in San Francisco, City for Sale (University of California Press, 2002), the 1950s were a time when corporate-backed regional planners were envisioning a new, international commercial hub in the Bay Area. They were looking for a place to put the high-rise office buildings, convention centers, and hotels that white-collar commerce would need. Urban renewal money and resources were coming to the city, and San Francisco’s Redevelopment Agency identified the Embarcadero and South of Market areas as two of several appropriate places to raze and rebuild.

The agency, however, was dysfunctional and couldn’t seem to get plans for the Yerba Buena Center — a convention hall clustered with hotels and offices — off the ground. The Blyth-Zellerbach Committee, "a group the Chamber of Commerce bluntly described as ‘San Francisco’s most powerful business leaders, whose purpose is to act in concert on projects deemed good for the city,’<0x2009>" as Hartman writes, commissioned a report in 1959 by Aaron Levine, a Philadelphia planner, which identified the Redevelopment Agency as one of the worst in the nation and recommended more leadership from the business community. The San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association was born, funded by Blyth-Zellerbach, whose leaders included some corporations that still pay dues to SPUR, like Bechtel, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

John Elberling, a leader of the Tenants and Owners Development Corp., a group representing the people who were trying to stay in the area, was one of many activists who litigated against the city’s plan and managed to wedge some affordable housing into the developers’ vision of South of Market. SPUR, he told us, was "explicitly formed to support redevelopment issues in the ’60s and ’70s."

By 1974, when Paul began fending off redevelopment efforts around the Tenderloin and directed the North of Market Planning Coalition, "all through that period SPUR was viewed by the community as a tool for the Chamber of Commerce," he said.

In 1976, "Urban Renewal" became "Urban Research," a move away from the tarnished term. The 1999 commemoration of SPUR’s 40th anniversary is a somewhat sanitized history that never presents the faces of the people who were displaced by the program; nor does the analysis nod significantly toward the neighborhood groups and activists who were able to mitigate the wholesale razing of the area.

That’s still a soft spot for SPUR, some say. "They’re uncomfortable with questions of class. Those questions tend to be glossed over," said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and a SPUR board member from 2000 to 2004.

Metcalf doesn’t duck the issue. "If you’re a city planner, you’ve got to meditate deeply on urban renewal, even though you didn’t do it. It’s the only time in urban history that planners were given power, and that’s what they did with it," he said.

Besides a long friendship with powerful businesses, SPUR has frequently enjoyed an intimate relationship with city hall. "They morphed in the ’80s into a good-government, good-planning group, but in fact they were really tight with the [Dianne] Feinstein administration," Elberling said. "One of the ways you got to be a city commissioner was by being a member of SPUR. Feinstein’s planning and development club was SPUR."

Mayor Feinstein’s reign is often remembered as a boom in downtown development — at least until 1985, when San Franciscans for Reasonable Growth succeeded in passing Proposition M, a measure severely limiting annual high-rise development. SPUR opposed the measure and still supports increased height and density along transit corridors in the city.

"SPUR always goes with more," Radulovich said. "Sometimes there’s a trade-off between sustainability and growth, and I don’t have much confidence they won’t go with growth."

A March SPUR report, "Framing the Future of Downtown San Francisco," is one example of a cognizance of other options, weighing the pros and cons of expanding the central business district or transforming it into a "central social district": "While office uses remain, the goal of a CSD is to create a mixed-use, livable, 24-hour downtown neighborhood." Another line in the report offers a telling look at how SPUR thinks: "Economic growth in the CSD model may be diminished as the remaining sites for office buildings become used for new residential, retail, or other non-office uses."

Retail means, in fact, economic growth. A 1985 Guardian-commissioned study of small businesses in San Francisco, "The End of the High-Rise Jobs Myth," found that most of the new jobs created in the city between 1980 and 1984 were not in the downtown office high-rises but around them. Businesses with fewer than 99 employees had generated twice as many jobs as those with more employees.

While the numbers may be different today, the concept that neighborhood-serving retail keeps a local economy healthy has only grown stronger, as has public sentiment against chain stores. Yet SPUR opposed a proposition calling for conditional-use permits for formula retail, which voters approved in 2006.

Over the years SPUR’s political record has been checkered. Though the group talks the good-government talk, it opposed propositions establishing the city’s Ethics Commission and reforming the city’s Sunshine Ordinance. According to Charley Marsteller, a founder of Common Cause and a longtime good-government advocate in San Francisco, "Common Cause supported initiatives in 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002, and 2005. SPUR opposed all of them."

This November, SPUR came out in favor of Proposition C, which calls for public hearings before measures can be placed on the ballot, but opposed Question Time for the mayor. The group gave a yes to the wi-fi policy statement and approved establishing a small-business assistance center — contrary to past stances.

SPUR isn’t afraid to defend its positions. "Those who disagree with a conclusion SPUR reaches object to us presenting our ideas as objectively true rather than as values based," Metcalf notes in the May SPUR report "Civic Planning in America," in which he surveys other similar organizations.

"And in truth, evidence and research seldom point necessarily to one single policy outcome, except when viewed through the lens of values. We want to stop sprawl. We want housing to be more affordable. We want there to be prosperity that is widely shared…. Perhaps it’s time to grow more comfortable with using this language of values," he writes.

Paul, who’s now program director for the Haas Jr. Fund and has served on the SPUR board for seven years, says the group is indeed changing. "Over the last six to eight years I’ve noticed a real shift on the board," he said. "We have really intense and interesting discussions about issues. People feel they can speak their mind."

Okamoto, a partner in the Okamoto Saijo architectural firm, thinks this is the result of a fundamental shift in planning tactics, due to a more recent and deeper comprehension of the coming environmental crises. "Global climate change is moving things. I think SPUR’s going in the same direction," he said. Okamoto joined SPUR "because I’d like to see if I could influence the organization toward sustainability. Now we have a new funded staff position for that topic."

And yet the fact remains that only 5 of the 71 board members — about 7 percent — can be described as prominent progressives. At least half are directly connected to prominent downtown business interests.

And a list of SPUR’s donors is enough to give any progressive pause. Among the 12 biggest givers in 2006 are Lennar Corp., PG&E, Wells Fargo, Westfield/Forest City Development, Bechtel, Catellus, and Webcor.

In the past 10 years SPUR’s staff has doubled, signaling a subtle shift away from relying mainly on the research and work of board members. One of the newest positions is a transportation policy director, and that job has gone to Dave Snyder, who helped revive the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition in 1991, founded Livable City, and spent seven years on SPUR’s board before taking the job.

Having occupied the new post for a year, he said, "If I left, it wouldn’t be because I didn’t like SPUR. The debates we have at the staff level are more open than I expected."

Proposition A, the November transportation reform measure, is one example of the group’s new approach. The group voted a month earlier than usual to endorse a measure that was directly in opposition to the interests of one of its biggest funders, Gap billionaire Don Fisher (the Gap is also a member of SPUR). According to Walker, when the SPUR board vetted the endorsements the number of no votes for Prop. A was in the single digits. "I was so surprised," she said.

SPUR opposed Proposition H, a pro-parking countermeasure largely funded by Fisher, and worked with progressives on the campaign.

Metcalf noted it was the ground troops who made all the difference. "We don’t have [that kind of] power, and there are other groups that do. We wrote it, but we didn’t make it win. The bike coalition and [Service Employees International Union Local 1021] did," he said.

Sup. Aaron Peskin, who brokered much of the Prop. A deal, called it a sign of change for SPUR. "They probably lost a lot of their funders over this."

Radulovich is still dubious. He jumped ship after witnessing some disconnects between the board and its members. Though SPUR asks members to check their special interests at the door, Radulovich couldn’t say that always happened and recalled an example from an endorsement meeting at which a campaign consultant made an impassioned speech for the campaign on which he was working.

As far as his board membership was concerned, Radulovich said, "there were times I definitely felt like a token…. Development interests and wealthy people were much better represented."

Some say that isn’t about to change. "SPUR has been, is, and I guess always will be the rational front for developers," said Calvin Welch, a legendary San Francisco housing activist. "The members of SPUR are real estate lawyers, professional investors, and developers. Its original function was to be the Greek chorus for urban renewal and redevelopment."

Welch and Radulovich agree SPUR doesn’t represent San Franciscans, and Welch suggests the Dec. 4 Board of Supervisors hearing on an affordable-housing charter amendment was a case in point. "The people who got up to speak, I’d argue that’s San Francisco, and it doesn’t look a fucking thing like SPUR."

SPUR recently applied for a tax-exempt bond capped at $7 million from the California Municipal Finance Authority to help pay the cost of SPUR’s new Urban Center. It’s a standard loan for a nonprofit — SPUR is both a 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) — but some neighborhood activists raised questions about whether SPUR’s project is an appropriate expense for taxpayer cash.

"There’s no city money going toward the Urban Center, but by using tax-exempt bond financing they’re depriving the US Treasury of tax revenues," Salomon said. "The people who are funding SPUR can afford to buy them a really nice building, with cash."

The Urban Center also received a $231,000 federal earmark from Rep. Nancy Pelosi, whose nephew Laurence Pelosi is a former SPUR board member. Another $967,500 will come to SPUR from the California Cultural and Historical Endowment, which voters set aside through Proposition 40 to fund projects that "provide a thread of California’s cultural and historical resources."

Metcalf said SPUR isn’t sitting on a pile of cash: "We’re not that wealthy. We just don’t have that level of funding." The group’s endowment is small, and according to its 2006 annual report, revenues were $1.8 million, 90 percent of that from memberships and special events. The annual Silver Spur Awards, at which the group celebrates the work of local individuals, from Feinstein to Walter Shorenstein to Warren Hellman, is one of the biggest cash cows for SPUR, typically netting more than half a million dollars.

So far most of the funds for the Urban Center have come from donations raised from board members, individuals, businesses, and foundations. Metcalf defends the use of public funds. "For a group like SPUR that needs to be out in front on controversial issues, our work depends on having a diverse funding base. The Urban Center is part of that," he said.

The new headquarters is modeled on similar urban centers in Paris and New York, places that invite the public to view exhibits and get involved in answering some of the bigger planning questions cities are facing as populations increase and sprawl reigns. According to SPUR, this will be the first urban center west of Chicago, and the doors should open in 2009.

Walker, who’s been a board member for about a year, isn’t ready to say SPUR has been transformed. "It’s in my bones to be skeptical of SPUR," she said. "I have a different perspective than most of the people who are on SPUR, but the membership is different from the people who are funding it. I still think we need to have a more progressive policy think tank as well."

Walker recruits for SPUR’s membership development committee and said some of her suggestions have been well received. "The reality is, the progressive community is really powerful here when we come together and work on stuff. You can’t ignore us. Rather than fight about it, SPUR is offering some middle ground."

Converting the rock

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› news@sfbg.com

Native American spiritual leader Marshall "Golden Eagle" Jack admits he was just a kid in 1969 when a group of American Indians occupied Alcatraz Island. They claimed that the island’s reclassification as surplus property following the 1963 closure of Alcatraz Prison entitled them to take possession of the iconic island.

But Jack says he knows enough people from the American Indian Movement, which began advocating for urban Indians in the late ’60s, to understand that "the people standing up for their rights back then didn’t have enough clout in the legal system" to keep the island and build an American Indian cultural center on its craggy slopes.

Instead, the island became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which is operated by the National Park Service. Today it attracts 1.5 million visitors per year, the GGNRA’s chief of public affairs, Rich Weideman, says. But having a brutal former prison as one of San Francisco’s top tourist attractions is unsettling to some.

So Jack and AIM founder Dennis Banks, Chief Avrol Looking Horse, Laynee Bluebird Woman, and Rose Mary Cambra of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe have sponsored Proposition C, a nonbinding declaration on the February 2008 ballot that would make it city policy to explore acquiring Alcatraz Island and setting up a global peace center in place of the prison.

They envision a white domed conference center, a labyrinth, a medicine wheel, and what their campaign literature calls an "array of architecturally advanced domed Artainment [sic] multimedia centers," which sounds more like a new age resort than a Native American cultural center. But Jack said the most important thing is turning the page on the island’s bleak modern history.

"My bottom line is getting the actual prison off the island," Jack explains. "There’s a lot of crystal energy, spiritually wise, on the island. It’s an icon for a lot of tribes around the Bay Area who were here way before the Europeans. A Global Peace Center idea is just an option, but if it doesn’t manifest that way, if it becomes an ecological center, fine."

Jack serves as assistant director of the Global Peace Foundation, a branch of the nonprofit San Francisco Medical Research Foundation, which Mill Valley resident Da Vid founded in the late 1970s — about the time he first had a vision of domes on Alcatraz.

"I saw them during a Celestial Healing Festival on Mt. Tam in 1978, seven years after the Indian occupation ended," says Da Vid, who says he is a medical doctor and artist — and currently serves as treasurer of the Alcatraz Conversion Project, a political action committee whose coffers contain $30,000 from Da Vid’s mother, Miriam Ornstein.

Da Vid is also the founder of the Light Party, which he describes as "a spiritual–political party using its resources to promote the Alcatraz Conversion Project in order to garner support for the construction of a Global Peace Center."

But to the San Francisco Republican Party, Prop. C represents nothing but a tax burden. "Were this proposal implemented the burden of maintaining and operating Alcatraz would shift from the federal government to San Francisco taxpayers," San Francisco Republican Party chair Christine Hughes writes in an official ballot argument against the measure, also claiming the measure’s sponsors are "an unaccountable and loosely organized nonprofit which envisions a billion dollar project administered by a local-international trust."

Yet GPF assistant director Kevin Ohnsman told the Guardian, "We feel that the Republican Party’s opposition to Prop. C is our best endorsement.

"Once acquired by the city, a portion of the considerable revenue from the ferryboats will be shared with the city," Ohnsman said. "This income will be more than sufficient to cover the minimal administrative costs for maintaining Alcatraz."

Currently ferry tickets to Alcatraz cost $16.50 each, of which about 25 percent, or $4.5 million annually, goes to the GGNRA, with the bulk of those monies covering Alcatraz’s night security and maintenance of the buildings and sewer.

According to San Francisco controller Ed Harrington, "should the proposed policy statement be approved, it would not increase the cost of government."

But that’s only because the policy statement wouldn’t do anything.

"However, should San Francisco actually work to acquire Alcatraz Island from the feds," Harrington adds, "there would be significant costs."

But Da Vid says there’s something more important at stake than money. He asks, "The bottom line is, do we want an old, decaying prison to continue to be a prominent landmark for the Bay Area or do we want to create a new Alcatraz, which will define a new emerging paradigm committed to progressive, enlightened values?"

Weideman cites Alcatraz’s landmark status and the 10,000 birds that nest on the island each spring as major hurdles in Vid’s path: "To remove the prison, which is a national historic monument, along with the Civil War–era fort beneath it, would take an act of Congress."

Bakery driver still on the lam?

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CLICK HERE FOR MORE UPDATES FROM THE CHAUNCEY BAILEY PROJECT

Since a trio of shotgun blasts killed Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey on Aug. 2, police and prosecutors have charged only one man with the crime: 20-year-old Devaunghndre Broussard, a handyman at Your Black Muslim Bakery, who is expected to be arraigned this morning.

But Oakland police records raise questions whether a second man, a 21-year-old former San Francisco resident with an extensive and violent criminal history, may have played a role in the journalist’s slaying.
That man, Antoine Mackey, who lived with Broussard and worked at the bakery, remains free. It’s unclear whether police are actively seeking to question him about possible connections to the crime.
Reached on a cell phone with an Atlanta area code earlier this week, Mackey denied any involvement in Bailey’s death.

But a bakery associate, Rigoberto Magana, told detectives that on the morning of theslaying, Mackey drove away from the bakery in a white Dodge Caravan belonging to Magana, according to handwritten police interview notes.

The vehicle in question figures prominently in the crime: Broussard later told homicide detectives he’d used the van to get to and from the scene of Bailey’s killing near 14th and Alice streets in downtown Oakland, and witnesses reported seeing a white van in the vicinity.

One witness said the gunman got in on the passenger side of an older Dodge Caravan shortly before shooting; another saw the assailant flee the crime scene in a waiting white van, police incident reports state.

When homicide detectives questioned Magana, he told them Mackey drove the van away from the bakery’s San Pablo Avenue headquarters at between 5:30 and 6 a.m., returning it to the bakery between 7:30 and 7:35 a.m. with a damaged rearview mirror. Bailey was shot at 7:25 a.m., according to police reports.

Magana, who was living at the bakery, identified Antoine Mackey immediately when shown Mackey’s photograph as the person who drove away in his van and later returned it, the police notes state.

Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV and Broussard gave police accounts of driving around the night before the killing with Mackey and also met him at the bakery immediately after the shooting and drove to the scene together, according to interview transcripts obtained by the Chauncey Bailey Project.

Broussard, who, like Mackey was raised in San Francisco, told police he shot Bailey three times because the journalist was working on stories about the bakery’s financial woes. He later recanted.

Days after Broussard’s Aug. 3 confession, Oakland police told the media their probe was ongoing and suggested Broussard likely had help. “We don’t believe he acted on his own,” Assistant Chief Howard Jordan said days after Bailey died.

Oakland Police Chief Wayne Tucker did not return telephone calls Wednesday and Thursday to answer questions about Mackey. In earlier interviews, Tucker and other officers refused to discuss him.
Officer Roland Holgren, a department spokesman, said Thursday he couldn’t answer any questions about the Bailey case.

Broussard’s defense attorney said he believes Mackey was involved in Bailey’s killing, and police may have detained him when they raided the bakery compound Aug. 3 but allowed him to go free.

Soon after, Mackey became a fugitive.

He failed to appear for a criminal hearing in San Francisco on Aug. 17, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
He disappeared, attorney LaRue Grim said this week. “We are hoping he will be picked up sometime in the future.”
Grim said he believes Mackey was involved. “He drove the van. Broussard is very reluctant to point the finger at anyone but I think he will be willing to do so at trial. If he does, he can implicate Mackey and Yusef Bey and couple of others.”

Bey, who is jailed for unrelated offenses, has denied any involvement in the slaying.
In addition to the revelations about the van, a review of police investigative documents by the Chauncey Bailey Project shows:

* In a taped jailhouse telephone conversation with a man identified only as “unc,” the man asked Broussard “what they do with Mackey?” “Mackey got out,” Broussard replied, an apparent reference to police possibly detaining Mackey and releasing him.

* Broussard told police he smoked a cigar laced with cocaine “when we were driving over there” to the corner where Bailey was ambushed. According to the transcript of the recorded portion of the interview, the homicide detective interviewing him, Sgt. Derwin Longmire, didn’t ask Broussard who he meant by “we.”

* Under questioning by Longmire, Broussard said he, Mackey and Bey IV drove past Bailey’s apartment near Lake Merritt the night before the slaying.

* Bey IV told police Mackey and Broussard drove with him to the scene of Bailey’s shooting shortly after it happened, and then went to Lake Merritt, where Bey IV claimed Broussard confessed to him he was the gunman.

* In interviews with detectives, Bey IV identified Mackey as a member of his security team.
Contacted Tuesday night, Mackey said he had nothing to do with Bailey’s shooting.

“I don’t know anything about that. I’d never even consider talking about anything like that,” he said, adding he knew Broussard, whom he described as “the dude from the Muslim bakery.”

Oakland Tribune staff writer Josh Richman and reporter Kenneth Kim of New America Media contributed to this report.

Rock on the sidelines

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Did Ian Hunter kill rock for Cleveland? Growing up in that blue-collared grime zone of fiery rivers and industrial blur, I never saw much rock rolling through my old haunt, and I never really understood what drove the former Mott the Hoople frontman to patronize us with "Cleveland Rocks" and provide my hometown with a surefire anthem for our flawed sports teams. While the city does get cited for a lot of proto-punk activity (the Electric Eels, Rocket from the Tombs), its influence on the rock world abruptly screeches to a halt there. If there’s any truth to Hunter’s rallying cry for the Mistake on the Lake, I’m pretty certain he wasn’t getting loud and snotty with the likes of the barflies and crusty punks at a Pagans show, or fostering a soft spot for the quirk-ball nerdiness of Devo, for that matter. "It’s all bollocks," as you might say, Mr. Hunter, so thanks, but no thanks.

If anything, "no one gets out of this town alive" seems like a more applicable rock slogan for this northeastern Ohio hub. While I rapped over the phone with fellow Clevelander Chris Kulcsar, the throaty lead vocalist of This Moment in Black History, that notion recurred as he discussed some of the disadvantages that come with being in a Midwestern band. For one, according to Kulcsar, there’s nothing glamorous about Cleveland, so a lot of music critics tend to ignore its scene.

"I feel like people from outside the city never take bands from Cleveland seriously," he explained from his parents’ house. "It’s so hard for bands from here to get a booking agent to be interested in you, and if you want to get beyond playing at peoples’ DIY spaces and basements — which is fine; it’s great doing that — I find it’s really tough.

"It’s killed a lot of bands from around here," Kulcsar continued, "because they’ll try and tour, and there’s nothing more demoralizing than spending six weeks playing to 10 people every night."

But Kulcsar’s not that bent out of shape: his band’s already sizable following in the underground punk community has swelled in the past year due to the release of its sophomore full-length, It Takes a Nation of Assholes to Hold Us Back (Coldsweat, 2006), and a much-acclaimed performance at this year’s South by Southwest conference.

TMIBH’s roots trace back to a housewarming party that Kulcsar threw in the fall of 2002, but its members are seasoned vets of the garage and punk scenes who have served time in such outfits as the Bassholes, the Lesbian Makers, the Chargers Street Gang, and Neon King Kong. Recorded in two 12-hour sessions at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, It Takes a Nation explodes with a raw, art-punk aggressiveness that’s both innovative and open-ended, offering an honest portrayal of the group’s run-down Middle America surroundings with lyrics that touch on alienation, humor, oppression, and rage. Guitarist Buddy Akita paws out filth-driven noise in minute-long bursts from one tune to the next, while Kulcsar frantically screams like a rabid lunatic and noodles with a detuned keyboard. The rhythm section of bassist Lawrence Daniel Caswell and drummer Lamont "Bim" Thomas thunders noisily in the background, alternating between brutal avidity and blues-driven backbone.

Though It Takes a Nation comes across as full-on garage punk, it should be viewed as more of a celebration of interracial assimilation and interaction within music, no matter what the genre. And while not all of TMIBH’s members are African American, the band explicitly emphasizes the theme throughout the recording’s 35-minute run. According to Kulcsar, TMIBH are focused on stressing the significance of black culture and its advancements in rock music.

"People forget a lot of the time that rock music is actually black music, and I think that’s important to all of us in the band, but especially to Bim and Lawrence — this idea that rock music came out of a blues and R&B tradition and now it’s just viewed in this really homogenized, white culture," he opines. "A lot of it comes from wanting to just get back to the idea that there can be black rock music or black people involved in punk."

And Kulcsar is conscious enough to step away from the role of spokesperson for black rock. "I feel like out of all the people in the band, I’m the least apt to speak about it, because sometimes I get weirded out saying I’m in a band called TMIBH and I’m a white singer," he confesses. "There’s just baggage that goes along with that I’m sometimes weighed down by…. But I guess it’s too late now." *

THIS MOMENT IN BLACK HISTORY

With the Late Young and Epic Sessions

Dec. 12, 9:30 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Sleep tight

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I am newly married and have a great, fulfilling sex life with my husband. A while ago, I told him that I’m really turned on by the thought of him rousing me out of sleep with sex. Months have passed since I told him my fantasy, and, thinking he just wasn’t interested, I recently asked him why he hadn’t tried it yet. His response was "I have, but every time I do, you mumble incoherent stuff and roll over." I’m really bummed that I don’t remember his advances, and even more bummed that my deep slumber is depriving me of potentially awesome sex! Is there anything I can do about this issue, or is this a fantasy that must remain only in the mind?

Love,

Sleepy

Dear Sleep:

I’m not sure if it’s my job to rate people’s fantasies, but hey, what the heck? Good fantasy. It just ever so gingerly starts to poke a toe into kinkier water: unconsciousness, inability to give consent, a little bit of the more wholesome sort of necrophilia — good stuff! — and yet it’s very sweet, very harmless, and very married. I give it a 9, and I’m sorry it’s been such a bust for you so far. Happily, though, you’ve hardly exhausted the possibilities. Give it here, and let’s see what we can do.

Your poor sweet husband is doing the equivalent of the would-be dom who, when the disappointed bottom complains, "You had me all tied up! You had a flogger! Why didn’t you whip me?" says, "Um, you said, ‘Please don’t!’<0x2009>" That’s why we have safe words: not so much so the top will stop as so he or she will start. The main problem, obviously, is that you have not worked out with your husband what you mean by rousing, nor have you determined just how awake you have to be in order to for him to continue his ministrations. If you’re going to push it toward my (admittedly, liberally editorialized) version above, then you hardly need be conscious at all. You’ve also apparently failed to give him explicit permission to wake you up. Which was sort of the point, wasn’t it? Your husband is simply being too considerate, and if he’s to take the role of the sort of brute who would rouse a lady from her slumbers just to satisfy his base lusts, he’d better get with the program: either he wakes you or he has his way with your somnolent self. Either way, he has to press the issue. He can’t just let you snore on! Talk about unclear on the concept. Apparently he needs express permission to pester you, so grant it and go to bed.

As I was answering this, something about it began to seem familiar, and after a while I realized I was remembering that long, deeply strange period in Alt.Sex.Column’s history (starting, I think, in 2004) when sleep sex and sleep rape simply would not go away and leave us alone. There was the guy who’d mounted his male partner in the latter’s sleep; there was the story of the woman who’d get in her car, drive to bars, and pick up strangers for sex, all in her sleep; and there was this guy who claimed he’d had accidental anal sex with his wife in her sleep and is still kind of freaking me out at several years later:

Since then I have done this again, with a growing sense of excitement. She will stir and wake up … so I always get out before she wakes. I want to do it when she’s awake but I don’t know how to tell her…. [February 2004]

He didn’t wait for my answer ("She will kill you!") before he confessed to her and then seemed a little surprised when she nearly killed him. And there was the molesting priest who had the boy sleep over repeatedly, got him drunk, took him out to bars and parties, and did who knows what to him under cover of night, then blamed it all on some sort of parasomnia. What I don’t think I ever followed up on, though, was whether those stories about sleep-driving, sleep-slutting around, and so on, were ever tied retroactively to use of Ambien and similar sleep drugs, which, it was revealed last year, can certainly have that sort of effect on the poor, hapless, really tired people who take them. If Ambien can (and it can, it can) cause people to wander down to the kitchen in the wee hours to stuff their faces, why couldn’t it make people stuff other things as well, all unawares?

None of which has anything to do with you, Nice Married Lady. You simply want to be roused by something, well, arousing. And you have every right to be, if you ask me.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Canadian astronaut

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› marke@sfbg.com

REVIEW Kids are bored. They’re hanging on the sidewalk outside a nightclub, splashed in sick amber light. Many of the usual suspects are here: the skinny postgoth chick in golden heels, the stereotypical Russian-looking muffin top trapped on a crappy date, the about-to-ralph dude in an untucked striped Oxford, some rasta hoppers, a hipster gal in rave flats and a trucker cap. Most are smoking and none look happy, except maybe the tranny-licious blond who’s about to skate the cover, glimpsed in the doorway flirting with the bouncers. She looks as fake as the rest of the scene.

I mean, what club is this? Yes, the breakdown of rigid nightlife subcultures has accelerated in recent years (no one can be only one thing in the Internet age) but these kids — part Marina, part Mission, part Oakland, part imaginary — would never traffic the same joint, let alone one that looks like a cheap storefront with Styrofoam gargoyles over the door, a tacky wrought-iron gate, and, oh yeah, a hilariously retro surveillance camera trained on them. Gross. Or paradise?

When I heard the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is displaying Vancouver-born photographer Jeff Wall’s gigantic In Front of a Nightclub (2006) as part of its retrospective of the artist’s three-decade career, my little ivory feet got tingly. Not just because I live in Clubland, but also because I trust Wall to get it right. Most club photographers have reeled back from Nan Goldin’s tear-jerking parties of grief in the ’80s to grease those spinning Warhol wheels again, dazzled by outsize personalities, druggy outfits, and pantomimed omnisexuality. But Wall’s a major artist with his own agenda, which looks so hard at the mundane, the normal, and the pointless that it often shoots right through into revelation. The humdrum apocalypse of a bad night out in a parallel universe fits perfectly. The picture is sensational.

This is a nice time for a Wall retrospective, mostly because his monumental intelligence — which ranges far beyond nightlife — provides a nifty alternative to both the tawdry macho "heroism" of the Matthew Barney–Damien Hirst–Jeff Koons art world establishment bonanzas and the current indie scene’s seemingly endless slide into infantilism and abnegation. No quilts made of dryer lint, deliberately embarrassing emotional outbursts, or snaps of naked skater chums for Wall. No scaling atria with Björk in tow either.

That doesn’t mean Wall lacks hipster cred: his first exhibited picture, 1978’s The Destroyed Room, provided the cover art and title for Sonic Youth’s 2007 collection of B-sides. But the Édouard Manet–like social commentary of Wall’s gorgeously staged scenes — a Cops-worthy outdoor argument in a run-down tract-home neighborhood, day laborers posed on a "cash corner" under flabbergasting winter skies, open-sore industrial operations in the pristine Canadian wilderness, an asshole mocking an Asian man while his girlfriend squints in the sun — and an eye that combines William Eggleston’s rough-and-tumble photographic haphazardness with the natty mannerism of ’70s photorealist painting seem revelatory, if a tad safe, in these times of numbed, numbing self-projection.

Trained in art history and drenched in way too much theory, the 60-year-old Wall works on a grand scale. His typical Cibachrome prints are several feet across, mounted on light boxes — an idea he ripped off from bus shelter advertising — and full of compositional winks at old masters and references to dense sociological notions. Much of this work heretically clings to the old-fangled notion of transcendence, that even the most mundane things, if examined closely enough, can send the metaphorical mind — the soul — soaring into space. Sure, he’s not above filling a grave in a Jewish cemetery with fluorescent pink sea urchins (Flooded Grave [1998–2000]), packing an entire basement ceiling with burned-out lightbulbs (After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue [2001]), or reimagining a platoon of slaughtered Russian soldiers in Afghanistan chatting as their innards spill out (Dead Troops Talk [1992]). Those are the kinds of blockbuster photoconceptualist images that made him famous and provide instant shivers to first-time viewers.

The real metaphysics come in Wall’s luminescent details, when he’s in hyperreal mode. He’s like a Martian poet, glossing the earthly everyday with a cosmic eeriness. In Insomnia (1994), possibly the most tweaked-out photograph ever, an empty plastic bottle of dish soap, under flickering kitchen lights, resembles a beckoning angel. A tiny octopus flopped onto a kid’s school desk, in An Octopus (1990), somehow summons all the horror in the world. Filthy linoleum roils biblically under a discarded mop in Diagonal Composition No. 3 (2000). And in Sunken Area (1996), the white vinyl siding of a trashy house morphs into abstraction, its glowing lines swooning into the room. It made me dizzy, and I had to sit down. *

JEFF WALL

Through Jan. 27, 2008

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF
Mon.–Tues. and Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; $7–<\d>$12.50 (free first Tues.)

(415) 357-4000
www.sfmoma.org

For rent sale

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› news@sfbg.com

Luz Moran, 75, fingers through a shoebox full of certified envelopes from her landlord’s attorney, squinting at the English words. She’s sitting on a red couch in the living room of her modest Mission District apartment, her feet barely touching the floor.

"This is another check he sent me, look," she mutters in Spanish, pointing out two checks amounting to $3,752.85. The money was sent along with an Ellis Act eviction notice, the first half of the $7,500 in relocation benefits city law requires be given to elderly or disabled tenants who are removed through the state law (if the tenant is not elderly or disabled, the landlord only needs to provide them with $4,500).

"I don’t know what we will do. Other apartments are expensive, and we can’t afford them," Moran says. The money is barely enough to cover moving costs and the first month’s rent at another place, she says, adding, "I don’t think this landlord is dying because of lack of money."

The eviction was not her landlord’s first attempt to move Moran, along with her 92-year-old mother and her son, from their two-bedroom apartment. In May 2006 he offered to sell them the unit for a discounted rate of $310,000, which was out of the family’s price range. Then he suggested a buyout agreement so they would leave voluntarily, but said he couldn’t offer much more than the Ellis Act’s required compensation. After the initial attempt to subdivide the building and all other negotiations failed, the landlord finally issued the eviction. He now wants to sell the units as tenancy in common apartments. But the Morans — and some other tenants in the building — are refusing to cash his checks.

"Because if we accept the money, it says that we are willing to leave here," Moran says.

The word eviction brings back bad memories for many residents of San Francisco, where the number of people thrown out of their homes numbered 2,878 in 1999. Then, at the height of the dot-com era, long-term renters were booted to make room for higher-paying tenants and out-of-towners prepared to buy six-figure homes.

But Moran’s story highlights two new additions to the renter woes that fill the San Francisco Tenants Union these days: landlord buyouts and a surge in TIC homeownership. With San Francisco’s housing prices on a seemingly perpetual upswing, it’s no wonder TIC ownership has increased twelvefold in the past decade. In 1996, 55 TIC units were sold through the San Francisco Multiple Listing Service, and in 2006 that number rose to 650, according to Realtor groups.

At first glance, it looks as if this trend should answer the prayers of middle-class families while avoiding an increase in no-fault tenant evictions. The city’s total evictions have been going down since 2001, hovering around 1,500 since 2003. But over the past five years Ellis Act petitions have slowly picked up, then petered off again, according to Rent Board data. And Ted Gullicksen, office coordinator at the Tenants Union, says these numbers don’t take into account relocation as a result of unregistered buyouts and threats, which can often lead to TIC ownership.

Each weekday at the Tenants Union dozens of renters shuffle through the doors, plop into mismatched chairs, and wait for hours to spill their complaints and legal paperwork onto the desk of a volunteer counselor.

"We’re pretty busy here at the Tenants Union," Gullicksen says on a Friday afternoon during counseling hours. "It’s pretty close to what it was during the worst of the dot-com years."

Gullicksen reports an increase in the number of threats and buyouts of tenants in the past year. He attributes that to 2006 legislation passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors prohibiting the conversion of buildings after the eviction of elderly or disabled tenants or multiple units. By avoiding putting an Ellis Act or other no-fault eviction on the record, the landlord can eventually convert the building into a condominium because its history hasn’t been tainted.

A building with no eviction history goes for more on the MLS, according to Gullicksen, which explains why landlords are willing to pay up to $60,000 for a "voluntary" tenant relocation. The private landlord-tenant agreement may be lucrative to the individuals involved, but it results in an almost undetectable loss of an affordable rental unit.

Gullicksen says it’s impossible to determine how many tenants relocate due to buyouts on a citywide level, but about 60 people seek help with one at the Tenants Union every month. Most tell a similar tale: A developer or landlord will offer between $2,000 and $60,000 to tenants to voluntarily vacate. The tenant may ask for a higher sum, and they’ll negotiate back and forth. Eventually, the tenant may be either bought out or evicted.

"It’s a game of chicken, really," Gullicksen says.

The loss of rental units at the hands of TICs or buyouts is not a small matter in a city where two-thirds of residents are renters (on the national level only 34 percent of housing units were rentals in the year 2000), and there is already a shortage of affordable housing.

US Census data show that San Francisco lost 18,474 rental-occupied housing units between 2000 and 2006. And the city isn’t doing much to plug the drain. According to the Planning Department, 13,795 new units have been built and ready for occupancy since 2000, and approximately 12,600 of those are condominiums.

Although the terms "TIC" and "condo" are often used interchangeably, they’re legally different. TICs follow a shared-homeownership model involving one deed and multiple live-in shareholders. They aren’t registered or restricted by the city, whereas condominium conversions are capped at 200 a year. Most notable is the price differential: TICs go for about $200,000 less than a median-priced condominium in San Francisco, which currently runs at $783,000, according to the San Francisco Association of Realtors.

TIC owners typically buy in hoping to raise their property’s value by eventually converting their units to condos through the city’s lottery system. Proponents call TICs one of the city’s only affordable homeownership options. Critics call them a loophole in condo conversion restriction laws.

Radhi Ahern, managing partner and broker at the TIC Group, doesn’t apologize for buyouts to make room for TICs. She acknowledges that TICs are obtained through financial negotiations with tenants.

"It’s the tenant’s choice on whether they get a buyout or don’t take a buyout. And it’s sometimes very lucrative," Ahern says from her spacious Union Street office. "I can honestly say nobody’s given me $25,000 to $50,000 to move into a place…. It’s a win-win situation."

A number of recent changes have increased TICs’ popularity, Ahern says. At first they were financially risky — with multiple people on one mortgage, everyone is affected if one defaults. But in recent years banks have taken on more responsibility through individualized loans to TIC owners. Ahern adds that there are virtually no foreclosures on TICs.

"With the advent of fractional financing, we’re going to see more and more people adopting TICs, just like co-ops were adopted in NYC," Ahern says.

In a city where about 90 percent of residents can’t afford a median-priced home, TICs are lifesavers to people like Scott Ozawa. The recently divorced 31-year-old father of two toddlers makes six figures at a dot-com but says buying into a Western Addition TIC was the only way he could own the home he wanted in San Francisco. Evictions shouldn’t be blamed on TIC owners, he says, but on the city’s faulty housing system and lack of new development.

"The lower-income and the middle-income folks are all vying for the same resources," Ozawa says. "But middle-income folks have more options that are open to them."

Meanwhile, Moran and her family plan to stay in the rent-controlled apartment she has lived in for 35 years and might have to fight an unlawful-detainer order in court this month. She says she likes her place — the neighbors all know one another, she’s close to transit, and her apartment’s thick walls offer protection from earthquakes. The family pays only $507 per month, less than one-fifth the average rate for a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, according to the Tenants Union.

In September the Morans and other tenants at their apartment held a support rally outside their building, catering it with sandwiches and juice they prepared. Four elderly female tenants lined up on the front steps, taking turns speaking to the few dozen onlookers. Moran’s upstairs neighbor took out her oxygen tube to speak into a bullhorn. Moran stood beside her, later clapping along to a guitar-strumming activist singing, "Yuppie, yuppie stole my pad! Yuppie, yuppie, bad, bad, bad." As she smiled and mouthed the words in a language she doesn’t speak, a young couple wearing bandannas and carrying what looked like art supplies exited the building next door. They glanced toward the crowd with confused, down-turned brows but didn’t break their stride as they walked off the steps in the opposite direction.

Where’s Michela?

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› news@sfbg.com

Michela Alioto-Pier, carpetbagger.

That’s what her Democratic primary challenger called her in 1996, when Alioto-Pier ran for the House of Representatives from the 1st congressional district, which hugs the California coastline from the town of Napa to the Oregon border.

Alioto-Pier, a San Francisco native, had spent the previous two and a half years at the White House advising Al Gore on telecommunications issues. After returning to the West Coast, the ambitious 26-year-old packed up her belongings and moved to St. Helena in Napa County, buying a home there in November 1995 and registering to vote the following month.

Her opponent, Monica Marvin, promptly attacked with a commercial showing a moving van heading across the Golden Gate Bridge alongside a photo of Alioto-Pier and a voice-over condemning outside candidates.

"I think the perception was that someone who’d lived most of her life in the district had a more comprehensive grasp of the issues and the culture reflected by those constituents," Marvin told the Guardian recently.

Alioto-Pier nonetheless won the primary, but she narrowly lost the general election to a Republican incumbent named Frank Riggs. He too assailed her for moving to the district just before the race.

More than a decade later, District 2 supervisor Alioto-Pier hasn’t managed to escape accusations that she’s detached from her constituents, nor has she succeeded in clearly reestablishing residency here since beginning a new political career at San Francisco’s City Hall.

THE SECOND-HOME STORY


Alioto-Pier is registered to vote at a Vallejo Street condo that she bought in 2005 for $1.9 million, and she told us that she, husband Thomas Paul Pier, and their three children make it their primary residence.

"Depending on the time of year, we spend some weekends at our St. Helena house, which is on the same street as Congresswoman [Nancy] Pelosi’s St. Helena house," she said in a written response to our questions.

An Alioto-Pier office assistant, Gene Eplett, left a voice message with the Guardian insisting that second homes are commonplace. "You probably have one as well," Eplett said.

Not exactly. Particularly not one with a taxable value of $774,793.

And in some legal documents, Alioto-Pier lists the Napa County house as her residence.

In August the supervisor formed a limited liability company for the purpose of "wine production" with Pier, called Alioto-Pier Vineyards, according to state business registration records. Both listed their home address as the three-bedroom, two-bath St. Helena home on Zinfandel Lane. Alioto-Pier paid $590,000 for the place, which sits on 2.6 acres of world-famous Napa County soil.

Within days of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s appointing her to the Board of Supervisors in January 2004, she signed a deed of trust for a $100,000 equity line of credit, again listing the Zinfandel Lane property as her home address, according to Napa County records.

In early May 2003, not long before she joined the board, former mayor Willie Brown tapped her to sit on the powerful San Francisco Port Commission. That same week she reregistered another wine-making business in Napa County she’d founded years before called Alioto Cellars, a.k.a. Alioto Winery. In the area of the original form asking for a residence, she began to list the St. Helena property but thought better of it, crossing it out and replacing it with a San Francisco address on Jackson Street that she appears to have used for at least two years, according to Napa County records.

In response to questions regarding the business registration records for Alioto-Pier Vineyards, the supervisor said neither she nor her husband signed the form and that it was filled out by their attorney.

"Alioto-Pier Vineyards LLC is a small wine producing business (approximately 250 cases per year) whose business address is more suitable to where our vineyard (approximately one acre) is located — at our St. Helena property," she wrote.

The form asks for the addresses of the company’s managers separate from the location of the principal executive office. For both Alioto-Pier and her husband, Zinfandel Lane is given as the home address.

DISTRICT ISSUES


As a supervisor, Alioto-Pier has exhibited savvy on emergency preparedness, mothers in the workplace, energy use, and the threatened demise of St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission, which treats primarily low-income patients.

Mick Suverkrubbe, president of the Marina Merchants Association, said the supervisor always has a presence at the group’s meetings.

"If she doesn’t show up, one of her aides shows up," Suverkrubbe said. "She’s always been real responsive when we’ve had questions."

But some critics say Alioto-Pier appears all too willing to take direction from the Mayor’s Office, well-financed business interests, and Democratic party functionaries rather than independently arriving at positions.

"She’s like the windup doll," said one City Hall insider who asked not to be named. "It’s fair to say every time I see Sean Elsbernd [her board ally] make a decision, I know that it’s coming from a policy perspective, not someone yanking his chain. It’s the exception, not the rule, that she comes up with her own policy perspective."

"She has three more years, and hopefully they’ll be better," Bill Barnes, an aide to Assemblymember Fiona Ma who formerly worked for Sup. Chris Daly, said of Alioto-Pier’s current board term. "The point of district elections is that supervisors respond to their neighborhood. The values and concerns in District 2 are going to be more moderate and conservative than some other areas, but you still have to provide that basic level of service."

ATTENDANCE PROBLEMS


Alioto-Pier’s attendance record has also caused her trouble and made her an easy target for political adversaries.

"I see her here on Tuesday afternoons," when the board meets, one City Hall staffer said. "She probably spends a full day here when she has a committee hearing with an item. Beyond that, her office is routinely shut on Fridays."

Alioto-Pier missed 17 of 160 board and committee meetings in 2004 and 2005 — that’s only about 10 percent. But throughout her tenure as a supervisor, she’s attended barely half of the meetings of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, where each of the supervisors automatically serves as a director, according to an analysis of the $100 payments the members receive for attending meetings.

"I missed Transportation Authority meetings related to the birth of my third child and the complications of that pregnancy," Alioto-Pier told us.

Alioto-Pier noted, as did others at City Hall, that she had health problems in 2006. She was pregnant with her third child, and there were complications. Further, she said, supervisors don’t get time off for maternity.

"All city employees with the exception of members of the Board of Supervisors are allowed to take a four-month maternity leave. I was the first member of the board in the history of San Francisco to give birth while in office. As such, there were no guidelines in place, and I had to place the health and safety of my newborn first," she said.

But for many months in 2004 and 2005, before that pregnancy, she missed all or almost all of the Transportation Authority meetings.

She also missed 16 of 20 scheduled meetings, including three public hearings, during the short time in 2004 that she spent as a director for the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District.

Alioto-Pier left the district before her term was set to expire after serving only six months, complaining that she didn’t have enough time for the position. In her resignation letter, she acknowledged that the bridge was adjacent to her district and "given my ongoing commitment to improving waterfront security in San Francisco, I hope in the future I will once again be able to work with you and serve as a director." She never has, but four other supervisors have served on the district’s board for years.

And she’s apparently not too busy to be running a winery in St. Helena. It’s a modest operation, but it has to take some of her time.

WHERE DOES SHE VOTE?


Alioto-Pier’s voter registration history is confusing.

She doesn’t appear to have voted at all in the November 1999 election — at least not in Napa or San Francisco counties — but, curiously, she did vote in that year’s December runoff, when Willie Brown won a second term over Sup. Tom Ammiano.

She cast a ballot as an absentee in Napa County one year later, even though she was registered at that time to vote in San Francisco under the name Michela Angelina Alioto-Pier, public records show. She voted here in November 1998 with the last name Alioto-Pier, but she didn’t marry her lawyer husband until May 2000, county records show.

In 2002 she voted in San Francisco during the primary and general elections under the name Michela Angelina Driscol Alioto, yet she was still registered concurrently under the name Michela Angelina Alioto-Pier.

Alioto-Pier said that she and her husband returned to St. Helena in July 2000 but moved back here in early 2001, reregistering in both places. She added that San Francisco and Napa counties were at that time slow to remove "deadwood" registrations from their rolls.

"Clearly, once one reregisters, the county has the obligation to cancel all previous registrations for that person," she said. Alioto-Pier insisted that she voted in San Francisco’s November 1999 election, but an office attendant at the Department of Elections asserted that the system "says she was eligible but she did not vote."

Her 1996 Republican opponent, Riggs, also castigated her for failing to vote in 1994 and 1995. Alioto-Pier’s explanation, according to press accounts? Her permanent residency wasn’t clear.

"As best as I can recall from the events of a decade ago, I responded to Republican Frank Riggs by saying there was a mix-up with my absentee ballots," Alioto-Pier told us.

She’s listed a string of San Francisco addresses in public records over the past two decades in addition to her St. Helena dwelling. But in 2005 she finally bought the condo on Vallejo Street in San Francisco. She didn’t file for a homeowner’s exemption on the condo in 2006, but neither has she taken advantage of the tax break on her Zinfandel Lane home during any year since 1997, according to property records.

Alioto-Pier said she was unaware of qualifying for the homeowner’s tax exemption. "However, we declare as a deduction the mortgage interest from our Vallejo Street home on our federal tax returns," she said. Taxpayers are permitted to benefit from the deduction on a second residence.

Whispers at City Hall surrounding the time Alioto-Pier spends in St. Helena and away from her District 2 constituents have dogged her increasingly since she replaced Newsom.

But she’s never faced the punishing regimen of banner headlines endured by District 4’s onetime supervisor Ed Jew. He’s also been suspended by the mayor and faces civil charges that he lied to voters about living permanently in the district he was elected to represent.

Alioto-Pier offered a few telling words in a recent robocall to San Francisco voters opposing mandated appearances by the mayor before the Board of Supervisors: "We need to get our house in order before we invite any guests."

Now, which house would that be?

You’re getting warmer

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>>CLICK HERE FOR OUR SPECIAL GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT

› news@sfb.com

I remember so well the final morning hours of the Kyoto conference. The negotiations had gone on long past their scheduled evening close, and the convention center management was frantic — a trade show for children’s clothing was about to begin, and every corner of the vast hall was still littered with the carcasses of the sleeping diplomats who had gathered in Japan to draw up the first global treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But when word finally came that an agreement had been reached, people roused themselves with real enthusiasm — lots of backslapping and hugs.

A long decade after the first powerful warnings had sounded, it seemed that humans were finally rising to the greatest challenge we’d ever faced.

The only long face in the hall belonged to William O’Keefe, chairman of the Global Climate Coalition, otherwise known as the American coal, oil, and car lobby. He’d spent the week coordinating the resistance, working with Arab delegates and Russian industrialists to sabotage the emerging plan. And he’d failed. "It’s in free fall now," he said, stricken. But then he straightened his shoulders and said, "I can’t wait to get back to Washington, where we can get things under control."

I thought he was whistling past the graveyard. In fact, he knew far better than the rest of us what the future would hold. He knew it would be at least another decade before anything changed.

TEN YEARS WARMER


The important physical-world reality to remember about the 10 years after Kyoto is that they included the warmest years on record. All of the warmest years on record.

In that span of time we’ve come to understand that not only is the globe warming but we’d also dramatically underestimated the speed and the amount of that warming. By now the data from the planet outstrips the scientific predictions on an almost daily basis. Earlier this fall, for instance, the seasonal Arctic sea ice melt beat the old record — by mid-August. Then the ice kept melting for six more weeks, losing an area the size of California every week.

"Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts," the headline in the New York Times reported. And the scientists were shaken by rapid changes in tundra permafrost systems, not to mention rainforest systems, temperate soil carbon-sequestration systems, and oceanic acidity systems.

Planetary climate change has gone from being a problem for our children to a problem for right about now, as evidenced by, oh, Hurricane Katrina, California wildfires, and epic droughts in the Southeast and Southwest. And that’s just in the continental United States. Go to Australia sometime: it’s gotten so dry there that native Aussie Rupert Murdoch recently announced his News Corp. empire is going carbon neutral.

The important political-world reality to remember about the 10 years after Kyoto is that we haven’t done anything.

Oh, we’ve passed all kinds of interesting state and local laws, wonderful experiments that have begun to show just how much progress is possible. But in Washington DC, nothing. No laws at all. Until last year, when the GOP surrendered control of Congress, even the hearings were a joke, with "witnesses" like novelist Michael Crichton.

And as a result, our emissions have continued to increase. Worse, we’ve made not the slightest attempt to shift China and India away from using coal. Instead of making an all-out effort to provide the resources for them to go renewable, we’ve stood quietly by and watched from the sidelines as their energy trajectories shot out of control: these days the Chinese are opening a new coal-fired plant every week. History will regard even the horror in Iraq as just another predictable folly compared to this novel burst of irresponsibility.

A HINT OF A MOVEMENT


If you’re looking for good news, there is some.

For one thing, we understand the technologies and the changes in habit that can help. The past 10 years have seen the advent of hybrid cars and the widespread use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Wind power has been the fastest-growing source of electricity generation throughout the period. Japan and Germany have pioneered, with great success, a subsidy scheme required to put millions of solar panels on rooftops.

Even more important, a real movement has begun to emerge in this country. It began with Katrina, which opened eyes. Then Al Gore gave those eyes something to look at: his movie made millions realize just what a pickle we are in. Many of those millions, in turn, became political activists.

Earlier this year six college students and I launched stepitup07.org, which has organized almost 2,000 demonstrations in all 50 states. Last month the student climate movement drew 7,000 hardworking kids from campuses all over the country for a huge conference. We’ve launched a new grassroots coalition, 1sky.org, that will push Congress and the big Washington environmental groups.

All of this work has tilted public opinion — new polls have energy and climate change showing up high on the list of issues that voters care about, which in turn has made the candidates take notice. All of the Democrats are saying more or less the right things, though none of them, save John Edwards, is saying them with much volume.

THE RACE OF ALL TIME


Now it’s a numbers game. Can we turn that political energy into change fast enough to matter?

On the domestic front the numbers look like this: we’ve got to commit to reductions in carbon emissions of 80 percent by 2050, and we’ve got to get those cuts under way quickly and reduce emissions by 10 percent in the next few years. The marketplace will help — if we send it the message that carbon carries a cost. But only government can do that.

Two more numbers we’re pushing for: zero, which is how many new coal-fired power plants we can afford to open in the US, and five million, which is how many green jobs Congress needs to provide for the country’s low-skilled workers. All that insulation isn’t going to stuff itself inside our walls, and those solar panels won’t crawl up to the rooftops by themselves. We can’t send the work to China, and we can’t do it with the click of a mouse; this is the last big chance to build an economy that works for most of us.

Internationally, the task is even steeper. The Kyoto Accord, which we ignored, expires in a couple of years. Negotiations begin this month in Bali, Indonesia, to strike a new deal, and it’s likely to be the last bite at the apple we’ll get — if we miss this chance, the climate is likely to spiral out of control. We have a number here too: 450, as in parts per million of carbon dioxide. It’s the absolute upper limit on what we can pour into the atmosphere, and it will take a heroic effort to keep from exceeding it.

This is a big change — even 10 years ago, we thought the safe limit might be 550. But the data is clear: the Earth is far more finely balanced than we thought and our peril much greater. Our foremost climate scientist, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s James Hansen, testified under oath in a courtroom last year that if we don’t stop short of that 450 redline, we could see the sea level rise 20 feet before the century is out. That’s civilization challenging. That’s a carbon summer to match any nuclear winter anyone ever dreamed about.

It’s a test, a kind of final exam for our political, economic, and spiritual systems. And it’s a fair test — nothing vague or fuzzy about it. Chemistry and physics don’t bargain. They don’t compromise. They don’t meet us halfway. We’ll do it or we won’t. And 10 years from now we’ll know which path we chose.

Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, is an author and environmentalist who frequently writes about global warming. McKibben’s essay was commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Approximately 50 AAN member papers will be publishing the essay this week.

Art and History vie for Presidio spot

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History museum proposed by Presidio Historical Association

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Art museum proposed by Don Fisher

Last night at the Officer’s Club about 200 Marina residents gushed over Gap-founder Don Fisher’s plan to put a 100,000 square foot museum in the Presidio to house his art collection. For the most part they gave a demur nod to the Presidio Historical Association’s alternate proposal for a history museum. The two museums are vying for the same slice of real estate at the head of the Main Parade Ground, facing north toward the Bay where a bowling alley and tennis courts are currently located.

The historical association made a case for the site as a place where the history they’d be presenting actually went down, and said the grounds surrounding the museum would be a part of the museum itself. “The Main Post area is the most historically sensitive area,” said Gary Widman of the Historical Association. “It’s where San Francisco really started 1n 1776 and it’s an area that has buildings from almost every major period since that time.”

The only historical connection Mr. Fisher could come up with was the original plan for the Main Parade Ground, which called for a significant building at its head to anchor the site. He was firm in saying he could think of no other possible place for his museum. “This is the only location that works for us,” he said. “Nothing like that is available anywhere else in the Presidio.” In fact, he said he was planning on gifting his art to some other, already established museums until he was approached by the Presidio Trust, which suggested he consider building his own museum in the park instead.

Before the two plans were presented, Mayor Newsom offered some very diplomatic remarks suggesting a great compromise. “These don’t have to be competing projects,” he said, adding that he’d appointed a staff member (Kyri McClellan, 554-6123) to this project. “My office wants to participate in this process from the beginning.”

The plans agreed on one issue — parking would go underground. After that, they differ radically.

Modern art infiltrates Presidio

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This is what happens when you privatize a public asset. It’s hard to imagine that the spirit of the Presidio Trust Act would have allowed for this kind of new construction in a National Park, where the emphasis is supposed to be the preservation of the natural environment and historic uses of the 1,491 acres. Where does contemporary art owned by Gap founder Don Fisher fit into that mandate?

This new structure, to house Fisher’s private art collection, is slated for the Main Post, the historic parade ground of the old army base, where several stately brick buildings now sit empty. The Trust Act, under section104(c) does state that new construction in the park should be “limited to replacement of existing structures of similar size in existing areas of development.” Nothing on shoebox aesthetics there, and this new museum doesn’t offer a way to rehabilitate the aging structures that would surround it, which is part of the Trust’s Management Plan.

A meeting will be held tonight, 6:30 at the Officer’s Club in the Presidio, to discuss the Fishers’ proposal and a competing plan for a history museum from the Presidio Historical Association. At least their proposal actually has something to do with the park.

Mission to Caracas

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Chavez snubs IAPA journalists in Venezuela

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Scroll down for the IAPA press release in English and Spanish on its free press mission to Venezuela)

It was an amusing and telling moment in the history of freedom of the press:

I serve on the executive committee of the Inter American Press Association, and arrived in Venezuela on Nov. 17 as part of a mission to check on President Hugo Chávez’s accelerating crackdown on the news media. Chávez had a message waiting for our delegation.

It was a half-page advertisement from the Venezuelan National Assembly, in the big morning Caracas daily paper El Universal, reprinting a copy of a congressional resolution urging the executive branch to declare the IAPA non grata (not welcome) in Venezuela. (Scroll down to see a copy of the ad.)

That set the tone for our mission: The sponsor of the resolution refused to meet with the IAPA’s delegation. In fact, no member of the three branches of the Venezuelan government or the National Electoral Council was willing to meet with the IAPA.

However, Chávez, who was plastered all over the papers and television for his trip to Iran and France, did send us a Chavista group called Journalists for the Truth.

The president of the group told the IAPA mission that there was complete freedom of the press in Venezuela, then promptly went outside the room and told the waiting press that the IAPA had been “duped in good faith by the reports prepared by the ‘opposition’ Venezuela press.”

Gonzalo Marroquín, chairperson of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, immediately retorted to the press that “it would seem that the journalists were at another meeting.”

In fact, the IAPA expressed “deep concern at the instability of press freedom in general and warned of the limited debate and public awareness surrounding planned constitutional reform and called on authorities to create an appropriate framework of guarantees and transparency for the Dec. 2 referendum,” according to its press release on its findings.

Earl Maucker, who led the mission as the IAPA’s president and editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., noted in a press conference that “the government’s unwillingness to talk about issues of press freedom and free speech, so essential to a democratic society, strengthens our belief that there is no real climate of respect, or the tolerance and political will to hold an open and comprehensive dialogue at a time when a major constitutional revision is under way.”

The mission met with members of the Venezuelan Press Bloc, a constitutional attorney, representatives of a human rights group, polling experts, the mayor of Chacao, the head of the National Press Workers Union, and other knowledgeable civilians. The mission and its final press conference were widely covered in the Venezuelan print and broadcast press. Marroquín, director of Diario Prensa Libre in Guatemala and a former television newscaster, was most eloquent in debating the IAPA’s findings on the government radio and television stations.

There were no violent incidents and no attempts to intimidate nor demonstrate against the IAPA mission. However, Chavez has made it difficult, if not impossible, for IAPA to hold its scheduled assembly next March in IAPA. Three different hotels in three different cities offered to host the convention, then mysteriously canceled their invitations.
Suddenly, two hotels said they did not have enough rooms, the third said it had it had rooms but could not provide meeting facilities. Even the J.W. Marriott Hotel that our mission was staying in asked us to hold our meetings and press conference in a nearby hotel.

Interestingly, after I posted a report on my blog, a self-described Venezuelan named Palomudo offered a comment describing the IAPA as a club of rich media owners.

“Look who owns the media in the USA and ask yourself what they did to convince you of their lies,” Palomudo wrote, echoing the Chávez line. “Remember Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction? … The media is your worse [sic] enemy and people like Bruce B. Brugmann are nothing more than media mercenaries pay [sic] to lie!!!”

Quite a statement, considering the Guardian is one of the strongest critics in the nation of media concentration and has consistently written about and criticized the mainstream media’s misreporting on Iraq. As an independent paper with a left-liberal approach, we’d be open to supporting some of Chávez’s economic policies of fighting multinational oil companies and redistributing wealth.

But we also believe that all governments — left, right, center, and otherwise — need a free and vigorous press and unfettered public debate. As long as Chávez refuses to accept those essential conditions, we happily stand with the non grata editors and publishers in the IAPA, and the courageous editors, publishers, media, students, and everyone else fighting Chavez for press freedom in Venezuela. B3

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IAPA Deputy Director RicardoTrotti and IAPA President Earl Maucker touch up the press release on deadline shortly before the IAPA press conference on Tuesday, Nov. 20th.

Click here for IAPA press release (English version).
Click here for IAPA press release (Spanish version).
Click here to view El National ad.

Eyes on the prize

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"One thing about Chicago — it’s a no-bullshit city," Elia Einhorn, the maestro behind the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, explains. "It’s a blue-collar, working-class city. There’s no pretension here." We’re sitting in the band’s de facto office — a corner booth at the absolutely unpretentious Pick Me Up Café in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood — where Einhorn and bandmate Ethan Adelsman have taken it upon themselves to school this recent San Francisco transplant in the ways of the local music scene.

To say they’re worthy teachers is an understatement. The group’s self-released 2003 debut, I Bet You Say That to All the Boys, topped many a best-of list that year, won the praise of local critics, and garnered heaps of music industry attention. The album led to shared billings with marquee artists like the Arcade Fire, the Violent Femmes, Spoon, and even San Francisco’s Dave Eggers. The obligatory television soundtrack spots followed, with salivating record execs not far behind. Eschewing major labels for its friendly neighborhood indie, Bloodshot, the band continued on its unpretentious way.

Originally recording more than 30 songs for its first Bloodshot full-length, the chamber-punk syndicate ended up with all of nine tracks. But even at a paltry 26 minutes, the album is the most complete I’ve heard in years. Steeped in Chicago’s "no bullshit" tradition, Einhorn’s songwriting is all substance. "Most records today are two or three good songs and then filler," the Wales-born songsmith says. "I could put out a double-disc record of fine songs, but fine can be the enemy of the best."

There’s no mistaking anything on this album for filler. Opening track "Aspidistra" tumbles with the frenetic energy you’d expect from a song propelled by three guitars. Recounting Einhorn’s history of drug addiction, the lyrical meat offers sinister contrast to the upbeat instrumentation. "Then and Not a Moment Before" showcases a similar dichotomy: long-overdue words fired at an absentee father are delivered over exhilarating major chords. Confusing, cathartic, and bordering on musical brilliance — it’s clear Einhorn’s understanding of songwriting forms, paired with his hard-won wisdom, presents a force to be reckoned with.

Employing the impossibly lonely voice of cellist Ellen O’Hayer, "In Hospital" delivers a gut-twisting account of coping with the death of a loved one. O’Hayer — who moonlights in Bright Eyes — also lends that sad and wispy voice to the sparse "Broken Front Teeth." Built from snapshots of Einhorn’s drug-addled past, the tune ends with the line "I knew I was done" but offers no closure. This honesty runs throughout the recording. "Most situations in life aren’t just resolved," Einhorn says. "It’s about recognizing the sadness. I’m putting it out there to say, ‘Look, here’s the confusion we’re dealing with. Here’s recognition that we’re all going through this together.’"

As far as uniting the masses goes, the sweeping anthem "Everything You Paid For" does this better than any song I’ve heard in years. Flanked by the disparate voices of the rest of the Choir, O’Hayer traverses the insecurities burgeoning inside the human condition in Einhorn’s ever-poignant narratives.

Fearlessly navigating a world beyond rock-ready love songs, the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir aren’t afraid to pluck at frayed and forgotten nerves. Such subjects as parental abandonment, gender identity, and mental illness aren’t your typical pop fodder. "People don’t want to hear songs about people you love dying," Einhorn says. "They don’t want to hear songs about having a crush on the same gender." Chalk it up to that no-bullshit ethos, but finally, here’s a band that’s working with something real. "If we ever go mainstream, it’s by pure luck," Einhorn adds before our waiter, eyeing the untouched food on the table, comes over to scold him, "Eat now. Interview later."

Obediently diving into his lunch, Einhorn can’t help but crack a smile: "See? There’s Chicago for you. Priorities in the right place." *

THE SCOTLAND YARD GOSPEL CHOIR

With Reduced to Ruin

Sun/2, 9 p.m., $7

Make-Out Room

3225 22nd St., SF

(415) 647-2888

www.makeoutroom.com

Eaux d’Anger

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Whither Kenneth Anger? Has his signature hot temper withered into kind, grandfatherly wisdom? If the commentary tracks of the marvelous Films of Kenneth Anger Volume One and Films of Kenneth Anger Volume Two (Fantoma) are to be trusted, this is the case. But one can’t be faulted for suspecting that Anger has consciously decided to favor restraint over verbal fireworks when discussing his films. "There will always be mysteries," he decrees near the end of the second disc’s last moments, just after pointing out smoke from Lucifer Rising‘s burning script in one of the 1981 version’s final shots, a lingering, distant gaze at colossi in upper Egypt.

To say that the DVD issuing of Anger’s films has been long awaited would be an understatement. As months gave way to years, grumbles about what might be slowing or even permanently preventing the process mixed with a chorus of hopes regarding the film restoration efforts of Ross Lipman and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Now that the restorations have been screened and the DVDs released, it’s time to rain praise on Lipman. Not only has he directed his and UCLA’s attention toward Anger and Charles Burnett — two filmmakers whose non-Hollywood artistry would have deteriorated and vanished otherwise — he’s delivered superb restorations that will change the way you see classic works. Both Anger collections deserve a place next to the just-released Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection (New Yorker Video/Milestone Cinematheque) as one of this year’s most vital and rewarding DVD collections.

The Anger DVDs seem ordered according to a masculine-feminine divide, with volume one showcasing Hollywood and European pageantry, and volume two gravitating toward motorcycle machismo, rock ‘n’ roll, and the occult. One thing that becomes clear on watching both is that the films that benefit most from restoration aren’t necessarily Anger’s best known or most canonical. In volume one, 1953’s Eaux d’Artifice truly seems born anew: what was once black and blurred now pulses with distinct energy. I once saw Anger berate a projectionist immediately after the movie was screened; at the time it seemed like a peevish diva display, but now I realize what the projectionist (working with an old print) was up against and why Anger was enraged by the overly dim images that had just been projected. By shooting in sunlight on black-and-white film with a red filter, he created a unique, electric blue nighttime hue.

If it were merely crude, Eaux d’Artifice would be the ultimate water-sports fantasy, culminating in perhaps the longest and most gorgeous money shot in the history of film. (After using a totem as a hard-on in 1947’s Fireworks, Anger rendered sexuality through playful metaphor or the more direct hint of nude eroticism.) Simply put, it’s resplendent: in an extended pure-light-and-dark passage that echoes a hand-marked moment in Fireworks, Anger almost allows nature to do the drawing. The streams of water from the baroque fountains of Tivoli Gardens are Anger’s chief material, creating an effect that’s a more dynamic femme foreshadowing or Euroecho of Jackson Pollock’s action painting.

They run hot, then cold, then hot again, but jewel-like strings or streams continuously run and spill through Anger’s films, from the slo-mo-homo(genized) milky money shots of Fireworks — in which fire also blazes next to the reflective surface of water — to the beaded dresses of 1949’s Puce Moment, through Eaux d’Artifice, to the snakelike lava flows and volcanic eruptions of Lucifer Rising. This love of ornamentation in motion might reach a hallucinogenic delirium in 1954’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, in which Samson de Brier literally swallows a series of jewels. While 1964’s Scorpio Rising is partly renowned for its subliminal qualities, trances invoked via overt repetition are another Anger motif, most at the fore in the lunar views of Rabbit’s Moon (1950–71; 1979) and the solar worship of Lucifer Rising.

Fantasma’s volumes of Anger’s films may not expose their mysteries or hocus-pocus, but the DVDs further reveal Anger’s impact on equally iconic but less experimental directors. That Martin Scorsese and David Lynch drew from Anger’s pop soundtracking is obvious — but one could also argue that the all-American family-room surrealism at the climax of Fireworks predates the Christmas tree rampage at the start of John Waters’s Female Trouble. Influence runs both ways, of course, and Aleister Crowley’s on Anger is also apparent, thanks to the presence of Anger’s 2002 slide show appreciation of Crowley’s frankly lousy paintings and drawings, The Man We Want to Hang, in volume two. The same wild eyes and crazed gazes that Crowley loved to draw dominate some of acolyte Anger’s far superior films, Inauguration and Invocation in particular.

Anger’s DVD commentary shares next to nothing about his soundtrack choices or his interpersonal dynamics with the many men who have stepped before his camera lens. But he does utter select camp trivia, witty anecdotes, and even symbolic explanations without giving away magic tricks. He repeatedly praises his interior designer grandmother, whom he considers a sorceress. He says Louise Brooks told him Eaux d’Artifice was his sexiest film, and that the film’s midget protagonist was discovered by Federico Fellini. He gossips that the star of his Puce Moment was a mistress of Lázaro Cárdenas, claims that Inauguration star de Brier "was rumored to be the bastard son of the King of Romania," says Invocation actor Sir Francis Rose is the in-joke inspiration behind a certain famous Gertrude Stein line, and notes with a tinge of irritation that Jimmy Page outbid him at a Sotheby’s auction of Crowley paintings. "Cameron thought she was a witch, and I’m in agreement with that idea," Anger says about the late painter-poet whose flame-haired appearance is the most vibrant of all of Inauguration‘s many grand entrances.

Only Lucifer Rising star Marianne Faithfull seems capable of sparking some off-the-cuff impish remarks from the cozy incarnation of Anger who recorded commentary for Fantoma’s DVDs. During a travel guide’s discussion of Lucifer Rising‘s journey through Icelandic, Egyptian, and Germanic Black Forest sites, Anger takes the time to softly but repeatedly chide Faithfull — perhaps because she mocks him in her autobiography? According to Anger, the mosquitoes of Egypt loved to bite Faithfull’s "tender inner thighs." But that tidbit is nothing in comparison with an anecdote he shares about her disguising heroin as face powder in order to smuggle it into Egypt. Whether this is true or false, it’s impossible not to laugh out loud when Anger states that, had this ploy been revealed, he and Faithfull would have faced a fate far different than — though just as dramatic as — the stories they’ve gone on to live: death by firing squad.

Homocision follow-up

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

You want to talk about homophobia! That’s cool. So do I, especially if it means we don’t have to talk about circumcision, which — really, honestly, wow. People, some perspective here. I was watching Delicatessen the other night — you know, the surreal French horror-comedy about the landlord–cum–deli owner who keeps his meat locker stocked the same way Mrs. Lovett got her mince for pies in Sweeney Todd, my all-time favorite piece of musical theater? So I was watching that, and as the evil proprietor advanced on Granny with his cleaver, I suddenly remembered that at least one of you had called me a butcher, of all things, over the circumcision issue. If I weren’t laughing so hard at the image of my husband, myself, and the sweet, rather distracted gray-bearded mohel in his greasy black hat advancing on our helpless babe with a gleaming cleaver, I might’ve been offended. Another reader suggested that we did it to appease a magical being in the sky. I will have you know, sir, that I don’t believe in an MBITS any more than you believe in my (and my partner’s) ability to make a good decision for our kid. We did it, more or less, for tradition’s sake and to help our son connect with his ancestry, and to keep him from being burdened with the only foreskin at Jew Camp when he gets there. And that’s enough of that. Here are some recent responses to the homophobia columns:

I believe homophobia is rooted in some baser instincts among animals — as you said, we are wired to notice differences. We then perceive (or install) hierarchy as a self-esteem mechanism and — even more primordially — as a method of establishing some basis of feeling superiority as a potential mate. As animals we seek, by instinct, someone to feel we are superior to, so we can enhance our perception of our viability among competitors. The next step is to communicate that notion to potential mates and competitors. From that gesture we create culture in our tribes. Although today we love to believe that (for example) sending an e-mail to a writer proves our sophistication, it has not been that long since we were clubbing one another over the head for food.

Yeah, sorta, maybe. Although I’m convinced that human culture is founded on both our need and our capacity to tell us from them (what do you think circumcision was for, anyway? Isn’t it just a primal version of "shirts versus skins?") for both good and, increasingly, ill, there’s really nothing in it for a male animal who gets all puffed up and furious over the mere existence of another male who presents no threat. What a waste of energy. I’m not quite seeing homophobia as a mating strategy. But that was interesting, so thanks. Next we have:

My theory is that it is all about warfare — does that sound crazy? Let me explain. Long ago, there were probably different peoples at war with each other. One of them needed to demonize the other in some way, as warring parties do. Perhaps one of the cultures was strictly heterosexual and the other not. Thus, the hetero rulers locked onto homosexuality as something to demonize. The winner of the war appears to have been the hetero side, which perhaps explains the heavy homophobia throughout history. A stronger war-related reason might be the necessity of military secrecy. Without the serious taboo, there would be spies literally sucking the military secrets out of people (pun intended). It may also have been a smart political tactic of the rulers. I am going to assume that people who think independently are more likely to deviate from sexual norms. Those independent thinkers are most likely the biggest threat to a controlling, ruling entity. What better way to isolate these troublemakers than with sexual taboos?

Not a chance in hell, but thanks for writing! Have you ever heard of Occam’s razor?

More seriously, there are dozens of theories attempting to explain homophobia (or, more accurately, heterosexism), most of which make more sense than the above but none of which will ever be definitive, because different people hate for different reasons and because some pervasive human beliefs are so old that they have been lost in prehistory. Basically, though, the answer’s going to be a mixture of societal discomfort with sexuality in general (heterosexual intercourse excepted, what with the carrying on of the species thing), sexism, and the need to keep categories neat and distinctions distinct. I don’t think it’s hard to understand where homophobia might come from. It’s why we can’t make it go back there that’s bothering me.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Graf legend

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On Aug. 15, on what would have been the late Mike "DREAM" Francisco’s 38th birthday, his old-school graffiti pal SPIE ONE honored his slain partner in the best way he knew how: by creating new street art, on 24th Street between Capp and Lilac in the Mission.

But it’s not just on anniversaries when SPIE thinks about DREAM, the widely respected Bay Area graffiti artist who was gunned down in the East Bay in 2000. "I think about DREAM every day. A lot of us do. It keeps me going sometimes. He was a positive spirit," SPIE said in mid-November. "And it’s pretty amazing how DREAM’s legacy just keeps growing. He has become this really important figure to a lot of youths out here who may never have even met him." That influence will inevitably grow with the publication of a comprehensive book on DREAM that SPIE and others are working on meticulously.

Like DREAM, SPIE is an integral figure in the history of Bay Area graffiti. Born and raised in San Francisco’s Excelsior–Outer Mission District, SPIE remembers the birth of graf in the city. "The graffiti really took off around ’84 in San Francisco," he recalled. That same year he started bombing, first as a solo artist and later with the crews KKW and ACT, which he joined while attending McAteer High School. "McAteer was very unique because a lot of different kids from different neighborhoods all seemed to gravitate there … from the avenues, Hunters Point," he said of the Diamond District school whose courtyard was used as a "writer’s bench." "Some kids would cut school from Lincoln or Washington and cut up there, meeting in the afternoon. We didn’t have a big fence around the school, so it was very loose to come on and off the campus." Others unexpectedly showed up too. "We knew a lot of folks that would find easy ways to escape Juvenile Hall across the street, and they’d be chilling too at the writer’s bench in their county orange, their sandals ready to run through Glen Park Canyon," SPIE said, laughing.

In 1987, when writers from all over the Bay Area converged on the Powell Street BART station for an informal graffiti meeting, SPIE first met Alameda artist DREAM, who’d already been tagging under various names for a few years. "In the book will be one of the first DREAM sketches that he ever did. It was on his court papers," SPIE said. "He just got caught when he was like 16 years old, and he was sitting in court and did a DREAM piece on the court paper!" In the two decades since that meeting, the laws against graffiti have gotten much tougher, and many youths have been tried as adults. "With just over $400 worth of damage, a kid could be arrested and prosecuted as a felon," SPIE said.

Consequently, for writers like SPIE, who requested anonymity for this story, the stakes are high when they do illegal street art. It’s a lot less stressful for him to do legit pieces like the recent city of San Francisco–sponsored mural on 24th Street between Capp and Lilac, which he did with Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth. The bright, block-long collaborative painting — which includes art by Nancy Pili, Marina Prez-Wong, and Mike Trigger — is, like much of SPIE’s work, politically charged. "Overall, it is about solidarity between communities of color and oppressed people … and a commentary on fences and borders around the world, including the Mexican-American border," SPIE explained. "The fence that goes around the parking lot gave us the basis for this theme about fences, walls, and prisons…. It’s like the gating and jailing of a community."

It’s a timely work, appearing at a moment when San Francisco and its developers seem intent on erasing its underground-art past. "They buffed everything out at China Basin and a lot of other places in the city," SPIE said, concerned about the forces that are "pushing the public artists into the far reaches of the city."

For more information on SPIE, DREAM, and the forthcoming book, go to www.dreamtdk.com.

Up against the wall

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

There’s a new mural at 24th and Capp streets that does a stellar job of capturing the urban, cultural vibe of the Mission’s residents. No, not the skinny jeans–wearing, Burning Man bohemians who’ve colonized the area in recent years. I’m talking the baggy jeans–wearing Latino youths who are the inheritors of a proud local tradition of Chicano mural art. Craftily melding urban motifs, the mural celebrates their bicultural realities: lowriders cruise alongside hyphy "scrapers," pachucos and Mac Dre mingle, and graffiti lettering makes the same statement as silk-screened Brown Pride posters of the ’70s.

The work was created from July to September by members of Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth, a neighborhood-based youth leadership nonprofit serving at-risk Latino teens and young adults. The primary goal of HOMEY is violence prevention. Through art, education, and skill-building activities, the organization offers alternatives to young people growing up in a rough environment where gangbanging, drug dealing, gun violence, and incarceration are the norm.

The mural is a shining example of the numerous creative projects initiated by HOMEY to bring together young folks who might otherwise have beef or get caught up in the neighborhood’s dangerous Sureño-Norteño turf rivalry. According to HOMEY project coordinator Nancy Hernandez, the mural bolstered the organization’s other violence-prevention efforts because "young people who didn’t know each other got to know each other. People in the community who didn’t know each other got to know each other. And people were educated on a lot of things to be proud of about their culture, their history, and their neighborhood." Although a core group of teen and adult artists executed the initial planning and design for the mural, in the end more than 200 community members contributed to the painting.

The title of the piece is Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers. Taking unity as a starting point, the artists began by brainstorming about the influences that divide people, communities, and cultures: everything from national boundaries to gang-affiliated colors. No national flags appear in the 100-foot-long painting. The United States–Mexico border wall figures prominently, snaking through the background of the mural’s central panels, but it’s juxtaposed with portrayals of intra- and interethnic alliance in the foreground. Mexican Revolucionarios, members of the United Farm Workers, and Brown Berets, all painted in sepia tones, float beneficently behind modern-day Raza activists wearing white tees and white bandanas — a purposefully neutral color worn nationwide by Latino youths during the immigrant rights rallies of May 1. In the Bay Area, many of those activists were HOMEY members.

As celebratory as the painting is, one controversial panel on its far right-hand side threatened to overshadow the entire project. It’s a portrayal of Palestinians garbed in traditional Arab kaffiyeh head scarves breaking through a concrete wall — ostensibly the Israeli West Bank security barrier. The image fits into a third-world rights vignette expressing solidarity with indigenous groups and colonized peoples.

Some members of San Francisco’s Jewish community took issue with the image, which originally included a hole in the wall in the shape of the state of Israel. Two Jewish advocacy groups, the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Anti-Defamation League, brought these concerns to the San Francisco Arts Commission, the board charged with approving all public art. "We thought this one panel was disjointed from the rest of the mural," JCRC associate director Abby Michelson Porth recalls telling HOMEY and the Arts Commission at a public forum this August. "It didn’t demonstrate peaceful coexistence, which is, frankly, contrary to the theme of the work."

Rather than battle it out and fling loaded accusations of censorship and anti-Zionism at each other — which would indeed completely contradict the intent of the community-building project — the two factions engaged in a civil dialogue that turned out to be a learning experience for all. HOMEY agreed to make some changes to the imagery: the kaffiyeh shrouding one figure’s face, which the JCRC and the ADL claimed connoted terrorism, is now pulled back and worn as a simple Muslim head scarf; the wall opening now breaks into an expansive blue sky; and the branches of an olive tree now weave around the wall — a symbol of peace and a near-literal olive branch. Still, according to Porth, "It’s not the imagery that we would choose, but we recognize the muralists made significant changes and that they came far from the original design."

Hernandez is quick to point out that many Jewish San Franciscans supported the original design and that several of the artists are in fact Jewish. But she acknowledges that "when we’re painting somebody else’s culture, we have to be humble. We have to say, ‘You know what? We don’t know everything about everybody, but we do know about ourselves, and we’re trying to draw parallels between ourselves and other peoples.’<0x2009>"

To many, it may come as a surprise that the mural’s Palestinian imagery was so controversial. After all, claiming solidarity with Palestine is a common stance among San Francisco’s radical left. Nonetheless, by giving their input, the mural’s detractors wound up being collaborators on a project authored by, as it turned out, truly disparate voices in the community.

www.homeysf.org

IAPA in Venezuela: The international press advocacy group stresses deep concern over the climate of press freedom in Venezuela

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

CARACAS, Venezuela (Nov. 20, 2007) It was an amusing and telling moment in the history of freedom of the press.

On the morning of Monday, Nov. 19th, as the press mission of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) started its 10th mission to Venezuela to check on President Hugo Chavez’s accelerating crackdown on the press, Chavez sent a message to the delegation:

It was a half page advertisement from the Venezuelan National Assembly, in the big morning Caracas daily paper El Universal, reprinting a copy of a congresswoman’s resolution urging the Executive Branch to declare IAPA “not welcome” in Venezuela. Click here to view the ad. This set the tone for our mission: The congresswoman refused IAPA’s invitation to meet with our delegation and no member of the three branches of the Venezuelan government and of the National Electoral Council agreed to meet with IAPA despite many contacts made in recent weeks from IAPA headquarters in Miami.

Nobody in the governement would meet with IAPA but Chavez, who was all over television and the newspapers for his trip to Iran and France, did send a Chavista group who called themselves Journalists for the Truth.
The president of the group told the IAPA mission that there was complete freedom of the press in Venezuela and then promptly told the press outside the meeting room that IAPA had been “duped in good faith by the reports prepared by the “opposition” Venezuela press. Gonzalo Marroquin, chairman of IAPA’s Commmittee on Freedom of the Press and Information, immediately retorted to the press that “it would seem that the journalists were at another meeting.” Gonzalo, director of Diario Prensa Libre in Guatemala, and a former television newsman, was widely interviewed on IAPA’s findings on radio and television.

The mission met with members of the Venezuelan Press Bloc, a constitutional attorney, representatives of a human rights group, polling experts, the mayor of Chicao, the head of the National Press Workers Union., and other civilian experts. The mission and its final press conference was widely covered in the Venezuelan press. There were no violent incidents nor any attempt to scare or demonstrate against the IAPA mission. B3

Click on the continue reading link to read the IAPA press release. Scroll down for the Spanish version.

Obama’s moment

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› news@sfbg.com

Barack Obama came to San Francisco with some pretty heavy baggage Nov. 14. His speech at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium was swarmed by a diverse crowd of about 7,000, with most of those we interviewed hungry for an answer to the big question: is Obama the one who can take this troubled country in a new direction?

The Illinois senator had just gotten a bump from a cover story in the Atlantic, "Why Obama Matters," which posits that he is the only candidate capable of moving our country past the divisive culture-war paradigms and into a period when fundamental change is possible.

But time is running out for Obama to take the Democratic presidential nomination from front-runner Hillary Clinton, who has locked up moderates and most women. And some progressives, including labor unions, are behind John Edwards. To win the nomination, Obama must find a way to quickly rally the left — including urban voters and the antiwar, social justice, LGBT, and labor movements — into an energized voting block.

And that, some progressives say, means he’s got to stop playing it safe.
obama
Guardian photo by Lane Hartwell

Days before the speech, former California state senator and 1960s radical Tom Hayden sent Obama a letter taking issue with the latter’s comment that Democrats are paralyzed by Vietnam-era fights — and in particular, his response, "That’s just not my framework."

Hayden argued that Obama was squandering his advantage as the sole credible antiwar candidate by running a safe campaign that equally repudiates both political extremes — even though progressives have been far closer to the truth on issues of war, civil rights, economic equity, and the full range of traditional Democratic planks.

Hayden wrote, "The greatest gift you have been given by history is that as the elected tribune of a revived democracy, you could change America’s dismal role in the world. Because of what you so eloquently represent, you could convince the world to give America a new hearing, even a new respect. There are no plazas large enough for the crowds that would listen to your every word, wondering if you are the one the whole world is waiting for. They would not wait for long, of course. But they would passionately want to give you the space to reset the American direction."

Many attendees of Obama’s SF speech shared similar sentiments. "I’m interested in what he’s been saying in his books, but he’s become a kind of politician, so I want to hear what he has to say tonight," Jeremy Umland, 33, a third grade teacher from Oakland, said as he was waiting in line. "I think he had a lot of brave ideas in the past, and I’d like to see him get back to that."

Umland, who is white and gay, stood with his partner, Terrence Marks, 34, who is black. The couple are in the process of adopting a child and wanted to hear Obama call for legalizing gay marriage or for a health care plan that doesn’t involve insurance companies.

"I’d like to see him address it in a way that doesn’t evade this issue," Marks said. "I want to hear him talk not like a politician, but a real person."

Inside, Obama gave voice to many of those same themes.
"Running the same old textbook, by the numbers, Washington campaign just won’t do it…. The triangulation and poll-tested positions because we’re afraid of what Mitt [Romney] or Rudy [Giuliani] will say about us just won’t do it," Obama said, adding, "If we’re going to seize the moment, then we can’t live in fear of losing."

He said we are in "a defining moment in our history," when Americans need to grapple with war, a planet in peril, economic insecurity, and a political system that seems corrupt and incompetent. "We’ve lost faith that our leaders can or will do anything about it," Obama said.

Over and over again, Obama said he is running to deal with the most difficult issues: living wages, universal health care, human rights and dignity, racial harmony, honest foreign diplomacy, and a return to the principles of the New Deal. "I’m running for president of the United States because that is the party that America needs us to be right now.

"I am in this race," he said, "because of what Dr. King called the fierce urgency of now."

Good stuff, but is it too late? "I don’t see it happening, but it’s still possible that Hillary Clinton will slip in Iowa. She’s not invincible," Hayden told us.

In fact, a new ABC–Washington Post poll shows Obama taking the lead over Clinton in Iowa, 30 percent to 26, with Edwards at 22 percent.

"Seeing him through the eyes of my 34-year-old son and his wife, I could see there was a lot of new excitement among the younger generation and that it would be a shame if that just dissipates," Hayden told us. "The thing Obama needs most is what he steers around: he need a new social justice movement similar in strength to what we had in the ’60s."

Donald Fowler, a San Francisco resident and Democratic Party campaign consultant who ran John Kerry’s Michigan campaign in 2004 and Al Gore’s field operation in 2000, said Obama has suffered for trying to communicate detailed positions through an intense media filter.

"You get into the danger of running a government when you should be running a campaign," Fowler told us.

He and Hayden each said that particularly on the Iraq war issue, where Obama is strongest, he should have projected his stance more boldly, something he may now be starting to do.

"My guess is they have decided to be strong, state things clearly, and take back the discussion," Fowler said. Listening to Obama discuss this moment, that assessment seems likely.

"It’s because of these failures that people are listening intently," Obama said. "We have the chance to come together to form a new majority." *

To hear Barack Obama’s speech and read the Atlantic article and Tom Hayden’s letter, visit www.sfbg.com.

An Appeal to Barack Obama

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“The Democrats have been stuck in the arguments of Vietnam, which means that either you’re a Scoop Jackson Democrat or you’re a Tom Hayden Democrat and you’re suspicious of any military action. And that’s just not my framework.” – Sen. Barack Obama.

Barack, I thought Hillary Clinton was known as the Great Triangulator, but you are learning well. The problem with setting up false polarities to position yourself in the “center”, however, is that it’s unproductive both politically and intellectually.

Politically, it is a mistake because there last time I looked there were a whole lot more “Tom Hayden Democrats” voting in the California primary and, I suspect, around the country, than “‘Scoop’ Jackson Democrats.” In fact, they are your greatest potential base, aside from African-American voters, in a multi-candidate primary.

More disturbing is what happens to the mind by setting up these polarities. To take a “centrist” position, one calculates the equal distance between two “extremes.” It doesn’t matter if one “extreme” is closer to the truth. All that matters is achieving the equidistance. This means the presumably “extreme” view is prevented from having a fair hearing, which would require abandoning the imaginary center. And it invites the “extreme” to become more “extreme” in order to pull the candidate’s thinking in a more progressive direction. The process of substantive thinking is corroded by the priority of political positioning.

I have been enthused by the crowds you draw, by the excitement you instill in my son and daughter-in-law, by the seeds of inspiration you plant in our seven-year old [biracial] kid. I love the alternative American narrative you weave on the stump, one in which once-radical social movements ultimately create a better America step by step. I very much respect your senior advisers like David Axelrod, who figured out a way to elect Harold Washington mayor of Chicago. You are a truly global figure in this age of globalization.

But as the months wear on, I see a problem of the potential being squandered. Hillary Clinton already occupies the political center. John Edwards holds the populist labor/left. And that leaves you with a transcendent vision in search of a constituency.

Your opposition to the Iraq War could have distinguished you, but it became more parsed than pronounced. All the nuance might please the New York Times’ Michael Gordon, who helped get us into this madness in the first place, but the slivers of difference appear too narrow for many voters to notice. Clinton’s plan, such as it is, amounts to six more years of thousands of American troops in Iraq [at least]. Your proposal is to remove combat troops by mid-2010, while leaving thousands of advisers trying to train a dysfunctional Iraqi army, and adding that you might re-invade to stave off ethnic genocide. Lately, you have said the mission of your residual American force would be more limited than the Clinton proposal. You would commit trainers, for example, only if the Iraqi government engages in reconciliation and abandons sectarian policing. You would not embed American trainers in the crossfire of combat. This nuancing avoids the tough and obvious question of what to do with the sectarian Frankenstein monster we have funded, armed and trained in the Baghdad Interior Ministry. The Jones Commission recently proposed “scrapping” the Iraqi police service. Do you agree? The Center for American Progress, directed by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, is urging that all US troops, including trainers, be redeployed this year. Why do you disagree? Lately you have taken advantage of Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness on Iran to oppose bombing that country without Congressional authorization. But you carefully decline to say whether you would support bombing Iran when and if the time comes.

This caution has a history:

– you were against the war in 2002 because it was a “dumb war”,
but you had to point out that you were not against all wars, without
exactly saying what wars you favored;

– then you visited Iraq for 36 hours and “could only marvel at
the ability of our government to essentially erect entire cities
within hostile territory”;

– then as the quagmire deepened, you cloaked yourself in the
bipartisan mantle of the Baker-Hamilton Study Group, which advocated
leaving thousands of American troops in Iraq to fight terrorism, train
the Iraqis until they “stand up”, and sundry other tasks of
occupation;

Perhaps your national security advisers are getting to you when it should be the other way around. Their expertise is not in the politics of primaries. If anything, they reject the of populist peace pressure influencing elite national security decisions. The result is a frustration towards all the Democratic candidates for what the Center for American Progress has recently called “strategic drift.” The political result is the danger of returning to John Kerry’s muffled message in 2004. The policy result may be a total security disaster for our country, draining our young soldiers’ blood and everyone’s taxes on the continuing degradation of our national honor in a war which cannot be won.

Just for the record, let me tell you my position on Iraq. I think the only alternative is to begin a global diplomatic peace offensive starting with a commitment to withdraw all our troops as rapidly as possible. That is the only way to engage the world, including the Iraqi factions, in doing something about containing the crises of refugees, reconciliation and reconstruction. It means negotiating with Iran rather than escautf8g to a broader war. If you want to “turn a new page”, it should not be about leaving the Sixties behind. It will be about leaving behind the superpower fantasies of both the neo-conservatives and your humanitarian hawks. And yes, it is to be “suspicious”, as Eisenhower and John Kennedy came to be suspicious, of the advice of any Wise Men or security experts who advocated the military occupation of Iraq. Is that position as extreme as your rhetoric assumes?

Your problem, if I may say so out loud, and with all respect, is that the deepest rationale for your running for president is the one that you dare not mention very much, which is that you are an African-American with the possibility of becoming president. The quiet implication of your centrism is that all races can live beyond the present divisions, in the higher reality above the dualities. You may be right. You see the problems Hillary Clinton encounters every time she implies that she wants to shatter all those glass ceilings and empower a woman, a product of the feminist movement, to be president? Same problem. So here’s my question: how can you say let’s “turn the page” and leave all those Sixties’ quarrels behind us if we dare not talk freely in public places about a black man or a woman being president? Doesn’t that reveal that on some very deep level that we are not yet ready to “turn the page”?

When you think about it, these should be wonderful choices, not forbidden topics. John Edwards can’t be left out either, for his dramatic and, once again, unstated role as yet another reformed white male southerner seeking America’s acceptance, like Carter, Clinton and Gore before him. Or Bill Richardson trying to surface the long-neglected national issues of Latinos. I think these all these underlying narratives, of blacks, women, white southerners and la raza – excuse me, Hispanic-Americans – are far more moving, engaging and electorally-important than the dry details of policy.

What I cannot understand is your apparent attempt to sever, or at least distance yourself, from the Sixties generation, though we remain your single greatest supporting constituency. I can understand, I suppose, your need to define yourself as a American rather than a black American, as if some people need to be reassured over and over. I don’t know if those people will vote for you.

You were ten years old when the Sixties ended, so it is the formative story of your childhood. The polarizations that you want to transcend today began with life-and-death issues that were imposed on us. No one chose to be “extreme” or “militant” as a lifestyle preference. It was an extreme situation that produced us. On one side were armed segregationists, on the other peaceful black youth. On one side were the destroyers of Vietnam, on the other were those who refused to
submit to orders. On the one side were those keeping women in inferior roles, on the other were those demanding an equal rights amendment. On one side were those injecting chemical poisons into our rivers, soils, air and blood streams, on the other were the defenders of the natural world. On one side were the perpetrators of big money politics, on the other were keepers of the plain democratic tradition. Does anyonebelieve those conflicts are behind us?

I can understand, in my old age, someone wanting to dissociate from the extremes to which some of us were driven by the times. That seems to be the ticket to legitimacy in the theater of the media and cultural gatekeepers. I went through a similar process in 1982 when I ran for the legislature, reassuring voters that I wasn’t “the angry young man that I used to be.” I won the election, and then the Republicans objected to my being seated anyway! Holding the idea that the opposites of the Sixties were equally extreme or morally equivalent is to risk denying where you came from and what made your opportunities possible. You surely understand that you are one of the finest descendants of the whole Sixties generation, not some hybrid formed by the clashing opposites of that time. We want to be proud of the role we may have played in all you have become, and not be considered baggage to be discarded on your ascent. You recognize this primal truth when you stand on the bridge in Selma, Alabama, basking in the glory of those who were there when you were three years old. But you can’t have it both ways, revering the Selma march while trying to “turn the page” on the past.

This brings me back to why you want to stand in the presumed center against the “Tom Hayden Democrats.” Are you are equally distant from the “George McGovern Democrats.”, and the “Jesse Jackson Democrats”? How about the “Martin Luther King Democrats”, the “Cesar Chavez Democrats”, the “Gloria Steinem Democrats”? Where does it end?

What about the “Bobby Kennedy Democrats”? I sat listening to you last year at an RFK human rights event in our capital. I was sitting behind Ethel Kennedy and several of her children, all of whom take more progressive stands than anyone currently leading the national Democratic Party. They were applauding you, supporting your candidacy, and trying to persuade me that you were not just another charismatic candidate but the one we have been waiting for.

Will you live up to the standard set by Bobby Kennedy in 1968? He who sat with Cesar Chavez at the breaking of the fast, he who enlisted civil rights and women activists in his crusade, who questioned the Gross National Product as immoral, who dialogued with people like myself about ending the war and poverty? Yes, Bobby appealed to cops and priests and Richard Daley too, but in 1968 he never distanced himself from the dispossessed, the farmworkers, the folksingers, the war resisters, nor the poets of the powerless. He walked among us.

The greatest gift you have been given by history is that as the elected tribune of a revived democracy, you could change America’s dismal role in the world. Because of what you so eloquently represent, you could convince the world to give America a new hearing, even a new respect. There are no plazas large enough for the crowds that would listen to your every word, wondering if you are the one the whole world is waiting for. They would not wait for long, of course. But they would passionately want to give you the space to reset the American direction.

What is the risk, after all? If “think globally, act locally” ever made any sense, this is the time, and you are the prophet. If you want to be mainstream, look to the forgotten mainstream. You don’t even have to leave the Democratic Party. It’s time to renew the best legacy of the Good Neighbor policy of Roosevelt before it dissolved into the Cold War, the Strangelove priesthood, the CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala, the sordid Bay of Pigs, the open graves of Vietnam. It’s time to renew the best legacy of the New Deal before it became Neo-Liberalism, and finally achieve the 1948 Democratic vision of national health care.

May you – and Hillary too – live up to the potential, the gift of the past, prepared for you in the dreams not only of our fathers, but of all those generations with hopes of not being forgotten.

Disaster preparedness

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Above a semicircle of wooden crates arranged on a weathered wooden stage, two tattered flags of New Orleans and the United States are projected on a back screen. The flags appear to flutter in the rotating series of overlapping still images. This shifting perspective implicitly signals the living and composite nature of the history (recent and long-term, local and national) we are about to hear, as the 11 members of the ensemble representing survivors of Hurricane Katrina’s inundation of New Orleans in 2005 slowly assemble onstage and introduce themselves.

As they tell their individual stories — with charming, informal demeanors — and relate the story of their city, the flags give way to a steady stream of projected images (designed by Daniel Gamberg), including old snapshots, local landscapes, memorabilia, bits of relevant text, a pregnant cloudscape, and, finally, images of an unprecedented natural and human disaster. The social breakdown, government malfeasance, and open racism attendant on the Katrina disaster are balanced by stories of courage, compassion, camaraderie, and resolve — human capacities grounded in individual character and familial and communal solidarity, as well as the resources of a specific cultural life and history made manifest in the play’s wise and winning emphasis on New Orleans’s African American musical heritage.

While not uniformly strong, the cast includes some formidable talents (including Mujahid Abdul-Rashid, Velina Brown, L. Peter Callender, and Elizabeth Carter) and has another actor playing herself: Federal Emergency Management Agency inspector Linda Rose McCoy (whose unique and surprisingly sympathetic perspective makes up for some awkward and rather abrupt entrances and exits). Although the unevenness brings unintended lulls to the show’s pith and pacing, in general these down-to-earth stories and alternately quiet and harrowing disaster testimonials — together with a solid mix of a cappella song, recorded music (from the irresistibly joyful Hot 8 Brass Band), and the occasional burst of movement — bring much life to a relatively spare stage. Amid a growing cult of catastrophe, Stardust reminds us poignantly of the culture of survival.

ARGOS, OR NOT


On dramatically turbulent waters of its own, the latest Mary Zimmerman extravaganza, a retelling of Jason and the Argonauts’ search for the Golden Fleece, sails smoothly into a West Coast premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Bay Area berth for the director’s previous work, including the Tony Award–winning Metamorphoses. Zimmerman runs a tight ship and knows how to rig a stage — first of all, with cleverly intricate mise-en-scènes, including a dynamic, even acrobatic ensemble of actors (led by Jake Suffian as an average-dude Jason), beautiful sets (Daniel Ostling’s enormous and pristine wood plank walls and ceiling, with a matching wooden catwalk and a mast rising like a firehouse pole through an aperture, look like the environs of a high-priced New York art gallery), and the playful use of stage properties (including Michael Montenegro’s buoyantly rough-and-ready puppets).

But the play also feels rigged. With humor pitched low (from an occasionally clever angle) and a forced sense of wonder, the spectacle has a vaguely didactic, children’s-theater aspect, as if some assigned learning were being dressed up and played down as "fun." Some episodes work well dramatically, the story of Hercules and Hylas in particular. But in the end, the long (two and a half hours) journey, which scrawls a timely (if wishful) moral about mad missions abroad "to put an end to evil" ending miserably for their instigators, is a short hop, emotionally and intellectually.

STARDUST AND EMPTY WAGONS: STORIES FROM THE KATRINA DIASPORA

Wed/21 and Fri/23–Sat/24, 8 p.m.; Sun/25, 3 p.m.; $18–$50

Brava Theater Center

2789 24th St., SF

(415) 647-2822

www.brava.org

ARGONAUTIKA

Through Dec. 16, $27–$69

See Web site for schedule

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

2015 Addison, Roda Theatre, Berk.

(510) 647-2949

www.berkeleyrep.org

Rip, role-play, and burn

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Jeanne D’Arc

(Sony, PSP)

GAMER I had the fortune of winning a PSP in a contest a few weeks ago, and in my hunt for an inaugural game for the system, I spotted Jeanne D’Arc on a shelf in a local toy store. Because the cover sports an awesome girl with a sword and because no one does medieval European history like the Japanese, I picked it up.

Jeanne D’Arc is historical fantasy with a plot that seems a little too familiar. The Level-5-developed title has a lot of the elements of your average Japanese role-playing game: a heroine whose home is put to the torch by agents of a diabolical figure (in this case Henry VI of England) under the influence of a demon summoned by the real villain, who is a sorcerer. Jeanne and her childhood friends set off to fight back, spurred by Jeanne’s discovery of a magical, demon-vanquishing armlet. They are accompanied by a cute animal companion, required in all Japanese RPGs: a giant purple toad. The rough placement of the story within the framework of a well-known legend is what rescues the plot from being completely pedestrian.

The game, a tactical strategy RPG in the style of Final Fantasy Tactics with few deviations from the formula, has a map of locations through which the player travels. Most of them have battles, though some also have shops and plot-revealing cut scenes. On entering a battle, the player chooses various characters with different abilities and arranges them on a large grid. The player and the computer take turns moving all of their characters and making them attack or use an item in their inventory. Think of a chess game in which all of the pieces have big swords and bigger hair. Jeanne D’Arc adds a few little power-ups — such as squares where your attacks have a greater impact — but these don’t affect game play much.

One thing I really liked about the game is that each character has a backstory. You aren’t controlling a bunch of nameless soldiers. Your characters are also fairly customizable. Usually each character in an RPG is locked into a career path for the benefit of the story, and usually the healer is a demure woman. This irks me. Jeanne D’Arc let me create a butch male healer who swoops to the rescue whenever one of my little chess pieces is hurting.

Jeanne D’Arc is nothing new, but it’s fun, and the development of the minor characters involves the player in a way that’s refreshing for a tactical RPG. The quality of the graphics and sound are exceptional for a handheld game; I found myself humming the fight tune in the shower, so I guess the music’s more memorable than most. That said, if the narrative keeps following history, it’s going to be a bummer to see a character I’ve developed for 40 hours get burned at the stake at the end. Oh well.

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