Interview

Guillermo Del Toro on eggs, ghost sightings, lucid dreaming, Catholicism, the “supranatural,” uterine imagery and more

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Now is the time to see Pan’s Labyrinth — and to read Sara Schieron’s interview with the man behind the movie, Guillermo Del Toro.

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Guillermo Del Toro

Gleamy-eyed as Santa Claus and every bit as generous, Guillermo del Toro recently visited SF to discuss his latest film, Pan’s Labyrinth. Already seen by droves of festivalgoers, Pan’s Labyrinth is worthy of profound praise. Both Del Toro and his movies have developed a reputation for converting skeptics to affectionate believers – perhaps this has something to do with his genuine (and apparently altruistic) interest in the world. He’s disarming in his curiosity. (Note: Had Del Toro not said, “Don’t chicken out,” the personal bits that follow would so have been cut.)

The P-U-litzer prizes

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Competition has been fierce for the fifteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes. Many can plausibly lay claim to stinky media performances, but only a few can win a P.U.-litzer. As the judges for this un-coveted award, Jeff Cohen and I have deliberated with due care. (Jeff is the founder of the media watch group FAIR and author of the superb new book “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.”)

And now, the winners of the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2006:

“FACT-FREE TRADE” AWARD — New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

In a press corps prone to cheer on corporate-drafted trade agreements as the key to peace and plenty in the world, no cheerleader is more fervent than Tom Friedman. During a CNBC interview with Tim Russert in July, Friedman confessed: “I was speaking out in Minnesota — my hometown, in fact — and a guy stood up in the audience, said, ‘Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you’d oppose?’ I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA,
the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.’”

(Friedman may not have read even the pact’s title; CAFTA actually stands for the Central America Free Trade Agreement.)

LOCK UP THE FIRST AMENDMENT PRIZE — CNN’s William Bennett

Soon after being hired as a CNN pundit, Bennett went on his radio talk show and offered his views on freedom of the press — and on reporters who broke stories about warrantless wiretapping and secret CIA detention sites “against the wishes of the president, against the request of the president and others.” Bennett fumed: “Are they embarrassed, are they arrested? No, they win Pulitzer Prizes. I don’t think what they did was worthy of an award — I think what they did was worthy of jail, and I think this investigation needs to go forward.”

BROKE-BRAIN MOUTHING AWARD — MSNBC’s Chris Matthews

As the movie “Brokeback Mountain” (about a relationship between two cowboys) was gaining attention and audience in January, Chris Matthews appeared on the Imus show to hail “the wonderful Michael Savage” and the talk-show host’s nickname for the movie: “Bareback Mounting.” Matthews and Savage had been MSNBC colleagues until “the wonderful” Savage was fired — after referring to an apparently gay caller as a “sodomite” and telling him to “get AIDS and die.” Now that’s hardball.

CASUAL ABOUT CASUALTIES AWARD — Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch

Echoing an Iraq war talking-point heard regularly on Fox News, owner Murdoch said on the eve of the November election: “The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute.” As FAIR noted, U.S. deaths in Iraq exceed those in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War, not to mention the combined U.S. deaths of all this country’s other military actions since Vietnam — including Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

FRONT-PAGE PUNDIT AWARD — Reporter Michael Gordon and The New York Times

With many voters telling pollsters that they want U.S. troops to leave Iraq, the Times front-paged a post-election analysis by Michael Gordon — headlined “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say” — quoting three hand-picked “experts” who decried the possibility of troop withdrawal. Gordon didn’t tell readers that one of his “experts,” former CIA analyst Ken Pollack, had relentlessly promoted an Iraq invasion based on wildly false claims about an Iraqi threat. Gordon took off his reporter’s hat that night on CNN to become an unabashed advocate for his view that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to “civil war” (as though civil war weren’t already underway).

“PROVE YOU’RE NOT A TRAITOR” PRIZE — CNN’s Glenn Beck

In November, Beck — an Islamophobic host on CNN Headline News — launched into his interview with Congressman-elect Keith Ellison, a Muslim American, this way: “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’” Beck then added: “And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.” Is it possible that primetime bigots like CNN’s Beck have something to do with the prejudices “that a lot of Americans feel”?

GROUNDHOG DAY AWARD — Ted Koppel

One role of journalism should be to help the public learn from past government policy disasters in hopes of preventing future ones. But in a New York Times column on Oct. 2, former ABC News star Koppel wrote that Washington should tell Iran it is free to develop an atomic bomb — with a Mafia-like warning: “If a dirty bomb explodes in Milwaukee, or some other nuclear device detonates in Baltimore or Wichita, if Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia should fall victim to a nuclear ‘accident,’ Iran should understand that the United States government will not search around for the perpetrator. The return address will be predetermined, and it will be somewhere in Iran.” In other words, no matter what the evidence, Koppel urged our government to attack a predetermined foe, Iran. Didn’t that happen in 2003 with Iraq?

Hold your nose and prepare yourself for 2007.

Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback. For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

Monster dearest

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Move over, matchy-matchy Faye Dunaway of Mommie Dearest and much too armed and dangerous to hug Shelley Winters of Bloody Mama (possibly the lousy dowager emeritus, thanks to Lolita). Mamma mia, was there ever a year crammed with more bad mothering run stealthily amok, far from most of the multiplexes and the real-life broodies dragging their spawn to the latest animated feature?

If you weren’t busily entertaining your offspring in the big theater, you could easily slip into a small screening room to feel either much better about your parenting skills — or much worse. No, 2006 was not kind to materfamilias — anxiety was high over nurturing yet meddling, muddling, and sometimes castrating bitches with often loved but also neglected litters. The not-quite-model matrons who stood out were flagrantly flawed hard-luck ladies, straight outta the clink, outta rehab, outta options. They were both abusers and abused, working lousy jobs, distrusted, and desperate for a second chance — Norma Raes and Erin Brockoviches sans a speck of political consciousness. Mother’s Day 2006 in the movie houses was all about evil as well as Eve’s plight: succumbing to temptation and, of course, seeking redemption. Call this gaggle of generally downbeat, self-absorbed, Dumpster-realism gals the prodigal (single) mothers.

Homemakers or home wreckers? Welfare queens or queen me’s? In Running with Scissors, Annette Bening’s med-damaged, mad housewife-poet of a mumsy was all of the above, with alimony. Meryl Streep’s cunning Lioness D’Wintour fashion editor piss-take in The Devil Wears Prada juggled career and family nastily, taking a smooth stab at working matriarchs both biological and mentor-ological. And the small-town girls and comeback kids–turned–semimythic maternal figures of Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest women’s film, Volver, take a dreamily innocent, genre-specific, less-realistic gaze at motherhood. The women in Almodóville are decent, vivid, communal, and inadvertently, invariably deadly — these bleeder-brooders with bloody "women’s troubles" live in a world almost completely free of men (the few who do pop up are incestuously abusive), somewhere on the matrilineal border of Two Women and Juliet of the Spirits.

Like Volver‘s Cruz and Maura, two other rhyming cinematic mothers — played by two Maggies, Cheung and Gyllenhaal, in Clean and Sherrybaby, respectively — believe there’s life after a loss of innocence and even death. Birthing best-actress awards and considerations, Cheung’s Emily Wang and Gyllenhaal’s Sherry Swanson are hardened but not broken junkie wild children, needle thin and barely clinging to the cracked-out, earthly pavement as they stomp through Paris and malled-over America, regretfully scraping their way back from prison after dropping their offspring like puppies and drifting off into good nods. Physically, the two cut through their landscapes like blades, antimaternal babes who happen to have had babies.

Braless, tank-topped, and jiggling through the hood, Gyllenhaal’s Sherry has a physical presence that hybridizes the inhibition-free but inappropriately hot mama and the gawky, sunken-chested teen. Slouching through motels and institutions, suburbs and ghettos alike, she’s always the riveting center, despite her love for and hunger to be loved by her daughter. Since she kicked in prison, love has become Sherry’s drug — she wants to work with kids, she’s desperate to take up mothering — and she slyly seduces her daughter with toys, praise, and her alarming, sexualized, chaotic presence from the brother and sister-in-law who raised the girl in safety and warmth. With her discomfitingly sensual singing routine and ravenous desire for attention, Sherry is every parent’s worst nightmare, yet Gyllenhaal’s emotionally and physically naked performance and Laurie Collyer’s empathetic direction etch her into reality. You want to take care of this sad, sexy mum.

On another continent and aeons away in awareness, Cheung’s Emily is also a junkie who landed in jail — after her rock star boyfriend, Lee Hauser, OD’d — but she’s now working her way back into the good graces of her child and family. Resembling a razor-sharp noirish Q-Tip with a shock of black fro, music biz hanger-on Emily evokes obvious predecessors (the derided Asian-other and band destroyer Yoko Ono, the stoned-in-love partner in crime Marianne Faithfull) and less-expected women (delicate beauty with a battery-acid rasp Hope Sandoval). The archetypal snide rock bitch at the start, Emily waxes selfish, proud, mouthy, brawling, irresponsible, bad tempered, only reflexively working her power over Lee — her real hunger is for the next fix. Cheung, however, gives Emily a heart — when her mouth twists into a dreadful pyramid upon hearing that the court has given custody of her son to Lee’s parents.

Still, throughout the process of getting clean, growing humble, and peeling away the layers of posturing, Emily exudes a resigned intelligence that the fearless but somewhat unconscious Sherry lacks. Tearful with loneliness, Emily confesses to her friend Elena (France’s favorite wild woman, Beatrice Dalle), "I don’t know if I can take care of a child." Almost everyone in Clean is smarter than they appear at first glance, even if they are embroiled in the "romantic myth of music," as director Olivier Assayas puts it in a DVD interview. Emily’s race complicates matters further, raising questions similar to those aimed at world-trawling Western adoptive parents. Are the white middle-class Hausers more entitled to raise Cheung’s son than she is? Must she become trustworthy — or assimilate — in order to be with her child?

Both Cheung’s and Gyllenhaal’s performances make one wonder why these women’s struggles are reaching the screen at this time. We continue to grapple with the question of whether single parenting translates to less-than-optimal parenting. Perhaps, as the war pigs and an archetypally male principle run rampant elsewhere, we wonder how we’re supposed to keep the home fires burning. Where are the mothers, and how does one nurture after all the high times? Can we, perpetual adolescents, ever really settle down? Who raised all these people? *

KIMBERLY CHUN’S LADY FEAST 11

• Ivana Baquero in Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, Spain) and Ko Ah-sung Ko in The Host (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea).

• Clean (Olivier Assayas, France) and Sherrybaby (Laurie Collyer, US).

• The Descent (Neil Marshall, UK). A postfeminist love song to spelunking and Carrie.

• Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, Japan). The Ramones would be proud.

• The Queen (Stephen Frears, UK/France/Italy), with lady-in-waiting Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, US/France/Japan). Feeling those royal pains.

• The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry, France/Italy). Charlotte Gainsbourg makes spectacles, sweater dresses, and felt-mation look trés belle.

• Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, South Korea). Red eyeliner, exploitation glam, and that scene with the grieving, vengeful parents …

• Volver (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain). Making us love Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani, eyeliner, and push-up bras again.

Powell, Baker, Hamilton — Thanks for Nothing

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When Colin Powell endorsed the Iraq Study Group report during his Dec. 17 appearance on “Face the Nation,” it was another curtain call for a tragic farce.

Four years ago, “moderates” like Powell were making the invasion of Iraq possible. Now, in the guise of speaking truth to power, Powell and ISG co-chairs James Baker and Lee Hamilton are refueling the U.S. war effort by depicting it as a problem of strategy and management.

But the U.S. war effort is a problem of lies and slaughter.

The Baker-Hamilton report stakes out a position for managerial changes that dodge the fundamental immorality of the war effort. And President Bush shows every sign of rejecting the report’s call for scaling down that effort.

Meanwhile, most people in the United States favor military disengagement. According to a new Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll, “Seven in 10 say they want the new Congress to pressure the White House to begin bringing troops home within six months.”

The nationwide survey came after the Baker-Hamilton report arrived with great — and delusional — expectations. In big bold red letters, the cover of Time predicted that the report would take the White House by storm: “The Iraq Study Group says it’s time for an exit strategy. Why Bush will listen.”

While often depicted as a rebuff to the president’s Iraq policies, the report was hardly a prescription for abandoning the U.S. military project in Iraq — as Baker was at pains to repeatedly point out during a whirlwind round of network interviews.

Hours after the report’s release on Dec. 6, Baker told PBS “NewsHour” host Jim Lehrer that the blue-ribbon commission was calling for a long-term U.S. military presence: “So our commitment — when we say not open-ended, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be substantial. And our report makes clear that we’re going to have substantial, very robust, residual troop levels in Iraq for a long, long time.”

Baker used very similar phrasing the next morning in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” — saying that the report “makes clear we’re going to have a really robust American troop presence in Iraq and in the region for a long, long time.”

That was 24 hours into the report’s release, when media spin by Baker and Hamilton and their allies was boosting a document that asserted a continual American prerogative to devote massive resources to war in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. And, in a little-noted precept of the report, it said: “The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise.”

In short, the Baker-Hamilton report was a fallback position for U.S. military intervention — and for using Pentagon firepower on behalf of U.S.-based oil companies. But the report’s call for tactical adjustments provoked fury among the most militaristic politicians and pundits. Their sustained media counterattack took hold in short order.

President Bush wriggled away from the panel’s key recommendations — gradual withdrawal of many U.S. troops from Iraq and willingness to hold diplomatic talks with Syria and Iran. War enthusiasts like Sen. John McCain denounced the report as a recipe for retreat and defeat. The New York Post dubbed Baker and Hamilton “surrender monkeys.” Rush Limbaugh called their report “stupid.”

By the time its one-week anniversary came around, the Baker-Hamilton report looked about ready for an ashcan of history. Bush had already postponed his announcement of a “new strategy for Iraq” until after the start of the new year — a delay aimed at cushioning the president from pressure to adopt the report’s central recommendations. Even the limited punch of the report has been largely stymied by the most rabidly pro-war forces of American media and politics.

But those forces don’t really need to worry about the likes of Colin Powell, James Baker and Lee Hamilton — as long as the argument is over how the U.S. government should try to get its way in Iraq.

“We are losing — we haven’t lost — and this is the time, now, to start to put in place the kinds of strategies that will turn this situation around,” Powell told CBS viewers on Dec. 17. That sort of talk stimulates endless rationales for continuing U.S. warfare and facilitates the ongoing escalation of the murderous U.S. air war in Iraq.

Powell’s mendacious performance at the U.N. Security Council, several weeks before the invasion of Iraq, is notorious. But an obscure media appearance by Powell, when he was interviewed by the French network TV2 in mid-September 2003, sheds more light on underlying attitudes that unite the venture-capitalist worldviews of “moderates” like Colin Powell and “hardliners” like Dick Cheney.

Trying to justify Washington’s refusal to end the occupation, Powell
explained: “Since the United States and its coalition partners have invested a great deal of political capital, as well as financial resources, as well as the lives of our young men and women — and we have a large force there now — we can’t be expected to suddenly just step aside.”

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Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback. For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

To sing like a mockingbird: A conversation with Nathaniel Dorsky

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In conjunction with an upcoming screening at San Francisco Cinematheque, Nathaniel Dorsky recently discussed his ideas and work with fellow filmmaker Michelle Silva of Canyon Cinema; Canyon is the sole distributor of Dorsky’s exquisite personal films, which are not available on video.
A shorter version of this interview, with introductory notes, can be found within this week’s issue of the Guardian.

Michelle Silva: First I want to ask about your recent book Devotional Cinema. I think it’s some of the most thoughtful and introspective writing on the human experience of cinema and the physical properties we share with the medium — such as our internal visual experience, metaphor, and the art of seeing. What’s great about the book is that it’s accessible to people who aren’t well versed in cinema, but who might be interested in a deeper understanding of their own senses.
Nathaniel Dorsky: The basic ideas for the book were originally formulated because I was hired to teach a course on avant-garde film at UC Berkeley for a semester. I didn’t want to teach a survey course on avant-garde cinema; I didn’t think I could do that with real enthusiasm, I thought it would be a little flat. I decided that what was most interesting to me about avant-garde film — or at least the avant-garde films that I found most interesting — was a search for a language which was purely a filmic language.

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Still from Nathaniel Dorsky’s film Threnody
Not something limited to film, but a purely filmic language that also had human value to it. There are various filmmakers who’ve explored human cinema language, or cinema human language, which is something other than using film to replicate a written language form, whether it be the novel or the poem. I was interested in something that was actually intrinsic to the nature of cinema, expressive as cinema, and at the same time expressive of our human needs and human worth.

Songs of devotion

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Accessible to anyone who might be interested in a deeper understanding of his or her own senses, Nathaniel Dorsky’s book, Devotional Cinema (Tuumba Press), explores the physical properties we share with the film medium. Within the book, Dorsky draws upon films by Roberto Rossellini, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Yasujuro Ozu, and others to illustrate his insights on filmic language. But if another person were capable of writing Devotional Cinema, he or she could just as effectively draw upon Dorsky’s films, which connect intrinsic facets of cinema to intrinsic truths about human experience.
Capable of discovering at least half a dozen fields of vision (or planes of existence, or worlds) within a single shot, Dorsky’s films can fundamentally alter — and heighten — one’s own perception, and his editing skill, tapped by many local directors, is as fundamental to his work as his image making. Sam Mendes took American Beauty’s floating bag sequence from Dorsky’s Variations, which he read about during filming. (Dorsky has noted that the image isn’t a new one — and it isn’t necessarily the richest among his luminous, phantasmagoric visions.)
In conversation with filmmaker Michelle Silva of Canyon Cinema, Dorsky paraphrases the observation of his friend, anarchist writer Peter Lamborn Wilson (a.k.a. Hakim Bey), that we’re trapped in a “light age” of meaningless information. “In the dark ages, there were little areas of light, where there might be alchemical investigations,” Dorsky says. “Now we have to find little areas of darkness.” This week brings an opportunity to explore those little areas, at a San Francisco Cinematheque program that will present Dorsky’s three most recent films, Song and Solitude, Threnody, and The Visitation, in alphabetical and reverse chronological order. (Intro by Johnny Ray Huston)
SFBG I remember running into you last year when you might have been shooting Threnody. You were in Chinatown perched right over a parking meter, and you had your camera hidden underneath you. You were so still I almost didn’t notice you — you were blending in with the background. I started thinking about the rules of quantum physics and that it’s impossible to not affect the object that you’re observing. Yet you seem to manage to do just that in your films — you don’t disturb the environment.
NATHANIEL DORSKY If you’ve ever gone into the woods and sat very still for half an hour, all the animals will come back and gather around you. You have to be part of the inanimate world, so the animate world can feel relaxed and come around. Also, you can find these little psychic backwaters on the street — there are places where the energy doesn’t quite flow, and you can kind of tuck yourself [within those places]. It has to do with the angle of the light and so forth.
SFBG My interpretation of your film Song and Solitude is that it is like a silent odyssey through shadow words and the introverted psyche. There are several masks and layers of reality that you’ve collapsed into one. There’s a depth of field in many shots, and the different layers aren’t aware of themselves, while you’re aware of all of them. Could you talk about your visual language in the new film and your state of mind while making it?
ND There are a number of things involved. One is that I’d made a film right before [Song and Solitude], called Threnody, which was an offering to Stan Brakhage after his death. In that film I was trying to shoot images while I had a sense of Stan looking over his shoulder one last time while leaving the world, having one last glance at the fleeting phenomena of life.
Song and Solitude I made along with a friend, Susan Vigil, who was in the last year of her life with ovarian cancer. [She’s] a person who was extremely important to the San Francisco avant-garde film community and helped support the San Francisco Cinematheque throughout the ’70s and ’80s. She was a wonderful, wonderful friend. She came and looked at camera rolls every Friday when I’d get them back from the camera store. There was that atmosphere going on of being with someone so close who was also involved in a terminal illness. But also you might say that with Threnody the camera was placed somewhere back around the ears looking out of your head. In Song and Solitude I actually placed the camera in a sense behind my own head — for a feeling like looking through your own head out [at the world].
Most of my films are more about seeing or about using seeing as a way to express being. [Song and Solitude] is more about being, where seeing is an aspect of the being. The world is seen through the whole fabric of your own psyche as a foreground. Through that foreground exists the visual world, almost as a background.
I also wanted to see if I could photograph things which you’d traditionally call nature and things you’d call human nature with the same primordial sense, to see the slight rub of what human nature is and what nature is, where they are similar and where they feel different. How is muscular movement different from wind? I wanted the film to rest in a very primordial place in its visual essence.
SFBG One time I was questioning you about why we torment ourselves making films, and you said, “It’s to attract a mate.” Could you elaborate on that?
ND I myself met my friend Jerome, who I still live with, on the night that I premiered my first film, when I was 20. So in a way it happened right away for me. But I’ve worked for many people in the film industry as an editor, especially in the area of documentary, and at least three or four times I’ve worked for someone who was looking for a mate.
Once, a friend, Richard Lerner, was producing and directing a film on Jack Kerouac called What Happened to Kerouac?, which I edited. It came time to write out an enormous check to make a 35mm print from the video material. He was really hesitant, and he was single at the time. I said, “Don’t worry. There is no way you won’t get a permanent relationship from this film.” He got irritated, because it was something like the third time I’d said that to him. But a woman approached him after the film premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and they’ve been married ever since.
That has happened with at least four other filmmakers. I worked with Kelly Duane, who made a wonderful film [Monumental] about David Brower, the guy who radicalized the Sierra Club. She was single. She met someone when she showed the film in LA at an environmental film festival, and now she’s married and has a child.
SFBG Is that why you’ve earned the reputation of being the editing doctor of San Francisco?
ND Yes. I work for a lot of single women.
But to answer your question in a more simple way: birds sing, and every February or March a mockingbird always appears in my backyard and sings all night. If it’s a bad singer, there can be trouble. One bird three years ago was not a good singer. It sang from February until the first week of July before another bird sang along with it — then it disappeared. But sometimes they sing for four nights, and it’s over. They’ve gotten someone, because they’re really good singers.
SFBG I’d never thought of filmmaking as a mating call, but you’re right.
ND Many people don’t understand that, and they try to win their mate by making horrible and aggressive conceptually based films. No one is drawn to them, and then they get even more conceptual and aggressive. It can be a downward spiral.
It’s difficult, because you’d think anyone who’d want to make a so-called handmade film would do so to have complete control of the situation. It’s also a chance to make a film that isn’t based on socialized needs. When you make your own individual film, it’s generally an opportunity to be completely who you are and share the intimacy with someone else. In my experience, the more purely individual a film is, the more universal it is. The less successful attempts at filmmaking occur when people are trying to make something which functions within the context of current belief systems. It’s like trying to get a good grade in society, even if it’s alternative society, rather than actually taking the risk of letting the audience feel your heart and your clarity and [to] touch them with that.
SFBG We might be in a dark age in architecture, design, fashion, and everything that involves representing ourselves visually. Aesthetics are ignored, intellect isn’t challenged, nor is spirituality. In contrast, all of those things are at the foundation of your work. Does it bother you that the audience is small?
ND I’m not sure. I’m 63 now, and in the last few years while showing my films in Europe and Canada and the US, I’ve noticed that people in their 20s are really loving them. There’s some kind of interesting face-off between my own generation and people who are in their 20s now.
Within the avant-garde there’s the virgin syndrome, which is that every showcase will only show a film that’s never been screened before. Everyone wants a virgin for their temple. A good avant-garde film is made to be seen 10, 15, 20 times. But because of the virgin syndrome, because they only sacrifice virgins at the temple altar at this point, audiences rarely get to experience a film a number of times.
SFBG Lastly, I want to ask about the roles of silence and sound in your films. Do you prefer silent films?
ND The first time I saw a silent Brakhage film, it seemed quite odd. If you’re used to having sugar with your coffee and someone gives you coffee without sugar, you might find it strange. But you can also get used to it, so that when someone puts sugar in your coffee it seems sort of obnoxious.
It’s an acquired taste, silence, definitely an acquired taste. But once acquired, it has many deep rewards. For one thing, a sound film is more like sharing a socialized event, where to me a silent film is more like sharing the purity of your aloneness with the purity of someone else’s aloneness. The audience has to work a little harder, of course, to participate — everything isn’t just spoon-fed to them. But if they do work a little bit harder, they’re more than rewarded for that effort.<\!s>SFBG
SILENT SONGS: THREE FILMS BY NATHANIEL DORSKY
Sun/10, 7:30 p.m. (sold out) and 9:30 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
$6–<\d>$10
(415) 978-2787
www.sfcinematheque.org
For a longer version of this interview, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Blood in the water

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Mayor Gavin Newsom has long been considered a lock for reelection next year, a belief driven by his same-sex marriage gesture, hoarding of political capital, personal charm, and high approval ratings. Yet Guardian interviews with more than 20 political experts and insiders from across the ideological spectrum indicate that Newsom may now be more vulnerable than ever.
Just as San Francisco politicians are starting to calculate whether to run, the Newsom administration has suffered a series of political setbacks. In November alone, most of Newsom’s picks got spanked during the election, his veto of popular police foot patrol legislation was overridden by the Board of Supervisors, and he was caught off guard by the San Francisco 49ers’ announcement that they were moving to Santa Clara, taking with them Newsom’s hopes of landing the 2016 Summer Olympics.
“Until recently, I didn’t have a lot of hope,” Sup. Chris Daly, whom Newsom unsuccessfully worked to defeat, told us. “Now the progressives have a glimmer of hope. The mayor seems to be hurting from three or four episodes where he was caught with egg on his face.”
To many political observers — most of whom the Guardian allowed to speak anonymously in order to capture their most candid observations and plans — the defeats were indicative of a mayor who seems increasingly disengaged and out of touch. Even Newsom’s strategy of avoiding fights that might hurt his popularity has rankled many of his allies, who complain that this risk-averse approach has allowed the Board of Supervisors to effectively set the city’s agenda.
“This guy does not use one scintilla of his political capital on anyone or anything,” said former mayor Art Agnos, whose name has been dropped as a possible challenger to Newsom but who told us, “I’m not running.”
There are a number of strong anti-Newsom narratives out there, even on his signature issues, such as crime and homelessness, which persist as visible, visceral problems despite increased city spending on homeless services and controversial tactics like police sweeps and one-way bus tickets out of town for vagrants.
The mayor started his term by announcing during a radio interview that if the murder rate rose, he should be ousted from office. It did — remaining at 10-year highs through the past three years — handing his potential opponents a ready-made sound bite. The crime rate could be a powerful weapon when paired with Newsom’s failure to follow up on promises of police reform.
Newsom is still likely to offer up a long list of accomplishments in his usual statistics-laden style. But much of what he tries to take credit for was actually someone else’s initiative, such as the universal health care measure crafted by Sup. Tom Ammiano (who is running for the State Assembly and not taking a third run at the mayor’s office). Adding to Newsom’s problems in November was the lawsuit the Golden Gate Restaurant Association — a Newsom ally — filed challenging the measure.
Almost everyone we interviewed agreed that if Newsom does have approval ratings of around 80 percent, as has been reported, that support is very soft and may significantly erode during the campaign. “His support is an inch deep and a mile wide” was how one political analyst put it.
“His ‘skyrocketing’ approval rating is irrelevant,” one downtown politico told us. “People approve of the mayor like they approve of the color beige. If you fill an arena with 50,000 people and ask them to decide on what color to paint the walls, that color will always be beige. It’s not that they necessarily like beige; it’s that they will accept it as long as those freaks who want hot pink don’t get their way.”
And then there are his personal foibles. Newsom’s choice of girlfriends — from the Scientologist actress to the 19-year-old hostess — has found its way into print and caused the mayor to lash out in brittle ways that have hurt his relations with once-friendly outlets like the Chronicle, which openly mocked Newsom’s televised comments last month about how hard his job is and how he might not run for reelection.
Finally, there are the new electoral realities: this is the first mayor’s race in which challengers will receive public financing from a $7 million fund (almost all of which, Newsom campaign manager Eric Jaye argues, will be aimed at doing damage to Newsom) and the first with ranked-choice voting, allowing candidates to run as a team and gang up on the mayor.
Add it all up, and Newsom looks vulnerable. But that’s only the first part of a two-part question. The trickier part is who can run against Newsom, and that’s a question to which nobody has any good answer yet.
THE FIELD
Among the names being dropped for a mayoral run are Dennis Herrera, Aaron Peskin, Ross Mirkarimi, Matt Gonzalez, Kamala Harris, Mark Leno, Agnos, Susan Leal, Angela Alioto, Lou Girardo, Warren Hellman, Jeff Adachi, Tony Hall, Leland Yee, Daly, Michael Hennessey, Quentin Kopp, and Carole Migden. That’s quite a list.
Yet most say they are disinclined to run this time around, and none are likely to announce their candidacies in the near future, which is when most observers believe a serious run at Newsom would have to begin. Here’s the catch-22: nobody wants to run against Newsom unless his approval rating sinks below 60 percent, but it’s unlikely to sink that low unless there are rivals out there challenging him every day.
Two candidates who already hold citywide office and could aggressively challenge Newsom on police issues are Sheriff Hennessey and District Attorney Harris, both of whom have mainstream credentials as well as supporters in the progressive community. But both have expressed reluctance to run in the next mayoral election, at least in part because they’re also standing for reelection this fall and would need to leave their jobs to run for mayor.
Public Defender Adachi is a favorite of many progressives and could also run on police reform, but his job of representing sometimes heinous criminals could be easy for the Newsom team to attack Willie Horton–<\d>style.
Many of the strongest potential candidates are thought to be waiting four more years until the seat is open. City Attorney Herrera can take as much credit as Newsom for gay marriage and is a tough campaigner and formidable fundraiser who has clearly been setting himself up for higher office. Assemblymember Leno has won over progressives since his divisive 2002 primary against Harry Britt and could be mayoral material, particularly because he’s termed out in two years. But both are allies of Newsom and reluctant to run against him.
Several supervisors and former supervisors would love to beat Newsom, but the road seems steep for them. Daly just got beat up in his own reelection, so his negatives are too high to run again right now. Supervisor Mirkarimi might run, but some consider him too Green and too green and are urging him to wait four more years. Board President Peskin could also be a contender, but some doubt his citywide appeal and note a few bad votes he’s cast.
Challenges from Newsom’s right could include Kopp, the former legislator and judge; Hall, the former supervisor whom Newsom ousted from his Treasure Island post; businessman and attorney Girardo; financier and philanthropist Hellman; and Alioto, who ran last time. But these would-be challengers are generally less liberal than Newsom, who pundits say is as conservative a mayor as a town with an ascendant progressive movement will tolerate.
Finally, there’s Gonzalez, who four years ago jumped in the mayor’s race at the last minute, was outspent by Newsom six-to-one, and still came within less than five percentage points of winning. Many progressives are urging him to run again, noting that he is still popular and has the political skills to highlight Newsom’s shortcomings. But Gonzalez remains cagey about his intentions.
“I don’t believe I’m running for mayor. The chances are slim,” Gonzalez told us. “But I think he needs to be challenged.”
TEAM NEWSOM
Newsom campaign manager Jaye says he’s definitely expecting a challenge. And unlike most observers whom we spoke with, who are surveying the field and not seeing many people jumping in, Jaye expects a crowded free-for-all and a tough race.
“Is it likely to be a highly contested mayor’s race? Sure. Is that a good thing? Yes, I think it is,” Jaye said. “Every race in San Francisco is tough. The school board races here are fought harder than some Senate races.”
But Jaye thinks the new public financing system — in which mayoral candidates who can raise $135,000 will get $450,000 from the city — will be the biggest factor. “That’s one of the reasons I think everyone’s going to run,” Jaye said. “That guarantees it will be a crowded field.”
One political analyst said that’s the best scenario for defeating Newsom. He said dethroning the mayor will be like a pack of jackals taking down an elephant. No single challenger is likely to beat Newsom, but if he’s being attacked from all sides, he just might fall.
As for Newsom’s weaknesses and missteps, Jaye doesn’t agree the mayor is particularly weak and doesn’t think people will turn away from Newsom because of his candid comments on how the job cuts into his personal life.
“One of the reasons so many people like Gavin Newsom is he’s not afraid to be human in public and to be honest,” Jaye said, adding that his candidate is up for the challenge. “He is running for real and will run a vigorous race.”
Jaye concedes that the 49ers issue is difficult: Newsom will be hurt if they leave, and he’ll be hurt if he appears to give up too much to keep them here. The high murder rate and inaction on police reform are widely considered to be vulnerabilities, but Jaye said, “Gavin Newsom gets up every day and works on that problem, and if voters think another candidate has a better solution, they’ll look at it.”
Everyone agrees that candidates will enter the race late — which is what happened during the last two mayor’s races and is even likelier with public financing. If Newsom takes more hits or can’t get his head into the game, the sharks will start circling. “The next three months with what happens with the mayor will be telling,” another political insider told us.
One test will be with Proposition I, the measure voters approved Nov. 7 asking the mayor to show up for a monthly question time before the Board of Supervisors. Newsom reportedly has said he won’t come, which could look cowardly and out of touch to the voters who approved it and to the supervisors, who might make great political theater of the no-show. And if Newsom does decide to show up, most observers believe he might not fare well in such an unscripted exchange.
If Newsom implodes or appears weak in late spring, suddenly all those political heavy hitters will be forced to think about getting in the fray. After all, as just about everyone told us, nine months is like an eternity in San Francisco politics — and Newsom has the best job in town.

Pink-paint hate

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It was a little after 6 o’clock on the morning of Sept. 21 when Naomi Okada arrived to start her day at Lowell High School. The Japanese language teacher is often at work early, and after a short wait a custodian let her into the building. Okada made her way down the quiet, empty halls of the school and up a stairwell to the second floor, where she unlocked the door of the World Language Department office. She dropped her things by her desk, one among more than a dozen belonging to the language teachers who share space in the large office. As she entered the nearby kitchen to brew a pot of coffee, John Raya’s desk, in the corner by the door, caught her attention.
“I noticed there was paint all over his computer,” Okada told the Guardian. “My first impression was that it looked like a bucket of paint was poured over it.” Thick streams of pink liquid dripped from the monitor onto the keyboard and were splattered on the wall behind the desk and the chair in front of it.
She thought this might have been an accident, but since Raya was also an early riser and usually came in about a half hour after her, she decided to go look for him. She walked quickly down the hallway, past Spirit Week posters painted the same shade of pink, to Raya’s classroom. It was still locked. Moments later she ran into him in the hallway, and together they went back to the office.
Okada hadn’t yet passed close enough to the desk to see a note propped on the keyboard. It was Raya who would first read what it said:
“Big mouth fag!!!!! You start too much trouble in this department!!!! Mind your fucking business and go back to New York!!!!! Or Cuba or wherever the fuck you come from!!!!!”
“I was stunned,” Raya told us. “It didn’t hit me in the beginning. It was just bizarre. It didn’t make sense. And then the reality hit.”
Raya thinks the pink paint was chosen because he is gay and the words because he’s been speaking up about problems he sees in the language department in which he has taught French and Spanish for almost 20 years.
Soon the school’s interim principal, Amy Hansen, and assistant principal Peter Van Court would have the room closed off and guarded by security. John Scully, the police officer assigned to the school, would arrive to gather evidence that might identify who committed the hate crime.
And all of that would take just a few hours. The destroyed keyboard and desk chair would be removed and replaced. The paint would be wiped up, leaving spare vestiges of pink in the seams of the computer monitor and on the chalk tray behind it. By lunchtime it would seem as though this had never happened — and most of the school would still be unaware that it had.
Later, Inspector Milanda Moore of the San Francisco Police Department’s hate crimes unit would be assigned to the case, and Raya would ask her why a crime lab was not brought in. “She said that was Mr. Scully’s call,” Raya said.
“We didn’t really have a lot of evidence,” Scully told us. “I guess it’s a computer office classroom,” he said, misidentifying the room. “A lot of people touch computers. It would be hard to get a good fingerprint. I didn’t see the point.” He said rooms that see a lot of use and are heavily trafficked by kids are hard to fingerprint.
This, however, isn’t one of those rooms. It’s an office to which only faculty and administration have keys and access, and students are strictly forbidden from entering without supervision. And when Okada arrived for work early that morning, the door was locked, the lock was functioning fine, and there was no sign of a forced entry.
That’s led Raya and others at Lowell to a truly disturbing conclusion: the hate crime was committed, they suggest, not by a disgruntled student or misguided prankster but by a member of the faculty or an administrator.
If that’s true, then Lowell — the city’s premier public high school, a place that wins awards for its teaching and is lauded for its tolerant attitudes — has a staff member who has resorted to the sort of racist, homophobic act that’s rarely seen in San Francisco workplaces these days. And he or she still hasn’t been caught.
In fact, one of the oddest elements of this entire episode — and the fact that makes it more than a passing story of poor behavior — is the way the school administration has seemed to go out of its way to keep the whole thing under wraps. Students were never formally told what happened. Faculty were discouraged from discussing it. The student paper, the Lowell, was scolded for daring to print a story about it. Other than a student-organized response, there was no attempt to use the incident as a learning experience.
Some school officials are unhappy that the administration kept this so quiet. “I think that’s totally inappropriate,” Sarah Lipson, vice president of the Board of Education, told us. “We’ve tried so hard to be transparent. If you have no idea where this is coming from, you have to err on the side of transparency.”
And when we started to look into the crime, we discovered that it wasn’t an isolated event. The language department at Lowell is such a mess that a specialist in nonviolent communication has been hired to mediate. “It’s a very hot, polarized situation,” said Lynda Smith, a consultant with Bay Area Nonviolent Communication who works with couples and groups and teaches classes at San Quentin. “In my experience, the tension and the lack of trust in this department is one of the more extreme situations that I’ve encountered.”
The situation is raising some deep-seated questions about the way one of the nation’s top public high schools is managed.
Lowell is the kind of academic institution that inspires faith in the public school system. Last May, Newsweek ranked it 26 out of 1,200 top public schools in the country. Each year nearly 3,000 of San Francisco’s intellectually elite eighth graders vie for the 600 open slots, facing academic standards more rigid than those of any other high school in the city. The list of alumni is thick with Rhodes scholars and Nobel Prize winners, Beltway press secretaries and Ivy League college presidents.
The rigorous learning environment means “the students are so academically driven they rarely have time to look up from their books,” said Barbara Blinick, a social studies teacher and faculty sponsor of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). She thinks that’s what makes Lowell “one of the safest campuses in the city.”
“We fight over seats in the library,” student Beatriz Datangel said. “Last year someone got in trouble for throwing a cupcake.”
And Lowell has a reputation for being a safe and accepting place for queer students. “They’re not attacked, they’re not beaten up,” Blinick said.
“I have never been in or heard of a high school with as gay-positive an environment as Lowell has,” English teacher Jennifer Moffitt said. “That isn’t to say Lowell is perfect by any means, but it’s unusually open here. We have several openly gay faculty members as well as students.”
“Last year’s prom king and queen were both guys,” English teacher Bryan Ritter added. “And they both fought over the tiara.”
Which is why the hate crime committed against Raya was so shocking.
“I can’t believe that someone would target him,” Ritter said. “He’s such a nice guy. I don’t tolerate homophobia, and I can’t express how appalled I am that it’s happened in my own school.”
Ritter, like a majority of the faculty, first heard about the incident from Hansen the day after it happened.
Hansen told us she said “this was a horrible act, that it was an assault on all of us and we need to keep our ears open and be listening, because if students know and if students were involved, if you listen, kids talk.”
But if the incident was indeed an assault on “all of us,” the students were not included in that community. No public announcement was made to the student body. The monthly “Message from the Principal,” released just three days after the hate crime was discovered, painted a bright, sunny picture of a day in the busy life of Lowell, with Spirit Week in full swing and faculty steeped in annual curriculum development. There was no mention of the incident of hatred directed against a veteran faculty member.
“It seems to me it’s been downplayed from the very beginning,” said David Lipman, a Spanish teacher. “We were told at the beginning not to say anything to the students. So we didn’t say anything.”
“Somehow,” Lipman told us, “I’m just afraid that it’s not in the district’s interest to find out who did it. And it seems like no one will ever hear about it again.”
The school’s award-winning student paper, the Lowell, wasn’t comfortable with that approach. “The students hadn’t heard about it — that’s why we covered it in the paper,” said Ritter, who’s also faculty sponsor for the monthly publication.
Raya was very willing to talk about the crime with reporter Cynthia Chau, who didn’t have a difficult time getting details of what happened or leads as to why from him. Responses from the principal were not as forthcoming.
“She did talk to us, and she answered all of our questions,” said a reporter who assisted Chau with the front-page story. “Except for when it got to Raya’s allegations that were more controversial — when he said she hadn’t done enough to respond to the hate crime, about her showing favoritism, and that he had had a discussion with her about that. She said, ‘No comment, that’s between Mr. Raya and myself.’<\!q>”
After the story hit the hallways, Hansen scheduled a meeting with the journalism classes that publish the paper to discuss their moral obligations as reporters. Though Hansen had issues with a number of their articles, including the one on Raya, the overall impression the classes came away with was that she disapproved of them covering controversy.
“Her recommendation was that we shouldn’t report stories that may have a negative effect,” reporter Jason Siu said. “That doesn’t really work. As journalists, we should report the truth. If it’s happening on the Lowell campus, we should report it.”
John Raya has the quiet presence of the kid who sits in the back of the classroom minding his own business. The only edge in his otherwise soft voice is a Brooklyn accent, which dissolves when he speaks French or Spanish, the two languages he teaches at Lowell. It’s hard to believe he could incite enough animosity to drive someone to commit a hate crime against him.
But at Lowell he’s become the most vocal leader of an expanding group of teachers unhappy about the management of the language department.
Since June, Raya has been writing letters to various administrators and the Board of Education about what he perceives as inequities in the way classes are assigned to teachers and how students are selected for them. He’s been calling for more openness in decision-making processes, for a formal policy on who teaches which classes, and even for the department head, Dorothy Ong, to relinquish her position.
“Everyone in the department was getting copies of these letters,” Lipman said. “There were a lot of them. They were mainly in the weeks preceding the incident. They were about policy, fairness, equity — very professionally done. Your jaw dropped open because they pierced right to the heart. They were like when a senator is calling for the president to step down.”
High schools are often places where petty drama takes the stage as high art, where locker room cliques are nascent coffee klatches and conflict and competition are extracurricular activities. But behind the academic politics are sometimes real issues.
When Amy Hansen left Oakland’s Skyline High School to stand in as interim principal at Lowell for the 2006–<\d>07 school year, Raya was one of the first people to come by her office, a few days before school commenced in August. He wanted to talk about the World Language Department’s “long-standing history of conflict,” she said. “He raised concerns about how the department was run, he felt that he was not being treated fairly, and he raised a number of issues which I took seriously.”
At Lowell the 600 or so incoming students are asked to rank three options from the nine languages the school offers. Like many high schools in the country, Spanish is in high demand, second only to Chinese; more than half of Lowell’s students are Chinese American. Over the years, more sections of these popular classes have been added incrementally, but a concerted effort has also been made to skim off some kids into other, less popular languages, such as Korean, German, and Italian.
Herein lies the rift, which some view as philosophical — but which in practice leaves one person playing God. Every year about 100 unlucky students end up with the second or third language they picked. This balances the class sizes and lets the less-popular languages survive, but critics of the system think it undermines student choice — for the benefit of the adults who teach them. This year three Spanish classes and a French class were replaced with additional sections of German, Korean, and Advanced Placement Chinese in order to bolster the numbers.
According to Raya and his contingent, this was inexplicable, and so much tension existed in the department, they suspected the only reason it was done was to favor teachers who might otherwise be let go if the programs were cut.
“We voted as a department years ago — the languages that don’t support themselves, we’re going to let them die off,” Spanish teacher John Ryland said. Tagalog, Russian, and Greek had all seen the ax.
Part of the problem is that teaching at Lowell is a popular gig no one wants to lose. “There’s always the fear that a diminishing number of students taking certain classes leads to a change in who gets to teach classes and teach at Lowell,” social studies teacher Ken Tray told us.
It’s particularly rough in the language department, where changing preferences can mean the end of a job. “Other departments don’t have competition or concern that there will be enough kids signing up to teach their classes,” Tray said.
Ong, who decides which language classes to save (and who should teach them), denied there was any favoritism. “If you look at the whole picture, what is lost here? Nobody lost their job,” she said. “People can say I favor the lesser languages. I protect all languages as department head.”
Then there’s the AP issue.
Nearly 100 percent of Lowell students graduate, nearly all continue on to college, and the school’s basic requirements are geared toward getting them into at least the University of California system. Unlike many other schools, Lowell doesn’t limit the number of Advanced Placement, or college-level, classes a student can take, and many kids use them to heavily spice their transcripts and entice college admissions counselors.
For teachers, the advanced curriculum of AP classes is a chance to be challenged along with the kids. “Among teachers, there’s no shortage of desire to teach AP,” said Bryan Ritter, who teaches AP English.
And the school is happy to provide as many AP classes as it can. According to San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) policy, for every 20 AP exams that are taken by students, the district will fund one additional AP class. So 100 students testing means additional funding for one new teacher. “At Lowell we make a bundle off of that,” said Terry Abad, president of the Lowell Alumni Association.
The money is deposited in the school’s general fund, but rather than hire additional AP teachers, Lowell’s administrators ask staff members to teach multiple sections of AP classes. By doubling and tripling the number of AP classes one teacher instructs, the school frees up thousands of dollars to pay for other school services.
“From a financial perspective, if teachers weren’t teaching AP, we wouldn’t be able to fund school,” Abad said. “Without AP money Lowell would be a disaster.”
But another disaster is in the works, with overburdened teachers looking to dump classes and underburdened teachers wishing they could have them. “The idea of AP is to give a very intensive college experience and give teachers the time to properly attend to those classes. The whole system has been corrupted,” said David Yuan, an English teacher.
Nowhere in the school is that more obvious than the language department, where one teacher has four Chinese AP classes. “It’s a tremendous amount of work,” Xiaolin Chang said. “I’m hoping next year someone else will teach.”
Hansen said these concerns have not fallen on deaf ears. Two subcommittees have been established for reviewing the numbers to determine classes and another “to create policies and procedures that are written, so that it isn’t ‘I like you, I don’t like you, you’re cute, or whatever, the kids like you better.’ So that there’s some process,” Hansen said.
She refused to allow teachers to review old data to see if favoritism had played into past decisions and defended the language department chair. “I feel that in the limited time that I’ve been here, Ms. Ong deals with a staff of at least 18 or 19, all of whom feel passionate about their language, a complicated scheduling process, and I think she does a herculean task. She has the support of the majority of the faculty, who trust her and believe that she’s doing the best she can.”
Despite the concession to be included in future decision-making processes, Raya continues to wonder why there hasn’t been more of an effort to find out who trashed his computer and to rectify the rumors. “People still think a student did it. I’ve gotten lots of cards and e-mails from people, all supportive, but they keep thinking it’s a student,” Raya said.
But that seems almost impossible to believe, since no students had access to the area and there was no forced entry, “I would be very, very, very surprised if it wasn’t an adult,” Lipman said. “The note said you’re making too many problems for this department — students don’t know that.”
The district hired a private investigating firm, Brubeck and McGarrahan, to look into the situation, and Ellen McGarrahan released the findings of her investigation to SFUSD legal counsel Nov. 20. Her report states that 15 people — all faculty or staff — were interviewed. The investigators were unable to reach any conclusions.
But not everyone who uses the room was questioned. “I’m shocked that they haven’t questioned everyone in the department,” said Lipman, who was not contacted by any investigator. “I’m surprised they didn’t ask everyone what they knew. It seems like that would be the logical thing to do.”
Instead, on Oct. 23, during the middle of the school day, Raya was called downtown by Inspector Milanda Moore for almost three hours of what felt like a full interrogation. “My mistake was I didn’t get a lawyer. I didn’t think I needed one. She duped me. She said it was an interview,” Raya said. He told the inspector he didn’t have a key to the building or any knowledge of the security code to quell the alarm and was at a class at City College the night before and working out at the gym the morning the vandalism was discovered.
“She said, ‘Why don’t you take a polygraph?” I said, ‘I have no problem doing it, but I’ll do it on the condition that every administrator, every faculty member, and every student do it.’<\!q>”
Raya told her, “I’m the victim! Why are you asking me?”
At Raya’s interrogation, one of the letters he wrote to assistant principal Peter Van Court was touted as an example of how Raya was capable of orchestrating his own hate crime. “She [Moore] said to me the language in the hate crime note sounds like the language I used to Van Court in my letter. I said, ‘Excuse me, there’s nothing in that letter that says faggot.’<\!q>”
Inspector Moore refused to comment on this case, except to say it was still open.
Hansen is not a popular principal these days. Since September she’s been “dropping in” on classes for short observations, which she says are a way to get to know the school and encourage a pedagogical dialogue.
In theory, this sounds exactly like what an engaged administrator should be doing — but the practice has had a hard launch as teachers have perceived it as an opportunity for the administration to unfairly critique them at their jobs.
“The principal started off the school year wanting to have this intense conversation about our teaching. Dropping into classes was initially portrayed as a collegial part of an ongoing process of a development exercise,” said Ken Tray, a social studies teacher and United Educators of SF union representative. Instead, the principal’s practice of dropping into classes to casually observe teachers has created a backlash against her style and approach.
“A record number of grievances have already been filed this year,” Tray said. “Last year we had one grievance the entire year, and there were some very serious issues that came up.”
“They’re clearly a lot more than friendly, getting-to-know-you visits,” Yuan said. “There are a lot of people that are unhappy. It’s tense. This is essentially a new policy.”
An unprecedented meeting Nov. 2 drew more than half the faculty to a forum to air their concerns. Their biggest gripes: a lack of trust, a rush to judgment, issues with communication, a sense of top-down management, and a real worry that teachers were being unfairly evaluated, which is a violation of the contractual agreement between the teachers’ union and the district.
“Lowell does not have to be fixed,” Tray said. “It’s creating a faux crisis. What’s the issue here? We have outstanding students doing outstanding work. More punitive measures from the administration seem out of place.”
Some say Hansen may be a good principal who’s just at the wrong school. “I think she’s probably a pretty good turnaround principal,” Yuan said. “Her approach is good for schools with more difficult students.”
“I think everyone is pretty much united,” school board member Eric Mar said. “The principal is autocratic and doesn’t resolve conflict. The principal chosen is the wrong person for the school, and that’s one of the root causes for the conflict.”
November is Transgender Remembrance Month at Lowell. GSA posters commemorating transgender victims of hate crimes hang throughout the hallways, and on a busy afternoon the students rush by them, their arms loaded with books, their ears pressed to cell phones, appearing like the young professionals they hope to someday be.
When asked why the students weren’t informed or brought together as a group to discuss a hate crime on their campus, Hansen said, “We can’t, first of all, have a schoolwide assembly. We have 2,700 kids and we have an auditorium of 900 capacity.”
And she said, “We wouldn’t generally broadcast this kind of information. Whenever a computer’s stolen or something terrible happens, we don’t tend to broadcast it.”
However, the day before the hate crime was discovered, another teacher’s tires were slashed. Hansen went on the school’s broadcasting system, Radio Lowell, to denounce the slashing as an inappropriate way of dealing with anger and asked anyone in the community with information to come forward.
That wouldn’t necessarily be the way to handle a hate crime, but according to other professionals in the field, secrecy isn’t always the best route either.
Al Adams has handled a few hate crimes during his 19 years as a principal, even writing about a 1994 incident at his school, Lick-Wilmerding High, for the National Association of Independent Schools newsletter. He titled his article “When Homophobia Rears Its Head.”
“My rule of thumb with anything like this is to be open and honest and candid about it. That always goes a long way. Make sure the victim feels safe and also search out teachable moments,” Adams said.
“The most effective treatment of a hate crime is to shine the spotlight on it and make the perpetrators accountable,” said Sam Thoron, who recently retired after six years as national president of Parents for Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), an organization he’s been involved with since his daughter came out in 1990.
He said there’s a fine line between shining a light and making too big a deal, but “burying something like this tends to make it worse.
“I would expect the school to make a clear and public statement that this is not acceptable, but it’s awful easy to hide these things.”
Barbara Blinick, faculty sponsor of the GSA, was worried about the lack of candor. “That was a fault. I do think that could have been done better. [Hansen] made a choice not to make it public. But everyone knew about it, everyone was talking about it, and that’s why the GSA wanted to respond.” Blinick spoke with Hansen shortly after the incident and arranged for the GSA to do the outreach.
“The students have been really brave and thoughtful and working so hard,” Blinick said. “We all agree it took too long, and some of the tardiness was that we wanted it to be perfect.”
On Nov. 30, more than two months after Raya discovered his defaced desk, an outreach bulletin written by the GSA was distributed to the students, with a cover letter from Hansen denouncing homophobic discrimination but without specific mention of Raya or the hate crime that happened in the school.
Communities United Against Violence does outreach in the SFUSD through a speaker’s bureau, a program founded by Sup. Tom Ammiano. The group is often contacted by schools after a hate crime occurs, and since 1978 some 70 volunteers have been visiting schools such as Washington, Galileo, Ida B. Wells, and Mission to talk about what it takes to have an open and supportive community, “but we don’t get invited to Lowell,” program director Connie Champagne told us.
“They need to be coming here,” Blinick said. “That’s a really easy way to talk about these issues. They should be hitting every 10th-grade classroom, and I thought that they were.”
The private investigator’s report has been finalized, with no conclusion about who may have targeted Raya. The city’s investigation is ongoing and already reeks of a case gone stale for lack of evidence and witnesses.
Nothing further about it has been said to the faculty, and nearly everyone questioned by the Guardian said they hoped to hear something more soon. Conditions in the department haven’t necessarily improved, and veteran teachers are already looking forward to the end of the year.
“Who did it? That piece needs to get solved for them to move forward,” said the mediator, Lynda Smith, who, after two sessions, was not invited back by the administration.
“I’m so discouraged now,” Raya said. “I’m just at low ebb. I’m really disgusted. I don’t want to leave Lowell. I love Lowell. I’m addicted to Lowell. But the morale is so low I think it’s going to be my time to go. I never thought I would.
“The sad part is it’s not the kids. They’re the ones I will miss the most. It’s sad that this has to prompt me at 50 years old, spending more than half my life in this profession, to decide that this is the time to quit.”

Wholly noise

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Trying to fathom the arcane and somewhat frustrating demeanor that shrouds a Bay Area noisenik is like cross-examining Walt Disney on LSD. I’ve been at the mercy of Rubber O Cement’s Bonnie Banks for the past week, meticulously querying the mumbo jumbo he (or she, as Banks likes to be referred to) sends in response to interview questions while nagging him for answers to my more dogged inquiries. One e-mail reply might yield a pensive thought, only to be followed by a farrago of chaotic imagery — swarms of schizo babble about vocal chord mulch, mosquito broccoli, and rabid zombie snowmen. When asked what people can expect from the impending Brutal Sound Effects Festival, Banks answers that performers “will present the sound of a stuffed horse and cat calliope skidded via hydroplane base into a volcano of semi-liquid thorium pellets.” In another e-mail he writes that he hopes people will come to the event “adorning their larger-than-life scramble nightmare Bosch slip-and-slide mask.”
Though put off at first by Banks’s excursive, seemingly psychotomimetic rants, I soon realize this is his world. What I mistook as some puerile screwball who’s simply fucking with me — I’m still convinced he’s doing that to a degree — is actually the eccentric, visionary heart of the Bay Area noise scene.
Since the early 1980s, Banks has exhaustively chiseled San Francisco into the West Coast hub for underground noise by playing in prominent acts such as Caroliner, bringing up young bands (his musical influence has extended from Wolf Eyes to Deerhoof), and encouraging others to engage in the scene. In 1995 he established the Brutal Sound Effects Festival — a musical community of misfits who, according to Hans Grusel of Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet, “didn’t fit in anywhere else.” Shortly afterward, Banks founded an online BSFX message board where people could discuss noise acts, events, and other bizarre topics.
Now in its 40th incarnation — Banks is said to organize four to five events a year — the forthcoming BSFX Festival includes some of the Bay Area’s renowned noise addicts: Xome provides power noise onslaughts, and Nautical Almanac’s James “Twig” Harper indulges in electronic cannibalism. Other notable acts include Anti Ear and Bran (…) pos of Beandip Troubadours, Skozey Fetisch, and Joseph Hammer of the Los Angeles Free Music Society in Psicologicos Trama, offering “a fun way to sample experimental sound,” says Joel Shepard, film curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which is hosting the event for the first time. Each act will integrate improvised film and video clips into a short performance, creating what Shepard describes as “a real multimedia sensory overload event.” If something seems boring, he adds, there will be another performance in minutes.
“I’ve been really impressed with what he’s been doing,” Shepard says, referring to the industrious Banks. “I find what he’s doing to be a very important part of the art and cultural scene in San Francisco, and I want to show my support.”
The freaks and geeks of BSFX push performance art to its limits, playing under unpronounceable aliases and often incorporating elaborate costumes and scenery unlike anything you see at conventional concerts. Musicians execute a medley of odd sounds using home-wired equipment and analog gadgets at warehouses like the Clit Stop and Pubis Noir. Blistering resonance is one element at these shows. Relying heavily on feedback and distortion, artists such as Xome, Randy Yau, and Tralphaz create a getting-sucked-through-a-vacuum effect by hooking up 20 guitar pedals and feeding them into each other. But don’t be fooled — not all noise acts use volume as an instrument. The Spider Compass Good Crime Band, a duo that will play the upcoming BSFX show, is described by its members as “giant vultures who play instrumental music based around a keyboard.” Their YouTube video is just as outlandish: two costumed performers (one dressed as a giraffelike character, the other as a flamingo) dance and fiddle with samplers; the chamber-driven organs and rubber-sounding belches resemble industrial surf pop.
It’s easy to get sucked into the abstract, visual noise. Costumes range from the cuckoo-clock masks of Hans Grusel to the moss-covered floor crouching of Ecomorti. “Some performers will move an entire set of scenery into a show, which takes two to three hours to set up, and then play a 15-minute set,” Grusel says over the phone. “That shows the dedication people have to this sort of thing.”<\!s>SFBG
BRUTAL SOUND EFFECTS FESTIVAL
Fri/8, 7:30 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
$6–<\d>$8
(415) 978-2787
www.ybca.org

EDITOR’S NOTES

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
Like far too many liberals, I spend far too much time listing to NPR, which can lead to a special kind of brain rot: I once actually sat through an hour-long program on Mormon folk songs that included a long, upbeat, and respectful ode to Brigham Young “and his five and 40 wives.” Jesus, that’s a lot of wives.
But there are things I love, and Science Friday is one of them. While I was fighting the traffic on my way back from a friend’s house in Healdsburg last week, I heard a fascinating interview with Michael Pollan, the UC Berkeley journalism professor who’s written a series of New York Times articles and now a book on how truly weird food production is in the United States in 2006.
Of course, everyone was digesting a big Thanksgiving dinner, and Pollan wasted no time getting to his thesis: if we are what we eat, then most of us are a mixture of corn and petrochemicals.
He’s got evidence of this too: he has a friend in the biology department at Berkeley who ran a bunch of samples of fingernail and hair clippings from students and learned that much of the carbon that makes up the basic organic structure of a lot of human bodies can be traced back to one Midwestern grain and some fossil fuels.
The cow or turkey or pig you ate was fed with corn. The sugar in the salad dressing came from corn. The calories in the sodas the kids were drinking came from corn. And the corn came in part from ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which came from petroleum.
The point of all of this is that America has created a monocrop food system (well, duocrop — a lot of the animal protein that we eat comes from soybeans). That’s not healthy for a long list of ecological reasons — and it’s really bad for the economy.
The thing is, very little of what we eat comes from anywhere near where we live. Iowa, one of the most agriculturally productive parts of the world, imports almost all of its food these days. The corn grown in the state is shipped to giant centralized animal feedlots, which ship meat elsewhere.
I mention all of this, which is hardly news to a lot of people, because it plays into something that’s going on the first week in December in San Francisco. Dec. 4 through 10 is Shop Local First Week, which sounds kind of like small-town-Chamber-of-Commerce-boosterish stuff (and indeed, Mayor Gavin Newsom, who clearly isn’t paying attention, has formally endorsed it), but there’s a lot more behind this. The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, which sponsors the event, actually has a fairly radical economic platform emphasizing how local merchants — and not big chain stores and other out-of-town corporations — benefit local economies. In the food world, that means buying stuff grown somewhere near you (not hard around here). In the arena of holiday shopping (and consumer behavior in general), it means patronizing locally owned outfits — and not giving your dollars to the chains.
Our main news story this week (see “The Morning After,” page 18) illustrates well how big chain owners operate: the combine owned by Dean Singleton, which now controls almost all the big papers in the Bay Area, is laying off journalists and (maybe) outsourcing jobs to India. The San Francisco Chronicle is outsourcing its printing, killing the local press operators union.
And the money all leaves town. SFBG

The morning after

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
The plight of newspapers is a popular news story these days, from a late-August cover package in the Economist (“Who Killed the Newspaper?”) to National Public Radio’s On the Media last week (“Best of Times, Worst of Times”).
It’s usually told as the story of an industry on its deathbed, bleeding from self-inflicted wounds and those delivered by Wall Street, Main Street, Craigslist, and the blogger’s laptop. Ad revenues have nose-dived in recent years. Circulation is down nationwide. Journalism scandals and shortcomings have damaged the whole profession’s credibility.
And staff newspaper blogs alone won’t be enough to bring a new generation of tech-savvy Americans back to hard-copy publications that even smell stodgy and old.
Yet the bottom line is still the bottom line. The truth of the matter is that many publicly traded newspaper companies have healthy profit margins ranging between 15 and 20 percent. But the tendency of the doom and gloom business press to sensationalize bad news may actually make things easier for William “Lean” Dean Singleton, the cost-cutting king of Denver-based MediaNews Group, which recently announced a round of staff reductions at its Bay Area newspapers. The cuts came amid claims of a massive dip in ad income just a few months after Singleton promised that his company’s buyout of local newspapers wouldn’t diminish the quality or quantity of journalism here.
“Given continued declines in revenue, we need to reduce expenses significantly, and thus have no alternative but to implement a reduction in [the] work force,” George Riggs, who was recently appointed to lead the company’s Northern California operations, told employees in a memo Oct. 20. Several such memos have now been posted on the Internet.
If this is how quickly the news biz can turn ugly, it’s a wonder MediaNews was attracted to print journalism in the first place. Who knows what newspapers around here will look like in another few months? How much fat can they trim before they start hitting bone?
They aren’t just cutting staff. The Bay Area’s newspaper establishment is now outsourcing work to circumvent those pesky labor unions. The press operators’ union at the San Francisco Chronicle — which was the sole union holdout against management’s demand for expanded control and decreased benefits — could disappear in three years as a result of a new printing contract with a Canadian company. MediaNews recently announced plans to outsource ad production positions to India.
Consolidation already has amounted to fewer reporters covering individual stories that are distributed to several publications, including at least one story about the latest layoffs. That means fewer editorial perspectives on key public policies (and possibly fewer editorial positions) for readers in a market that’s notorious for its high intellectual demand and robust political participation.
Only an ongoing federal Justice Department investigation and a civil lawsuit threaten to slow down big changes going on at the Bay Area dailies. A federal judge ruled just before deadline in real estate mogul Clint Reilly’s antitrust claim against the Hearst Corp., publisher of the Chronicle, and MediaNews that for now, at least, the two could not combine circulation and advertising operations to save money.
The companies had secured a court order sealing key records unearthed during discovery, including depositions and exhibits, citing the right to protect confidential trade secrets. It’s an ironic move for a group of papers that have regularly sued government agencies for public records and made a great show of their First Amendment pieties.
Federal Judge Susan Illston on Nov. 28 blocked the two companies from merging some advertising and distribution operations, a consolidation she said was probably illegal under antitrust laws. And she sounded her concern that Hearst isn’t the “passive equity investor” it had represented itself in court to be. She also revealed the contents of letters written in March and April by company executives: “Hearst and MediaNews will enter into agreements to offer national advertising and internet advertising sales for their Bay Area newspapers on a joint basis, and to consolidate the Bay Area distribution networks of such newspapers, all on mutually satisfactory terms and conditions, and in each case subject to any limitation required to ensure compliance with applicable law.” (For more extensive information on the ruling and related coverage, see www.sfbg.com.)
For those who regard newspapers as more of a public trust than an engine for deep profits, the future is starting to look a bit unsettling.
When Singleton expanded his control over the Bay Area threefold last summer, he temporarily quelled some discontent by assuring skeptics that there were no planned changes in staffing and salaries as a result of the transactions.
“We’re looking forward to doing a lot of good things here in Northern California,” Singleton told San Jose Mercury News staffers, according to the paper’s story on the buyout.
But employees at the papers still had every reason to be nervous about Singleton’s $1 billion takeover of the Contra Costa Times, the Mercury News, and other papers from the Sacramento-based McClatchy Co.
MediaNews already owned the Oakland Tribune, the San Mateo County Times, and the Marin Independent Journal among others in California before it carved excess properties out of McClatchy, which had grown too large following its purchase of the Knight Ridder chain earlier this year.
The purchases allowed Singleton to seize almost complete control of 14 metropolitan and suburban media markets. The only remaining daily print competitor in the Bay Area was the Chronicle and its parent company, the Hearst Corp., which subsequently purchased $300 million in MediaNews stock, a deal the feds are still investigating. When the transaction with Hearst was finalized, top executives at MediaNews were collectively awarded about $2 million in bonuses.
Some profiles of Singleton have depicted him as a good old-fashioned newspaper journalist, but knowing his cost-cutting reputation, only a fool would assume there were no plans to consolidate major operating functions to save money regardless of any promises made. Singleton has always been more about business than news.
Clustered ownership and shared management were prominent features of the company that MediaNews presented to investors at a Deutsche Bank “Global High Yield” conference in October. An April letter that reappeared in federal court last week during a hearing in Reilly’s suit confirmed that MediaNews and Hearst hoped to shed costs by possibly combining circulation and advertising operations.
Layoffs are also a big part of Singleton’s MO. Respected but tough Contra Costa Times editor Chris Lopez was let go in October because he’d become “redundant,” according to a memo company executive John Armstrong sent to employees.
“That came as a shock to a lot of people in the newsroom,” one source at the paper told the Guardian. Known for handing cash rewards out of his wallet to reporters who nailed concise stories for the front page, Lopez had attempted to play down Singleton’s reputation when the purchases were announced. Lopez had been at the paper for more than six years and had helped earn Singleton a Pulitzer Prize during a six-year stint at the company’s flagship Denver Post, received for its coverage of the Columbine shootings.
“In better times, we might have found a way to ignore an extra position or two or even three,” Armstrong wrote in the memo.
Lopez insisted to the Guardian in a phone interview that he had proposed his own termination to ease anticipated cuts elsewhere.
“My layoff from the paper was not unexpected,” Lopez said. “It caught the staff off guard, but I saw it coming. I made the recommendation. I was trying to save some jobs in the newsroom.”
The loss of an experienced editor may have saved some jobs … for now. But maybe not for long. Reporters have been asked to summarize their beats for managers to determine how they can cover single subjects for a number of papers. The idea seems to be maximizing staff output rather than ensuring broad coverage of the communities.
A story about Lopez’s departure written by a Times reporter also appeared on the Merc’s Web site. MediaNews is also looking into multimedia deals with local TV stations and arming reporters with cameras for podcasts, one source told us.
Armstrong told the Guardian in a phone interview that opinion columnists, for instance, could still cover the same stories. “But we had found some situations where reporters were sent to the same events like Oakland [Raiders] away games.” He said offering buyouts to staffers has been “successful,” but it wasn’t enough to stem declining revenue, triggering the need for “involuntary” layoffs.
All of this may make sense from a strictly economic perspective. After all, doing more with less is a widely accepted imperative for profit-driven corporations. But there is a public price that will be paid for this reality: Bay Area citizens will get less original reporting and fewer perspectives on the news.
A former senior staffer at a major Bay Area daily wrote an open missive outlining recent major stories covered by fewer reporters: “Three months after MediaNews Group added two major Knight Ridder dailies to its far-flung Northern California newspaper group, news coverage is well on its way to being homogenized in this formerly competitive market.”
The observation is borne out by a Guardian survey of three major MediaNews papers. Out of 10 top recent cultural and political stories in the Bay Area, nine were covered by the same reporter, who wrote the same article for all three papers. (For details, visit www.sfbg.com.)
Under the recent layoff announcement, the Merc could lose up to 101 employees, half from its newsroom, while more than 100 business-side positions will be reportedly moved to a new, nonunionized San Ramon office of the California Newspapers Partnership (CNP), a consortium of companies including Gannet Co. and Stephens Group that helped MediaNews fund its recent purchases. The centralized San Ramon space could continue to fill up with employees from the business side of the papers who have been forced to reapply for their jobs under the CNP corporate moniker. They would presumably fall out from under union protection.
The company’s Peninsula and East Bay papers saw cuts across their operations from Walnut Creek to San Mateo. Armstrong told the Times the layoffs were “broad but not deep.” East Bay Express writer Robert Gammon, a former Tribune reporter and union organizer, revealed in early November that MediaNews planned to leave behind the Tribune’s historic downtown tower and move many of its staffers to the San Ramon office. News-side functions could be moved to a cheaper spot across from the Oakland Coliseum.
“The question is how do we continue to put out a paper people want to read if we continue to cut further?” Luther Jackson, executive officer for the San Jose Newspaper Guild, which represents almost 500 workers at the Merc, asked the Guardian. “I have a concern that when newspapers face increased competition for advertising, why are we cutting service? Does it work for readers? Does it work for advertisers?”
The Bay Area isn’t alone. In the complex transactions that took place over the summer, Hearst bought the St. Paul Pioneer Press from McClatchy and shifted it to MediaNews in exchange for stock in the company. At the Pi Press, as it’s known in Minnesota, 40 positions were cut in November. A MediaNews paper in Los Angeles, the Daily News, recently axed its publisher and 20 other workers.
MediaNews enraged union workers at the Merc when it offered them a contract during September negotiations that was unlike anything they’d seen at the paper before. The company has since toned down some of its harsher demands but asserted that if a tentative agreement were accepted by Nov. 30, the Merc might see fewer layoffs, Jackson told the Guardian.
The proposal would grant management the right to modify insurance coverage without telling the union, freeze the paper’s pension plan and replace it with a 401(k), and change the types of work that could be assigned to nonunion employees. It would also allow the paper to hire new workers at “market-rate” salaries, which means their pay increases could be capped at lower rates.
The company may choose to simply not replace costly veterans who are retiring or accepting buyouts, meaning cub reporters could find themselves with fewer seasoned mentors around to help teach them government and private sector watchdogging.
The guild foresees losing nearly 200 members if the full number of layoffs and worker transfers are carried out. And many guild members fear it may also mean the beginning of the end of newspapers as we know them.
Corporations have the right to see to their bottom lines. But communities and individuals also have a right to the fruits that independent, competitive journalism bestows. And that’s the right being asserted now in civil court by Clint Reilly.
While federal and state investigators have largely been idling, Reilly sued Hearst, MediaNews, and its other business partners last summer. He asked Judge Illston to temporarily halt the transactions until the trial begins in his antitrust claim against the companies. She denied Reilly’s initial request for a preliminary injunction, in part because the Hearst investment had not been officially inked, even though the trial isn’t expected to start until this spring.
In her opinion, however, she suggested parts of the deal were troubling and has not ruled out forcing MediaNews to give up some of its newly acquired assets. Earlier this month Reilly’s attorney, Joe Alioto, again asked the judge for an injunction. The renewed appeal was inspired in part by the recently announced job cuts.
The plaintiffs are arguing Hearst and MediaNews previously withheld a letter from the court that the two companies had signed agreeing to discuss the possibility of combining some circulation and advertising functions to save money. In his request Alioto told the judge the companies were “rapidly consolidating, commingling, and irrevocably altering their San Francisco Bay Area newspapers so as to frustrate this Court’s ability to provide an effective remedy for their antitrust violations.”
During a tense hearing last week on the matter, Alioto asked that top Hearst and MediaNews executives be ordered to testify immediately. He suggested Hearst’s board of directors would never have agreed to invest $300 million in MediaNews if it couldn’t also merge distribution and ad sales with its competitor.
“I don’t think there is any doubt that they intend to end up with newspapers that are very different than they are today,” Alioto said. He wants any such discussions stopped by the court, adding, “We believe they intend to wipe out the possibility of any of these papers to remain freestanding. These papers will not be the same within a very short amount of time.”
Hearst attorney Daniel Wall angrily fired back that no one was trying to deceive the court with a price-fixing agreement and that the companies were merely discussing the possibility of “pro-competition collaboration,” which Wall described as a business partnership lawfully permitted by the Justice Department. He disclosed that the Chronicle was bleeding millions of dollars annually, partially because of lost revenue to the Web, and exclaimed that drastic cost reductions were necessary to keep the paper alive.
“These are tough times for newspapers, and they need to take cost out of the system,” Wall told the judge. “They need to find new revenue streams.”
Hearst has already faced something akin to all of this before. Reilly sued it in 2000 when the company bought the Chron and attempted to nix competition by shutting down its long-held San Francisco Examiner. Reilly didn’t block the deal, but the Justice Department forced Hearst to keep open the reliably conservative Examiner, today owned by another Denver-based company.
This week Illston ruled that Hearst and MediaNews must temporarily stop any agreements to combine advertising sales and distribution networks until Dec. 6, when she’ll decide whether to extend her prohibition on merging business operations.
Reilly has emerged over the last decade as a serious pain for corporate media executives and unshakable critic of concentrated newspaper ownership in the Bay Area. His most recent lawsuit charges that the Hearst and MediaNews partnership would dilute fair competition and limit alternatives for both readers and advertisers.
“They started the blood flow with the firings,” Alioto told reporters after the hearing. “We think when they’re done with this they’re going to have entirely different newspapers.”
Recent job losses don’t stop at just MediaNews. The Chronicle is getting in on the action too.
Divisive contract negotiations between the Chronicle and the Web Pressman and Prepress Workers Union Local 4 over the last two years ended recently when the union “reluctantly approved” an agreement, union treasurer Paul Kolter told us. The union was the last holdout at the paper to accept drastically reduced workers’ rights.
By successfully pushing its will on the unions, Hearst has virtually ensured that the press operators won’t pose much of a threat to the company anymore, because around the same time it signed a $1 billion outsourcing deal with the Canadian printing company Transcontinental.
The union’s new contract is up in about three years, and there are no assurances Local 4 will have any workers in the new plant Transcontinental has promised to build. That could mean the end of its relationship with the Chronicle and about 225 workers from the paper that it represents.
The previous contract ended in the summer of 2005, and under the paper’s new publisher, Frank “Darth” Vega, management called for drastic cuts in salaries and benefits. The two groups spent several intervening months battling over the proposed changes.
In July, Vega prepared the paper for a strike, issuing a memo that outlined exactly how to keep the paper operating throughout a work stoppage, and hired a notorious security firm that specializes in handling labor disputes.
The union points out that while the Chronicle complains of massive financial bloodletting, its parent company, Hearst, has somehow scraped together enough money for a brand-new $500 million office building in midtown Manhattan, the construction of which was completed over the summer. The company also sold the sprawling 82,000-acre ranch that surrounds Hearst Castle to the state early last year for nearly $100 million. It was once home to the notoriously belligerent and imperialistic newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
Union members say there are wide ramifications to what’s happening here. In July the World Association of Newspapers published a report describing how more news services globally, including the New York Times, were outsourcing major tasks, even news reporting, to save money.
“There are a lot of labor unions that have an interest in what is happening with us,” Local 4 organizer and press operator Bruce Carlton told members at a meeting in late October. “If this flies, it will be a blueprint on how to break unions. We will be sent back into the ’30s.”
The mood is dark for many employees working under MediaNews and Hearst. The scrappy feel and hard-driving reportage of the CoCo Times under Lopez and Knight Ridder are believed by some to be at risk following the purchases. “No one thinks we’re going to be a better newspaper because of this,” one source at the paper told us.
In another memo MediaNews executive Armstrong wrote to Bay Area staffers last week, he stated that the company, in fact, predicted its “advertising revenue challenges.”
“We have no additional job reductions planned due to economic conditions, but we cannot guarantee that additional reductions might not be necessary in the future,” he wrote. “Our job level is dependent on our revenue performance.”
The memo also shows that the company plans to sell an office in Danville and two parking lots in downtown Oakland.
News accounts depicted third-quarter earnings for MediaNews based on Securities and Exchange Commission filings as a windfall profit caused by its purchases of the Times and the Merc. But the company’s ad revenue and circulation are actually down a few percentage points, and it made $16 million from the July sale of an office building in Long Beach, which offsets a simple analysis of its financial standing.
It’s still a company that topped $1 billion in revenue last year, a figure that has increased steadily since 2002, but Singleton has never feared doing business with loads of debt on the books, which he’s always used to fuel new purchases. For the Bay Area papers, MediaNews took on a $350 million bank loan in August.
MediaNews has still managed to take recent dire economic forecasts to a fever pitch despite its confidently large debt burden, enabling the company to implement a business model that’s hardly new for Singleton. He knows how to make money. Interestingly, for an industry that’s supposedly on the ropes, several billionaires (who didn’t become wealthy by investing poorly) have in the last few weeks publicly expressed interest in purchasing some of the nation’s largest dailies.
The Boston Globe noted earlier this month that rock industry tycoon David Geffen and grocery chain investor Ron Burkle were considering a bid for the Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times. That paper recently endured a major shakeup when a top editor was fired for refusing to execute job cuts demanded by the company. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch has considered a run for the Globe, and more buyout rumors have floated around the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant. Such deals could signal a fundamental shift in how newspapers are regarded with respect to their newsgathering responsibilities.
“Geffen has reportedly told associates that he’d be happy with returns comparable to the 3 or 4 percent he might get from municipal bonds,” the Globe wrote. Others have discussed turning individual newspapers into nonprofits.
But Singleton probably isn’t going anywhere, and a lot of people are going to have to learn how to get along with him around here, Texas drawl and all, unless the feds shut down his party.
Knight Ridder was a respected newspaper chain before investors grew restless and demanded greater short-term profit margins. It was sold earlier this year to McClatchy (begrudgingly for some top execs and Pulitzer-wielding journalists who openly fought with Knight Ridder’s financial backers prior to the sale). Knight Ridder posted a profit margin of nearly 20 percent in 2004.
Employees of the chain wrote a chilling open letter shortly before it was sold: “Knight Ridder is not merely a public company. It is a public trust. It must balance corporate profitability with civic purpose. We oppose those who would cripple the purpose by coercing more profit. We abhor those for whom good business is insufficient and excellent journalism is irrelevant.” SFBG

The other home of Bay hip-hop

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
If you don’t know about the Filthy ’Moe
It’s time I let real game unfold….
Messy Marv, “True to the Game”
I meet Big Rich on the corner of Laguna and Grove streets, near the heart of the Fillmore District according to its traditional boundaries of Van Ness and Fillmore, although the hood actually extends as far west as Divisadero. “Me personally,” the 24-year-old rapper and lifelong ’Moe resident confesses, “I don’t be sticking my head out too much. But I make sure I bring every photo session or interview right here.”
At the moment he’s taping a segment for an upcoming DVD by the Demolition Men, who released his mixtape Block Tested Hood Approved in April. Since then, the former member of the San Quinn–affiliated group Fully Loaded has created a major buzz thanks in part to the snazzy video for “That’s the Business,” his E-A-Ski- and CMT-produced single, which was the Jam of the Week in August on MTV2 and added to straight-up MTV in time for the Oct. 3 release of the Koch full-length Block Tested Hood Approved. (Originally titled Fillmore Rich, the album was renamed to capitalize on the mixtape-generated hype.)
Presented by E-40 and featuring Rich’s dope in-house producer Mal Amazin in addition to heavyweights such as Sean-T, Rick Rock, and Droop-E, BTHA is a deep contribution to the rising tide of Bay Area hip-hop. While Big Rich’s gruff baritone delivery and gritty street tales make his music more mobster than hyphy, the album is not unaffected by the latter style’s up-tempo bounce, helping the movement hold national attention during this season of anticipation before Mistah FAB’s major-label debut on Atlantic. “I don’t necessarily make hyphy music,” Rich says. “But I definitely condone it. As long as the spotlight is on the Bay, I’m cool with it.” Coming near the end of a year that has seen landmark albums from San Quinn, Messy Marv, Will Hen, and fellow Fully Loaded member Bailey — not to mention JT the Bigga Figga’s high-profile tour with Snoop Dogg, which has taken hyphy all the way to Africa — Rich’s solo debut is one more indication of the historic district’s importance to the vitality of local hip-hop and Bay Area culture in general.
THE EDGE OF PAC HEIGHTS
The Fillmore is a community under siege, facing external and internal pressures. On the one hand, gentrification — in the form of high-end shops and restaurants serving tourists, Pacific Heights residents, and an increasingly affluent demographic creeping into the area — continues to erode the neighborhood’s edges. “If you grew up in the Fillmore, you can see Pacific Heights has crept down the hill, closer to the ghetto,” says Hen, who as a member of multiregional group the Product (assembled by Houston legend Scarface) moved more than 60,000 copies of its recent “thug conscious” debut, One Hunid (Koch). “Ten years ago there were more boundaries. But the Fillmore’s prime location, and I’m not asleep to this fact. We’re five minutes away from everything in the city. That has to play a role in the way the district is represented in a city that makes so much off tourism. You might not want your city portrayed as gangsta, even though it is.”
Hen has a point. The notion of San Francisco as gangsta is somewhat at odds with the way the city perceives itself. As an Oakland writer, I can attest to this, for even in San Francisco’s progressive artistic and intellectual circles, Oakland is usually understood to be beyond the pale in terms of danger and violence. Yet none of the Oakland rappers I’ve met talk about their hoods in quite the same way Fillmore rappers do, at least when it comes to their personal safety. As Big Rich films his section of the DVD, for example, he remarks on the continual stream of police cruisers circling the block.
“They slowed it down,” he says. “Now they only come every 90 seconds. Right around here is murder central — people be shooting each other every night. By 7 o’clock, we all gotta disperse, unless you want to get caught in the cross fire.” He waves his hands in mock terror. “I ain’t trying to die tonight!”
“BUSTING HEADS”
Though Rich is clowning, his statement is perfectly serious — indiscriminate gunfire among gang members, often in their early teens, makes nocturnal loitering a risky proposition at best. As of September, according to the San Francisco Police Department’s Web site, the Northern Police District, which includes the Fillmore, had the city’s second highest number of murders this year, 11, ceding first place only to the much larger Bayview’s 22. For overall criminal incidents, the Northern District led the city, at more than 10,000 so far.
Though Fillmore rappers might be given to stressing the danger of their hood, insofar as such themes constitute much of hip-hop’s subject matter and they feel the need to refute the city’s nongangsta image, no one I spoke to seemed to be boasting. They sounded sad. Hen, for example, reported that he’d been to three funerals in October, saying, “You hardly have time to mourn for one person before you have to mourn for the next person.” While the SFPD’s Public Affairs Office didn’t return phone calls seeking corroboration, both Rich and Hen indicate the neighborhood is suffering from an alarming amount of black-on-black violence.
“Basically, it’s genocide. We’re going to destroy each other,” Hen says. “It used to be crosstown rivalries rather than in your backyard. Now there’s more of that going on. If you get into it at age 15, the funk is already there. Whoever your crew is funking with, you’re in on it.” The ongoing cycle of drug-related violence — the Fillmore’s chief internal pressure — has only ramped up under the Bush administration’s regressive economic policies. It’s a fact not lost on these rappers: as Rich puts it succinctly on BTHA, “Bush don’t give a fuck about a nigga from the hood.”
“Everybody’s broke. That’s why everybody’s busting each other’s heads,” explains Rich, who lost his older brother to gun violence several years ago. “If you don’t know where your next dollar’s coming from …”
To be sure, the rappers give back to the Fillmore. They support large crews of often otherwise unemployable youth, and Messy Marv, for example, has been known to hand out turkeys for Thanksgiving and bikes for Christmas. But Bay Area rap is only just getting back on its feet, and while the rappers can ameliorate life in the Fillmore’s housing projects, they don’t have the means to dispel the climate of desperation in a hood surrounded by one of the most expensive cities on earth. Moreover, they are acutely aware of the disconnect between their community and the rest of the city, which trades on its cultural cachet.
“It’s like two different worlds,” Hen muses. “You have people sitting outside drinking coffee right in the middle of the killing fields. They’re totally safe, but if I walk over there, I might get shot at. But the neighborhood is too proud for us to be dying at the hands of each other.”
HOOD PRIDE
The neighborhood pride Will Hen invokes is palpable among Fillmore rappers. “I get a warm feeling when I’m here,” Messy Marv says. “The killing, you can’t just say that’s Fillmore. That’s everywhere. When you talk about Fillmore, you got to go back to the roots. Fillmore was a warm, jazzy African American place where you could come and dance, drink, have fun, and be you.”
Mess is right on all counts. Lest anyone think I misrepresent Oaktown: the citywide number of murders in Oakland has already topped 120 this year. But my concern here is with the perceived lack of continuity Mess suggests between the culture of the Fillmore then and now. By the early 1940s, the Fillmore had developed into a multicultural neighborhood including the then-largest Japanese population in the United States. In 1942, when FDR sent West Coast citizens of Japanese origin to internment camps, their vacated homes were largely filled by African Americans from the South, attracted by work in the shipyards. While the district had its first black nightclub by 1933, the wartime boom transformed the Fillmore into a major music center.
“In less than a decade, San Francisco’s African American population went from under 5,000 to almost 50,000,” according to Elizabeth Pepin, coauthor of the recent history of Fillmore jazz Harlem of the West (Chronicle). “The sheer increase in number of African Americans in the neighborhood made the music scene explode.”
Though known as a black neighborhood, Pepin says, the Fillmore “was still pretty diverse” and even now retains vestiges of its multicultural history. Japantown persists, though much diminished, and Big Rich himself is half Chinese, making him the second Chinese American rapper of note. “My mother’s parents couldn’t speak a lick of English,” he says. “But she was real urban, real street. I wasn’t brought up in a traditional Chinese family, but I embrace it and I get along with my other side.” Nonetheless, Pepin notes, the massive urban renewal project that destroyed the Fillmore’s iconic jazz scene by the late ’60s effectively curtailed its diversity, as did the introduction of barrackslike public housing projects.
The postwar jazz scene, of course, is the main source of nostalgia tapped by the Fillmore Merchants Association (FMA). Talk of a musical revival refers solely to the establishment of upscale clubs — Yoshi’s, for example, is scheduled to open next year at Fillmore and Eddy — offering music that arguably is no longer organically connected to the neighborhood. In a brief phone interview, Gus Harput, president of the FMA’s Jazz Preservation District, insisted the organization would “love” to open a hip-hop venue, although he sidestepped further inquiries. (Known for its hip-hop shows, Justice League at 628 Divisadero closed around 2003 following a 2001 shooting death at a San Quinn performance and was later replaced by the Independent, which occasionally books rap.) The hood’s hip-hop activity might be too recent and fall outside the bounds of jazz, yet nowhere in the organization’s online Fillmore history (fillmorestreetsf.com) is there an acknowledgement of the MTV-level rap scene down the street.
Yet the raucous 1949 Fillmore that Jack Kerouac depicts in his 1957 book, On the Road — replete with protohyphy blues shouters like Lampshade bellowing such advice as “Don’t die to go to heaven, start in on Doctor Pepper and end up on whisky!” — sounds less like the area’s simulated jazz revival and more like the community’s present-day hip-hop descendants.
How could it be otherwise? The aesthetics have changed, but the Fillmore’s musical genius has clearly resided in rap since Rappin’ 4Tay debuted on Too $hort’s Life Is … Too $hort (Jive, 1989), producer-MC JT the Bigga Figga brought out the Get Low Playaz, and a teenage San Quinn dropped his classic debut, Don’t Cross Me (Get Low, 1993). While there may not be one definitive Fillmore hip-hop style, given that successful rappers tend to work with successful producers across the Bay regardless of hood, Messy Marv asserts the ’Moe was crucial to the development of the hyphy movement: “JT the Bigga Figga was the first dude who came with the high-energy sound. He was ahead of his time. I’m not taking nothing away from Oakland, Vallejo, or Richmond. I’m just letting you know what I know.”
In many ways the don of the ’Moe, San Quinn — reaffirming his status earlier this year with The Rock (SMC), featuring his own Ski- and CMT-produced smash, “Hell Ya” — could be said to typify a specifically Fillmore rap style, in which the flow is disguised as a strident holler reminiscent of blues shouting. While both Messy Marv and Big Rich share affinities with this delivery, Will Hen, for instance, and Quinn’s brother Bailey — whose Champ Bailey (City Boyz, 2006) yielded the MTV and radio success “U C It” — favor a smoother, more rapid-fire patter.
What is most striking here is that, with the exception of fellow traveler Messy Marv (see sidebar), all of these artists, as well as recent signee to the Game’s Black Wall Street label, Ya Boy, came up in the ’90s on San Quinn’s influential Done Deal Entertainment. Until roughly two years ago, they were all one crew. While working on his upcoming eighth solo album, From a Boy to a Man, for his revamped imprint, Deal Done, Quinn paused for a moment to take justifiable pride in his protégés, who now constitute the Fillmore’s hottest acts.
“I create monsters, know what I’m saying?” Quinn says. “Done Deal feeds off each other; that’s why I’m so proud of Bailey and Rich. We all come out the same house. There’s a real level of excellence, and the world has yet to see it. Right now it seems like we’re separate, but we’re not. We’re just pulling from different angles for the same common goal.”
“We all one,” Quinn concludes, in a statement that could serve as a motto for neighborhood unity. “Fillmoe business is Fillmoe business.” SFBG
myspace.com/bigrich
myspace.com/williehen
myspace.com/sanquinn

Margaret Cho on sex, Good Vibrations–and San Francisco’s answer to the 49ers leaving town

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By Sarah Phelan

There’s something deliciously violent about stand-up comedian Margaret Cho’s voice. Even when she picks up the phone in her hotel room in Philadelphia and says, “Hell-low? This is Margaret,” in that familiar Cho twang, you feel the tigress at the end of the line.
OK, maybe I’m just projecting. Because let’s face it: to call Margaret is to risk ending up as fodder in her next comedy act, especially if you have a British accent and work for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
But that’s OK, because I love this bitch, and I’m glad that Good Vibrations, San Francisco’s legendary retailer and distributor of sex toys and sex education, gave me an excuse to interview her by appointing her to be on their Board of Directors.
“I did it for the free vibrators,” jokes Cho, by way of explaining the Good Vibrations gig. “Seriously, I worked a long time ago at another sex store, Stormy Leather, in the retail store. Before it was just a leather company, making dildo harnesses and clothes and S&M gear, and then it opened a retail store. In fact, I think that was my last daytime job, other than stand-up comedy. Through working there, I learned about Good Vibrations, the sisters’ store, which had a different location, but with the same ideas and philosophies about women and sexuality that help empower us and learn. And I bought a lot of stuff at Good Vibrations. I love Carol Queen and I love the diversity of the people who work there. It’s very much my crowd, my queer friends, lovers and people I know. It’s so familiar. The people who work there are my cup of tea. I enjoy just hanging out there.”
Asked about the thumping the Republicans got in the November 2006 election, Cho laughs. “I’m glad. It only took a couple of all-time gay scandals to turn it around. It was about time. It should have happened a lot sooner. Homophobia is something that worked in our favor this time. Americans are so homophobic. They realize that Republicans could be closet gays –and so they don’t want to vote Republican any more. That’s fine right now. If it works in our favor, it’s gotta be OK. Hopefully, it will lead to people understanding the queer culture more, and at least there’s been some shift in balance.”
In light of the news that the 49ers want to leave San Francisco and SF Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier wants to form a sports commission to keep teams in town, I asked Cho if she could think of any sports that might work better for our city, like competitive gay brunching, perhaps, as recently defined by the Bay Guardian’s cultural editor Marke B.?
.“How about a really bad-ass lesbian softball league,” suggests Cho. “No holds barred. Armed with weapons. Something violent, really empowering and kick-ass.”

Margaret Cho on sex, Good Vibrations–and San Francisco’s answer to the 49ers leaving town

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By Sarah Phelan

There’s something deliciously violent about stand-up comedian Margaret Cho’s voice. Even when she picks up the phone in her hotel room in Philadelphia and says, “Hell-low? This is Margaret,” in that familiar Cho twang, you feel the tigress at the end of the line.
OK, maybe I’m just projecting. Because let’s face it: to call Margaret is to risk ending up as fodder in her next comedy act, especially if you have a British accent and work for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
But that’s OK, because I love this bitch, and I’m glad that Good Vibrations, San Francisco’s legendary retailer and distributor of sex toys and sex education, gave me an excuse to interview her by appointing her to be on their Board of Directors.
“I did it for the free vibrators,” jokes Cho, by way of explaining the Good Vibrations gig. “Seriously, I worked a long time ago at another sex store, Stormy Leather, in the retail store. Before it was just a leather company, making dildo harnesses and clothes and S&M gear, and then it opened a retail store. In fact, I think that was my last daytime job, other than stand-up comedy. Through working there, I learned about Good Vibrations, the sisters’ store, which had a different location, but with the same ideas and philosophies about women and sexuality that help empower us and learn. And I bought a lot of stuff at Good Vibrations. I love Carol Queen and I love the diversity of the people who work there. It’s very much my crowd, my queer friends, lovers and people I know. It’s so familiar. The people who work there are my cup of tea. I enjoy just hanging out there.”
Asked about the thumping the Republicans got in the November 2006 election, Cho laughs. “I’m glad. It only took a couple of all-time gay scandals to turn it around. It was about time. It should have happened a lot sooner. Homophobia is something that worked in our favor this time. Americans are so homophobic. They realize that Republicans could be closet gays –and so they don’t want to vote Republican any more. That’s fine right now. If it works in our favor, it’s gotta be OK. Hopefully, it will lead to people understanding the queer culture more, and at least there’s been some shift in balance.”
In light of the news that the 49ers want to leave San Francisco and SF Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier wants to form a sports commission to keep teams in town, I asked Cho if she could think of any sports that might work better for our city, like competitive gay brunching, perhaps, as recently defined by the Bay Guardian’s cultural editor Marke B.?
.“How about a really bad-ass lesbian softball league,” suggests Cho. “No holds barred. Armed with weapons. Something violent, really empowering and kick-ass.”

The Butcher Brothers part two: “Are these guys real?”

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Francis 2.jpg
Francis (Cory Knauf) documents his home life — which happens to involve quite a bit of bloody murder — in The Hamiltons.

Yesterday, I posted my interview with Mitchell Altieri, one half of the filmmaking team known as the Butcher Brothers — the Bay Area not-really-brothers (though they are tight-bros-from-way-back-when) responsible for The Hamiltons, described by Altieri as “a horror coming-of-age story.” (More on the film in my entry below). Here, I chew the fat with the other Butcher Brother, inner Sunset resident Phil Flores, who spilled on casting, the true genesis of the Butcher Brothers, and the film’s ending — though any potential spoilers were strictly off the record, of course.

Secrecy wins, 4-3

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By Tim Redmond

Late last night, after all the debate about surveillance cameras was over, the San Francisco Police Commission narrowly voted down a plan that would have made a strong statement against secrecy in police discipline.

The vote was 4-3,. with the usual pro-cop suspects, Louse Renne, Joe Marshall and Yvonne Lee joined by the swing vote, Joe Alioto Veronese. He should have voted the other way.

Here’s what happened: After the state Supreme Court came out with its atrocious ruling in a case called Copley, essentially enshrining all cop discipline cases in a veil of secrecy, Commissioner David Campos proposed an intriguing idea: A lot of disciplinary cases are settled before a formal trial. That’s usually to the benefit of the cop, who can accept a lower penalty in exchange for, in effect, pleading guilty. Campos suggested that the commission simply state, as a matter of policy, that no cases would be settled unless the officer involved agreed to waive his right to confidentiality and let the public know about the charges and the outcome.
That would simply continue the way things have been done for the pas 14 years, prior to this horrible court decision.
When the idea first came up, Alioto Veronese supported it, but over the past few weeks, he’s backed away. And last night, with a bit of a convoluted explanation, he cast the deciding vote to shoot down the Campos proposal. Not good.

By the way, the meeting ended with Campos and Commissioner Theresa Sparks demanding that Chief Heather Fong explain her rather bizarre statements on police foot patrols.The chief had initially argued that foot patrols would never work, because the department didn’t have enough staff. Then she presented her her own foot-patrol plan. Then she was quoted in a TV interview as appearing to say that if the supervisors passed the law, she’d ignore it anyway.

What, exactly, was the chief’s position, and how did it change so radically from one day to the next? Fong ducked beautifully. But the commissioners promised to bring the issue back.

Goodbye PG

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
When Japanese documentary filmmaker Kazuo Hara was approached by Okuzaki Kenzo — the subject of his 1987 The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On — and asked to film him committing murder, Hara strongly considered it before turning him down, more than anything because he “had become really sick of Okuzaki.” Or so he told an interviewer. This sounds like bullshit, and it may be, but the filming approaches and content of Hara’s body of work make you think that maybe he could have done it. (Okuzaki, incidentally, is currently serving time for the unfilmed murder attempt.) Hara has captured on film, in a doc that is essentially the sanctioned stalking of his ex-wife, the full frontal birth of her child. This was in 1974, understand, way before the Learning Channel or even The Cosby Show. He has followed a head case who once slung pachinko balls at Emperor Hirohito as the leader traveled around Japan accusing ex-soldiers, not without reason, of cannibalism. He has filmed the assaults of old men being accused, not without reason, of cannibalism. This is a filmmaker who might very well show up to a murder if he could still stand his subject.
Two of Hara’s docs will be showing this week at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Goodbye CP (1972) was his first film and caused quite a fuss in Japan for its uncensored look at the lives of people with cerebral palsy. It’s been called sadistic, and it almost broke up the marriage of its main protagonist, but it’s applauded by civil rights groups and is still shown to social service workers as a not-too-gentle reminder that those with CP aren’t anatomically smoothed-over dolls.
A Dedicated Life (1995), about the life and death from cancer of Japanese author Mitsuharu Inoue, isn’t as gonzo as most of Hara’s other films, but it’s one of his fullest and most mature. The transgression of the biography (beyond a fairly fruitless preoccupation with Inoue’s playboy persona) is Hara’s gruesome admission that he was basically waiting for the man to die so that he could get more candid interviews from those who knew him. This information, taken from an interview with professor Kenneth Ruoff, adds menace to the scenes in the doctor’s office and muddies the poignance of conversations Inoue had with his wife about his illness. But the poignance is always there, in this and Hara’s other films. It just usually has to share the spotlight with the creepy methods of the man behind the camera. SFBG
NO BOUNDARIES: THE TRANSGRESSIVE DOCUMENTARIES OF KAZUO HARA
A Dedicated Life, Thurs/16, 7:30 p.m.
Goodbye CP, Sun/19, 2 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, screening room
701 Mission, SF
$6–$8
(415) 978-2787
www.ybca.org

Bollywood dreams

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› news@sfbg.com
It was the proverbial phone call every aspiring actor waits for. An agent for a TV producer rang Raj Vasudeva in 2003 to say he would be perfect for a role in a new show that needed a dynamic lead.
Vasudeva, 33, eagerly invited the agent over to view his modeling portfolio and acting tapes. The agent flipped through a book that featured shots of the former Mr. India California crawling through the surf seductively with a dress shirt fluttering open. The agent said he was impressed. Vasudeva thought he had the role, but then the real audition began.
“‘Can I be blunt with you?’” Vasudeva recalled the agent saying. “‘Are you ready to get your ass fucked by men and older women?’”
Vasudeva laughed at the sleazy suggestion and said no. The interview ended abruptly, and the agent tossed the following advice at Vasudeva as he left the meeting in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay: “If you’re coming to Bollywood, you have to be shameless.”
Welcome to Bollywood, or as they say in India, Bollywood mein aap kaa swaagat ho. Vasudeva, who was born in Delhi but spent much of his life in San Francisco, is trying to accomplish something no US resident has ever done: become a top star in the world’s largest film industry.
For anyone still not familiar with Bollywood, it’s entertainment on a scale that can make your average Hollywood production look like Saved by the Bell. The films are a brawling mix of Broadway-style song and dance, bling that rivals a 50 Cent video, and dizzying scene changes across two or even three continents. The pictures often mash up elements of drama, comedy, and action into a single bursting-at-the-seams melodrama that can last more than three hours.
Bollywood has grown increasingly popular in the United States over the last five years. While it was a lackluster summer for many of Hollywood’s big summer releases, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Never Say Goodbye) grossed $1.4 million in US theaters during its opening weekend in August — the best showing ever by a Bollywood movie in this country. The film shows Nov. 11 at 8:15 p.m. in the Castro Theatre as part of the San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival (www.thirdi.org/festival).
Vasudeva’s transformation into an aspiring actor might work nicely as a plot for a Bollywood film. Vasudeva came to the States in 1990 to attend college. He graduated with a degree in industrial management and seemed to be headed down the path to a respectable, if somewhat unfulfilling, white-collar future.
His acting career began as little more than a hobby in 1997. He began taking classes at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. Later, he took a job in sales at Oracle in Redwood City. His friend Paul Chopra recalled Vasudeva renting a bunch of Bollywood films and then practicing lines from them in between fielding service calls to Oracle from India in the dead of the night.
He graduated to theater and film productions at the San Francisco Academy of Art, which was followed by his first feature film, Indian Fish. It traces the journey of an Indian software engineer as he makes his way through unfamiliar American culture. Vasudeva, who is tall and has boyish good looks, burnished his résumé by snagging the title of Mr. India California in 2002 on the strength of a performance of a monologue from a Bollywood film.
Vasudeva then starred in Khwaab, the story of another Indian immigrant who gives up a career in the tech world — against the wishes of his parents and friends — to pursue an acting career. Vasudeva declined to discuss whether the movie parallels his own struggles, but the similarities are striking. He said his parents were initially upset about his career choice but eventually came around.
With some solid acting experience to his name, Vasudeva decided to make the leap to Bollywood in 2004. He packed up his San Francisco apartment and moved to Mumbai. It was a shock for him.
Vasudeva found the Mumbai film industry was more freewheeling than the one in the United States. Contracts are often nonexistent; producers hit him up for money to complete films and sometimes bounce his paychecks. Then there are the thickets of “secretaries” — movie agents who serve as intermediaries for actors looking to land roles.
“There are secretaries that will squeeze every penny from you,” Vasudeva said.
Occasionally, the action off the screen seems as dramatic as that on it. The Indian underworld has been accused of threatening — and even killing — actors who won’t pay it protection money or act in its films.
It hasn’t been easy, but Vasudeva managed to get his first break by placing in the top 10 in another contest, called Grasim Mr. India, which was broadcast nationally in India. He compared the contest to Bravo’s short-lived Manhunt USA, which pitted aspiring models against each other to win a contract with an agency. A publicity photo for Grasim Mr. India shows Vasudeva was right on the mark. It features him and a stageful of hunky guys decked out in mesh shirts. (Unfortunately, mesh shirts seem to be a staple fashion for male actors in Bollywood.)
Vasudeva’s showing in the event prompted the interview with the sleazy talent agent. He has since landed a role in Kaho na Kaho, a Bollywood remake of Notting Hill. (Bollywood often liberally borrows from American films and music because, for the most part, artists in the West have not paid much attention to Bollywood, although this is coming to an end.) And he’s starred in a remake that would seem an unlikely choice for Bollywood’s romance- and family-centered cinema, The Ring. The movie is called Second Day. Both Kaho na Kaho and Second Day have yet to be released.
Lisa Tsering, who has covered Bollywood for the newspaper India West for 10 years, said Vasudeva’s chances of making it in Bollywood are “not too good.” And it has little to do with his talent.
“I think that NRIs [nonresident Indians] don’t have a certain quality they are looking for in India,” Tsering said. “They feel NRIs are too complacent and too well fed. They’re not hungry enough.”
An American has yet to crack Bollywood’s A-list, although Canadian-born actress Lisa Ray (who starred in Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood and Water) has generated buzz recently. Tsering said non-Indians are also at a disadvantage because many don’t have the family connections that are so important to making it in Bollywood. Unlike in Hollywood, where actors often try to obscure their family connections by changing their name (think Angelina Jolie and her father, Jon Voight), blatant nepotism is part of the game in Bollywood. It is so pervasive it has become a running joke among Indian film fans, who often complain about the latest pudgy, bad-haired, leaden-acting relation who is foisted on them. Vasudeva may be able to capitalize on this nepotistic trend: he is related to Gauri Khan, an actress and the wife of megastar Shah Rukh Khan, star of Never Say Goodbye. (Vasudeva said he doesn’t trade on his family connections.)
Vasudeva’s current role could be his most challenging yet. In the psychological thriller tentatively titled Boomerang he plays three separate characters. The movie is based on the story of a famous London crime novelist who returns to his ancestral home in India to write a novel. The novelist, played by Vasudeva, soon realizes that someone has followed him there. Drama ensues.
Vasudeva’s choice to pursue a career in Bollywood instead of in the States says as much about Hollywood as it does about the Indian film industry. Despite the exasperations of Bollywood, he’s happy with the choice and doesn’t plan to return to this country anytime soon.
“I didn’t want to spend my career playing a cab driver,” Vasudeva quipped about the limited roles for Indians in Hollywood. SFBG

Rob Black’s paid “volunteers”

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By Tim Redmond

Everyone’s having fun with this story: Apparently, the Rob Black campaign in District 6 is paying people $15 an hour to act like volunteers. There’s a great photo on Sfist that sets the scene. Then KPFA sent a reporter to interview Black “volunteers” and got some great stuff. Here’s a partial transcript, thanks to leftinsf.

REPORTER JOSHUA SMITH: On a busy street corner in District 6, campaigners are out in full force. Eric Wilson is wearing an I Black Back Button and standing next to a large poster endorsing the candidate. He says he got involved with the campaign through the Glide Church. But from a glance you would never guess his political stance.

ERIC WILSON: “Allegedly I’m going to be paid fifteen dollars an hour cash. I support Chris Daly, but I’m doing this for Rob Black for the cash. And it’s an oxymoron, but well, you gotta do what you gotta do to eat in this city.”

In other words, Black doesn’t actually have a lot of volunteers, so he’s trying to buy them.

What would Jesus do?

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“I bought it for myself but never used it,” he said. “I was tempted, but I never used it.” – Ex-National Association of Evangelicals prez (and George W. Bush bud) Ted Haggard to reporters regarding his alleged meth use, 11/03/06

That’s kind of like saying he smoked pot but didn’t inhale — except way more hilarious, ain’t it??

If you’re following the absolutely delightful Ted Haggard kerflaffle (sfgate.com has the latest AP story here), have a look at my interview with one of the directors of Jesus Camp, which features jabs at a pre-scandal Haggard (weirdly hammy on-camera, he’s the only featured subject to publicly denounce the film).

Black Ops

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By Steven T. Jones
Re-reading the article I linked to in my last post reminded me to remind y’all about an event from earlier this year that goes to the heart of Rob Black’s close ties to downtown developers and why he can’t be trusted. In the incident described in this article, Black was the Alioto-Pier board aide who worked with those five developer attorneys to craft legislation designed to kill the downtown parking limitations sought by livable city advocates and Planning Director Dean Macris, all at the demand of Don Fisher, the Republican who founded the Gap and uses his money to bankroll SFSOS and the attacks on Chris Daly. My article doesn’t mention Black by name, but I have the e-mails in which he discusses the legislation and its wording with these developer attorneys. And if you want to hear Rob Black fumble to address the issue, listen to his endorsement interview here.

Tony rewards

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› johnny@sfbg.com
FILM FESTIVAL After a week of stealth watching at the Vancouver International Film Festival, you wonder about odd things. Such as: what’s with the trend of naming movies after post-punk touchstones? Jia Zhangke probably started it with 2002’s Unknown Pleasures. In its wake came All Tomorrow’s Parties by Jia’s cinematographer Yu Lik-wai and the Smiths-inflected twist of Lee Yoon-Ki’s terrific This Charming Girl. The 25th annual VIFF brought So Yong-Kim’s In Between Days (title swiped from Cure single) and one of this year’s best movies, Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth (English title courtesy of classic Young Marble Giants album). As Costa explained during a candid Q&A that included a pointed Hou Hsiao-hsien dismissal, his film’s extraordinary look and atmosphere derive from the fact that mirrors are its chief nonnatural light source.
A more perplexing minitrend might be the sudden return of ’80s MTV vixen Kim Wilde via art films — not as an actress but as set decoration or spectral presence. Wilde posters dominate the walls of the title character’s apartment in last year’s Cannes un Certain Regard winner The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and this year a 45 by the “Kids in America” songstress becomes one of manic-depressive Romain Duris’s last lifelines in Dans Paris, Christophe Honoré’s vastly improved and new wave–inflected follow-up to his debut, the Georges Bataille adaptation Ma Mere. Though Duris’s walk on the Wilde side might not be the most convincing evidence, Dans Paris makes wonderfully inventive use of music.
I love Paris in the springtime, I love it in the fall, and for the most part I love ’Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris, Raymond de Felitta’s video mash note to the late, underknown jazz singer — a work of fan devotion that ultimately uncovers uncomfortable facts about its subject. Most of all, I love Vancouver when ’tis autumn, because it’s home to the most impassioned and inventive strains of commercial cinema, partly due to VIFF programming associate Mark Peranson, who edits the excellent journal Cinema Scope.
This year’s VIFF showcased the Slavoj Zizek–guided The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, which places the psych theorist in lecture settings such as Melanie Daniels’s Bodega Bay Birds motorboat. Rarer treats included the North American premiere of Jacques Rivette’s 743(!)-minute new wave touchstone from 1973, Out 1: Noli Me Tangere. I caught most of it but missed a six-hour excerpt of Stan Douglas’s endlessly variable new installation, Klatsassin — to my regret, since one of Douglas’s previous projects warps Dario Argento’s Suspiria and this latest connects North American Indian history to a score by the excellent Berlin electronic dubster duo Rhythm and Sound.
If such disparate ingredients can have a bond, then so can Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Tsai Ming-liang, to name just one of the better-known directors commissioned to make movies for the “New Crowned Hope” film series in honor of the composer’s 250th birthday. Tsai’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is his first feature set in his birth country of Malaysia, but its near-silent strains of lovelorn pathos and comedy fit alongside past works. The movies made thus far for “New Crowned Hope” are uniformly and individually superb. A case could be made that Garin Nugroho’s Opera Jawa — in which powerful waves of sound might even be overshadowed by gorgeous costume and set design — is the best. That is, if one discounts Syndromes and a Century, the latest miracle by Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul — an improvement on Tropical Malady that condenses all the director’s unique gifts into a fine mist.
Apichatpong was on the jury for this year’s Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema, a prize that thanks to programmer Tony Rayns has helped make the name of directors such as Jia — primarily because Rayns’s trailblazing broader Dragons and Tigers selections have introduced Miike Takashi, Bong Joon-ho, and others to North American audiences. This was Rayns’s last year in his current capacity at VIFF, where he’s offered a peerless example of what a festival programmer can do for filmmakers and filmmaking. Through happenstance on my last night at the fest, I wound up at a spontaneous Rayns-thrown dinner that included documentarian Amir Muhammad (who has a way with a wickedly funny Keyser Söze punch line) and the respective directors of what would soon be the Dragons and Tigers winner, Todo Todo Teros, and honorable mention Faceless Things. That the meal took place immediately after the genuinely scatological latter film — a provocation that moves postteen Kim Kyong-Mook beyond the Sadie Benning–of–South Korea realm of his earlier short Me and Doll Playing — was just one of the reasons it was memorable.
I wound up seated next to Todo Todo Teros director John Torres and his friend — as well as one of the first faces glimpsed in his movie — Alexis Tioseco, who oversees the outstanding Web site criticine.com. Tioseco’s site currently features a poignant Paris diary by the talented young filmmaker Raya Martin, whose A Short Film about the Indio-Nacional (or the Prolonged Sorrow of Filipinos) hints at Apichatpong-level brilliance and is at the vanguard of a new Filipino cinema powered by friendship and inspiration rather than the country’s film industry or government funds. It was a pleasure and in some ways a revelation to talk movies with the Andrei Tarkovsky–loving Tioseco, who likes to kid Torres, though he’s perceptively respectful of his friend’s filmmaking efforts in a current Criticine interview. The reward of such a meeting wouldn’t be possible without Rayns — here’s hoping whoever takes the VIFF reins will follow his example. SFBG
For more extensive reports on this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival, go to the Pixel Vision blog at www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision.

Oh, Alejandro

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
These days finesse in the art of montage is too often used to compensate for ineptitude (or just laziness) in the art of storytelling. Of course, rhythmic, Eisensteinian montage can be beautiful in itself and can even bear the weight of actual substance. Right now there is no more impressive practitioner of this particular skill than Alejandro González Iñárritu, who since his first feature, Amores Perros, has worked on the kinds of expansive, crisis-driven, crisscrossing stories that practically require cathartic crescendos of pure editorial bravado.
González Iñárritu doesn’t write his own screenplays (Guillermo Arriaga does), and the two features since Perros have credited others as editors. But Perros, 21 Grams, and the new Babel are so much of a piece — conceptually, thematically, stylistically — and the work his collaborators have done elsewhere is so dissimilar that there’s no doubting González Iñárritu’s all-controlling hand.
Anyone who works on so ambitious a scale risks missteps and unevenness. Babel is a teetering monument, and its plot is hole pocked as if made of Swiss cheese. Yet it’s also better shaped as a whole than Amores Perros and carries its burden of existential hand-wringing less pretentiously than 21 Grams. Mercifully, it abjures the latter’s jaundiced palette for Rodrigo Prieto’s full-bodied, naturalistic wide-screen compositions. There are individual passages that are as dazzling as anything onscreen this year. Perros told three consecutive Mexico City stories; Grams interwove three chronology-scrambled threads set mostly in New Mexico (though originally conceived for Mexico City). Babel sprawls across the globe, tenuously linking tales of culture shock in Mexico, Japan, and Morocco.
The last is where San Diegan professionals Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett have gone for reparative alone time. They’re about to reconcile, maybe, when a stray bullet from a young goatherd’s gun strikes their tour bus. The panic among fellow passengers and impact on innocent locals are ramped up by international media attention on this “terrorist act.”
The same couple’s two preschool children are back in San Diego with Mexican housekeeper-cum-nanny Amelia (Adriana Barraza). She’s willing to go the extra mile when the globe-trotting parents get in trouble — but not, when those troubles drag on, to miss her own son’s wedding. Amelia finally decides to take her towheaded charges across the border, with reckless nephew Santiago (Gael García Bernal) as their most untrustworthy chauffeur.
Ultimately connected to these dramas by the thinnest of threads, a third strand centers on deaf-mute Tokyo teen Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi). Her mother is dead, her CEO father distant. Further alienated from the speaking world, Chieko plunges into raver postures of wannabe nymphomania that are by far Babel’s least convincing or pointed ploy. Still, they engender the movie’s most exhilarating montage — an ecstasy-propelled joyride that arcs from desire to bliss to aftermath, only slightly overdoing the audio on-off effects meant to capture the nonhearing experience.
What is González Iñárritu saying here? Why are the near-death experiences of American yuppies straying outside their home safety zone — in nations painted as menacingly chaotic, even the director’s native Mexico — more vivid than the travails of residents? Surely that’s not González Iñárritu’s intention, but the star power of Pitt and Blanchett and the pixie perils endured by their fictive kids tend to tip the scales in that direction. In interviews the director says what he thought would be a movie about cultural differences ended up being about subjects — family, parenting, compassion — that unite all people. Babel does gesture thataway, yet its primary emphasis is on crisis creation and ambulance chasing. Hot-button issues like terrorism, illegal immigration, and US imperialism are diversionary flags González Iñárritu waves without actually signaling anything.
Among filmmakers working in this fashionable crazy-quilt-of-humanity genre, many less talented ones are even more convinced they’re making an important statement about life. Babel is so accomplished and urgent as spectacle that maybe it’s folly to expect more than the rewards of an engrossing, sweeping surface. Babel might not be a great movie, but you can’t watch it without knowing González Iñárritu will someday make one. SFBG
BABEL
Opens Fri/3 at Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for theaters and showtimes
www.paramountvantage.com/babel
For Cheryl Eddy’s interview with director Alejandro González Iñárritu, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Governor Hummer

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› steve@sfbg.com
If there is a single symbol of American wastefulness, military fetishism, and willful ignorance about what it means to be heating up the planet at the end of the age of oil, it is the Hummer. And if there is one American who is most closely associated with the Hummer, it is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
So why, in a state whose voters consistently rank environmentalism as one of their most important concerns, is Governor Hummer considered such a lock for reelection? And why haven’t the mainstream media made more of Schwarzenegger’s stubborn refusal to give up the four Hummers he still owns?
For that matter, why is the press overlooking his opposition to Proposition 87 (which would tax oil companies to support research of alternative fuels) and tacit support of Proposition 90 (which would make environmental protection far more costly for governments), both positions on close races that are at odds with environmental groups? Is he really that good an actor?
The visceral response that Hummers elicit from true environmentalists is perhaps best captured on the Web site www.fuh2.com, which has posted thousands of pictures of people flipping off Hummers, what it refers to as “the official Hummer H2 salute.”
The H2 is the slightly less offensive version of the original Hummer, a 10,000-pound monster adapted from the Humvee military vehicle that gets about 10 miles per gallon. The high cost and negative stigma attached to the original Hummer eventually caused sales to lag, and General Motors stopped making them earlier this year.
Schwarzenegger was the first private citizen to own a Hummer, back in 1992, reportedly encouraged American Motors (which GM later bought) to produce them for civilian use, and at one time owned at least seven of them.
Environmentalists have been chiding Schwarzenegger for years to set a good example and get rid of his Hummers, but he has only thrown them a couple of bones: he had GM develop one hydrogen-powered Hummer (at a cost of millions of dollars) and has publicly mused about converting one of his four Hummers to biodiesel, a project he hasn’t yet begun.
At one point Schwarzenegger was rumored to have given up his Hummers. But Schwarzenegger spokesperson Darrell Ng told the Guardian the governor still owns four Hummers, which are now in storage while he drives state vehicles, and that he has no plans to get rid of them. Environmentalists say it is a missed opportunity at a critical juncture in the world’s relationship with oil.
“He could say, ‘I was part of the commercialization of these vehicles, and it was a mistake,’” Bill Allayaud, state legislative director for the Sierra Club, told us. “He could have a press conference and have one of his Hummers crushed or blown up, say these were the products of another era, and it would be a very important symbolic gesture.”
We talked to Allayaud just after Schwarzenegger was elected three years ago, and he was “cautiously optimistic” that the governor would protect the environment. Initially, Allayaud was disappointed: “He vetoed a lot of good bills in those first few years.”
Now, after the governor signed landmark legislation to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions and a few other bills that the Sierra Club supported and made a couple of good appointments to regulatory agencies, Allayaud said, “I feel like we’re right back where we were in 2003, like he might be OK … but what do we get in the second term? It’s anybody’s guess.”
After all, every environmental bill Schwarzenegger signed was someone else’s idea, Allayaud said, and many had to be significantly weakened to gain his support. Schwarzenegger also enraged environmentalists and some lawmakers two weeks after signing the global warming measure by issuing an executive order that seemed to weaken its enforcement provisions.
Schwarzenegger starts to sound like an environmentalist only around election time, his critics say, indicating where he really stands. And so does his choice of vehicles.
“It’s a window into the real Schwarzenegger,” Dan Newman, the spokesperson for challenger Phil Angelides, told us. “It exposes the governor as a complete and utter fraud. Someone with seven Hummers pretending to be an environmentalist is akin to Attila the Hun claiming to be a pacifist.”
Others say “the real Schwarzenegger” is reflected in his positions on Props. 87 and 90.
“It’s a neck and neck race, and the oil companies are pouring unprecedented sums against us, $80 million so far [a figure that had risen to more than $90 million by press time],” said Yusef Robb, communications director for the Yes on 87 campaign. As for Governor Hummer, Robb was critical but diplomatic (noting that Schwarzenegger wasn’t actively campaigning against 87), telling us, “Personally, we think it’s an unfortunate choice of vehicles.”
The Schwarzenegger campaign says he would like to see oil companies pay for alternative energy development, but the measure violates his “no new taxes” pledge.
“The governor is opposed to tax increases. Personally, he opposes the initiative, but he strongly supports its goals,” Schwarzenegger campaign spokesperson Julie Soderlund said.
Apparently, such vague statements of support for good environmental policies are enough for the many daily newspapers that have endorsed him, including the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner. But Chronicle staffers did ask about the Hummers at his endorsement interview, and the paper was apparently satisfied with his answer: “As far as my Hummers are concerned, they are very safely stored in some warehouse garage. I have not had an opportunity to drive them, but I don’t think they are polluting the air or ocean sitting in the garage.”
Allayaud said he prefers to focus on indicators with more direct impact, such as the fact that Schwarzenegger’s best annual rating by the California League of Conservation Voters (the 58 percent he received last year; this year he got a 50 percent) was worse than former Gov. Gray Davis’s worst annual rating (72 percent) — and on Schwarzenegger’s stance on Prop. 90.
“If this is close and we lose it,” Allayaud said of the measure, “it’ll be another thing that he didn’t do.” SFBG

Late breaking news: Just as this story was going to press, Schwarzenegger finally came out with a statement opposing Prop. 90, something he resisted doing until a week before election day when many absentee ballots have already been turned in.

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