Well, Tim Burton it isn’t. Since Matthew Bourne’s Edward Scissorhands is inspired by Burton’s delightful but dark 1990 film, a comparison seems fair enough. Right off the top, Bourne’s dance musical has neither the gentleness nor the creepy underbelly of the filmed adaptation of Caroline Thompson’s gothic story. It’s coarser, more cartoonish, and fits too smoothly into the conventions of the Broadway musical.
And yet there is a lot to be said for what Bourne has done. Most important, he has made the parable his own. He tells his version of the old story clearly and with a light touch. It’s the one about the outcast who is destroyed by the civilization into which he is thrust. But it’s also a story of growth from naïveté to wisdom, a tale with a twist in the happy ending. These threads are woven into an at-times entertaining, mostly well-paced, and always splendidly performed piece of musical theater.
Edward Scissorhands (Sam Archer) is a leather-clad creature created by an inventor (Adam Galbraith) who is literally scared to death by Halloween pranksters — leaving the unfinished boy an orphan. How Edward makes his way in the world, becoming more vulnerable as he becomes more human, takes up the bulk of the story. Archer brilliantly realizes the trajectory, from stumbling through life to learning about love and pain to ultimate self-acceptance.
Lez Brotherston’s fabulous sets and costumes create a Hope Springs in which perfect tract houses and perfect families are perfectly color coded. Bourne creates amusing portraits of these homes in which the men go to work and play sports while the more or less desperate housewives keep the family machinery humming. It’s a world of sibling rivalries, raging hormones, secret lives, and unrealized aspirations. Within the stock character tradition in which he chooses to work, Bourne creates reasonable facsimiles of the kindly Peg Boggs (Etta Murfitt), the poodle-walking Charity Upton (Mikah Smillie), and the ever-pregnant Gloria Grubb (Mami Tomotani). But the scene-stealer is the local vamp, the man-eating Joyce Monroe (a splendid Michaela Meazza), who regularly cuckolds her husband (Steve Kirkham), an adoring father.
Bourne specializes in a genuinely new form of musical theater. At his best — Swan Lake, Cinderella, and Play Without Words — he creates characters and situations that resonate with theatrical truth. That’s exactly where I felt many parts of Scissorhands came up short. The big production numbers, in particular “The Boggs’s Barbecue” and “Christmas in Hope Springs,” fell flat. One sensed that Bourne, who clearly loves the energy of social dancing, has watched a lot of movie musicals. But he doesn’t give a fresh perspective on the genre. During “Christmas” I couldn’t help but think of the sparkling invention seen in the holiday party scene in Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut.
Yet there are moments when the choreography works excellently. “The Suburban Ballet,” depicting the town’s awakening and daily activities, was smartly layered and fast paced, with many clever touches. It was great fun to watch. “A Portrait of Kim,” which takes place in the bedroom of the Boggses’ teenage daughter (Kerry Biggins as the ingenue), has an intriguing premise. Deposited into this pink boudoir, a bewildered Edward admires three life-size pictures of Kim. They come alive through his yearning glances. Unfortunately, what could have been an enchanting dream ballet was shortchanged by bland und undistinguished choreography.
“Topiary Garden” was Scissorhands’ more successful dream ballet. Bourne had Edward and Kim waltzing through and with whimsically trimmed, tutu-wearing bushes. Though using fairly standard steps and patterns — I saw echoes of both Fred Astaire and George Balanchine — he deftly combined them for a first act closer resplendent with wit, charm, and emotion.
The “Farewell” pas de deux, at the end of the piece, showed just how good Bourne can be. Here the two lovers unite for the first and last time. Back-to-back, in and out of each other’s arms, they swirled and swooned and held each other. When Kim finally came to rest inside Edward’s enfolding embrace, the scissors against her chest looked like silver flowers. (Rita Felciano)
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS
Through Dec. 10
Orpheum Theater
1192 Market, SF
$35–$90
www.shnsf.com
Local
THE BOURNE IDENTITY
Plays of the year
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You may not have noticed, but an unprecedented theatrical experiment was launched nationwide last week. Its San Francisco segment unfolded the night of Nov. 23 before an audience of 80 to 100 people in a modest wood-shingled community center atop Potrero Hill, with the playwright who started it all in attendance.
Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays project — a national yearlong grassroots theatrical festival premiering a unique and audacious play-a-day cycle by one of the country’s foremost dramatic voices — took off at a benefit performance put on by the Z Space Studio as a group of 11 performers, directed by Lisa Steindler and director-actor Marc Bamuthi Joseph, unveiled the first seven playlets in the cycle.
The pieces (each no longer than 10 minutes) percolate with a mixture of mischievous invention, absurdist humor, pointed irony, and somber reflection on a variety of themes. In the first, for example, the aptly titled Start Here, an African American man gets vague encouragement and direction as he prepares, with some trepidation and confusion, to head out on a path as obscure, ambiguous, and mysterious as the history behind him. (The names of the characters, Arjuna and Krishna, invoke the tale of the Bhagavad Gita and overlay it on this seemingly American allegory.) In another piece, a young woman from a long line of “good-for-nothings” fails miserably to make nothing of herself — rejected by a crowd as inadequately worthless, she is forced to reinvent herself as something instead.
In Veuve Clicquot, which deftly reframes a comic situation into one of pathos and acute ambivalence, a seeming gourmand is in the process of ordering a sumptuous meal until his waiter balks at his pretension, and a chorus of women haunts him with the ethereal voice of his departed victim — whose own last meal, as it turned out, was nothing all that special.
Well acted and smartly blocked on and around a nearly bare stage (with some choice choreography added by six female dancers), the evening’s performances coincided with similar premieres around the country involving a wide range of local theater companies (more than 800 and counting) that have each signed on to produce a week’s worth of Parks’s yearlong cycle (which she composed daily for one full year, beginning in November 2002). Locally, the project is spearheaded by the Z Space Studio, Playwrights Foundation, and Cutting Ball Theater (the last of which recently staged a very fine production of Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World). The Bay Area manifestation of the 365 Days/365 Plays festival (which runs daily to Nov. 12, 2007) will ultimately involve more than 40 companies and 300 theater artists. This week’s shows are by the all-female Shakespeare company Women’s Will.
Parks — the Pulitzer Prize–winning creator of Topdog/Underdog, In the Blood, and The America Play, among other works (including screenplays and a novel) — was in a jocular and expansive mood during the Q&A. She explained her commitment to the idea of writing a play a day for one year as the product of an inclination to entertain any idea that comes into her head — “through the window of opportunity,” she laughed, nodding to the suspended prop window stage left that had featured as the thematic and titular center of one of that evening’s seven playlets.
Plays in the cycle beyond these first seven run a varied and quirky gamut of inspirational matter, with themes of war, family, and spiritual life among the leitmotifs. There are pieces that revisit some of the playwright’s favorite themes (Abe Lincoln comes around again), some that pay homage to people who happened to have passed on during the course of the year (Johnny Cash, for instance), others that take off from real-life encounters (one piece incorporates Parks’s meeting with Brad Pitt, for whom she was developing a screenplay). At the same time, the festival aims to do much more than showcase Parks’s enviable talents. Each company is free to stage the plays as it sees fit, giving the festival a panoramic scope that takes in the diversity of the whole theatrical scene. This kind of coordinated national grassroots effort — something Parks described as an extension of a process of “radical inclusion” — has probably not been seen since the days of the Federal Theater Project in the 1930s.
According to Parks, many of her best ideas for the stage have come from entertaining spontaneous ideas others would prudently dismiss after a gratifying chuckle. (Two African American brothers named Lincoln and Booth? Why not?) In her telling, it was her husband, blues musician Paul Oscher, who first responded affirmatively from the couch to her spontaneous idea to write a play a day for a year. “Yeah?” she asked. “You really think it’s a good idea?” That, apparently, was enough. The rest is theater history. SFBG
365 PLAYS/365 DAYS
Through Nov. 12, 2007
This week: Fri/24–Sun/26
Oakland Public Conservatory of Music
1616 Franklin, Oakl.
Pay what you can, $15–$25 suggested
(510) 420-1813
www.zspace.org/365plays.htm
www.365days365plays.com
49ers aren’t worth public money
EDITORIAL The prospect of the San Francisco 49ers moving to Santa Clara — and taking with them any hope of a 2016 Olympic bid for San Francisco — caught the Newsom administration off guard and has much of City Hall scrambling to figure out a way to keep the fabled sports franchise in San Francisco. It’s not a futile effort by any means: the deal to build a new stadium in Santa Clara still has a long way to go, and there are some very real issues (including the phenomenal parking and traffic problems and the utter lack of accessible transit).
But city officials need to keep a sense of perspective here: the loss of the Olympics was almost certainly a good thing, and the loss of the 49ers wouldn’t be the end of the world. So there’s no reason to even start to talk about handing out promises of more public money, tax breaks, or favorable land deals to keep the Niners in town.
We’ve never been terribly hot on the idea of hosting the Olympics. The last time the issue came up, with a possible bid for the 2012 games, we noted that cities hosting the Olympics tend to wind up with huge public debt and that the costs (typically including gentrification and displacement) aren’t worth the gains. Our articles infuriated local sports leaders, but we’re not the only ones raising questions these days. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Gwen Knapp, in an insightful Nov. 16 piece, suggested that the city might want to thank 49ers owner John York: “He might have saved San Francisco from a vanity project that often leaves ugly blemishes on a community’s bottom line.”
San Francisco is one of the world’s great cities, an international tourist destination, a place that’s already on everyone’s map. We don’t need the Olympics.
We may not need the 49ers either. That’s what Glenn Dickey, Examiner sports columnist, argued Nov. 14. Football teams, with a limited number of home games, bring very little to a local economy — and this is hardly a city that needs the name recognition of a National Football League franchise. “Mayor Gavin Newsom should spend his time on more critical priorities,” Dickey noted.
Of course, if the 49ers leave, something has to be done with the park formerly known as Candlestick — a white elephant that cost the city tens of millions of dollars in bonds. But almost any sort of new development there would do more for the neighborhood than a stadium filled by people who drive in, bring their own food, drive away, and spend almost no money at local businesses.
The San Francisco Giants managed to build a new stadium almost entirely with private money, and it’s been a huge financial success. The city shouldn’t be tempted to throw big chunks of public money at keeping the 49ers from moving. SFBG
The people’s party
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Sake 1 isn’t your typical DJ. Holding a graduate degree in social work from UC Berkeley, he volunteers for Caduceus Outreach Services, providing aid to mentally ill homeless adults. He is in the middle of a year initiating as a priest of Elegua in the Lucumi faith (more commonly known as Santeria) and, among other restrictions, must wear white from head to toe, refrain from sex, alcohol, and drugs, and avoid physical contact with others. His weekly party Pacific Standard Time regularly donates a portion of its proceeds to community organizations such as DiverCity Works and the Center for Young Women’s Development. And he has continued to be an in-demand hip-hop and soul DJ, playing parties like Little Ricky’s Rib Shack in NYC and mixing compilations for outfits like Fader magazine, while relentlessly maintaining an optimistic outlook — even though 2006 saw the deaths of his brother; his best friend, DJ Dusk; and his protégé, DJ Domino.
“It has been hard to lose my best friend, my brother, and a student-friend all in the span of four months,” Sake said from his home in the Mission the week before he was to play a memorial party in New York for his brother, house producer and DJ Adam Goldstone. “But it reminds me where I come from and why I do what I do as a DJ. And I have angels all around me …”
ANGELS FROM THE AVENUES
Sake 1 (the name is his tag from his graffiti days) grew up Stefan Goldstone in the Fillmore and the avenues and graduated from Washington High School before attending UC Santa Cruz and finally UC Berkeley. He learned to mix by using records like Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads” and Ultramagnetic MC’s “Ego Tripping” on one turntable while listening to KPOO on Sunday afternoons. His older brother in New York expanded his world with Red Alert, Pete Rock, and Marley Marl tapes, and Sake 1 soon began visiting the North Beach Tower Records, which at the time had an extensive selection of 12-inch singles. House parties in Santa Cruz followed when he went to college, and to this day the mood of those early parties is something he treasures. “I always feel like that’s something I’m trying to recapture, that house party vibe where you know everybody, where you feel safe even though it’s kinda out of control.”
Following a long list of steadily higher profile events that included Church, Soulville, and Luscious, Sake’s latest attempt to have a club that feels like a house party is Pacific Standard Time, where he is the resident DJ. The PST started in the spring of 2005 at Bambuddha Lounge, eventually moving to Levende Lounge in search of a bigger dance floor. Reflecting Sake’s diverse selections, which range from hip-hop to disco to broken beat, guests have included Daz-I-Kue from Bugz in the Attic, house producer Osunlade, and local favorites such as Mind Motion.
“Pretty much from June of 2005 until [now], it’s been packed every week, so it’s been a blessing,” Sake said. “The struggle part has been trying to keep the music progressive, keep the ideas and the organizations that we support at the forefront, and not fall back on ‘Well, we’re successful, we’re making money, and people like it, so let’s wild out and just have this bacchanal thing.’ When things become successful, it’s almost like a gift and a curse, because then people expect it to be a certain way every week, and it makes it hard to keep it changing. When it’s not successful, you can change, and nobody’s really trippin’, because nobody’s coming!” he laughed.
REACHING OUT
Saying that the party’s crowd has evolved with its success, Sake acknowledged that at times he finds it hard to strike a balance between playing the more obscure tracks he may personally favor and keeping the party rocking. At the same time, he is well aware that being successful allows him not only to reach a broader audience but to make a bigger impact when he does use his party for benefits. And keeping that success rolling may mean tempering his philosophy of selecting tracks by artists from other countries, female artists, and those that represent genres not easily slotted into the Clear Channel and MTV pigeonholes.
“At PST we struggle with trying to be this sexy, cool, tastemaker thing and then doing these community organization parties,” he reflected. “And the community organizations come and bring their bases, and their bases don’t want to hear SA-RA Creative Partners necessarily. They want to hear commercial rap, because that’s what a lot of our folks listen to.”
Nevertheless, at 11:20 on a recent Thursday night, Levende was rapidly filling up, and the already packed dance floor had no problem getting down to SA-RA’s “Hollywood.” But half an hour later there was a markedly bigger response when Sake dropped “Keep Bouncing,” a track by Too $hort featuring Snoop Dog and will.i.am that the majority of DJs digging SA-RA joints wouldn’t let near their crates.
“DJs should break records, and nightclubs should be places for not just new music but new ideas,” Sake explained. “People should be open to new sounds … and people should be open to having a nightlife experience that isn’t [divorced] from thinking about what is going on in the world outside — that [doesn’t just accept] that you have to step over homeless people to get into the nightclub, you have to disrespect the bar staff to get your drink quicker, you have to touch a girl’s ass if she won’t dance with you.” Walking the line between educating and entertaining, Sake 1 is making San Francisco a better place with a party that might just have it both ways. SFBG
SAKE 1 AT PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Thursdays, 10 p.m.
Levende Lounge
1710 Mission, SF
$10
(415) 864-5585
The other home of Bay hip-hop
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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
Memo to the city desks of the Chronicle/Hearst and Media News Group/Singleton papers and the Associated Press: the Hearst/Reilly antitrust suit is scheduled for a hearing tomorrow (Wednesday) morning before Federal Judge Susan Illston. Will you cover it?
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Eureka! As you will remember from my earlier blogs, I coined the term Eurekaism to replace the old term Afghanistanism for the bad habit of many daily papers, notably the Hearst and Singleton chains, for reporting on stories in Eureka instead of reporting on the big local scandal or embarrassing story in their own communities. (Hearst did a rollicking Sunday story awhile back on the competition way way up in Eureka between a Singleton daily and a locally owned daily.)
Tomorrow (Wednesday) at ll a.m., in the courtroom of Federal Judge Susan Ilston, there will be a major story that will once again raise the issue of Eurekaism: the major antitrust case of Reilly vs. Hearst and the request for a temporary restraining order sought by Clint Reilly and his attorney Joe Alioto to halt the accelerating moves by Hearst and Singleton to destroy daily competition and impose regional monopoly in the Bay Area.
Illston earlier tossed Reilly’s request for a temporary restraining order against the Hearst/Singleton transaction, but she did state in her last order that she would “seriously consider” forcing Sington to gve up some assets if the court finds the company’s transactions to be anti-competitive.
Meanwhile, on other fronts, the Guardian has learned that the U.S. Justice Department has interviewed a wide variety of local people, including former Chronicle executives and local antitrust attorneys and professors, to further its investigation into the Hearst/Singleton part of the deal (See previous Guardian stories and Bruce blogs). “It seems to be a very vigorous and aggressive investigation,” one interviewee told the Guardian.
The unanswered questions: Where is the current Attorney General Bill Lockyer and the incoming
Attorney General Jerry Brown (nowhere, it seems)? Will Hearst and Singleton papers provide the coverage that a major regional story of this magnitude deserves: an advance in tomorrow’s papers and then followed with a thorough story on the outcome of the hearing and the impacts of the moves to regional monopoly? Will they continue to try to black out the story keeping the court documents under seal? Or will there be more Eurekaism? Stay tuned, B3
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times: still no answers on why it once again censored and mangled Project Censored and its stories on Bush and Iraq et al
On Sept. 10, 2003, while the New York Times and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and affiliated papers were running Judith Miller’s stories making the case for the Iraq War and then seeking to justify it, the Guardian published the annual Project Censored list of censored stories.
Our front page had a caricature of Bush, standing astride the globe holding a U.S. flag with a dollar sign, and a headline that read, “The neocon plan for global domination–and other nine other big stories the mainstream press refused to cover in 2002.”
The number one story was “The neoconservative plan for global domination.” Our introduction to the timely censored package made the critical point: “If there’s one influence that has shaped world-wide politics over the past year, it’s the extent to which the Bush administration has exploited the events of Sept. ll, 200l, to solidify its military and economic control of the world at the expense of democracy, true justice, and the environment. But President George W. Bush hasn’t simply been responding to world events. The agenda the administration has followed fits perfectly with a clearly defined plan that’s been in place for a decade.”
In many cases, we noted, the neocon story and the other censored stories laying out the dark side of the Bush administration and its drumbeat to war got little or no play–or else were presented piecemeal without any attempt to put the information in context. (The number two story was “Homeland security threatens civil liberties.” Number three: “U.S. illegally removes pages from Iraq U.N. report.” Number four: “Rumsfeld’s plan to provoke terrorists.” Number seven: “Treaty busting by the United States.” Number eight: “U.S. and British forces continue use of depleted uranium weapons despite massive evidence of negative health effects.” Number nine: “In Afghanistan poverty, women’s rights, and civil disruption worse than ever.”)
Project Director Peter Phillips told us at that time, “The stories this year reflect a clear danger to democracy and governmental transparency in the U.S.–and the corporate media’s failure to alert the public to these important issues. The magnitude of total global domination has to be the most important important story we’ve covered in a quarter century.” In our summary of the neocon plan, we wrote that “it called for the United States to diversify its military presence throughout the world, offered a policy of preemption, argued for the expansion of U.S. nuclear programs while discouraging those of other countries, and foresaw the need for the United States to act alone, if need be, to protect its interests and those of its allies.”
And we then asked the critical and timely question. “Sound familiar?”
In that critical year of 2003, only months after the ill-fated Bush invasion of Iraq, the timely and relevant Censored project and stories were not published in the New York Times and the Press Democrat and affiliated papers either censored or mangled the coverage. This year, as Iraq slid into civil war, U.S. war dead rose toward 3,000, and the U.S. public was well ahead of the media in turning against the war, the New York Times should have finally recognized its annual mistake and published the Project Censored story. It didn’t (and it never has). The Santa Rosa Press Democrat should have been all over the story, since it was a local and national story out of nearby Sonoma State University, it was reseached by local professors and students, and it was the project’s 30th anniversary highlighted with a special conference at the school. Instead, the PD did a front page hatchet job on the story and then refused to run a decent number of complaining letters, according to Phillips.
However, The PD did run an op ed piece in this morning’s paper by Phillips (see link below). Which is to the good.
But the paper never answered any of the questions and complaints submitted by Phillips, the project founder Carl Jensen (retired and living in nearby Cotati), or the Guardian (see previous blogs and links). Why? No explanation.
The key point is that the Times and the PD have once again demonstrated in 96 point Tempo Bold the point of Project Censored and the value of alternative voices.
Postscript: More impertinent advice: TheTimes papers that marched us into war, with their flawed front page reporting and backup editorials, ought at minimum to start covering the project and the stories and the voices who had it right before, during, and after Bush committed us to the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. Repeating: the PD ought to invite Jensen, Phillips,and the Project in for a chat and discuss why they have so much trouble handling a local story. B3
STOP THE PRESSES: And now the word from Montreal is that “Transcontinental signs l5-year deal to print Hearst Corporation’s San Francisco Chronicle.” Does this mean ever more branch office journalism?
Is this the wave of the future? Will our big local news come via Montreal and New York? And will the Hearst and Singleton papers become even more branch offices of corporate headquarters in Montreal, New York, and Denver? Is Hearst so contemptuous of its San Francisco paper that it releases major Hearst stories in New York and Montreal before it appears in the Hearst paper or on its website in San Francisco?
B3 and the Guardian, a locally owned newspaper safely situated at the bottom of Potrero Hill in San Francisco and not planning to go anywhere
PRESS RELEASE: The Hearst Corporation
TRANSCONTINENTAL SIGNS 15-YEAR DEAL TO PRINT HEARST CORPORATION’S SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
SUNDAY
Nov. 19
Event
Transgender Day of Remembrance
Remember and honor victims of antitransgender hate crimes as Alameda County joins more than 200 locations around the world to hold the first Transgender Day of Remembrance. Elected officials and community members will speak at the event, which marks the anniversary of the murder of Rita Hester, a Massachusetts transgender woman. (Deborah Giattina)
4:30 p.m.
Preservation Park
MLK and 13th St., Oakl.
(510) 713-6690
Event
Unsung Heroes
Show your support for eight Bay Area residents and one organization recognized for improving lives in the African American community. The 18th annual Unsung Heroes awards ceremony features entertainment from the Praise and Sign Dancers and Stepping Knights. Local comedian Veronica Dangerfield MCs. (Deborah Giattina)
1 p.m.
San Francisco Public Library, Koret Auditorium
100 Larkin, SF
Free
www.sfpl.org
The new media offensive for the Iraq War. Why the Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times ought to stop “censoring” and mangling Project Censored and its annual list of censored stories on Iraq and Bush et al
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Norman Solomon, a syndicated columnist who appears on the Guardian website, wrote a chilling column this week
on how the “American media establishment has launched a major offensive against the option of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.”
He noted that the “heaviest firepower is now coming from the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA–the front page of the New York Times. The present situation is grimly instructive for anyone who might wonder how the Vietnam War could continue for years while opinion polls showed that most Americans were against it. Now, in the wake of midterms elections widely seen as a rebuke to the Iraq war, powerful media institutions are feverishly spinning against a pullout of U.S. troops.”
Solomon cited a Nov. l5 front page piece by Michael Gordon under the headline “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say.” Gordon then appeared hours later on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, “fully morphing into an unabashed pundit as he declared that withdrawal is ‘simply not realistic,'” Solomon said.
“If a New York Times military-affairs reporter went on television to advocate for withdrawal of U.S. troops as unequivocally as Gordon advocated any such withdrawal during his Nov. l5 appearance on CNN, he or she would be quickly reprimanded–and probably would be taken off the beat by the Times hierarchy. But the paper’s news department eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the basic world views of the country’s national security state.”
Solomon’s key point: “That’s how and why the Times front page was so hospitable to the work of Judith Miller during the lead-up to the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. That’s how and why the Times is now so hospitable to the work of Michael Gordon.”
And so it is not surprising that the New York Times and its Santa Rosa daily have been so inhospitable through the years to Project Censored, housed nearby at Sonoma State University. (See my previous blog and the scathing criticism by founder Carl Jensen and current director Peter Phillips of PD/NYT coverage of the 30th anniversary project and conference.)
I asked Jensen about the PD and Times record of covering what ought to be a top annual local and national press story. “At first,” Jensen said, “the PD merely ignored the Project. Then, after Newsweek ran a column about it, the PD was embarrassed into covering it. Which they did, using the annual results as an excuse to criticize me for being a liberal, left-wing agitator. Finally, they just started to run one story a year, or sometimes none, announcing the results. This year they didn’t even bother to announce the results for the 30th anniversary of the project. Instead, they did Paul Payne’s hit piece about Steve Jones. To my knowledge, and a Lexis-Nexis search, the New York Times has never run an article about the project.”
The PD has also not answered my impertinent questions about their censor-or-mangle coverage, which I emailed to the reporter, editors, and publisher.
Let us remember that IF Stone, in his famous IF Stone’s Weekly, exposed in l964 the Gulf of Tonkin scam only days after President Johnson used it as the excuse to expand U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And ever after he led the journalistic charge brilliantly against the war. It took years and tens of thousands of dead American soldiers for the New York Times (and the other big “liberal” papers, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post) to figure out that Stone was right and change their “we can’t get out now” news and editorial policies in support of the war. If Project Censored had been going at that time, Stone and his powerful little four page publication would have had major stories on the Censored list every year.
My impertinent advice to the Post Democrat and the New York Times: if you are are going to run Jayson Blair and Judith Miller and Michael Gordon and Paul Payne, then you sure as hell ought to be giving serious regular coverage to Project Censored at Sonoma State University and its annual roster of major “censored” stories the New York Times, PD, and the mainstream press don’t cover properly. Why not start by running Phillips’ op ed piece and inviting Jensen, Phillips, and their Project Censored crew into the PD for a full editorial conference and a podcast question and answer session? B3
The new Iraq-war media offensive
How powerful institutions like The New York Times are feverishly spinning against a pullout of U.S. troops
BY NORMAN SOLOMON
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times “censors” the annual Project Censored story. Why? Some impertinent questions for the Press Democrat by Bruce B. Brugmann
The Business of Dirty Nukes
By Sarah Phelan
In the war on terror, even cats are suspect. Or at least their kitty litter is.
That’s because of trace amounts of uranium and other suspect stuff that apparently triggers alarms at ports worldwide
But now comes news of better technology–and bigger profits—in the war on terror.
Today, the Bay Area-based Veritainer unveiled equipment at the Port of Oakland which can, according to Veritainer CEO John Alioto, detect “dirty bombs” in shipping containers
Yes, we know that Oakland is a domestic port, and thus less likely to be the site of smuggled nukes, but the Veritainer folks say they are using Oakland as a test case.
No, that doesn’t mean they’ll be bringing in dirty bombs to Oakland so they can test their technology. Instead, they’ll be bringing in small sources of naturally occurring nuclear material, such as americium, which is found in smoke detectors (and was, ironically enough, named for the Americas).
“This is to protect ports around the world from the low probability but high impact of nuclear smuggling,” said Veritainer Chairman and CEO John Alioto, who plans to charge $20 per container to screen for dirty bombs, provided his company gets certified by the Department of Homeland Security in January 2007.
In other words, Veritainer stands to make oodles of bucks, given that Oakland handles 2 million containers a year, L.A. handles 6 million and Rotterdam handles 20 million. Add to that the fact that radiation screening is now required at international ports, thanks to the Safe Port Act which President Bush signed in October, and you get the picture.
Right now, according to John Alioto, the customer is the government, with the National Nuclear Safety Agency setting aside $2.5 billion to cover initial costs.
Alioto also told me that there’ll be no danger to port workers from this technology,
“The equipment is purely passive,” he said. “Unlike dentists’ X-ray equipment, this is passive, purely detective equipment. So, there’ll be no shooting of radiation at the waterfront!” (The International Longshoremen and local residents will be happy to hear that.)
“Unlike radiation portal monitors, which were called kitty litter detectors because they couldn’t differentiate between dangerous and non-dangerous sources, these devices can identify isotopes, and say, yes, it americium. At which point, port officials can check the ship’s manifest and see if it’s certified to carry smoke detectors. And eventually, the machine will be able to do manifest comparison itself, too.”
So, next year, if you’re riding a ferry to Jack London Square, chances are port officials will be monitoring radioactive levels at the port, 24/7. So, leave the kitty litter at home.
Smart and dangerous
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
The Fucking Ocean are seriously fucking refreshing: they’ve taken cues from Mark E. Smith and Ian MacKaye alike to produce biting, sincere post-punk that’s nigh anomalous in American music. In band member John Nguyen’s San Francisco home, the current three-piece talked about their politics, new record, playing under the stairs at the Edinburgh Castle, and a shared affinity for Mexican food and DC punk.
It was collegiate rock enthusiasm that initially helped bring about this ensemble. Nguyen went to Brown with fellow band member Matt Swagler, where they played together in what Swagler said was a “pretty embarrassing ’90s power pop band.” When Nguyen subsequently moved west to enter med school at Stanford, he randomly tuned in to Fucking Ocean cofounder Elias Spiliotis on KZSU, the campus radio station.
“I had a show called Lethal Injection on Saturday evenings where I was playing Greek punk and bands like the Fall, Fugazi, and Blonde Redhead,” Spiliotis said. “Before I ever met him, John called in one night, said he liked the show, and asked me, ‘Where are the cool people at Stanford?’”
They inevitably found each other at a station staff meeting a few months later, and Nguyen started his own finely titled show, Sad and Dangerous. Later, after Swagler moved to San Francisco, a 2003 show from defunct DC no-wave ragers Black Eyes blew the friends’ collective mind. Starting a band was the noble, noisy result.
As cryptic as the Fucking Ocean’s name is, it has rather silly origins: “I was dropping off Matt after band practice when ‘Foggy Notion’ by the Velvet Underground came on the radio,” Spiliotis said. The band had been tossing around possible names, and when he suggested “the Foggy Notion,” his Greek accent unwittingly locked in a different phrase, one that they’ve used to this day.
SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION
Luckily, Swagler explained, the Foggy Notion serves as a name for playing kids’ birthday parties — when his grandmother recently asked his band’s name, that’s the one he gave her. Spiliotis, while no longer in the band (he left in order to continue his research in cell biology at Stanford), appears on the record with Nguyen, Swagler, and Marcella Gries, who joined the group after former bass player Megumi Aihara moved to Boston for graduate school.
For more than a year their rehearsals were tape-recorded on Gries’s clock radio. The band eventually had a friend help them record a five-song EP that, while never released, primed them for their studio time at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studio.
“We were playing a lot of shows, and our friends in the Mall suggested going to Ian and Jay Pellicci to record an album,” said Gries of the Pelliccis, who have recorded some of their favorite bands, Deerhoof and Erase Errata. They brought the Fucking Ocean newfound on-tape clarity and a pointed drum sound care of Jay Pellicci, as well as some nifty frills — a vintage Gibson amplifier and, appropriately, a telephone, which Nguyen said was “rewired and disordered in a way that makes it sound vaguely like a bullhorn.”
“MUSICAL VOLLEYBALL”
The Fucking Ocean’s affable attitude contrasts with their music’s tension and focus. Drum, bass, and guitar duties aren’t singularly assigned — the band writes collectively and swaps instruments. The approach makes their live show as varied and blindingly fun as their record. On the road they have been carting around new songs and video accompaniment courtesy of local artist Tony Benna. Shawn Reynaldo, who signed the Fucking Ocean to his Oakland label, Double Negative Records, calls them a “musical volleyball team” with a deliberately Minutemen-like songwriting economy. The prevailing maxim among the Fucking Ocean is that if an idea is presented to the listener, it needn’t stick around that long: no use in letting John Q. Listener get too comfortable, right?
Recording the album, all done on analog tape, took six days in June. While a lot of Indian pizza, Gatorade, and various caffeinated drinks fueled their long nights behind the boards, the result, Le Main Rouge, is damn lean. At 11 songs in a little under 27 minutes, it’s an urgent delight of terse angularity from a band bursting with novel ideas, both politically and riffwise.
Addressing abortion rights in the fuzzed, pissed strut of “Adam,” the Fucking Ocean close with the lines “Do you remember when, do you remember when?/ Women had to risk their lives just to live again!” “Bombs in the Underground,” a response to last year’s London Underground bombings, opens with a memorable guitar-bass groove reminiscent of midperiod Sleater-Kinney before bursting into a shouted refrain, then traversing odd tempo shifts and a drum fill — it’s thoughtfully fragmented and endlessly listenable. Le Main Rouge shows a band whose enthusiasm hopefully bodes a good run ahead. You’re advised to polish up that kayak and tune in. SFBG
FUCKING OCEAN
With Kid 606 and Friends and Warbler
Thurs/16, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$8
(415) 621-4455
The new sunshine “problem”
EDITORIAL Matt Dorsey, who handles press for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, stopped by last week to talk to us about the barrage of public records requests that are coming in from one activist, Kimo Crossman, who is demanding so many records and so much information from so many departments that it’s costing the city big money.
The problem, Dorsey says, is a lot of the records that people like Crossman request (particularly if they have metadata, or hidden computerized information, embedded in them) have to be reviewed by a lawyer before they’re released to determine if any of the internal information might contain something confidential. The city typically accounts for its legal work at about $200 an hour — and already, Herrera’s office has spent hundreds of hours scouring records just to satisfy one aggressive gadfly whose sunshine activism is, we have to agree, sometimes rather scattershot. That’s a hefty taxpayer bill.
Dorsey’s done more for promoting open government than anyone who has ever worked for the Office of the San Francisco City Attorney, so we don’t dismiss his concerns. And we’ve said before and we’ll say again that the Sunshine Task Force needs to take up this issue, hold hearings, and make some policy recommendations.
Still, we had the same response we typically do when public records are at issue:
Why all the effort? Why the fuss? Just release the stuff. Give Crossman what he wants, and that will be the end of it.
Dorsey’s response: state law and state bar requirements mandate that attorneys, including municipal attorneys, carefully monitor all documents that might contain metadata and “at every peril to himself or herself” prevent any potentially confidential material from accidental release. “The lawyers in our office risk real penalties if they don’t carefully review every one of these requests, and that takes a lot of time,” Dorsey told us.
Well, if that’s a problem, the city and the state need to address it right now. Metadata is increasingly becoming part of government activities and will increasingly be part of public records requests by community activists. And there’s no reason that city employees, including city lawyers, should have to fear retribution if they make a good-faith effort to release information to the public.
Under state and local law everything the city government does is presumed to be public, unless it falls under one of a set of very narrowly defined exemptions.
But in San Francisco there’s been a culture of secrecy at City Hall that goes so far back and is so deeply inbred it’s hard to remove it from the political DNA. All sorts of deals are done behind closed doors. It’s considered perfectly acceptable to promise vendors bidding on public contracts that they can keep basic financial data secret. Every city official seems to think that every request needs legal review.
It’s ridiculous — and the supervisors, the mayor, and the city attorney should take some basic steps to end it.
For starters, the supervisors should pass a clear policy statement that says no city employee shall face any disciplinary action of any sort stemming from a good-faith effort to release information to the public. Herrera should tell his lawyers the same thing: nobody gets in trouble for handing out information.
Yes, there are sensitive documents, particularly in the City Attorney’s Office — but overall, the risk to the city of a mistaken release of confidential information is far, far lower than the risk (and the cost) of continuing this deep culture of confidentiality.
If that creates a problem with the state bar, Assemblymember Mark Leno should introduce a bill that eliminates any penalties or consequences for public agency lawyers who, in good faith, allow the release of public information that may unintentionally include confidential material.
Meanwhile, Crossman has a good idea: why not create a publicly accessible database that gets automatic copies of every document created at City Hall (unless there’s a damn good reason to mark it secret)? That way the busiest of the advocates can spend their time searching the files on their own, and the lawyers can go back to fighting Pacific Gas and Electric Co. SFBG
EDITOR’S NOTES
› tredmond@sfbg.com
I started getting all the usual calls last week, from all of the usual national media outlets, with all the usual questions that a local political reporter gets when a local politician makes good. “Who is Nancy Pelosi, really? What do her constituents think of her? Is she going to bring Burning Man and gay marriage to Washington?”
My answer to everyone, from the liberals to the conservatives, was exactly the same:
Relax. There’s nothing to get excited about. Pelosi is by no means a San Francisco liberal. She’s a Washington insider, a born and bred politician who cares more about power and money than she does about any particular ideology.
I’m glad the Democrats are in charge, and Pelosi deserves tremendous credit for making that happen. But she’s not about to push any kind of ambitious left-wing political or cultural agenda.
Just look at her record. Pelosi was weak on the war and late in opposing it. She was the author of the bill that gave that well-known pauper George Lucas the lucrative contract to build a commercial office building in a national park. She worked with Republicans such as Don Fisher of the Gap on the Presidio privatization and set a precedent for the National Park System that the most rabid antigovernment conservatives can love.
Just this week Bloomberg News reported that Pelosi is working with Silicon Valley venture capital firms to weaken the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley law, which mandates strict accounting procedures for publicly held corporations.
And just a couple of weeks before the election, she told 60 Minutes that same-sex marriage is “not an issue that we’re fighting about here.”
I think it’s pretty safe to say she’s never been to Burning Man.
Pelosi, who is backing antiwar but also anti-abortion Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha for majority leader, has an agenda for her first 100 hours. It’s nice moderate stuff — raising the minimum wage (to all of $7.25 an hour), lowering interest on student loans (but not replacing loans with grants), and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower-priced drugs (but not making Medicare a national health insurance program for every American). Tactically, it’s brilliant: there won’t be a lot of national opposition, and Bush will look like a heel if he vetoes the bills.
In fact, as a political strategist and tactician, Pelosi has proven brilliant. She’s whipped together a dysfunctional party and led the most important electoral change to this country in more than a decade.
Along the way, though, she’s pretty much stopped representing San Francisco. On issue after issue, her constituents are way to the left of her. This fall she didn’t even bother to show up in the district (except to extract money for Democratic congressional campaigns around the country). She spent election night in Washington.
There are a lot of people who think that’s fine. Now that she’s speaker, she’ll be able to do a lot for this city, particularly when it comes to bringing in federal money. I appreciate the fact that her work on the national level, which often involved running away from San Francisco, will allow more-progressive Democrats like Los Angeles’s Maxine Waters to chair powerful committees that can go after White House cronyism and corruption.
But if the right-wing talk show hosts are worried about San Francisco liberals like me, they can take it easy: Nancy Pelosi is not one of us. SFBG
“When it comes to herb, you gotta set some standards in your life.”
Tomorrow night at the Parkway Theater — local writer-director Kevin Hahn premieres his new film Stoner’s Run. Judging by the cover art (below), I assumed it was gonna be in the grand tradition of Up in Smoke or Half-Baked, which is to say, a pot comedy all the way. I’m not sure if it’s a spoiler to tell you that the giant joint never actually makes an appearance.
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times “censors” the annual Project Censored story. Why? Some impertinent questions for the Press Democrat
To the Santa Rosa Press Democrat:
This morning I got an email from Carl Jensen, the founder of Project Censored at your nearby Sonoma State University, complaining that the Press Democrat published an “irresponsible page one article” about Project Censored and its annual Sonoma State Conference. He and Peter Phillips, the current director of the project, have asked for answers to the questions they have raised about your coverage.
As the editor and publisher of the alternative paper that has for years proudly run the Project Censored story, and then sent it out for publication in alternative papers throughout the country, I would appreciate your response to their charges of omission and commission as noted below. And I also have some questions. I am sending them via the Bruce blog at our website sfbg.com to the reporter, and the editors and publsher of the Post Democrat.
I have been astounded through the years that the Press Democrat has never to my knowledge written up this annual story. And then, this year, instead of running a fair story on a major local story by a major local university on its 30th anniversary, I was further astounded to find that you go on the attack mode and pick out one story and use it to lambaste the project on the front page of the Press Democrat. I find it particularly galling that, after censoring the story for three decades or so, you finally do the story on the project’s 30th anniversary, a major journalistic and academic milestone. Bush. Real bush.
Some questions:
+Will you answer the questions raised by Jensen and Phillips in their notes to you? (Please send them also to me for publication in the Guardian and the Bruce blog.) Will you run the Phillips’ answer in an op ed?
+Why have you never run this story through the years? (If you have, I would appreciate knowing about it and would love to see copies.)
+Why this year, instead of running a fair account of a nationally recognized project in journalism, did you center on just one story, which was number l8 on the list, and left out a flood of stories on important issues. (See the Guardian Censored package link below). In fact, in our coverage, we did not even go down this far on the list and concentrated on the top l0 stories, which ranged from number one (“The Feds and the media muddy the debate over internet freedom” to number ten (“Expanded air war in Iraq kills more civilians”). We did synopses and comments on the other stories and cited the source. Why didn’t you at least do this and run a list of the stories, so people had a chance to judge the project for themselves, if you were going to do a hit attack and not a fair story? (We ran the entire list in our online package.) Why didn’t you at least say this was the project’s 30th anniversary and provide some history and context?
+Why didn’t you get comments from any of the distinguished Censored judges through the years or from any of its many supporters, including Ben Bagdikian, author of “The Media Monopoly” and former dean of the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and Noam Chomsky, and Robert McChesney, a prominent media critic and author, and many many others. Or from any of the alternative press that regularly runs the Censored story as one of its most widely read and highly respected issues of the year?
+Each year, Censored runs l0 stories that it considers Junk Food News. Doesn’t this story qualify as a top entry this year?
I would also appreciate it you would address the larger issue of “censorship” that this project, and many of us, try to address. As the only daily paper in the Bay Area not aligned with the emerging Singleton/Hearst regional monopoly, you have a special responsbility to report the news, not censor it and mangle as you do annually with this story.
This is particularly the case with the paper of Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, and the uncritical news stories and editorials that helped march us into Iraq and a deadly occupation. The “censored” Iraq stories, let me emphasize, were a major staple of Project Censored and the Guardian, and other alternative papers that ran Censored stories and took the anti-war side and condemned the preemptive invasion before and during the war and up to the present day.
Last impertinent question: has the Press Democrat/NY Times done a major local story on the impact of the Hearst/Singleton moves to destroy daily competition and impose regional monopoly in the
Bay Area (and the Clint Reilly/Joe Alioto suit to break up the unholy alliance)? If not, why not? If not, when will you start doing this kind of major local story and stop doing attack stories on major local projects such as Project Censored? Have you run the major Hearst scandal story on prescription drug pricing (from the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and previous Bruce blogs). This is a story, let me emphasize, that Singleton papers are also censoring as yet another example of the Hearst/Singleton mutual benefit society. Until you do this Hearst/Singleton story and pursue it properly, until you run the major Hearst scandal story, until you start doing fair and balanced stories on major local projects such as Project Censored, you have no business criticizing anybody on much of anything involving media criticism. Thanks very much.
Dear Colleague:
On October 4, the Press Democrat published an irresponsible page one article about Project Censored and a conference it held at SSU. The article, written by Paul Payne, appeared to be set up to attack Project Censored. He interviewed two well-known critics of the project before the conference took place. They didn’t even attend the conference to know what the speaker said.
In all my years in journalism, as a journalism professor, and as an advisor to the SSU STAR, Payne’s hit-piece definitely was one of the least objective articles I have ever read.
In the weeks following, the Press Democrat published just two letters concerning the ethics of Payne’s article leading readers to believe there was little public reaction. However, there were well over 100 comments submitted to the Press Democrat on line with the great majority castigating the PD.
Following is a letter Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored, wrote to Payne questioning his article Further, Phillips is submitting an op ed article to the PD this week, in hopes of letting the public know the truth about the conference and the speaker.
I thought you, as a journalist, should be aware of this unethical behavior by Payne and the Press Democrat.
Carl Jensen
Dear Paul Payne,
Staff Writer for the Press Democrat
October 6, 2007
Subject: There’s that other theory on 9/11: SSU hosts discredited academic who says U.S. could have planned attack.? Page 1 October 4, 2006 Press Democrat
Were we at the same lecture last? Friday night?? Somehow you missed reporting? Dr. Jones’? first 45 minutes on the?collapse speeds of building 7 and the Twin towers, which where the principle physics questions? presented that evening.??
Did you? tape the lecture, because nowhere can we find Dr. Jones making a statement that the US Government did it? He was quite clear in saying he doesn’t know who placed the thermite in the building,? if indeed that is what was used.
When you write that Jones’ theories have been discredited/condemned by other scholars and critics as groundless,? it would be nice to actually cite who is making these charges.? If you look on the 9/11 Scholars for Truth website you will find the names of over 2 dozen structural engineers, physicists, chemists, and other scientists who support his work . That sounds to us like a valid scientific dispute not a total or even partial discrediting.?
When we discuss journalism at the University we clearly talk about objectivity and balance as the hallmark of solid reporting. So we are wondering how the effort by you to present both sides of the issues was missed? Obviously, the quotes from the two well-known enemies of Project Censored were obtained before you came to the lecture, but why weren’t the numerous other professors present at the event or Project Censored people, or even Jones himself given the opportunity to respond to the critics???
The article was so one-sided and biased that we will be formally requesting to Pete Golis to provide space for a 700 word response sometime within the next two weeks.??
Disagreeing on scientific issues is one thing, slandering a visiting scholar is quite another.? I saw Dr. Jones’ face when he read your article.? He didn’t deserve such a mean-spirited slight. What a terrible thing to do to him personally.??
Dr. Jones spoke at the University of Colorado the? weekend before last and I have attached the Denver Post story for your review.? Perhaps this will assist you in understanding what balanced objectivity in news is about.
Peter Phillips
Congratulations, Dan Savage!
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Congratulations to Dan Savage, editor of the Stranger in Seattle who writes a syndicated sex column called “Savage Love” for the Voice/New Times chain and other papers. I am toasting him once again with a Potrero Hill martini at our neighborhood local.
Dan performed heroically in the referendum on Bush, the war, and neocon policies. He helped knock out Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania with personal appearances in the state. He managed to get key endorsements into his column in the ll New Times papers that traditionally don’t endorse. He helped voters in Arizona (the non-endorsing Voice/New Times is headquartered in Phoenix) to be the first in the nation to reject a ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage. He kept a liberal and activist spark alive in his column in the Village Voice (and the other Voice papers purchased last fall by New Times and were therefore shut out of doing endorsements and strong election coverage. They were besides the Voice, the Minneapolis City Pages, Seattle Weekly, Nashville Scene, LA Weekly, and OC Weekly, all of whom traditionally did endorsements and strong election coverage until the sale to the Voice. The OC Weekly to its enormous credit did endorsements.)
Dan also wrote a typically useful op ed piece in today’s New York Times, titled “The Code of the Callboy” in which he explains why the callboy outed Ted Haggard, one of the most powerful evangelica ministers in the country. “Ultimately,” Savage wrote, “it was Ted Haggard’s hypocrisy–railing against homosexuality and campaigning against gay marriage while apparently indulging in sex romps with a gay escort–that prompted Mr. Jones to shove him out of the closet. The homophobia promoted by Mr. Haggard and other agents of intolerance, if I may use John McCain’s phrase (he’s not using it any more), undermined the callboy code of silence that Mr. Haggard himself relied on. Most callboys are gay, after all, and most are out of the closet these days.
“And while most callboys will continue to respect a code of silence where the average closet case is concerned, the Ted Haggards of the world have been placed on notice: You can’t have your callboy and disparage him too.”
Repeating: Dan, in this critical election, showed he had more real balls than MIke Lacey, the editor of the Voice/New Times papers.Dan, Keep it up, B3, savoring the ascendancy of San Francisco Values and Guardian editorial positions
PS: Repeating: The staffs of New Times papers have been long baffled by the New Times non-endorsement policy. And the staffs of the Voice and other Voice papers who had been endorsing and doing strong election coverage were particularly baffled when Lacey shut down their endorsement process this year without explanation. What are Lacey and the Voice/New Times afraid of? Of annoying their advertisers? Of giving up control to local chain editors who may be (gasp!) more liberal and activist than the gang in Phoenix? Are they worried that endorsements and strong political coverage would disclose just how cynical and out of touch Lacey and New Times are in their politics and in their view of the cities i n which they have papers? That chain-driven endorsements would expose the template that Voice/New Times uses in their papers? As always, I will send this blog and these questions to Lacey in Phoenix for comment. Stay alert.
By the way, MIke, what do you think of the election results? Will your papers be allowed to comment on them?
Is Mike Lacey for real? More on Mike’s massacre at the LAWeekly/Voice/New Times and the culture war at the LA Weekly
By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)
Lacey’s Wednesday night massacre. The LA Weekly’s Harold Meyerson says to all staffers on the l7 Voice/New Times papers: Don’t deviate from the template or you are out. Lacey publicly savages Meyerson.
By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)
The comments roll in on the search for endorsements in Village Voice/New Times papers? Is it a snipe hunt? Does San Savage or Mike Lacey have the real balls?
By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)
Dan Savage comes through in the clutch. The gay sex columnist endorses in his pre-election column in the Voice and other New Times papers, but the Voice and New Times papers do not endorse. Hurray for Dan Savage!!!
By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)