› johnny@sfbg.com
One of us is wearing green short-sleeved Lacoste, the other blue short-sleeved Sergio Tacchini. We’ve looked around his apartment, where he’s leaving behind one shoebox-size tranquil bedroom — he’s now restlessly moving his belongings between two larger sun-drenched spaces. He jokingly calls one a massage room and the other a museum and talks about the patterns of shadows through his windows — how there’s a shadow that looks like a dancing lady, and how the window that faces a church is both peaceful and a passage to a fantasy about priests. Then we walk down the 37-step staircase onto 23rd Street, and Colter Jacobsen and I start talking about his art.
One of Jacobsen’s first shows took place in the exact spot we’ve just left behind. “Woods in the Watchers,” featuring pencil renderings of nudes and seminude photos Jacobsen found at the shop known as the Magazine (on Larkin), was presented in and around his bedroom. “The funny thing is what instigated the whole project was Friendster,” he says as we begin an uphill trek. “I was obsessed with it for two weeks and just started seeing everybody as a personal page — as if when they were looking at you, they were clicking on you. It was kind of fucked up. My response was that I wanted something more tactile. The idea eventually came to be one-hour timed drawings of guys wearing watches.”
We pass a couple on a stairway taking pictures of each other — the man is shooting video, the woman taking digital snapshots. Jacobsen remarks that one irony of the “Watchers” drawings, which uncover a bygone snail mail universe of intimate connections, is that they’re back on the Internet, via the Web site of local press Suspect Thoughts. I say they remind me a bit of the late artist and writer Joe Brainard’s casually hot drawings for the book gAy BCs. “[Brainard’s] stuff is amazing, it’s intimidating to me,” says Jacobsen. “It’s gestural and quick. I use a mechanical pencil and just thinking about approaching a piece of paper without a pencil scares me a little.”
If so, he has little reason for apprehension. In “Watchers” and especially in a recent group exhibition at White Columns in New York (where New York Times critic Roberta Smith singled him out for praise), and now in “Your Future,” a show at Four Star Video’s attic space, Jacobsen displays a talent for drawing images in a low-key way that can still saturate the banal with potent emotion — a truly rare ability these days.
A Mormon upbringing and contemplative community college time in San Diego, where he took a single class on color, light, and theory three times, are a few extreme shorthand examples of what led Jacobsen to San Francisco and his current work. He counts fellow artist Donal Mosher and the writers Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian as friendly influences; in fact, he’s created a gridlike piece charting Bellamy’s and Killian’s use of color in their fiction. “From reading their writing and not knowing what’s fiction and what’s real, I’ve gone on all these mind trips,” Jacobsen admits, as we cross paths with a woman using her cell phone like a loudspeaker. “One time on the Fourth of July I totally thought they were going to kill me.”
Jacobsen’s favorite course at the SF Art Institute was a creative writing class taught by Bellamy. There, he wrote a story — O Rings, about a blind girl obsessed with the 1986 space shuttle Challenger explosion — that has somewhat eerily prefigured his current art and life. He’s worked at Lighthouse for the Blind and currently is a caregiver and driver for the blind and disabled.
The walk up 24th Street has led us to Grand View Avenue, where the view is indeed grand. As we climb the coiled freeway overpass, Jacobsen talks about the “memory drawings” featured in both the show at White Columns and in the current Four Star Video show in San Francisco. “When I try to find a photo to draw from — which takes a long time — it’s like me trying to predict what I’ll be meditating on for the next couple of weeks,” he says. “I don’t take it lightly, and it’s often related to something personal.”
The element of prediction might be what Jacobsen is referring to when he says that these drawings stemming from old photos “are about the future.” In Four Star Video’s attic, Jacobsen has painted the titular words of the show over a newspaper obit page and fixed it to the corner of a wall so it can also read “Our Future.” This melancholy verging on morbidity spills from some drawings, especially a truly great one of a waterfront snapshot that uses a film-frame crosscutting technique to convey romantic heartbreak.
The show’s staircase climb to a heavenly Four Star “Future” is typical of Jacobsen’s casual yet concise use of place, and there are many elements at play, some so understated that a viewer who isn’t attentive might not even notice. Two papier-mâché teardrops hide in a corner, near the store’s rare DVDs of Salo and Lilya 4-Ever. (Images are often presented in twos and fours and eights: “Eight is my favorite number,” says Jacobsen. “It’s like two circles or two eyes.”) A pair of found-object mock columns stand next to the store’s shelving units. In a practice that updates pop art chestnuts to the current moment, Jacobsen — who first used the technique while reeling from being “totally blind” about a guy he was in love with — uses Wite-Out to cover up most of Peanuts and other strips (including his least favorite, Family Circus) in a way that reveals the wartime aggression and tension seething beneath.
Though he uses newspaper “funnies,” Jacobsen refers to these works as his “Saddies.” “I just wanted to show what I was seeing,” he says as we travel back down 24th Street past some children. Another irony: This newspaper is a space to discuss the deathly element within Jacobsen’s use of newspapers as found material. “My friend Tariq [Alvi] sees paper as death, because he once saw a mummy and the quality of its skin was like paper,” Jacobsen says when I mention the current bicoastal interest in works — especially drawings — on found or old documents.
As we near the end of our stroll, I ask Jacobsen about another walk, one in which he led a group of people — half of them blindfolded and the other half accompanying those wearing blindfolds — during a Sunday evening this June. The walk spanned from one Mission laundromat to another and included Jacobsen’s discussion of the visual theories of physicist Joseph Plateau, who went blind from staring at the sun. The choice of the event’s landmarks stemmed partly from the laundry lectures of Portland-based artist Sam Gould of Red76 and partly from Plateau’s interest in bubbles. “Does that all relate somehow?” Jacobsen asks as he explains it. “I have trouble figuring out how one thing connects to the next.”
“Usually, where I start [with a project] is where I’m stupid or ignorant — which can be anywhere, really,” he admits with a laugh, after saying that he even counted the number of steps — 313 and 168 — between the two laundromats and the walk’s starting point. Right around then, we reach those 37 steps that lead back up to his apartment, the same staircase that Jacobsen’s friend and musical collaborator Tomo (of Hey Willpower and Tussle) climbs, carrying a column, in a drawing within the Four Star Video show. When I say that the staircase’s red steps are just two short of matching a certain famous 39 Steps, Jacobsen says Alfred Hitchcock is one of his favorite filmmakers. It’s funny how one thing connects to the next — and often beautiful when Jacobsen renders the connections. SFBG
“YOUR FUTURE”
Through July 31
Daily, noon to 10 p.m.
Attic, Four Star Video
1521 18th St., SF
Free
(415) 826-2900
www.4starsf.com
Local
A present from the past
Verizon’s tubes
› tubes@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION If you think I’m done making fun of Sen. Ted Stevens from Alaska, then you are sorely mistaken. I have only just begun to mock.
In a rousing speech about why he would be trashing network neutrality provisions in the Senate’s version of the new telecommunications bill, Stevens sagely pointed out that the Internet “is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.” Instead, he explained, “it’s a series of tubes.” And those tubes get all gummed up with icky stuff like big movies and things. For example, Stevens said, “An Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet.”
Ultimately, after worrying at length about how “your own personal Internet” is imperiled by “all these things,” Stevens concluded that there is no violation of network neutrality that “hits you and me.” And that’s why he’s pushing to keep net neutrality from being written into law. This is the sort of politician who is deciding the future of Internet regulation — a guy who thinks that he received “an Internet” yesterday, and that it was made of “tubes.”
What’s even worse is that Stevens’s main beef with the Internet is that it moves slowly, and this is a problem that will only be worsened when big companies like Verizon and Comcast start creating prejudiced pipes that privilege certain kinds of network traffic over others. You think your own personal Internet is slow now? Wait until Verizon starts making Disney movies travel faster than e-mail over its, um, tubes.
While Stevens is basing decisions that will affect the future of communications technology for decades to come on trucks and tubes, Verizon is covertly preparing its newest customers for a world without network neutrality. A few weeks ago the telecommunications giant announced it would be installing fancy new routers with its high-speed fiber-optic cable service known as FiOS. Available in only a few places across the United States, FiOS has been drooled over by tech-savvy blog Engadget and CNN alike. That’s because it can deliver a wide range of media (from movies to phone calls) much faster than its competitors — supposedly at a speed of up to 20 megabits per second, far faster than typical DSL’s 1.5.
Sounds great, right? Not so much. The router that comes with new installs of FiOS, according to Verizon’s press release, “supports remote management that uses new industry standards known as TR-069, enabling Verizon to perform troubleshooting without having to dispatch a technician.” Whenever I see the phrase “remote management,” I get antsy. That means Verizon can talk to your router from its local offices, which the company claims is all for the good of the consumer.
However, if you actually read the TR-069 standard, you’ll see that Verizon can do a lot more than just troubleshoot. It can literally reflash all the memory in your router, essentially reprogramming your entire home entertainment system. As a result, Verizon can alter its service delivery options at any time. Even if you’ve signed up for a network-neutral FiOS that sends you to whatever Web sites you like and routes your peer-to-peer traffic the same way it routes your e-mail, Verizon can change that on a whim. With one “remote management” event, the company can change the settings in your router to deliver Fox News faster than NPR. It can block all traffic coming from France or prevent you from using Internet phones that aren’t controlled by Verizon.
Verizon’s new router is also great news for anyone who wants to wiretap your Internet traffic. All a bad guy has to do is masquerade as the Verizon “remote manager” and he or she can fool your nifty router into sending all your data through his or her spy computer. The more people allow companies like Verizon to take arbitrary control of their “personal Internets,” the less freedom they’ll have — and the more vulnerable they’ll be.
Surely even the good Sen. Stevens can understand why Verizon’s antineutral router isn’t desirable. You see, it turns the Internet into a truck. A truck that doesn’t go. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is powered by trucks.
Playing hardball in the Presidio
EDITORIAL When Rep. Nancy Pelosi began peddling her plan to privatize the Presidio back in the 1990s her chief weapon was fear: If the Democrats didn’t cut a deal to let the private sector control the fate of the new national park, she argued, the Republicans who ran Congress would simply sell off the land. Then there would be no park at all.
That was a highly unlikely scenario — there was a Democrat named Bill Clinton in the White House, and it’s hard to imagine him going along with the GOP on the sale of 1,491 acres of parkland in San Francisco (part of his loyal California base). But even if that happened, we argued at the time, San Francisco wouldn’t have been helpless: The city at least could have had some zoning control over the private land.
Instead, we’ve wound up with the worst of all worlds — a park controlled by an unelected, unaccountable federal trust that’s dominated by real estate and development interests, that has already handed over big chunks of the park to the private sector (George Lucas and others), and that refuses to abide by any local land-use regulations or ordinances.
That’s the problem at the heart of the dispute over the plan to build 230 luxury condominiums and apartments on the site of the old Public Health Service Hospital Complex just off Lake Street. Neighbors want a smaller project, one more in sync with the (relatively) low density district. More important, Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who represents the area, wants to see the developer add some affordable housing to the mix.
But the Presidio Trust has no interest in affordable housing. For the Bush appointees who run the park, the only thing that matters is the bottom line. Luxury units mean more profit for the developer and more cash for the trust. The needs of San Francisco aren’t even part of the equation.
This is what Pelosi wrought, with the help of then-mayor Willie Brown and the entire old Burton Machine (along with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups), and it is the most enduring legacy she will leave behind. (See “Plundering the Presidio,” 10/8/1997.) It’s important for every activist infuriated with the arrogant behavior of the Presidio Trust to remember that — and to start mounting some real pressure on Pelosi to undo the damage and repeal the Presidio Trust Legislation. The Presidio is a national park and ought to be run by the National Park Service.
In the meantime, though, the city has no choice but to play hardball. McGoldrick was only half joking (if he was joking at all) when he suggested that the city close portions of 14th and 15th avenues — literally blocking off the only entrance to the Presidio from the Richmond, a move that would seriously damage the new development. The city can also deny water and sewer service, which would pretty much end any plans for luxury housing.
Those aren’t pretty solutions — but if the trust won’t back down and at least meet the city’s requirement for affordable housing, McGoldrick and his colleagues should pursue them. SFBG
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› tredmond@sfbg.com
Wow: A little more drunkenness and a bit of public nudity, and San Francisco could have had a real world-class soccer party Sunday. As it was, things were pretty darn festive: I was too busy chasing the kids around and watching the game to get a good count, but I bet there were 15,000 people at Dolores Park, more than I’ve seen in one place in the Mission for anything short of a big antiwar rally. The sun was shining, the mood was upbeat, people waved French and Italian flags around and cheered when either side scored a goal… what a great event.
And it only happened because a German-born former teacher named Jens-Peter Jungclaussen, who is traveling around in a bus trying to bring the world to local kids, decided to get the permits, line up a big-screen TV and a huge forklift, and pull it off.
And as I stood there and marveled at how one motivated person could create a massive civic event, I had to wonder: Why can’t the Recreation and Park Department do stuff like this?
How hard would it have been for the city to rent the TV screen (or better, three or four screens; there were so many people the ones in the back could barely see), put out the word (Jungclaussen did, as far as I can tell, no advertising — the whole thing was by e-mail and word of mouth), and maybe even do this in half a dozen places around town?
It’s funny, when you think of it: So much of the fun stuff that happens in San Francisco is done by private groups. The street fairs, the festivals, the concerts… the city does almost none of this. Even the Fourth of July fireworks are run by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Rec-Park spends a lot of time pissing people off, making dumb rules about permits that make even the private events harder to finance. It’s a nest of bureaucrats without any vision.
This ought to be a wake-up call: There are all sorts of things that can bring people together. There are all sorts of ways to spend the public’s money helping the public have fun (and along the way, reminding people why we pay taxes).
You want to cough up extra money every year to pay someone to tell you that you can’t drink beer in North Beach? I don’t either — but a few events like Sunday’s impromptu festival in Dolores Park, and one of the most loathed agencies at City Hall could become one of the most loved.
Think about it, folks.
Now this: I think just about every Guardian reader in the world has noticed that we’ve had some serious Web problems in the past few weeks. We got hit with something — maybe an attack, we’re still not sure — on Election Day, and whatever it was pretty much fried sfbg.com, and we’ve been limping along ever since.
But we’re back now and way better with a bunch of big changes that we’d been planning anyway. Sfbg.com now has a new design, a (much, much) faster user interface — and several new blogs that will be updated daily and full of everything you need to know about politics, arts, culture, and the unconventional wisdom of San Francisco.
It’s still a work in progress, but it’s going to be a lot easier to tell us what you think. SFBG
Ammiano’s health care plan is fair
OPINION Universal health care. These days, most people want it, but no one wants to pay for it.
But like it or not, we all share in the expense of providing health care. We pay for it directly in our health care premiums or indirectly from higher costs for goods, services, and taxes. According to the activist group Health Care for All, “We spend over $6,000 per person in the US — two to three times the amount spent in other countries that insure everyone and have better health outcomes.” Our health care system, if you can call it that, is currently based on a corporate, for-profit model that increasingly leaves large numbers of people uninsured — and they must rely on taxpayer-subsidized public health programs.
Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing for universal health care in San Francisco, and there are three ways on the table to fund it.
The Committee on Jobs, Chamber of Commerce, and Golden Gate Restaurant Association champion a plan in which all businesses pay a set fee, whether or not they are providing health care for their employees. Under this plan, large businesses that are not providing health care for their employees will save big money. Small businesses — and every business already doing the right thing — would subsidize the minority of large businesses that don’t provide health care.
In fact, 63 percent of the projected $50 million in revenue raised by this plan would come from businesses with fewer than 20 employees. A full 80 percent would be paid by employers with fewer than 50 employees.
The local papers say Newsom supports a voluntary plan. I assume that means employers can choose whether to pay. I’m surprised anyone would propose this with a straight face. Most employers do provide health care. This legislation is about those that don’t. They haven’t volunteered to pay for their own employees’ health care; why would they pay for a city plan?
Then there’s Sup. Tom Ammiano’s proposal.
Ammiano’s plan includes a minimum spending requirement for health care services for all employers with 20 or more employees. Small businesses with less than 20 employees (the vast majority of registered businesses in San Francisco) don’t have to pay anything. Of the three proposals, Ammiano’s seems the fairest to the majority of employers that already provide health care.
The Committee on Jobs tells us that small businesses will be hurt by this plan. I’m always suspicious when a well-funded organization that exists to lobby for the interests of the largest corporations in San Francisco leads with an argument related to the impact to the small business community.
The SFSOS thinks that any decision on Ammiano’s health care plan will be made “predominantly by people who have never worked in retail business, never managed a staff, nor ever had to make a payroll.”
I operated a temporary employment business in San Francisco for 25 years. Ammiano’s plan levels the playing field for all businesses.
For the record, many of my former colleagues within the small business community provide very generous health care benefits. Employees in small businesses, after all, are like family. Many small business owners think that those who do not provide health care have an unfair competitive advantage.
If we’re going to have universal health care, everyone should pay. SFBG
Barry Hermanson
Barry Hermanson is running for state assembly in District 12 on the Green Party ticket.
The Mexican election
By Tim Redmond
Not a huge amount of furor (yet) in San Francisco over the apparent theft of the Mexican elections. John Ross has all the background here. Randy Shaw has some thoughts on the Mexican left in BeyondChron, but he doesn’t talk to much about the local scene either. There’s an awful lot of Mexican nationals in San Francisco, and Ross says they were badly disenfranchised. If the theft is certified, perhaps some street protests in major SF cities would be in order.
SUNDAY
JUlY 9
SCREENING/TALK
Buyer Be Fair: The Promise of Certification
Watch Buyer Be Fair: The Promise of Certification at a screening sponsored by the Bay Area Fair Trade Coalition, followed by a discussion led by John De Graaf of TransFair USA. (Deborah Giattina)
7 p.m.
Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia, SF
Free
(415) 824-3890, jwalsh@transfairusa.org (RSVP)
event
SF General Strike Walk
Steee-rrr-ike! I’ve done it before and could do it again, and I ain’t talking about throwing or missing a baseball. This morning, in conjunction with the mammoth and multifaceted LaborFest, [www.laborfest.net] International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 member Jack Heyman leads a walk and history talk devoted to the famous 1934 West Coast longshore strike. Focusing on how the strike was organized and why it was successful, Heyman will include some key historical sites related to the police violence of Bloody Thursday and the effective protests (remember those?) that took place in its wake. (Johnny Ray Huston)
10:30 a.m.
Harry Bridges Plaza, front of Ferry Building
Embarcadero, SF
Free
FRIDAY
JUlY 7
MUSIC
Artificial Intelligence
Yes, Virginia, there is still drum ‘n’ bass in San Francisco. Look no further than the Soul Stream and Still Doin’ It crews, who team up tonight to bring Artificial Intelligence from the UK to the Bay for the first time. The London-based production duo of Glenn Herweijer and Zula Warner are responsible for a string of releases on imprints like V Recordings, Commercial Suicide, and Soul: R, as well as running their own Widescreen label. The pair are touring in support of their new mix CD Liquid V Club Sessions vol. 2: The Big Picture (Liquid V), which features their own tracks alongside cuts from Roni Size, Calibre, and others. Local pressure brought by the Still Doin’ It and Soul Stream DJs along with the Colonel MC on the mic. (Peter Nicholson)
9 p.m.
BOCA www.sfboca.com
414 Jessie, SF
$5
(415) 474-7973
VISUAL ART
“Verve Syntheses”
All that shiny, glossy stuff – so large, so speedy, so colorful, so alluring, and so deceitful and unfulfilling. Not just post-Pollock in their computer splatter approach, Yoon Lee’s paintings also possess a postpop cynicism about advertising imagery and consumer culture even if it isn’t immediately apparent or spelled out through helpful text. How do graffiti and urban architecture figure as influences within Lee’s work? Placed next to each other, are these acrylic polymer and pigment monuments powerful or numbing? Lee’s new show, “Verve Syntheses,” at the ever great Luggage Store – recently given a deserved deluxe interview profile in ANP Quarterly – should provide some answers. (Johnny Ray Huston)
Through Aug. 5. Reception Fri/7, 6-8 p.m.
The Luggage Store
1007 Market, SF
Free
(415) 255-5971
Don’t give the tides to PG&E
EDITORIAL It’s been three years since former supervisor Matt Gonzalez suggested that the city build a tidal energy plant, but the mayor is finally catching on. Gavin Newsom told the Chronicle editorial board last week that a new study shows San Francisco could generate a phenomenal amount of electricity from Ocean Beach waves and the tides under the Golden Gate Bridge. If it can be done without disturbing marine life, it’s a great idea — as long as the power stays in public hands.
The legal and philosophical case is simple: Nobody owns the tides, the wind, or the waves. The energy contained in these renewable resources is and should always be in the public domain. Economically it’s clear: Once the power plant is built, the energy would be free — and could be a tremendous boon to the city’s treasury and to local business.
Politically the issue is even stronger: San Francisco is the only city in the nation with a congressional mandate to operate a public–power system, and any new energy resources the city taps should be used to help extract residents and businesses from under the expensive private–power monopoly of Pacific Gas and Electric Company. So why is the mayor even considering other options?
According to the Chronicle’s Phil Matier and Andrew Ross, the mayor’s staff is looking at the possibility of allowing PG&E (or “a little-known Florida firm, operating as Golden Gate Energy, that has already landed a federal license to bring the ocean technology to the bay”) to build and operate the plant. That would be a near perfect repeat of the Hetch Hetchy scandal, the deal that kept public power generated from public water at a publicly built dam in a public national park (Yosemite) under the private control of PG&E.
The Board of Supervisors needs to weigh in on this quickly with a resolution stating that no private company can develop, control, or profit from energy generated through wind, tides, waves, or any other renewable resource in or around the city of San Francisco. And if Newsom tries to treat the Golden Gate tides the way his predecessors treated Tuolumne River water, it will be the worst moment of his political career. SFBG
The best health care plan
EDITORIAL The health care model that’s been established, largely by default, in the United States is an utter mess. Most working people get their insurance through their employers. That means people who have jobs that don’t provide insurance are out of luck, and people who don’t have jobs are out of luck, and the self-employed are stuck with crazy bills, and small businesses are getting hit harder and harder with rising insurance rates that they can’t afford.
It’s a ridiculous way to handle health care: In most other western democracies, everyone is part of a national health care program, and under the best systems, the government is the single insurer and pays all the bills.
Among other things, that prevents the sort of crisis that San Francisco faces today, where the large numbers of uninsured residents have no choice but to seek care at the overburdened San Francisco General Hospital. That leaves the taxpayers on the hook for more than $100 million a year.
For businesses, particularly small businesses, that scrape and suffer to provide health insurance for their workers, the system is fundamentally unfair: Those companies pay twice, first for their own employees, and then again in higher taxes to cover the costs of the uninsured. Businesses that can well afford health insurance (the Wal-Marts of the world) but don’t pay are forcing others to cover their costs.
In a perfect world, with national health insurance, this wouldn’t be an issue. But it’s almost impossible for a single city to implement a single-payer system — which is why Mayor Gavin Newsom is struggling to present a functional health plan, and why Sup. Tom Ammiano’s employer mandate plan is absolutely necessary.
But the small business advocates who complain about the burden of paying more than $100 a month for each uninsured employee have a point, too — and this entire plan ought to be linked (at least in the long run) to Sup. Aaron Peskin’s proposals to change the city’s business tax.
Newsom’s dramatic announcement last week of a complex plan to cover all residents won overwhelmingly favorable press coverage. But so far, the plan itself is little more than a glorified press release. There are a lot of devilish details, particularly when it comes to funding.
There’s no new money in the mayor’s plan. He argues, correctly, that San Francisco currently spends $104 million on health care for the city’s 82,000 uninsured, and shifting that money into a city-run health care program will underwrite a significant amount of the cost. But that money can’t just be moved like a chess piece — it’s part of the San Francisco Department of Public Health budget, and if everyone does not sign up for the new program and very sick patients (including, say, undocumented workers who don’t understand or fear enrolling in the city plan) keep showing up at General, there won’t be enough money to go around.
There’s also the very real prospect that some unscrupulous employers will simply quit paying health insurance premiums and dump their employees into the city plan. That would overwhelm the program and push it quickly toward financial ruin.
So the mayor’s plan has no chance at success unless Ammiano’s employer mandate passes, too. The Ammiano plan would offer additional funding for the program by requiring that employers either provide private health insurance or pay into a city pool — and would prevent businesses from tossing their health expenses into the city’s lap.
Ammiano’s plan isn’t perfect — no employer-based plan ever will be. The health insurance requirement would hit all businesses with more than 20 employees, and that might be a bit low. The plan already has some progressive gradations (companies with more than 100 employees would pay a higher fee), but linking the costs more directly to the size of the business (in other words, hitting the large outfits — which can well afford health insurance — a bit harder and giving more of a city subsidy to the smallest companies) could help ease the burden on struggling merchants.
But in the end, his plan — which would have no impact on employers who already offer health insurance to their workers — is crucial to any effort to get the uninsured into a decent health program (and to end the stiff taxpayer subsidy for companies that don’t provide insurance). The supervisors should approve it.
Still that’s not the end of the story. At the same time that Ammiano’s addressing health care, Peskin has floated a proposal for a new gross receipts tax on local business. Here’s the way to proceed: The supervisors need to fund a complete study of how much gross revenue local firms take in; write a new tax that allows the city to eliminate the payroll tax; add a progressive gross receipts tax; and use the next tax policy to help deal with the costs of health care. Big, rich companies pay a lot (enough to help subsidize the citywide health plan). Small firms pay less (and the reduced tax burden helps offset the costs of paying for health insurance). In the end, San Francisco would be the first US city to launch a progressive system for providing health insurance to all. SFBG
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› tredmond@sfbg.com
The local daily newspapers haven’t paid much attention to it, but there’s a ferocious fuss going on in the blog world over political power and journalistic ethics, and it’s all swirling around a 34-year-old who runs the world’s most popular political blog out of his home in Berkeley.
It’s a fascinating story because of what it says about the revolution that’s taking place in media and politics today.
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga runs the blog DailyKos, which started off as just another liberal political blog by a liberal political activist (who used to be a political consultant and worked at one point for Howard Dean). But in the past three years it’s become phenomenally successful: DailyKos.com gets about a half million page views a day, which puts it in the league not with most of the other blogs but with major mainstream news operations. Moulitsas has no staff — no reporters, no editors, no reviewers, no nothing. His readers — or, more accurately, the members of the huge and growing DailyKos community of 92,000 registered users — provide almost all of the content. They write their own personal blogs called diaries, they comment on each other’s stuff, they promote (and dis) candidates, and they have formed the best known place in the country for the Dean wing of the Democratic Party to meet and confer.
The politicians have noticed, big time: Leading Democrats (like Rep. Nancy Pelosi) post on the site. A couple of months ago, a former president (Jimmy Carter) stopped by to blog. When the Kossacks organized an annual convention this summer, Sen. Harry Reid and presidential hopeful Mark Warner showed up.
So now DailyKos is in the big leagues — and not surprisingly, critics are starting to snipe.
The latest: Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong, who runs MyDD.com, have written a book together, and are longtime pals. (Moulitsas calls Armstrong his “blogfather.”) Armstrong is an active political consultant, and the candidates he works for sometimes get nice mentions on DailyKos. There’s been a lot of mumbling about how there might be some kind of sordid conspiracy here (hire Armstrong, get plugged on DailyKos), and it all became louder when the New Republic got word that Armstrong had been accused of illegally hyping stocks on the Web several years ago — and that Moulitsas had sent an e-mail around to a private mailing list urging other bloggers to keep it quiet.
The right-wingers (including David Brooks of the New York Times) have had a field day with this, acting as if they’ve finally unmasked the Great Left-Wing Conspiracy. Actually, the fact that it all came out in the open pretty quickly shows what a lousy secret cabal the bloggers make. Mostly, Moulitsas’s e-mail was just pretty stupid. But the whole episode raises the question: At what point do bloggers have a responsibility to be accountable, to have ethics and disclosure standards the way “mainstream” journalists are supposed to?
I e-mailed Moulitsas about it, and he’s pretty clear: “People like you keep trying to pound a round peg into a square hole,” he said. “This is citizen media. It is what it is … Old media might want the media landscape to resemble their old world, but it doesn’t, not anymore.”
Which is absolutely true. And I love DailyKos. And the blog explosion is perhaps the most democratic thing that’s happened to media in the history of civilization.
But at some point, citizen journalism isn’t enough — you need reporters and editors and a real staff to give the public real information about the world. And when that happens in the blog world (and it will soon) a lot of the rules are going to change. SFBG
Put away the cameras
EDITORIAL The rate of violent crime in San Francisco, including murder, is climbing, and it’s way past unacceptable. Progressives aren’t generally known for their crime-fighting plans, but in this case the left flank of the Board of Supervisors, led by Ross Mirkarimi and Chris Daly, has offered a real, functional plan: an increase in community policing and additional funding for violence-prevention programs. However, Mayor Gavin Newsom and the cops are against that, and they helped knock it down on the June 6 ballot.
So what does the mayor want to do? He wants to put surveillance cameras — perhaps as many as 100 new surveillance cameras — all over the city, recording everything that happens in big swaths of public space, 24 hours a day.
The American Civil Liberties Union is urging the mayor to drop the plan. We agree.
For starters, there’s no evidence that cameras deter crime. Studies in England, where crime cameras are ubiquitous, show no decrease in criminal activity that can be linked to the cameras, and even studies in the United States suggest that criminals aren’t deterred by them. It’s possible cameras will help identify killers, particularly in neighborhoods where it’s almost impossible to find witnesses willing to talk — but it’s also possible (even likely) the bad guys will know exactly where the cameras are and either move somewhere else or wear masks.
And in exchange for this dubious benefit, San Franciscans will give up an immense amount of privacy.
We already live in a society where surveillance is an ugly fact of life. Credit card customers, grocery shoppers, cell phone and FasTrak users — almost all of us have our names and other details of our lives in electronic files, controlled by private firms and (as we’ve seen in the post–Sept. 11 era) easily accessible by government agencies.
The cameras offer such a huge potential for abuse. Will local or federal authorities use them to monitor political protests? Will they become a tracking device for people the feds consider a “threat”? Will they be used to monitor and suppress perfectly legal political activities and private associations?
No matter what the mayor and the San Francisco Police Department say, those cameras will be recording in public spaces, and those video files will exist somewhere, and even if they’re regularly erased (and given the SFPD’s record on following its own rules in other areas, we don’t trust that for a second), all it takes is a visit from the Department of Homeland Security to overrule all the safeguards. And anybody who thinks that won’t happen has been utterly out of touch with the state of the body politic in the past six years.
Another possibility the ACLU raises: Those videos could be considered public record in California — meaning stalkers, angry ex-spouses, and people planning violent crimes will have access to the daily movements of their potential victims.
The supervisors have, to their credit, tried to come up with rules to limit the potential abuses. But these sorts of technologies have a way of expanding, and law enforcement agencies have a way of avoiding oversight and scrutiny. There are much, much better ways to deter and fight violent crime. The best solution here is to simply cut the funding for the mayor’s cameras from next year’s budget. SFBG
Taking spills
> kimberly@sfbg.com
It takes a lot to knock an obsession out of Built to Spill singer-songwriter-guitarist Doug Martsch. Behind the beard, the down-low home life with wife and child, and the phone conversation padded with softly undercutting “Oh, I dunno’s,” once lay the heart of a raging pickup basketball junkie.
“I kinda got sucked into the NBA play-offs seven or eight years ago,” explains Martsch, 37, from his home in Boise, Idaho. “Then I quit smoking cigarettes five or six years ago, and when I quit smoking, I decided to go shoot hoops, and then I just got really addicted to it, totally loved it. That was kind of my main passion.
“Yeah, I played music somewhat, but basketball was what I lived for and did every day.”
A seemingly harmless hobby, except that Martsch threw himself so vigorously into the game that he was starting to do some real damage — to himself. Most recently, Built to Spill — one of Northwestern rock’s most respected representatives and one of ’90s indie/alternative/modern rock/whatev’s most influential bands — had to push back the tour dates for their new album, You in Reverse (Warner Bros.), because of a detached retina Martsch suffered while banging around the court. And then there was the last time Built to Spill played in San Francisco, two years ago …
The band was staying at the Phoenix, and as usual while on tour, Martsch ventured out, looking for a local pickup game. He found one at the Tenderloin Golden Gate YMCA. “I was playing noon ball with the people there, and I got smacked in the ear and popped my eardrum, and I was deaf in my right ear for a couple months,” he recalls. “I kept waiting for my hearing to come back. We had to finish the tour, and I could only hear out of one ear, and it was driving me crazy!” After he returned home Martsch finally, reluctantly broke the news to his wife, who had been worried about basketball injuries for some time. One can imagine the I told you sos ringing out all over Boise.
“Yeah, I had my right ear destroyed, and my right eye destroyed so far, and my right knee also,” continues Martsch, who, at one point, also suspected he had a torn ACL. “So, I dunno — I’m about done. I also started taking it a little too seriously. I started not having very much fun unless I was playing well. If I missed a few shots, I’d just become really frustrated, and I wasn’t really enjoying myself.” After his eye injury Martsch followed his doctor’s orders to stop playing for a few months, and in the process, some of the fixation dissipated (though plucky challengers can get a taste of it by playing Martsch via a game on the band’s Built to Spill Web site).
Luckily for patient Built to Spill fans, Martsch reimmersed himself in music. Those listeners had been waiting for five years for a studio follow-up to Ancient Melodies of the Future (Warner Bros.). Touched by Martsch’s passion for the Delta blues — which resulted in his 2002 solo album, Now You Know (Warner Bros.) — You in Reverse finds the band shaping less characteristic jams and experimenting in the studio, sans their longtime producer Phil Ek and accompanied by only engineer Steven Wray Lobdell (who ended up getting the producer credit). Pitting himself against longtime contributing guitarist–turned–permanent member Brett Netson of Caustic Resin, Martsch unfurls guitar solos that are both economical and impassioned, beginning with the lengthy, multitextured suite “Goin’ Against Your Mind.” He buries his vocals as guitars chime brightly in the foreground on “Liar,” then throws indie listeners for a loop with souped-up ska and flamenco tempos (“Mess With Time”). In all, Martsch sounds more like a ’burb-bound Neil Young than ever before, harnessing a semi-tamed Crazy Horse for his garage jams with his Seattle- and Boise-based bandmates while sidestepping the dangers of repeating himself and working in almost undetectable jabs at the current political environment.
Looking back at the gap between Ancient Melodies and You in Reverse, Martsch is quick to point out that the band actually took only a yearlong breather between tours and recording. But the reason they took the break, he confesses, was that “I just really burned out. I was just kind of tired of Built to Spill and wasn’t very interested in alternative rock in general.” He discovered Delta blues around the time he recorded Keep It Like a Secret and, he explains, “that’s all that sounded very good to me.”
That changed when the group got together to jam for You in Reverse, which Martsch describes as Built to Spill’s most collaborative album yet. He hopes with the official addition of Netson that he can write songs with the rest of the band while Built to Spill is on tour and recording songs at studios across the country. “I’m just kind of excited,” says Martsch. And that’s a major score for someone who claims he doesn’t think he has a “real lust for life.”
“I think the best things Built to Spill ever does are yet to come on some sort of level.” SFBG
BUILT TO SPILL
Wed/21-Sat/24, 9 p.m.
Slim’s
333 11th St., SF
$18
(415) 522-0333
www.builttospill.com
Great head here
> barsandclubs@sfbg.com
“Half of Americans haven’t tried decent beer,” says William Brand, the Oakland Tribune’s resident beer columnist and local brew expert. Back in the sixth grade, Nebraska native Brand was himself weaned on the likes of Budweiser, Hamm’s, and Coors, wan beverages he now refers to as mere “alcohol vehicles” — brewed with rice and corn, cheaply made, and lacking any real taste. “That’s not beer,” he says, “that’s just crap.”
Brand encountered his first crap-free beer during a stint in the Navy, when he was stationed near Washington, DC. Friends took him out to a posh German restaurant and there, he recalls, he ordered a Wurzburger amber “in a very nice pilsner glass.”
“I took one taste,” he says, “and it was amazing. I never tasted anything like it. Until then, everything I ever tasted was awful.”
He soon mail ordered a home-brewing kit from England and began his long journey to respected beer connoisseurship. Since 1989, his Oakland Tribune column, “What’s on Tap,” has been steering beer fanatics toward the finest local suds. We asked him to share some Bay Area brewery history and talk about some of his local favorites.
SFBG You used to brew your own beer. Why did you stop?
BRAND I moved to California in 1970. I had one glass of Anchor Steam and realized I didn’t have to brew any beer. And of course then the whole beer-making revolution happened. It really all started in the Bay Area, with the Portland area right behind it. In the United States, home brewing was made legal in ’78. Brewpubs became legal in California in ’81.
SFBG How has the American microbrew movement evolved since then?
BRAND For a while it was all Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. But that’s all ancient history. Young Americans traveled to Europe, discovered good beer, and started brewing it. Now there’s about 1,300, 1,600 breweries in America. There’s more beer — and more styles of beer — in America than in any other country in the world.
SFBG What distinguishes the Bay Area microbrew scene?
BRAND Well, you can’t really say “the Bay Area.” You have to say “Northern California.” And it’s a toss-up between Northern California and the Pacific Northwest for beer nirvana. In the US it’s becoming like Germany or Belgium, where different people from different regions have their own styles. In the Pacific Northwest they go for dark and strong beers. In Northern California we’re famous for extremely hoppy beers.
Beers are measured in international bitterness units — it’s a scale that beers use. For comparison purposes, Budweiser is 13 IBUs; Stella is 30 IBUs. We have lots of beers that are 100 IBUs or more. It’s a style that’s becoming known as double IPA [India Pale Ale].
SFBG With an eye toward both quality and adventurous weirdness, what are some of your favorite Bay Area beers?
BRAND There’s one called Watermelon Wheat from 21st Amendment Brewery in San Francisco. It’s a blend of wheat and barley, and they actually put watermelon in it, which really comes through. You’d think it would be ghastly beer, but it’s quite good. Another of my favorites comes from Drake’s Brewing in San Leandro, and it’s called Papa Denogginizer. It’s hugely hops — and somewhere around 11 percent alcohol. Then go to Marin Brewing Company in Larkspur, and the guy there is making barrel-aged beers. With barrel-aged beers, you brew your beer, you ferment your beer, then you put it in a whiskey barrel or a wine barrel. Going over to Magnolia Brewery on Haight Street, the brewer makes a mild beer in a high hop area. And he brews cask ales — real ale — in the English style.
SFBG If you really want to impress, say, a Belgian — which local beers would you introduce them to?
BRAND Actually, the ones that are really interested in what we’re doing in the US are the Belgians. They’re really smart, and they’re watching us, and there are a few Belgian breweries that are making American-style beer. Most of the Belgians that come over here are looking for something strong and hoppy. So I’d try and find them something like Old Yeltsin — brewed by HopTown Brewing Company in Pleasanton — or a barley wine. There’s a bar and grill called Schooner’s in Antioch that makes a barley wine. It’s quite strong — around 10 or 11 percent — and they age it for a year or two or three, and it’s astounding. So I’d go with our own styles. There are also some American breweries that are doing a Belgian style. In the Bay Area one place for that is Russian River Brewing Company in Santa Rosa — they do stunning stuff.
SFBG So you might say that Europeans understand American beer.
BRAND There’s a lot of respect in Europe for American beer makers today. And there’s no animosity at all. The thing about beer is that people are never snobby. People only become beer snobs when they don’t know what they’re talking about — or when they’re talking about crappy beer. SFBG
Want more brew-haha? Contact William Brand at whatsontap@sbcglobal.net.
THE BREWERIES
21st Amendment Brewery www.21st-amendment.com
Drake’s Brewing www.drinkdrakes.com
Marin Brewing Company www.marinbrewing.com
Magnolia Brewery www.magnoliapub.com
HopTown Brewing Company www.hoptownbrewing.com
Schooner’s www.schoonersbrewery.com
Russian River Brewing Company www.russianriverbrewing.com
CLUB REPORT: BANGKOK
Clubs in Bangkok are always packed with a mixture of Thais and farang, which means honky or honkies, depending on the number of honkies being talked about. Dressed in perfect designer knockoffs, the local people in Thailand almost never look tacky. The tourists, however, almost always do. Pastel polo shirts, sunglasses at night, and hair that only David Hasselhoff can be blamed for is the standard look for Bangkok’s “cool dudes.” Do not go out on the town wearing a Blue Öyster Cult T-shirt — people will actually be afraid of you.
Probably the hippest club in Bangkok right now is Bed (www.bedsupperclub.com), a massive, hangarlike space divided into two rooms. One room is an enormous dance floor with either thumping techno or prancing house played at a deafening volume. The other half of Bed is where it gets its name. Along the walls of this huge room are big fluffy mattresses with big fluffy pillows on top. Everything is spotless white, so please bathe before climbing up on one.
Santika is the other big mainstream spot. Malls are very popular in Bangkok, and Santika is like a huge mall for clubgoers. The ceilings are about 1,000 feet high, and everything’s very well lit. One room has a stage with live bands playing anything from reggae to metal and a throng of local Thais in front, guzzling whiskey and soda and generally going nuts. Another room has a punishing array of strobe lights and specializes in hip-hop, which in Thailand often means Black Eyed Peas, House of Pain, and Gwen Stefani. Fun.
The best underground “all-Thai” club I’ve been to didn’t have a sign, or a name. My friend led me through a darkened hair salon that was closed for the night (the front door was unlocked), into the next room, up some dimly lit stairs, and then into a darkened room. I half expected to find a game of Russian roulette in progress, but instead the room was packed wall-to-wall with people. Seemingly run by teenagers, the place had, like, two whole lights flashing and was playing authentic hip-hop — every single person was dancing. As the night went on, more and more of the kids came up and wanted to shake my hand and welcome me (the conspicuous farang) to Thailand. It was a really entertaining place but, like many of the best things in Bangkok, totally illegal and transitory. It probably closed down the next night and opened up somewhere else. It’s crazy here. (Mike McGuirk)
CLUB REPORT: REYKJAVIK
Vikings party, hard. That famous take-no-prisoners vigor applies, big time, when it comes to getting down and conquering pints of good ole bjor (beer by local breweries Viking, natch, Egils, Thule, Spegils, and Litli Jon), the low-alckie malt (brown ale), and lagerol (pale ale). Ducking into Reykjavik’s three-floor dance palace NASA (slogan: “EXPECT HANGOVERS!”), I didn’t glimpse too many elfin Icelanders sucking down the native caraway schnapps, brennivin, also known locally as svartidauoi (“black death” — sch-weet). I was served that on the jet over, along with yummy business-class reindeer sashimi. (Svartidauoi is a very necessary chaser when it comes to tourist palate-tester skyrhakari — putrid shark).
Drinks, schminks, the locals were out on the dance floor, booty dancing to Ali “Dubfire” Shirazinia of Deep Dish live on the tables. Got to love the native boogie that evening: a condensed, pixieish finger-and-shoulder wiggle that was a smidge early Steve Martin and more than a little high-nerd. High, for reals — my sturdy male traveling companions later reported back from the men’s room, which they described as a “total scene.” A woman apparently waltzed in at one point and set up a pharmacy, surrounded by a crowd that proved Viking blood courses through their veins — according to one fellow traveler, they elbow something fierce.
Though the packed club was bustling, I met with no outta-hand shoving, just friendly offers to dance with groups of fresh-faced men, handsome, slender, and high-cheekboned. This evening, the internationally renowned Icelandic ladies paled in comparison — many appeared a wee bit wenchy. You know what I’m talking about — too much maquillage, too little too-tight clothing, too many servings of rotten shark. Meow! Where’s my kitten tartare? Time to repair to a quieter watering hole, like Asian fusion temple Apotek, mod lounge Oliver, or the chandeliered Rex, where Quentin Tarantino is said to have matched shots with Björk and the Iceland cultural minister.
Forget about live music tonight, although Iceland is chock-an-ice-block with creative musical originals. I followed Tarantino’s lead once again — as well as Bill Clinton’s — and ended the morning at the Baejarins Beztu hot dog stand by the wharf, right next to my deco lodging, Hotel 1919, circa 1919. Mind-cleansing, chill sea air. Warm light emanating from the oldest fast-food joint in Reykjavik (established 1935). The finest dog in town (homemade lamb wieners topped with delish dried onion and rémoulade). No better way to watch the dawn melt into day. (Kimberly Chun)
Partying for Laguna Honda
By G.W. Schulz
Perhaps the most obscure and complex of the four local measures that appeared on Tuesday’s ballot was Proposition D, a land-use initiative designed to prevent San Francisco County health officials from allowing the spill-over of patients diagnosed with psychiatric or behavior problems from Potrero Hill’s San Francisco General Hospital to Laguna Honda Hospital in the western section of the city. Prop. D’s opponents defeated the measure by around 45,000 votes. Curiously, however, of all Tuesday’s races, the No on Prop. D election party seemed to be the most star-studded.