Media

Futures not taken

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION The future is a crowded graveyard, full of dead possibilities. Each headstone marks a timeline that never happened, and there’s something genuinely mournful about them. I get misty-eyed looking at century-old drawings of the zeppelin-crammed skyline over "tomorrow’s cities." It reminds me that the realities we think are just around the corner may die before they’re born.

A few weeks ago I was trolling YouTube and stumbled across a now-hilarious documentary from 1972, Future Shock, based on the 1970 futurist book of the same name by Alvin Toffler. The documentary focused on a few themes from the book and tarted them up by throwing in a lot of trippy effects and sticking in Orson Welles as a narrator.

As Welles intones ponderously about how fast the future is arriving, we learn that "someday soon" everybody will be linked via computers. Essentially, it was an extremely accurate prediction about Internet culture. Score one for old Toffler.

Things go tragically incorrect when the documentary turns to biology. Very soon, Welles assures his audience, people will have complete control over the genome and drugs will cure everything from anxiety to aging. Through the wonders of pharmaceuticals, we’ll become a race of immortal super-humans. It sounds almost exactly like the kinds of crap that futurists say now, 37 years later. Singularity peddlers like futurist Ray Kurzweil and genomics robber baron Craig Venter are always crowing about how we’re just about to seize control over our genomes and live forever. So far we haven’t. But every generation dreams about it, hoping they’ll be the first humans to cheat death.

Some dreams of the future, however, shouldn’t outlast the generation that first conceived them. Suburbia is one of those dreams. In the fat post-war years of the 1940s and ’50s, it seemed like a great idea to build low-density housing to blanket the harsh desert landscapes of the Southwest. But now the green lawns of Southern California have become an environmental nightmare of water-sucking parasitism. Just think of the atrocious carbon footprint left behind when you lay pavement, wires, and pipes over a vast area so that nuclear families can each have huge yards and swimming pools instead of living intelligently in high-density green skyscrapers surrounded by organic farms.

Oh wait — I just gave away my own crazy futurist dreams, inspired by urban environmentalism. Today, many of us imagine that the future will be like the green city of Dongtan, an ecofriendly community being built outside Shanghai using recycled water, green building materials, and urban gardens that will allow no cars within its limits. The hope is that Dongtan will have a teeny tiny carbon footprint and be a model of urban life for the future. Of course, that’s what suburbia was supposed to be too — a model of a good future life. No future is ever perfect.

Perhaps the saddest dead futures, though, are the ones whose end may mean the end of humanity. I suppose one could argue that the death of an environmentally conscious future is in that category. But what I’m talking about are past predictions that humans would colonize the moon and outer space. As the dream of a Mars colony withers and the idea of colonizing the moons of Saturn and Jupiter becomes more of a fantasy than ever before, I feel real despair.

Maybe my desperate hopes for space colonization are my version of Kurzweil’s prediction that one day we’ll take drugs that will make us immortal. Somehow, I think, if we could just have diverted the global war machine into a space-colony machine sometime back in the 1930s, then everything would be all right. Today the planet wouldn’t be suffering from overpopulation, plague, and starvation. We’d all be spread out across the solar system, tending our terraforming machines and growing weird crops in the sands of Mars.

Of course, we might just be polluting every planet we touch and bringing our stupid dreams of conquering the genome to a bunch of poor nonhuman creatures with no defenses. But I still miss that future of outer-space colonies. I can’t help but think it would be better than the future we’ve got. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd whose Martian colony has a better space elevator than yours.

Ending the SFUSD’s gag order

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EDITORIAL San Francisco’s new school superintendent officially started work last week, taking over a district with a long list of serious problems. Carlos Garcia knows exactly what he’s getting into: he was a high school principal in this city before moving on to the top jobs in Fresno and later Las Vegas. He announced that his top priority will be addressing the achievement gap — the glaring fact that black and Latino students don’t do nearly as well as white and Asian students at any level of the San Francisco Unified School District. And he insisted that he wants to listen to the concerns of the community.

There are plenty of tough assignments on his immediate agenda, including the fact that enrollment is declining and the district so far has addressed that by closing schools. There should be a coherent, effective central plan to try to raise enrollment instead. Closing schools is always an ugly process, and Garcia should try to avoid wading into it this year, until he’s been able to put together, with input from the community, a long-term enrollment and facilities-use plan.

It’s going to take months, even years, to begin to come to terms with and work on the district’s most serious problems, but there’s one simple step Garcia could take — today — that would demonstrate his willingness to work with the community, show his faith in the teachers and administrators, and set a new and very different direction from that of his predecessor.

Garcia should publicly revoke the district’s gag order.

Under former superintendent Arlene Ackerman, no SFUSD employee was allowed to talk to the media or make statements about the district in a public forum without clearing it, in advance, with the district’s public relations staff. That put a serious chill on open discussion within the district, left teachers, principals, and other staff fearful of pointing out problems to reporters, and left the distinct impression that Ackerman would not allow any negative information to leak out of district headquarters.

It also set a terrible standard for district communications and ensured that the public relations office, with a yearly budget of $250,000, was doing little more than buffing the superintendent’s image and hiding data from the media.

Garcia can turn things around in two minutes with a quick memo to all staff. It ought to say:

"While we would appreciate it if district staff didn’t make statements or comments on behalf of the administration unless they’re authorized to do so, any employee of the San Francisco Unified School District is free to express personal opinions, provide information that is in their purview, discuss issues they face in their workplace, and otherwise freely communicate with the press and public without prior notification or approval from district headquarters."

That’s not so hard, is it? *

Contemputf8g Wolf

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Months after local videographer and blogger Josh Wolf was released from federal prison — where his seven-month stay was the longest in history for an American journalist for refusing to turn over unpublished materials to criminal prosecutors — the San Francisco Police Commission finally has decided to analyze the incident. That inquiry comes just as Wolf embarks on a campaign for mayor, which he hopes will create a dialogue about the lack of police accountability and the overzealous federal intrusions that marked his story.

Wolf, 24, told the Guardian that he’s still baffled by what transpired after he filmed the July 8, 2005, anti-G8 protest, which involved a heavy anarchist turnout, "got rowdier than local officials would have liked," and left a San Francisco police officer with a fractured skull — an incident that Wolf calls "unfortunate" but of which he claims to have absolutely no knowledge

"I’ve read the evidence that was presented in my case, but to this day no one has pointed out anything that constitutes terrorism," Wolf said.

The day after the protest, Wolf was contacted at his home by members of the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, along with two San Francisco Police Department officers. The four agents who showed up Wolf’s door, one of them dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, demanded that he hand over all his video outtakes after local and national TV stations aired edited footage that Wolf posted on his blog. The aired film included scenes of anarchists setting off firecrackers, turning over newspaper racks, and spray-painting a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. office. It also showed an SFPD officer holding local resident Gabe Meyers in a choke hold while another agent waved his weapon at the crowd and shouted, "Leave or you’re going to get blasted. I’m a fed, motherfucker."

"If any time the SFPD decides it doesn’t want to deal with some local issue, does it have the autonomy to contact the feds, and if so, doesn’t that jeopardize all the laws that the voters of San Francisco have passed?" Wolf asked July 11 as the Police Commission discussed a resolution supporting the First Amendment rights of the "new media," which is how Web-based disseminators of news, such as Wolf, are being described.

Earlier this year, police commissioner David Campos tried to pass a resolution in support of the then-jailed Wolf, but the proposal got no traction until Theresa Sparks was elected as president in May. By then Wolf had been free from jail for a month, leading Campos and Sparks to shift their focus toward investigating exactly why Wolf’s case got federalized in the first place as well as the implications for other groups that are protected locally but at risk federally.

As Campos told the commission, "A lot of people in San Francisco have been talking about how we as a department interact with the feds, to the extent that it has an impact on medical cannabis providers and immigrants and on First Amendment rights, as in the case of Josh Wolf."

Under state law, reporters’ sources and their work products are protected. A recent case involving Apple suggests that the law also extends to bloggers and independent reporters. But under federal law, reporters have no such protections, which is why former New York Times journalist Judith Miller was jailed in the Valerie Plame–CIA investigation and San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada faced potential jail time in the BALCO affair, as did freelancer Sara Olsen in the court-martial of Army Lt. Ehren Watada.

But while these journalists refused to comply with subpoenas that were clearly related to federal matters, there was no such obvious connection in Wolf’s case. An investigation into the assault on SFPD officer Peter Shields normally would have been undertaken by local police and District Attorney Kamala Harris. Police records show that SFPD inspector Lea Militello requested "assistance from the FBI/JTTF regarding investigation of a serious assault against a San Francisco police officer." Federal investigators justified their involvement by maintaining that there had been an attempted arson on an SFPD squad car purchased in part with federal funds, even though SFPD records indicate only that the car’s rear tail light was broken.

"There was nothing incriminating on my tape," Wolf told the Police Commission, recalling how he offered to prove his statement by letting the federal judge view it in his private chambers, an offer the judge refused. "But because I had no federal protections, I had to decide whether to engage in a McCarthyesque witch hunt," Wolf added; he long had suspected that the feds wanted to profile anarchists about whom he has intimate knowledge.

Campos and Sparks hope that last week’s Police Commission discussion will be the first in a series about the protocols and procedures that the SFPD follows in deciding whether to refer matters to federal authorities. Both stress that asking for such a study does not mean they do not care that an SFPD officer was hurt. As Sparks told us, "At this point we don’t know what the deliberations behind everything that night were or how many people were deployed. For us to comment on a police officer being injured is inappropriate unless we have all the information. And all we’re hearing is anecdotal stuff. Our job is not to take sides but to figure out what the policies were, are, and what they should be."

Police Chief Heather Fong has agreed to report to the Police Commission in August on policies and procedures related to the SFPD’s General Orders, the city’s ordinances on immigration and medical marijuana, and protection of journalists’ rights. Sparks predicts that the report will tell the commission "what the SFPD’s policies do, how that compares to the Board of Supervisors’ resolutions, and whether we need to rewrite them or write new rules for the police."

Commissioner Campos told us he hopes the report will clarify whether the police have an obligation to report to the feds if an investigation involves damage to property bought with federal funding. "If it’s the case that we are obligated, then we need a discussion. Do we want to accept funds if doing so ties our hands and forces us to do something that San Francisco doesn’t want to do? For instance, if we accept funding, then does that mean we have to cooperate with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]? If so, then a lot of us, myself included, would be up in arms and would say, ‘Let’s not.’ To the extent that it comes down to money, I’d hope that we’d make the choice that we’d rather not take the money than get in bed with the federal government."

Wolf, who was not convicted of any crime but served 226 days for being in contempt of a grand jury subpoena, was released April 3 after he agreed to post all his unedited footage online — an action the feds claimed as evidence that he had submitted to their demands. But Wolf pointed out that he agreed to do so only after the feds promised that he would not have to testify about anyone whose actions or words he had captured on tape. He also pointed out that he released the tapes to everyone, not just the federal government.

Since being released Wolf has announced his intention to run for mayor of San Francisco this fall, saying he was inspired by the recent Progressive Convention called by Sup. Chris Daly "in which they had a great platform but no declared candidate."

Wolf’s candidacy pits him against Mayor Gavin Newsom, who expressed neither support for Wolf nor criticism of his detention. That stance is in contrast with that of Harris, who is also running for reelection this fall and publicly criticized the US Attorney’s Office in March, a month before Wolf was released. In August 2006, Newsom returned unsigned the resolution of support for Wolf’s plight that was sponsored by Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi, Tom Ammiano, and Daly. The resolution, which passed on a 9–1 vote, with Sup. Sean Elsbernd voting no and Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier absent, declared that the city "resisted the federal government’s intervention in the City and County of San Francisco’s investigation of the July 8th, 2005 G-8 protest; expressed support for the California Shield Law; and urged Congress to pass Senate Bill 2831, the Free Flow of Information Act."

Asked about Newsom’s position on Wolf and related matters, spokesperson Nathan Ballard reminded the Guardian that the mayor authorized a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the assault on Shields. "We take these attacks seriously and will take the appropriate actions necessary to ensure that the person or persons responsible are prosecuted," the mayor said shortly after the assault. As for Wolf, Ballard said by e-mail, "I am not aware of any public statement [by] the Mayor on the case of Josh Wolf. The Mayor is generally supportive of the concept of a better shield law, but he has not taken a position on this particular bill at the present time."

As it happens, Wolf, who has made numerous media appearances since his release, including on The Colbert Report, could find himself in the unusual position of having more name recognition than any of Newsom’s other challengers. And with Congress currently considering a federal shield law, the cause for which Wolf went to jail remains in the news. As media activist Rick Knee put it, pointing to the "Free Josh Wolf" button that he continues to wear on the lapel of his tweed jacket, "Josh may be out, but the issue is still with us." *

iPhone politics

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› techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION The marketing maestros at Apple have turned the iPhone into the summer’s biggest consumer electronics blockbuster, and they didn’t even have to pay Michael Bay millions of bucks to write robot piss jokes to do it. Everybody’s talking about the damn things — of course the usual gizmo-obsessed pubs like Wired and PC Magazine are drooling all over it, but some unexpectedly political critics and fans have gotten into the mix.

The tech community made its annoyance at iPhone boosterism felt when hacker David Maynor announced that he’d found a bug in Safari (the iPhone’s Web browser) that would allow him to seize control of iPhones remotely. The Daily Show, which usually exhibits a modicum of geek savvy, blithely ignored tech criticisms and led off one episode last week with a breathy noncommentary on how the iPhone is the greatest thing ever. Then politicians started sounding off. Demos snarked at Republicans last week about the iPhone during a House subcommittee hearing on wireless innovation. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) told the committee that the iPhone was the "Hotel California" of mobiles because of an exclusive deal Apple cut with AT&T to provide network service for the multimedia devices. (Apparently Markey’s one big pop culture moment was to listen to the Eagles’ famous ’70s song about a hotel where "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.")

CNET commentator Declan McCullagh spoke the latent convictions of many libertarian nerds when he responded to Markey’s analogy: "Apple makes the iPhone. It has every right to sell it via only AT&T if it wishes…. More broadly, Apple has the right to [make] iPhones only available for purchase on the third Monday of the month in even-numbered zip codes if it chooses." Activist group Free Press responded to ideas like McCullagh’s by starting a "Free the iPhone" campaign (freetheiphone.org) designed to spur the Federal Communications Commission and Congress to consider passing regulations that would force vendors like Apple to make mobile phones interoperable with all phone network operators so that consumers could choose which carrier they want.

Meanwhile, digital freedom lovers have been up in arms over Apple’s many closed-door policies for the phone. Not only are the damn things locked into using AT&T as a carrier, but iPhones are also designed to prevent users from writing additional software for them. Nothing but Apple-approved software may run on the iPhone. That means people who want to play music on the iPhone will have the same problems they have with iTunes on the iPod — you can put as much music on the phone as you want, but you can’t transfer it to another device. Nor can you choose a secure browser over Safari, or an e-mail program of your choice. Even free-software activist Richard Stallman is pissed about the iPhone, and he’s a guy who rarely gives little toys from Apple a second thought.

So what’s the big deal? Why do people even want a $600 phone, and why has this luxury device for the pampered techie become such a hot political issue? I think the answer to the first question is easy: the iPhone is the first truly cool convergence phone that combines multimedia with multispectrum goodies like Bluetooth, wi-fi, and of course, a phone network. Who doesn’t wish to combine phones, iPods, and laptops into one nifty thing?

That’s where politics come in. In the United States we have a long history of government regulations on the phone network, as well as on what can plug into the phone network, so naturally the public wonders what the government is going to do with the iPhone. Especially when other components of the iPhone, such as its ability to play music, touch on another government-regulated area: copyright law. And then there’s another issue that few people have commented on, which is that Apple’s chosen carrier for the iPhone, AT&T, has a history of letting the government spy on its phone networks. So every way you slice it, the iPhone is subject to government.

The iPhone is political because it somehow manages to capture the essence of authoritarianism in its shiny little box. Totally locked down, it runs only preapproved software on a prechosen phone network that is subject to government surveillance. Long live the iPhone! Long live democracy! *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who thinks the iPhone’s telephone network makes surveillance as fun as iTunes made DRM.

Billboard sleaze

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EDITORIAL Clear Channel is one of the biggest media companies in the world, with more than 1,100 radio stations, more than 40 TV stations, and a massive outdoor advertising network with billboards in more than 20 countries. This conglomerate, much despised for undermining independent broadcasting in this country, does business with a lot of government agencies, including the city and county of San Francisco. Clear Channel maintains the city’s bus shelters and runs the city’s pedestal-mounted newsrack program, and sells ads on the shelters and the backs of news racks.

So when Clear Channel does a favor for a local politician, it ought to raise eyebrows immediately.

That’s what’s happened with Sen. Carole Migden. Just as she’s fighting to defend local campaign reform laws (see "Gutting Campaign Reform," this page) Migden has been the recipient of tends of thousands of dollars’ worth of free billboard ads from Clear Channel. The ads were facilitated by local company executive Michael Colbruno, a former Migden aide who remains close to the senator.

We’ve been concerned about the billboards since they went up. At first, as we reported on www.sfbg.com, Colbruno refused to say who had paid for the boards, insisting they were independent issue-advocacy ads supporting Migden’s stances on the war in Iraq and rebuilding the state’s infrastructure. Migden came clean a few days later and told us that Clear Channel had, in fact, provided the ad space free; she added that her campaign had paid for the printing, although her campaign manager, Richie Ross, now denies that.

At the very least it’s awfully close to a legal issue: donors who sponsor issue-advocacy ads that promote individual candidates can’t coordinate those efforts with the candidate’s campaign. Otherwise the expenditure isn’t independent at all and ought to be reported as a campaign contribution.

Of course Clear Channel can’t contribute tens of thousands of dollars to Migden; the maximum contribution under state law is $3,600, and the company has already given her $2,500. "Therefore, presuming that the value of several billboards throughout San Francisco exceeds $1,000 dollars, Clear Channel has made a contribution to Carole Migden in excess of legal limits," states a July 16 memo from Reed and Davidson, a Los Angeles law firm hired by Migden’s primary opponent, Assemblymember Mark Leno. (Read the entire memo at .

Migden may not be the only one involved in this Clear Channel scam; the company regularly sells or donates ads to local political candidates, and it’s entirely possible that others have gotten either discounts or partial gifts from the conglomerate.

For starters we’d prefer that Migden, and everyone else who’s running as a progressive in this town, eschew contributions from Clear Channel. But if such a powerful local operator is handing out favors, the details need to be made public, fully and immediately.

What was the actual value of what the company gave Migden? How closely was the deal coordinated with her campaign? What other local candidates have gotten free or cut-rate ads from this outfit?

The San Francisco Ethics Commission and the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission ought to investigate — and if it turns out that what Migden has done is legal, then the State Legislature needs to figure out a way to ban it. Meanwhile, the San Francisco supervisors, who are about to approve a new bus shelter contract, should demand that Clear Channel first release a full list of its billboard beneficiaries. *

Earthquakes and nukes

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atomic1.jpg

By Tim Redmond

Back in the early 1980s, San Francisco’s Public Media Center did a campaign against PG&E’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant with a slogan that read:

“A nuclear plant on an earthquake fault? PG&E is making the mistake of our lives.”

You see, Diablo’s built right smack atop the active Hosgri Fault.

PG&E has always insisted that there’s no problem, that the plant is perfectly safe, that even a severe quake wouldn’t cause any problems.

I’m sure the folks at Tokyo Electric Power said the same thing.

Except that their nuke just spilled some radioactive shit into the ocean, had to be shut down and is sparking calls for better nuclear safety. In fact, Japan, which has invested heavily in nukes, is starting to have some second thoughts.

I wonder what all the pro-nukers will be saying after the inevitable big quake hits San Luis Obispo and Diablo becomes a massive safety hazard. Maybe they’ll realize they made the mistake of our lives.

Are Migden’s billboards illegal?

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migbil.jpg
(Graphic from Calitics)

By Tim Redmond

Lawyers hired by the state Senate campaign of Assembly member Mark Leno have concluded that those big, colorful billboards promoting Carole Migden all over town are in fact an illegal campaign contribution from Clear Channel Corp. That was based in part on my blog of a few days ago, quoting Migden as saying that Clear Channel paid for the billboards but that her campaign had paid for the printing.

Check out the memo here.

Well, the plot thickens: I just talked to Richie Ross, Migden’s campaign manager, who says the senator was wrong: The Migden campaign never paid for printing anything related to the billboards. The boards, he insisted, were and are an independent issue-advocacy expenditure on the part of Clear Channel.

Well: My understanding is that independent means no co-ordination with the campaign in question, and it appears there was at least some connection here. Ross says he knew the billboards were going to go up, and that he talked to Colbruno prior to the launch. “I called him and said, ‘Michael, walk me through the law [on independent expenditures and issue-advocacy ads].’ He explained it, and I said okay.”

Ross acknowledged that the billboards use the images and graphics from Migden’s web site, but insisted that the material “was all publicly available.”

No question: The graphics on the boards and on Migden’s website are almost identical.

Now: I’m not a techie by any stretch, but I do have some modest experience in print and web media, and I can say that I think it would be pretty hard to download a four-inch graphic from a website and blow it up to the size of a giant billboard without some nasty issues of resolution. If I were going to print the big ol’ plastic sheets that got glued to these billboards, I would have sought an original, high-res copy of the graphics, which could only have come from the Migden campaign.

But at this point, we don’t know what really happened, since there is no written disclosure anywhere. And that’s not good.

CNN Vs. ‘Sicko’: Fact-checking Michael Moore is not a healthy thing to do on the air

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

CNN, whose correspondents have been lobbying softball questions to Bush administration spokespeople since the Iraq War began, decided to do a “fact check” of Moore’s film ‘Sicko’ and then ask him some pointed questions when he appeared on CNN’s Situation Room on July 9.

Moore was up to the test, and then turned the tables on Wolf Blitzer and Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s senior medical correspondent, who did the “reality check” on “Sicko.” Moore confronted Blitzer about the inaccuracies in Gupta’s report and the result was a most animated discussion, according to the media watchdog FAIR.

FAIR, which stands for Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, laid out the errors in Gupta’s piece and called for viewers to contact CNN’s Situation Room and demand that they correct the mistakes.

The Moore vs. CNN exchange prompts two rhetorical questions: Wouldn’t it be nice to have Michael Moore in the Washington and White House press corps? Wouldn’t it be nice to see CNN ask some tough “fact-checking” and do some “reality checks” of the Bush administration and its generals before and during the Iraq War–and now? B3

Click on the continued reading link for the July 11 FAIR report:

Migden: Clear Channel paid for the billboards

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By Tim Redmond

State Sen. Carole Migden just called me to answer the question I’ve been posing to her for a couple of weeks: Who paid for all those pro-Migden billboards?

Migden says it wasn’t a secret donor; as far as she knows, Clear Channel, which owns the billboards, donated them, through the efforts of Michael Colbruno, a local Clear Channel exec who is a former Migden aide and remains close to the senator.

“My campaign paid for the printing,” she said. “The money for the boards came from some sort of internal fund available to Clear Channel to pay for these things when there are boards that aren’t sold. It’s all perfectly legal.”

That isn’t exactly what Colbruno had told me, which was that this was entirely independent of the Migden campaign.

Migden agreed that the ads were “helpful to me,” but she also insisted that they were aimed in part at promoting her anti-war efforts, which will include a February state ballot measure calling for an end to the war.

Bottom line, though, these are billboards that promote Migden’s campaign, and if we hadn’t made a fuss about this, nobody would ever have known that they were, in effect, a gift from Clear Channel, one of the nation’s biggest (and some would say, most evil) media conglomerates.

“Transformers” without irony

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION There is absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying truck commercials. Enjoying truck commercials can even be a politically innocent act — it does not signify that you secretly lust after fossil fuels. Plus, there’s a payoff to admitting that such pleasures can be had guilt free: you can enjoy watching Michael Bay’s latest sci-fi actionfest, Transformers, on its own terms. If you’re one of the people who helped the flick earn more than $100 million during its opening week, you may not need my help. For those still fighting the urge to cheer for shiny trucks, I offer a few arguments to persuade you.

The first, most obvious case in favor of this movie is that it just looks neat. There are giant robots that turn into, among other things, SUVs, tanks, fighter planes, scorpion things, race cars, and yes, trucks with flames painted on the sides. It shouldn’t be too surprising that computer-generated imagery is the perfect tool for demonstrating how cars morph into robots. Haven’t you always wished that one day your boring old Prius would twist itself into a gigantic alien robot from the planet Cybertron?

Ah, Cybertron. This brings me to my next argument, which is that Transformers is one of those rare action movies about incredibly silly things that take those silly things dead seriously. No doubt you are as heartily sick of knee-jerk irony as the next chump who shelled out cash to see Ghostrider (OK, so I liked Ghostrider, but you know what I mean). There are no great actors in Transformers showing us how distanced they are from the trashy source material by "acting" à la Nicolas Cage. In Transformers, characters discussing the robots refer to them, with straight faces, as Optimus Prime and Megatron. The good guys are Autobots and the bad guys are Deceptacons. They are all trying to find a giant, unexplained box called the All Spark. Nobody raises an eyebrow at the total goofiness of this scenario. The film’s straightforwardness is downright refreshing.

Like other kid-friendly action films, Transformers is low on bloodshed and high on "Wow, that’s cool!" Even the film’s worst bad guy, a government secret agent played with snarky relish by John Turturro, never kills anybody. Instead of murderous mayhem, the movie offers us rampaging teenage hormones, packing the dialogue with cute but groanworthy double entendres about asses and dicks and humping. Not since E.T. has a movie aimed at tweens been this honest about how kids really talk: there’s a lot of creative cursing, and main character Sam (Shia LaBeouf) spends the entire flick trying to snog his hot pal Mikaela (Megan Fox). Thank you, Michael Bay, for removing rampant death from the action-movie genre and replacing it with dumb masturbation jokes.

What truly surprised me about the movie was that Bay did a fairly good job updating the concept for the 2000s. The film’s plot hinges on something Sam is selling on eBay, and there are a few good jokes about how the Autobots learned English on the Web (surprisingly, this does not mean that they yell "LOL" or "OMG" all the time). I was deeply amused when the evil Deceptacons hunt Sam down via his eBay listing, ambush him, then grab him in their giant metal fists so they can scream in his face, "Are you user LadiesMan217?"

Another way Bay updates the Transformers premise is by connecting the Deceptacons with the Middle East. The film has this sort of murky, inexplicable opening sequence that takes place in what we’re told is "Qatar, Middle East," where good US soldiers encounter mean, scorpion-shaped Deceptacons who smash the crap out of them. The Middle Eastern ‘bots look bizarrely like improvised explosive devices come to life; made of scrap metal and old tires, they hide in the sand and strike at unwary troops who are trying to be nice to the native folks. This is possibly the only part of Transformers in which Bay attempts to grasp feebly at political relevance and make something other than a zoomy truck commercial. Of course, he fails miserably. If you want to enjoy this flick without guilt, you will have to ignore the whole Middle East issue. Of course, one could say the same thing about living in the United States. Maybe Bay has succeeded in pulling off some social commentary after all: welcome to the United States — ignore the Middle East stuff, but stay for the masturbation jokes and cool special effects. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd whose battle cry is "All hail Megatron!"

Ephemera, etc.

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Technology induces unrealistic leaps of optimism, and so it was that usually reliable New York Times film critic A.O. Scott recently imagined a future in which "you will be able to watch whatever you want whenever you want." Drawing back a hair, Scott admitted that "there are still hundreds more titles awaiting transfer to digital media." The reality is a good deal grimmer, with thousands of titles lost or languishing in various states of disrepair — and such estimates do not take into account the colossal numbers of nonfeatures, everything from promo spots to pornography.

This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents two programs emphasizing some of the bygone era’s lost treasures. "More Amazing Tales from the Archives" (Sun/15, 10:30 a.m., free) is an education in itself, with representatives from the UCLA Film and Television Archive and Rochester, N.Y.’s George Eastman House demonstrating preservation techniques and spoils. This year’s program features films restored from 28mm (even the formatting is archaic!) and rare ephemera (Clara Bow fragments, San Francisco newsreels, something called Mushroom Growing). Parisian collector Serge Bromberg looks to be packing a lot of heat in his artfully arranged "Retour de Flamme" program (Sun/15, 12:45 p.m., $13) of early French cinema: trick films, travelogues, skin flicks, Josephine Baker, a "strange music-hall performance from 1907, with a dancing pig," and other confectionary surprises along the way.

Praise the Lordi!

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Even if you haven’t heard Lordi’s music, you’ve heard of Lordi — or at least seen their picture. After they won the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest, a distinction that approximates winning American Idol, the Finnish group became a media sensation. Who can resist a band that performs songs like "Hard Rock Hallelujah" with copious pyrotechnics while dressed in head-to-toe monster outfits? Nobody in Finland, where Lordi’s members are national heroes. Besides musical fame, the band has a postage stamp, a "rocktaurant" (on the menu: chili-sautéed reindeer), and its signature Lordi Cola.

Back in March, on what was to be the eve of a Slim’s gig, I spoke to bass player Ox the Hellbull (the band’s other members, who never publicly appear out of character, are lead monster Mr. Lordi, mummy guitarist Amen-Ra, vampire keyboardist Awa, and alien drummer Kita). Soon after, Lordi’s club tour was scrapped in favor of a main-stage slot at Ozzfest. The band’s latest album, The Arockalypse (The End), is a jubilant celebration of fist-pumping rawk that wouldn’t have been out of place on Headbangers Ball. Like you’d expect anything less from rock ‘n’ roll monsters.

Initially, Ox said, folks didn’t know what to make of their act. "People thought we were like crazy Satan worshipers or something, but we’re not," he explained before noting that Lordi is heavily influenced by KISS, Alice Cooper, and "my personal favorite, Mötley Crüe."

In fact, the Crüe is the reason for Ox’s bass-playing ambitions. As a kid, "I saw a picture of Mötley Crüe in the paper, and I hadn’t heard them yet," the 31-year-old remembered. "But I decided that this was the coolest band in the world. Then I bought the album, and it was the coolest band. And I decided this is what I want to do: I want to play rock."

However, band mastermind Mr. Lordi — who makes all of the band’s monstrous apparel — is the reason for the Ox. "At the first rehearsal we had, Mr. Lordi looked at me and said, ‘You look like a raging bull when you play.’ "

Inside the costume "it’s hot as hell. I start sweating when I put the mask on," Ox said, adding that he’s not bothered by the fact that the group is so defined by its theatrical image. "There are all kinds of fans. Some like the music first. Some like the outfits. It doesn’t matter really."

And, being a wiseass, I had to ask: what are the signs of the Arockalypse? Ox laughed. "Everyone’s gonna turn into monsters!"

OZZFEST

July 19, noon, free (sold out) Shoreline Amphitheatre 1 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View (650) 967-3000

www.livenation.com

Hyphy and its discontents

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Hyphy is here to stay because hyphy was created in the streets and the streets will be here forever."

E-40 in an e-mail, June 28

Send a 911 to the 415 and 510: does hyphy have a pulse? Several articles in recent months have suggested the answer is no. A May 13 San Jose Mercury News article, "What Happened to Hyphy?" by Marian Liu, for example, insists that a year ago, "the Bay Area seemed poised to become the center of the hip-hop universe," when, we are told, the genre "was ubiquitous at clubs, on the streets and on local radio stations." Now hyphy is "listless, with even local popularity beginning to dissipate."

This account of the rise and fall of hyphy is exaggerated to the point of fiction. Bay Area hip-hop has, of course, been cracking for at least two and a half years, following a long post-Tupac period of commercial decline now referred to as "the drought." But while the amount of local spins Bay Area music received increased, hyphy was never anything like ubiquitous on the radio. The small number of major-label signings never threatened to displace any presumed center of hip-hop’s stubbornly regional universe nor does such an image convey what’s been at stake in the Bay’s struggle for recognition.

According to the Arbitron radio ratings system, San Francisco is the fourth-largest market in the country, after New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. This figure includes Oakland but not Sacramento or San Jose, which are classed as separate markets but are considered by everyone from the rappers to the media and the listeners as part of the Bay Area in terms of hip-hop regions. All Bay Area artists want is to be treated like other rappers in similar areas of the country. Rappers from smaller markets like Houston (number six), Atlanta (number nine), Miami (number 12), and even St. Louis (number 20) routinely receive local airplay, major-label deals, and national exposure.

Only the Bay is denied such opportunities. While the publicity of E-40’s 2005 signing with BME/Warner Bros. scored hyphy coverage in national media like USA Today and secured the Bay its own episode of MTV’s region-oriented rap show, My Block, the music hasn’t had a chance to blow up. With the exception of E-40 — whose gold-selling 2006 album My Ghetto Report Card (BME/Warner Bros.) ensured a Warner Bros. release of his upcoming The Ball Street Journal — no Bay Area hip-hop artist has been permitted to drop a big-label full-length in the past two years. Albums by the Pack on Jive, Mistah FAB on Atlantic, Clyde Carson on Capitol, and the Federation on Warner Bros./Reprise have all experienced frustrating delays, fostering the notion that hyphy is foundering. But not everyone agrees with this impression.

DEAD OR ALIVE?


"How can hyphy be dead when the key players are still there?" 19-year-old producer extraordinaire and Sick Wid It Records president Droop-E asks. It’s a good question, for if the short history of the hyphy movement has proved anything, it’s that there’s no lack of hot Bay Area acts, from vets like Keak Da Sneak to new artists such as FAB to rappers who came up during the drought and didn’t get to shine, like Eddi Projex (formerly of Hittaz on Tha Payroll) and Big Rich (once of Fully Loaded). Carson, the Jacka, Beeda Weeda, J-Stalin, the Federation, Turf Talk, Kaz Kyzah, San Quinn, Messy Marv: the list of major-label-level talent only begins here, and the extent to which any of the above identify as hyphy hardly matters, inasmuch as for the rest of the country, hyphy stands for Bay Area hip-hop.

Many of these rappers predate hyphy, and while the word definitely has musical signification — it’s a fast, club-oriented sound inspired by crunk but transformed by electronica and techno flourishes — its most important function has been as a marketing tool to direct national attention back to the Bay. To write off hyphy as a passé trend is, in this sense, to write off the region, leaving the Bay back where it started.

Further complicating any so-called postmortem analysis of hyphy is the fact that the term also refers to the Bay Area culture of disaffected hood youths known for white Ts, dreadlocks, and ghost riding. "Hyphy is part of the street," Droop-E affirms, noting that the culture emerged before the name was attached or the music drew attention to it. The merging of this culture and a particular hip-hop sound in a single term is what makes hyphy so potent a concept, functioning in a manner akin to the word psychedelic in the late ’60s. This union between a lifestyle and an aesthetic is the chief justification for considering hyphy a movement, however vaguely articulated.

"The hyphy movement reflects what’s going on in the streets," Federation producer and national hitmaker Rick Rock says. "That will never die, as far as that goes. The kids are going to be hyphy. But the music — you don’t have to say ‘hyphy’ to do a hyphy song. If people are saying ‘go dumb’ on 10 different songs on the radio, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot."

Traxamillion — another architect of the hyphy sound and producer of Keak’s local number one hit "Super Hyphy" — agrees the music could be "losing its edge due to oversaturation of the same topics: scrapers, purp, pillz, shake ya dreads, and stunna shades," underscoring the tension between hyphy and a region whose rappers pride themselves on originality. Yet if hyphy’s lyrics often suffer from an overreliance on now-established slang, the limitations of its subject matter hardly seem greater than that of mainstream rap; the high-fashion emphasis of East Coast rap is infinitely more tedious.

In any case, Rock’s response has been to reinvigorate hyphy through the innovative impulse that led to its current form. "That hyphy sound I blueprinted, I don’t have to stay with it," Rock says. "Hopefully people will gravitate toward the new music, and that’ll be the new hyphy."

NEW SICK SOUNDS


Rock is leading the way with the Federation’s thrice-delayed It’s Whateva — finally to be released by Warner Bros. on Aug. 14 (see sidebar) — and his production on "I Got Chips," the guitar-driven first single off Turf Talk’s West Coast Vaccine (Sick Wid It), released in June. One of the year’s most anticipated Bay full-lengths, Vaccine more than fulfills its buzz. Besides the excellence of its composition as an album, it displays Turf Talk’s tremendous artistic growth in the number of flows he adds to his characteristic bark, from a whisper to a lazy drawl to a hyperactive bellow.

While Droop-E confirms that several major labels expressed interest in Vaccine, ultimately none pulled the trigger. Yet deals of various sorts keep trickling in, most recently for Keak, whose camp confirms his recent signing to national independent Koch. Tha Mekanix production squad is negotiating a rerelease of J-Stalin’s On Behalf of the Streets (Zoo Ent., 2006) through one of the biggest independent distributors in the States, Select-O-Hits. And more major-label ice has begun to thaw, as the Team member Carson reports that Capitol is leaning toward a mid-October release of his solo debut, Theatre Music.

"It’s going to be real good for the Bay," Carson says of his ambitious project, originally conceived as one continuous track, à la Prince’s Lovesexy (Warner Bros., 1988), though Capitol has nixed this risky idea. Yet Carson insists the album "will still be one body of music." Cobranded by the Game’s Black Wall Street Records and boasting appearances by the multiputf8um rapper, Theatre Music finds Carson busting over big-time beatmakers like Scott Storch and Wyclef Jean, and it’s hard to imagine Capitol squandering such resources.

SO HARD ON THE FUNKY RADIO


Another symptom of hyphy’s alleged demise, offered in the Merc and elsewhere, is its lack of current radio play. Yet if there’s been no recent hit on the level of Keak’s "Super Hyphy," it’s because KMEL and other hip-hop stations have withdrawn support for local music.

"The radio play on the hyphy movement has definitely slowed down," Traxamillion says. "They play a few Bay joints here and there, but overall I feel a lot of the radio play is coming to a halt."

Mistah FAB, for example, has a pair of new singles, "Goin’ Crazy," highlighting Too $hort and D4L of "Laffy Taffy" fame, and "Race 4 Ya Pink Slips," with Keak and Spice 1. But you’ll never hear these on KMEL, as the station has stopped playing FAB.

"It’s the politics of radio," says FAB, who claims that since he accepted his Friday-night radio gig at KYLD, he’s been subject to an unofficial ban at KMEL, courtesy of musical director Big Von Johnson — though both stations belong to Clear Channel. "As an artist, I find this hard to accept," FAB confesses. "As a businessman, I realize why." Nonetheless, FAB was surprised that ending his radio show had no effect on the ban.

"It hurts the movement," he says, and he’s right. His 2005 radio hit "Super Sic Wit It" was one of the catalysts of hyphy, bringing other local music in its wake. "If we can’t get the support here at home, how can we expect to break nationwide?"

FAB has a point: local rap needs radio to generate sales, which in turn generate label deals. At press time, Johnson hadn’t respond to several requests seeking his side of the story, yet the Arbitron ratings speak for themselves.

In summer 2006, when it was playing hyphy, KMEL was the number two station in the market, after KGO-AM talk radio. That winter, when it began slacking off, KMEL finished at number seven, tied with KYLD. (Spring ratings aren’t yet posted.) This is difficult to reconcile with the claim that hyphy’s popularity has dissipated. Yet while hyphy — and by extension, Bay Area rap — may never break nationally if KMEL doesn’t support it, even fewer people will tune in to KMEL if the station doesn’t play it.

Nearly every Bay Area rapper I’ve met seeks what Messy Marv once called "that major label shine." Yet the lack of hyphy-era major-label-deal flash — or rather follow-through — thus far may stem more from the general decline of the corporate music system than from the strength or weakness of local hip-hop. Fewer major-label albums are being released now compared with earlier periods of pop, and those imprints are generally taking fewer chances and are often unable to move fast enough for rap. Radio, moreover, has lost at least a portion of its audience to Internet alternatives like MySpace and YouTube, both of which FAB credits with mitigating the impact of absent radio play. Given the fact that a popular independent artist can potentially make more money — at the price of much glory, perhaps — than many bigger names, it’s hard not to wonder if the major labels do hip-hop more harm than good. It’s something to consider as we wait to see if the Federation’s new album, whateva its final form, keeps hyphy’s momentum alive.*

Never mind the steampunk

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION If someone were to hold a knife to your throat and ask what the aesthetic sensibilities of the computer age are, you’d probably babble something about the iPod and its curvy, candy-colored precursor, the iMac. You’d think of the typical PC laptop, dumb and square and black, and you’d wonder whether this question about aesthetics was actually a trick. Because there are no computer age aesthetics.

Of course I’m exaggerating. There are a million interesting designs for consumer electronics and computers, but most don’t call attention to themselves. Computer aesthetics say "I am functional" — even the iPod Shuffle’s, whose colorful clip-on version kids attach to the gold chains around their necks as techno-bling.

But your Gateway computer, with its stalwart rectangular tower, is not the last word in how technology can look. Think of the crazy dial phones from the 1920s, with their curlicues and shiny brass and polished wood handsets. Or recall early radios, with their curving wooden exteriors meant to look like fancy furniture. And if you really want to see some seriously decorated machines, just check out pictures of devices from the 19th century, when everything from radiators to dynamos was covered in filigree and iron flowers and stamped, embossed shiny crap. For the record, I fucking love embossed shiny crap.

I think the search for an over-the-top tech aesthetic is driving the current craze for steampunk, a design and fashion style that combines Victorian sensibilities with contemporary gizmos. The ideal steampunk device would probably be a coal-powered cyborg, such as the creatures found in the novels of British fantasist China Miéville. In the real world, one of the most popular steampunk tinkerers is Jake von Slatt, who recently rebuilt his desktop computer as a vision in brass, marble, and old typewriter parts. He even offers a step-by-step guide to making your own functioning steampunk computer on his Web site, the Steampunk Workshop. Whenever von Slatt produces a new creation — a telegraph sounder that taps out RSS feeds, for example — pictures of it are always wildly popular on social news site Digg and elsewhere on the Web. Geeks who might not know what the word aesthetic means are instinctively drawn to the way von Slatt has made artifice from functionality. I expect to see cheap, knockoff steampunk computers for sale any day now.

As steampunkish critic John Brownlee has pointed out in several articles on the topic, steampunk designers tend to reverse-engineer ordinary electronics — say, a computer keyboard — and enhance them with parts that look antique. The idea is not just to create machines whose beauty goes beyond functionality. It’s also, Brownlee contends, to recall an era when amateurs could contribute meaningfully to the development of science and technology. We live in a time when no single human being can fully comprehend the Windows operating system. No wonder we’re nostalgic for the days when beachcombers could be naturalists and tinkerers could invent the telephone.

I think the popularity of steampunk also expresses our collective yearning for an era when information technology was in its infancy and could have gone anywhere. In 1880 we hadn’t yet laid the cables for a telephone network, and computer programming was just an idea in Ada Lovelace’s head. Nineteenth-century technology was often operated by factory laborers, and it meant backbreaking work and the ruination of healthy bodies. Information technology, to the 19th-century mind, would be something that set us free from brutal assembly lines.

One hundred years later, I wish it were so. Information technology has its own brutal assembly lines, mind-numbing data work that cripples our fingers with repetitive strain injuries and mangles our backs with the hunched postures required to work at a computer all day long. Seen from this perspective, steampunk is an aesthetic that tells the truth about us. We are no better off than our Victorian ancestors, bumbling into the future with crude technologies whose implications we barely understand. But let’s make our devices pretty, at least. Let’s remember the days when the machines that now cage us promised liberation. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd whose flat is full of servers and anaglypta.

The City College shell game

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Part one in a Guardian series

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

The motto of San Francisco’s community college is "The truth will set you free."

For taxpayers, that’s a painful irony. Since 1997, the district has moved around $130 million in bond money in a fiscal shell game, taking funds that the voters were told would go to one set of projects and spending the money on others.

The half-billion-dollar bond program is now at least $225 million over budget, in part because of what the school admits was shoddy planning, and City College is considering asking voters to approve yet another set of bonds to catch up.

And all of this happened without a detailed performance audit.

Among the transfers and overruns we’ve discovered in a review of the bond program:

•<\!s>City College made up for a planned gym’s mammoth budget shortfalls by transferring more than $53 million from other projects, like the new Performing Arts Center, improvements to the Balboa Reservoir (that massive, sunken eyesore of a parking lot west of the Ocean Avenue Campus), and an academic partnership with San Francisco State University.

•<\!s>Construction on the Performing Arts Center was supposed to begin in 2004, but it’s gone nowhere. According to the school’s most recent estimates, the center now will cost $125.8 million, an increase of 152 percent from the original $50 million.

•<\!s>Two new campuses planned for the Mission and Chinatown neighborhoods are now running a combined $78 million over budget. School administrators this May requested an additional $6 million to complete the Mission campus. Plans for the Chinatown facilities were originally unveiled in 1997 to voters, who were later told construction would begin in 2006. Today the designs are mired in a political battle with neighborhood residents, and City College hasn’t broken ground on the project.

In at least one case, the school has acknowledged that a $1.3 million reallocation took place without prior authorization from its independently elected overseers, the Board of Trustees. Administrators later asked the board to consent to the transfer retroactively.

"We’re always asked to take this money and move it from here to here," complained trustee Milton Marks III, one of the few consistent critics on the board who in the past voted against such reallocations. "It may be justified…. But when I ask if there are programmatic changes, nobody can answer me."

The school calls the transfers "reallocations," and as of May the administration and the board had agreed to shift the bond money five times.

In one case, administrators asked for $70 million in transfers mere weeks after the 2005 election in which voters authorized the school to sell $246.3 million in bonds.

That January 2006 reallocation strongly suggests the office of Chancellor Phil Day knew the school wouldn’t be able to complete the projects described to voters but never corrected the ballot handbook or told the media and the public the truth.

Day agreed to a Guardian interview, then canceled it, citing a schedule conflict. But in board meetings he and his staff have insisted that the transfers were perfectly legal.

The school’s lawyers say reallocations are acceptable under Proposition 39, a state ballot measure passed by voters in 2000 that lowered the threshold in California for passing school and community college bonds.

Other districts have also relied on reallocations as the cost of construction materials has increased globally in recent years due to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing expansion of China’s economy.

But the San Francisco school has argued the logical extreme — that it can transform voter-approved projects in virtually any way it deems necessary.

"What obligation do we have in our reallocation considerations about making sure that those things get delivered — all of those projects we listed in both [the 2001 and 2005] bond measures?" former trustee Johnnie Carter asked during a meeting Jan. 12, 2006.

"You have no obligation to complete any of those projects," Mona Patel, a bond advisor for the school, responded. "You can complete one of those projects. You can complete all of those projects or anything in between…. It’s solely within the board’s discretion."

Despite that explanation, City College’s woefully short budget projections mean the school might have to return to voters a fourth time to secure funding for two projects already promised the last time City College went to the ballot, in November 2005.

One of those planned facilities was supposed to house a stem-cell-technology training program lauded by Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2005 as a way to help locals compete for jobs in the Bay Area’s growing biotech and life-sciences research industries. The school stripped $25 million authorized by voters from that project and directed it mostly to two other projects running a combined $105 million over budget.

Marks and new board member John Rizzo have urged an expansive performance audit of the bond money, which they say is required under Prop. 39 but had never been completed.

Rizzo and Marks both told us that if unforeseen construction costs, a low number of project bidders, and the lethargy of state regulators are all problems contributing to unpredicted costs, school administrators need to come up with a plan to fix the situation. But the performance audit proposed by Rizzo and Marks would first identify which problems are most severe. Not having it, Rizzo said, "is like flying blindly. We’re just writing checks."

Peter Goldstein, vice chancellor for finance and administration, insisted to us that state law, as interpreted by the school, doesn’t require the type of audit called for by Rizzo and Marks. It simply requires that the school prove it isn’t spending money on projects not presented first to voters. He added that the reallocations weren’t simple but said he couldn’t answer from memory specific questions about the 2005 bond election, including why the school chose to pursue tens of millions of dollars in reallocations so soon afterward, in January 2006.

"They’ve been very difficult decisions for both the administration and the board," Goldstein said. "[This has] not been some kind of snap judgment. We’ve really had to search and try to make sure there wasn’t some way to contain costs otherwise."

The trustees often seem just as confused as the voters may be about the cost overruns. The trail is laid out in thousands of pages of bond proposals and ever-changing explanatory documents, all complete with glossy schematics and computer-generated students looking gleeful as they head off to class at one or another of the new facilities.

The section of City College’s Web site dedicated to its bond projects is difficult to follow. A brief summary of the projects appears in voter guides, but the full bond proposals are filed with the San Francisco Department of Elections, and you’d have to go there to copy or read the tomes, which contain a lot of qualifying paragraphs that look like this one, which refers to an academic building planned in conjunction with San Francisco State University:

"The college will aggressively pursue state and federal funding to support the ‘joint-use’ concept with San Francisco State University. If funds are not forthcoming, the ‘local’ funds will be utilized to support the construction of the new Child Care Center and the new Student Health Service Center."

Such fine-print disclaimers enabled Chancellor Day and Vice Chancellor Goldstein to later depict multimillion-dollar transfers away from academic construction as entirely legal, even though the Child Care Center and health clinic never appeared as official stand-alone projects in bond proposals presented to voters.

Between 2001 and 2005 the school asked for a total of $40 million to construct in tandem with SFSU the joint-use facility, which was slated to include new classrooms and laboratories where students could work toward bachelor’s degrees in education, health care, and child development. The project is now $26 million over budget and remains in the design phase. Since 2003 about $20 million that voters were told was going to the project has been reallocated to other projects facing increased costs.

A facilities manager at San Jose–Evergreen Community College District, Robert Dias, was incredulous when we presented our findings to him. He said he’d heard of cost overruns statewide but "not to this extent."

"We have experienced rising costs, but we planned for it," Dias said. "Construction costs were going through the roof, but we did creative things to manage it."

On the other hand, Fred Harris, vice chancellor of the California Community College System, based in Sacramento, said the figures didn’t necessarily surprise him and that the state as a result has adjusted its guidelines for what individual school districts can claim as costs.*

Rescue Dawn spawn

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Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to Screen Rescue Dawn for American Troops in Iraq

LOS ANGELES, CA, June 28, 2007 — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM) will help America’s troops overseas celebrate Independence Day this year by screening the studio’s Vietnam War biopic Rescue Dawn in Iraq. On July 4, 2007, over 2,000 troops stationed at Camp Anaconda, a large U.S. base near Balad, will screen the film highlighting the amazing life of Dieter Dengler, the only American to ever break out of a POW camp in the impenetrable Laotian jungle during the Vietnam War. The film, which will also be released in Los Angeles and New York on July 4th, will be introduced with a taped message to the troops from the film’s lead actors Christian Bale, Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies. Rescue Dawn will expand its release domestically in ten markets on July 13, 2007 and release wide on July 27, 2007.

MGM arranged the Rescue Dawn screening in Iraq through the motion picture team of The Army & Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES), a division of the military which provides products and services to military families worldwide and generates earnings to supplement military morale, welfare and recreation programs.

“We are proud of our troops in Iraq and we wanted to do something special to honor their commitment,” said Rick Sands, MGM’s Chief Operating Officer. “Screening a film about Dieter’s heroic life on Independence Day could not be more appropriate to show our thanks to the brave men and women overseas.”

“Given the extraordinary heroic story that this film portrays, I can think of no better venue to show it to America’s warriors than Camp Anaconda in the heart of Iraq,” said AAFES’ Chief of Communications Lt. Col. Dean Thurmond. “We are gratified and thankful to the distributor, producers and cast of this film for remembering our troops and giving them the opportunity to see this film.”

Legendary director Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo) and starring acclaimed actor Christian Bale (Batman Begins, The Prestige), Rescue Dawn is the true story of a Dieter Dengler who, from the depths of total darkness, blazed his own willful path to freedom. Dengler, a German-American Navy pilot, received numerous honors for his heroism including the Navy Cross. An inspirational action-adventure and a stark epic of survival, Rescue Dawn reveals how Dengler relied on his courage, endurance and tenacity to find his way home.

About Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., through its operating subsidiaries is actively engaged in the worldwide production and distribution of motion pictures, television programming, home video, interactive media, music and licensed merchandise. The company owns the world’s largest library of modern films, comprising around 4,000 titles. Operating units include Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc., United Artists Films Inc., Ventanazul, MGM Television Entertainment Inc., MGM Networks Inc., MGM Distribution Co., MGM International Television Distribution Inc., Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer Home Entertainment LLC, MGM ON STAGE, MGM Music, MGM Worldwide Digital Media, MGM Consumer Products and MGM Interactive. In addition, MGM has ownership interests in international TV channels reaching nearly 110 countries. MGM ownership is as follows: Providence Equity Partners (29%), TPG (21%), Sony Corporation of America (20%), Comcast (20%), DLJ Merchant Banking Partners (7%) and Quadrangle Group (3%). For more information, visit http://www.mgm.com/. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.

The Nation blasts SF Weekly’s parent

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By Tim Redmond

Long, detailed article in the Nation this week by John Wiener on how sharply the LA Weekly has declined since Village Voice Media, the parent company of SF Weekly, took over.

It’s exactly what a lot of us predicted: No more endorsements. No more progressive politics. No more reporting or commentary on the war in Iraq. Sad.

Double trouble

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Rosie O’Donnell, in a recent New York Times article about the TV star’s video blog, has been outed as a woman of many personalities. The piece notes the shades of O’Donnell’s various public talk-show personae, from closeted lesbian girl next door to outspoken View-er, and surveys her current makeup-free webcam self. Yet O’Donnell is simply following what legions of the less famous do via MySpace pages and YouTube postings: compose and experiment with low-budget media selves.

Artists, along with actors, have, in theory, a slight advantage in exploring this territory. They must consider the formal constraints of presentation in a gallery, yet plenty have managed quite well by dressing up as new incarnations drawn from their imaginations or obsessively charting personal information. In exhibition spaces, this stuff either hits a universal note or collapses under the weight of vanity.

The current exhibits by Alice Shaw at Gallery 16 and Kelli Connell at Stephen Wirtz Gallery walk that taut psychological tightrope and thankfully keep their balance. Both artists work with photography, a medium conducive to entertainment and realism. Both shows are seductive, witty, and disturbing as they extend dialogues put forth by artists such as Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, and Nikki S. Lee, who in different eras effectively confounded ideas of fixed identity by taking on different roles in their photographic projects.

Shaw immediately suggests schizophrenia by titling her solo exhibition "Group Show." It includes three bodies of work, all by Shaw and all addressing the notion of reflected or fractured selves. One of her identities is a photographer, and the first series involves appropriating works by 19th-century photographers Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, and E.J. Bellocq, whose images of prepubescent girls and New Orleans prostitutes, respectively, employed a nascent medium to indulge visual preoccupations. Using lenticular printing — the plastic layering that creates the postcard illusion of a winking Jesus — Shaw fuses works by each artist to reveal nearly identical poses and create a compact narrative of ripening sexuality. First you see a young girl standing in a nightie; with a slight shift in view, you see a more mature woman doing the same. The juxtapositions of the photographers’ works also recall tales of twins separated at birth who unknowingly go down parallel paths.

The second series follows a previous body of work in which Shaw sought out mirror selves. She developed her own character by photographing herself with a male grocery store clerk, friends, dates, her dad (artist Richard Shaw), and even Matt Gonzalez. The results are collected in a Gallery 16–published book, People Who Look Like Me (2006). For this show, she sought the opposite of herself, a self-described "small, white, middle-aged woman": a leggy young African American tranny named Ryhanna. The pair, in separate shots, strike similar boudoir poses in a sparsely furnished Victorian, subtly mirroring the Dodgson-Bellocq images hanging across the gallery. The two models appear in various states of undress, makeup, and sauciness, though both play on their mixture of male and female traits. The artist sometimes seems most confident posing in a wife beater, while Ryhanna appears equally self-assured showing off lace panties and her penis. Shaw’s artistic demeanor is deadpan, so there’s a comic appeal to these images. Both seem to ham it up for the lens, which also effectively channels discomfiting racial overtones and the way a different personality arises when we stand before the camera.

Connell doesn’t pose for her large, glossy photographs in "Double Life," but the pictures immediately suggest an intimate form of role playing. In each of her photographs, there are two figures seen in the midst of psychologically and sexually charged moments. They are enmeshed in a serious discussion, poised for a kiss or a fuck, or lighting sparklers on a grassy field. As in Sherman’s work, all quickly conjure narratives. Are they a happy couple or about to break up? Straight or gay? Eventually you realize that all the figures are the same woman, a friend who has been the artist’s exclusive model for the past few years.

As the 33-year-old Connell is part of a generation that has few qualms about Photoshop magic, her work is less about seamless digital manipulation than about hefty psychosocial concerns in contemporary life. Connell has said her pictures are an "honest representation of the duality or multiplicity of the self." She does this by literalizing the myth of Narcissus, a tale that involves longing, incest, and the curse of delusion. The convincing reality of the pictures also heats up dialogues about homosexuality, cloning, and, ultimately, the highly constructed nature of identity. Without ever needing to appear on TV. *

ALICE SHAW: "GROUP SHOW"

Through July 12, free

Mon.–Fri., 9 a.m.–5 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.–5 p.m.; and by appointment

Gallery 16

501 Third St., SF

(415) 626-7495

www.gallery16.com

KELLI CONNELL: "DOUBLE LIFE"

Through July 14, free

Tues.–Fri., 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Stephen Wirtz Gallery

49 Geary, SF

(415) 433-6879

www.wirtzgallery.com

Turning the tides

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› amanda@sfbg.com

On June 19 the Board of Supervisors cast its final ayes in favor of San Francisco’s new plan for public power, Community Choice Aggregation, which allows the city to own or purchase as much as 51 percent of the electricity for its residents and businesses from renewable sources. The plan’s goal is to meet or beat the rates of the city’s current provider, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which draws 13 percent of its power from renewable sources. CCA has become the popular choice for public power fans, who have long pushed the city to get a divorce from PG&E’s monopoly.

But across town the same day, it looked as if Mayor Gavin Newsom was renewing nuptial vows with the $12 billion utility. In front of the charming backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge, Newsom announced a partnership between the city and PG&E to look into tidal power. He promised "the most comprehensive study yet undertaken to assess the possibilities for harnessing the tides in San Francisco Bay."

PG&E committed as much as $1.5 million, which will bolster $146,000 from the city and a $200,000 grant from the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

The news conference had public-power advocates wondering about Newsom’s real commitment to renewable, locally owned power. "I’ve asked all the members of the Board of Supervisors," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian. "That press conference — nobody knew it was taking place." He said a mayoral aide later apologized that his office hadn’t been informed, but he added, "I don’t think it was a mistake that it occurred on the same day as the vote for CCA."

The Mayor’s Office said the scheduling was purely coincidental and had been on the books for at least three weeks, but it did not issue a news release about the news conference, and no media advisory was sent to us.

Parties involved in the deal say it will bring more money to researching a shaky, untested technology — even if it means that the power any project generates could be controlled by PG&E. "We’re always going to have that issue of ownership later, and I’d rather get the research data into the public domain," said Jared Blumenfeld, director of the city’s Department of the Environment (SFE).

Blumenfeld insisted that the deal would give the public direct oversight of all research, including work done by the private utility. The memorandum of understanding between San Francisco, PG&E, and Golden Gate Energy, which holds the permit license for tidal energy in the bay, makes it clear that all information will be shared by all parties and open to public scrutiny.

Newsom made a similar announcement in September 2006, when he called for the creation of a Tidal Power Advisory Group and allocated $150,000 for a feasibility study through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the SFE. But that program hasn’t gone far — and the little that has happened is secret.

A review of the agendas and minutes of SFPUC and SFE commission meetings shows only scant and passing mention of tidal power. The Tidal Power Advisory Group eventually came to fruition as one of five subcommittees of the Clean Tech Advisory Council, a 16-member board of local "green" business executives, entrepreneurs, and environmental experts that was formed at the call of the mayor in November 2005. Chaired by William K. Reilly, an Environmental Protection Agency administrator under George H.W. Bush, the council neither announces meetings or agendas nor makes public its minutes.

A special subcommittee devoted to tidal and wave energy has worked closely with the SFPUC to advance a feasibility study. The contract for that study went without bid to URS Corp. and will continue in conjunction with the new PG&E partnership.

URS, an international engineering, design, and construction firm based in San Francisco and formerly run by Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, has a long history with the city. The tidal power study was not subject to competitive bids and was awarded to URS because the company had undertaken significant computer models of the entire Bay Area for a past proposal to fill in part of the waterway to extend runways at San Francisco International Airport, Blumenfeld said. That plan was shot down, but the environmental impact report it spawned contains information relevant to studying tidal power.

Additionally, URS has an as-needed work agreement with San Francisco, Blumenfeld said, "and everything moves glacially" in regard to contracting with the city.

The kind of tidal power being considered — called "in-stream" and analogous to a wind farm of water-pushed turbines — is such a new technology that there is only one deployment in the world that’s generating more than one megawatt of energy. One megawatt is enough to power about 1,000 average homes. The Electric Power Research Institute released a study in 2006 concluding that the Golden Gate has the potential to generate 237 megawatts but suggesting that only 15 percent of that — about 35 megawatts — would be available without negative environmental impact.

"I think that number’s made up, personally," said Mike Hoover, a partner at Golden Gate Energy. "We know the energy that’s coming in and out of the bay is more than that."

URS, which has conducted no other tidal power studies in the United States, may support those findings, but the outlook at this point doesn’t bode well. "It appears EPRI used optimistic assumptions on water velocities," the SFPUC’s Power Enterprise director, Barbara Hale, wrote to officials in the Mayor’s Office and at the SFPUC and the SFE. "Our feasibility study estimates around 10 MW extractable power, peak, and five MW on average with a commercial plant." Additionally, Hale wrote, the cost per kilowatt-hour could be closer to 20 cents than the 5.5 cents the EPRI predicted.

Hale told us it’s difficult to say how much power would make dropping a pilot project into the bay feasible, and the best-case scenario has a pilot project four or five years away. An actual grid connection of any significance would be several years in the future.

Then there’s the huge issue of who would own the power. San Francisco Bay is considered a public trust — and under any reasonable policy scenario, the power generated by its tides should belong to the public.

After hearing about the mayor’s handshake with PG&E, Mirkarimi introduced legislation at the June 19 board meeting that would require any power harnessed in the bay to be publicly owned. He said tidal technology is still at an "embryonic stage," but the memorandum of understanding "that was unilaterally devised by the mayor and the PUC at the exclusion of the Board of Supervisors demonstrates an early intention to give the new technology to the profiteers, and that alarms me."*

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

My father died June 15, in Philadelphia. He was 82. He hated doctors (who kept telling him to quit smoking and drinking) and hospitals (which he alternately described as prisons and torture chambers, depending on how charitable he felt that day). When he realized that the emphysema had gotten the best of him and his days were numbered, he made it clear that all he wanted was to stay at home, so I and my siblings took time off, and for several weeks we helped my mother take care of him, keeping him as comfortable as we could until his lungs finally gave out and he stopped breathing. I gave the eulogy at his memorial service.

So I’m about tapped out on the emotional stuff, and I’ve said all I have to say about what a wonderful guy he was. But along the way I learned a couple of things that are worth thinking about.

Home hospice care has come a long way. When my friend Paulo died of AIDS in 1995, you had to be in a hospital to get easy access to drugs like morphine and Haldol, and if you were at home and woke up in horrible pain in the middle of the night, your friends had to take you to the emergency room and wait until a doctor could find time to give you a shot. The hospice program we had was awesome; the nurses gave us big jars of medicine, taught us how to administer the doses to relieve my dad’s pain, and told us that we shouldn’t worry if he asked for a cigarette (it was a bit late for lifestyle changes).

The insurance providing us with all of that top-rate care, and the remarkable social services that went along with it, came through a government program called Medicare. It has an overhead rate of about 3 percent, which makes it about five times as efficient as most private insurers. It’s not perfect — all health insurance in the United States is a bureaucratic nightmare, and even this coverage required intervention on the part of my family to keep things on the right track. But it’s available to seniors who don’t have much money, and it works.

While my dad was dying, I read some of the early reviews of Michael Moore’s Sicko in the East Coast media. I think my favorite was in the New York Post, which accused Moore of demanding that everyone in the United States get their health care from Fidel Castro. The critical reviews played up the fact that Moore fairly gushes about medical care in countries like Canada and France (along with Cuba) while people who live in such places with government-run health care systems complain about long waits for nonemergency treatment.

Perhaps so. I can’t argue the facts one way or another. I could argue that a system covering everyone at the cost of a bit of waiting for all is better than one that dumps all of the waiting, getting sicker, and dying on the poor and uninsured. But I will also argue that Moore is right (see Cheryl Eddy’s piece on page 64). This is the richest country in world history. We can have a public health system that works. We just need to get the private insurers the hell out of it.*

Budget blowback

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› sarah@sfbg.com

People’s Budget Coalition member Esther Morales says she’s angry that the media obsessed over Sup. Chris Daly’s June 19 comments about whether Mayor Gavin Newsom has honestly addressed allegations that he’s used cocaine yet ignored hours of testimony that hundreds of San Franciscans gave at the very same meeting, a state-mandated hearing on the impact of Newsom’s proposed spending cuts on the city’s neediest populations, including those with drug and alcohol problems.

"There’s been so much press about that hearing, but it’s all been about what’s happening between Sup. Chris Daly and the mayor," Morales said, accurately observing that there has been no coverage by the mainstream media of the addicts who waited for hours that night but only got to talk for two minutes each about how they would have died had it not been for the substance abuse programs that Newsom plans to cut.

Nor has much been written about the folks who pleaded for Buster’s Place, the city’s only all-night homeless shelter, which was to close at the end of June unless the Board of Supervisors saved it from Newsom’s $1.6 million cut. Nor has much mention been made of the organizers from the city’s four single-room occupancy hotel collaboratives that showed up at City Hall a few days earlier to decry Newsom’s proposed $233,000 cut in their combined budgets.

As David Ho of the Chinatown Community Development Center told the Guardian, "These are programs for the poor and for public health, and they are always on the chopping block. The mayor talks about the need to preserve working-class families in the city, and here we are being left out of the budget."

Muna Landers of the Coalition on Homelessness said SRO hotel rooms were originally meant to be single dwellings, but now more than 450 families — 85 percent of whom are immigrants — live in such rooms without bathrooms or kitchens. "When one family moves out, three families move in," Landers said.

Meanwhile, in light of Newsom’s proposal to restore only 50 percent of a $9 million federal cut in San Francisco’s HIV/AIDS programs, San Francisco AIDS Housing Alliance director Brian Basinger accused the mayor of "playing bullshit games."

As Morales told us this week, "What’s really behind these fights between Chris and the mayor is the fact that Chris spearheaded the board’s $28 million affordable-housing supplement…. Without Daly’s footwork the $28 million supplemental would not have passed by an 8–3 majority, and the mayor only refused to sign it because it was Chris’s measure."

Morales works with 60 community-based groups as the organizer of the Family Budget Committee, one of seven committees of the People’s Budget Coalition, which unveiled its annual report June 21 on the steps of City Hall. The group values services for those struggling to get by.

"But this mayor’s budget is a law-and-order, streets-and-potholes, increasingly right-wing conservative budget that is not reflective of what San Francisco is about, and it will drive even more families out of town," Morales told us.

Months ago the Family Budget Committee met with the mayor’s staff to ask for a $30 million package of services, part of the People’s Budget Coalition’s $78 million request from the mayor’s record $6.1 billion budget.

"The mayor’s staff talked to us about how dismal the budget year looked, how the firefighters’, the police[‘s], and the nurses’ contracts are up for negotiations, and so they didn’t know how much money they would end up with," Morales recalled.

So the Family Budget Committee whittled down its needs, first to $20 million, then $10 million, and sent those priorities to the Mayor’s Office for consideration. Ultimately, it said, the mayor found just $1.5 million for its priorities, so it turned its attention to the Board of Supervisors.

Since board president Aaron Peskin removed Daly as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee on June 15 and took the reins himself, the body has restored $4 million in HIV/AIDS funding, and much more is on the way. Peskin told us that he intends to significantly change the mayor’s budget, promising more so-called add backs than the board has ever approved.

"It’s all about priorities," Peskin told us. He said Daly "never intended to actually cut" any of the mayor’s top-priority projects when he introduced his motion to slash $37 million from Newsom’s funding plans. It was simply a negotiating tactic that "backfired majorly" when the targeted constituencies rallied against Daly.

Yet board progressives haven’t been derailed by Daly’s actions, as many pundits predicted. At the same meeting at which Daly mentioned cocaine while making a point about substance abuse program cuts, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi led a challenge of Newsom’s proposed San Francisco Police Department contract on the grounds that it would grant cops a 25 percent pay increase but give the city little in return. And there are still eight supervisors who supported Daly’s affordable-housing plan.

Peskin told us, "I’m hopeful that by the end of the week you’ll be able to write that Peskin took the baton that Newsom handed him, and while it may not have been as pretty as we might have liked, I’m hopeful that after reversing cuts to health care and [making the additions requested by] the Family Budget Committee, we’ll even be able to dump money back into low-income, affordable, family, and rental housing." *

The future of paper

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Twenty years from now, paper will no longer be a tool for mass communication. Instead it will be a substance akin to plastic, a mere fabricated building material with industrial and consumer applications. At least, those were the thoughts that ran through my mind when I received a strange news release last week from a Finnish company called VTT, which trumpeted a business model that included developing new products based on what it called "printing technology" and "paper products." VTT has developed a prototype for bioactive paper that responds to enzymes and biomolecules by changing color. One idea is to use it in food packaging or air filters to get an early warning about toxins.

Weird innovations are great, but the most interesting part of this news release was about markets: "The goal is … to create new business for the paper industry … to introduce new innovations and market initiatives between the traditional ICT [information communication technology] and paper industries by combining IT, electronics and printing technologies."

Let us parse the high-flown language of commerce. VTT is saying the paper industry needs new markets, and high-tech, bioactive paper will help create them. But why? Obviously, paper has its uses — there are newspapers, magazines, notepads, and books to be printed! Why worry about making the stuff bioactive when you can just sell it to Random House or Conde Nast? You already know the answer. Print communication is dying out, and with it goes the paper industry. Over the past few months, I’ve witnessed the two biggest daily papers in my area, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, announce budget cuts that will slash their staffs by one-quarter. What does that mean for the paper industry? Fewer orders for newsprint.

When Karl Marx wrote that every great historical event occurs twice — "first time as tragedy, second time as farce" — I doubt he had print media in mind. And yet the upset of the paper industry feels to me like the joke that comes after the tragedy of print media’s fast decline. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of those people who think that barbarians are storming the gates because anyone can publish their ramblings on MySpace instead of having to get David Remnick’s permission to publish their ramblings in the New Yorker. Still, I cannot help but feel wrenchingly bad when I think about what it will be like in the Mercury newsroom after a quarter of the editorial staff has left the building.

I won’t miss the paper, but I will miss the journalists.

What’s tragic is that print journalism has not tried to diversify its market as methodically as the paper industry has. Right now, VTT is just one of many companies trying to figure out cool new ways to use paper. But who is trying to figure out cool new ways to employ smart, highly trained print journalists? Maybe Dan Gillmor and a few other people running small nonprofits. But mostly, print journalists are having to figure the future out on their own.

Some will do what I’ve done, gradually moving from print media to online. I’ve gone from a print zine to an online zine to a weekly newspaper to print magazines to running a blog. This column you’re reading is syndicated to both print newspapers and Web sites. Nobody gave me guidance. No slick marketing dude from Finland came in and said, "Hey, maybe you should diversify and start creating bioactive journalism." Instead, I fumbled along on my own, trying to find the most stable place where I could settle down and write for a living. Other journalists won’t be as lucky or as willing to change. They may stop writing; they may become shills for the companies they once investigated; they may feel bitter or liberated or panicked. None of them deserve it. Somebody should have helped them get ready for this transition five years ago.

I live in a world where corporations care more about the future of paper than the futures of people who have made their living turning paper into a massive network of vital, important communications. This is not how technological change should work. You cannot discard a person the way you discard a market niche. That’s because people revolt. Especially journalists. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd looking for a few good geek journalists to help her run a blog. Serious nerd experience needed. Inquire within!

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/22/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/22/07): 14 U.S. soldiers killed in two days.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

U.S. military:

14 U.S. soldiers killed in Baghdad in two days this week, according to the New York Times.

3,794: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

111 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

Iraqi civilians:

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

65,880 – 72,165: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 3 June 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/47/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

177 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

164: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded from 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (6/22/07): So far, $436 billion for the U.S., $55 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

Yay! New reasons to hate your body!

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By Molly Freedenberg

Library - 386.jpg
Because all we need is another magazine telling us how thin, young, and Caucasian we’re not, a group of editors and doctors have decided to bring us a new mag, New Beauty. What’s new about New Beauty, you ask? Basically, this is a mag that does for lipo and Botox what InStyle does for lipstick and Lucky Jeans. Including the part where it reminds us we’re not rich enough to actually get what we need to be less flawed than we so clearly are.

Now, to be fair, I have to admit the magazine is well designed, and it’s refreshingly text heavy for a mag targeting women (though the font’s a bit small for my aging eyes). And New Beauty does have a panel of actual doctors, dermatologists, and scientists acting as some kind of official resource, so at least they’re not approaching such serious subjects as surgery and implants in an irresponsibly fluffy way. I also have to concede that this could be a great resource for people already interested in getting these procedures and wanting to know more about them.

But Jesus. Is this what it’s coming to? Facelifts for 20 somethings? Preventative Botox? And treating these kinds of procedures as normally as we’d treat self-tanners or slimming pantyhose? I know it’s just a reflection of our culture and all, so perhaps I should be complaining about that, not the fact that the magazine is (wisely, from a financial standpoint) capitalizing on it.

But I believe the role of the media is to shape culture as much as reflect it. And by its very existence, this magazine is pushing us even more in the direction of age-phobic, superficial self-loathing. Sigh. I guess it’s back to Bitch and Bust and Cunt for me.

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