Tired of hearing about Sarah Palin’s plans to run in 2012?
It’ll make it easier to bear the media’s constant Sarah craving.
Media
My call with Rose Aguilar
By Amanda Witherell
Local KALW “Your Call” radio show host Rose Aguilar has written a fascinating account of her six-month road trip through four “red” states interviewing people about their lives and asking them why they vote the way they do. The book, Red Highways, details her interviews and interactions she meets and reveals Aguilar as the kind of reporter who is drawn to apparent contradictions and keeps her microphone on way past the sound byte responses. She and her boyfriend, Ryan, attend a progressive church in Dallas and dine with a pro-war vegan; interview a Republican turned Democrat because of domestic violence in Mississippi; have a close encounter at a gun show in Oklahoma City; and talk with gay, Republican environmentalists in Montana.
The book was published just before the election and I gave her a call today to get her thoughts on Barack Obama’s win, hear some stories that were left out of the book, and talk about how the media could and should be reporting from the real American perspective.
We’ll be publishing a review of Red Highways in Wednesday’s paper, but in the meantime, Aguilar is reading tonight, November 11, at 7:30 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. You can find other author events here.
Here are some excerpts of my interview with her:
Extra! Hearst tries to bury the clean energy act
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Finally, two days after the election, Andrew S. Ross provided the first Hearst coverage of the Clean Energy Act initiative (Prop H) on the business page of the San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst.
At the bottom of the business page in the right hand corner, Ross wrote one paragraph in his “The Bottom Line” column:
“The combined piling on by business groups, public policy organizations, and newspaper editorials had its intended effect on San Francisco’s Prop H. But for those endlessly trying to take over PG&E, the motto will likely hold:
If, on the 20th time you don’t succeed, try another 20 times.”
Combined piling on? Did not PG&E’s victory have anything to do with deploying $l0 million plus and massed muscle? Did it not have anything to do with Hearst’s historic role as PG&E’s journalistic arm?
I also asked Ross in an email if he could explain, as a featured Hearst business writer, just how clean energy and cheap public power could hurt business? (It doesn’t of course hurt business in any of the 2,200 cities in the U.S. that have public power.) Ross did not answer by blogtime.
Meanwhile, Heather Knight did a PG&E victory story in the Wednesday Chronicle (ll/5/2008). It took her eight paragraphs to get to the critical point (PG&E’s $l0 million), which she presented as a kind of throwaway afterthought. And she once again retailed PG&E’s Big Lies without giving the Yes on H people a real chance to correct them or to correct them herself, which was the Hearst policy in covering the story. For God’s sakes, don’t correct a PG&E lie. Ever.
Ross and Knight keep thumping away on the number of times the issue has been on the ballot (ll), without mentioning the key issues: the underlying PG&E/Raker scandal. How San Francisco is the only city in the U.S. that is mandated by federal law (the Raker Act) to have a public power system. How the city endangers the entire Hetch Hetchy system by violating the original public power mandates of the act and exposing the system to the tear-down-the dam forces. How clean energy and public power would bring the same advantages to San Francisco that it does for 2,200 other cities in the country: public power that is clean, cheap, reliable, and accountable. How the Clean Energy Act would make San Francisco the world leader in clean and renewable energy and a world class sustainable city. How PG&E and Hearst working in deadly combination defeated ll ballot measures through the years and established the story as the biggest scandal in U.S. history. The Hearst bottom line: this nightmare for PG&E is over, done, those pesky clean energy and public people are gone, we will keep running PG&E greenwashing ads and PG&E greenwashing stories, editorials, and campaign endorsements for the duration. We’re moving on in lockstep with PG&E.
This is classic Hearst over the generations. The founder William Randolph Hearst was a key crusader for the Hetch Hetchy dam and public power for decades.
Then he made a shameful deal with a PG&E-controlled bank in t he mid-l920s to get much needed capital. In return, he agreed to reverse his position on Hetch Hetchy and support PG&E. Then he and his papers reversed field and became the major media players in helping PG&E defeat ll ballot measures through the years to buy out PG&E. And forever after the deal, Hearst worked with PG&E to black out and marginalize the scandal story. And today, in this election, Hearst tried its best to help PG&E bury the scandal for good.
Sorry, that won’t work any more. The battle goes on. B3, still watching PG&E doing all it can to keep the Potrero Hill/Mirant power plant pumping away and putting out poisonous fumes that I can see from my office window
Click here to read more about the Raker Act, Hearst and public power in San Francisco.
V. Vale and RE/Search Publications
Call him the monkish punk elder of counterculture in the Bay and fringes wherever they may fray. Behind a monochromatic, black-clad, black-banged façade and unassuming demeanor, V. Vale is a man of so many interests and accomplishments that it’s hard to know where to start. How about with Vale as Punk Showman?
"In 1984 I’m sure I put on one of the greatest shows ever to celebrate our J.G. Ballard book," the 50-plus publisher says. He’s tucked beside a thermos of tea in his book- and collection-crammed office-apartment in a North Beach edifice that, legend has it, Janis Joplin, Odetta, and Paul Robeson once dwelled in. Survival Research Labs and an S-M group were on the Fort Mason bill, and in honor of the occasion Vale visited the junkyard and had them deliver two cars that he selected. "I’m sure people had died in them — there was so much blood in the interior — and they were all crushed down. There’s no way you could survive that!"
Naturally, Vale and SRL rigged up the two bloody junkers to simulate a sex act — doggy-style — while yet another car with square wheels and a huge battering ram attacked the humping death-mobiles. The, ahem, climax: a performance by Public Image Ltd.
If that’s not punk — in the classic, highly original, high-low San Francisco style, full of hard-scrabble high spectacle and an edge you can lacerate yourself on — who knows what the fuck is?
It’s just one of many tales — about shooting pistols with "Uncle Bill" Burroughs or watching exotica innovator Martin Denny field a $25,000 royalty check — that emerge during an interview with this lifelong interviewer. His own narrative is just as riveting: he grew up, as part of a minuscule Japanese American minority, in a small town in Riverside County, raised on welfare by a mother who suffered from mental illness. The young Vale read voraciously, from the kitchen table to the bed, which led to his acceptance at Harvard, though an antipathy toward ivy made him choose to attend UC Berkeley instead. In the ’70s, he worked at City Lights, and in 1977, while ripping off the covers of unbought magazines and returning them, he formed the idea to start his own zine about the punk scene combusting right around the corner at Mabuhay Gardens. Search and Destroy was born, with $100 seed money from Allen Ginsberg and matching funds from his boss Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Now lauded as an invaluable document of early punk and a graphic design rule-breaker ("We’d do a layout meeting: ‘Here’s the text. Here are the pictures. Your job is to make this interview as rad as you can’"), Search and Destroy also became a way for Vale to make critical connections between the work and thoughts generated by punk groups and those formulated by artists in other media, as interviews with Vale’s mentors Ballard and Burroughs made their way into the zine.
When the Mabuhay scene turned toward servicing a younger, violent hardcore audience, the zine-maker’s interests shifted as well. Tapped to start a stateside headquarters for Rough Trade in 1980, he convinced founder Geoff Travis to fund a new tabloid, RE/Search, during an all-nighter. Three issues later, Vale moved on to launch a typesetting business, RE/Search Typography, which he ran in North Beach until he sold it in 1991 when he saw that the home computer had finally arrived.
In the meantime, the RE/Search series had become the equivalent of an ever-unfolding countercultural bible: essential reading not only for punks — all the books, Vale swears, are informed by that revolution — but artists, musicians, cultural fire-starters, and trouble-makers of every nonconformist stripe. In turn, Vale built a bridge with his paperbacks between the cultural movers around him and the world of books that has succored him. "I learned long ago that reading is not a passive process," says Vale. "I like to mark up my books. My books are heavily interacted with. I look at books not as books, but as conversations."
The RE/Search volumes Vale is most proud of, on Burroughs and Ballard, resuscitated the former author’s career and threw a proper coming-out party in America for the latter. Vale went so far as to help organize Burroughs’ tour with Laurie Anderson. Meanwhile, RE/Search’s sibling compendiums, Incredibly Strange Movies (1986) and Incredibly Strange Music (1993, Vol. 2 1995), were pivotal in placing filmmakers like Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis and music-makers such as Yma Sumac and Ken Nordine in a new canon for culturally conversant hipsters, leading to crucial reissues and reappraisals of their work.
And then there’s RE/Search’s biggest hit. "The most influential of all the books is Modern Primitives [1989], which sparked the whole mainstream mass interest in piercing and tattoos and body modification," says Jello Biafra, who first met Vale in 1978 when Biafra was simply an admirer of Search and Destroy and the vocalist for a then-new band called the Dead Kennedys. "There was very little of that going on compared to what happened after that book came out. Of course, now even secretaries and bank clerks and Bush administration bureaucrats have tattoos, and who knows how many pierced penises are on the Republican National Committee!"
With a new publication, prOnnovation? Pornography and Technological Innovation, just out, and books on Timothy Leary, Burning Man’s Piss Clear newspaper, and steampunk on the horizon, Vale doesn’t have time to be bitter that so many have grabbed ideas from his tomes and run with them. "I would say I’ve had a disproportionate amount of influence," he says. "People tell me, ‘Your Pranks [1987] book inspired Jackass, Punk’d, and god knows how many other TV shows.’ You just keep thinking of your next project and never look back."
The first book I held close to my heart was Italian poet Antonio Porta’s 1987 Kisses from Another Dream, number 44 in the ongoing City Lights Pocket Poets Series. I bought it on a trip to the city from Santa Cruz when I was around 17, and I savored every line, whipping out the book at coffee shops and other high school hangouts, in attics late at night, at beach bonfires, and even for a speech at one friend’s funeral. It wasn’t just the eerily direct poems that turned me on, nor the delightful format (which has remained basically unchanged in the series aside from modernized cover designs), but a feeling of participation in a tradition that began with the first City Lights Publications book, founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Pictures of the Gone World in 1955, and that has continued with wordsmiths and thinkers from Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski to Tom Hayden, Terry Wolverton, and San Francisco poet laureate Jack Hirschman. I am biased about City Lights, but isn’t that the mark of good publishers — to increase readers’ bias toward purveyors of quality writing and thought? To this end, City Lights has participated in a type of conscious branding of which Americans can be proud. The publisher and North Beach bookstore continues to be marked by fierce, heartfelt works that seem to emanate from their instantly recognizable Y-with-an-O-on-top logo of a human in a state of ecstasy, outrage, celebration, and/or soothsaying. Having worked in numerous positions in the small press world, I continue to be annoyed by the oddly prevalent idea that putting out more books — including those of low quality which you think will sell — somehow guarantees success. Despite this type of bingeing, the information age has ushered in a new set of consumers whose interests, resources, and appetites run so wide that they crave guidance across the board. From the Slow Food movement to Bookforum.com’s daily online roundups, people are willing to research and improve most areas of their lives. Publishers have long served this need, and under the guidance of the current executive director, Elaine Katzenberger, and others such as editor and Guardian contributor Garrett Caples, co-owner Nancy Peters, and Open Media Series acquiring editor Greg Ruggiero, City Lights is increasing the potential of real and literary democracy. At a publishing-world dinner a little while back, Katzenberger impressed me with her eloquent dedication to publishing good writing without unreasonable marketing goals. Obviously City Lights wants its books to sell, but there’s no reason to expect Oprah’s Book Club-type numbers. Part of the reason the press is still in business is that it has taken risks on good but unknown writers, not on bad but marketable mishmash. In his introduction to 1995’s City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology, Ferlinghetti writes: "The function of the independent press (besides being essentially dissident) is still to discover — to find the new voices and give voice to them — and then let the big publishers have at them." He goes on to remark that although City Lights initially tapped into the Beat scene, it has continued to respond to current circumstances: "From the beginning the aim was to publish across the board, avoiding the provincial and the academic, and not publishing (that pitfall of the little press) just our ‘gang.’ I had in mind rather an international, dissident, insurgent ferment." In a recent column for Slate, Emily Yoffe noted that taking offense — especially taking offense at taking offense — has become a "political leitmotif" during the seemingly endless election season. Any actual discussion disappears into the mist. City Lights’ political output, whether you agree with individual authors or not, has certainly worked against the reactionary bullshit and political fluff that plagues politics everywhere. It’s been good to see them bringing this cultural literacy to more art-related titles of late, including 2007’s All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna and this year’s Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun by Wafaa Bilal and Kari Lydersen, a much-needed evaluation of Bilal’s controversial project. One of the poems in that heart-close Porta volume is "You Continue to Ask What Silence Is." If poetry comes from silence, and politics from the space between dreams and reality, then City Lights knows what silence is, and this is why its authors scream so sweetly. A Lifetime Achievement award is as much a hymn to co-owner Ferlinghetti’s life and early organizational skills as to what City Lights has become. Though he has technically passed over the editorial reins, Ferlinghetti remains involved in the press and also, in terms of his own writing, intentionally uninvolved: he has kept New Directions, over on the other coast, as the publisher of his own writing, ensuring that in an age of celebrity and numbness, City Lights is anything but a vanity press.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books
Election day luncheon in SF
Former Mayor Willie Brown, with luncheon co-hosts Angelo Quaranta (left) and Alex Clemens (right) behund.
By Steven T. Jones
I ran into Willie Brown as we were both headed into today’s Election Day luncheon at the California Culinary Academy – a two-decade-long tradition hosted by political power brokers Angelo Quaranta and the late Bob McCarthy (with Alex Clemens now stepping into that host role) – and asked for his electoral predictions.
“There’ll be no surprises,” Brown told me, “not a one.”
I took that as a hopeful sign that Barack Obama will win the presidency by an electoral landslide and Democrats will add significantly to their congressional majorities, but it didn’t tell me much about tonight’s nail biters, including the fate of the same sex marriage Proposition 8 or the balance of power on the Board of Supervisors.
Inside, many of the political luminaries expressed real anxiety over Prop. 8, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who warned Brown and the media against any early Obama victory parties that might hurt Prop. 8, the high-speed rail bond measure Prop. 1A, or the other crucial measures that need every Obama supporter they can muster.
Xbox activism
> a&eletters@sfbg.com
REVIEW The day after the last 2008 presidential debate, the stock market rollercoastered, however tenuously, to a high point, and oil prices plummeted. One would think those would be hopeful omens — on NPR, a woman interviewed on the street claimed lower gas prices were akin to a miracle. Yet the current ability to get the news the moment it happens — where would we be without e-alerts regarding daily Wall Street dramas? — has conditioned us to believe tomorrow might offer a radically different story. When OPEC calls an emergency meeting, and the US feds hold a global economic summit, who knows which side of the economic seesaw we’ll occupy at sunset?
Right now, you could say the economy is a form of conceptual art writ large, with real world implications. The numbers are based on shifts in mood and degrees of confidence, rather than anything you could really put your finger on (like cold hard cash). Apparently the idea that the earth’s thermostat is dialed up to a higher temperature is similarly conceptual. A surprising number of Americans — about 50 percent in a Pew Research Center poll taken last summer — believe there’s no such thing as global warming, and if there were, its causes cannot be scientifically determined. (Say bye-bye to the king penguin.)
Volatile situations have a way of generating free-floating cultural anxiety, and perhaps one of art’s jobs is to assuage it, or at least render it in unexpected terms and media. Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung’s Internet-based game project Gas Zappers does both. Using a colorful cast of characters wrested from online news outlets, it maintains a brash, interactive appeal as it tackles the implications of global warning and shifty petroleum economies. An animated digital collage, it takes two forms — a single-channel digital video, and a series of interactive computer games that can be viewed and played on a large flat screen monitor. It’s also accessible online.
The most attractive aspect of Gas Zappers‘ video version is its amped-up lucidity. Hung may be trafficking in environmental activism, but his vision of green takes on the gloriously corrosive hue of antifreeze. The piece is rendered in a color scheme you could describe as a toxic chemical rainbow. Art with social intent is often deemed didactic, but Hung steers clear of such charges with unabashed satire that plays like John Heartfield — the master of Hitler-hating WWII photomontage — meets South Park on YouTube.
Gas Zappers‘ appeal stems partly from the zeal with which Hung tosses cultural and political references. A polar bear, cast from its frozen habitat, navigates through a global landscape of energy issues — and celebrity spokespeople. Leonardo DiCaprio’s there, as is George W. Bush (as a barbecue grillmaster) and Al Gore (in a polar bear costume accessorized with Nobel bling). Al gags the prez on a compact fluorescent bulb and then sits on his face, issuing a forceful invitation: "Try my greenhouse gas, sucker."
Hung, who studied at San Francisco State University and showed an equally brash Internet-critique piece in Bay Area Now 3, is an artist of our moment. With this project, he has devised perhaps the perfect, time-filling, politically astute work for Berkeley tree-sitters — and those of us who wish we had the time and gumption to get up off our asses and make a difference.
GAS ZAPPERS
Through Feb. 8, 2009
Berkeley Art Museum
2626 Bancroft, Berk.
(510) 642-0808
Yahoo News: Fascists and gay marriage? Heil yes
Oh, these automated media times — faster, news cycle, kill kill! Here’s another fun distraction: In a gaffe that slightly recalls Yahoo’s infamous Katrina photo captioning brew-ha-ha of 2005 (where black people were labelled as “looters” while white people were “finders”), that great news aggregator of the digital Alps pricelessly pulled up this pic of recently semi-outed — and recently very-dead — hard right Austrian fuckwad Joerg Haider and his simpering spokesperson/buttboy Stefan Petzner to illustrate a story on Prop 8, plus bonus slideshow. Oops.
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Hey, though — doesn’t the number 88 mean something in skinhead culture? Fascists — always only going halfway.
The bf and I were horrified when we Web-stumbled upon this Sunday night. Moral: Yahoo, it haz confuzed. Even bigger moral: The gays can be anything! We. Are. Everywhere.
Gayz: were in yr fascism, marrying yr mormonz.
UPDATE: Oh lord, it’s still up there. Editors …
Wind turbines? On PG&E’s headquarters?
The Clean Energy campaign (Prop H) is heating up and PG&E is now running more scared than the company has ever been about any initiative campaign. Here’s the latest media advisory from the campaign’s Julian Davis and Aliza Wasserman:
For Immediate Release Contact: Aliza Wasserman
510-717-6599
MEDIA ADVISORY Tuesday October 28, 2008
PROP H WIND TURBINES INSTALLED ON PG&E HQ
PG&E’s record-breaking $9.9 million opposition to Prop H said to be obstructing San Francisco’s chance for renewable and cheaper energy
SAN FRANCISCO — In front of PG&E’s downtown headquarters at 77 Beale St. at Market, three twelve-foot wind turbines will be constructed by citizens eager to see Prop H pass and begin a green jobs and affordable green energy future. On Wednesday, October 29 from 12:00 to 12:30pm over three-dozen citizens wearing green hard hats and worker overalls will promptly descend on PG&E’s headquarters and construct the wind turbine art installations. PG&E provides the City with only 2% wind energy, and 1% solar, for a total of 14% renewable energy, while Prop H would develop thousands of green jobs and move San Francisco’s energy provider to 51% renewable and clean energy in a decade, 75% by 2030 and will maximize all available and affordable renewable energy possible by 2040.
Deeper and deeper
Everybody has an unlucky-star arena in which they’ve serially flunked out. Madonna, long successful in so many media, has cinema. Can our hyper-ballsy Material Girl be intimidated by "real" acting, as opposed to music video personae she’s done fine by? Maybe. But that doesn’t explain why, after 30 years’ experience behind cameras, she’s made a directorial debut as poorly crafted as Filth and Wisdom, which looks cheap and ugly despite all gratuitous visual gimmicks.
That’s not even the real problem. Since she got religion, Madonna (like myriad post-hedonist celebrities) thinks she has profound wisdom to share. That renders this wannabe quirky ensemble seriocomedy not just unfunny, but annoying. Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hutz constantly lectures the camera with vapidities like "There’s duality in everything." Good. Evil. They co-exist! If that’s all Kabbalah offers, bring on the Zoroastrianism. It’s hard not to view Filth and Wisdom as a prism magnifying its auteur’s world view, which doesn’t flatter. Characters we’re meant to like — Hutz’s emigre rocker, ballerina-cum-stripper (Holly Weston), and drug-thieving pharmacist (Vicky McClure) — are snide and resentful. Their sexuality exists to generate $$. Everyone else is a fool or john. Then there’s Richard E. Grant’s blind poet, pathos apexing when he fondles and smells books he can no longer read. Smells. Seeking to amuse and enlighten, Filth feels joyless and pretentious, yet empty. There will be worse 2008 movies. Probably none will make their makers seem quite so smugly unpleasant.
Filth and Wisdom opens Fri/24 in Bay Area theaters.
Cougar Den
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea,
I appreciated your response to Older and Wiser ["Sunrise, Sunset," 9/24/08], the late-20s woman who is planning marriage and kids with her late-50s boyfriend.
Fourteen years ago, when I was 26, I met my husband, who was then 58. We’ve stayed together through thick and thin, and we love each other enormously. It has pained me over the past decade to realize that, even when the woman in question has her own accomplishments and is not a "bimbo", and even when the man in question is appealing and interesting (neither a Donald Trump nor a philandering cad), still the nasty stereotypes abound. British comedian Graham Norton, for instance, refers to Catherine Zeta-Jones (39, married to Michael Douglas, 64) as "that gold-digging Welsh whore."
I find that otherwise thoughtful women I meet, acting on a mixture of feminism, anger, and what I infer to be unacknowledged personal pain or fear, seem too willing to continue such stereotypes, and I hesitate to open up to women I would otherwise think of as potential friends. I have hoped that as increasingly empowered women realize that they can date younger men if they choose, the rage over the double-standard and the fear of abandonment and dwindling romantic options will begin to fade.
Then SNL comes along with, among other bits that belittle older women, their despicable new "Cougar Den" skit, mocking sexually-active older women as ridiculous and disgusting. Fuck you, SNL!
These mean-spirited portrayals are destructive. I’ve attempted to convey this message through other venues and have been ignored. I remember a few years ago, you wrote that the only regrettable mixed union between adults is "the always unfortunate nice person/asshole combo" — so maybe you’ll see my point and print this.
Love,
Love My Older Spouse
Dear Love:
Ha, that’s a pretty good line. Thanks for remembering it.
I hadn’t even thought about SNL in years until the recent gratifying return of Tina Fey, but now that you mention it (you didn’t), I have conceived a visceral loathing for Sarah Palin so intense that I couldn’t even watch the debate for fear of feeling too sick to cook dinner. Yet I’ve still managed to be offended, feministically-speaking, by some of the endless harping on her supposed babe-itude. Can we not leave her legs (slender and therefore officially babe-ly) and Sen. Clinton’s, which have been judged unacceptably stumpy, and everyone else’s out of the equation, and judge the candidates on their merits? Gov. Palin, for instance, doesn’t have any. We win!
As for "cougars," I have puzzled over the sudden emergence of the stereotype and the unquestioned assumption that the women it is applied to deserve ridicule. After a spate of popular-media articles in the 1990s about older women and their younger men, I suppose some degree of backlash was inevitable. Still, I, like you, am nonplussed by the degree of venom spit at any woman of a certain age who not only dares to date above her age-determined station, but to do anything for fun at all beyond book club, knitting, and golf.
Don’t you think, though, that the reaction of some older women to a young one seen with a man old enough to be the first woman’s first husband is understandable? We can claim the right to date younger men all we like, but who’s to say that most younger men will be interested? And there are still legions of old coots advertising for "fit, slender" young things in the personals. There is still a media-driven double standard keeping George Clooney in the "sexy lead" seat while Glenn Close and Cybill Shepherd have to play doughty moms and, yes, cougars. Even the accolades heaped on the glorious Helen Mirren in recent years have a faint aspect of the freak show about them: "Step up and see the 60-something woman who is still sexually attractive!" These forces are still powerful enough to make your fond wish for a time when older women will inevitably gaze upon your union with one of their own with bland approval still a bit of a pipe dream. As long as older women with a sex drive, and indeed any juice at all left in them, are laughed and pointed at, some will still look at a young woman who scoops up one of the few available men in their bracket as whatever the opposite of a cougar might be. Minx. Bitch. Gold-digging (Welsh) whore. Sad, and frustrating, but human.
Incidentally, I was curious about the origin of "cougar" in this context and found an article dating it to the founding in 1999 of Cougardate, an online dating site. A book, Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men, by Valerie Gibson, came along in 2001. As you can see, these were guides for women, so the term, even with its "rapacious animal" connotations, wasn’t even meant pejoratively. The nastiness accrued to it gradually, it seems, and inevitably. If it’s about women actually wanting sex, that’s gonna happen.
OK, now I’m mad too.
Love,
Andrea
Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!
Sparring with Garcia
I was honored to be a guest on KQED’s Forum with Michael Krasny this morning, but I was once again dismayed by the conservative political spin of Examiner columnist Ken Garcia, another guest on the show. Perhaps I should adjust my expectations (after all, Garcia works for a paper that endorsed John McCain for president) but it’s still so frustrating to be arguing about issues we should have settled generations ago in San Francisco.
Instead, progressives are still fending off arguments by Garcia and his ilk that Pacific Gas & Electric is more trustworthy than our elected local government (a ridiculous notion that PG&E is spending record-breaking millions to push), that decriminalizing social ills such as drug use and prostitution is the same thing as condoning and promoting them (as if “harm reduction strategies” pioneered in SF is a foreign concept), that creation of affordable housing (which developers won’t build without public subsidies that Prop. B will strengthen) is something the city can’t afford, that new revenue measures are also bad, and that the best leadership program we can offer our young students is JROTC (the main purpose of which is to instill military values in our peace-loving kids and recruit them as cannon fodder for our wasteful, unnecessary wars).
I think I held my own and hopefully offered listeners a better sense of this city’s full political spectrum than they often get from the mainstream media, but I’ll let you all be the judge of that. You can listen to the show here:
You can’t kill them
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
They’re on the fringe, and they don’t plan to leave it. Though mostly overlooked in their home country of New Zealand during the last two decades, the free-rockers in the Dead C will be the first to tell you that they’re not terribly bothered.
"We are not seen as plausible cultural ambassadors," stated guitarist Bruce Russell by e-mail from his home Down Under, citing the failure of the "laughable New Zealand media" to cover what’s artistically adventurous as one of the reasons his three-piece rarely can make it abroad to play shows. One would hope that Russell, Michael Morley, and Robbie Yeats would be more seriously considered for Kiwi government arts grants: indie rockers of yesteryear and the narcoleptic noisemongers of today repeatedly cite the Dead C as an influence on what they do. Just look who’s opening for them on their upcoming US gigs: Thurston Moore (who hosted them at All Tomorrow’s Parties’ "Nightmare Before Christmas" in England two years ago), Blues Control, Wolf Eyes, Six Organs of Admittance — all serious contenders on the experimental circuit, and all projects that garnered something, aesthetic or emotional, from the Dead C’s history of desperate clatter.
The Dead C got its start in Dunedin — members are located in Port Chalmers and Lyttelton today, about 225 miles apart — when the self-designated "AMM of Punk Rock" released its 1988 full-length debut, DR503, on Flying Nun, the infamous home to pop bands like the Clean, the Chills, Tall Dwarfs, and the Verlaines, for whom Yeats once drummed. A pop group the Dead C are not, but for an ensemble so ardently free-form and unmarketable, they’ve done nicely.
"The irony is, we’ve done very well in commercial terms by being ‘uncommercial,’" Russell explained. "I don’t know many of our contemporaries in New Zealand who are in better career positions than us. We make money. We can make any kind of record we like."
Much of their international clout was forged in their ’90s relationship with the Siltbreeze label, run and recently revived by Tom Lax of Philadelphia, with whom they released some of their most acclaimed discs, including 1992’s Harsh ’70s Reality, 1995’s White House, and 1997’s Tusk. This period saw them create what many consider to be their most vital material, flirting with darkly catchy riffs while always doggedly blazing space for noisy, alien buzz and scrape. Secret Earth is their brand new release, shortly following last year’s Future Artists (both Ba Da Bing) and recorded over two days, six months apart. Morley’s eerie exhale oversees a stupor-inducing slow grind that renders track titles a useless roadmap for proceedings: after a few minutes with the Dead C, one won’t notice such trifling details as the stops, starts, and riffs anymore. They are, after all, masters of mood. Morley and Russell’s guitars-at-odds and Yeats’ distantly mic’d drums consistently scare up an unsettling, deconstructed blues-groove that makes clear the precedent for Sebadoh’s stoned angst cassettes.
Regardless of influence, the upcoming US dates mark only their third outing to the States since getting together — damn! What do they do on the rare occasion they’re on a stage? "We approach live shows quietly, without undue fuss, so we can take ’em by surprise and wring their necks before they can fight back," Russell wrote, pointing out that there’s nothing static about a Dead C track — other than that staticky sound.
Any fan with the whoops and feedback screeches of "Driver U.F.O." committed to memory will hear something that sounds rather otherwise if that song shows up in the set. "We are ‘fully improvised,’ though every now and then we’ll attempt an item from our back catalog," Russell continued. "But we never, ever practice them."
This back catalog is becoming more available thanks to Ba Da Bing, their US label for the past few years, which will be reissuing DR503 and 1989’s Eusa Kills (Flying Nun) on vinyl. The band is, according to Russell, also hoping to reissue its pre-1990 work next year (working title: Complete ’80s Reality). Immediately available, however, is the tour-only 12-inch, which includes recent live recordings, and gives an added incentive to check ’em out this week.
Why not? It’s hard not to be charmed by their passive-aggressive, cavalier mode of operation. "We just do what we do and dare people to ignore it," Russell offered. "Which they duly do, and we could not care less."
THE DEAD C
With Six Organs of Admittance
Thurs/16, 8 p.m., $20
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750
Greener than thou
> news@sfbg.com
GREEN CITY Mayor Gavin Newsom has made a high profile push for several new green initiatives in recent weeks, a concerted political move that comes just as he and his political team are aggressively working to subvert a city ballot measure that would make far bigger gains in combating climate change and greening the city’s energy portfolio than anything he’s proposing.
"San Franciscans should be ashamed that they have a mayor who is greenwashing and gay-washing his way to the governor’s mansion," Julian Davis, campaign manager for Proposition H, the Clean Energy Act, told the Guardian.
Newsom opposes Proposition H, which would direct the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to figure out how to provide clean and renewable energy to the city, and Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has hired Newsom’s chief political strategist, Eric Jaye, to lead the multimillion dollar campaign to defeat the measure.
Davis said the steady stream of green initiatives from the Mayor’s Office are simply a means to make up for the mayor’s severe deficiency in environmental credibility. "You can’t call yourself a green mayor when here is a genuine green measure and you’re against it," Davis said.
The array of press releases issued from the mayor’s office include a partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative to transform the Civic Center into a green model of sustainability by reducing water and energy use, and installing solar panels as well as living roofs.
Further green city visions include installing solar paneling on 1,500 commercial buildings within one year, and giving building owners rebates of as much as $10,000 as part of the solar rebate program launched in July.
But some supervisors take issue with the direction of the program, which they say would only make solar installation companies become rich people overnight. "There are a lot of flaws in that thing," said Sup. Jake McGoldrick. "It should’ve been steered toward low-income folks, nonprofits, schools — stuff like that."
Sup. Gerardo Sandoval said the mayor’s program would lead to an unequal distribution of wealth with an already small pool of resources — something he is trying to combat with a loan program that would offset the cost of solar installation for residences. "If we don’t help residences, families will be left to their own devices," he said.
Moreover, the mayor has set aside $1 million for the Environmental Service Learning Initiative (ESLI), which would integrate environmental community service into K-12 schools, and hired a Director of Sustainability, with $150,000 salary, to develop curriculum and help the district become more energy efficient and environmentally conscious. And last week the Mayor’s Office promoted rainwater harvesting for the purposes of outdoor irrigation and indoor toilet use, and sent out press releases touting the SFPUC’s Big Blue Bucket eco-fair held Oct. 11 to educate people about this concept.
Brad Johnson, legislative coordinator at the Sierra Club, called on Newsom to do more than use green events for media opportunities, stating that the mayor’s initiatives are "not a truly visionary policy, like Prop. H is a visionary and sweeping policy."
When the Mayor’s Office was contacted about the statements made by the supervisors and the Sierra Club as well as the contradiction in policies, Nathan Ballard, Newsom’s director of communication, replied tersely: "They’re not experts." Attempts to elicit further clarification yielded no reply from Ballard.
But Jared Blumenfeld, director of the San Francisco Environment Department, and interim director of the Recreation and Park Department, provided broader insight to the mayor’s environmental politics, insisting that the green calendar of events is nothing out of the ordinary.
"Every week we do a great number of events around the environment. The pace has been pretty unrelenting for the past year," Blumenfeld told us.
But experienced environmental leaders remain suspicious of the timing and correlation of the mayor’s green photo and media opportunities while he wages an aggressive war against Prop. H.
"I think they’re related, and he’s trying to cover his bases should Prop. H win and he finds himself on the losing side of a major initiative," said John Rizzo, a board member of the Sierra Club.
“SF Open Studios: Weekend 3”
STUDY 3, 2003 BY DAVID KING
PREVIEW The third weekend of Open Studios focuses on spaces in Bernal Heights, Duboce Triangle, Glen Park, Eureka Valley, Noe Valley, and the Castro and Mission districts. Here’s a lucky-seven list of artists worth seeking out.
Matt Sarconi Spatial clarity is a major aspect of Sarconi’s photography; his use of frames within frames elevates images that might be pretty as a greeting card into something more contemplative. His settings span from the Bay Area to Spain and Croatia.
A.J. Oishi There’s at least a bit of the late Sol Lewitt in Oishi’s low-key commercial acrylic-on-canvas paintings. She patterns circles within circles (or conversely uses smaller circles to form larger ones) while experimenting with muted versions of appetizing colors such as chocolate, orange, and cherry.
David King The gallery owner Jack Fischer first showed me some of King’s collages, which commingle camp and metaphysical imagery in a manner that never neglects visual pleasure. King’s most recent work veers away from blue-hued dreamland into darker, microscopic images. His sharp-eyed use of found material means an upcoming residency at the San Francisco Dump holds promise.
Lauren Kohne A mixed-media piece that mines musicality from the grids, strips, and numbers on Muni bus transfers demonstrates Kohne’s interest in foregrounding societal habit and patterns.
Victor Cartagena Artist and teacher Cartagena had a stark solo exhibition at Galeria de la Raza earlier this year — a visit to his busy studio is bound to reveal different facets of (and relationships between) his mixed media works, painting, and printmaking.
Bill Basquin This is a busy time for Basquin: you can find his collected films for sale at Needles and Pens, see at least one of them projected by kino21 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this week, and check out photos from his urban garden series "SOILED" at Mission Pie. He’ll show photos and installation work at Open Studios.
Robert H. Garrett Garrett’s photo in the Open Studios guide suggests a color version of Henry Wessel’s droll, laconic, crisp images of the suburban landscape.
SF OPEN STUDIOS: WEEKEND 3 Various neighborhoods, SF. (415) 861-9838. www.artspan.org
Nachtmystium
PREVIEW Nachtmystium, Chicago’s premier experimental black metallers, are on their fourth album with Assassins: Black Meddle, Part 1 (Century Media). Beyond the surface punning and musical nods to Pink Floyd — "One of These Nights" is the black mirror reflection of "One of These Days" from Meddle (Capitol, 1971) — the Chicago foursome seem to be out to offend the sensibilities of black metal traditionalists with spacious production, electronic scribbles, bluesy solos, and a deeply epic scope. It might be an attempt to escape the pall that their indirect association with NSBM — that’s "national Socialist black metal" or "Nazi metal" to you — temporarily cast on their rising cachet with hipsters (Black Meddle got a Best New Music nod from Pitchfork at the time of its release).
Blake Judd, Jeff Wilson, John Necromancer, and Zack Simmons have gone out of their way to dissociate themselves with politically motivated music, but it’s still tricky territory. In the search for more extreme, more dubiously authentic sounds, where can one find the line in the sand? It’s like seeing a Burzum patch on the Gossip guitarist’s hoodie: that’s not simple irony, accepting something to express a deeper rejection, right? In the case of a band like Nachtmystium, there’s the question of whether its aesthetic is inherently bound up with black metal’s anti-Semitic history, or whether the path it’s pursuing — cutting across classic rock and even classical tropes — messes with the smooth functioning of this equivalence mechanism.
Nachtmystium shares a bill with Wolves in the Throne Room — a band of cooperative-farm-dwelling radical ecologists whose relationship to black metal’s aesthetic/political orientations is more obviously strained, but is equally provocative. Don’t worry — there’s still time to bury your going-out clothes in the earth and arrive at the show smelling like decay.
NACHTMYSTIUM With Wolves in the Throne Room, Saros, and Embers. Sun/12, 8 p.m., $12. Oakland Metro Operahouse, 630 Third St., Oakl. www.oaklandmetro.org
Obliterating the dollar
REVIEW Andrew Schoultz is prescient. A week or two before Wall Street and Washington were forced to admit they’d obliterated the US economy, he unveiled new work that literally slices and blows up the dollar bill. In his A Litany of Defense and a Liturgy of Power (Come) from the Palm of His Hand, shards of the pyramid, all-seeing eye, and other mint-y green fixtures slice through the air alongside similar fragments of currency from other countries. These literal markers of economic chaos add yet more kinetic distress signals to the meta-intersections of iconic bird flocks, medieval warhorses, and whirlpools in Schoultz’s already claustrophobic vision. A hand-rendered George Washington stares blankly from the center of one relatively quiet piece, unaware that his image needs to be multiplied 700 billion times to begin to balance a different George’s checkbook.
"In Gods We Trust" finds Schoultz adding flagrant emphasis to his political content — most of his titles are declarative mouthfuls. Conversely, he veers away from wall murals into mixed-media pieces that only might be more market friendly. He braids collage elements into drawings and paintings. He’s also constructed a centerpiece installation that presents scales of justice set catastrophically awry. Subtlety isn’t on the agenda, and maybe it shouldn’t be. After all, Schoultz’s timing couldn’t be more right.
The visual impact of the work in Schoultz’s first major SF solo show in four years is best experienced one piece at a time, and at close range. Obsessive-compulsive repetition is a chief facet of some of the best San Francisco paintings and drawings of the past decade, and Schoultz, who has lived here around that long, is a standout representative of the practice. But unlike OCD peers’ veerings toward op art or pointillist tactics, his graffiti or mural aesthetic doesn’t always fit into a frame — it can seem murky from afar. This isn’t a matter of scale — in fact, my favorite pieces in "In God We Trust" are small ones — as much as perspective. I like Schoultz’s art most when I’m close enough to stare into the eye of the storm, or, in Sinking Slaveship, the blue (as opposed to black) hole.
ANDREW SCHOULTZ: IN GODS WE TRUST Through Oct. 25. Tues.–Fri., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Marx and Zavaterro, 77 Geary, second floor, SF. (415) 627-9111, www.marxzav.com