Media

The SF Weekly’s war of attrition

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Another fascinating day in court in the Guardian’s predatory-pricing lawsuit against the SF Weekly and its corporate owner. The Weekly is now well into its defense case, and the lawyers for the 16-paper chain that owns the paper are making the same arguments they’ve made all along. And they aren’t holding up very well.

The Guardian, as readers of this blog know by now, is claiming that the Weekly and Village Voice Media, the chain formerly known as New Times, sold ads below cost in an effort to harm the local competitor.

Today’s main witness was Jed Brunst, the company’s Phoenix-based CFO. H. Sinclair Kerr, the Weekly’s lead attorney, asked Brunst why New Times decided to buy the Weekly in 1995. “We saw San Francisco as a very vibrant market,” Brunst testified. “We saw it as an opportunity to make money and to practice good journalism.”

It was clear that Brunst was well prepared – much of his testimony seemed pre-rehearsed, which is not terribly surprising. Lawyers in a case like this typically make sure their own witnesses aren’t going to surprise them.

But Brunst got out of the box with a big problem: He said the chain saw San Francisco as a good opportunity to make money. And it became clear as the day went on that the Weekly had never made any money at all. Neither had the East Bay Express, which New Times bought in 2001. Both lost huge amounts of cash.

Climate change: yes? no? banana?

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Global warming is just one of many, many emergency environmental issues — like, the world is just plain looking trashy lately — but, hey, warming gets all the press these days. Whether or not the uptick in earthly sweatiness is caused by man (“anthropogenic”) or cosmos (solar flares?) is kind of a moot point: everyone pretty much agrees there’s some warming going on, and, to me, anything that panics consumers into using less and actually thinking about how products are made and where they come from is a good thing. Consumer consciousness needs a swift kick in the pants — let the panic continue!

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Yet it’s been awfully confusing to follow the warming debates — especially since it’s so easy in these days of selective media to just read things you agree with. Luckily, Interneteurs Douglas Campbell and Dennis Dutton (who maintains the mighty fine Arts & Letters Daily Web site) have started Climate Debate Daily, which collates recently Web-published “Calls to Action” and “Dissenting Voices” on either side of the debate (perhaps a bit simplistically). Informative!

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Wherefore art thou, Romero?

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On returning to his independent filmmaking roots: When we made [1968’s Night of the Living Dead] we were just a bunch of young people in Pittsburgh. We had a commercial production company, so we had our own equipment, and we audaciously decided that we should go out and make a movie. So the first one was real guerrilla filmmaking — but actually the first five or six films that I made were completely independent. After Dawn of the Dead [1978] we hooked up with a distributor-production company, and they financed us to some bigger budgets. But even those films were independent. There was a period when I was courted by Hollywood and made a couple of studio pictures and was getting very discouraged. Finally, the last zombie film that I made, Land of the Dead [2005], was for Universal. And they really let me alone — they let me make that movie. But it was a grueling process. And I realized, "Man, this is all getting too big. It’s approaching Thunderdome here." I felt this incredible disconnect with the roots, with where it all came from. I really wanted to throttle down and back up and see if I had the energy and the chops to go do another really low-budget film. I needed to revitalize myself.

On the trend of movies using the self-filming technique: I haven’t seen Cloverfield. Redacted, I guess, was similar. Vantage Point I haven’t seen. I thought that we would be the originators of it, but now I guess I have to say we’re part of a trend. I think there’s some kind of collective subconscious — all the world has a camera these days. I think it’s rather obvious for fiction writers, filmmakers, whatever, to take note of that and use it. It’s pretty scary, this blogosphere — man, you just wonder who’s out there throwing up all these ideas.

On finding truth in the media, be it mainstream or underground: To me that’s the argument that’s central to [Diary of the Dead]. When there were three networks, sure, [the news] was all being managed and controlled and spun, no doubt. Now it’s completely unmanaged. And it’s not even necessarily all information — it’s opinions, viewpoints. Anybody could get on there with any kind of an idea and find followers. That’s what spooks me. What would you rather have: it being controlled but not be insightful, or would you rather have this chaos? And I don’t have the answer to that. I almost blame the public more than anybody else for being suckered into it and not bothering to do their own homework. People would rather have somebody tell them the way it is, and go along with it.

On the living dead: The zombies, to me, don’t represent anything except the disaster. They could be a hurricane. They could be an approaching asteroid. My stories have always been about the people and how they respond or fail to respond or respond improperly — and keep trying to preserve the world as they knew it instead of readjusting to whatever these changes are on the planet. The zombies are just zombies. They’re the reason that I can get these movies made. They’re the fun part of it! But to me, they don’t represent anything in particular.

Tiger Beat bard

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

If 1967 was the Summer of Love, then late 1968 through mid-1969 brought the seasons of mass deflowering. This wasn’t due to LSD, flower power, or even the trickling down of the sexual revolution. Rather, it was the perfidious influence of a nearly 400-year-old play that teenagers had previously read and watched with glazed eyes. Franco Zeffirelli’s big-screen version of Romeo and Juliet made underage sex look extremely hot, virtuous, and stick-it-to-the-man rebellious. And because it was rated G (until the Motion Picture Association of America subsequently wised up and gave it a PG) and based on, you know, the Bard, parents couldn’t object.

Foolish adults, so not with it! As sheer incitement to Get Laid Now, this Romeo and Juliet was the worst celluloid influence on America’s impressionable youth since Splendor in the Grass seven years earlier — and that was an old-fashioned movie whose mature stars (Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty) were only playing at being teens. Plus, they kept their clothes on.

Not so Zeffirelli discoveries Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, age 17 and 15, respectively. It took her frenziedly heaving bosom and his famously bare ass (the shot that perhaps heated up gay lib as much as Stonewall) to add new life to hitherto yawnsville poetry, making everyone under the age of consent desperate to be in love, thwarted, secretive, coital, and tragic. That last is, after all, the ultimate teenage fantasy: to die knowing that grown-ups will finally realize that crushing your delicate feelings drove you to it. Oh, now you’re sorry! Enjoy that eternal guilt! (In 1981, Zeffirelli would film the ultimate camp incarnation of this theme, Endless Love.)

Much was made of the principals’ youth, for once close to that of the characters as envisioned by Shakespeare. The most famous prior screen version, MGM’s 1936 extravaganza, had cast thirty- to fiftysomethings in the lead roles. Onstage, various famed thespians practically portrayed the young lovers into senility. Zeffirelli — who’d successfully tamed famous couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a robust Taming of the Shrew the year before — not only selected young actors but also juiced Romeo and Juliet with a hyperbolic style designed to excite. The film’s color-saturated photography, costumes, and production design make Renaissance-era Veronese life the apex of sensuality. Nino Rota’s score (with a love theme that topped the United States pop charts as a Henry Mancini instrumental) is romantic catnip. Male testosterone — including that of Tybalt, as played by Michael York, who’d never seem so flamingly heterosexual again — jumps off the screen in splendor, with equally rattling sword fights and projectile codpieces.

The goal was intoxication, and as obvious as some of the above tactics might appear now, Romeo and Juliet remains a heady brew. The mega make-out movie’s principals handled such fantastic early pop culture fortunes with varying success. Hussey carved out a long, diverse adult acting career in projects around the globe. Whiting, an unhappy teen idol ("Oh Romeo, Romeo, why are you so difficult to talk to?" Tiger Beat lamented), tried to earn cred in an eccentric array of projects. But most were poorly received, apart from 1973’s exceptional all-star TV movie Frankenstein: The True Story, in which he played the bad doctor. The next year he retired to engage in other pursuits.

Zeffirelli — an opera director before, during, and after his relevancy as a screen auteur — revealed himself to be a maestro of overripe kitsch in such films as 1971’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon (a now-unwatchable Jesus People Movement–era shampoo-commercial take on St. Francis), 1988’s Young Toscanini (La Liz meets C. Thomas Howell), and 1999’s Cher-starring Fascist Italy soft sell Tea with Mussolini. He’s openly gay, yet a big-time papist (who supports the church’s stance on homosexuality), as well as a member of media magnate and corruption magnet Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative Forza Italia party. One of his greatest legacies may turn out to be inadvertent: Bruce Robinson, who plays Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet, later claimed Zeffirelli’s on-set overtures inspired the genius character of Uncle Monty in Robinson’s immortal 1987 directorial debut, Withnail and I.

Thanks to Marc Huestis’s one-night-only 40th anniversary revival at the Castro Theatre — with Hussey in person, interviewed, and no doubt impersonated by local personalities in the preshow — Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet will be celebrated as a cultural phenomenon. The cheesy contemporary amp-up that Baz Luhrmann engineered in 1996, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes doing the heavy breathing, also struck a popular adolescent chord, but its trendy vulgarity has already aged a whole lot worse than Zeffirelli’s version. The latter remains breathless, and is duly classic.

ROMEO AND JULIET

With Olivia Hussey in person

Thurs/14, 7 p.m., $12.50–$25

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 863-0611

www.castrotheatre.com

Ecoerotic

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› molly@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY You may be the greenest, most permacultured locavore with a heart made of hemp. You tend your community garden on dates, travel only by biodiesel bus, and make your Christmas gifts from recycled materials rather than contribute to our culture’s overconsumption of resources. But chances are you haven’t thought about how your sex habits are affecting the planet — not to mention your partner. And what better time to think about it than the week of Valentine’s Day, the date when couples feel entitled to sex and singles are saddest about not having any? (Or is that the other way around?… But I digress.)

`Thing is, your favorite dildo may be releasing deadly toxins into the environment. Your discarded butt plug, so small and cute and seemingly innocent, may spend several centuries in a landfill before it degrades — if it ever does. Your vibrator could be the reason for someone else’s unnaturally tiny penis. Really.

The issue with sex toys — one of the more recent industries to be examined through a green lens — is twofold: disposal and toxicity.

The first is the easier, less contentious, and somewhat more obvious issue. Since we’re talking about a variety of objects often made of plastic, PVC, rubber, electronics, and other nonbiodegradable materials, it makes sense that concern has been raised about where sex toys end up and what happens to them when they get there. Just like water bottles and discarded train sets, sex toys made from these materials seem destined to last longer on the earth than any of us will — causing more pain in the long term than pleasure in the short term.

The second issue is whether sex toys are safe for humans, both those who use them and those who may be exposed to them through the environment. The concern here is phthalates, a variety of chemicals most commonly used to soften hard plastics but also found in cosmetics, food wraps, and a number of other ubiquitous consumer goods — and until recently, often used in plastic-based sex toys. There has been substantial research suggesting that phthalates — chemicals not naturally occurring in the human body — are present in 90 percent of Americans’ bodies. Furthermore, scientists believe phthalates can have a detrimental effect on male reproductive development.

"Severe interference can involve incomplete development of the penis, undescended testicles, decreased testosterone levels," Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California at San Francisco, told the Guardian. "There can be lifelong consequences."

Are there counterarguments to all of these worries? Sure. For starters, there’s always the issue of how green to go. Should you worry more about your rubber dildo — which you may keep for 10 years — than about your plastic shower curtain, which you’ll throw in the landfill in three months? Or is this just the latest ecofriendly phase our culture (and media) is going through? And as for phthalates, there are lots of different kinds — and no one is exactly sure what they do or how they do it.

But if you’re anything like Coyote Days, buyer for Good Vibrations, you’ll figure safe is better than sorry. Days said the major sex toy retailer has decided to phase out products containing phthalates, just in case it turns out the chemicals really are as bad as scientists suspect. In particular, Days suggested replacement with silicone varieties, if you can afford them.

And if you’re worried about how well a sex toy will biodegrade, you can always opt for a metal, wood, or glass variety.

In fact, if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can check out the P Aqua from Love Piece, a dildo made from seaweed and water that, while solid at room temperature, can be boiled to oblivion for Earth-friendly disposal. (Though the company asks you to notify it if the dildo has a sour odor. Ew.)

As for Good Vibrations’ future inventory? Day said, "We’re not quite at the seaweed and water level yet." Me either. But I’m hoping for a sushi restaurant tie-in when this thing gets big. Buy one California roll-in-the-hay, get one seaweed sex toy free? I like it.

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Editor’s Notes by Tim Redmond

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom is all hot and bothered about the report by the Board of Supervisors budget analyst saying Newsom has taken $1 million that is supposed to pay for homeless services and Muni and used it to pay his own staff. The mayor says it’s all just a personal attack on him by the supervisors. He also says other mayors have done the same thing. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Phil Ginsberg, the mayor’s chief of staff, called the report "bullshit." (Actually, the Chronicle, in its infinite decorum, used the term "bull-," to avoid offending the tender values of its readers.)

OK, look: there are politics going on here. The supervisors and the mayor aren’t getting along, the mayor has unleashed a rather savage attack on board president Aaron Peskin, Peskin is going after some of the mayor’s commissioners, and maybe Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who asked for the report, had some sort of political motivation. Or perhaps McGoldrick, who doesn’t tend to like this sort of bullshit, just got mad that the mayor was doing something funky with the taxpayers’ money.

Whatever. Nobody is denying the factual accuracy of the report. And if Newsom wants to make an issue of it, he ought to get beyond the politics and the accusations and just tell us:

Does he really think this is a good way to spend city funds?

Should the Human Services Agency, which is responsible for the most needy and broke people in town, be spending $95,000 per year to pay for a mayoral press aide? Does that money really help the homeless? Is there a good argument that having a media flack in Newsom’s shop defending the mayor’s homeless policies helps save lives, provide housing, or get substance abusers into recovery?

Fine, Mr. Mayor: perhaps you can elucidate it.

Was Stuart Sunshine, until recently Newsom’s chief transportation aide, really worth $203,000 per year? Did paying him that salary out of Muni’s budget help improve bus service? I dunno, maybe it did. But I haven’t heard Newsom tell me how.

Is it fair — and is it a good idea — at a time when every city department is being asked to cut back, when crucial city programs are being reduced or eliminated, when it’s going to be an ugly year for the public sector in general and San Francisco in particular, for the mayor to be filling his staff jobs on someone else’s dime?

That’s the real issue here: if Newsom thinks his high-paid staffers in his newly renovated office are doing such a bang-up job that two underfunded city agencies ought to be writing their paychecks, then the public is welcome to listen to his pitch. But there is nothing political or personal about asking the questions; that’s exactly what the supervisors ought to be doing.

Newsom is the chief executive of San Francisco. He sets the policies; he hires the senior staff. He can be upset with the legislators who are the checks and balances of his power, and he can disagree with the conclusions of a report that the board’s budget analyst has produced. But to call it bullshit when he knows it’s true (and when he knows from his own experience that Harvey Rose, the budget analyst, is widely respected for his fairness) … well, that just sounds defensive. Bad place to be, Mr. Mayor.

Activism brings hyphy back to Berkeley

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By Jamilah King

Almost a week before the media was glowing with tales of unprecedented numbers of youth voters hitting the poles in this week’s primary elections, hundreds of young activists and music heads made their power known in Berkeley.

Last week, Cal’s Activism Right There conference brought new attention to the intersection of art and politics. The week-long conference culminated in a night of performances last Friday, Feb. 1. The night began with a panel that featured five generations of Cal activists, including Bettina Abtheker and onetime Guardian columnist Jeff Chang, who dissected everything from organizing during the Free Speech Movement to the myth of defeat during the Reagan years. The event also featured sick performances by spoken word artists, including a group from the Philadelphia called Ammo and iLL-Literacy and thieir band the Hi-Lifes.

But the climax of the event came when Zion I took the stage. Savvy bloggers have already detailed the sheer energy of the performance. As dozens – it looked like hundreds – of young folks crowded onto the stage and went dumb in what Zion I called one of their livest performances, the power of the hip-hop generation was felt loud and clear (pardon the poor video quality):

Predatory pricing: A primer

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The jury in the Guardian’s lawsuit against the SF Weekly got a primer today on how prdatory pricing by a big chain works.

Guardian controller Sandy Lange took the stand, and outlined the results of information she’d compiled on below-cost sales by the Weekly and the East Bay Express. The Guardian is charging that Village Voice Media, formerly known as New Times, which owns the Weekly and until recently owned the Express, has been selling ads below the cost of producing them to harm a competitor.

That’s a violation of California law.

Lange explained how she and other Guardian staffers and legal assistants had entered into an Excel spreadsheet some 20,000 sales transactions from the Weekly and the Guardian, involving 128 accounts, over eight years, from 1999 to 2007. In each case, the computer tracked whether the Weekly’s ads were sold below cost — and how often those cut-rate sales were linked to the Guardian either losing a client or being forced to cut prices to salvage the deal.

The spreadsheet showed that in 91 percent of the transactions, the Weekly’s sale price was below cost. That’s consistent with data Lange presenting showing that the Weekly had consistently lost money. In 2003, she noted, the cost of producing a page of the SF Weekly was $1,936.17 — and the paper’s revenue was just $1,634.36. That meant the Weekly was losing about $300 for every page it produced. A few years later, the gap had grown: The cost of producing a page was $2,730 and the revenue was $1,900 — meaning the Weekly was losing $800 a page.

How was this possible? Simple: The chain kept pouring in money from its 15 other markets to prop up San Francisco and the East Bay.

Then Lange explained her correlation report: In 34 percent of the transactions involving below-cost sales, the Weekly’s rate-cutting was associated with the Guardian deeply discounting its own ads (threatening the financial viability of a local paper with no deep-pockets parent). And when she added in the accounts that the Guardian lost entirely after the Weekly’s predatory pricing, the total came to 66 percent.

In other words, in two-thirds of the cases where the Weekly had sold below cost, the Guardian had either had to follow suit and sell for less than the ads were worth — or lost the account and the business.

Lange also presented charts that showed how the predatory behavior had eroded the Guardian’s share of the local alternative-weekly ad market.

On cross-examination, Weekly attorney Ivo Labar tried to argue that the market itself had shrunk. In 2000, he pointed out, the two papers together sold $13 million worth of display ads. By 2007, that number had shrunk to $8.8 million. “Isn’t it true,” Labar asked, “that advertisers chose to spend only $8.8 million in 2007?”

Lange said she disagreed with the premise of the question. “Because of your predatory pricing,” she testified, “you put negative pressure on the market.” In other words, the Weekly depressed the costs of all alt-weekly ads in San Francisco.

Labar then pointed to a handful of accounts in which the Weekly either sold ads for a higher price than the Guardian or the Guardian appeared to have lost the business for reasons that had nothing to do with price, and tried to discredit the entire report on the basis of a few examples. That’s been the Weekly’s practice in this case: Take a clear trend (years of below-cost pricing) and clear results (damage to the Guardian) and try to poo-poo it by saying there are a few cases here and there that don’t fit the pattern.

Lange’s testimony will continue tomorrow morning.

Gee, the SF Weekly is bored

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Some interesting evidence emerged in the Guardian’s lawsuit against the SF Weekly and its corporate parent today, most of it in the form of depositions from witnesses. If you were looking for the kind of drama we had yesterday, this was fairly mundane stuff — but if you listened to what a former publisher of the Weekly said in his depositions, it showed exactly why this case has gone to trial.

Before I start on that, though, one note: I’m trying to play this fairly straight, and not get into personality stuff, but I have to say: The Weekly’s hit man, Dandy Andy Van De Voorde, is … how else can I say this? Making stuff up.

From the lead of his blog (if you can call it that) tonight:

After yesterday’s fireworks from Bruce Brugmann, Guardian attorneys returned to their plodding ways Wednesday, subjecting the jury to an entire day of testimony from witnesses who weren’t there.

Brugmann, who treated the court to a three-hour display that included spluttering, shouting and fist pounding yesterday, sat quietly in the gallery as his lawyers put on a noticeably dull performance that had at least two jurors visibly napping at times

Um … I was there yesterday, and I can say with absolute certainty that Bruce Brugmann never once pounded anything with his fist and never shouted. That’s just wrong. It didn’t happen. (I don’t know what “sputtering” is, so I can’t comment on that.)

And Andy: Most bloggers use links to connect to other stuff they’re talking about. You’ve blasted me a few times, but your poor readers don’t have the help of these simple little bits of HTML code that let you go from one blog to another so they can see what you’re attacking. It’s not that hard; I bet someone at your 16-paper chain could teach you how to do it.

Now then, back to the story:

Most of the morning was devoted to the (admittedly unexciting) reading of the deposition of Chris Keating, who until early 2007 was publisher of the SF Weekly and group publisher for the Weekly and the East Bay Express. Keating started out the deposition insisting that when he came to San Francisco (and to a paper that was losing lots of money) he was determined to control expenses and bring them into line with revenues.

In fact, he testified, one of his primary goals was to raise ad rates.

But somehow, that didn’t happen. The losses kept rising — and, apparently with Keating’s permission, the Weekly continued to sell ads below cost.

In fact, Keating admitted that “given the level of costs, [the Weekly was] not pricing at a level to cover those costs.”

In other words, the Village Voice Media chain, which owned the Weekly, was selling ads below what it cost to produce them.

There are three elements required to prove the Guardian’s case: The Weekly and Express had to be selling ads below cost, for the purpose of harming a competitor, and there had to be damages.

Keating as much as admitted to the first part.

Then he proceeded to come close to admitting to the second.

In a Sept. 26, 2005 email that was presented to the jury, Keating, discussing a national ad buy, said the Weekly and Express “would give the most amount of rate break to get the business over the Guardian. If that means I net $18 an inch I’ll take it.”

Keating had previously said that the Weekly needed to sell ads for at least $18.75 to $19.25 an inch to make any profit.

And his deposition was filled with references the the Guardian as the Weekly’s main competitor (a fact that undermines the chain’s argument that the San Francisco market is so diversified that the head-to-head between the Guardian and the Weekly is only a small part of the competitive landscape.)

Evidence admitted this morning showed that the Weekly prepared regular “Guardian reports” on how the locally owned paper was doing in ad count — and that there was no other competitor that rated that sort of treatment.

The Guardian lawyers also presented parts of the deposition of Jed Brunst, the chain’s top financial officer, who was asked what happened when the Weekly was losing money and couldn’t pay its bills. Simple, he said: The Weekly got “cash advances from the parent.”

Did those “advances,” he was asked, come with promissory notes or anything else that would suggest they were loans?

No, Brunst said. Nothing like that.

In other words, the chain was propping up a money-losing operating in San Francisco, which was selling ads below cost in an effort to get the business away from the Guardian.

That’s quite a set of admissions. Sorry Dandy Andy was bored.

Weekly tries a “gotcha” — and fails

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It was a wild day in court in the Guardian’s lawsuit against the SF Weekly. Bruce Brugmann took the stand. He generally made the SF Weekly’s lawyer look silly – but the Weekly’s out-of-town hit man, Andy Van De Voorde, was almost giddy with his attempts to say that Bruce Brugmann did poorly as a witness.

I’m biased, of course (so is the hit man), but I have to disagree: Bruce laid out the Guardian’s history, explained how the Weekly had attacked us, and stood up remarkably well under a cross-examination that may have given Van De Voorde something to write about, but didn’t really present many relevant facts to the jury.

Several times during cross examination, Weekly attorney H. Sinclair Kerr tried to pull the legal equivalent of a “gotcha.” He kept pushing the notion that the media marketplace in San Francisco is so crowded with so many competitors that the Weekly and the Guardian really aren’t fighting over a discrete slice of that market. Bruce had none of it. Kerr kept trying to get Bruce to talk about competition in general and kept trying to get him to admit that the Weekly isn’t our biggest or most important competitor; Bruce would have none of it.

“I’m talking about competition in general,” Kerr said at one point.
“Well, I’m talking about competition with New Times,” Bruce replied.

Kerr tried to say Bruce wasn’t much of a publisher because he didn’t go on sales calls, but Bruce made quick work of that, too, saying that he was the Guardian’s editor as well, that editors generally don’t do sales calls, that we have a sales staff to do that, and besides “I’m a busy guy – I’m blogging.”

The jury members laughed.

Should you be ‘dancing?

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The Sundance Film Festival is like Los Angeles (in fact, for 10 days Park City, Utah, really is LA, plus snow). Each year you think it can’t possibly get any more congested and shallow, yet it does. This is largely the fault of umpteen opportunists (people who set up celebrity gifting lounges! Paris Hilton!) who show up to exploit the enormous and indiscriminate media spotlight.

But the festival must also share blame, its original "purity" having given way to a marketplace and red-carpet zone often barely distinguishable from the entertainment mainstream. This year found such personalities representing indie cred as U2, Robert De Niro, and Mary-Kate Olsen. Media attention invariably goes to the most high-profile films — for which folks like Josh Hartnett and Tom Hanks suffer pay cuts for art’s sake — which almost invariably disappoint. Ultimately unwanted and unloved this year were such big-noise entries as The Deal (William H. Macy, Meg Ryan, and LL Cool J … together at last!) and What Just Happened? (De Niro, Bruce Willis, Sean Penn), both soft satires of that kwazy industry.

There was the ongoing curse of the Sundance selection that plays like a moderately quirky cable flick, this time encompassing The Last Word (Winona Ryder and Wes Bentley), Smart People (Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker), The Year of Getting to Know Us (Jimmy Fallon and Lucy Liu), and so forth. There were literary adaptations (of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke and Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh), each easier to take if you hadn’t read the book; sophomore slumps (Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock’s Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, aptly described in the Sundance catalog as "a Happy Meal of a documentary"); and the usual cases of festival acquisition fever likely to look less all that in the sobering light of theatrical release. Principal examples: American Teen, a heatedly bid on doc that smells as manipulated as an MTV reality show (in fact some MTV staff told me so), and Hamlet 2, which is Waiting for Guffman plus Dead Poets Society minus about 45 percent of the laughs that description would lead you to expect. Fifty-five percent ain’t bad, but is it worth Focus Feature’s $10 million?

Of course, there were plenty of good movies at Sundance. Nonfiction cinema is usually where the most quality is concentrated, this year being no exception. There was an astute appreciation of Hunter S. Thompson (Gonzo) and one of Derek Jarman. Anvil! The Story of Anvil paid fond tribute to a Spinal Tap–ish Canadian ’80s metal band that refuses to quit even though it probably ought to. On the "my movie, my self" tip, Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster was a funny, surprisingly sympathetic look at steroid use, while Londoner Chris Waitt’s A Complete History of My Sexual Failures made autohumiliation hilarious.

On the fiction front, there was less to get excited about — The Wackness was yet another teen-angst exercise, albeit a good one, with Ben Kingsley cast more or less as Dennis Hopper. Tuvalu director Veit Helmer’s Absurdistan is definitely the German Azerbaijani Lysistrata whimsy of the year. But only one film at the festival knocked my socks way off: Half Nelson makers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Sugar, about a Dominican Republic pitcher’s culture shock when drafted into the United States minor leagues. I don’t even like baseball — but this movie is the rare kind so enjoyably right that after a while you find yourself grinning like a fool from sheer pleasure.

Ballin’

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "I get to go to the ball!"

Longtime Oakland soul hopeful Ledisi isn’t spilling the beans about what designer she’ll be wearing to the Grammy Awards on Feb. 10, but on the phone from New York City, where she’s as deep into the wardrobe as the lion and the witch, she guarantees, "I’ll be cute!"

Red-carpet frocks, on-and-off awards ceremonies, and nominations for Best R&B Album for last year’s Lost and Found (Verve Forecast) and, get this, Best New Artist ("People say I’m a new artist, and I am a new artist in this mainstream world," says the woman who put out her previous two CDs on her LeSun label. "I’ve never had third-party involvement in anything!") — it’s all high drama for Ledisi Anibade Young. Nonetheless, she knows she’ll be enjoying herself to the core and even more because she’ll be exactly where she wants to be: namely, comfortable in her own skin.

"I just feel like I’ve finally come into my own, meaning I’m OK with myself," the vocalist says, bubbling like de Brignac. "I’m still hungry, but I’m not begging anymore."

As we speak, Ledisi is floating, as she puts it, in more ways than one: she’s drifting between residences in NYC, Oakland, and Washington DC and lifting higher about the national spotlight that comes with her nominations, a recognition laid on a clutch of other once and present Bay Area artists like Keyshia Cole, Machine Head, and Turtle Island Quartet and local indie label Six Degrees (for Bebel Gilberto, Ce’U, and Spanish Harlem Orchestra). Regardless of how you feel about the continuing relevance of the Recording Academy paperweights — yes, the Best Polka Album category is still in place — the thrill a nominee like Ledisi feels is catching, especially when one considers the flights of ups and downs she’s undergone over the years.

"I didn’t think I wanted the pressure of being in the front again, with all the issues of image and the style of singing and choosing a category to be in — you know, all that kind of the pressure!" she says, recalling the times she thought about giving up performing. After her debut, Soulsinger (LeSun, 1999), won near-universal praise but garnered zero coveted R&B radio attention, she left Oakland and moved to NYC because, she says, she was "tired of going around in circles." With an understudy role in Broadway’s Caroline, or Change in her change pocket, Ledisi had begun developing the stage version of The Color Purple when she signed to Verve and dropped out of the production to work on Lost and Found.

But after working for a year and a half to get her deal, "the guy who signed me," Verve president Ryan Goldstein, was suddenly laid off among many others. She finished the record, took a breath, and went back into the studio, fearing the new powers that be would require further alterations.

Meanwhile, she adds, "I was finding myself in my personal life": she ended a long relationship and met her father. Her R&B vocalist mother had already told her that her biological father was Larry Saunders, but only when Ledisi traveled to Amsterdam and mentioned his name to a DJ there did she realize others knew The Prophet of Soul, the name of Saunders’s 1976 Soul International LP. "He said, ‘We know who he is!’ and pulled out his record," Ledisi remembers. Her parents had met on tour when Saunders was a starring performer and her mother a backup singer, and when Ledisi finally met her father, "it was just like peas in a pod. I never felt so complete. Now I don’t have those things around me going, ‘Who am I?’<0x2009>"

Ledisi also discovered that her father was the love child of blues vocalist Johnny Ace, who achieved legend as an early rock ‘n’ roll casualty, allegedly shooting himself during a Russian roulette game on Christmas Day, 1954. "When I found out," she says, "I was, like, ‘No wonder we’re all singers!’<0x2009>"

"You know this record is really powerful, with all this happening during its process," she says of Lost and Found, which eventually debuted at number 10 on Billboard‘s R&B chart. "I tell you, with all the stuff that went on, it’s all worth it. Win or lose, I’m just so complete. I just want to stay in the moment — couldn’t ask for a better moment to happen."

WALKING PNEUMONIA, HERE WE COME

THE EVERYBODYFIELDS


Everything’s OK with these tenderhearted crust-country kids. With I See Hawks in LA. Wed/6, 8 p.m., $12. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

PIERCED ARROWS


Dead Moon rising: "Walking Wounded" vets Fred and Toody Cole keep flying that lo-fi flag. With Black Lips. Fri/8, 9 p.m., $15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

TERRIBLE TWOS


Motor City kiddies trade in snot-laced cacophony. With Top Ten and Wylde Youth. Sat/9, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

PALEO


Gimmick or gimme-gimme? Brooklyn’s David Strackany followed in the footsteps of Suzan-Lori Parks with his "Song Diary" project: 365 songs, one written and recorded each day for a year. But his next trick after that media blitz? With the Blank Tapes and Eddy Burke. Sun/10, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

MERLE HAGGARD


NorCal’s country music giant reaches east with 2007’s The Bluegrass Sessions (McCoury/Hag) — see where it takes him. Mon/11, 8 p.m., $65. Grand at the Regency Center, 1290 Sutter, SF. www.ticketmaster.com

LOS AMIGOS INVISIBLES


The very newest sounds from the Venezuelans of disco derring-do? With Si*Se and DJ Franky Boissy. Mon/11–Tues/12, 8 p.m., $22. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Techsploitation: Information dystopia

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TECHSPLOITATION I was raised on the idea that the information age would usher in a democratic, communication-based utopia, but recently I was offered at least two object lessons in why that particular dream is a lie.

First, a dead surveillance satellite, one roughly the size of a bus, fell out of orbit and into a collision course with Earth. It will likely do no damage, so don’t worry about being crushed to death by flying chunks of the National Security Agency budget. The important part is that nobody knew when the satellite died. Maybe a year ago? Maybe a few days? A rep from the National Security Council would only say, "Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation."

Is this our info utopia, wherein we literally lose track of bus-size shit flying through space over our heads? I mean, how many surveillance satellites do we have? It’s not like I love the techno-surveillance state, but it is a little shocking that the SIGINT nerds who run it are so out of touch that they can’t even keep track of their orbiting spy gear. Still, it’s hard to be too upset when Big Brother isn’t watching.

But that satellite could just as easily have been a forgotten communications satellite dive-bombing our atmosphere. And that would have sucked, especially since last week’s mega Internet outage across huge parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia didn’t bring down the global economy largely because people had satellite access to the Internet. This Internet outage, which took millions of people (and a few countries) off-line, happened when two 17,000-mile underwater fiber-optic cables running between Japan and Europe were accidentally cut. No one is quite sure how they were severed, but it was most likely due to human error — an anchor was probably dropped in the wrong place.

And so big chunks of Dubai went dark, as did many Southeast Asian countries. Businesses couldn’t operate; people couldn’t communicate. The people and businesses that were able to keep running were by and large the ones that didn’t depend on cheap Internet services that use only one or two cables to route their traffic. It’s cheaper to rent time on one cable, but if that cable is cut, you lose everything. Most customers don’t research how their Internet service providers route Internet traffic across the Asian continent — or across the Pacific Ocean — so they don’t realize their communications could be disrupted, possibly for weeks, if some drunken sailor drops anchor in the wrong spot.

In fact, few of us anywhere in the world consider the fact that our info utopia is a fragile thing based on networks that are both material and vulnerable. We think of the Internet as a world of ideas, a place "out there," unburdened by physical constraints. Even if you wanted to research which physical cables your ISP uses to route your traffic, it would be very difficult to do without a strong technical background and the help of the North American Network Operators’ Group list, an e-mail list for high-level network administrators.

So why do a crashing spy satellite and a partly dark Internet mean we’ve entered the age of information dystopia? Quite simply, they are signs that our brave new infrastructure is failing around us even as we claim that it offers a shining path to the future. It’s as if the future is breaking down before we get a chance to realize its potential.

But the information age doesn’t have to end this way, in a world where
can-and-string-network jokes aren’t so funny anymore. There are a few simple things we could do. We could help consumers better understand what happens when they buy Internet access by showing them what routes their traffic might take and giving them realistic statistics about possible outages. People could then make better choices about what services to buy. And so could telcos and nations.

Why shouldn’t we have solid research on which ISPs are most likely to suffer the kind of network outages we just witnessed from the severing of those two cables? Consumer groups could undertake this research. Or, since developed nations suffer more, perhaps the United Nations might want to conduct the investigation as a matter of Internet governance. We know where car traffic and sea traffic go. Why don’t we know where Internet traffic goes?

Another thing we could do to stop the information dystopia is to cut down on spy satellites, but that, as they say, is another column.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is investing in semaphore communication networks.

Guardian trial heats up

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The fireworks have started to explode in the trial of the Guardian‘s lawsuit against the SF Weekly and its chain parent corporation as three witnesses testified that the chain’s top executive had vowed to put the Guardian out of business.

Lawyers for the Weekly and Village Voice Media, which owns the San Francisco paper and 15 others, tried aggressively to undermine the critical testimony. The Guardian is claiming the SF Weekly sold ads below cost for years in an effort to damage the local competitor. That’s illegal in California.

The Weekly lawyers aren’t putting up much of a fight so far over whether the paper sold ads at such cheap rates that it was losing money. In fact, evidence presented in court shows that VVM has lost $25 million over the past 11 years in San Francisco and the East Bay, where the chain until recently owned the East Bay Express.

But VVM lawyers H. Sinclair Kerr and Ivo Labar have contended the Weekly and the Express were simply cutting rates to meet competition or were trying to increase market share — and harming a competitor was never a motivation.

Three Guardian witnesses provided evidence to the contrary. Jennifer Lopez, Carrie Fisher, and Andrew O’Hehir all worked for the Weekly when the chain, then known as New Times, bought it in 1995. Lopez sold ads, Fisher was copublisher, and O’Hehir was the editor.

All three testified that Mike Lacey, one of the two top executives at the chain, arrived at the Weekly offices in January 1995 to announce the sale and told a meeting of the staff that he intended to wipe out the local competitor. At one point, Fisher said, Lacey picked up a copy of the Guardian, threw it on the floor, and said, "We don’t just want to compete — we want to put the Guardian out of business."

Two of the early witnesses were Guardian copublisher Jean Dibble and me. Dibble talked about how the paper had survived recessions, economic changes, and legions of competitors over the years but was put on the ropes by the chain’s predatory tactics. I talked about the impact — how the Guardian, which has to live on its revenue and has no chain with deep pockets to subsidize it, has been forced to cut costs, lay off staff, and reduce the size of the paper.

Kerr and Labar pushed us both, trying to make the case that it was the rise of the Internet and the changing demographics of the city that caused the Guardian‘s problems. But in fact, Dibble stated, the Guardian has lost very little display advertising business to the Internet.

On Feb. 4 the Guardian lawyers read from the depositions of Jim Larkin, VVM’s chairman, and Scott Tobias, the chain’s president. Among the fascinating information: Larkin testified that VVM paid between $5 million and $6 million for the East Bay Express and sold it for around $3 million, taking a big loss on the deal. Larkin also said both the Weekly and the Express were profitable when the chain bought them but that they’ve lost money ever since.

Most important, both Larkin and Tobias testified that they received monthly "Guardian reports" focusing on how the Weekly and the Express had been competing with the local alternative newspaper in San Francisco. The depositions were riddled with references to the Guardian as the two VVM papers’ main competitor — which undermines the claim by VVM lawyers that the chain papers were focused on a broad range of other media, not just the alternative-paper market.

In one instance, the depositions show, VVM cut a deal with Clear Channel for naming rights at the Warfield theater that specifically stated the Weekly and the Express would get 85 to 90 percent of the ads from concert promoter Bill Graham Presents, then owned by Clear Channel — and the Guardian would get "15 percent to nothing."

The next phase of the trial will focus on financial data, as the Guardian presents records to the jury that show how the Weekly and the Express were consistently selling ads below cost.

Editor’s Notes by Tim Redmond

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

There are plenty of stark contrasts between the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns, starting with the fact that all of the Republicans sound like morons and both the Democrats have credible policy ideas that they appear to have thought about.

But the thing that struck me most in the week before the California primary was the tone of the GOP debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, where John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Ron Paul spent an inordinate amount of time arguing over who was the most authentic conservative.

The c word came up about every five seconds. I’m a right-wing conservative! No, no, I’m even more conservative. Hey, I’m so conservative I think all the immigrants ought to be lassoed with a chain and dragged back to Mexico behind a Hummer. Romney even hit McCain for winning the New York Times endorsement, saying that means he isn’t a real conservative.

And I wondered: what would the world be like if the Democrats were arguing over who was the best liberal?

Imagine if Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fought over who can be most trusted to reverse the 25-year trend of economic and social inequality in the United States, who would most effectively tax the rich and shift some of the wealth to the middle class and poor. Imagine if they fought over whose health care plan would move the nation toward a single-payer system with no private insurance participation? Clinton: "I’ll cut the defense budget so fast that the military-industrial complex will think it’s 1976 all over again." Obama: "Yeah? Well, I’ll eliminate 90 percent of the nuclear arsenal, quit selling high-tech weapons to trouble spots around the world, and institute an excess-profits tax on any corporation that milks the taxpayer in a defense contract." Take that.

I have a friend who’s in the political consulting business; he works on big national campaigns and does high-level strategy for the Democratic Party. He’ll laugh when he reads this; when I say this kind of stuff, he shakes his head and says, "This is a conservative country."

But I don’t believe it.

Another political consultant, a guy who’s run some of the most important liberal campaigns in the state over the past couple of decades, stopped by our office a few weeks ago, and after he talked about an energy plan he’s pushing, I took him aside and asked one of my favorite questions:

How much money would it take — what kind of a campaign would you have to run, and for how long — to counter a quarter century of brilliant, effective right-wing propaganda and reconvince the American people to have faith in the public sector? What would we have to do to make people think — as they did during the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s — that government is part of the solution, not part of the problem? If some rich person put up a billion dollars, could you do it?

"It wouldn’t take that much," the guy said. But from the look on his face, I suspect he thought it would be close.

I used to blame the media for all of this, but I’ve been in the media for a very long time now, and I don’t think it’s that easy. Somewhere along the line the bad guys figured out that if they repeated their message often enough and funded their think tanks and promoted their political leaders, eventually they’d sell a scam of cosmic proportions to the electorate. We could tell our story too, if we thought it was important enough.

G-Spot: Everyone’s a wiener

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› marke@sfbg.com

You’d think that amid all of the bell tolling and hand-wringing about DIY online media proliferation, professionally produced gay porn would have gone the way of the floppy disk and dial-up modem long ago. (Remember waiting 20 minutes for free stud-muffin bitmaps to download, pixel by aching pixel, onto your 10-inch monitor? Ah, AOL blue balls. Whither the ’90s?)

But no – gay porn is the new fireplace. You can hardly turn around in most finer homo homes and gardens without some two-dimensional boy butter spattering your delicate cheekbones. Gooey! And every edgy hetero is at least partially versed in the extensive oeuvres of quasi-professional online sites like Bait Bus or His First Huge Cock, if only because sticky fingers often click too quickly on flickering banner ads.

Gay porn’s also big business, of course, and an especially homegrown one. Almost all of the most profitable studios are based in San Francisco – a rare case of several giants of an industry being located within mere blocks of one another. SoMa has become the Wall Street of Crisco.

The reasons behind this multimillions-generating clusterfuck are myriad: mainly, the local economic advantages, cultural environment, and plethora of scruffy multiculti boys (all the rage among a rapidly globalized audience) make SF a much more fertile gay porn hot spot than the traditionally down-and-dirty San Fernando Valley. Also, many big studios are the bastard children of SF’s Falcon Studios, the granddaddy purveyor of male video erotica headed by the late, irascible Chuck Holmes, for whom our groundbreaking Charles M. Holmes LGBT Community Center was affectionately named.

And it doesn’t hurt that Silicon Valley is a whip flick down the freeway. Gay porn studios have been aggressively savvy about riding the online wave to solvency, even if lately that’s meant a hilariously regrettable spate of behind-the-scenes blogs and vids that feature pec-implanted gym queens sashaying nude around Palm Springs pools and fussing over which pair of snakeskin trousers go with which Tony Lamas. Decisions.

Yet despite the buttloads of profit, cornered markets, community accolades, and extensive and rabid fan bases, gay porn studios – like cuddly-wuddly gay porn stars themselves – have massive inferiority complexes. They want recognition, dammit! Thus the annual Golden Globes of filmed homosexual obscenities, the GayVN Awards, presented by venerable gay porn insider news source GayVN (recent headline: "Jock Itch in the Can!"). Last year’s awards presentation at the Castro Theatre — open to the public – was a raucous, substar-studded affair featuring MC Kathy Griffin and more fashion nightmares than you could shake a spangled man boa at. This year’s awards show expands to the Giftcenter Pavilion – because, really, doesn’t this celebration require an entire pavilion? – and although no D-list host has been announced, fan tickets are being snatched up at a robo-thrusting pace.

A quick and gleeful scan gleans from among the 2008 nominees: Gaytanamo for Best Leather Video (when, oh when, will someone make Fahrenheit 9"x11"?); Tiger’s Eiffel Tower: Paris Is Mine!, Gunnery Sgt. McCool, and Rocks and Hard Places for Best Video; the mathematically challenging Bottom of the Ninth: Little Big League 3 for Best Direction, and, inevitably, Buckback Mountain (Best Specialty Release) and Bi Pole Her (Best Bisexual Video, duh). There are awards for Best Box Cover Concept, Best Music, and the always bracingly racist Best Ethnic-Themed Video: (Arabian Tales 1-2? Spilling the Tea? Queens Plaza Pickup 2, surprisingly not about migrant-worker prostitution? Only the judges can decide.

But most enticing of all, barring any prerecorded acceptance speeches — and despite the writer’s strike – there will be actual humans in attendance, the real faces behind the fornication, in all of their fleshy solidity, crossing their powder-encrusted pinkies and gazing hopefully, hazardously into the glare of their peers’ applause or opprobrium. The meltdowns will be spectacular!

GAYVN AWARDS

Feb. 16, 6 p.m., $100

Giftcenter Pavilion

888 Brannan, SF

(415) 861-7733

www.gayvnawards.com

Dinner for Dr. Paul

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It was a casual dinner affair for the supporters of Ron Paul on election night, with roughly thirty people showing up for dinner under the big screen at Thai Stick, 925 O’Farrell St. As the results came in from around the country, party-goers casually looked up from their animated conversations to remark at the TV screen.
George Gaboury, self-described “media support”, struggled with a projector and screen, but was finally able to set up a slide show of the groups’ past exploits – including the staged Ron Paul “TeaParty” in December. The projected video showed attendees throwing boxes with words like “Patriot Act” and “WTO” written on them off of a pier near the Ferry Building.
“For people who have been abused by the government for so long, this is almost therapy,” Gaboury said, watching the screen.

TRAGIC COUNT/COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS REPORT

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*Novye Izvestia*
No 17
February 5, 2008

*TRAGIC COUNT*

Author: Yevgenia Zubchenko

*COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS IS CRITICAL OF THE STATE OF AFFAIRS WITH FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IN RUSSIA*

Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) presented its latest report titled Attacks On The Media (2007). At least 65 journalists were murdered worldwide in the line of duty, almost half of them in Iraq. The state of affairs with freedom of expression in Russia was castigated as unacceptable.
CPJ, an international non-governmental organization with headquarters in New York, has been drafting these reports for years. Authors of the latest indicate that 2007 became the worst year since 1994 when 66 journalists had been killed. Iraq is branded in the document as “a slaughterhouse for the press”: over 170 journalists and technicians of media outlets perished in this country since March 2003. China on the other hand is the leader in the number of imprisoned journalists (29 editors and journalists). According to CPJ, 127 journalists were imprisoned throughout the world by December 1, 2007.
Authors of the report analyze the situation in Russia and point out that the recent parliamentary campaign included “certain events disturbing for the media and civil society.” CPJ experts are convinced that media outlets and non-governmental organizations in Russia with the temerity to criticize the regime are put under pressure or closed altogether. “The Russian authorities made use of the charges of extremism and bureaucratic means of punishment,” the report stated. Still, the authors did comment on “certain progress” made in investigation of assassinations of Igor Domnikov, Yuri Schekochikhin, and Anna Politkovskaya (all of them Novaya Gazeta journalists).
CPJ analysts also commented on the new trends in the relations between the powers-that-be and the media. “Regional authorities used fabricated charged in connection copyright violations or the use of piratical software to shut down independent or oppositionist media outlets on the eve of elections,” experts said. The report made a reference to Sergei Kurt-Adjiyev, Novaya Gazeta (Samara) editor charged with the use of unlicensed software.
As for assassinations, the CPJ report only mentions the death of Ivan Safronov, military observer of Kommersant. According to the Glasnost Protection Foundation in the meantime, 8 journalists including Safronov perished in Russia in 2007. “They mostly concentrate on whatever deaths foment scandals or whatever, while a great deal of journalists killed in the provinces are never even mentioned,” Glasnost Protection Foundation President Aleksei Simonov said. On the other hand, data always differ depending on the criteria used by the compiling organization. Reporters Without Frontiers, for example, claims that 86 journalists were killed in 2007 while the International Journalistic Organization compiled a list of 100 (but this structure does not differentiate between journalists and their assistants).
In any event, specialists tend to agree with CPJ’s conclusions on the state of affairs with freedom of expression in Russia. “They say true,” Igor Yakovenko, General Secretary of the Russian Journalistic Union, said. “Most media outlets accepted the rules of the game forced on them by the authorities. By and large, there is nobody left to apply pressure to.” “Most journalists are trying to revert to the double-think practiced in the Soviet Union,” Yakovenko said.
Simonov agrees that journalists in Russia gave in. “Freedom of expression exists only in several newspapers, one radio broadcaster, and one program on REN-TV channel,” Simonov said. “All others play one and the same tune.”

Lacey: I’ll bury the Guardian

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lacey.jpg
Mike Lacey, waving, is flanked by attorneys Ivo Labar and H. Sinclair Kerr, left, and Don Moon (who actually IS wearing a puffy coat) right, after hearing testimony about how Lacey told SF Weekly staffers that he wanted to put the Guardian out of business. Photo By Luke Thomas, fogcityjournal.

Three witnesses have testified in the Guardian v. SF Weekly trial that they heard Mike Lacey, a top executive with the chain that owns the Weekly, say he wanted to put the Guardian out of business.

That’s a key part of the case: The Guardian has to prove that the Weekly sold ads below cost – which isn’t much in dispute, since the chain has essentially admitted it – for the purpose of injuring a competitor. The evidence that Lacey, executive editor and one of the two primary owners of Village Voice Media (formerly New Times) intended to damage the Guardian bolsters that point.

The witnesses, former Weekly sales rep Jennifer Lopez, former Weekly co-publisher Carrie Fisher, and former Weekly editor Andrew O’Hehir, all described a January 1995 meeting at which Lacey arrived to tell the staff that New Times had bought the Weekly.

Lacey, along with Jim Larkin, the chain’s other top exec, marched into the Weekly office on Brannan street “with a very intimidating entrance,” Fisher testified. With Lacey and Larkin were Hal Smith, who headed up the chain’s ad sales, and Patty Calhoun, the editor of Westword, a New Times paper.

Lacey launched into a profanity-laced diatribe, Fisher testified, “insulting the office space, insulting the neighborhood and making comments on the quality of the writing” in what was then a small locally owned paper.

At one point, she said, Lacey picked up a copy of the Bay Guardian, threw it on the floor and said “we don’t just want to compete, we want to put the Guardian out of business.” While she said she couldn’t swear to the exactly language Lacey used, “the gist of what he said was very clear.”

Jennifer Lopez, who was a sales rep, testified to the same point yesterday.
Andrew O’Hehir, who was editor of the SF Weekly at the time of New Times purchase in l995, confirmed that story, describing Lacey throwing the Guardian on the floor and saying that the New Times was coming to San Francisco to “bury the Bay Guardian.”

O’Hehir said that Lacey told the Weekly staff that the New Times had “deep pockets and deep resources” and would compete aggressively on both editorial and business fronts with the Guardian, the dominant alternative in San Francisco.

“We intend to beat the Guardian,” he quoted Lacey as saying. In answer to a question a question about the “future relations with the Guardian,” Lacey said that “we are going to bury the Bay Guardian. We would like to put the Bay Guardian out of business.” O’Hehir is now living in New York City and working as columnist for Salon, the online magazine.

H. Sinclair Kerr, attorney for VVM/New Times, sought to minimize the impact of Lacey’s quote by suggesting that Lacey was like a coach coming in to “fire up the team.” No, replied E. Craig Moody, Guardian attorney — in the case of the old Weekly the team was “quickly disbanded.”

In fact, O’Heir was soon fired and most of the rest of the staff either quit or were fired.

The last event of the day was the reading of the deposition of Jim Larkin, the CEO of VVM/New Times. Richard Hill, a Guardian attorney, read the questions from the deposition that he took earlier this year in Larkin’s Phoenix, Arizona office. Ralph Alldredge, another Guardian attorney, sat in the witness box and played Larkin to Hill’s questions.

Larkin admitted in his deposition that the New Times was in a rate battle with the Bay Guardian in San Francisco, but refused to acknowledge that the chain had an advantage because of its size and assets.

Larkin had trouble remember lots of things. He couldn’t remember the Bay Guardian Report that the Weekly publisher prepared each week and sent to him. He was at the Lacey meeting but he couldn’t remember what Lacey about the Guardian or even what Lacey said about anything at the meeting. He denied ever saying he was “going to run the Bay Guardian out of business.”

Larkin also refused to say if he ever put a floor under the Weekly’s below cost sales.

“I try to make money,” he said. “I try to break even. I don’t do things this way.”

Well, if Larkin and his publishers at the SF Weekly and the East Bay Express were operating under Larkin’s mandate to make money, something was going very wrong, because the chain lost $25 million dollars over 11 years, without having one profitable year.

The Guardian claims this is no coincidence – the chain was willing to lose money through below-cost sales in an effort to harm a local competitor, which is illegal under California business law.

The jury trial continues Monday morning at 8:30 before Superior Court Judge Marla Miller.

PS: Andy Van De Voorde is not only nasty, he has no sense of humor. Jesus, Andy, I’m nowhere near cool enough to wear a puffy coat. I do, however, put either my Langlitz Leathers bomber jacket (made by a locally owned independent business) or a waterproof ski jacket over my clothes when it’s pouring rain.

Lighten up, Andy.

BG v SFW lawsuit: I take the stand

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I took the witness stand today to testify in the Guardian’s lawsuit against the SF Weekly and its parent, Village Voice Media, the chain formerly known as New Times. I talked about why I worked for the Guardian, why I’d stuck around for more than 25 years and why I believe in the paper’s misssion.

The point I tried to make: The Guardian is a community institution. We care about this city; we care about people and issues and arts and culture, and whether you agree or disagree with our political stands, we’re part of San Francisco — and our readers have always known that. The Weekly is part of a chain based in Phoenix.

And yeah, I think local ownership matters, and I think independent papers matter, and I think it sucks that the Weekly has been selling ads below cost and trying to hurt our ability to compete. The Weekly has been losing tons of money; when VVM/New Times owned the East Bay Express, that paper lost tons of money, too. Over the past 11 years, the chain has lost $25 million in the Bay Area. That’s what happens when you sell ads for less than the cost of producing them.

And it only works, and it only makes sense, if you have a big chain that can subsidize the losses in the hope that the locally owned competitor will be driven out of business. (That, by the way, is what this suit is all about.)

As I pointed out, I don’t have the luxury the SF Weekly editors do; I have to live with the money we make by selling ads. If that revenue goes down, I have to cut costs. The Weekly editors don’t have to meet that kind of budget; they can just get more money from headquarters.

The Weekly’s lawyer, Ivo Labar, went after me pretty hard on cross-examination. He tried that old saw that the Guardian writes too many stories about PG&E; I told him that if the Washington Post had decided that Watergate was a one-day story, American history would be very different. He suggested that I was a bad editor and that the paper was losing readers because we had nothing valuable to say. I’m afraid I have to disagree.

But in the end, the facts and the law are on our side in this case. I’ll keep you posted.

PS: BeyondChron has been doing a good job covering the trial, which, the online news outlet points out, is about more than just a business dispute — it’s crucial to the future of independent media.

Digging the new-old roots

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Yodeling is African? Well, one could certainly trace the practice from the Ituri of the Congolese rainforest, described as the first people by ancient Egyptian chroniclers, to country icons such as Jimmie Rodgers — who, incidentally, recorded with Louis Armstrong — but also to less-explored sonic shores like James Brown’s iconic scream or Marvin Gaye’s version limning his legendary 1970s LP cycle. However, if this is too far a leap for you to make, the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ appearance as part of the San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival might be a bit of a head-scratcher. The Chocolate Drops — Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson — don’t straight-up yodel, but their harmonies and banjo-and-fiddle-anchored instrumentation reach back not only to the halcyon days when Africans in America entertained themselves at fiddle-scored frolics but all the way to the griot tradition of Western Sudan.

To be sure, the Durham, NC, band — yes, their moniker invokes the Tennessee Chocolate Drops and Mississippi Mud Steppers of yore — is neither superurban nor contemporary. Its members play strictly prewar African American string-band repertoire, as evidenced by their current release, Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind (Music Maker): see "Tom Dula," "Ol’ Corn Likker," and yep, the ever-contested "Dixie." Still, being young, hip children of the postdesegregation era, the trio have a musical expression and an aesthetic that are informed as much by the hybridity and daring of the 1960s and ’70s golden age of black rock and psychedelic soul as by classic country and western and ethnographic studies of the genre’s African antecedents. If only by pursuing their dusky twang muse in reaction to the deplorable, moribund state of today’s urban music, these Drops live in a world that differs from that of their 1920s and ’30s predecessors chiefly in that (a) the wages of desegregation include black audiences’ will to eschew arts reminiscent of their past of bondage and hard times and (b) the dominant society’s prevailing and most popular stereotype of blackness has an inner-city face — "Makes me wanna holler!" — that rejects any other ways of being or seeing.

Some of my colleagues — and doubtless myself — have been obliquely accused of holding up emerging progressive black artists on the rock scene and satellites such as the Drops as examples of uplift and enshrining their hard work beneath a welter of sociological wankery stretching back into the prewar mists of time to Talented Tenth big daddy W.E.B. DuBois. Yet if some of that giddiness at Afro-futurist striving is sloughed off, there remains the central, inescapable fact that in much of the West, rock is still seen as "black music played by white people" and country is this nation’s most racially separatist genre.

Much was made this past fall of Rissi Palmer’s Billboard debut with "Country Girl," since it was the first such charting by an African American in the two decades after the long-forgotten Dona Mason’s fleeting dent with "Green Eyes (Cryin’ Those Blue Tears)." Critics worked overtime to display color-blind bona fides, bending themselves over backward in the attempt to downplay the role of race in Palmer’s ascent and note the singularity of the event while also sugarcoating their general consensus on the disc’s mediocrity. Personally, I wish Sister Palmer much success and far better material plus production, but what struck me most was the cover of her eponymous release. Only a sliver of Palmer’s brown face is to be seen, the overabundance of russet curls perhaps meant as commerce-inducing allusion to the Great Reba. It’s certainly baffling that 42 years since Charley Pride’s debut was released sans artist photo, one still has to mince around difference.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops have more to overcome, seeing as they play an earlier, unplugged form of twang that’s light-years away from not only the patriotic-pandering, reheated Southern boogie and suburban soccer mom–and–sippy cup sentiments of mainstream Nashville but also the ambitious incursions of Palmer and Cowboy Troy and the recent bluegrass syncretism of Merle Haggard and Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. Now sharing management with fellow Carolinians the Avett Brothers, the Drops are garnering just acclaim from roots-friendly media and making fruitful incursions into important arenas, like the annual MerleFest. Yes, the trio are benefiting from both the breakdown of a music industry in turmoil that’s reliant on streams from independents and a more reflective moment among media and listeners who have come of age in an era of omnivorous multiculturalism. And let us not discount the Drops’ sheer talent and charm.

Nevertheless, as a mere Negress observer, this critic finds her attention inevitably straying to the lack of intraracial institutions to advocate for artists in the Drops’ vein — in addition to an infrastructure for developing and sustaining nonwhite audiences’ taste for the music. Since, y’know, they’re isolated from the rural. (Must Dona be retroactively screwed and chopped?) It would be nice to see the band embraced as part of a continuum by progressive audiences, just as there’s some energy around soul-folk as a viable trend. Will the Drops’ version of young fogydom garner as much breathless critical attention and community building as the so-called freak-folk scene does? Of course, cross-cultural exchange is possible: current Nashvegas superstar and Troy’s boy "Big" Kenny Alphin traveled to Sudan last October to do his bit for the struggle and got the country press to cover his contribution. Now if only the media would turn its attention to the best acolytes of medieval traditions created by Africans not abject but divinely inspired.

THE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS

Feb. 7, 8 p.m., $18.50–<\d>$19.50

Freight and Salvage Coffee House

1111 Addison, Berk.

(510) 548-1761

www.thefreight.org

CRITICAL ‘GRASS

The San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival runs Feb. 1–9. For information on other shows and events, go to www.sfbluegrass.org.

Hey, hey. hey

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m getting superfrustrated. I don’t have the highest sex drive, but it is there. However, I can’t understand why my brain and my body tell me I want to do something that inevitably makes me uncomfortable and unhappy. Even with lube, sex leaves me sore for hours. I try to just give my boyfriend blow jobs so I can avoid having to have sex. I’m 21 and have been sexually active for about three years, and I just always figured everything would get better.

And it’s not just intercourse. I can’t even get satisfaction from oral sex or masturbating. It feels good, but then, instead of feeling really good, like you’d expect an orgasm to feel, suddenly the pleasure just kind of floats away. If that’s an orgasm, it freaking sucks. It is unpleasant. What is wrong with me?

Love,

Can’t Get Me No

Dear No:

Well, you’re feeling unsatisfied because you are unsatisfied, but I don’t suppose that observation will be much use to you. I believe that your sex drive is still hanging in there because you’re a normal, healthy girl, albeit one who apparently has some issues (we call them issues when we don’t know what else to call them) about sex. In fact, I’m not even sure you have issues. I think maybe you’ve just had some pretty disappointing sex, and now you’re so expecting it to be disappointing that you’re just kind of jumping straight to the disappointment part and saving yourself some time.

I hate to punt this over to the usual suspects, but I think I have to: there are books — lots of them — on learning to masturbate and becoming orgasmic, and there are some spectacular toys out there now, toys so good that I am not altogether positive I can still promise that using them will not interfere with partnered sex, but that is obviously a topic and a worry (an issue) for another time. The old classics are Lonnie Barbach (reads like a therapist writing for Redbook) and Betty Dodson (reads like someone you’d meet at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival circa 1989, naked), but they have accumulated an Amazon wish list full of competition. Poke around in the reviews and see if you can find someone whose voice you can stand, buy their book or DVD and whatever basic toys they recommend, then buy yourself some time and use them. Oh, and if there’s a boyfriend in the picture, tell him to just hang on — you’ve got some stuff to do, after which he’s welcome to come back and try again. If this works, it should be worth the wait.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’m a 20-year-old girl, and I’ve only had one sex partner in my life (high school to the present). My problem seems pretty basic: sex doesn’t feel all that great. I mean, the desire’s there, but after a few minutes the pleasure part just kind of slips away, despite my best efforts to keep it there, and the rest either feels like smushing body parts or else is unpleasant and sort of painful. I don’t understand how it can start off feeling good and then just go away. Maybe I’m on the right track: When I first started having sex (three years ago), it always felt pretty neutral. Now at least it feels good for a little while. I can’t masturbate to orgasm either. It is incredibly frustrating to want to have sex even knowing I always go away from it unsatisfied. What is wrong with me? How do I fix it?’

Love,

No, No, No

Dear No:

I had to reread very carefully to make sure you and your doppelgänger are not the same person, but look — you’re slightly younger! And very, very faintly less hopeless, I think, but that is open to interpretation. I do find it slightly heartening that you are experiencing a bit of pleasure now, since I’d have to agree that it would be difficult to get motivated in the complete absence of anything more exciting than "neutral" sensation.

It’s neither fair nor just but is common for women to be out of touch with their sexual-response cycles in a way that simply doesn’t occur very often in males. I hesitate — nay, refuse! — to get into any historical-political reasons why this might be so. (It’s not that they’re not interesting, but they are unfruitful and dreadfully distracting, which is exactly what we don’t need when we’re already having trouble concentrating.) I’m afraid you too will have to buy media products and a vibrator that tickles at least your fancy, put the boyfriend on hold, and get practicing. I wish I could wave a magic wand for you, but I think the motor in mine is burning out. They don’t last forever.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Polite message from the surveillance state

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Say what you want about Google being an evil corporate overlord that steals all of your private data, turns it into info-mulch, and then injects it into the technoslaves to keep them drugged and helpless. There are still some good things about the company. For example, Google’s IM program, Google Talk, sends you a warning message alerting you when the person on the other end of your chat is recording your chat session.

Just the other day I was chatting with somebody about something slightly personal and noticed that she’d suddenly turned on Record for our chat. I knew everything I was saying was being logged and filed in her Gmail. In this case I wasn’t too concerned. For one thing, I wasn’t saying anything I’d regret seeing in print. I’m used to the idea that anything I say on chat might be recorded and logged.

What was different about this experience was that Google warned me first — told me point-blank that I was basically under surveillance from the Google server, which would automatically log and save that conversation. I appreciated that. It meant I could opt out of the conversation and preserve my privacy. It also meant that other people using Gtalk, who might not have had the expectation that all of their chat sessions might be recorded, would be enlightened.

It also reminded me forcefully that Google is a far more polite and privacy-concerned evil overlord than the United States government.

Right now members of Congress are trying to pass a law that would grant immunity to large telcos like AT&T that have been spying on their customers’ private phone conversations and passing along what they’ve learned to the National Security Agency. The law, called the Protect America Act, would allow telephone and Internet providers to hand over all private data on their networks to the government — without notifying their customers and without any court supervision of what amounts to mass wiretapping.

Last year the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued AT&T for vioutf8g the Fourth Amendment when a whistle-blower at AT&T revealed that the company was handing over private information to the NSA without warrants. That case has been working its way through the courts, and making some headway; in fact, it was starting to look like AT&T would be forced to pay damages to its customers for vioutf8g their rights. But the Protect America Act would stop this court case in its tracks by granting retroactive immunity to AT&T and any other company that spied on people for the NSA without warrants.

The whole situation is insane. First, it’s outrageous that telcos would illegally hand over their private customer data to the government. And second, it’s even more outrageous that when its scheme was discovered, the government tried to pass a law making it retroactively legal for AT&T to have broken one of the most fundamental of our civil rights: protection of our private data from the government.

Imagine what would happen if the phone and Internet systems in our country had the same warnings on them that Gtalk has. Every time you picked up the phone to make a call or logged on to the Internet, you’d get a helpful little message: "Warning: the government is recording everything that you are saying and doing right now." Holy crap.

The good news is that it’s not too late. The Protect America Act must pass both houses of Congress to become law, so you can still alert your local congress critters in the House that you don’t want retroactive immunity for telcos that are logging your private conversations for the NSA. Find out more at stopthespying.org.

And remember, everything you say and do is being logged. This polite message has been brought to you by the surveillance state.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who yells "Fuck you!" into her phone as often as she can — you know, just to let the NSA know how she really feels.<

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