New York Times

The Gaza resolution

Zelda Bronstein
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25
The Gaza resolution

I know that the discussion over the John Avalos/Sophie Maxwell resolution on the Gaza flotilla took a long time, and kept the supervisors and assorted city employees at work until midnight, and Sweet Melissa says that cost the city some money. And she makes the same argument we hear all the time when these things come up:


Run for Congress. Jump onto a plane. Send money to a worthy organization. But don’t pat yourselves on the back for a job well done for getting a resolution passed at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. No one cares what supervisors in San Francisco think about foreign policy — not other governments, not the U.S. government and especially not those of us who live here.


And while I agree that the Avalos/Maxwell resolution was long, and isn’t going to change anyone’s foreign policy, and a lot of the other supervisors wish the thing had never come up and consider it a terrible time suck, let me gently argue the contrary.


I remember back in 1984, when a group of Berkeley activists put a measure on that city’s ballot calling on the United States to reduce its aid to Israel by the amount that Israel was spending on settlements in the occupied territories. It bitterly divided the Berkeley City Council, stirred up a giant fuss on the city’s left and led to a long, dramatic meeting of the progressive coalition called Berkeley Citizens Action. BCA was at that point the equivalent of a political party that dominated city politics.


There were some BCA members who thought the measure was horrible, anti-semitic and needed to be killed. There were some who argued that the situation in the occupied territories was so bad that Americans needed to take a stand. There were others who said this was none of Berkeley’s business — much as a lot of San Francisco pundits say that the Avalos resolution was none of San Francisco’s business.


But I was there and I watched all of this come down — and in the end, it was a good thing for Berkeley, for progressive politics, and for the way the left in the Bay Area thought about the Middle East.


Lee Halterman, who was an aide to then-Rep Ron Dellums, chaired the BCA meeting where the measure was debated, and he did a fabulous job — everyone got a chance to speak, nobody was cut off, the discussion was remarkably civil and in the end, the group voted not to endorse either side. “This was healthy for BCA,” Halterman told me afterward. “This was a discussion that we needed to have.”


I didn’t know much of anything about the politics of Israel’s settlement policies back then, and I got quite an education. The Arab-American Anti-Discrimination committee folks came down to the Guardian and — calmly, without harsh rhetoric, explained why the continuing settlement construction was creating a serious obstacle to future peace (they were absolutely right). I learned that John B. Oakes, the former editorial page editor of the New York Times, had written a series of columns saying, in essence, that building all the new settlements was going to make a two-state solution almost impossible. Slowly, political observers who fully supported Israel on almost every issue were starting to question the Israeli government’s actions.


We heard the other side, too: Anna Rabkin, the Berkeley city auditor and an icon on the Berkeley left, came in and told us how painful this would be to progressive Jews and how harmful it would be to the progressive agenda. She made a powerful, impassioned argument. 


And all of this came to a head with a ballot campaign that generated both heat and light. We endorsed Measure E (I wrote the endorsement myself); it went down overwhelmingly, but it got a lot of people thinking. I think today it would pass overwhelmingly. And while the usual snipers complained the “Berserkeley” was wasting everyone’s time and money on a foreign policy statement that nobody would pay attention to anyway, I think a lot of us were glad it happened.


And I think that the members of Congress who represented the Bay Area were paying close attention.


So let’s not trash the Avalos/Maxwell resolution so quickly. Sometimes these debates are good; sometimes they help the local voters — who, after all, decide who to elect to Congress, the U.S. Senate and the White House — hear conflicting sides of a complicated story.


The Gaza flotilla wasn’t just about breaking the blockade; it was about getting people in the United States to pay attention to a terrible situation that the daily papers and TV stations typically ignore. I don’t see why it’s so bad for the San Francisco supervisors to help spread that word. 

Before I die, if printing still exists: An interview with Daniel Clowes

John Elberling
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0
Before I die, if printing still exists: An interview with Daniel Clowes

By Sam Stander

Daniel Clowes has made the leap over the past decade from underground comics hero to a more mainstream identity, with an Oscar nomination for screenwriting, several New Yorker covers, and a comic serialized in the New York Times Magazine under his belt. Despite his raised profile, his newest work, Wilson (Drawn and Quarterly, 80 pages, $15.37), comes closer to home than ever before. The cynical comic strip-based book is largely set in Oakland, of which he is a proud denizen. Clowes recently appeared at Diesel in Oakland, in conversation with McSweeney’s editor Eli Horowitz and the audience. On the setting of the comic, he proclaimed, “I’m pro-Oakland, I’m not sure Wilson is.” He also discussed his forays into film, his debt to Charles M. Schulz and R. Crumb, and the slight controversy over his recent New Yorker cover, among other things.

A lengthy signing followed, where fans presented everything from freshly purchased copies of Wilson to old favorites like David Boring to collector’s items like Lout Rampage for signing. Once the line had dwindled, Clowes sat down for a one-on-one interview.

San Francisco Bay Guardian One of the things I wanted to ask you, if the Oakland observations haven’t been beaten into the ground, was that you also used to live in Berkeley, right? When you were writing Ghost World?
Daniel Clowes Yeah, I was living up by College and Ashby.

SFBG Why are you explicitly writing about Oakland now, and why did you choose to live in Oakland? What do you see as the differences between the different areas?
DC It’s funny, I sort of wound up in Oakland by default. We were living in Berkeley, because my wife was going to Berkeley, and our landlord doubled our rent one month, which I actually didn’t think was legal. And so we said, well, maybe we should try to buy a house. This was years ago. We looked all around Berkeley and it was really expensive, and we found this neighborhood in Oakland that we didn’t even know about, over where we live now, and wound up buying a house there.
You know, I never really thought about Oakland. Even living there for two or three years, I thought, well, we’re near San Francisco and Berkeley. Then I started to walk around and embrace the idea of Oakland. I kind of learned to like Oakland above all its other surrounding cities. I’ve gotten to the point where I almost never go to San Francisco. It’s like, I go to LA more than I go to San Francisco. I just don’t relate to San Francisco at all, and somehow Oakland feels — I grew up in Chicago, and Oakland has this kind of second-tier quality that I find appealing.

SFBG Second-tier?
DC It’s not San Francisco. It’s [its] ugly sister across the Bay, and I prefer that somehow. I was in New York recently, and I was on a block in the Upper East 70s, I think, and I was looking around and I realized every building on the block was a beautiful art deco building built in the ’20s. And I thought, well, Oakland has one building like that. It has the Bellevue-Staten down by Lake Merritt. That’s it. But I’d prefer that, because, to see 20 of them, it has no impact anymore. It’s just, wow, a lot of buildings, and your brain can’t grasp that. But somehow I’m obsessed with this one building in Oakland and I know all about it. I can fixate on that one thing, so I like a city that has one of everything rather than hundreds of the same thing.

SFBG One of the strips in Wilson is him talking about all the bookstores closing down. I was wondering if that was you speaking through him at all, and if so, what bookstore are you saddest to see close down?
DC Well, that was really all about Cody’s. My wife worked at Cody’s, and when I moved here, I sort of agreed to move to Berkeley with my wife because of Cody’s. I thought that [was] something I needed, this world-class bookstore. It was sort of the focal point of my life for many years. I would go there two, three times a week and see what was new, and it just felt like the focus of my world in a way. And when it closed down, it was really hard for me to accept. It was like, you know, you always hear stories of guys who talk about their baseball team leaving town. The guys from Brooklyn are like, “The Dodgers left town in 1958,” or whenever it was. It felt like that to me…Still, when I go to downtown Berkeley and see that empty building, it seems so awful. It seems just like an awful thing that the world couldn’t support that.

SFBG At least it didn’t become a CVS.
DC Exactly.

SFBG [There] was a brief interlude where it was going to be a CVS.
DC Yeah, that’s true. There is that. At least the tomb of Cody’s is still there. And you think, “Well, somebody could just reopen it. Why not? Nobody’s paying rent.”

SFBG Looming over Moe’s.
DC Yeah, I should count my blessings. At least Moe’s is still around, and this place. Better than most cities.

SFBG You were talking about Wilson sort of materializing as a character, [that] you didn’t know who he was at first, but that it was you interacting with him. I was wondering if you’ve ever had experiences with a character who you didn’t have such a productive relationship with, or if you’ve ever had characters who worked against you?
DC Oh, that’s a good question. It’s more that they just run out of — it’s usually a character that I’ve kind of predetermined. Like, I need a character who’s a certain type of person to fit into a story, like, “I need a comic relief character.” Something where you have a role for them, and then they’re never that interesting. I find the best way to do it is to just let the characters come naturally. If they’re forced at all, they tend to [be] artificial. They have to seem like real people. There are characters that I’ve written the hell out of for page after page and they never quite are real people to me. Those are the things that never work, and that I usually have the good sense to throw away before they see print. [Laughs]

SFBG You’ve always had a really strong interest in perversity and human weirdness, and that’s not so central in Wilson. Was that a conscious move away or a permanent move away, or just a change in interests?
DC I think that’s true, you know. I always had a real interest in outsider culture. When I first began doing comics, that kind of thing was so inaccessible. I had a little group of friends who would send me all these weird things. You’d find out about little groups of people who were all linked together by some really odd interest, but they were so segregated. They’d maybe have some little newsletter that they all communicated through, but it felt like the world was filled with these little secret societies. And ever since the Internet has taken hold, it doesn’t feel like that anymore. It feels like the minute anybody hears about any weird little perversion or interest or anything like that, that everybody finds out about it and they know all about it, so it’s sort of lost its interest.
Also, having a child, you sort of reassess what you’re interested in, and you think, would this make me proud for my son to find my collection of books of pictures of freaks, or whatever? You just think, “Ehhh, I’m not sure I want to stand behind that.” Certain [times], you [decide] “I really do think this is cool and I will defend this,” but you weed out a lot of things that were just there because they would get a good reaction out of people.

SFBG Possibly spinning off from that question, but on another angle: You said [during the Q&A] that, specifically, no filmmaker has a strong specific influence on you, but certain films or certain scenes do. Are there any films or scenes you have in mind for Wilson or any of your other works?
DC I feel like Wilson is very non-filmic as far as most of my books go. It’s not about the images at all. A lot of my comics come from ideas that are images, that then turn into stories. Like David Boring and the Velvet Glove thing, and even a little bit of Ghost World. But Wilson was really all about this guy. If it were a movie, it would be more like a Mike Leigh movie or something than a Stanley Kubrick movie. [Laughs]

SFBG And you were saying that to make it into a film would be a strange format for a film.
DC It would be a strange format. I mean, you could certainly rethink it as a story about a guy, and sort of have the same elements, but to replicate the feel of the book would be a very odd thing. That’s the beauty of comics, is you can do all those different styles and they actually resonate off of each other, and even a really amateurish reader, a non-reader of comics, can tell the difference between the styles, whereas in a movie it’d be very hard to do different styles. Only film experts would get that you’re doing, you know, Michael Bay and then Alfred Hitchcock, or whatever.

SFBG Have you seen Natural Born Killers?
DC Yeah, that’s a perfect example.

SFBG Where it’s kind of off-putting at the end of the movie.
DC Right, it’s just a little irritating. Although I think that was the idea, I suppose. I haven’t seen that movie in a long time, I bet it’s really irritating now.

SFBG I’ve never seen all of it, actually. I’ve had friends show me parts.
DC I barely could tolerate it in theaters.

SFBG Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis are —
DC Yeah, she’s great. I like him, too.

SFBG In the right role.
DC Yeah, yeah.

SFBG Somebody was asking you about drawing eyes and mouths and conceiving of how people look in each panel, and you were saying that you do [stick-figure] sketches beforehand. How much do you script or plan out or storyboard versus just drawing a comic?
DC It depends on, not even the story, but just on my mood before I start. I usually try to do each story somewhat consistently, but I’m always trying to come up with a new way to do things. Not to be different or to give myself a challenge, but [because] I’m looking for a better way to work. And I always have this carrot dangling in front of me that there’s some other way, that if I could only find that way, it’ll make everything easy. And then it never does, and it always comes out exactly the same, no matter if I script the thing carefully or if I make it up off the top of my head. I could show those comics to a hundred people, and they would have no idea what was the planned-out one and what was the one I just made up. It all turns out the same. And I think that’s true of most artists. You can’t really tell what they’re going through, it’s just their work is always them, you know.

SFBG Do you always get a stack of other people’s works [at signings]?
DC [Holding a thick stack of various printed matter presented by fans] This was a good stack, I’d have to say. Often it’s much more, like, Xeroxed stuff. This actually looks like some pretty decent stuff that people have actually printed up. But yeah, usually you get a big pile of stuff, although not as much anymore, because a lot of people don’t print anything. So now I get business cards, like, “Check out my webcomic.” I have to go type it in at home.

SFBG You have the thing in the little author’s bio in Wilson about [how] you have danielclowes.com reserved.
DC That’s right.

SFBG Do you have any ideas for using that, or anything you want to use it for?
DC Well, my publisher actually said, “Now you have to put something on there, since you said that in the book.” So they just put an ad for Wilson that links right back to their website. I don’t want to get into doing, like, a blog or responding to people, ’cause my life is already so taken up by just responding to e-mails from my friends that I can’t imagine introducing a whole ’nother element of that. But it would be good to make announcements, and just to clarify things. I feel like the average reader doesn’t understand that I used to do a comic called Eightball and the stories were serialized — I figure if there’s some way [to] really concisely explain my career, then I won’t have to explain it to everybody over and over. [Laughs]

SFBG Are the original sequences of Eightball ever going to be made available again, and things that aren’t collected?
DC One of these days we’re going to do the complete Eightball, and do like a hardcover thing, but that’s nine projects down the road or something. But before I die, if printing still exists.

SFBG As far as film projects, is there anything on the horizon or anything you’re excited about working on?
DC With Ghost World, I learned, don’t tell anybody about your film projects until they have a release date. I used to tell people, “Oh, they’re going to make a Ghost World movie,” and then five years later, they finally actually made it. I felt like such a chump. But I wrote a screenplay for this thing that Michel Gondry came up with, this crazy dystopian sci-fi epic. I wrote a script based on his ideas. His son is going to do the drawings for it. I’m not animating it, but I think he wants to do that as his next film, so that should be fun, if that actually happens.

SFBG Have you ever done any animation?
DC I did a video for the Ramones in 1995, and that was it.

SFBG Would you ever do it again?
DC Yeah, I’d like to, I’d like to. I need to sort of come up with an idea that’s only appropriate for animation, and then actually try to get somebody interested in producing it. So there’s lots of hurdles there. [Laughs] But yeah, I’d love to. I feel like I should do that one of these days.

 

The NY Times discovers illegal church parking

Zelda Bronstein
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The NY Times discovers illegal church parking

The Bay Citizen-New York Times partnership is already jazzing up the quality of what was a very weak Northern California section in the Times. And now the pair have discovered one of the dirty little secrets of San Francisco Sundays — illegal parking by church-goers who just leave their cars in the middle of the street.


This is one of my favorite crusades, and I’ve been on it for quite a while. The Times/Bay Citizen story tries to sort out what the rules are and why this is allowed to happen. The SF Appeal tried to figure it out, too. But when you talk to the cops on the beat in the Mission, here’s what they’ll tell you: There are no rules. There is no law. The church-goers have no legal right to park in the middle of the damn street. It’s just a tradition that goes back so long that nobody wants to defy it.


And whatever the cops and the MTA say, it’s not a public service for community events. It’s about religious gatherings. If you want to go to a secular gathering — say, a Yoga class — and park in the streets Sunday morning, you get a ticket. In fact, I know somone who tried that; she said a cop on the scene asked where she was going, and she said yoga, and the cop said she couldn’t park there. It’s only “for church services.”


I’m all in favor of closing streets to traffic, but turning them into parking lots — and allowing private institutions to use city property, at no cost, to promote religious events is not only a violation of church and state. It’s wrong.

In Mexico, turtles and oil privatization

Zelda Bronstein
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0
In Mexico, turtles and oil privatization

MEXICO CITY (June 3rd) — The turtles of Caribbean Mexico are an ancient race. Their ancestors paddled with dinosaurs and prehistoric fish. Kemp’s Ridley turtles were burying their eggs in Gulf Coast sanctuaries countless millennia before the Olmecs, Mexico’s matrix civilization, installed their mysterious giant heads on the Veracruz plain. The presence of turtles in indigenous iconography is evidenced by artifacts displayed in anthropological museums in Mexico City and Jalapa Veracruz. The 20th Century naturalists recorded “arribos” (“arrivals”) of tens of thousands of Kemp’s Ridley females at Rancho Nuevo beach Tamaulipas; with few exceptions, Kemp’s Ridleys (named for an amateur turtle-ologist and the smallest and rarest of all sea turtles) nest only at Rancho Nuevo and Padre Island, Texas.


But for Gulf waters, turtles are like canaries in the coalmines. The 1979 blowout of Ixtoc 1, a Mexican National Petroleum Company (PEMEX) platform off the southern state of Tabasco, gushed uncontrollably for nine months. Some 3,000,000 barrels spewed into the Gulf of Mexico, fouling beaches and nesting grounds. The Rancho Nuevo arribos shrank below 4,000. Although Mexican Kemp’s Ridleys have staged a modest comeback (the population is now calculated at 8,000), the April 20th explosion of a British Petroleum deep-sea drilling rig on the Macondo Prospect (with apologies to Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 130 miles southeast of New Orleans could spell doomsday for these primordial creatures.


Across the Gulf, Mexican authorities are watching this travesty unfold with furrowed brows. The blow-out of the Deepwater Horizon platform that killed 11 and wounded 17 workers is now the largest oil spill in U.S. history, almost doubling the size of the Exxon Valdez fiasco in Alaskan waters (10,000,000 gallons) and threatening biblical devastation of Caribbean wildlife from Mexico to Cuba. Already, Gulf Coast fishing grounds have been shut down, shrimp and oyster beds contaminated, colonies of marine mammals such as dolphins and manatees are menaced, and bird life, particularly brown pelicans, is at extreme risk. In just the first 20 days of the catastrophe, 156 dead Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles were counted.


The good news — at least for Mexico — is that deep-water oil plumes have been caught up in loop currents that threaten environmental mayhem as far east as the Florida Keys and Communist Cuba, but will not touch home. The bad news is that, come August, when the hurricane season blows in (2010 is being touted as a record year for tropical hurricanes with 15 giant storms headed for the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico), those currents will shift dramatically south towards Mexico. Even now, deep water “cyclones” are sweeping gobs of oil towards Veracruz and Tamaulipas turtle breeding grounds, and Mexico’s environmental secretary, Rafael Elvira, is preparing to file suit against BP, whose $325 billion earnings in 2009 is larger than Mexico’s total annual budget.


BP efforts to plug the leak with everything from old tires to tons of mud, robot submarines and never-before-tested “domes” have met with serial failure. A slant drill to relieve pressure on the undersea gusher will not be in place until August, when the currents turn towards Mexico. Kemp’s Ridleys nest from April through August.


President Felipe Calderon’s brow is further corrugated by the prospect that the mammoth BP spill will torpedo his pledge to privatize (he calls it “modernize”) both Mexico’s oil industry and PEMEX, the national petroleum consortium. The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, a joint venture between BP, Halliburton, and TransOcean (controlled by a Swiss holding company), has certainly slowed, if not slain, Calderon’s plans to contract similar transnationals for deep sea drilling in Mexico’s slice of the Gulf.


According to U.S. Department of Energy evaluations, Mexico has only nine years of proven reserves left before it becomes a net oil importer. Major offshore wells like Cantarell in the Sound of Campeche are played out, and no new land-based deposits have been located. Rummaging through the remains of the old Chicontepec field in Veracruz (Halliburton is an important subcontractor) has yielded meager results.


One joke making the rounds has Calderon delighted by the BP spill, because it will bring more oil to Mexican waters.


In the vision of Big Oil, Mexico’s only hope for economic survival lies in its “aguas profundas,” or deep waters, five miles down in the Gulf. Of course, only Big Oil has the technology to get at these riches. According to the transnationals, PEMEX must be reformed and partner up with them (“an association of capitals”) for a percentage of the take. So-called risk contracts are currently barred by the Mexican Constitution. 


Following orders from his backers (Halliburton, the number one PEMEX subcontractor, was a generous contributor to Calderon’s fraud-tarred 2006 election victory), the Mexican president submitted “energy reform” legislation to Congress in 2008 that laid out a “strategic alliance” with Big Oil and “flexibilization” of PEMEX opening the state company to private investment and risk contracts. The Calderon media machine cranked up an infomercial campaign depicting an azure Caribbean under which Mexico’s true wealth lay buried. “The Treasure of Mexico” was repeatedly shown at prime time on this distant neighbor nation’s two-headed television monopoly, Televisa and TV Azteca.


Mexico is fast running out of oil, the president warned to make his point. Deep sea drilling is the only option. “Energy reform” was put on congressional fast track.


By seeking to privatize Mexico’s petroleum industry, Felipe Calderon is swimming against global currents. World-class producers like Russia and Saudi Arabia are consolidating their state-run oil companies, Glasprom and Aramco, rather than selling them off to the private sector.


Petroleum is a volatile liquid in the Mexican mix. Oil and sovereignty have been joined at the hip ever since depression-era president Lazaro Cardenas expropriated and nationalized the industry in 1938 from Anglo and American owners — the so-called Seven Sisters — when they defied the Mexican Supreme Court during an oil workers’ strike. Those opposed to Calderon’s scheme went into hullabaloo mode to push back his privatization legislation.


Ex-left presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, from whom many Mexicans believe Calderon stole the 2006 election, organized his social base and the “Adelitas,” women partisans dressed up as “soldaderas” or female fighters in the Mexican revolution, donned sombreros and long skirts, toy carbines and bandaleros of fake bullets crisscrossed across their breasts, and encircled the Mexican Senate. Inside both houses of congress, Lopez Obrador’s colleagues seized the podiums and paralyzed all legislative activity for ten days.


The stand-off resulted in a series of nationally televised debates over the next four months during which energy experts, academics, Big Oil reps, PEMEX honchos, lawyers, leftists, senators, deputies, impresarios, and even a poet or two argued about the privatization proposal. The debates were carried live on a big screen in the great Zocalo plaza, where hundreds of outraged citizens gathered every afternoon to cuss out the privatizers.


By autumn 2008, a compromise was struck between Calderon’s PAN party and the former ruling PRI, which still holds a majority in both houses. Anti-Lopez Obrador elements within the left-center PRD also signed off on the deal, which delineated hundreds of exploration tracts in Mexican deep sea waters, but put a hold on transnational participation and risk contracts. The compromise did not please the transnationals, but Calderon okayed it reluctantly and was preparing fresh legislation to assuage their concerns when the Deepwater Horizon blew out at the bottom of the Gulf, putting the kibosh on Big Oil’s pipedreams.


The struggle to stop the privatization of PEMEX is symbolic and illusory. Thirty one out of the company’s 41 divisions are, in effect, subcontracted out to the likes of BP and Halliburton;  most contracts are concentrated in the PEP or exploration and perforation sector. Ironically, players like BP, the biggest producer in the Gulf of Mexico today, and Shell are reincarnations of British interests that dominated petroleum production in Veracruz before expropriation — Royal Dutch Shell evolved from Lord Cowdry’s (Weetman Pierson) Aguila Oil. Moreover, Exxon is reported to be dickering for BP (which now incorporates Amoco and Atlantic-Richfield), a merger that would restore John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil taken down by trustbusters in 1911. Standard Oil’s James Doheny and Pierson ruled Mexican oilfields before 1938, and once threatened to secede and form their own “Republic of The Gulf of Mexico.” 


The U.S. and Mexico dispute a pair of potentially abundant fields in the deep waters of the Gulf. Designated “Donas,” the eastern polygon is triangulated between the Yucatan, New Orleans, and Cuba. The much-larger (16,000 square kilometers) western polygon sits between Tamaulipas and Texas. Mexico’s share of the western “Dona” (62%) purportedly holds up to 34,000,000,000 barrels, twice current reserves.


Preliminary delineation of the Donas was agreed upon by Washington and Mexico City in 2000, and deep-sea drilling is set to begin as early as next year. Chevron and Shell have reportedly already won contracts to work the U.S. sites. But Mexico does not have the technology to get at its “treasure” and Houston oil guru George Baker confirms that it will be another decade before PEMEX comes into possession of the tools to drill baby drill at such depths.


Advocates for continued state control of Mexico’s oil like Professor Fabio Barbosa of the National Autonomous University (UNAM) rebut the claim that PEMEX cannot drill deep, citing development of the Nab platform in mile-deep waters off Yucatan  (the Dona reserves are thought to be three to five miles down in the Gulf.)


In a recent El Universal op-ed, Barbosa recalled then-BP vice president Cris Sladen’s warning to a 2006 oil conference in Veracruz that Mexico would go belly-up if it didn’t dissolve PEMEX and let the latest version of the Seven Sisters handle the deep sea exploration and drilling.


Closer to the bottom of the food chain, the voices of the turtles are not heard in this debate between privatizers and nationalists. Deep sea drilling presages unprecedented carnage for their already exhausted species. BP itself has an unblemished record of species genocide — its Arctic projects threaten protected bowhead whales in the Beaufort Sea and a 900,000 gallon spill in Prudhoe Bay in 2000 plus its plans to trash the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge put dozens of species, from Polar bears and caribou to the Arctic tern, the longest-flying migratory bird on Planet Earth, on the brink of extinction.


In an exhibition of unbridled cynicism, BP greenwashes its tarnished image with full-page New York Times professions of its concern for the environment and by handing out conservation awards and grants. So far as is known, no Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle has ever won one.


The indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest liken the American continent to the back of a turtle — humans are allowed to live on it but must do so in harmony with the planet. “Turtle Island” is the translation of the name of the place where we live in several Indian languages, a designation that once lent its name to Gary Snyder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poems imploring environmental respect and salvation.


But the poet’s metaphors do not carry much weight in the boardroom. BP and its cronies in corporate crime and capitalist greed have put Turtle Island at the top of their hit list.          


John Ross is back in “El Monstruo,” the title of his latest cult classic (“pulsating and gritty” the NY Post) and can be reached at johnross@igc.org

Political juggernaut

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Political juggernaut

sarah@sfbg.com

City officials are scrambling to secure final approvals to allow Lennar Corp. to move forward with its 770-acre Candlestick/Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment of San Francisco’s impoverished and polluted southeast sector. But the community remains divided on the project, raising concerns that wary residents will end up being steamrolled by this politically powerful juggernaut.

Some groups say the project needs major amendments, but fear it will be rushed to the finish for political reasons. Others say they are hungry to work and desperate to move into better housing units, so they don’t want all the myriad project details to slow that progress. And Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration is arguing that approving the project’s final environmental impact report by June 3 is crucial if San Francisco wants to keep the San Francisco 49ers in town.

But many observers fear Lennar wants its entitlements now before its project can be subjected to greater scrutiny that could come with the November elections. Newsom, who made Lennar’s project the centerpiece of his housing policy, will be replaced as mayor if he wins the lieutenant governor’s race. And a crowded field of candidates, many of them progressives concerned about the project’s impacts on the poor and the environment, are vying to replace termed-out Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose district includes Lennar’s massive territory.

“It’s 180 percent about the 49ers,” land use attorney Sue Hestor told the Guardian, referring to the city’s proposed rush job, as evidenced by a rapid entitlement schedule that the Newsom’s administration wants city commissions and the board to follow.

Under that schedule, which Hestor procured from the Mayor’s Office, Planning and Redevelopment commissioners are expected to certify the project’s final 6,000-page EIR, adopt California Environmental Quality Act findings, approve amendments to the project’s original disposition and development agreement, and authorize land trust and open space reconfigurations — all during a June 3 meeting where public comment will likely last for many hours.

Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, a community-based nonprofit that tracks the development, says this schedule stretches the credulity that this is a deliberative process. “There’s no way anyone could make a functional reasoned assessment,” Bloom told us. “How do you have any meaningful public conversation under those circumstances?”

Michael Cohen, Newsom’s chief economic advisor, asserted in an April 29 article in The New York Times that Lennar’s plan is a “really, really good project,” echoing the glowing praise he’s heaped on the project since its conception.

“But there’s nothing new in their proposal,” Bloom told us. “That’s because they haven’t been listening to the public’s concerns. [Cohen] says, ‘Haven’t we talked enough? The community’s been waiting all these years!’ But waiting to get what done?”

Lennar’s project — which had early backing from Newsom, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and other political power brokers — was sold as creating “jobs, housing, and parks” and “revitalizing the abandoned shipyard” when voters approved the Lennar-financed Proposition G in 2008.

“Proposition G is from the community and for the community,” Lennar’s campaign promised. “You can turn the abandoned Hunters Point Shipyard into a clean, healthy, sustainable, livable neighborhood — a place where people can raise their children.”

The shipyard once employed thousands of workers, including African Americans who were recruited from the South in the 1940s and ’50s. But the district’s economic engine fell into disrepair when the military left in 1974. Today the neighboring Hunters Point and Bayview neighborhoods have the highest unemployment and crime rates and the largest concentration of African American families in the city.

But the city’s final EIR for the project, which the Planning Department released mid-May, shows that 68 percent of the developer’s proposed 10,500 new housing units will be sold at market rates unaffordable to area residents, and that many of these units will be built on state park land at Candlestick Point.

Lennar is also proposing to build a bridge across the environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough, significantly changing the southeast waterfront. Lennar says it plans to develop the project’s remaining 3,000 units at below market prices, including one-for-one replacement of rundown Alice Griffith public housing units. Its proposal includes a dozen high-rise towers, 2.7 million square feet of commercial space, 1 million square feet of retail space, a performing arts theater, and an artists colony.

Lennar claims its proposal will create 1,500 construction jobs annually during the project’s 20-year build-out, along with 10,000 permanent jobs, thanks to a United Nations Global Compact Sustainability Center and a vaguely defined green technology office park.

The project and its impacts are already an issue in this year’s District 10 supervisor’s race (see “The battle for the forgotten district,” Feb. 23). Candidate Chris Jackson says Lennar’s proposal is weak when it comes to creating well-paying, low-skilled green collar jobs. He supports Arc’s proposal to including green maritime industrial use at the shipyard.

Arc recommends that the city’s final EIR allow recycling and repairing of ships, including the Suisun Bay Ghost fleet — decommissioned U.S. Navy, cruise, and ferry ships — arguing that “ship recycling and repair are resurgent strategic industrial activities yielding employment opportunities for our existing pool of skilled and unskilled workers.”

Jackson, who was elected to the Community College Board in 2008 and recently jumped into the District 10 race, wants the city to assert that the project is not a regional housing plan.

“It’s a local housing plan for local residents,” Jackson asserts. “It’s not here to provide housing for Silicon Valley. It’s for Bayview-Hunters Point and District 10 residents.”

Jackson understands why some local residents want no delays on final EIR approval: “I can never blame folks in Alice Griffith public housing for coming out and saying ‘no delays.’ They really want something real, housing that is not rat and cockroach infested.”

As a policy analyst (a position he’s quitting to focus on the District 10 race) for the San Francisco Labor Council — which gave key backing to the project in the 2008 election — Jackson knows labor is frustrated by all the project meetings. “I try to tell them it’s better to get this project right than rush it through and find out later that it goes against the interests of labor,” Jackson said.

In May 2008, the Labor Council signed a community benefits agreement (CBA) with Lennar. Since then labor leaders have urged no delays on the project’s draft EIR review. But Jackson believes the city must demand that financial consequences, such as liquidated damages, be a project approval condition if the developer reneges on the CBA.

“Right now the only push-back the city has is to threaten to kill the whole project if Lennar doesn’t meet its timeline,” Jackson said. “But people are really invested in this project, and I don’t believe anyone would pull the trigger and end the entire development. We don’t need to throw everything out; we just need to change them.”

Jackson wants to see the inclusion of a special-use district that would create a cooperative land trust to ensure affordability and home ownership opportunities for local residents. “I love open space and sustainability, but I also want affordable housing and real light-industrial opportunities that can employ people living in the district now.”

Special-use districts, Jackson argues, give city commissioners a way to amend this project to make it more acceptable.

Jackson wants to see strong tenant protections for public housing residents. “The vast majority of those residents are African American. At the end of the day, I want to see economic and environmental justice, so we can say we brought the right change to our community.”

Jackson also would like to see a more independent Mayor’s Office. “Don’t you feel like its 2002/2003, and that if you speak out against the project, it’s like you are speaking out against the Iraq war, and all of a sudden you are not patriotic?”

Fellow District 10 candidate Eric Smith concurred. “The powers that be are definitely moving this thing forward,” he said. “And this is a monster train, a juggernaut that is gathering steam. But how it shakes out down the road remains to be seen. My whole mantra is that there needs to be greater transparency down the line. If I become the sheriff, I’ll be shining a light on all this stuff.”

Smith warned that the community needs to work together or it won’t win a better deal. “It’s clear that folks in the city are hoping against all odds that Lennar can pull this stuff off so they can prove all the naysayers wrong and these community benefits can be realized, and that scrutiny of the projects can go on while all this happens,” he said.

But Arthur Feinstein, the Sierra Club’s political chair, worries that the city’s rush job is resulting in seriously flawed documents and decision-making. “It’s difficult for folks to digest 6,000 pages of comments and responses on the draft EIR in the three weeks since planning posted them online,” Feinstein said. “And nothing has changed despite all the comments, which is why it continues to be a nonsense process.”

Feinstein says the Sierra Club’s top concerns are the Parcel E-2 cleanup on the shipyard, a deal to transfer 23 acres at Candlestick Park for development, and the bridge over Yosemite Slough.

“You can cover most of the site,” he said. “But when it comes to Parcel E-2, where the dump burned for six months in 2002, that’s only 20 acres, it could and should be removed. This is the environmental justice issue that has the community up in arms.”

Feinstein worries about the precedent that selling a state park for condos sets. “This is our park, and they are shrinking it.” He is also concerned that the developer wants to bridge Yosemite Slough for cars.

How many of these concerns will be addressed at the June 3 hearing, which is just days before Santa Clara County voters decide whether to try to lure away the 49ers with a new publicly financed stadium? We’ll see.

Editor’s Notes

David Talbot
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Editor’s Notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

When I first heard that Arne Duncan, who hails from the charter-schools-are-great side of the educational spectrum, was going to be President Obama’s secretary of education, I figured: that’s too bad. But after all these years of Republicans, how bad can it be?

Well, pretty bad.

Duncan has discovered that he has a powerful tool to use to force some really terrible "reforms" onto school districts and states that really don’t want them. And he’s using it in a way that’s almost cruel.

See, every public school district in urban America is hurting right now. Everyone needs money; everyone’s desperate. Teachers are getting pink slips, schools are closing, class sizes are growing, programs are getting cut … and school boards and superintendents are reduced to begging for spare change to buy chalk and pencils.

And along comes Secretary Duncan with billions of dollars in grants, scraps of food for starving people — and all you have to do to get some of it is adopt an agenda that blames the problems of the education system on the teachers.

Get rid of teacher seniority. Get rid of tenure. Link teacher pay to student performance, as measured by standardized tests. Approve more charter schools (which suck money out of the public school system). Just do those things and you can compete in the beauty contest called "Race to the Top" — and maybe you’ll get some cash.

The New York Times Magazine had a fascinating story on this May 21. The writer, Steven Brill, marveled at how successful Duncan had been leveraging a fairly small amount of money into the most profound changes in educational policy this country has seen in 30 years. That’s because these days, school districts will do almost anything to keep the doors open.

But the problem is that the federal grants will run out, and some day the economy will recover, and maybe we’ll come to our senses and realize that government at every level should properly fund education — and the damage of the Duncan reforms will be done.

I can’t blame the SFUSD, which just agreed to apply for Race to the Top money, for seeking cash everywhere. And the SFUSD application doesn’t promise anywhere near what Duncan wants, so we won’t win anyway. But at some point, somebody’s got to say: this is a bad way to run the public schools.

Why is SFUSD signing on to Race to the Top?

Zelda Bronstein
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Why is SFUSD signing on to Race to the Top?

The Obama administration, to its credit, is actually paying attention to, and putting money into, urban public education. But Arne Duncan, the education secretary, is using some of the money to push a broad agenda that, frankly, drives me nuts and undermines a lot of what public education ought to be about.


The New York Times Magazine did a good job laying out the agenda May 23. The self-styled reformers want to encourage charter schools, push standardized testing (and other easily quantifiable methods of evaluating classroom performance) and change the way teachers are hired and fired. In fact, in many ways, the Duncan agenda is all about blaming the teachers for the problems in public schools.


There are, absolutely, some bad teachers out there. There are people who are so burned out they should leave and find other work. There are people who never were terribly good at teaching anyway. There are people who can’t do the job, and somehow stick around year after year, dooming students to poor-quality classes. There are 300,000 public-school teachers in California; not all of them will be great. (There are also, by the way, terrible lawyers who never get disbarred and terrible doctors who kill and maim patients and manage to protect their medical licenses.)


But in California, certainly, the relatively modest number of poor teachers is not by any stretch the biggest problem with public education. And tests, particularly standardized tests, are not remotely a valid way of determining which teachers are good and which aren’t.


Teachers in California cities face widely divergent student populations. In some San Francisco classrooms, a majority of the students are English learners, or come from broken or troubled families, or lack proper nutrition, or are homeless … and those are just the surface issues. Telling a dedicated first-grade teacher that he or she is going to be fired because of test scores in a classroom where it takes heroic efforts every day to get 20 troubled kids to sit down and pay attention for even 15 minutes isn’t just unfair. It’s crazy.


The teachers unions have fought some of these efforts, and — thanks to world-class organizing efforts and a fair amount of campaign money — have managed to beat some of them back in Congress and state Legislatures. That’s where Race to the Top comes in.


Duncan and his merry band of “reformers” are dangling out federal money to districts that desperately, desperately need any pennies they can get — but the price is high. In essence, you have to sign on to at least part of the Duncan agenda, which promotes testing, charter schools, etc. 


The highest number of points — 138 of the 500-point scale that Duncan and his staff created for the Race — would be awarded based on a commitment to eliminate what teachers’ union leaders consider the most important protections enjoyed by their members: seniority-based compensation and permanent job security.


It’s almost a cruel bargain: You don’t have enough money to buy chalk for the chalkboard or pencils for the kids, and the feds are happy to help — as long as you stick it to the teachers unions and sign onto an agenda that a lot of progressive school boards despise.


And that’s where San Francisco is.


In a special meeting May 20, the San Francisco School Board signed on to a Memorandum of Understanding with the state of California that will be part of California’s application for Race to the Top funding. You can read the MOU here. It’s not as bad as some of what Duncan is pushing, but still: SFUSD is participating in this madness.


I asked Jane Kim, president of the School Board, about it, and she told me that the district’s proposal “doesn’t have anything about charter schools or merit pay. It’s really just a continuation of the work that we’re already doing.” And that’s true, although Dennis Kelly, the head of the local teachers union, United Educators of San Francisco, isn’t happy about it, though; he told me that “this is not something we could sign on to. It’s pretty much the standard state form.”


And the board passed it unanimously, and a lot of the local board members are good progressives who know more about education than I do. And as Kim pointed out, at a time like this, “I don’t think we should refuse to go for the extra funding.”


Frankly, the San Francisco Unified School District isn’t going to get any Race to the Top money anyway — not with districts all over the country selling their souls and going way, way further than we are to scrap for that cash. But I have to ask: Since Race to the Top is such a bad idea, why are we even playing the game?

The Bay Citizen makes a strong debut

Sasha Cuttler
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The Bay Citizen, a well-funded newsroom that is the most anticipated of several new media experiments in San Francisco, officially launched today with some solid, interesting stories that include an investigation of toxic pesticides being illegally applied to local marijuana crops and a look at how Prop. 13 has obscenely benefited the wealthiest San Francisco residents.

The organization also announced today that it has raised an additional $3.5 million in donations to supplement the $5 million in seed money that local investment banker Warren Hellman provided to the start-up. Meanwhile, another new media start-up that we profiled this week, SF Streetsblog – one of The Bay Citizen’s many local partners — has issued a fundraising plea for $50,000 that it needs by July 1 to continue its award-winning coverage of local transportation issues.

But today is a day for The Bay Citizen to bask in its initial success, which it will do tonight starting at 7:30 with a launch party at the Great American Music Hall. And then tomorrow, once the hoopla is over and the stories that have been in development for weeks or months are replaced by fresh content, San Franciscans will begin to learn whether The Bay Citizen represents a new journalistic powerhouse or just a well-funded website with some powerful friends.

I’ve heard some detractors in the local media grumble that their presentation seems “banal” and unworthy of their big budget, but I don’t agree. Personally, I think The Bay Citizen strikes the right tone and balance, emphasizing solid journalism rather than flashy gimmicks, while also drawing on multimedia tools such as the video of yesterday’s protests against President Obama’s visit to SF.

San Francisco needs relevant, well-presented, serious journalism more than the snarky, juvenile stories we see in design-heavy local start-ups such as The Bold Italic, where The Bay Citizen’s culture writer came from, or the often out-of-touch, sneering, or self-important stories that we see in corporate-run papers like SF Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, and San Francisco Examiner.

Instead, our first peek at The Bay Citizen seems to show that it might just be up to the important task of providing relevant content for the New York Times’ twice-weekly Bay Area section – which has also demonstrated a tin ear for San Francisco values since it launched last year – providing an important new forum for those who believe in speaking truth to power.

Digital glam

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Digital glam

Read our full interviews with the beauty gurus here!

cheryl@sfbg.com

VIDEO Back in April 2001, I wrote a Guardian article about home shopping networks. These days, I have a new fascination, no doubt originating in the same part of my brain that latched onto QVC: YouTube’s beauty gurus. I never did pick up any samurai swords from Shop at Home’s knife guy, but I can now do winged eyeliner like never before.

Filming themselves at their kitchen tables and bedroom vanities, the gurus (YT-speak for “expert”) upload opinions on everything from high-end mascara to dollar-store lip gloss. There are “Tag” videos, which get passed around from guru to guru (“Top 10 MAC Eye Shadows”), popular perennials (giveaway videos score high), and “haul” videos, which detail shopping-trip spoils.

Haul videos have earned mainstream media attention, with a recent New York Times story detailing how some women are making mad cash thanks to YouTube’s revenue-sharing partner program. The ultimate success story? Probably Lauren Luke, a.k.a. panacea81, a bubbly Brit who parlayed her YouTube fame into her own makeup line.

While not all gurus make money off YouTube, many have received free products from companies eager to tap into each channel’s unique audience. Late last year, the Federal Trade Commission ruled that “bloggers or other ‘word-of-mouth’ marketers” must disclose their material connections with a company when endorsing its products. You’ll notice many YouTube beauty vids now have FTC disclaimers (“I got this for free …”) accompanied by guru disclaimers (“… but this is my HONEST opinion!”) tucked into the video description box.

But them’s semantics. Most gurus, paid and otherwise, also provide tutorials of hair and makeup looks using favorite products. If you’re stressed about appearing professional at a job interview, or sexy on a date, YT gurus have got you covered. And they review everything: if you’ve been waffling over whether to drop $23 on a Nars eye shadow, fear not. Someone on YouTube has already bought it, tested it, and deemed it worthy (or not). The best gurus have the kind of charisma that can transfix thousands of viewers — even when the subject at hand is a 15-minute discussion of nail polish.

YouTuber: Lisa Freemont Street (www.youtube.com/user/LisaFreemontStreet)

What you’ll find on her channel: classy vintage hair and makeup techniques inspired by Old Hollywood and pin-up girls.

Her favorite kind of video to make: “My series called ‘Diamonds and Dames’ consists of requested looks by my viewers, based on their favorite hairstyles [from] classic films. These are the most fun for me because they require the most research. I have to figure out what setting was used to create the style or how to tailor the look to my own hair texture or length. I also include music from the year the film was released, to lend some extra credibility to the video, and I tend to really get into character by the end of filming.”

Her audience: “I have come to realize that my viewers range in age from preteen to octogenarian. I love that! The one thing I hope they take away is that if you enjoy and appreciate a vintage style, you should not let the world’s trends sway you. Stay true to yourself and feel pretty all the time, even if you get a few odd looks along the way.”

Her favorite beauty product: “A plain white concealer stick. It can be used to provide a pale base for eye shadow or as a highlight for brows and cheeks.”

YouTuber: Pursebuzz (www.youtube.com/user/pursebuzz)

What you’ll find on her channel: upbeat videos offering hair, makeup, and nail advice. Also, her “How to Fake Abs” makeup tutorial has over 13 million views. Respect.

Why she started making videos: “I started in 2006 on a separate channel to show my friend some makeup tips. After that I received some comments and that grabbed my interest. I was shocked that someone else wanted to know what I had to say. At the time I only saw professional makeup artists applying makeup on models, but there weren’t any videos with makeup artists applying makeup on themselves or on everyday people. I knew I had to start somewhere and I have always read in magazines on how to get (insert celebrity) look. So I broke down Carmen Electra’s look in her Max Factor ad, [showing] it step by step. I have loved it ever since.”

Her most rewarding YouTube experience: “I am huge on understanding that your internal beauty is most important and makeup is just an accessory to your look. So it is rewarding to know that I have reached out to so many people and showed them how to be the best version of themselves.”

Her favorite beauty product: “My love of/obsession with makeup began with my MAC Parfait Amour eye shadow.”

YouTuber: Vintage or Tacky (www.youtube.com/user/vintageortacky)

What you’ll find on her channel: vibrant, colorful eye shadow looks.

Her audience: “I hope that my audience gains some perspective from watching my videos. Yes, I have a beauty channel, but I don’t always go on camera looking picture perfect. I showed my hair when I had a botched dye job, I’ve gone on camera without makeup. I try new hairstyles, hair colors, and makeup. It’s not always pretty, but it’s honest, it’s fun and creative. I hope they learn to have fun with their looks, but not to be ruled by them. My motto is ‘Be vintage or tacky, just be yourself!’ That and to wear sunscreen.”

Her most rewarding YouTube experience: “When people send me messages telling me how much my videos have helped them, with makeup or skincare or self-worth and self-esteem. Knowing that some people just like me and value my opinion and my videos has made me a more confident person.”

Her favorite makeup brand: “MAC, because of their quality and price, their palette system, their diversity of items, their pro line, and their recycling program. And, they don’t test on animals.”

YouTuber: Michele1218 (www.youtube.com/user/michele1218)

What you’ll find on her channel: wearable neutral looks demonstrated in easy-to-follow tutorials.

What inspired her to start making videos: “I have always had a passion for makeup and beauty products and for as many friends as I have, none of them ever shared in my passion. When I stumbled across the beauty community on YouTube, I was hooked! I watched videos for about three months, learned so many amazing techniques, learned so much more about makeup, and found new products that I never knew existed. Once I started to feel comfortable with myself and felt confident, I thought ‘Hey, this might be fun!’. I knew how inspired I felt just watching some of these girls, and I thought it would be great if I can help inspire other girls as well! The rest was history!”

How YouTube has changed: “With so many companies finding out about all the YT beauty gurus it seems like more and more review videos are becoming paid advertisements. Therefore viewers and subscribers are becoming more and more skeptical of the products people are reviewing. When I make a review video, it seems as though I always have to defend it by saying my own money was spent and I was not sent free products or been paid to review. It’s unfortunate because there are a lot of girls including myself that never accept paid reviews and because the ‘bigger’ gurus do it is assumed that we all do.”

Her favorite makeup brand and beauty product? “My favorite makeup brand is MAC and my favorite product is mascara. I don’t care what brand but I can never leave the house without it on!”

Read complete interviews with the beauty gurus.

 

 

Media experiments

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Media experiments

news@sfbg.com

With traditional journalism outlets still struggling through the Great Recession and into an uncertain future, some interesting new media experiments have been popping in San Francisco, including much-anticipated The Bay Citizen, an initially well-funded newsroom that launches this week.

It will join a media landscape filled with a wide range of new ventures: general news websites ranging from the nonprofit SF Public Press to the theoretically for-profit SF Appeal; niche sites such as the popular SF Streetsblog; the Spot.us media funding experiment; and the MediaBugs accountability project. And it isn’t all online — McSweeney’s magazine put out the one-time San Francisco Panorama newspaper in December and SF Public Press plans to print a similar demonstration newspaper next month.

But for all the high hopes and talk of using strategic partnerships and new funding models to overcome economic and readership trends that have hobbled the San Francisco Chronicle and other big media companies, those who run The Bay Citizen and other start-ups still need to prove their worth and sustainability.

Whatever The Bay Citizen becomes, it will break new ground — nobody has ever put this level of money into creating a nonprofit, online-only daily newspaper in a major market, or had such significant media partners, ranging from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to The New York Times, which will run the newsroom’s content as its twice-weekly Bay Area section.

Some people think this is the future of journalism; San Francisco-based financier Warren Hellman, who provided the seed money, thinks it’s worth $5 million or more to get the project off the ground. But since there’s no model out there, the crew at The Bay Citizen will be making it up as they go along. And at this point, even with what most Web publications would consider a huge amount of money, it’s clear that The Bay Citizen will not be replacing the Chronicle any time soon.

Jon Weber, the publication’s editor, knows the world of mainstream daily journalism (he was a writer for the Los Angeles Times); the world of high-paced big-money startups (he ran the Industry Standard); and the world of low-budget fledgling operations (he founded the small online magazine New West). And the first thing he had to figure was exactly what this new online daily was going to look like.

With a staff of just six news writers — and a regional focus — The Bay Citizen can’t try to cover breaking news the way the Chronicle, Examiner, or even Bay City News Service do. So the publication will be different from a traditional daily, with more enterprise reporting and less of the types of features dailies typically offer.

There will, for example, be no daily sportswriter. “There won’t be stories on every game, every day,” Weber told me. “We’ll pick our spots with enterprise reporting.” The Bay Citizen won’t try to compete with the Chronicle on national or international stories, either: “It’s a Bay Area focused site,” Weber said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t cover national stories when they impact the Bay Area. But that’s not part of our beats.”

The reporters will cover land use and environmental issues; health and science; education and social issues; business and finance; crime; and government and politics. The politics reporter won’t be able to cover San Francisco City Hall every day, either — he or she (that’s the one slot still open) will have to stay on top of local and statewide issues.

But what could make the Bay Citizen truly unusual is the extent to which Weber plans to partner with existing local bloggers and nontraditional news outlets. “We hope we can be a supporter of the local media ecosystem,” he said.

That could eventually set The Bay Citizen apart — and provide a new model for daily journalism. The publication has pending agreements with a dozen local Web sites and bloggers, some of them well-established and funded, and some more homegrown efforts. It’s also working with New American Media, which for many years has represented and encouraged ethnic news outlets.

Yet this isn’t exactly a new idea. SF Gate, the Chronicle’s Web site, has been running content from local blogs, including SF Streetsblog, for more than a year. But it doesn’t pay for that content and so far there have been few discernible benefits for either side of the equation.

“That’s been an experiment for us, but I’m not sure we see much of a return,” Streetsblog SF Editor Bryan Goebel told us. “The question is how you make these partnerships sustainable.”

That’s a question he’ll continue to explore with his newest partner, The Bay Citizen, which is promising to pay bloggers $25 for each post they run and to partner with them on larger projects. Although he’s still waiting to see a contract from Weber, Goebel said, “The model Bay Citizen is using could potentially work.”

Goebel needs something that will work. After 16 months in business, he said SF Streetsblog has 14,000 weekly readers and a loyal following among those interested in transportation and urbanism, but it’s funding (primarily from two rich individuals) has dried up to the point where he’s worried about the site’s future.

“I was hired to be the editor, but now the onus is on me to also keep it going,” Goebel said. “If the community likes this valuable resource … then the community needs to step up and support it.”

The Bay Citizen is also relying on that community-supported paradigm, using a four-part plan to pay the bills. At first The Bay Citizen will be heavily dependent on big donations. But Weber wants to see the operation transition to a more independent program that will rely on public broadcasting-style memberships (small donations), sponsorships (read: ad sales), and the sale of original content (syndication).

There’s already been some grumbling in the local blogosphere about Bay Citizen, from noting the outsized salary of the project’s president and CEO Lisa Frazier (a media consultant who led the search and then took the job at a reported $400,000 per year) to concerns about this big venture exploiting small local partners.

Frazier answered the salary question by noting that she has been working on the project for 14 months and emphasizing her business development experience. “This is a difficult problem we’re taking on and we need to put together a sustainable business model,” she told us. “It’s about results and our fundraising response has been fantastic.”

Another eyebrow-raiser is the background of The Bay Citizen’s Chief Technology Officer Brian Kelley, founder of the Web site ReputationDefender, which promises to remove negative items from the Internet searches of its paying clients — an antithetical mission for news organizations that expose the misdeeds of powerful figures.

Kelley downplayed his former company’s role in countering good journalism, telling us, “I do intend to take that knowledge here to promote our online content.”

Weber said the new venture won’t use its considerable initial resources to try to steal the show, and they’re bringing something truly valuable to the local media scene: a paid staff of journalists to counter the steep declines in local news-gathering.

“Listen,” Weber told us, “I was there for five years. I was running a little start-up with no resources. The last thing I want to do is hurt the smaller outfits. We think we can work together in ways that benefit everyone.”

SF Public Press has pursued a model like Bay Citizen’s for two years. But without millions of dollars in seed money, it’s still hobbling along as basically a volunteer newsroom despite getting around $35,000 from San Francisco Foundation, another Hellman-funded enterprise. “It’s an uncertain model. It’s a leap of faith for the writers to get involved with this,” said project manager Michael Stoll.

Yet Public Press is still moving forward with a newspaper (due out June 15) featuring content culled from a wide variety of local partners ranging from the Commonwealth Club and World Affairs Council to local public radio stations, local blogs, and The Bay Citizen. “We’re calling it both a pilot and a prototype,” Stoll said. “We want to get people’s reactions.”

Weber says he’s also eager to see how people react to The Bay Citizen when it launches May 26, because it will need to quickly establish itself. At the rate The Bay Citizen is spending, Hellman’s money won’t last more than a couple of years, and the financier told us he may be willing to put in a bit more, but he’s going to want to see a plan for financial stability that doesn’t involve him underwriting operations forever. It’s an experiment, but one most observers say is worth trying.

“We need to keep experimenting,” Goebel said, “because not every experiment is going to work.”

Quick Lit: May 19-May 25

David Talbot
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Quick Lit: May 19-May 25

Literary readings, book tours, and talks this week

Michael Chabon, Chuck Palahniuk, a celebration of Bukowski, Carol Queen revisits exhibitionism, Rebecca Solnit and Mona Caron create a California bestiary, and more

Wednesday, May 19

A California Bestiary
Authors Rebecca Solnit and Mona Caron partnered to create their own book of magical California beasts inspired by medieval bestiaries that were more fanciful than factual.
7 p.m., free
Green Arcade
1680 Market, SF
(415) 431-6800

Celebrate Bukowski
Celebrate the release of Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays by Charles Bukowski with editor David Calonne in conversation with Garrett Caples and readings from Stephen Elliot and Daphne Gottlieb.
7 p.m., free
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus, SF
(415) 362-8193

The Empire Strikes Out
Author Robert Elias reads from his new book The Empire Strikes Out: How baseball sold U.S. foreign policy and promoted the American way abroad, which takes an eye-opening look at baseball’s relationship to the American empire, from the revolutionary era to the present.
7:30 p.m., free
Pegasus Books Downtown
2349 Shattuck, Berk
(510) 649-1320

Michael Chabon
Join bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon as he discusses his new memoir, Manhood for Amateurs.
7:30 p.m., free
The Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
(415) 863-8688

“Massive Stars and Their Temper Tantrums”
Join UC Berkeley professor Dr. Nathan Smith as he discusses the properties of the most massive stars, and the life and death of large, unstable stars, such as Eta Carinae.
7:30 p.m., free
Randall Museum
199 Museum Way, SF
(415) 554-9600
www.randallmuseum.org

Carol Queen
Attend a book party for Queen’s 1996 book, Exhibitionism for the Shy, featuring new chapters on internet exhibitionism and added interviews. Dress up, show off, and talk hot at this discussion on finding your own erotic identity and comfort zone to become the erotically outgoing soul you’d like to be.
6:30 p.m., free
Good Vibrations Berkeley
2504 San Pablo, Berk.
http://events.goodvibes.com

Thursday, May 20

An evening with Chuck Palahniuk
Hear the famed author of Fight Club discuss his new book Tell All, a Sunset Boulevard homage to Old Hollywood, filled with name-dropping and nostalgia.
7:30 p.m., $36
Swedish American Hall
2174 Market, SF
(415) 863-8688

California Condors
Learn more about the reestablished population of California Condors after their near extinction 30 years ago at this talk with National Park Service wildlife biologist Daniel George titled, “The Natural History and Future of California Condors.”
7:30 p.m., free
First Unitarian Universalist Church
1187 Franklin, SF
www.goldengateaudubon.org

The Food Industry
Hear Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times reporter Michael Moss discuss lapses in food safety, nutrition related issues, the White House’s war on obesity and more in conversation with KQED reporter Sarah Varney.
Noon, $20
Commonwealth Club
2nd floor
595 Market, SF
(415) 597-6700

Hearts for Madeline
Hear author Page Hodel talk about her new book about when she met Madelene Rodriguez, who soon after died of cancer, and how she still leaves crafted hearts on her doorstep to say ‘I love you.’
7:30 p.m., free
Books Inc.
2275 Market, SF
(415) 864-6777

InsideStorytime: Crime
Enjoy readings from crime writers Lisa Lutz, author of The Spellmans Strike Again, Mark Coggins, author of The Big Wake-up, Seth Harwood, author of Jack Wakes Up, Mitzi Ngim, and Julie Graham with MC Ransom Stephens.
6:30 p.m., $3-$5 sliding scale
Café Royale
800 Post, SF
(415) 505-0869
www.insidestorytime.com

Low Bite
Attend this launch of Sin Soracco’s new prison novel about survival, dignity, friendship, and insubordination inside a women’s prison.
7 p.m., free
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia, SF
www.mtbs.com

“Lyman vs. Niman: Can you be a good environmentalist and still eat meat?”
Raising livestock is resource-intensive and, we are beginning to learn, a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Nicolette Hahn Niman, a Marin rancher and author of Righteous Porkchop, will argue that there is an ecologically sustainable way to eat meat against Howard Lyman, the author of Mad Cowboy: Plain truth from a cattle rancher who won’t eat meat.
7 p.m., $10-$20
David Brower Center
Richard & Rhoda Goldman Theater
2150 Allston, Berk.
(510) 859-9100

Friday, May 21

To Teach: The Journey, In Comics
Graphic artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner brings William Ayers’ memoir To Teach: The journey of a teacher to life in this new graphic novel.
7 p.m., free
Green Arcade
1680 Market, SF
(415) 431-6800

Saturday, May 22

“Shanghai”
Attend an Asian Art Museum docent talk featuring a lecture and slideshow presentation about the museum’s exhibition “Shanghai.” The talk will be in English and Cantonese.
2:30 p.m., free
Chinatown Branch Library
Community Room
1135 Powell, SF
(415) 355-2888

Very Good-Looking Seeks Same
Author Robert Philipson will read from his new book, Very Good-Looking Seeks Same: Gay profiles in search of love, a new volume of transgressive, internet inspired poems, at this event featuring refreshments and live jazz music.
5 p.m., free
San Francisco LGBT Center
4th floor
1800 Market, SF
(415) 865-5555

Sunday, May 23

Broken Promises, Broken Dreams
Hear author Alice Rothchild explore the complexities of Jewish Israeli attitudes and the hardships of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza through personal narratives based on work with medical delegations in the region.
3 p.m., free
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia, SF
www.mtbs.com

Monday, May 24

Sunnyside
Bay Area author Glen David Gold discusses his new American epic, Sunnyside, starring Charlie Chaplin, about dreams, ambition, and the birth of modern America.
7:30 p.m., free
The Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
(415) 863-8688

War: As Soldiers Really Live It
Hear Sebastian Junger discuss his new book about the reality of combat, the fear, honor and trust among men in an extreme situation whose survival depends on their absolute commitment to one another. His on-the-ground account follows a single platoon through a 15 month tour of duty in the most dangerous outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley.
7:30 p.m., $12
First Congregational Church of Berkeley
2345 Channing, Berk.
(510) 848-6767

Tuesday, May 25


A Poem for Mother Earth
Attend this poetry sharing and community healing ceremony featuring poetry, spoken word, and music from migrant Raza, indigenous youth, adults, and elders in poverty focused on the impacts of climate change  on indigenous peoples and poor people of color.
Noon, free
Galleria de la Raza
2857 24th St., SF
www.poormagazine.org

Drills, baby, drills

David Talbot
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Drills, baby, drills

rebeccab@sfbg.com

The disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico should be viewed as a wakeup call for the San Francisco Bay Area, Pacific Environment’s Jackie Dragon noted at a May 11 forum on oil spill preparedness and prevention.

The forum was planned even before the April 20 explosion of BP’s rig, triggering the onset of an out-of-control oil spill that has continued to wreak havoc in the Gulf for nearly a month. Up to 100,000 barrels of oil a day could be gushing from undersea pipeline, according to the highest estimates, which would dwarf the damage caused by the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

Investigative reports in the New York Times in the wake of the spill revealed that the Minerals Management Service (MMS) had issued deep water drilling permits in the Gulf without obtaining permits from a federal agency that assesses threats to endangered species — in violation of federal law — and that MMS routinely overruled staff biologists’ safety concerns. The reports suggest the failure of not only a mechanical device, but an entire regulatory system, in which oil company interests appeared to take precedent over public safety and environmental concerns.

Here in California, environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger withdrew his support for Tranquillon Ridge, a controversial offshore oil drilling project planned off the coast of Santa Barbara. Yet the governor’s change of heart doesn’t safeguard California’s coastal territories from a spill. Millions of gallons of oil are transported in and out of the ports every year, and refinery infrastructure dots the coastline.

“It’s all about the initial timeframe,” noted Fred Felleman, an environmental consultant who spoke at the forum. Shaken by BP’s colossal blunder and wary of the string of failures that led up to last year’s Dubai Star oil spill, environmental groups are now pushing for legislation they hope will slash response time by requiring ships to deploy protective boom before pumping fuel, so potential spills could be sopped up immediately.

The precaution would do little to remedy a major spill, however, and it’s just a small piece of a wider response puzzle that entails coordination among volunteers, community groups, and multilevel government agencies to accomplish everything from containing the slick, to cleaning beaches, to caring for impacted wildlife.

Although established protocols and a chain of command are in place for responding to oil spills, several speakers at the forum noted that vigilance tends to wane between these catastrophes. The environmental devastation in the Gulf could prove to be a catalyst for investing more energy and resources into safeguarding against the worst.

 

LESSONS LEARNED?

Fortunately, the Bay Area has been spared from the sort of devastating blow that is blackening Gulf of Mexico waters, crippling fisheries, and sending tar balls ashore. However, the bay has weathered two comparatively minor oil spills in the last three years, which could be viewed as learning experiences for a bigger incident.

The Cosco Busan spill occurred in late 2007, when a cargo ship hit the Bay Bridge under foggy conditions and released 58,020 gallons of bunker fuel into the bay. According to a detailed account of the incident response, the vessel collided with the Bay Bridge at 8:30 a.m., and the fuel leaked out in a matter of minutes. Two hours later, the estimated amount spilled was reported at 10 barrels (420 gallons), and hours passed before the actual quantity was revealed. The state official who determined how much had leaked arrived at Yerba Buena Island at 9:45 a.m. to perform an assessment but had to wait more than two hours to be transported to the ship.

Speaking at the forum, Zeke Grader, of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, said fishing boat captains with vessels at Fisherman’s Wharf were ready to be deployed instantly to help contain the spill — but the Coast Guard initially turned them away. “This was a relatively minor spill in a bay, and we were totally unprepared to deal with it,” Grader charged. “That is really egregious.” Commercial fishing vessels were finally deployed to help with efforts, most venturing out on day five — long after the damage had been done.

San Francisco Baykeeper, a pollution watchdog group, was inundated with thousands of phone calls from volunteers, but the lack of an overarching volunteer coordination plan between governmental agencies and community organizations made it difficult to plug people in, executive director Deb Self noted. The Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR) is the state agency under the Department of Fish and Game that works in conjunction with the U.S. Coast Guard and the financially responsible polluter to react when a spill occurs. Carol Singleton, an OSPR spokesperson, acknowledged that better communication during the Cosco Busan would have made the response more effective.

The spill affected the Bay Area’s biologically rich ecosystem. Just 421 of the roughly 1,000 oiled birds recovered by volunteers were successfully rehabilitated and released back into the wild, according to the Golden Gate Audubon Society, while nearly 7,000 are estimated to have died. Even a small drop of oil on the feathers of a bird can destroy the animal’s natural insulation, resulting in hypothermia.

Singleton said a well-established oil-spill response strategy is in place. “Every vessel and every facility has a contingency plan,” she noted. “We’re constantly practicing.” Since the Cosco Busan, a volunteer coordination plan has been crafted, she said. Ecologically sensitive areas are mapped out and prioritized, and a network of wildlife care facilities stand ready to take in oiled animals.

Following the Cosco Busan spill, members of the Legislature put forth a suite of proposals that came to be known as the “spill bills,” resulting in a few stronger protections such as spill-response equipment stationed and ready for deployment in high-risk areas, enhanced funding to care for oiled wildlife, and grants to local governments for oil-spill response tools. However, some ideas for stronger protection got killed by Schwarzenegger’s veto pen.

Former Sen. Carole Migden proposed a mandatory spill response time of two hours, but that was vetoed. Sen. Loni Hancock proposed beefing up the state’s Oil Spill Prevention Administrative Fund, which is derived from fees on barrels of oil transported into California ports, by upping the charge from 5 cents to 8 cents per barrel. That was also struck down, as was Sen. Mark Leno’s proposal to establish grants to develop better containment and cleanup technology.

As the disaster in the Gulf continues to unfold, Dragon of Pacific Environment said grassroots environmental organizations might renew pressure for stricter regulations on some of these fronts.

 

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

Another piece of legislation, inspired by the Dubai Star oil spill, is expected to go before the Senate Environmental Quality Committee in early June. The Dubai Star mishap occurred last October when at least 400 gallons of bunker fuel was released into open water near Alameda.

Far smaller than the Cosco Busan incident, the Dubai Star spill still resulted in the deaths at least 100 shorebirds. It happened at Anchorage 9, two miles south of the Bay Bridge, during a fuel transfer — a routine fill-up that occurs roughly 800 times per year.

The official investigation report hasn’t been released, but U.S. Coast Guard Captain Paul Gugg noted that a faulty valve was to blame. Some 2,000 gallons of oil overflowed, but went unnoticed until someone aboard a tugboat pointed it out, according to Gugg’s account. Most of the oily mess was contained on board, but between 400 and 800 gallons spilled over the port side, instantly creating a toxic plume.

“This particular vessel is equipped with high-level alarms, and high high-level alarms, which did not activate,” Gugg noted.

Under state regulations, vessels are required to respond to spills by deploying 600 feet of boom within 30 minutes, and 600 more feet more within one hour. In the case of the Dubai Star, that didn’t happen, a report released by the San Francisco Estuary Partnership noted. Instead, the slick was allowed to spread.

Assembly Member Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) introduced AB 234 to establish a requirement for vessels to deploy boom before beginning a fuel transfer, so that a spill could be contained without losing time. The state of Washington has a similar law, noted legislative aid Paige Brokaw, “and their current conditions are pretty similar to our current conditions.” Booming is only effective at slower currents, which makes things difficult since a fuel transfer can take more than eight hours, and currents may shift in that time.

Huffman’s office received a letter of opposition to the bill from OSPR. “Booming is a good method to contain a spill, but it’s not a foolproof method,” said Singleton, the OSPR spokesperson. “To use that one method, it just may or may not work in certain circumstances.” Nonetheless, proponents of the bill say that even partial oil containment in higher currents is better than having no precautionary measures at all.

While the lessons of the past can be instructive, forum participants noted that continuous coordination, communication, and vigilance is the surest path to being able to respond if another oil spill occurs in the Bay Area. Grader, meanwhile, said he knew the best solution of all. “The ultimate prevention,” he said, “is basically getting off our oil addiction.”

PG&E pitches the Guardian for support

Sasha Cuttler
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1
PG&E pitches the Guardian for support

You know that Pacific Gas & Electric is carpet-bombing voters with its campaign to kill the CleanPowerSF program and pass Proposition 16 – which would prevent such renewable public power programs in the future – when one of their minions calls the Bay Guardian City Editor at his desk at work with their pitch.

That’s what happened this week when a representative of a PG&E front group, the Common Sense Coalition, called me to warn about San Francisco’s “dangerous energy scheme.” I listened for awhile, and then asked the guy a few of my own questions.

“What is the Common Sense Coalition?” I asked, a seemingly straightforward question that I already knew the answer to. I could hear him fumbling through his notes looking for the answer, and when he finally started to read me his deceptive script about “concerned citizens,” I asked another, “Where does the Common Sense Coalition get its funding?’

He didn’t seem to know, so I told him that PG&E Corp. has dedicated at least $35 million in ratepayer money – that is, profits from the high electricity rates paid by San Franciscans and PG&E’s other captive customers – to the campaign being waged by its front groups.

That campaign includes slick mailers and ads on websites (including the New York Times), television, and print publications, asking, “Do you think voters deserve the right to have the final say on how our money is spent?” Actually, the measure requires a two-thirds vote, which is nearly impossible to obtain when PG&E spends tens of millions of dollars to distort the truth in every election that its market share is threatened.

And the truth is that we do have a right to vote on the elected officials who pursue programs like CleanPowerSF, but we don’t have a right to vote on whether we get our power from PG&E or whether it uses our own money against us.

Yann Martel brushes off the haters

Andrew Lam
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0

Last night, Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, and the new spectacularly panned follow up effort Beatrice and Virgil, took the stage at Kabuki Sundance Theater to speak with fellow writer Laura Fraser.

One can almost hear the semi colons when Martell speaks. “What makes life go well is not just external success; it’s how you feel about it.” It’s well and good that he seems relatively undisturbed by reviews of his work, because otherwise he might be a little ruffled these days; despite the phenomenal triumph of Life of Pi, the New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani heads up a long list of unimpressed critics, calling the new book “disappointing and often perverse.”

Seen onstage, Martel seems to be too engaged with philosophical conquesting to bog down in such matters.

An exotic biography (born in Spain!  Foreign service parents raised him in Costa Rica, France, and Mexico! Employed as a security guard and tree planter before coming to writing full time!) has left Martel with a desire to express the totality of human existence through the simplest narrative possible. All the better to communicate with the rest of the world, something which the author finds his “duty,” albeit a grand one. “It’s no easy fate,” to be endowed with such literary responsibility, he sighs.

Let’s leave aside, for a moment, the slings and arrows of outrageous book critics. What Martel took nine years to come up with in Beatrice and Virgil is what last night’s host Laura Fraser dubbed “meta fiction,” a Rubik’s cube of narrative not unlike Life of Pi’s structure. The book follows a writer who has become disenchanted by criticism from his editors; a character that Martel makes no bones about being a semi-autobiographical representation. The character finds inspiration renewed upon meeting a taxidermist, who needs help writing his own Beckett-like play starring personified characters based on his stuffed donkey and monkey friends that live in his shop. Oh, and the whole thing’s about the Holocaust.

It’s actually a less complicated version of what Martel had planned for the book at one point; a flipbook, “a book with two doors, but no exit,” which read one way would contain an essay about Holocaust lit, and the other, a fictional novel on the genocide.

Martel thinks it’s time to move past the strict rule that the Holocaust must be approached from a historical realist perspective because of the scope of the horror that occurred. By representing tragedy in a “non-literal, compact way,” he argues, the artist is able to create “art as suitcase: light, portable, [and] essential,” and speak to the emotional side of a tragedy where the voices of billions have been blurred into silence. Hence the donkey and monkey. He compares the need for these fictional characters to Orwell’s Animal Farm, Camus’ The Plague, and Picasso’s Guernica. One things for sure, Martel is a well read guy.

See we were totally there! Blurriness is the new artistic thing. Geez. Photo by Paula Connelly

It’s decadent really, the certain, bountifully nerdy joys involved with spending a Wednesday night watching onstage conversation with a book author. Respectful hushes. The discovery of exciting new vocabulary words. Audience opportunities to extrapolate theories of the meaning of titles and character names. Central among these pleasures, the chance to hear a person who has built their life on the solitude of reading and writing speak in front of a crowd. How do they do it, these authors? Masters of the written word, shouldn’t they be slobbering, anti-social messes at public speaking, at human relations in general?

But, scholarly as he may be, he’s well spoken, this Martel. He goes so far in his gregariousness, even, to engage with Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, having sent the head of state a book every two weeks for the past three years to instill in him a deeper appreciation for the arts and their import in the character and integrity of a guy that can run a country. He holds our Prez highly, noting that, in contrast to Stephen’s complete lack of response to the literary missives, Obama sent him a thank you note upon reading Life of Pi.

The whole thing’s mind boggling. A celebrity in the public eye, easeful and unworried in the face of professional turmoil enough to spend his moments onstage discussing why the leader of his country should read a Harlequin romance novel (a. the company is based out of Canada, b. they’ve sold 5.63 billion titles to date)? The man doesn’t appear to be worried. A solid endorsement of any current project, if ere I’ve seen one.

Bring it back?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Bring it back?

UPDATE: Oh dear, the Talvin Singh show’s been cancelled. More Volcano fallout? Hopefully he’ll be back soon, tablas in hand.

superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO One thing I’ve noticed recently, with equal parts pleasure and mind-warping “oh jeez”-ness, has been the unashamed use of the terms electronica and trip-hop in party promotions. I know we’re in a moment of total 1990s nostalgia — and, yikes, rap-rock was the byword at Coachella, according to the New York Times — but can we finally chuff off the wallpaper blahs of these musty genres and renew them? This week sees a plethora of well-known older acts like Talvin Singh, Bonobo, Signal Path, and Bluetech coming to town — all with live instrumentation. Maybe the moment to reshine has arrived, live? Ping me when DJ Shadow steps up with the Dap-Kings or Boards of Canada melts into Mastodon. Or Owl City grows some Orbs.

 

TALVIN SINGH

It’ll be tablatastic when the British legend, who laced drum and bass with acoustic Asian-flavored classical effects (and took Indian dance music out of the bhangra and into the digital) with seminal album OK in 1998, brings his live act to town. Yes, he’s calling his sound tablatronica, and, yes, he has invented an electronic instrument called the Tablatronic. The future is here again. Tabla!

Wed/21, 8 p.m., $25. Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. www.bimbos365club.com

 

SIGNAL PATH

Montana — known for its live electronic musicians? For the past decade and change, Missoula duo Signal Path have been representing with a bop-worthy blend of live instrumentation and “computer-generated production.” (Think all kinds of wired hijinks plus live drums and guitar.) The effect is surprisingly free of pretension, almost jam-bandish, but without all that twirling patchouli. They’ll be joined by energetic SF groovers MO2 — no relation to Montana.

Thu/22, 9 p.m., $10. Boom Boom Room, 1601 Fillmore, SF. www.boomboomblues.com

 

BLOODY BEETROOTS

One thing about the last decade’s electro-filter explosion — the music may not survive, but future anthropologists will forever be puzzled by the profusion of masked DJs. Italian duo Bloody Beetroots are among the few big names standing in terms of ear-splitting squelch and spangle (and their original Bizarro Spider Man masks are still de rigueur), perhaps by expanding their onslaught to include quiet moments of finely sculpted beauty — and a live drummer. Plus, they quote Baudelaire on the MySpace.

Thu/22, 9 p.m., $20. The Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

 

BONOBO

I’ve seen trip-hopper Bonobo several times in his DJ guise, and while he pushes all the right sonic buttons for a toke-tastic night of bass-heavy sway, it always seemed his mind was more on mental trips than dance-floor hips. On new album Black Sands, he’s added live horns, strings, vocals, and percussion that allow his more cerebral compositions to take on fuller force and rumble. He’ll hit Mezzanine with the whole works.

Fri/23, 9 p.m., $25. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.blasthaus.com

 

SATORI SOCIAL

Set on expanding his musical palette beyond mere laptopping, Hawaii’s ambient wizard Bluetech has gone live with his new band Satori Social, adding a vocals, flute, horns, and percussion to his mellow glitching. Can a Burner-heavy crowd vibe on a little jazzy soul and reggae-ish sunshine? Whatever the answer, the question-wrestling should be a joy to watch and hear. Contempo Brit dubber Ott and hometown acid-crunky an-ten-nae open up.

Fri/23, 10 p.m.- 4 a.m., $15. 103 Harriet, SF. www.1015.com

 

A+D

Oh dear and good goddess, they’re back. DJs Adrian and the Mysterious D are two of our finest exports, delivering genre-defying bootlegs and monster mashups to needy hordes from Budapest to Hong Kong. They’re back from roving the world on a giant tour to helm once again their little famous party, Bootie, here at home. Will they be bringing back any Finnish death rock to pervert?

Sat/24, 9 p.m., $12. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.bootiesf.com

 

PRINCE KLASSEN

More striking disco re-edits on the scene, this time coming from Austin, Texas — and, oddly, from a member of the Fully Fitted crew that includes ho-hum hipster-electroids Amanda Blank and Pase Rock. Don’t let that scare you away. If you’re into warm, red classics made warmer and redder and no neon posing, Prince Klassen (not to be confused with Prince Language, the NYC re-edit master) can provide. Disco love is a drug.

Sat/24, 9 p.m.- 3 a.m., $5. Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF. www.decosf.com *

The inside angle

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The inside angle

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Josh Wolf’s second spell in the hot seat — and other penalties brought down against independent journalists documenting California’s defiant student movement — raise some important questions about the freedom of the press at civil disobedience protests.

Wolf, a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, faces a possible academic suspension for violating the student conduct code during a Nov. 20 student occupation of a campus lecture hall. But Wolf says he was there to document the moment as a reporter.

Brandon Jourdan, an independent journalist who was also inside the hall with Wolf, now faces his own set of misdemeanor charges after capturing footage of a March 4 student protest that broke onto a West Oakland freeway. And David Morse, a journalist and Indybay collective member who reported on a raucous Dec. 11 protest at the UC Berkeley chancellor’s residence, is now fighting the seizure of his camera and a search warrant issued by UC police for his unpublished photographs — something the First Amendment Project maintains is in violation of state law.

The footage that Wolf and Jourdan took on Nov. 20 and March 4 captured police use of physical force against protesters and documented the widely publicized actions from unique perspectives. The reports were broadcast on Democracy Now!, a popular independent news program that airs nationally on satellite television stations, public access channels, and online.

The gutsy camerapersons aren’t the first to face criminal charges. After nine reporters followed several hundred protesters seeking to block construction of the Black Fox Nuclear Power Plant onto private property in June 1979 and were arrested, an Oklahoma court of appeals ruled the First Amendment guaranteed them no immunity from prosecution for trespassing.

“That makes the position of a journalist very difficult, in areas where demonstrators are essentially exercising civil disobedience to make a point,” notes Terry Francke, executive director of Californians Aware, a watchdog organization focused on First Amendment issues. “There’s no free pass for journalists in the crowd recording what’s going on. Their principled position would presumably be yes, like [protesters] risk arrest and consequences for the greater good, they’d risk the same for the sake of giving the public … a close-up picture of what it’s like to be in those circumstances.”

Without that journalistic witness, “When you hear stories about what went on in the middle of a police and demonstrators’ confrontation … you’ll have two irreconcilable versions, from only directly interested parties,” Francke points out.

There’s been no shortage recently of civil disobedience on California college campuses, where operations have been ravaged by budget cuts. The Nov. 20 occupation was staged early in the morning at Wheeler Hall, when students barricaded themselves inside to protest a 32 percent fee hike imposed by the UC Board of Regents. While most reporters gathered outside the building or flew over in helicopters, Wolf was inside, and he’s the only student to claim being there in a journalistic capacity. He says he wore a police-issued press badge.

Wolf, a video journalist, enjoys a sort of celebrity status because he spent 226 days in jail after resisting a subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury. It started when he shot a film of a 2005 protest in San Francisco, which police tried to obtain because they believed it could help them pinpoint demonstrators who vandalized a police car and injured an officer. Since the case was pursued at the federal level, he was unable to invoke California’s shield law protecting journalists from being compelled to reveal unpublished material.

Democracy Now! aired a lengthy report of the Nov. 20 occupation featuring footage that the two embedded reporters had captured from the interior of Wheeler, coproduced by David Martinez. Show host Amy Goodman specifically named Wolf as a co-contributor when the report aired.

Now Wolf is facing a possible seven-month suspension by the campus Center for Student Conduct, which charges him with violating the student conduct code on multiple counts. “Their perspective is that I am a student and that I am a journalist,” Wolf explained. “My responsibility is no different from anyone else’s in there, and therein, my punishment should be reflective of that of everyone else.” Wolf said he had the backing of the journalism school, which confirmed to the Guardian that the dean wrote a letter of support for Wolf.

David Morse, 42, is a journalist who has covered hundreds of Bay Area protests on Indybay, an online news site that spotlights grassroots movements and protests. In a motion filed against UCPD, the First Amendment Project charges that Morse was arrested and had his camera seized Dec. 11 despite repeating six times that he was a journalist and displaying a press pass. “They told me, ‘You have a camera, we want your camera,'<0x2009>” Morse recounted. The next morning, as reports of angry, torch-wielding students storming the chancellor’s home and smashing windows made headlines, Morse was still sitting in jail in Santa Rita. “My voice as an eyewitness was completely silenced,” he said. His charges were dropped, but now he is challenging the search warrant to get his memory discs back.

When the police department sought a search warrant for Morse’s unpublished photos, they didn’t mention that he had identified as a journalist, the FAP charges. The legal nonprofit filed a motion to quash the warrant on grounds that it violates a provision in the penal code barring search warrants for journalistic work products, invoking the state shield law.

Jourdan, meanwhile, faces five misdemeanor charges after filming the March 4 freeway protest and subsequent police response, which many have characterized as excessive. (In one clip, an officer can be seen striking an individual who doesn’t appear to be resisting with a baton.) He was arrested along with two other videographers who also face criminal infractions. Footage Jourdan and Martinez captured from March 4 aired on Democracy Now!, and Jourdan’s report was also featured as a lead story on the Huffington Post. Jourdan says he wore press credentials.

“It’s unfair for them to file charges against me when they’ve dropped charges against others,” Jourdan said. The Oakland Police Department confirmed to the Guardian that Jourdan had been charged with crimes such as unlawful assembly and obstruction of a thoroughfare, but did not respond to a message asking what set him apart from other reporters.

Jourdan, who has also contributed to Reuters, The New York Times, and other outlets, has managed to capture a variety of similar events on film, including Amy Goodman’s arrest during protests outside the Republican National Convention in 2009. “Barely a month goes by that some lawyer isn’t calling me up trying to get footage of some one getting beat up,” he said. But he maintains that documenting these intense moments is crucial, not for resolving disputes, but to document these moments in history.

Reporters from mainstream television news programs toting bulky cameras were also filming on the freeway, but were allowed to leave. Guardian news intern Jobert Poblete and multimedia producer Cameron Burns with UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian were arrested on the freeway too, but their charges were later dropped after state Sen. Leland Yee intervened. “Journalists are generally provided greater access to cover news stories than other members of the public,” Yee wrote in a letter to the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. “Unfortunately, law enforcement did not provide such leeway in this case.”

Adam Keigwin, Yee’s chief of staff, said the senator’s office got involved on behalf of the Guardian and the Daily Cal because he knew those publications. “We just need to know more about this,” Keigwin said. “Once credentialed media is present, it’s the senator’s perspective that journalists should have the right to cover these things and should not be charged.”

But when asked if there is a deficiency in state law since that right doesn’t technically exist, Keigwin responded, “This may be something we should consider.”

Appetite: 3 food memoirs with heart

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: 3 food memoirs with heart

While reading Kim Severson’s new gem of a food memoir that came out last week, I started reminiscing about other food memoirs in recent years that travel well beyond food… the kind of books that leave one simultaneously comforted, satiated and challenged to live a more authentic life.

Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life by Kim Severson
Kim Severson, a New York Times food journalist, just debuted Spoon Fed, sharing about eight cooks who taught her important life precepts. I read a lot of food memoirs but when this one hit my desk a few weeks ago, I couldn’t put it down. It contains stories (each accompanied by a recipe) of food trailblazers, from Alice Waters to Marion Cunningham. I related not only to Severson’s stories of life on both coasts (and in the Midwest) or as a food writer, but was touched by her tender honesty, blanketed in warm frankness. Severson’s life lessons are never heavy-handed and, in fact, are so vulnerable, I came away renewed to face my own hang-ups, while understanding others’. I particularly loved “Popular Girls,” a chapter on Ruth Reichl and self-acceptance, or lessons on faith and tenacity in New Orleans from the wonderful Leah Chase, even embracing authenticity and ambition from Rachael Ray. Severson’s own stories carry impact due to the heartfelt candor with which she shares her insecurities and fears, and what she has achieved in facing them.

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from my Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg
Molly Wizenberg is an author who grew up in Oklahoma (where I was born), exhibiting a youthful yet mature-beyond-her-years hominess in her writing and comforting recipes. A Homemade Life pulsates with accessible heart but not naivete. This was a favorite memoir in recent years, laden with bittersweet sadness from her father’s cancer, the rejuvenating joy of re-discovering herself and her love for food upon returning to Paris after his death, the surprise of starting a blog, Orangette, that gained her an international following… and even more suprising, meeting the love her life through the blog. Her recipes are delicious, whether cider-glazed salmon or a ginger chocolate banana bread that’s become a staple in my own kitchen.

Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples by Ruth Reichl
One of Kim Severson’s aforementioned inspirations, Ruth Reichl has also long been a favorite of mine. Her memoirs are enjoyable reads, including delightful stories of life and disguises as a NY Times food critic in “Garlic and Sapphires”, or understanding her mother in “Not Becoming My Mother”. Reading Severson brought to mind Ruth’s first two memoirs, Tender at the Bone (1998) and Comfort Me with Apples (2002). Whether bluntly proclaiming she wasn’t “pretty or funny or sexy” but could attract people with food, or, in “Comfort Me…” (I recommend this one if you haven’t read her books), where she reveals, via colorful food and travel stories, the heartbreak of the dissolution of her first marriage or the agony of nearly adopting a child. Ruth’s bright candor, adventurous palate and lack of self pity make these food memoirs worth returning to.

Visit Virginia Miller’s food itinerary and review site, www.theperfectspotsf.com

Quick Lit: April 21-April 27

David Talbot
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Quick Lit: April 21-April 27

Literary readings, book tours, and talks this week – including NYT Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin, local activist Peter Berg, McSweeny’s Issue 34, poetry readings in honor of National Poetry month, and more.


Wednesday, April 21

Cosmic Conversation
Join KQED for a conversation with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of NOVA scienceNOW, and Paula Apsell, senior executive producer of NOVA and NOVA scienceNOW, for a behind-the-scenes look at the science series and a discussion about the show’s “Pluto files.”
8 p.m., $15
Palace of Fine Arts
3301 Lyon, SF
(415) 392-4400
www.cityboxoffice.com
 
Greenpeace’s New Rainbow Warrior
Hear from Kumi Naiboo, the new Executive Director of Greenpeace International, discuss how to lead a grassroots group at a crucial point in the international environmental movement.
6:30 p.m., $20
Commonwealth Club
595 Market, 2nd floor, SF
(415) 597-6700

Daniele Mastrogiacomo
Hear Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo discuss his new book, Days of Fear, about how the Taliban kidnapped him, his driver, and his translator, about his subsequent travel throughout a system of Taliban underground hide-outs, the televised brutal murder of his driver, and his eventual release.
6:30 p.m., free
Italian Cultural Institute
425 Washington, Suite 200, SF
(415) 788-7142

Wherever There’s a Fight
Hear authors Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi read from and sign their new book at this installment of Betty’s List Literary Salon.
6 p.m., free
Duboce Park Café
2 Sanchez, SF
www.wherevertheresafight.com


Thursday, April 22

Reza Aslan
Hear Reza Aslan, author of How to Win a Cosmic War: Confronting religious fundamentalism, discuss her theory that in a post 9/11 world, the U.S.’s “war on terror” adopts the same religiously polarizing rhetoric and cosmic worldview as the jihadists, and is therefore fighting a war that can’t be won.
8 p.m., $10-18
Jewish Community Center of San Francisco
Kanbar Hall
3200 California, SF
(415) 292-1233

Envisioning Sustainability
Hear author and environmental activist Peter Berg discuss his new collection of essays that helped to define the bioregional movement and shape the sustainability revolution.
7 p.m., free
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia, SF
www.mtbs.com

How to Cool the Planet
Hear author Jeff Goodell discuss his new book that talks about the Earth’s possibilities for geoengineering, the idea that we can use technology to reduce global warming on Earth, which was recently made more popular by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano.
7 p.m.,free
Books Inc.
1760 4th St., Berk.
(510) 525-7777

“Medicean Music and Francesca Caccini”
Hear a presentation from Kip Cranna, from the SF Opera, about music from the Medicean world and hear Richard Savino, from CSU Sacramento, discuss Francesca Caccini, composer of the first published opera by a woman.
6 p.m., $15
Mechanics’ Institute
57 Post, SF
(415) 393-0100

“The Natural and Unnatural History of Yerba Buena Island and What Might be Next”
Hear a panel of experts present an illustrated overview of Yerba Buena Island’s history, ecological treasures, threats, and possible plans for the future.
7:30 p.m., free
Randall Museum
199 Museum Way, SF
www.natureinthecity.org

Poetry at Pegasus
Celebrate National Poetry Month at this reading with poets Kathleen Weaver, Gretchen Stengel, Susan Elliot Jardin, Cynthia Carmichael, and Jane Downs.
7:30 p.m., free
Pegasus Books Downtown
2349 Shattuck, Berk.
www.pegasusbookstore.com

RuPaul
Attend this book signing with the world’s most famous drag queen RuPaul, celebrating her recent book, Workin’ It! RuPaul’s Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style.
7:30 p.m., free
Books Inc.
2275 Market, SF
(415) 864-6777

“Truth Emergency Interantional: Censorship, propaganda, and empire”
Attend this talk and booksigning with Peter Philips and Mickey Huff, co-editors of Project Censored 2010: The top 25 stories of 2010.
7 p.m., $5-20 sliding scale
Berkeley Unitarian Universalists
1924 Cedar, Berk.
http://www.bfuu.org

Friday, April 23

“The Contradictory Legacy of Haiti’s Revolution”
Attend this talk with Robert Fatton, Jr., author, scholar, and Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, titled, “The Contradictory Legacy of Haiti’s Revolution: History and the earthquake crisis.”
6:30 p.m., free
California Institute of Integral Studies
Social and Cultural Anthropology Department
1453 Mission, Room 308, 3rd floor, SF
(415) 575-6249

Mark Kurlansky
Hear about Mark Kurlansky’s new book, The Eastern Stars: How baseball changed the Dominican town of San Pedro de Marcoris, about one small impoverished area in the Dominican Republic that has produced a suprising number of Major League Baseball talent.
7:30 p.m., free
Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
(415) 863-8688

WritersCorps Reading Series
Attend this “Claim the Block” reading series featuring readings by young writers.
7:30 p.m., free
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
(415) 252-4655 to RSVP

Saturday, April 24

“America’s Muslim Roots”
Hear Bay Area Muslim journalists Hamza van Boom and Yahsmin Binti Bobo in conversation with Jonathan Curiel about his new book, Al’ America: Travels through America’s Arab and Islamic roots, which details the historic influence of Arab and Muslim culture on America from Columbus to the modern age.
6 p.m., $7
Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California
1433 Madison, Oak.
(510) 219-2431

“Outspoken: Vietnamese Poets of the Diaspora II”
Attend this event that celebrates the thriving Vietnamese community in the Bay Area with readings by poets Anh Vu Buchanan, Andrew Lam, Kim-An Lieberman, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Dao Strom, and Lan Tran.
7 p.m., free
Fort Mason Center
Laguna at Marina, Fleet Room, SF
www.friendssfpl.org

 

Sunday, April 25


I Love You and I’m Leaving You Anyway
Mad Men writer Tracy McMillan tells the story about her relationship with her father, who was a convicted pimp, drug dealer, and felon, and what it has meant for her relationships with men.
3 p.m., free
Books Inc.
2251 Chestnut, SF
(415) 931-3633

Monday, April 26

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
As part of the Ask a Scientist lecture series, scientist and author Rebecca Skloot will discuss her new book about the life of a poor tobacco farmer who died of cervical cancer in 1951 but whose cells are still alive today and used for scientific research. Skloot will discuss bioethics, race issues, history, and family.
7 p.m., free
Horatius
350 Kansas, SF
(415) 252-3500

A Thousand Sisters
Hear author Lisa Shannon discuss her book which cronicles her journey to the Congo to meet the women there and share their stories.
7:30 p.m., free
Books Inc.
2251 Chestnut, SF
(415) 931-3633

Will Grayson, Will Grayson
Not Your Mother’s Book Club (NYMBC) presents John Green and David Levithan,
the authors of Will Grayson, Will Grayson, about two teens with the same name who cross paths in Chicago.
7 p.m., free
Books Inc.
601 Van Ness, SF
(415) 776-1111

Tuesday, April 27

Andrew Revkin
Hear award winning environmental journalist and author Andrew Revkin discuss his work on the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog, 25 years covering environmental and social subjects, and his previously published books, like The North Pole Was Here.
8 p.m., $20
Herbst Theater
401 Van Ness, SF
www.cityboxoffice.com

Hunting Eichmann
Hear author Neal Bascomb discuss his new book about a Nazi who escapes American POW camps and hides in the mountains in Buenos Aires before he is eventually caught and brought to trial.
7 p.m., free
Books Inc.
1760 4th St., Berk.
(510) 525-7777

McSweeny’s Issue 34
Attend this release of the highly anticipated Issue 34 of McSweeny’s presented by Nick McDonell, Tom Barbach, and Daniel Handler.
7:30 p.m., free
Books Inc.
2251 Chestnut, SF
(415) 931-3633

Noir Literary Night
Attend the 5th annual Nior Literary Night featuring Cara Black, author of Murder in the Palais Royal, David Corbett, author of Do They Know I’m Running?, and Joe Gores, author of Spade & Archer: The prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s the Maltese Falcon.
6 p.m., $12
Mechanic’s Institute
57 Post, SF
(415) 393-0100
www.milibrary.org

Karin Sanders
Attend a reading and discussion of Karin Sanders’ new book, Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination, in conversation with Mark Sandberg.
5:30 p.m., free
University Press Books
2430 Bancroft, Berk.
(510) 548-0585

Teabaggers: Angry, ignorant, and proud of it

Sasha Cuttler
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Teabaggers: Angry, ignorant, and proud of it

As the teabaggers hit the streets again on April 15 to shout their denunciations of taxes and government, a new poll in the New York Times confirms what most of us knew: these people are angrier, more conservative, and less informed than the average American – a deadly combination.

The Grey Lady didn’t say it that way exactly, but that’s what the results show. They overwhelmingly hate Obama and think that he’s been pushing policies that disproportionately help the poor and African-Americans and that he has already increased taxes on most Americans, none of which is true, as untrue as the supposed “government takeover” of the health care system that ushered in the Tea Party in the first place.

The teabaggers are older and wealthier than most Americans, and they also describe themselves as far more angry than the average American or even most Republicans. And considering their affections for guns and Revolutionary War metaphors, that’s kinda scary.

Frankly, I was hoping that these people would eventually realize that Obama was as far from being a socialist and I am from being, well, a teabagger. But this strange circle jerk of proud ignorance seems to have some staying power. In San Francisco, there are not one but two Tax Day Tea Parties: an event from 4-7 pm at Union Square and another from 1-4 pm at Civic Center with the telling title, “Tell Pelosi to Shove It!”

Josh Wolf in the eye of the storm (again)

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Josh Wolf in the eye of the storm (again)

Josh Wolf has landed in hot water again — this time in connection with his reporting from inside the student occupation at Wheeler Hall on the University of California Berkeley campus to protest budget cuts.

The blogger and videographer was jailed in 2006 after resisting a subpoena to testify before a Federal grand jury because he had taken footage at a 2005 San Francisco protest against the G8 summit. His case was widely reported on, in part because he set a record for jail time served — 226 days — for refusing to give up newsgathering materials. Police believed Wolf possessed footage that could be used to press charges for vandalism of a police car and an assault on an officer. He didn’t.

Now the 27-year-old filmmaker, a student at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, faces a possible seven-month suspension in the wake of a student occupation of Wheeler Hall last November 20. Wolf was one of two reporters whose footage from inside Wheeler Hall was included in a Democracy Now! broadcast about the occupation — but he was the only UC Berkeley student who has said he was there documenting the event as a member of the press.

Wolf says he wore a police-issued press badge around his neck during the Wheeler Hall occupation. Press passes can serve to flag journalists as being in a separate category from civilians in situations involving law enforcement, but displaying one does not always provide a reporter immunity from arrest. The video he shot was integrated into a report produced with independent journalist Brandon Jourdan, who was also inside the building. Wolf and Jourdan were both arrested — but their footage was widely viewed on Democracy Now!, a national alternative news outlet.

In an “informal resolution” issued April 9, UC Berkeley’s Center for Student Conduct found that Wolf “participated in a disturbance of the peace,” charging him with multiple violations of the student conduct code. Wolf’s role as a journalist is not discussed in the list of charges, making it seem as if he’s being lumped in with the student protesters, despite being there as a reporter.

But the fact that he wears another hat as a journalist clearly hasn’t escaped the campus enforcers of the student conduct code. As part of the disciplinary measure, Wolf was also directed to write a 10-page essay reflecting on a list of questions, including: “How do you consider and reconcile the roles of being a student and being a journalist? At what points does either role become more important to you and why? What are your limits as a journalist? Where and how do you draw lines for yourself in terms of things you will or will not do to pursue professional goals?”

Wolf is being given the option of writing the paper and taking the seven-month suspension (a plea bargain of sorts), or moving on to a formal adjudication process that would entail going before a five-member hearing panel, like a court trial. His plan is to try and get an extension for the informal resolution process as a means of getting the charges dropped altogether.

Berkeley Associate Dean of Students Christina Gonzales, whose office oversees the Center of Student Conduct, was unable to discuss Wolf’s particular case because of a federal law prohibiting public disclosure on such matters. Nonetheless, she offered some general comments. “In the big picture, whenever you’re dealing with conduct, you do take into consideration circumstances,” Gonzales said. “If some one reported, ‘I have special credentials’ or whatever, then [the Center for Student Conduct] will go back as part of their research on any of the cases and try to find out as much information they can to determine if that was a known fact, whatever it is that the student’s telling us.” She stressed that the informal resolution was only a first step in the disciplinary process, and that no formal decision has been made at this point in time.

 “There’s always information that comes from others that’s taken into consideration with the whole picture,” Gonzales added.

Wolf says that when he asked Laura Bennett, Assistant Director at the Center for Student Conduct, whether it would impact the outcome of his case if he submitted a letter from Jourdan confirming that he was there as a reporter, he didn’t get a straightforward response. “Her response was, well, that kind of a letter would simply lead me to have more questions, such as, ‘how did you get into the building, who did what, what happened inside the building,’ a whole bunch of stuff that I’m not inclined to help with for any number of reasons,” Wolf said. “Some of this was given on a privileged basis. … And admittedly it’s like, wait, I went down this rabbit hole before, with the grand jury, and I’m not about to deviate from that path.”

Jourdan, who has contributed to the Huffington Post, Reuters, and the New York Times, among other outlets, told the Guardian that he wrote a letter supporting Wolf in this case. “To the best of his ability, he was there to capture a moment in history,” Jourdan said. Wolf is holding off on submitting the letter for now.

“I think what’s happening in the UC system is there’s a sort of crackdown,” added Jourdan, who faces his own charges after reporting on a March 4 demonstration against budget cuts to education that broke onto a West Oakland freeway. “When journalists are charged with criminal offenses … it’s impeding the work. The information is not free flowing. It’s imperative that journalists be given access to cover something … that in time will be seen as an historic movement.”

Pick up next week’s issue or visit us online for a more detailed report.

New media sources win Pulitzers

Sasha Cuttler
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American journalism’s biggest awards, the Pulitzer Prizes, were awarded today and among the honorees was a nonprofit newsroom, Pro Publica, which was recognized for groundbreaking work that it did on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Pro Publica reporter Sheri Fink was honored for “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” which chronicled ethically questionable decisions made by medical staff about what to do with critically ill patients awaiting a delayed evacuation. The nonprofit operation partners with other newsrooms, and Fink’s story also ran in New York Times Magazine.

Although he was not part of the Pulitzer Prize, former Guardian writer A.C. Thompson has been part of the Pro Publica team covering the aftermath of Katrina, doing amazing work on troubling actions (and inaction) by the New Orleans Police Department in the wake of Katrina, partnering with The Nation, Frontline, and The Times-Picayune on his stories.

Closer to home, SFGate cartoonist Mark Fiore won the Pulitzer for editorial cartooning, the first time that prize went to an online-only cartoonist.    

The Daily Blurgh: That cat should have won the prize

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The Daily Blurgh: That cat should have won the prize

Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

“We offer a kind of grittiness you can’t find much anymore,” said Randy Shaw, a longtime San Francisco housing advocate and a driving force behind the idea of Tenderloin tourism. “And what is grittier than the Tenderloin?”

Now that San Francisco is going to court the tourist dollars of baby boomers descending upon the TL in search of reawakening the pleasure centers of their youth – the music! the drugs! the picturesque squalor! – perhaps City Hall should also consider starting up tourism franchises in other “gritty” parts of the city? 

(But gawking humorously at the poor, addicted, and metally challenged makes for such a sensational blog post! –Ed.)

Also: Drubbing! This headline is the second Google hit that comes up for the search: “slumming San Francisco.” Take that, spendy New York Times (which seems to have a long history of reporting on slumming in other cities).

 
There are too many golden nuggets to choose from in Roger Ebert’s account of working on the Russ Meyer-directed Sex Pistols film that never was, but this exchange is one of them:
 
Meyer opened up by informing Johnny Rotten that with his stovepipe arms he wouldn’t have survived one day in the army.

“What do I want with the fucking army?” Rotten said.

 “You listen to me, you little shit. We won the Battle of Britain for you!”

I reflected that America had not been involved in the Battle of Britain, and that John Lydon (his real name) was Irish, and therefore from a non-participant nation. I kept these details to myself.

 
The anxiety of influence: The debate going on in the comments on this Fecal Face interview with local artist Maxwell Loren Holyoke-Hirsch is heated. Holyoke-Hirsch doesn’t seem to lack faith in his abilities (he is quoted as referring to himself as, “the hardest working illustrator and artist based in San Francisco, California”), although irony is sometimes lost in transcription. Hubris aside, there is still the question of whether or not his art, as some comments posit, swagger-jacks Chris Johansson and Barry McGee. But kids, it’s OK. Put down those rocks! Didn’t you know street art has already jumped the balaclava’d shark?

(Kidding!)

We love our cat
for her self
regard is assiduous
and bland
 
Congrats to personal fave Rae Armantrout for winning this year’s Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Cat people, this may be finally be your salve for the incredibly raw wounds from our canine-centric Pets issue.

The Daily Blurgh: The true price of free food tattoos

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The Daily Blurgh: The true price of free food tattoos

Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

A. E. Housman (who once deliciously referred to poetry as a “morbid secretion”) said, “Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. ” And as John McWhorter so ably demonstrates, Sarah Palin’s words — or at least the art of parsing them — can be extremely pleasurable:
 
“This reminds me of toddlers who speak from inside their own experience in a related way: they will come up to you and comment about something said by a neighbor you’ve never met, or recount to you the plot of an episode of a TV show they have no way of knowing you’ve ever heard of. Palin strings her words together as if she were doing it for herself — meanings float by, and she translates them into syntax in whatever way works, regardless of how other people making public statements do it.”

 

She’s no delicate petal-pusher. How pretty are the state’s highway medians at this time of year? Check the Desert Wildflower report for daily updates.

No it’s not clip art. That twilight landscape on your iPad desktop was actually shot by a local. (h/t to Boing Boing)

“A San Francisco eatery has convinced some customers to get tattoos in exchange for free food for life.” Hint: It’s not Michael Mina — but possibly a replay of the great burrito tattoo “disaster” of 1999.

This was supposed to be worth $5.8 million at the time. Like Gezundheit.com

An addendum to yesterday’s esteemed guest columnist: the New York Times’ Bay Area blog (the nerve!) ran a profile yesterday of Glendon Hyde, aka our favorite punk rock dragtavist, Anna Conda. She knows from first hand experience what gets lost – and more importantly, who gets displaced — when a gayborhood becomes just a neighborhood. Granted, Polk Street’s de-gayification has been happening for decades now (the pink flight to the Castro began around the mid-to-late 60s), and is just one part of the long, ongoing story of gentrification in the TL. Still, Anna/Glendon’s efforts to “Take back the Polk,” and now, her current campaign for the District 6 supervisor’s seat, should serve as rebukes to Katz’s patronizing mourning of communities that he was only superficially invested in.

Finally, in honor of Lady Day would have been 95 today I’ll leave you with this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs

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