New York Times

So why is Pelosi still the target?

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B3: The Guardian through the years has criticized Rep. Nancy Pelosi for many things, from leading the fight to privatize the Presidio to her early support of the Iraq War to her unnecessary move to take impeachment of President Bush off the table during the election season.

But we are happy to come to her defense now that now she is under fire for saying that CIA briefing officials told her in September 2002 only that they had determined that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were legal, not that they were using them, as the New York Times put it on Friday (5/22/09). Why? Why is she under fire and not the people who did the torturing and former Vice President Dick Cheney who without shame is publicly supporting waterboarding and torture?
Why is she under fire for lying by people who lied us into war and lied about torture? Here is one of the best accounts I’ve seen, written by the media advocacy group called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

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Media Advisory

Does the CIA Ever Lie?
Parsing the Pelosi torture controversy

The debate over Bush-era torture tactics like waterboarding has morphed into a full-blown Washington scandal. But the target isn’t the Bush administration officials who ordered the torture; instead, the corporate media’s focus is on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who claims that she was not fully briefed by the CIA on the use of waterboarding in late 2002. The prevailing assumption in much of the coverage is that the CIA couldn’t possibly have misled members of Congress–despite the fact that this has happened repeatedly.

The media reaction has been intense. Right-wing pundits and the Fox News Channel are treating the issue as the most important political story of the moment. Pelosi is “undermining our national security. She’s emboldening our enemies,” declared host Sean Hannity (5/15/09). MSNBC’s Morning Joe has covered the subject repeatedly, with host Joe Scarborough expressing utter disbelief (5/15/09) that the CIA could possibly have misled Pelosi, since Congress could cut off the CIA’s funding. “They would never lie to Congress, because they would be crushed,” Sen. Kit Bond (R.-Mo.) said on the show.

Rally this Sunday against torture and killings of gays in Iraq

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By Rebecca Bowe

Gays Without Borders S.F., the Rainbow World Fund, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and others will host a rally and fundraiser Sunday to speak out against torture and slayings of gays in Iraq.

Reports in the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and elsewhere have described atrocities against gay men that occurred in Iraq’s Sadr City, where victims were fatally shot and found with the word “pervert” on notes attached to their bodies.

“This news has been under the radar for the past few years due to the overall confusion and killing in Iraq,” a press statement released by the rally organizers points out. “But the heinous torture and murder of gays in Iraq has escalated.”

The groups hope to attract international media attention to the abuses, and they plan to urge the U.S. State Department to investigate, denounce the killings, and support asylum. The goal of the fundraiser is to send $10,000 to organizations aiding Iraqi gays who are fleeing the most dangerous areas.

The rally and fundraiser — featuring speeches from S.F. Police Commission President Theresa Sparks, State Senator Mark Leno, Supervisors Bevan Dufty and Ross Mirkarimi, and others — will be held Sunday, May 17 from noon to 4 p.m. at Harvey Milk Plaza, near the intersection of Castro and Market streets. Speakers are scheduled for 12:30 to 1:30 p.m.

Donations may be made through the Rainbow World Fund. Those interested in volunteering at the rally should email MrSFL96@aol.com.

Shades of time: Q&A with Matt Keegan

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Barack Obama boarding an Air Force One plane for the first time. Gay calendars from the 1960s. A New York Times article on the death of a major urban newspaper. Sundays at the Alemany Flea Market. These are some of the temporal markers at play in Matt Keegan‘s exhibition “Postcards & Calendars.” The show (reviewed in the current Guardian) could be Keegan’s postcard to New York about time spent in San Francisco. It’s also an exploration of the ways in which calendars and other time keepers can be used subversively to convey forms of experience or forge communities. Keegan is no stranger to the such endeavors: his 2008 book AMERICAMERICA (Printed Matter, 140 pages, $35) gathers interviews, old People magazines, memorabilia connected to the “Hands Across America” project, artifacts from his small-scale update of that endeavor, and unorthodox archival material into a journal that doubles as a portrait of the Reagan era. The artist and I recently sat at a petite lemon yellow table with pretty lemon yellow flowers in Altman Siegel Gallery to discuss his current exhibition.

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View of Matt Keegan’s “Postcards & Calendars.” All images from “Postcards & Calendars” courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SFBG Many shows repeat the same execution of a single theme, over and over. In contrast, “Postcards & Calendars” has many forms and facets.
Matt Keegan The thematic of this show is definitely influenced by my time in in San Francisco, but not relegated to being here. Lots of things at play are continuations of my preexisting engagement with photography.
In terms of local influences, the calendars from the GLBT Historical Society had a tremendous impact on this show. Before I met with Rebekah Kim, the Historical Society’s archivist, I was trying to figure out how to map the ways time is not only recorded but visually structured — to think about such rudimentary things as a planner, or a calendar, or a newspaper, in terms of how days and months can be iterated.
When I saw their collection of calendars, part of the power of those objects comes from the way they integrate a social history into an innocuous form. Also, some of the calendars that have a clear porn element, also have a social element. For example, Fizeek from the mid-‘60s — the back of that calendar has notations about who shot which photo and where the photographers are based, which provides it with this added level of social exchange.

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Matt Keegan

SFBG In the past year I’ve amassed a stack of the 1970s SF gay magazine Vector, so it was serendipity to come across a calendar from Vector on the wall in your show. More than with microfiche of local newspapers, I get a sense of what was going on in San Francisco at the time from a publication such as that magazine, simply through the addresses in advertisements.
MK Material that might be considered insubstantial or peripheral in terms of formal archiving and recording has a historical implication. Close to the time when I met with Rebekah, I met with Gerard Koskovich, one of the founding members of the GLBT Historical Society. He told this amazing anecdote about Bois Burke placing an ad in The Hobby Directory that is significant in helping to understand a 1940s and ’50s queer history of correspondence. Within this guide, people would reach out about hobbies such as nude sunbathing and physique photography. I am very interested in the various ways that such print-based and distributed publications were activated to serve unintended purposes. And, I love the way that the calendars, specifically, embed such a social history so that it becomes part of daily and monthly activities.

Barack Obama, 31 shades of white, newspapers as endangered species, the archivist’s life, the art of interviewing, and more, after the jump

New art and style on Geary

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With a calm demeanor and a pulled-together, no-nonsense appearance, Claudia Altman-Siegel isn’t an obvious suspect when it comes to identifying the driving force behind a conceptual art show that draws well-heeled European tourists and people clad in Converse shoes and skinny jeans. Both types, and more, are drawn to Matt Keegan’s "Postcards & Calendars," where they’re confronted by an eight-foot list of days of the week and a larger-than-life photograph of a New York Times reader hidden behind dismal headlines.

The four month-old Altman Siegel Gallery is set apart from neighboring galleries by its inclusion of a window, a trait that trades art hermeticism for the possibility of sunshine. Street noise is present but not disruptive — a reminder that another world exists beyond the space’s light cocoon of images and ideas. It has a distinctively different aura from the other galleries in the 49 Geary St. building, something Altman-Siegel says she is "sort of blind to."

After 10 years of work in New York City, Altman-Siegel slipped over to San Francisco to fill a gap in the West Coast gallery scene, bringing emerging local and internationally established artists who are still early on the trajectory to significance in the art canon.

Local art or specificity is prominent in Altman-Siegel’s curatorial work to date. The current show, though by a New York artist, includes sketches of familiar San Francisco street corners. Bay Area artist Trevor Paglen’s surreal cosmic photographs were the focus of the gallery’s first solo show.

Across the street, mannequins wearing teal trousers topped by black, multipocketed jackets and craftily reconstructed vintage dresses stand defiantly among an installation of birch tree branches and rusted machinery. A former STA travel office has been transformed into Shotwell, a cutting-edge update of a funky Aunt Edna boutique.

Newlyweds Michael and Holly Weaver needed somewhere to hawk their extensive collection of vintage clothes. When they landed a lease at 36 Geary St., the shop expanded to fuse groundbreaking European fashion and clothes by Bay Area designers. Denim from local menswear line B.Son is paired with chic shirts by Parisian collective Surface2Air. Shape-shifting square dresses from the San Francisco duo Please Dress Up! hang alongside bold separates by British label Scout. On the other side of Silverman Gallery’s recent move to Sutter Street, the openings of Shotwell and Altman-Siegel suggest that something new and bold is creeping up on Union Square.

Making sunshine work

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EDITORIAL The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force and the Ethics Commission are talking to each other, which is some small progress on one of the most annoying lingering issues in San Francisco. But the joint meeting last week, while positive in tone, didn’t solve the basic problem.

Under the city’s Sunshine Ordinance, the task force investigates complaints about city agencies improperly withholding records or meeting in secret. If the task force members find that there’s been a violation — and that the matter is serious enough to merit enforcement action against the city officials involved — the file is forwarded to Ethics, which can charge elected and appointed officials with misconduct.

But that never happens.

Fourteen times the task force has asked Ethics for action, and 14 times those cases have been dismissed — with little serious investigation. In fact, at the April 24 meeting, John St. Croix, the executive director of Ethics, admitted that his staff doesn’t always interview the complainants in these cases. Instead, Ethics asks the respondent for his or her side, and relies heavily on the advice of the city attorney.

That’s a problem in itself, because sometimes City Attorney Dennis Herrera will advise a department to keep something secret when the task force — which has its own lawyer, also from the City Attorney’s Office — disagrees. And in some cases it’s very clear that city officials have willfully ignored, defied, or sought to circumvent the open-government law.

Mayor Newsom, for example, refuses to release his full appointments calendar, which would show the public whom he’s meeting with — a key way for San Franciscans to understand who is influencing, and seeking to influence, city policy. The New York Times just published a detailed investigative report on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s ties to Wall Street financiers, basing the story in significant part on a review of Geithner’s appointment calendars. The New York City Federal Reserve Bank — a secretive institution if ever there was one — released the calendars of Geithner’s appointments when he was bank president. Newsom can certainly do the same, and the law requires him to. But he simply ignores that mandate.

The district attorney also has the authority to enforce the law, but has never filed a single sunshine violation case.

The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance is supposed to be the best and most comprehensive law in the state ensuring public access to government activities. But it’s rendered almost meaningless when city officials can defy it, routinely, and suffer no consequences.

The current enforcement system is simply not working. The supervisors should hold hearings on this with the goal of placing a charter amendment on the ballot giving the task force the independent authority to order documents released and adopting a more effective way to sanction officials who disregard the law. The task force should also have the right to take cases directly to the Ethics commissioners and prosecute them in public before the full commission. It’s the biggest open government issue in the city right now. Which supe wants to take it on? *

SF Weekly keeps getting spanked

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By Tim Redmond

And the poor boring people there don’t even enjoy it.

Violet Blue weighs in today with some harsh commentary:

It’s just sad when “alternative” papers can’t be more trustworthy or accurate as the New York Times when it comes to the one thing they’re supposed to excel at: accurately representing local culture. And having a clue about San Francisco values.

And now local artist Matthew Williams has come up with an anti-SF Weekly shirt (unfortunately, some people might think NSFW is cool).

It’s been hard to find any substantive response from Matt Smith to all of this; he just complains about “anti-free-speech pornographers (as if protesting a news media column is an attack on free speech).

But in some ways, the thing I find most offensive is his suggestion that it’s appropriate for a newspaper reporter and columnist, who takes shots every week at other people, to duck calls from the press. I make it a policy to call people before I write anything critical about them (Smith apparently didn’t talk to any Kink.com models before saying that they were, in effect, degrading themselves for money out of economic desperation.) Smith says he deleted my phone message without even listening to it.

That’s just really, really lame. You work for anewspaper and you talk shit about other people, you should be willing to defend yourself, in public. When the Weekly calls me — even if I know it’s a hit piece — I always, always talk to them. That’s what you do in this business.

Unless, like Matt Smith, you just want to hit and run and hide.

What do (people) want?

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andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:
Have you heard of a study that analyzed biometric feedback from self-identified male bisexuals, and the notable finding was that the overwhelming majority of these men were in fact homosexual, not bisexual? The conclusion of the study was that "true" male bisexuality is extremely rare. (For what it’s worth, I consider myself a "true" male bisexual, but what do I know?)

I also heard about another study from at least 10 years ago that tracked the sexual fantasies of self-identified lesbians, and the surprising result was that some 50 percent of these women actually fantasized about men while doing it with their female partners.

Have you heard of these, and would you care to comment?
Love,

Actually Here!

Dear Here:

I have, of course, and they’re all fascinating, partly for the science (which is generally super-simple and not easily misinterpreted) and partly for the reactions in the various communities whenever one of these studies is reported, which are frankly pretty funny.

The "there’s no such thing as male bisexuality" studies have received the most press, and the biggest, most offended reactions, but it’s not like the researchers at Northwestern University and the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto set out to disprove the existence of an entire sexual orientation! All they did was hook up some volunteers to a plethysmograph and show them porn. I think the first researchers were probably as surprised as anyone when the self-identified bi men failed to respond in a recognizably "bi" manner. About three-quarters of the bi men read as completely gay according to their penises (do penises lie?), while the rest were indistinguishable from the self-identified straight guys. There was no recognizable "bi" pattern of arousal, and the subjects seemed overwhelmingly to fall on one or the other end of the Kinsey scale:

Regardless of whether the men were gay, straight or bisexual, they showed about four times more arousal" to one sex or the other, said Gerulf Rieger… the study’s lead author.

So obviously, you think you exist but you’re wrong, Bi Guy!

Okay, no. What do I really think? I think, for one thing , it’s all funny since in my little bubble of not only San Francisco-ness but San Francisco sex educator-ness, fake bi guys who are actually straight but want hot bi chicks to think they’re cool way outnumber bi guys who are actually gay but closeted. Also, I do think you exist. Clearly truly bi men are rarer even than we thought, but I’m fairly certain that you are not a figment of your own or my imagination, and I think sexuality is a mite more complicated than penile plethysmography.

Another study, described here in a ScienceDaily article from 2003, and distinguished by including only people who identified as gay or straight, turned up more bisexual women than expected, but replicated earlier results where gay and straight (but not bi) men responded consistent with their self-identification: In contrast, both homosexual and heterosexual women showed a bisexual pattern of psychological as well as genital arousal. That is, heterosexual women were just as sexually aroused by watching female stimuli as by watching male stimuli.

The extraordinary article on female desire that ran in The New York Times Magazine (www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire) introduced recent research by Meredith Chivers, who’s been following up on the research above with the added fillip of throwing some ape porn in the mix and requiring volunteers to report their own perceptions of their arousal levels, which proved wildly inaccurate: During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

Good to know!

As for the studies (self-reported behavior, no telemetry) that show a high percentage of self-described lesbians fantasizing about men while having lesbisex, eh. People fantasize about all kinds of things, particularly things they feel uncomfortable about. Are those women fake lesbians? The furthest I can go with that is to say that we’ve seen that women are much (so much!) more likely than men to be bisexual by attraction. I’m assuming that some of the women studied are physically attracted to both, but emotionally more attached to women ("Whom do you fall in love with?" is a hugely important but oft-neglected measure of sexual orientation) and some are into women but enjoy fantasies of committing unnatural acts with men. That some must be really not that into chicks but have chosen for whatever reason to live as lesbians is undeniable but just not that important. They wouldn’t be the first people to partner with someone not of their preferred gender, or the last, and their existence does not cast doubt on anyone else’s authenticity. Can anyone do that?

Love,

Andrea

Don’t forget to read Andrea at Carnal Nation.com.

Shades of green

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sarah@sfbg.com

When President Barack Obama signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in mid-February, folks across the country were hopeful that the $787 billion stimulus package would help preserve and create decent jobs in their communities.

And in mid-March, when the Obama administration announced that Bay Area social justice activist Van Jones was joining the White House Council on Environmental Quality, advocates for green jobs took it as a sign that Obama shares Jones’ belief that we can fix our nation’s two biggest problems — excessive greenhouse gas production and not enough good jobs for the working class — by creating a green-collar economy.

Jones cofounded Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which opposes police abuse and promotes alternatives to incarceration, and founded Oakland’s Green for All, which aims to create green-collar jobs in low-income communities. He defines a green-collar job as "a family-supporting, career-track job that directly contributes to preserving or enhancing environmental quality."

"Think of them as the 2.0 version of old-fashioned blue-collar jobs, upgraded to respect the Earth and meet the environmental challenges of today," Jones wrote in his New York Times bestseller The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (HarperOne, 2008).

But is Jones’ definition codified into Obama’s Recovery Act? And in San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom speaks incessantly about green jobs and regularly praises Jones, will the jobs we create be for the people who need them most? And how will that play out in a city where blacks, Latinos and Asians experience higher unemployment, poverty, and incarceration rates than whites, and building construction has stalled, pitting skilled union workers against training program graduates?

Last month, an alliance of community and worker organizations from San Francisco’s working class neighborhoods sent a letter to Newsom outlining concerns about the Recovery Act’s equity, job quality, and transparency requirements.

Antonio Diaz of PODER (People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights), Alex Tom of the Chinese Progressive Association, Steve Williams of POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), and Terry Valen of the Filipino Community Center asked Newsom to ensure that ARRA funds would be used to create "green jobs and opportunities primarily for low-income people and people of color" and "high quality jobs with family-supporting wages and benefits, safe and healthy working conditions, and career ladders."

"We ask for your commitment to greater transparency and community input in shaping and monitoring the infusion of ARRA funds for San Francisco’s developing green collar economy," they wrote.

Two weeks later Newsom announced the launching of www.recoverysf.org, a Web site that seeks to track stimpack funds coming to San Francisco. Although the Web site shows that $150 million of the first quarter-billion of formula funding is headed toward infrastructure projects, it does not include estimates of the numbers of green jobs created.

Wade Crowfoot of the Mayor’s Office told the Guardian that the city is focused on ensuring that green jobs are created with these funds and that the City Attorney’s Office is figuring out what is "allowable" under Recovery Act’s guidelines.

On April 3, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget issued a 172-page memo outlining the Recovery Act’s policy goals. The goals included ensuring compliance with equal opportunity laws and principles, promoting local hiring, providing maximum practicable opportunities for small business and equal opportunities for disadvantaged business, encouraging sound labor practices, and engaging with community-based organizations.

"But will all cities include achievable, measurable requirements?" Crowfoot said. "I don’t think so, without federal guidelines."

This lack of specifics, Crowfoot says, has the City Attorney figuring out if San Francisco can include "first source" hiring requirements, in which hiring halls agree to interview graduates from local training programs first. If so, Crowfoot says, the city will seek to leverage existing funding for energy efficiency programs and conduct hire-locally campaigns in low-income communities.

But as Crowfoot notes, although we know that $1.5 million in ARRA funding is coming to San Francisco for weatherizing homes — helping to decrease the energy costs of low-income residents, reduce the city’s energy demands, and increase the number of people hired from the local community to do energy audits and retrofits — we still don’t know how many jobs will be created per project, which is the basic goal of economic stimulation.

"If we spend the dollars, say, on boiler replacement, that’s more equipment and less labor," Crowfoot said. "But the more you hire locally, the more those folks get experience, the more they’ll be well positioned to get jobs in the non-subsidized sector once the stimulus funds are gone."

Acknowledging the tension between laid-off union workers and graduates of apprentice training programs, Crowfoot said, "We are trying to figure out a balance, whereby the community is not shut out, but the unions’ needs are addressed. We want to be careful about how many jobs we say are going to be created. We don’t want to build hope in populations who already have a lot of mistrust in the government."

Michael Theriault, secretary and treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, told us that 25 percent of the region’s 16,000 building trades workers are out of work, compared to nearly full employment last year.

In the past, the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council provided CityBuild with instructors and took the lion’s share of the program graduates, Theriault explains. But under present conditions, the Council isn’t keen on another CityBuild cycle.

"I think they should work to sponsor another cycle, but the ball is also in the city’s court," Theriault said, noting that the ARRA-funded weatherization program could soon be offering prevailing union wages ($20 an hour for roofers, $40 to $50 for plumbers and electricians) that could help ease the tension. And then there’s the inconvenient truth that some union members view non-unionized solar panel installers as "scabs," creating another barrier to using green jobs to lift the underemployed.

Mayor Newsom has until June to secure and implement stimpack funding as part of upcoming local budget proposals, a timetable that has Green for All issuing a call for action to ensure that Recovery Act implementation creates green-collar jobs, ensures transparency and accountability, and supports pathways out of poverty.

"This may be the most important opportunity you’ll ever have to bring green-collar jobs to your community," Green For All wrote in a public statement. "But the planning process will be over in the blink of an eye, and your community could miss out. That’s why we’re calling on you to take action now."

Green for All field organizer Julian Mocine-McQueen is scheduled to sit down with Crowfoot this week in an effort to get Newsom to sign his group’s pledge. He said there’s been an expansion of the city’s lighting and refrigeration cooling retrofitting program, starting with small business owners who speak English as a second language. "It’s good," McQueen said. "But it’s not enough."

He believes green job success will depend, in part, on including hiring parameters. "A job in the city’s southeast sector may not pay $70,000 a year, but it would be a huge step toward creating a family-sustaining job," McQueen said, noting that the Obama administration has "to a certain extent" adopted Jones’ definition of green-collar jobs. "I’m not sure that they have codified it," McQueen said. "They have recommendations."

Asked to define green jobs during a recent media roundtable on projected budget deficits, Newsom talked about weatherization and sustainability and plans to expand the city’s training academies before handing the floor to the Office of Economic and Workforce Development’s Kyri McClellan, whom he described as his "green czarina."

McClellan, who describes herself as "the lead cat-herder" of Recovery Act funds, told reporters that San Francisco is expected to receive a quarter of a billion dollars in formula funds in the coming fiscal year, 95 percent of which have been allocated to "shovel-ready" projects that were already queued up under the city’s 10-year capital plan.

During a subsequent board committee hearing, McClellan shared job estimates — 30 jobs from the $11 million Department of Public Works street paving allocation and 250 jobs from the $18 million Housing Authority retrofitting allocation — that raised eyebrows.

McClellan said that OEWD is "moving as quickly as possible to take the dollars we’ve been allocated, get approval from the Board of Supervisors, and get programs up and running."

Observing that the city also has parallel funding for training programs such as CityBuild and a Green Academy, McClellan added that "no one is working harder than Rhonda Simmons." Reached by phone, OEWD’s Simmons said she has been working with San Francisco State University professor Raquel Pinderhughes to identify five job sectors that have "the capacity to grow the greatest number of green jobs."

These include solar installation, energy efficiency, landscaping/public greening, recycling, and green building. "In an economy like this, you have to be competitive," Simmons said. "And almost all the programs that come out of my shop are geared toward low-income to moderate-income folks."

Observing that OEWD is using a $238,000 federal earmark to seed a Green Academy and that will expand the GoSolarSF workforce incentive, compete for a $500,000 EPA brownfield cleanup training grant, and coordinate with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to develop "workforce incentive language" for biodiesel reuse program and energy efficiency projects, Simmons notes that it was the unions that helped create CityBuild in the first place, and the city is working to ease current concerns.

"It is our intent as OEWD designs the academy that any training programs must demonstrate that they train individuals for occupations with opportunity for upward mobility," Simmons said, after emerging from a meeting cochaired by Crowfoot and Pinderhughes to help community-based organizations understand green jobs and figure out how to link with the Green Jobs Corps that Pinderhughes set up in Oakland.

Eric Smith runs the Bayview-based Green Depot, a nonprofit that promotes biodiesel use in neighborhoods facing environmental justice issues and ran a $9,000-per intern pilot program with Global Exchange. He worries that administrative costs will chew up much of the stimulus money, citing SFPUC figures that the cost ratio for trainers to interns is about 3:1.

"There is a lot of concern in the Bayview that the money will end up going to consultants and administrators when we have people who are hungry and desperate to work," Smith said.

After two green jobs hearings, Sup. Eric Mar says that he and Sups. Sophie Maxwell and David Chiu have concluded "that unless the board takes action and gives clear guidelines and expectations, green collar job creation will be miniscule."
Noting that Oakland’s Green Job Corps and Richmond’s solar program seem years ahead of San Francisco’s efforts, Mar said his next step will be to talk with labor, environmental groups, businesses, and nonprofits to get a sense of an appropriate structure to prioritize the low-income communities as the main beneficiaries of green-collar job creation. "It’s pretty clear that the [Newsom] administration’s commitment to the numbers of jobs created is pretty small," Mar said. "The community is going to have to push for more."

A Q&A with Nick Cave

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By Johnny Ray Huston

Nick Cave and I probably crossed paths in Heaven one night. Heaven was a club on Woodward Avenue in Detroit where you could go, after 2 a.m., to dance and sweat and lose yourself to the sounds of DJ Ken Collier. Cave’s time in Heaven has made it possible for him to create “Meet Me at the Center of the Earth,” his show at Yerba Buena Center of the Arts. Time spent in that kind of cathartic, uninhibited place is necessary for someone — someone like Cave — to bring people to the Earth’s core and allow them to begin reimagining from the center of existence. When Cave and I talked on the phone recently, the morning of a full-page profile of him appeared in the Sunday New York Times, our discussion started near Heaven, and ended in Barack Obama’s Chicago.

SFBG How has your studio changed over the years, in terms of location, layout, and contents?
Nick Cave My studio has changed according to the way my career has changed. I’ve expanded in space due to demand. I’ve had to bring on more studio assistants. It’s evolved and grown, but without expanding beyond my means. I look at it the same way I did when I had a clothing store. I try to make smart moves.

SFBG Do those things influence your process, or do many of your ideas originate outside of the studio space?
NC I think it does occur outside the studio space. The studio is where the ideas are manifested. The ideas come from being out there in the world — just being open. Though sometimes a revelation may happen in the studio, based on an experience I’m developing. It happens when it happens.

SFBG We’ve both spent formative time in Detroit and the Detroit area. I went to Wayne State [University], while you went to Cranbrook Academy of Art]. I’d love to know more about your experience there with [fiber artist and teacher] Gerhardt Knodel. I wondered also whether you had ties to the club scenes in Detroit or Chicago at any time.
NC Oh, hell yeah [laughs].
Cranbrook was probably the most extraordinary place for me. I could have gone straight to New York [City], or to other schools, but I knew I needed an environment that was somewhat isolated, because of my desires to be distracted by other creative endeavors. Cranbrook provided this amazing intensive rigor and isolation from the world. Yet I had Detroit, which really allowed that gritty balance. It was the best of both worlds. When I needed to get the hell out of Cranbrook, believe me, I did.

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Photo by James Prinz

The new razzle dazzle

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

More on SFBG:

>>Q&A with artist Nick Cave

>>A guide to artists with famous namesakes

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Where is the center of the Earth? According to artist Nick Cave, it lies somewhere between a night out at Taboo with Leigh Bowery and a Brazilian Carnaval parade. It can be found in Liberace’s glittering stage getups and Yoruba ceremonial hunting dress. Other possible coordinates include Yinka Shonibare’s Africanized rococo costumes, Cockney pearly suits, the hautest of haute couture, and the fun fur tribes of Black Rock City.

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Thankfully, for us, Cave’s crocheted, sequined, bedazzled, embroidered, dyed, and encrusted vision of the heart of the world can be found locally. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ "Meet Me At the Center of the Earth" presents the largest exhibit to date of the Chicago artist’s work, which straddles the realms of sculpture, high fashion, body art, and dance with a visual ferocity and level of workmanship that is alternately stunning and inspiring.

Cave’s art practically dares you to play chicken with your thesaurus. One would have to borrow a page (or several) from the descriptive reveries of Thomas de Quincey or Ronald Firbank to fully convey the cluster fuck of beading, psychedelic hair furs, plastic tchotchkes, yarn, tin toys, buttons, second hand sweaters, and enough sequins to cover a thousand ’80s cocktail dresses that he has quixotically and painstakingly pieced together.

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The centerpieces of "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" are undoubtedly Cave’s Soundsuits — wearable sculptures that take their name from the sounds created by their movement. They fill YBCA’s largest gallery like some other-wordly pantheon of gods and monsters. Arranged in an X-shaped configuration with paths running down the center of each axis, the suits form a giant visual nod to the exhibit’s title. X, of course, marks the spot, and hanging above the room’s center is the Earth itself, swathed in several shades of inky sequins. On the adjacent walls hang two huge and possibly glitzier tondi — the Italian Renaissance term Cave uses for these round hangings — which serve as flattened counterparts to the globe.

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The display lets you explore the Soundsuits from every angle. Designed to cover the entire body, the suits hide any individual traces of the wearer by creating a second skin, and then some. The suits with towering, festooned cage structures — which bring to mind both Balinese funeral pyres and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers — still have a vaguely human outline at their core, whereas the suits patterned in all sort of brilliantly colored fur-like human hair could very well be studies from an unrealized Jim Henson project. This lycanthropic aspect of the Soundsuits is explored most humorously in Cave’s more recent pieces, which take the reverse tactic of fashioning knitwear pelts for taxidermy models of bears and beavers.

While much of Cave’s work, to quote New York Times critic Roberta Smith, "fall[s] squarely under the heading of Must Be Seen to Be Believed," it also begs to be heard. It is unfortunate that YBCA wasn’t able to more fully integrate the sounds of the suits into their display. Although there is an adjacent gallery that shows several videos of the Soundsuits in action — including great footage of Cave and a posse of pom-pom covered lion dancer-clown hybrids inciting massive dance parties in public — the suits themselves stand silent. The audio/visual divide enforced by the two-gallery layout seems to point to the larger issue of static mannequins being the curatorial norm for costume and textile-related exhibits. I guess we’ll have to wait until May, when choreographer Ronald K. Brown stages his Soundsuit performances, to see Cave’s creations in action.

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Cave writes in an artist’s statement for the show that he hopes "we will dream together" One would have to have a heart of stone not to take up the challenge and the invitation delivered by Cave’s art — and implicit in the exhibit’s title — to create another scene, to go beyond what’s familiar, and to transform oneself. I left YBCA dreaming of raiding craft stores, thrift shops, and fabric outlets. I dreamed of painting the town red, cerulean, silver, magenta, and neon green with sequins and glitter. I dreamed of dancing. I’ll see you at the center of the Earth. I’m halfway there.

NICK CAVE: MEET ME AT THE CENTER OF THE EARTH

Through July 5, $3–$6 (free first Tues.)

Tues.–Wed., Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.; Thurs., noon–8 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org


All photos by Jim Prinz

Editor’s Notes

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› Tredmond@sfbg.com

I spent the weekend with my head under the kitchen sink, experiencing that loop of doom that makes old San Francisco houses so charming. The drain was stopped up, so I figured I’d pull the trap and clean it out, but the pipe broke in half the minute I tried to unscrew it. When I bought a new one, the pipe it attached to started to crumble, and when I replaced that one, the seals on the next pipe were shot, and after the third trip to Cole Hardware, I realized that I was going to have to pull out all of the kitchen plumbing and replace everything.

So I was lying there on my back, with dirty water and little pieces of whatever foul gunk had adhered to the insides of the old pipes dripping into my eyes, and all of the Sunday ads and advertorial sections of the Chronicle next to me to sop up the mess, and I started thinking about why I subscribe to The New York Times.

We’ve considered cutting it off — it costs a lot of money, and we’re trying not to spend a lot of money these days. Also, if I want to, I can find all the entire paper on the Web anyway. I don’t even get most of my world news from the Times; I read the British papers, the Guardian and The Independent.

But every morning while I’m sitting at the counter eating my breakfast, I turn to the Times op-ed page and get some of the most intelligent, interesting insight and commentary you’re going to find on a single sheet of paper anywhere in the world. And I thought: If the Times was in such dire financial straights that it had to fire half its staff, and Bob Herbert was one of the unfortunate souls chosen for a pink slip, I’d be joining the national uproar. There would be petitions, and editors’ inboxes would be jammed with e-mail, and marchers would mass in Times Square.

Ditto Paul Krugman, who is one of the few prominent economists in America who isn’t full of shit. And Thomas Freidman, who is sometimes full of shit but thinks so clearly and makes such cogent arguments that it’s a pleasure to get mad at him. And Nicholas Kristof, who routinely travels to some of the nastiest places on the planet to bring back the stories of how American policy affects human beings who otherwise would have remained in the shadows for life. That page alone is worth $1 a day; in fact, it’s one of the greatest bargains on Earth.

I don’t know whom the Chronicle is going to fire March 31 when the cutbacks are supposed to happen. I have kinda, sorta friends there, and there are some good, honest reporters, and I hope they all survive. But is there any political opinion columnist whose pending demise would get me out of my chair to a rally? Uh, no.

I love Jon Carroll, but he writes a lot about cats and mondegreens and there’s a good reason he isn’t on the op-ed page. Debra Saunders? Sorry, she’s an idiot. (And not just because I disagree with her — William Safire is one of my favorite writers ever. Saunders? Idiot.) C.W. Nevius? Belongs in the suburbs. John Diaz? Eh. Whatever.

I still pay for the Chron, but I’m not surprised that hardly anyone else I know does.

CJR slams the Chronicle

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By Tim Redmond

The Columbia Journalism Review trashed the Chronicle this week, in a harsh, pointed and entirely on-target piece by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter David Cay Johnston.

Johnston’s chief complaint: The Chronicle has done a miserable job of reporting on its own possible demise. In sharp contrast, he says, the Seattle P-I ran some well-reported stories about the papers’s closing that let readers know what was actually going on.

The blog post raises some interesting journalistic questions, though, that are going to be echoing through this entire debate about the future of newspapers.

The first thing I noticed when I read Johnston’s piece was that he singled out the Chron’s editor, Ward Bushee:

under editor Ward Bushee the Chronicle has provided little actual news reporting about its prospects for dissolution unless its unions agree to drastic job cuts and givebacks for those who remain on the payroll.* Mostly, Bushee gave Chronicle readers unsigned “staff reports”—actually rewritten Hearst press releases.

He later attacks Phil Bronstein, the former Chron editor who is still a top Hearst executive:

At least the careful reader found out that Phil Bronstein, the journalist who is now editor-at-large, has abandoned that role to become an unregistered lobbyist seeking political favors for his employers.

Johnston is a careful, weidely respected reporter who does his homework. And in this case, his analysis of the situation seems entirely accurate. The Chron hasn’t been giving us the real story of what’s going on — and the stuff left off the news pages is really interesting.

But I was surprised that neither Bushee nor Bronstein were quoted in the piece; I’ve always thought that before you attack someone in print (or online) — particularly when you call into question their professionalism or ethics — you should call first to get that person’s response. It’s not only common courtesy and standard journalistic practice; it makes for a better story.

So I emailed both Bushee and Bronstein, and both confirmed that Johnston had never contacted them. Bushee:

I will not comment about the Chronicle’s situation during the union negotiation period. I’ve told this to every reporter who has called to ask.
I have never been asked for comment by the (sic) David Cay Johnson. I was called by him one evening several weeks ago to tell me to look up another story on CJR.com — and then he promptly hung up.
In his latest posting on CJR, he continues to get my name wrong (my father, who has been dead for seven years, was Ward Bushee Jr.). But that is only the start of his errors.

Bronstein:

I’m not going to debate someone who has no real information and hasn’t tried to get any.

In general, we all ought to be talking about the value newsrooms and journalists bring to society – as Bruce Bruggman (sic) did very articulately the other night – to anyone who is willing to listen.

As columnist J.R. Labbe wrote in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about that paper, “This newspaper gave more ink to the campaign to save the Texas Ballet Theater than it has to making this case for its own future. Time for that to change.”

Okay, fair enough. But here’s where it gets interesting.

I called Johnston to discuss all of this, and he was happy to talk to me. “This was a blog,” he said. “If I were writing a story for the New York Times, I would have absolutely called them.”

Why is a blog at CJR any different from a newspaper story? Johnston:

“I’m the definintion of a dinosaur, but I’m trying to embrace the idea that this is a new era. This is an experiment for me. I’m trying to see what happens when we embrace the values of the blog world. What if we just write what we see? I’ll take some slings and arrows, but I’m trying it out.”

He promised to correct the error on Bushee’s name, and did.

David Cay Johnston has done some phenomenal work He’s a perfect example of the value of a major newspaper — the New York Times had the money to pay him to spend weeks and months digging into the federal tax code so he could tell the world how government policies were helping the rich screw the poor. We’d all be a lot less informed without him.

But I have to say, with all due respect to one of the great reporters of our time, I don’t think a blog for CJR is any different than a story in the Times. The world of journalism is changing, and in a few years, none of us will be putting stories on dead trees any more — but the delivery vehicle isn’t the issue. There will be millions of bloggers who comment on things, which is a positive development and I love it, but there will also have to be real news institutions that pay staff people to report stories. And those reporters still have an obligation to call the objects of their attacks and scorn and get a response.

The future isn’t going to be about newspapers vs. online publications. It’s gong to be about journalists doing one kind of job, and others using the web to do something different. Not bad, not wrong — just different.

Should California be split up?

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By Tim Redmond

It’s an interesting question. Nothing new, really — folks up in the northern part of the state have been talking about secession since the 1940s.

But these days, the talk has shifted from North-South to Central Valley-Coast.

There’s plenty of discussion going on — the New York Times
reports on a move by farmers in Visalia, who say those of us in the more liberal western regions don’t understand what it’s like in the center of the state:

Frustrated by what they call uninformed urban voters dictating faulty farm policy, Mr. Rogers and the other members of the movement have proposed splitting off 13 counties on the state’s coast, leaving the remaining 45, mostly inland, counties as the “real” California.

The reason, they say, is that people in those coastal counties, which include San Francisco and Los Angeles, simply do not understand what life is like in areas where the sea breezes do not reach.
“They think fish are more important than people, that pigs are treated mean and chickens should run loose,” said Mr. Rogers, who said he hitched a ride in 1940 to Visalia from Oklahoma to escape the Dust Bowl, with his wife and baby son in tow. “City people just don’t know what it takes to get food on their table.”

A former Assembly member is pushing a vertical split, too :

“Citizens of our once Golden State are frustrated and desperately concerned about the imposition of burdensome regulations, taxation, fees, fees and more fees, and bureaucratic intrusion into our daily lives and businesses,” declares downsizeca.org, the movement’s website.

And all of this comes as reformers form both the left and the right are talking about a new Constitutional Convention.

Athough some of the proponents are clearly nutty, the idea isn’t. As the noted political economist Gar Alperovitz wrote two years ago

The United States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy. What does “participatory democracy” mean in a continent? Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization of the federal system may be all but inevitable.

He was talking about California becoming its own nation, but I’d argue that the same problem applies here. The budget crisis, the gridlock in Sacramento … all of it suggests that maybe California itself is too big to govern. There’s also clear evidence of dramatic regional differences. If you take the Central Valley from about Redding on down, and wrap in Orange County, you have a red state within a blue state where most of the residents say they want lower taxes and smaller government. Along the coast from about Sonoma County down to the southern part of Los Angeles County, you have people who generally would like to see taxes pay for public services. If the coast were a state, we could repeal Prop. 13 and build world-class schools. We’d have same-sex marriage and single-payer health insurance. And we’d still be one of the biggest states in America.

Now, I’m not sure the people in the central valley quite realize the problem with their plans, which is illustrated in this wonderful chart that comes from the office of Assemblywoman Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa (PDF):

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The chart shows that the people who dislike and distrust government and don’t want to pay taxes are in fact the beneficiaries of the tax dollars that the rest of us pay. In California, tax money from the coast winds up paying for services in the central valley.

But that’s okay — if they don’t want our money any more, maybe we should tell them we’re fine with that. Maybe we should split the state not just in two but into three: Let the northern counties become the state of Jefferson, where pot will be legal and the residents will be so wealthy from taxes and exports of that cash crop that they’ll make oil-richAlaskans seem like paupers. Pot will be legal in the coastal communities, too, and will generate tax revenue.

We’ll have a Democratic governor, and overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, fewer prisons, better schools, cleaner air, no Ellis Act, rent controls on vacant apartments, more money for transit, strict gun control, support for immigrant rights … and no more of these ugly battles over budgets held hostage by right-wing Republicans.

And in the central valley, they can have their low taxes and conservative values, and watch their roads, schools, and public services go to hell. Maybe eventually they’ll figure it out.

Of course, we’d have to figure out the water rights. The folks in Jefferson would have control over much of the water that now goes South, and there would have to be some long-term water contracts between the states, but that shouldn’t be an insurmountable roadblock.

And the solution would create its own problems; The GOP would control the central state, and would move to abolish the Agricultural Labor Relations Act and make life even more miserable for farmworkers. But then, maybe Jefferson would turn off the water and big agribusiness would be SOL anyway.

As part of the break-up, all parties would have to agree to create a special relocation fund to help lonely, sad liberals from Modesto come west and to help lonely, sad Republicans in San Francisco to move east. I wonder which way the net migration would go.

Meanwhile, Evans has introduced my favorite tax bill of the year, AB 1342, and it’s related to this entire discussion. She wants to allow counties to levy their own income taxes and vehicle license fees. “We went through this difficult process of trying to arrive at a budget,” her spokesperson, Anthony Matthews, told me. “For those communities that have a different view of government [than the Republicans], this bill would let them raise their own taxes to fund their priorities.”

Home suite home

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

How’s this for lowest common denominator? The first sentence of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Wikipedia entry explains that he is a "Japanese filmmaker best known for his many contributions to the J-horror genre." With his latest film, family drama Tokyo Sonata, particularly fresh in my mind, I’d nearly forgotten he was even part of that late-1990s trend. It’s inarguable that he made one of the best of the genre — 2001’s cult nugget Pulse, a meditation on the cold, paralyzingly lonely soul of the Internet masquerading as a sublimely creepy ghost story. Pulse is the only one of Kurosawa’s films made widely available to American popcorn-munchers, albeit in the dumbed-down form of a bastardized PG-13 remake starring Kristen Bell (tagline: "You are now infected.")

Fortunately, as the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival program notes point out, you’ll soon be getting a chance to see the original Pulse on the big screen, where its sinister sparseness should freak out even those who’ve already watched it on DVD. SFIAAFF’s spotlight on Kurosawa, encompassing seven films (including the local premiere of Tokyo Sonata) and an in-person visit from the man himself, couldn’t have been easy to curate. His filmography stretches back to the 1970s, with pink films and yakuza films and pre-J-horror horror films. His breakthrough, at least to stateside art house patrons and festival attendees, was 1997’s Cure, a serial-killa-thrilla lacking anything resembling Hollywood-style story beats. As the New York Times marveled, "Kurosawa constructs an elaborate psychological maze and then strands us in the middle of it" — a favorite technique that echoes throughout his work.

Though the SFIAAFF program spotlights Kurosawa, in many ways it’s also the Sho Aikawa show, with the actor appearing in paired films The Revenge: A Visit from Fate and The Revenge: The Scar that Never Fades (both 1997), and Eyes of the Spider and Serpent’s Path (both 1998). The stone-faced Aikawa — also a Takashi Miike regular, having triggered the total destruction of Planet Earth at the end of 1999’s Dead or Alive, among other triumphs — is particularly moving in the later films, wherein he plays a same-named character caught up in mirror-image circumstances who is, nonetheless, decidedly not the same dude. A child is snatched and murdered, and vengeance is sought, but Kurosawa focuses on the mundane aspects of gangsterhood, with the crew in Eyes of the Spider, for example, discussing polar bears and fishing strategies during stretches of downtime.

But this ain’t no Tarantino-style crimes-‘n’-chuckles set of films. With Tokyo Sonata, Kurosawa does away with the yakuza element, along with the overtly scary stuff, though the film is so timely it’s near-eerily prophetic. The economy is the boogeyman here, as an average Japanese family fractures when Dad is laid off (and doesn’t tell Mom) and the older son decides that joining the U.S. military seems like a pretty good career option. Dinner-table calm is soon replaced by ever-bizarre and sometimes tragic events, but the hidden talents of the younger son suggest all may not be dark in the world. The end result is Kurosawa’s most fulfilling work to date, in a career that’s already delivered quite a few winners. To borrow the title of one of those films, a bright future awaits.

THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL March 12–22. Main venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets (most shows $11) are available at www.asianamericanmedia.org. For this week’s schedule, see film listings.

Indie notes

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A D.I.Y. movie musical made for all of $15,000, indie popster-turned-scenarist/actor H.P. Mendoza and local cinematographer-turned-feature-director Richard Wong’s Colma: The Musical proved to be the little movie that could after its 2006 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival debut. It won a limited theatrical release and critical praise, including a flattering New York Times review. After collaborating on last year’s unclassifiable (IMDB lists it as "action/drama/musical/thriller") SFIAAFF premiere Option 3, they’re back with Fruit Fly, which isn’t quite a Colma sequel but feels like one. It brings back that film’s Maribel (L.A. Renigen), this time starring as a straight newcomer wading into SF’s theater and gay-nightlife scenes while dealing with some unresolved identity issues. With 19 numbers (including "Fag Hag"), it is once again not your grandma’s (or even ABBA’s) kind of musical.

This time around Mendoza (who also plays a supporting part) is in the director-editor’s chair. But Wong’s brightly colored widescreen HD photography is once again an outstanding element. He spoke with the Guardian before Fruit Fly‘s bow as this year’s SFIAAFF Centerpiece presentation.

SFBG H.P. Mendoza directed this time, but it seems like the two of you are collaborative in most aspects of the movies you’ve made together.

RICHARD WONG I was certainly very involved in a lot of different ways. This is definitely H.P.’s movie, though. We were originally going to do something called On Sundays. Where Colma was kind of H.P.’s story, I wanted to do a movie about my family dynamic, this big, grand musical. But the economy really screwed that. We decided to use our CAAN (Center for Asian American Media) grant just to jump in and do something, [resulting in] both Option 3 and Fruit Fly.

SFBG You must have been really surprised by the exposure Colma got.

RW So much has happened since then, it’s really changed my life. I can attempt to be an actual, serious filmmaker. When we were making it, it was hard to see that as even a possibility. It was so remote. Of course all the timing was wrong with the writer’s strike and the recession, but nonetheless, I honestly still can’t quite believe it.

FRUIT FLY

Sun/15, 6:15 p.m., Castro

March 20, 6:30 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

March 22, 7 p.m., Camera 12

THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL March 12–22. Main venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets (most shows $11) are available at www.asianamericanmedia.org. For this week’s schedule, see film listings.

Why we need newspapers

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By Tim Redmond

The Sunday Chronicle story on the power struggle at Your Black Muslim Bakery that led to the murder of Chauncey Bailey is a reminder of why the world needs newspapers. The latest installment of the Chauncey Bailey Project, which shows the tight connections between homicide inspector Sgt. Derwin Longmire and bakery leader Yusef Bey IV, is another.

These stories could never have been put together by part-time bloggers and citizen journalists. Investigative reporting on this level requires staff — experienced, full-time reporters who have the resources to did into stories.

This is serious stuff: WIthout the Chauncey Bailey Project and the Chron, it’s entirely possible that Chauncey Bailey’s murderer(s) would never be brought to justice. The Oakland cops were bungling the case; it took the newspapers, with a team of paid reporters, do get to the bottom of it.

So as much as the Chronicle drives me nuts, and as much as I’m not sure what the business model should be in the future, democracy is going to require some sort of old-fashioned newspapers.

UPDATE: Ken Conner, the Chron’s Metro editor, just sent me the following:

A minor point about the reference to the Chauncey Bailey project story about the link between the lead detective on the case and the bakery members. Actually we broke that story on Nov. 11, 2007 — months before the project. Both the New York Times and NPR have corrected stories about the project that made the same mistake.

Okay, then. My basic point remains.

Jess Brownell: Think Dubai!

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Think Dubai, free, rich, and minimally governed. It will be fun.

By Jess Brownell

Sometimes it’s like taking candy from a baby. Or selling an adjustable rate mortgage to an illiterate.

This requires a little set-up, but it’s worth it. Recently the New York Times Book Review covered a book by Jeff Madrick called “The Case for Big Government.” In the Times piece Mr. Madrick was quoted as writing “there really is no example of small government among rich nations.” The review elicited a response from one Donna Wiesner Keene, identified as a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum (whatever that is) and a former toiler in the verdant gardens of the Reagan and Bush administrations, taking issue with Mr. Madrick. According to her, the statement quoted above is “unsupported nonsense. Think Dubai, free and rich.”
Oh God, yes. Let’s do that. Let’s think Dubai, free and rich and, I guess, minimally governed. Trust me, it’ll be fun.

Hugues de la Plaza controversy refuses to die

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MV5BMTAzNjQ4NTM1ODheQTJeQWpwZ15BbWU3MDI3NjQxMzE@._V1._SX97_SY140_.jpg
Sonnez le claxon! (Sound the alarm!) Is Inspector Clouseau headed to SF to investigate the de la Plaza mystery?

Text by Sarah Phelan.

In a sign that the ghost of Hugues de la Plaza swirls restlessly around the city by the Bay—and will keep making headlines until his death is ruled a homicide and resolved–the New York Times ran a story about his case.

In another sign, de la Plaza’s ex-girlfriend, Melissa Nix, who attended last week’s Feb. 26 press conference looking Betty Paigesque thanks to a long dark mane and a lacy black top, and his handsomely graying father, Francois de la Plaza, continue to assert that Hugues, a French and American citizen, was murdered in his Hayes Valley apartment on June 2, 2007. (All of which suggests, citizens of San Francisco, that de la Plaza’s killer is still at large.)

And then there is the fact that the San Francisco Police Department took pains to clarify, the day before this press conference, that the San Francisco Medical Examiner concluded that the manner of De la Plaza’s death was “undetermined,” in face of claims, made by Nix and Francois de la Plaza, that French investigators have declared that Hugues death was 100 percent a homicide.

On Feb. 25–and the day before de la Plaza’s father announced a $100,000 reward (the proceeds of his son’s life insurance policy) for information about his son’s death, the SFPD issued a press release, stating that they wished to clarify certain public statements about Hugues de la Plaza’s death.

“The French police never took over the case with the sanction of the U.S. Department of Justice, as has been publicly stated,” the SFPD’s Public Affairs department wrote. It is simply policy, through international treaty, to report the case to DOJ. The San Francisco Police Department never declares deaths as homicides or suicides, and has never ruled the death as ‘suspicious’ as has been publicly stated. It is the Medical Examiner’s Office, not the police department, that determines a death as homicide, suicide, or death by natural causes. In this case, the Medical Examiner’s Office concluded that the manner of Mr. de la Plaza’s death was “undetermined.'”

“Although the Medical Examiner’s Office has classified Mr. de la Plaza’s death as an “undetermined’ death, the police department handles and investigates all ‘undetermined’ deaths as if they were homicides,” SFPD continued.

“It has been reported that the French investigating magistrate concluded that Mr. De la Plaza’s death was a homicide. Two of our most experienced investigators have been unable to respond to the French findings because we as yet have not been afforded the opportunity to review those findings, which have been communicated to Mr. de la Plaza’s family. A formal request for the French investigative file and their official conclusion is in progress.”

“San Francisco investigators continue to investigate the death in an impartial and far from ‘lackluster’ manner, as was publicly reported. The SFPD anticipates reviewing the French investigative documents once they are received and to continue to work with our French colleagues.”

At last week’s press conference, de la Plaza’s father said that French investigators had concluded that his son’s death was a homicide for a number of reasons, including the fact that the murder weapon had not been found and the angle of the knife wounds on his body precluded the possibility of suicide.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

When the news broke last week that Hearst Corporation was threatening to shut down the San Francisco Chronicle, the pundits across the country raised the obvious question: will San Francisco become the first American city without a major daily newspaper?

I think it’s a little early to say that Chron is actually going to vanish; part of what’s going on is clearly a shot across the bow of the paper’s unions, a warning on the part of tough-guy publisher Frank Vega that he’s deadly serious about cutting costs. That will mean widespread layoffs, outsourcing of union jobs, etc. Hearst is a big corporation run by bean counters, one that has major financial problems at many of its media properties. It’s not going to keep sustaining $50 million a year losses in San Francisco.

But Hearst is also a major political player in the United States, California, and San Francisco, and a big-city newspaper carries with it a lot of influence. Shutting down the Chron would be a huge step, one that the Hearst board members, who include William Randolph Hearst 3rd, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, are going to do only as an absolute last resort.

What happens if we lose the Chron? Well, in the short term, we’re stuck with the Examiner, which recently lauded Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s CEO as an icon of alternative energy. I need say no more. In the longer term, something will arise to replace the Chron, probably several Web-only daily newspapers, but they’ll never achieve the clout an old-fashioned morning paper had on the political, cultural, and civic dialogue. Those days are numbered anyway; the urban news media of the future will be smaller, less concentrated, and less individually influential.

I’m not a huge fan of Hearst’s San Francisco flagship, but it’s always a shame to see a newspaper die. And I’m convinced that the creaky old Chron could still survive. But it will need major surgery — not just on the finances, but on the content. Because these days, nobody I know under 30 bothers to read it.

So for Mr. Vega and his editor, Ward Bushee, allow me to offer some hints at reviving the moribund publication:

1. Become a San Francisco paper. Nobody reads the Chron for national news any more. You can get The New York Times delivered or read it on the Web and get far better coverage than anything the Chron offers. So give it up. Go local. And by local I don’t mean Walnut Creek and Orinda; forget the suburban readers and try to convince people in your central circulation area that you have something worth reading every day.

2. Trade C.W. Nevius to the Examiner for a draft choice and a writer to be named later and hire seven young, progressive columnists who can talk about issues that people in one of America’s most liberal cities actually relate to. Run a front-page opinion column every day, by a different one of them — make every powerful interest in the city nervous.

3. Redirect the energy and money from the national news to local investigative reporting. A team of five reporters can break a dozen major stories a year. We do it here on much less.

4. Since David Lazarus left for the L.A. Times, there’s not much muckraking on the business desk. Forget the wire stories and the puff — kick some corporate asses.

5. Hire a liberal editorial page editor.

6. Ray Ratto. Go team.

Free the prisoners, a case study

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By Steven T. Jones
Cases like this — nonviolent drug offenders sent back to prison on bullshit parole violations — make a mockery of claims that California can’t significantly reduce it’s prison population without endangering public safety.
The New York Times is right: we can and should substantially decrease our prison population.

What if Paul Krugman’s right?

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Mr. Obama’s victory feels more than a bit like defeat. The stimulus bill looks helpful but inadequate, especially when combined with a disappointing plan for rescuing the banks. And the politics of the stimulus fight have made nonsense of Mr. Obama’s postpartisan dreams.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Paul Krugman ended his column in his Friday New York Times column with this warning and a bit of paraphrase from a W.B. Yeats poem:

“And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach–a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic catastrope in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures. And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, obliviious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice.

“There’s still time to turn this around. But Mr. Obama hs to be stronger looking forward. Otherwise, the verdict on this crisis might be that no, we can’t.”

Click here to read Paul Krugman’s full column in the Friday, February 13 New York Times titled, Failure to Rise.

Thank God for Paul Krugman!

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What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care, and undermines schools, but offers a $l5,000 bonus to affluent people to flip their houses?

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Jim HIgjhtower, the Texas columnist, once wrote that “there is nothing in the center of the road except yellow lines and dead armadillos.”

Paul Krugman, the Princeton Nobel prize winner, put it a little more diplomatically in his Monday column in the New York Times, “The Destructive Center.”

He led off his discussion of the Obama stimulus plan with this lead:

“What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, and undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

“A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.”

“Even if the original Obama plan–around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts–had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

“Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.”

Krugman rightly criticized Obama for offering a plan that was “too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts” because he “wanted the plan to have bipartisan support and believed that it would.” Krugman rightly criticiazed Obama for not doing something “cruciall important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead he let conservatives define the debate…” And so Obama “was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists.”

Krugman asked the critical question: “So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.

“For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. ‘Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,’ he decalared on Saturday and ‘the scale and scope of this plan is right.'”

Krugman’s summing up, “No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.”

Thank God for Paul Krugman. B3

Click here to read Op-ed columnist Paul Krugman’s Monday, February 9th article in the New York Times, The Destructive Center.

Click here to read a CNN report on “What got cut from the stimulus bill.”

Jess Brownell: Keynes & Friedman fight it out

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“John Maynard Keynes, he’s our man. He knows more dead than Alan Greenspan”

By Jess Brownell

In the January 28 edition of the New York Times there was a full-page advertisement paid for by the Cato Institute and signed by 203 economists (if I counted correctly; I’m not an economist myself) objecting to the following statement by President Obama: “There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.”

The brief text above all those signatures advises the world that the signers do not in fact agree and deeply resent being lumped with those who do. No jumpstarting needed, in their opinion. Indeed, the so-called recession/depression seems to bother them very little. Less government and lower taxes will easily solve that problem, and psoriasis better look out, too.

All mod cons

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› johnny@sfbg.com

How can any of us forget 1835, and the heady discovery of spherical amphibians, blue goats, and petite three-foot zebras frolicking on the moon? In Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders (New Press, 245 pages, $24.95), Paul Maliszewski relates that time, when the New York Sun brought news of lunar life to an increasingly large readership that craved delightful information during an economic drought. Maliszewski doesn’t have to work to make the story funny — he merely has to relate how the paper’s moon-discovery serial likened a typical blue goat to "a young lamb or kitten," and presented scientists pretending to tickle the creature’s beard as seen through a telescope, only to witness it "bound away into oblivion, as if conscious of earthly impertinence."

Within the context of Maliszewski’s sprawling look at fakery, the Sun saga is a light vacation, because of its relative datedness and good-natured imagination. Before and after, Fakers largely avoids such Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds–style nostalgia for more contemporary tales: the stories of Stephen Glass, James Frey, and JT Leroy, for example. It places Glass’s accounts under a microscope that highlights their pandering corniness. It relates the life and times of Leroy — and his feverish endorsement by the likes of Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon (more on him later), as well as his editorship of an installment in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing series — without losing sight of the fact that Leroy’s much-celebrated writing is mawkish.

Such targets and views might suggest that Maliszewski likes to wag his finger and tut-tut, but his viewpoint is much more variable — he isn’t out to condemn various literary liars, for example, so much as critique them. Early in the book, he relates one of his own adventures in the creation of phony identities, a Walter Mitty–scale satire somewhat akin to the letters that Joe Orton used to write to newspapers as "Edna Welthorpe," a make-believe housewife outraged by Orton’s plays. Here, and in other instances, such as a discussion of George W. Bush’s use of the word "confidence" when discussing economics, Fakers suggests that the Bush years have not just eroded but demolished the value of truth.

In a seeming act of first-person tit-for-tat, Maliszewski shares an example of an instance when he fell for a hoax, though the chosen subject — a tall tale that might qualify as an urban legend if it weren’t set in the wilderness — cops out in terms of allowing a truly personal and thus uncomfortable examination of the various aspects of being duped. The most curious of Maliszewski’s practices is the frequent weaving of e-mail interviews — a format that would seem to allow for flights of fancy — into his investigative text. A correspondence with former New York Times journalist Michael Finkel, for example, stays soft-focus when it could have questioned the presumptuous audacity of a middle-aged white man assuming the voice of a West African boy.

In a recent Bookforum review, Hua Hsu describes Fakers as vaguely paranoia-inducing, and indeed, at the very least, this reader — a journalist who has been duped — wonders if any of the facts or stories that the author relates might contain creative twists. In an extended conclusion about a fraudulent Michael Chabon essay, Maliszewski essentially asserts that to lie for the sake of lying is a cynical, selfish act. True. But Fakers is more interesting when it is ambivalent and discomfiting, or when Maliszewski’s examples and anecdotes prompt ideas about various permutations of truth and falsehood in the media landscape. (Take CNN’s Nancy Drew, I mean Nancy Grace, and the way she is currently using a compulsive liar — Caylee Anthony — to co-author cable news television’s version of a radio serial.) Blue goats are cute, but — as Fakers makes clear — white lies have many facets.

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