New York Times

Still beating

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Still beating

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM/LIT A few weeks before our scheduled interview, Laura Albert mails me copies of 2000’s Sarah and 2001’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. Inscribed on Heart‘s title page is a note: “Thanks for being available to revelation.” The volumes are signed “Yours, LA and JT” — the latter, of course, referring to JT LeRoy, the identity under which Albert penned both books.

That secret’s been out since late 2005, and has been dissected over and over. It even inspired a Law and Order episode. LeRoy, and his fantastically tragic back story (just out of his teens, he’d survived drugs, homelessness, and prostitution en route to becoming the lit world’s hottest wunderkind), were Albert’s creations. She was the true author behind the best-sellers listed above, plus 2004’s Harold’s End, dozens of magazine articles, an early script for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), and numerous other works. (Meanwhile, the androgynous “JT” that had been appearing in public was actually the half-sister of Albert’s then-partner; she wrote her own tell-all in 2008.) On Albert’s website, there are tabs marked “Who is Laura Albert?” and “Who is JT LeRoy?” Both link to Albert’s biography.

Years have passed since l’affaire LeRoy, and Albert has moved through the experience in her own way. (Her business card lists her as “literary outlaw.”) Later this summer, Sarah will be reissued as an ebook, with a fairy tale-inspired cover by artist Matt Pipes. Albert also is working on her memoirs (though she doesn’t like to use the word “memoirs”), and tells me there’s a documentary forthcoming from Jeff Feuerzeig, who made 2005’s critically-acclaimed The Devil and Daniel Johnston. This weekend, Asia Argento’s 2004 adaptation of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things screens as part of the Clay Theatre’s midnight-movie series, with Albert and producer Chris Hanley in person, plus Argento via Skype.

Sitting in her San Francisco kitchen, Albert eyes my tape recorder and admits she’d rather focus on the film, not JT — though it’s a topic that inevitably arises. Argento, Albert says, encountered Heart the way many LeRoy readers did, via word-of-mouth recommendation.

“She read the book and she didn’t know anything about JT. At the same time, a small publisher was putting out the book [in Italy], and they wanted to bring JT over,” Albert recalls. “It was a weird coincidence. They were putting on an event, and they wanted to get someone to read. They had contacted Asia, and she already knew about the book, and she wanted not only to do this event, but to make the movie. It’s funny because I thought Sarah would be the first [to become a film], because it was already optioned by Gus [Van Sant]. But Asia moved really fast. We went over to meet her, and I had turned down a lot of people. My feeling was, it’s my baby and I’m giving it up for adoption, and I saw that this was someone I could give my baby to.”

Argento, the daughter of famed Italian horror director Dario Argento, is best-known stateside as an actor; previous to Heart, her directing experience was limited to short films and 2000’s flamboyant Scarlet Diva. Once she decided to helm the movie, her decision to star as the free-spirited, needy, sometimes-cruel single mother of the story’s young protagonist was an obvious choice.

“I had concerns about that, how much she would take on the role, how much it would become her. It’s ironic, because I had given myself over completely to Jeremy, to JT, to Jeremiah,” Albert says. She pauses. “Did you see that French film, about the guy who assumes different characters?”

“Holy Motors?”

“Yeah! It really was transformative to me. There’s a scene where someone asks [the main character], ‘Why are you still doing this?’, and he makes reference to the act of giving yourself over completely. And that was it. I gave myself over completely. I did not break character. You know how, in that movie, he’ll do anything? He’ll kill someone! He’s in it. Most people don’t know what that’s like. And that was it. I will never apologize,” she says, firmly. “We’re talking about art. Nobody was harmed in this, really. I didn’t really scribble that far outside the lines. Everything was labeled ‘fiction.'”

At her mention of an apology, I have to ask: does she feel like people demanded one?

“People like to give themselves a lot of credit for how vanguard they are. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had tell me, ‘Warhol would have loved it!’ — including people who were close with Warhol,” she says. “I think it revealed more about other people and what they could accommodate, and what they put on the work, than it does about me. If you have a personal relationship with JT, then that’s a conversation between you and me. I put my email [in the books], and I really did have a connection with the fans because I grew up in the punk scene, and I wasn’t into hero worship. The problem was — psychologically — I wasn’t able to do that. It wasn’t like [adopts goofy voice], ‘Gee, how do I burst forth onto the literary scene? I know! I’ll create a little boy!’ No. It wasn’t like that.”

As we talk, Albert makes references to her own troubled youth: surviving abuse, living in a group home, being institutionalized. Amid the tumult of her teenage life, she would “call hotlines — I don’t know what I would talk about, but it was the only time I could feel. I would give myself over to another being, and it was always a boy. So when I hear people say, ‘I’m gonna do what you did,’ it’s like, good luck. For me it was created the way an oyster creates a pearl: out of irritation and suffering. It was an attempt to try to heal something. And it actually worked, and it did so for a lot of other people. The amazing thing is, now I can be available to people.”

We’re delving more into her work (“I didn’t do anything new — writers have always been using combinations of pseudonyms and identities,” she points out) when the doorbell rings; it’s a Comcast technician here to see about Albert’s Internet connection. We move to her office, which features a wall collaged with photos and several filing cabinets full of archives — material she’s letting Feuerzeig use in his documentary.

But it’s not a room completely given over to the past. It’s also where Albert works on her new projects (besides her memoirs, she’s writing screenplays — building off her experiences working on Deadwood with David Milch), and stashes new mementos, including a program from a recent Brazilian rock opera entitled JT, A Punk Rock Fairy Tale.

Before I leave, she gives me a copy of a New York Times article from 2010 entitled “Life, In the Way of Art;” its subjects include Joaquin Phoenix, still smarting from the backlash after his faux breakdown in I’m Still Here. The director of that film, Casey Affleck, cites a line from a Picasso quote that Albert emails to me in full the day after we speak: “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

She’s just as frank over email as she is in person. “It’s OK with me if someone doesn’t like my writing. But they shouldn’t try to tell me how I’m obliged to present my work,” she writes. “When I talk about my personal background, I’m not attempting to somehow bestow legitimacy to what I’ve written — anyone should be able to do what I did. My life history doesn’t matter and isn’t being offered as any kind of excuse.”

I think back to something she said in her kitchen — a simple, powerful summation of a story that will never not be complicated. “JT was my lifeboat. You loved him? Well, I loved him more.” 

THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS

Fri/28, midnight, $10

Clay

2261 Fillmore, SF

www.landmarktheatres.com

 

Bully for the ACLU! It went after the real lawbreakers

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Scroll down to read the ACLU complaint in the New York Times story

For me, the crucial question was not whether Edward J. Snowden broke the law but whether the U.S. government had broken the law in secretly setting up and secretly expanding what the American Civil Liberties Union called its “dragnet”collection of logs of domestic phone calls.

The ACLU, filing on Tuesday one of its most important lawsuits ever, stated that “this practice is akin to snatching every American’s address book, with annotations detailing who we spoke to, when we talked, for how long, and from where.  It gives the U.S. government a comprehensive record of our associations our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our familial, political, professional, religious, and intimate associations.”

The suit stated that this mass tracking violates the Patriot Act and the First and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.  The ACLU asked for the court to stop the Obama Administration from the practice and expunge the records.

“Every American” needs to read the ACLU suit embedded in the New York Times story. Let’s get our priorities straight and go after the real lawbreakers. Bully for the ACLU. b3

Click here to read the Times story and complaint.

Bruce B. Brugmann, who signs his blogs and emails B3, is the editor at large of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He writes and edits the Bruce Blog on the Bay Guardian website at sfbg.com. He is the former editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Bay Guardian with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012.

Dede Wilsey re-elected prez of Fine Arts Museums board with little fanfare

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Dede Wilsey re-elected prez of Fine Arts Museums board with little fanfare

At a quarterly meeting on June 6, Diane “Dede” Wilsey was summarily re-elected as president of the Board of Trustees of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF). The election marks her sixth consecutive term in a post she’s held since 1998, a tenure made possible when the board eliminated term limits in 2009.

She ran uncontested, and her unanimous endorsement by the board’s Nomination Committee was granted, in the words of Committee Chair Lisa Zanze, to be “mindful of the need for continuity” at FAMSF.

Earlier this year, Wilsey was the subject of harsh criticism by former and unnamed current employees at FAMSF, who anonymously submitted information to the Bay Guardian demonstrating that, among other things, Wilsey was directing staff members to assist with the maintenance of her personal art collection on museum time. Curator Emeritus Robert Flynn Johnson was even quoted in the New York Times as saying the museum was in a state of “Orwellian dysfunction” under Wilsey’s leadership.

Other allegations of mismanagement have included the ouster of several well-regarded, veteran members of the museum’s staff, such as European art curator Lynn Orr. Eyebrows were also raised over the exhibition of Wilsey’s son Trevor Traina’s photography collection at the deYoung last summer. Incidentally, Traina was re-elected to the FAMSF board last week after briefly retiring in April 2012, just before his show opened.

Despite the controversy, Wilsey’s position was never questioned at last week’s meeting. The need for “continuity” ostensibly stems from a gap in leadership at the museum following the death of Director John Buchanan in December 2011. The protracted recruitment effort for Buchanan’s replacement finally came to an end earlier this year, in the wake of the controversy, with the appointment of Colin Bailey, former deputy director and chief curator at The Frick Collection in New York. (On Thursday, Wilsey likened working with the selection committee to “herding cats.”)

It’s true that Wilsey has an extensive record of arts patronage in San Francisco. But with Wilsey retaining her post as president of the board, it’s unclear whether the “points of great concern amongst a broad range of professional staff” highlighted in an anonymous note sent to the Guardian this past February have been adequately addressed. The outcome of Wilsey’s re-election, perhaps, was the quiet dismissal of an ugly period in an institution otherwise concerned with beauty.

SFPD responds (weirdly) to allegations of racial disparity

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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The San Francisco Police Department has issued a head-scratching response to charges of racial disparity in marijuana arrests, possibly in an attempt to defuse controversy over a recent incident that already has some members of the African American community up in arms.

This latest flap started Monday, when the New York Times ran a piece about an American Civil Liberties Union analysis finding that nationwide, Black Americans were four times more likely to be arrested than white people on charges of marijuana possession in 2010.

On Tuesday, the East Bay Express drew attention to that report. Then, the Chronicle ran a story suggesting that racial disparity in marijuana arrests extends to San Francisco – a city where white people have such affinity for weed that they’re known to congregate in droves not only on Hippie Hill but also Dolores Park to commemorate 4/20 with collective puffs of smoke.

The Chronicle piece seizes on 2010 data to back up its claim, noting:

“Black residents made up 6 percent of San Francisco’s population in 2010 while whites comprised 55 percent. The ACLU report said that of 298 marijuana possession arrests that year, 99 were black suspects and 195 were white suspects.” This would appear to suggest that a disproportionate number of Black suspects were arrested for marijuana possession. The Chron also pointed out, “the ACLU’s report analyzed arrest data from 2001 through 2010.”

Earlier today, the SFPD issued a response, apparently attempting to set the local press straight. It states: “This is not so. The San Francisco Police Department does not racially profile.”

To back up its claim, officers in the SFPD’s Media Relations Unit wrote: 

“In 2011, the SFPD made over 23,000 arrests, of which 14,000 were classified as misdemeanors. Today, Chief [Greg] Suhr reviewed all 11 misdemeanor marijuana arrest reports from 2011. All 11 misdemeanor marijuana charges were secondary to other charges, e.g., outstanding warrants, weapons possession, drunk in public, for which the person (four white males, three black males, two black females, one Hispanic male, and one white female) were arrested and booked. It is evident that the misdemeanor marijuana arrests cited in the article were made using sound police procedure pertaining to criminal activity and not by racial profiling.”

But this response fails to address the ACLU’s findings head on. If the New York Times and Chronicle pieces specifically hinged on 2010 figures, why did Suhr review data from 2011? The only hint comes in the SFPD statement, which notes that 2011 “was Chief Suhr’s first year as chief.”

Salon says, “Ladies, shush! People paid good money for Michelle Obama and rape”

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Salon says, “Ladies, shush! People paid good money for Michelle Obama and rape”

Hey, remember Code Pink during the Bush years?  “Why can’t those old, shriveled, nagging dyke hags stop screaming about Iraq and stuff,” seemed to be the reaction of most of America and the media.

Meanwhile, even many of us wholly sympathetic to their message cringed a bit in our Internet-ringside seats as the valiant fuschia-clad ladies yelled, and yelled, and yelled. Even at Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi! (Clutch pearls.) And hey, they’re still doing it. Even at Obama! (Clutch pearls tighter.)

Weren’t they hurting our cause with all this rudeness? Why could they just sit down at their Dell Gateway computers, dial up AOL, and write a firmly worded comment on the New York Times site like the rest of us. What about civility? WHO WILL THINK OF THE CIVILITY?

Now, of course, with the distance of time and the realization of just how awful that political period was still dawning, it’s like, “Thank fucking god someone was doing something real, however quixotic.”

And yet, the sorry clutching of pearls in the face of female resistance continues. Why can’t women just pipe down about stuff? Especially those whiny ol’ man-hater ones.

If you’re awake today, you’re hearing about how Ellen Sturtz of Berkeley-based gay rights activist group GetEQUAL “heckled” Michelle Obama at a $10,000 per person DNC fundraiser by loudly demanding that President Obama issue an executive order protecting LGBTs from discrimination by companies that contract with the federal government. “I’m a lesbian looking for federal equality before I die,” she shouted. WELL, I NEVER!

Michelle Obama left the podium, confronted Sturtz (whose description in almost every major news account incorporates the phrase “56-year-old lesbian activist” or, better, “a divorced lesbian” — because you know what that means: shrieky shrieky!), and told the crowd that it had to choose whether it wanted to hear her or Sturtz. Sturtz replied that she’d gladly take the mic. But, duh, the fancy crowd chose Obama, and Sturtz was promptly hauled off by security — thank god for our great country’s sake, and that of general decorum also.

Of course this episode is being touted, even by liberal-leaning outlets, as Michelle’s great “smackdown,” a “verbal chin check,” a brilliant takedown. She has had it, get huh! That angry lesbian got what she deserved.

But the most disappointing — and frankly shocking — take was by Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon. In an incredibly weird and misguided post this morning called “Michelle Obama’s Heckler Win,” Williams decries any kind of disruptive protest, let alone one at a $10,000 per person fundraiser, my stars, because it’s forcing your values on someone else. 

“[Sturtz] explains her actions by saying, “I simply couldn’t stay silent any longer.” And she did manage to draw attention to the issue. But she did it by being rude and boorish, so where’s the satisfaction in that? The headline-grabbing outburst is a common ploy, one that, it depresses me to say, is far too often used by those of us here on the crunchy left. We can say that dire circumstances call for extreme reactions, but really, all that heckling does is broadcast to the world, “What I feel right this moment is more important than what everybody else in the room paid money to experience.”

Nevermind for a minute if Sturtz paid her money, too, or that Williams is privileging money over expression and using a common rightwing troll attack trope (protesting is infringing on freedom) — but seriously, WTF? Heaven forbid people get what they paid for at a political fundraiser … actual politics. (Obama was on her usual schtick about ‘we must help the poor children of Chicago.” Pretty sure not much of that $10,000 was going South of the Loop.)

Could everyone please just sit quietly after they give all their money to Michelle Obama or whoever because FREEDOM OF MONEY? Thanks. If you’re upset about something, organize your own million-dollar fundraiser. These people paid to worship Michelle, not hear about your discrimination under the hypocritical administration she’s representing. Why don’t you crunchy lefties understand that?

But wait, there’s worse. In her Salon piece, Williams extends her “please don’t ruffle the money feathers” to an incident that blew up last year when a woman, during a rape-based routine at a Daniel Tosh comedy show, stood up and yelled, “actually rape jokes are never funny!” (Tosh then suggested the crowd gang-rape the woman — and oh boy, did Mary Elizabeth Williams have some fucked up opinions about that at the time.) Her post this morning continues:

“Last summer, a comedy club patron enticed Daniel Tosh to make some very unfortunate remarks about rape – an event that was set in motion when the woman decided, “I felt that sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman.”  In other words, much like Sturtz, she decided that her values should be made known to everyone in the audience, because they were more important than anything anybody else was saying or doing. Certainly more important than what the person the rest of the assembly had paid their money to see was saying and doing.”

Um, so of course the woman “enticed” the rape remarks by speaking out against them — she sure was asking for it. She should have just sat there and not imposed her highly unusual and embarrasing “rape is bad” values on people who paid to hear rape jokes. Williams then ends the piece:

“A no-nonsense mom like Michelle Obama could tell you that any 2-year-old in a WalMart can get noticed just by throwing herself on the floor of the sporting goods aisle. That doesn’t mean anybody is going to take her seriously.”

So, just to recap, raising your voice for equality at a $10,000 per person fundraiser is just as annoying as standing up against rape jokes (which you caused in the first place) because you’re being a bully to all these people who paid money. Don’t ever speak up about injustice because you’re being a baby. Live with it like the rest of us, especially here at Salon, which never speaks out about anything to grab attention. 

Got it. Mary Elizabeth Williams, you are a master troll. Not even Code Pink with 10,000 crimson bullhorns could fault your logic. Ellen Sturtz, go to your room — with no equality for dinner.

 

 

 

Google and Wikileaks: The takedown

Zelda Bronstein
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Google and Wikileaks: The takedown

By now half the Internet has read the New York Times piece Julian Assange wrote on Google. In theory, it’s sort of an analysis of “The New Digital Age,” a book by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and former State Department official Jared Cohen, which got a lukewarm review in the Times a month ago. In practice, it’s a total slam at Google and its “don’t be evil” slogan.

Assange isn’t impressed by the Googlers; in fact, he argues that the book is just a manifesto for a new digital age of American imperialism:

 The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom — banal. But this isn’t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.

 “The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.

More:

 Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as “participation”; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.

It’s easy to paint Assange as a crazyman seeing conspiracies everywhere (I’d get that way too if I were cooped up in an embassy and unable to escape.) And that’s how some of the tech journals are playing it.

But let’s get beyond Google Glass and information capture and the scary shit that technology will be doing to us all in a couple of decades. Let’s take Google out of this altogether.

Is it unusual for giant corporations based in the US that control important technology to work closely with the government? Of course not; it’s been going on for more than a century. Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan, General Motors, Lockheed Martin … the list goes on. Corporations that operate on that level are and always have been a part of American foreign policy — and almost always for the worse.

Google doesn’t build missles or spy satellites (although you know they’re working on drones), but what it does is even more powerful — it collects and controls information. And while much of its mission involves making the world’s knowledge available to all, there are other sides to that. And it would be shocking if the State Department/CIA/Industrial Complex DIDN’T involve Google.

At a certain level, if you’re running a big coporation, you have to do more than have a slogan to avoid being evil. Assange’s article is a bit over the top, but I think that’s what he’s trying to say. And it’s absolutely true.

 

 

 

I agree with a three-star General

Zelda Bronstein
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I agree with a three-star General

I don’t find myself in agreement with military leaders that often, but Lt. General Karl Eikenberry and historian David M. Kennedy have a fascinating piece in the New York Times that I have to say makes a lot of sense.

I was in college when Jimmy Carter brought back draft registration, and we all went batshit: We were just a half-step behind the Vietnam Generation, and I had friends and relatives who faced geting drafted (and the very high likelihood of being sent to die in the jungles in an utterly pointless war) and the notion of “the draft” was repugnant. We protested; we formed collectives; we met late into the night and organized. Nobody outside of the college campuses paid much attention.

That’s because it was pretty clear to political leaders that, registration or no, there wasn’t going to be a return to the draft anytime soon. Congress is happy with the all-volunteer Army: It guarantees that most recruits will be poor people, that very few sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful (or the members of Congress) will ever have to go to war, and that the upper-middle classes will feel no pain whatsoever when other people’s children become cannon fodder.

If every young American risked getting drafted to go to Iraq, that war might never have happened — and certainly wouldn’t have lasted as long. The general notes:

The Congressional Research Service has documented 144 military deployments in the 40 years since adoption of the all-voluntary force in 1973, compared with 19 in the 27-year period of the Selective Service draft following World War II — an increase in reliance on military force traceable in no small part to the distance that has come to separate the civil and military sectors. The modern force presents presidents with a moral hazard, making it easier for them to resort to arms with little concern for the economic consequences or political accountability. Meanwhile, Americans are happy to thank the volunteer soldiers who make it possible for them not to serve, and deem it is somehow unpatriotic to call their armed forces to task when things go awry.

The officer corps is made up, to a significant extent, of sons and daughters of military officers, making war a “family business.” The rest of the nation is insulated — both from the experience of military service and the impacts of deployments.

I’m not (exactly) in favor of mandatory military service for all (although it would have a huge impact on Washington’s desire to use force every time there’s a foreign policy issue), but I like what Eikenberry says, not only about the draft but about the cost of war:

Congress should also insist that wars be paid for in real time. Levying special taxes, rather than borrowing, to finance “special appropriations” would compel the body politic to bear the fiscal burden — and encourage citizens to consider war-making a political choice they were involved in, not a fait accompli they must accept.

A military that operates outside of the civilian world isn’t good for the country. A civilian population that sees war as an abstract problem happening somewhere else in the world involving someone else’s family isn’t good, either.

So yeah, here I am agreeing with a three-star. Enjoy it; that doesn’t happen often.

 

 

Selector: May 29-June 4, 2013

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 29

John Hodgman

John Hodgman has parlayed his starring role as the awkward PC in Apple Computer commercials into a multifaceted comedy career. The humorist typically portrays the authoritative know-it-all, dispensing faux expertise on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and through his trilogy of satirical almanacs titled Complete World Knowledge. Unsatisfied with conveying pseudo-information to the masses, quasi-legal expert (fake) Judge John Hodgman also adjudicates over everyday silly disputes on a weekly Internet podcast. His thoughtful, goofy, non-legally binding rulings are a regular feature in the New York Times Magazine. Adam Savage of Mythbusters‘ fame provides a clever and fitting foil. (Kevin Lee)

In conversation with Adam Savage

7:30pm, $27

Nourse Theatre

275 Hayes, SF

(415) 392-4400

www.cityarts.net

 

“Drinking/Songs: A Night of Beer and the Music That Goes With It”

I feel a beer coming on! Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and public radio’s VoiceBox have joined forces for an “inter-active beer-tasting and live music event,” i.e., a night of singing and musical revelry the way nature intended — with frothy steins of that beloved thirst quencher known to barstool Pavarottis everywhere as a brewski. With musical entertainment from the Fill A Steins a cappella vocal music ensemble and a live discussion on the cultural history of this love affair between pipes and pints with cicerone Sayre Piotrkowski, the Fill A Steins, and VoiceBox‘s Chloe Veltman, there’s even an added touch of class with your glass. (Robert Avila)

8pm, $20

50 Mason Social House, SF

(415) 608-0133

drinkingsongs2.eventbrite.com


THURSDAY 30

Skull and Bones NightLife

Like Halloween in springtime, the Cal Academy’s popular Thursday evening nightlife event this time explores the creepier side of life — animal insides. At Skull and Bones, you can play like Indiana Jones — or at least, an amateur archaeologist — and watch volunteers assemble the bones of a skeleton, those of a juvenile offshore orca whale. Plus, Lee Post and Academy field associate/bone collector Ray “Bones” Bander will be on hand to answer the thorny questions, Icee Hot DJs Rollie Fingers and Ghosts on Tape will be spinning spooky tracks, and Paxton’s Gate will have a station of treasures; if you’ve ever visited the Mission curiosities-flora-and-fauna shop, you know they’ll have some good stuff on hand. This time, they’ll show Jason Borders’ skull art, and conduct a hands-on owl pellet dissection. SCRAP will have crafts at the ready, EndGames Improv will tickle your funny bone (ha! laughing already), and the planetarium will have a presentation on the “bones’ of the Milky Way. It’ll be a great way to bone up on the galaxy (sorry). (Emily Savage)

6pm, $10–<\d>$12

California Academy of Sciences

55 Music Concourse Dr., SF

(415) 379.8000

www.calacademy.org

 

San Francisco Green Film Festival

The third San Francisco Green Film Festival opens tonight with a tale of true Bay Area environmental heroes. Nancy Kelly’s doc Rebels With a Cause — first seen locally at the 2012 Mill Valley Film Festival and opening at the Roxie Fri/31 — offers an inspiring look at the Marin County activists who fought to preserve the NorCal coastline at a time when “conservation” was a dirty word. The rest of the Green fest’s over 50 films include Bidder 70, about climate activist Tim DeChristopher; Jon Bowermaster’s “fracktivist” tale Dear Governor Cuomo; and Kalyanee Mam’s Cambodia-set doc A River Changes Course, which just picked up a much-deserved Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. (Cheryl Eddy)

Through June 5, $12 per film (passes, $100–<\d>$200)

Various venues, SF and Berk.

www.sfgreenfilmfest.org

 

Cheap Girls

Call them loud, reckless, naïve — but don’t call them cheap. Though cranking out a big garage rock is something Cheap Girls could do in their sleep — and well — they’ve been known to slow it down on the few tracks that showcase their pop side and tight vocals. Like on earworm “Her and Cigarettes,” for example, it’s hard to believe this self-ascribed power pop rock group from Lansing, Mich. is not a small acoustic trio. “I love her and cigarettes/we took the long way, so we could have another,” whimpers vocalist Ian Graham in the song, embodying the wayward insecurities and heightened drama of adolescence itself. The group doesn’t present its songs; it relives every single one right there on stage. (Hillary Smith)

With Make Do and Mend, Diamond Youth

9pm, $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 626-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com


FRIDAY 31

Walking Distance Dance Festival

Building on last year’s Walking Distance Dance Festival, featuring local dance, ODC Theater Director Christy Bolingbroke has changed the formula. With a sure touch for vision leavened with reality, she has assembled a line-up that, with the exception of opening night, pairs locals with visitors. First up, however, will be Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters, and Kate Weare and Company — once they were local, now they are visitors. Other fab choices are Nicole Klaymoon’s House of Matter and ODC/Dance’s Cut-Out Guy. New in town will be Brian Brooks (NY), and casebolt and smith (LA). You see each program in Studio B at ODC Commons and the B’way Theater across the Street. Amazing how much fun last year the simple act of walking from one venue to the other was. (Rita Felciano)

Fri/31, 7pm; Sat/1, 4pm, $20

ODC/Commons and B’way/ODC Theater, SF.

(415) 863-9834

www.odcdance.org/walkingdistance

 

Hi Ho Silver Oh

The LA-based band Hi Ho Silver Oh converts even the toughest of listeners with its harmonies. Frontperson Casey Trela’s vocals communicate a yearning I’m not sure I’ve felt before. The group’s humor will lure you in almost as much as its sometimes giddy, occasionally melancholic sound. The band’s affinity for good times shines through while performing great tracks, which makes for a set worth checking out. The video for the band’s “My Confessor” displays just this. It profiles a spelling bee gone wrong, starring a washed out principal, juxtaposed with clean vocals, attractive guitar rhythms, and evocative lyrics — it’s an encompassing reflection of the group. Hi Ho Silver Oh opens tonight for Mice Parade. (Smith)

9pm, $12

Brick and Mortar

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 800-8782

www.brickandmortarmusic.com

 

Jazzanova’s Jurgen von Knoblauch

“This is one of Jazzanova’s major talents: to combine pieces from very different musical genres. And the linchpin holding them together is generally soul.” That’s how Jurgen von Knoblauch describes his German supergroup Jazzanova, now approaching two decades of producing and performing a blend of jazz, boss nova, soul, Latin, deep house, and electronica. The collective’s versatility means it can shift from individual DJs like founding member von Knoblauch spinning at nightclubs across Europe to a nine-person live performance band performing around the world. Von Knoblauch also maintains a music show on German radio with two of his fellow Jazzanova DJs and helps select new talent for the group’s record label Sonar Kollektiv. (Lee)

With Fred Everything, Joey Alaniz

9pm, $10–<\d>$15

Monarch

101 Sixth St, SF

(415) 284-9774

www.monarchsf.com


SATURDAY 1

Ludovico Einaudi

Ludovico Einaudi avoids describing his music any one way; he likely wouldn’t call it classical or modernist, because he feels a plethora of influences inform his pieces. It’s likely if you attend one of his performances you too will have a tough time describing it in one phrase anyway. He offers viewers a cathartic experience — one that is felt on many levels — and takes them through the big emotions of ecstasy and doom, the same emotions Rothko was interested in conveying in his paintings. Like the famous painter, Einaudi’s work is presented on a grand scale. He plays with a raw emotion seldom seen in similar pianists. The intrinsically deep, emotional tones presented in his performances are emphasized by his 11-piece band that includes a string section.(Smith)

7:30 p.m., $40–<\d>$85

Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 345-0900

www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

 

No Regular Play

If you haven’t heard of ‘Play,’ a monthly party put on by Listed Productions and the End Up, all you really know is that it’s described as “recess for adults.” Which is perfect if you, like me, have the Peter Pan syndrome that’s particular to the Bay Area, holding down jobs but still holding onto acting like a kid the rest of the time. When I’ve been hula-hooping recently — on breaks, in the handicapped bathroom stall at work — I’ve been listening to Endangered Species by Wolf + Lamb compatriots No Regular Play, whose playful shows mix funky house with live vocals and fresh trumpet blasts. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Butane (Crosstown Rebels), Bells & Whistles (AYLI), Alex Blackstock (Less is More)

10pm-6am, $15 advance

End Up

401 Sixth St., SF

(415) 357-0827

www.theendup.com


SUNDAY 2

“The Globalization Trilogy”

For the last 12 years, local filmmaker Micha X. Peled’s documentaries have exposed the human toll of corporate greed around the world.

The Rafael is showing the completed trilogy over the next week, with the filmmaker present at each screening. 2001’s Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town chronicles the decimating impact America’s favorite retailer (and arguably worst employer) has on local businesses. 2005’s China Blue provides a rare, clandestine peek inside a Chinese garment sweatshop-factory. His latest Bitter Seeds ponders the epidemic of small-farmer suicides in India — over a quarter-million in 16 years — due to the impoverishing effect of genetically modified seeds from US agri-giant/villain Monsanto. (Dennis Harvey)

Through June 9, $6.50-10.75

Rafael Film Center

1118 Fourth St., San Rafael


www.cafilm.org 2 The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian, 225 Bush, 17th Flr., SF, CA 94105; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

Solomon: Our twisted politics of grief

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Solomon: Our twisted politics of grief

By Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.”

Darwin observed that conscience is what most distinguishes humans from other animals. If so, grief isn’t far behind. Realms of anguish are deeply personal — yet prone to expropriation for public use, especially in this era of media hyper-spin. Narratives often thresh personal sorrow into political hay. More than ever, with grief marketed as a civic commodity, the personal is the politicized.

The politicizing of grief exploded in the wake of 9/11. When so much pain, rage and fear set the U.S. cauldron to boil, national leaders promised their alchemy would bring unalloyed security. The fool’s gold standard included degrading civil liberties and pursuing a global war effort that promised to be ceaseless. From the political outset, some of the dead and bereaved were vastly important, others insignificant. Such routine assumptions have remained implicit and intact.

The “war on terror” was built on two tiers of grief. Momentous and meaningless. Ours and theirs. The domestic politics of grief settled in for a very long haul, while perpetual war required the leaders of both major parties to keep affirming and reinforcing the two tiers of grief.

For individuals, actual grief is intimate, often ineffable. Maybe no one can help much, but expressions of caring and condolences can matter. So, too, can indifference. Or worse. The first years of the 21st century normalized U.S. warfare in countries where civilians kept dying and American callousness seemed to harden. From the USA, a pattern froze and showed no signs of thawing; denials continued to be reflexive, while expressions of regret were perfunctory or nonexistent

Drones became a key weapon — and symbol — of the U.S. war trajectory. With a belated nod to American public opinion early in the century’s second decade, Washington’s interest in withdrawing troops from Afghanistan did not reflect official eagerness to stop killing there or elsewhere. It did reflect eagerness to bring U.S. warfare more into line with the latest contours of domestic politics. The allure of remote-control devices like drones — integral to modern “counterterrorism” ideas at the Pentagon and CIA — has been enmeshed in the politics of grief. So much better theirs than ours.

Many people in the United States don’t agree with a foreign policy that glories in use of drones, cruise missiles and the like, but such disagreement is in a distinct minority. (A New York Times/CBS poll in late April 2013 found Americans favoring U.S. overseas drone strikes by 70 to 20 percent.) With the “war on terror” a longtime fact of political life, even skeptics or unbelievers are often tethered to some concept of pragmatism that largely privatizes misgivings. In the context of political engagement — when a person’s internal condition is much less important than outward behavior — notions of realism are apt to encourage a willing suspension of disbelief. As a practical matter, we easily absorb the dominant U.S. politics of grief, further making it our politics of grief.

The amazing technology of “unmanned aerial vehicles” glided forward as a satellite-guided deus ex machina to help lift Uncle Sam out of a tight geopolitical spot — exerting awesome airpower in Afghanistan and beyond while slowing the arrival of flag-draped coffins back home. More airborne killing and less boot prints on the ground meant fewer U.S. casualties. All the better to limit future grief, as much as possible, to those who are not us.

However facile or ephemeral the tributes may be at times, American casualties of war and their grieving families receive some public affirmation from government officials and news media. The suffering had real meaning. They mattered and matter. That’s our grief. But at the other end of American weaponry, their grief is a world of difference.

In U.S. politics, American sorrow is profoundly important and revs up many rhetorical engines; the contrast with sorrow caused by the American military could hardly be greater. What is not ignored or dismissed as mere propaganda is just another unfortunate instance of good intentions gone awry. No harm intended, no foul. Yet consider these words from a Pakistani photographer, Noor Behram, describing the aftermath of a U.S. drone attack: “There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can’t find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.

A memorable moment in the film Lincoln comes when the president says, “Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other” — in 1865, a daring leap for a white American assessing race. Truly applying the same Euclidean theorem to grief would be just as daring now in U.S. politics. Let’s face it: in the American political culture of our day, all grief is not created equal. Not even close.

We might say ’twas ever thus: countries and ethnic groups mourn their own while yawning or even rejoicing at the agonies of some “others.” And when grief weighs in on the U.S. political scale, the heaviness of our kind makes any other secondary at best. No wonder presidents have always been wary of red-white-and-blue coffins at Andrews Air Force Base. No wonder “Bring our troops home” is such an evergreen slogan of antiwar activism. If the only grief that matters much is American, then just getting Americans out of harm’s way is the ticket. The demand — like empathy for the war-torn grief of Americans — is vital. And grievously incomplete.

The world’s only superpower has been operating with vast impunity to strike targets and, in effect, summarily execute. (President Obama’s big speech on May 23 reasserted that prerogative; as the ACLU’s president Anthony Romero pointed out, Obama “still claims broad authority to carry out targeted killings far from any battlefield, and there is still insufficient transparency.”)  For American politics and mass media — perennially infatuated with the Pentagon’s latest tech advances in military capacities — such enormous power to smite presumptive evildoers has fed into a condition of jingo-narcissism. Some of its manifestations could be viewed as sociopathic: unwilling or unable to acknowledge, or evidently care much about, the pain of others.

Or the terror of others, if we are causing it. In the American political lexicon, terror — the keynote word for justifying the U.S. state of warfare so far in this century — is a supreme epithet, taken as ours to confer and to withhold. Meanwhile, by definition, it goes without saying, our leaders of the “war on terror” do not terrorize. Yet consider these words from New York Times reporter David Rohde, recalling his captivity by the Taliban in 2009 in tribal areas of Pakistan: “The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”

As part of tacit job descriptions, the U.S. network anchor or the president is highly selective in displayed compassion for the grieving. It won’t do to be seen with watery eyes when the Pentagon has done the killing (“friendly fire” a notable exception). No rulebook need be published, no red lines openly promulgated; the gist remains powerfully inherent and understood. If well acculturated, we don’t need to ask for whom the bell tolls; we will be informed in due course. John Donne, meet Orwell and Pavlov.

The U.S. Constitution — if not international law or some tenacious kind of idealism — could prevent presidential “kill lists” from trumping due process. But, as Amy Davidson wrote in a New Yorker online column last year, the operative approach is: “it’s due process if the president thinks about it.” Stephen Colbert summed up: “The Founders weren’t picky. Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock-paper-scissors — who cares?” After all, “Due process just means there’s a process that you do.” Satire from Colbert has been far more candid than oratory from President Obama, whose May 23 speech claimed a commitment to “due process” and declared: “I’ve insisted on strong oversight of all lethal action.”

Bypassing due process and shrugging off the human consequences go hand in hand. At the same time, it can be reassuring when the commander in chief speaks so well. But Obama’s lengthy speech at the National Defense University laid out a global picture with a big missing piece: grief due to U.S. military attacks. The only mention was a fleeting understatement (“for the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss”), instantly followed by a focus on burdens of top perpetrators: “For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live…” As usual, the grief of the USA’s victims was quickly reframed in terms of American dilemmas, essential goodness and standing in the world. So, while Obama’s speech called for “addressing the underlying grievances and conflicts that feed extremism, from North Africa to South Asia,” some crucial grievances stoking the conflicts were off the table from the outset; grief and rage caused by U.S. warfare remained out of the picture.

Transcendent and truly illuminating grief is to be found elsewhere, close to home. “The greatest country in the world” presumes to shoulder the greatest grief, with more access to profundities of death. No wailing and weeping at the scene of a drone strike, scarcely reported by U.S. media anyway, can hold a candle. For American grief to be only as weighty as any other just won’t do. We’re number one! A national narrative of emotional supremacy.

Our politics of grief, bouncing off the walls of U.S. media echo chambers, are apt to seem natural and immutable while fueling much of the domestic political rhetoric that drives U.S. foreign policy. The story goes that we’re sinned against yet not sinning, engaged in self-protection, paying to defend ourselves. Consider the Google tallies for two phrases. “U.S. defense budget”: nearly 4,000,000. “U.S. military budget”: less than 100,000.

But for those in communities grieving the loss of people struck down by the USA’s “Defense Department,” the outlook is inverted. To be killed is bad enough. But to be killed with impunity? To be killed by a machine, from the sky, a missile fired by persons unseen who do not see who they’re killing from hundreds or thousands of miles away? To be left to mourn for loved ones killed in this way?

When, from our vantage point, the grief of “others” lacks major verisimilitude, their resentment and rage appear irrational. Heaven forbid that such emotions could give rise to deadly violence approaching the level of our own. People who are uneducated and unclear on the American concept sometimes fail to appreciate that our perception is to be enforced as hegemonic reality. By a kind of fiat we can elevate with fervent validation some — some — others’ grief. As for the rest, the gradations of importance of their grief, and the legitimacy of their resort to violence, are to be determined by our judicious assessment; for further information, contact the State Department.

There may be no worse feeling of human powerlessness than inability to prevent the death of a loved one. The unmatched power of bereavement forces people to cope with a basic kind of human algebra: love + death = grief. Whether felt as a sudden ghastly deluge or as a long series of sleeper waves with awful undertows, real grief can turn upbeat memories into mournful ones; remembering becomes a source of anguish, so that, as Joan Didion wrote, “Memories are what you no longer want to remember.” Ultimately, intimately, the human conditions of loss often move people to places scarcely mapped by standard news coverage or political rhetoric.

Imagine living in a village in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Yemen. From the sky, death has been visited on neighbors, and drones keep hovering. (As now-former Times reporter Rohde pointed out: “Drones fire missiles that travel faster than the speed of sound. A drone’s victim never hears the missile that kills him.”) Overhead are drones named Reaper, shooting missiles named Hellfire. Have the heavens been grabbed by people who think their instruments of death are godly?

“When scientific power outruns moral power,” Martin Luther King Jr. said, “we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.” For America, drones and other highest-tech weapons are a superb technological means of off-loading moral culpability from public agendas; on the surface, little muss, less fuss.

Disembodied killing offers plenty of pluses in U.S. politics, especially when wars become protracted. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, the reduction of troop levels has cut the number of American deaths (easing the grief that “counts”) in tandem with more bombardment from the air (causing the “other” grief). Today’s domestic politics of grief are akin to what emerged after mid-1969, when President Nixon initiated a steady withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Vietnam. During the three years that followed, Nixon reduced the number of soldiers in Vietnam by nearly half a million, to 69,000. During the same three years, the U.S. government dropped 3.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam — more than all the bombing in the previous five years.

Then, as now, the official scenario had U.S. troops thinning on the ground, native troops taking up more of the combat burden, and the Pentagon helpfully bombing from the sky as only Americans could “know how.” Independent journalist I. F. Stone astutely identified the paradigm in 1970, when the White House struggled with fading public support for the war. The revamped policy, Stone wrote, was “imperialism by proxy,” aiming to buy “low-wage soldier-power,” an approach that “will be seen in Asia as a rich white man’s idea of fighting a war: we handle the elite airpower while coolies do the killing on the ground.” Stone would have swiftly recognized the pattern in President Obama’s upbeat statement on May 23 that “we will work with the Afghan government to train security forces and sustain a counterterrorism force.”

The number of U.S. ground troops in Afghanistan was down by one-third, to 66,000, at the start of this year, when Obama announced plans to gradually withdraw the remaining troops over a period of two years. High-tech warfare would pick up the slack. The outgoing Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, told a news conference that a key mission in Afghanistan, persisting after 2014, would be “counterterrorism,” a buzzword for heavy reliance on airpower like drones and cruise missiles. Such weapons would give others grief.

A top “national security” adviser to the president, John Brennan, said as much in an April 2012 speech. “As we have seen,” he noted, “deploying large armies abroad won’t always be our best offense. Countries typically don’t want foreign soldiers in their cities and towns.” The disadvantages of “large, intrusive military deployments” were many. “In comparison, there is the precision of targeted strikes.”

But such “precision” is imperfect enough to be an other’s calamity. Likewise, the extreme relativity of “agony.” At his Senate confirmation hearing to become CIA director in February 2013, Brennan spoke of “the agony we go through” in deciding which individuals to target with drones. Perhaps to square some circles of cognitive dissonance, those who inflict major violence often seem moved to underscore their own psychological pain, their own mental wounds. (As if to say, This hurts me as much as it hurts them; maybe even more, given my far more acute moral sensitivities.) When the focus is on the agony of the perpetrators, there may be less room left to consider the grief of their victims.

Shifting the burden of protracted war easily meshes with a zero-sum geopolitical game. Official enthusiasm for air strikes has correlated with assurances that Americans would be facing much less grief than allied others. So, near the end of 2012, the USA Today front page reported that “the number of U.S. deaths in Afghanistan is on track to decline sharply this year, reflecting the drawdown in U.S. forces” — while the death toll for Afghan government forces had climbed to ten times the U.S. level. These developments were recounted as progress all the way around.

As top officials in Washington move to lighten the political load of American grief, their cost-benefit analyses find major strategic value in actions that inflict more grief on others. Political respects must be paid. Elites in the war corps and the press corps do not have infinite tolerance for American deaths, and the Pentagon’s latest technology for remote killing is a perpetual favorite. In the long run, however, what goes around tends to come around.

Advice offered by scholar Eqbal Ahmad before 9/11 bears repeating and pondering: “A superpower cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to discourage terrorism in another place. It won’t work in this shrunken world.”
After the “war on terror” gained momentum, Martin Luther King III spoke at a commemoration of his father’s birth and said: “When will the war end? We all have to be concerned about terrorism, but you will never end terrorism by terrorizing others.” That was more than nine years ago.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.”

(The Bruce blog is written and edited by Bruce B. Brugmann, editor at large of The San  Francisco Bay Guardian, and editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Guardian with his wife Jean Dibble (1966-2012). He can be contacted at Bruce@sfbg.com. b3

Alerts

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 29

Protest: Call on Walmart and Gap to protect worker safety tinyurl.com/nfvnslj. Four Seasons, 757 Market, SF. Continue to Gap flagship store, 980 Market, SF. 5pm, free. Activists with Our Walmart and San Francisco Jobs With Justice recently discovered that Walmart made clothing at Rana Plaza, the Bangladesh factory building that collapsed recently, killing more than a 1,100 workers. Activists plan to rally outside the Four Seasons penthouse of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who also sits on the board of Walmart. Activists will show up to ask Mayer, then Gap, to sign onto a building safety agreement that would prevent future tragedies of this scale. Actions followed by a 6pm gathering at Bayanihan Community Center, 1010 Mission, SF. Dialogue on LGBT-inclusive comprehensive immigration reform SF Public Library, 100 Larkin, SF. www.sf-hrc.org. 5:30-7:30pm, free. The SF Human Rights Commission will host this community conversation on LGBT-inclusive comprehensive Immigration Reform, cosponsored by the Human Rights Commission LGBT Advisory Committee, Our Family Coalition, and Out4Immigration.

THURSDAY 30

San Francisco Green Film Festival Various SF and East Bay locations, Thu/30 thru Wed/5. www.sfgreenfilmfest.org. General admission $12/$11; Festival passes $100–$200. View 50 new films from around the globe, with over 70 visiting filmmakers and guest speakers, on topics ranging from clean energy, to water, to trash, to art in the environment. Events take place at the New People Cinema in Japantown, the SF Public Library, SPUR Urban Center and the David Brower Center in Berkeley.

SATURDAY 1

Moana Nui 2013 two-day teach-in Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School Auditorium, 1781 Rose, Berk. tinyurl.com/nlw34wd. 10am on Sat/1 to 6pm on Sun/2, $10–$20. The International Forum on Globalization and Pua Mohala I Ka Po present this two-day, international gathering featuring 45 speakers from 20 nations. All will present on critical issues facing the Asia-Pacific region, ranging from environment, to militarism, to global trade and resource depletion. Participants include Jerry Mander (dubbed as the "Ralph Nader of the anti-globalization movement" by the New York Times); indigenous actress Q’orianka Kilcher; Anuradha Mittal of the Oakland Institute, and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, one of the original drafters of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, among others.

SUNDAY 2


Conference on public banking Dominican University, San Rafael. www.publicbanking.org. 1pm on Sun/2 to 6:30pm on Tue/4, $35 to $295. Join the Public Banking Institute in conversation with pioneering policymakers, civic leaders, banking entrepreneurs, innovators and ordinary citizens interested in learning about one of the most critical undertakings of our time: creating a truly prosperous, democratic and sustainable new economy. Attend the conference or just catch the Sun/2, 7pm forum, titled Take Our Economy Back from Wall Street, with Rolling Stone staff writer Matt Taibbi, Web of Debt author Ellen Brown, and guests Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Icelandic Parliament, and Gar Alperovitz, author of What Then Must We Do?

Solomon: Obama in Plunderland: Down the corporate rabbit hole

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Solomon: Obama in Plunderland: Down the corporate rabbit hole


By Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He writes the Political Culture 2013 column.

The president’s new choices for Commerce secretary and FCC chair underscore how far down the rabbit hole his populist conceits have tumbled. Yet the Obama rhetoric about standing up for working people against “special interests” is as profuse as ever. Would you care for a spot of Kool-Aid at the Mad Hatter’s tea party?

Of course the Republican economic program is worse, and President Romney’s policies would have been even more corporate-driven. That doesn’t in the slightest make acceptable what Obama is doing. His latest high-level appointments — boosting corporate power and shafting the public — are despicable.

To nominate Penny Pritzker for secretary of Commerce is to throw in the towel for any pretense of integrity that could pass a laugh test. Pritzker is “a longtime political supporter and heavyweight fundraiser,” the Chicago Tribune reported with notable understatement last week, adding: “She is on the board of Hyatt Hotels Corp., which was founded by her family and has had rocky relations with labor unions, and she could face questions about the failure of a bank partly owned by her family. With a personal fortune estimated at $1.85 billion, Pritzker is listed by Forbes magazine among the 300 wealthiest Americans.”

A more blunt assessment came from journalist Dennis Bernstein: “Her pioneering sub-prime operations, out of Superior Bank in Chicago, specifically targeted poor and working class people of color across the country. She ended up crashing Superior for a billion-dollar cost to taxpayers, and creating a personal tragedy for the 1,400 people who lost their savings when the bank failed.” Pritzker, whose family controls Hyatt Regency Hotels, has a vile anti-union record.

Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker? What’s next? Labor Secretary Donald Trump? SEC Chairman Bernie Madoff?

The choice of Penny Pritzker to run the Commerce Department is a matched set with the simultaneous pick of Tom Wheeler — another mega-fundraiser for candidate Obama — to chair the Federal Communications Commission.

With crucial decisions on the near horizon at the FCC, the president’s nomination of Wheeler has dire implications for the future of the Internet, digital communications and democracy. For analysis, my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy turned to the progressive former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson, who called the choice “bizarre.”

“There is no single independent regulatory commission that comes close to the impact of the FCC on every American’s life,” Johnson said. “That’s why Congress, in creating it, characterized its mission as serving ‘the public interest’ — an expression used throughout the Act.

But with countless billions of dollars at stake, the corporate fix was in. As Johnson pointed out, “Wheeler’s background is as a trade association representative for companies appearing before the Commission, a lobbyist in Congress for other FCC customers, and a venture capitalist investing in and profiting from others whose requests he’ll have to pass on. He has no record, of which I am aware, of challenging corporate abuse of power on behalf of consumers and the poor.”

But wait. There’s more. “Nor does Wheeler’s membership on the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board bode well for those who believe Americans’ Fourth Amendment privacy rights should be getting at least as much attention as the government’s perceived need to engage in even more secret snooping.”

To urge senators to reject the nominations of Pritzker and Wheeler, click here.

Meanwhile, at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Obama’s recent appointment of Wall Street insider Mary Jo White as SEC chair is playing out in predictable fashion. Days ago, in an editorial, the New York Times faulted her role in an SEC decision on regulating the huge derivatives market: “Last week, in her first commission vote, Ms. White led the commissioners in approving a proposal that, if finalized, could leave investors and taxpayers exposed to the ravages of reckless bank trading.”

We need to ask ourselves how the forces of corporate capitalism have gained so much power over government, to the extreme detriment of people who aren’t rich. Humpty Dumpty’s brief dialectical exchange with Alice is on point

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” Alice replied, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.””The question is,” Humpty Dumpty responded, “which is to be master — that’s all.

Denunciations and protests against the dominant power structure are essential. And insufficient. For the body politic and the potential of democracy, accommodating to the Democratic Party leadership is a deathly prescription. So is failure to fight for electoral power by challenging that leadership, fielding genuinely progressive candidates and organizing to win.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He writes the Political Culture 2013 column.

(The Bruce Blog is written and edited by Bruce B. Brugmann, editor at large of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and co-founder and editor and co-publisher with his wife Jean of the Bay Guardian, 1966-2012, now retired.)

DPH: Unaffordable housing is bad for your health

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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To cover rent on a two-bedroom apartment at “fair market value” in SoMa, a San Francisco minimum-wage earner would have to work 7.4 full-time jobs.

That jaw-dropper of a statistic is just one tidbit in a fascinating dataset featured in a recently published interactive map plotting housing affordability in San Francisco neighborhoods. Combining data from Craigslist and PadMapper, the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, and the local minimum wage ($10.24 per hour, widely regarded as generous), the map isn’t the handiwork of affordable housing activists. [Note: this reflects the 2012 minimum wage, the rate now stands at $10.55.]

Instead, it was created by the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Program on Health, Equity and Sustainability. To view the full map and dig around for data on your neighborhood of interest, go here.

The embedded dataset reveals that the median income in SoMa is $91,000 lower than the $158,000 one would need to afford renting a market-rate two-bedroom. This figure, expressed as $-91,000, is known as the “affordability gap,” and the map plots these gaps neighborhood by neighborhood.

It was rolled out as part of a weeklong effort to raise public awareness about the link between affordable housing and public health, explains Cyndy Comerford, manager of planning and fiscal policy at the Environmental Health division of DPH. The reason? “Unmet housing needs in San Francisco can result in significant public health concerns,” Comerford says.

A lack of affordable rental housing can push more tenants into substandard or overcrowded living situations, she adds. Housing units within reach for lower income residents might be squeezed up against a highway, for instance, putting tenants in close proximity to noise, traffic, or air pollution, thus increasing their risks for experiencing heart or respiratory problems. Substandard housing also makes lead or mold exposure more likely, possibly triggering serious health issues over time.

For residents who fork over a significant percentage of their income for rent, other problems can arise. “It leaves little money for other provisions,” such as healthy food or preventative health care, Comerford adds, so low-income tenants have a higher likelihood of malnourishment or preventable disease related to nutrition.

The map is part of a broader DPH initiative known as the Sustainable Communities Index, which provides datasets for more than 100 health indicators. There’s a whole section on housing, which even covers the negative health effects of eviction: “Involuntary displacement contributes to stress, loss of supportive social networks and increased risk for substandard housing conditions and overcrowding,” DPH points out.

More information is yet to come: “Every day this week, we’ll put out a new bit of information around health and housing,” Comerford says.

Taking a broader view, it appears that sweeping cuts to public programs will present a whole new set of challenges for lower-income populations who have a higher risk of housing-related health problems. As a New York Times opinion piece highlighting the public health ramifications of austerity measures notes, “there are warning signs … that health trends are worsening. Prescriptions for antidepressants have soared. Three-quarters of a million people (particularly out-of-work young men) have turned to binge drinking. Over five million Americans lost access to health care in the recession because they lost their jobs.”

Amid all this, as a consequence of the $85 billion “sequester” that began on March 1, “Public housing budgets will be cut by nearly $2 billion this year,” the New York Times piece continues, “even while 1.4 million homes are in foreclosure.”

The Pulitzer Prize Board surrender – and how the New York Times blew the Ed Kennedy story (Part l)

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The Pulitzer Prize Board surrender – and how the New York Times blew the Ed Kennedy story (Part l)

In the May 19, 1945 edition of the New Yorker magazine, the legendary press critic A. J. Liebling wrote a prescient article on what happened when Edward Kennedy, an Associated Press combat correspondent, defied military censorship to break one of the century’s biggest and most important stories.

His lead said that “the great row over Edward Kennedy’s Associated Press story of the signing of the German surrender at Reims served to point up the truth that if you are smart enough you can kick yourself in the seat of the pants, grab yourself by the back of the collar and throw yourself out on the sidewalk. This is an axiom that I hope will be taught to future students of journalism as Liebling’s Law.” Liebling titled his piece, “The AP surrender,” because AP, caving in to government pressure, led the attack on its own reporter by publicly censuring and then firing him. He cited the New York Times as leading the charge with a nasty editorial blasting Kennedy only two days after it had splashed Kennedy’s story on the front page with huge heads. Kennedy, the editorial intoned solemnly, had done a “grave disservice to the newspaper profession.”

Liebling, a mid-1920s  student at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, was presumably aiming his axiom at his alma mater, which was in a building endowed by Joseph Pulitzer, a crusading liberal publisher in New York at the turn of the century.  Pulitzer also endowed the prestigious Pulitzer Prizes, which are housed in the school and administered by a senior member of the faculty.

I especially enjoyed Liebling’s Law as a Columbia journalism graduate (’58) and as a charter member of the committee working to get Kennedy a posthumous Pulitzer prize this year for his story. The axiom was timely because my wife Jean and I were at the journalism school in April to attend my 55th class reunion and the school’s centennial celebration. The event was full of Pulitzer references and remembrances, highlighted by an address by James McGrath Morris, a respected Pulitzer biographer, speaking in the World room, named after Pulitzer’s newspaper.

The day after the centennial weekend, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced its Pulitzers and rejected the two Kennedy nominations without comment. One nomination was for his story, the other for a previously unpublished book by Kennedy on his career as a WWII foreign correspondent. The rejections demonstrated a serious flaw in the Pulitzer Prize process.

The point of quoting Liebling today, in May of 2013, is that almost seven decades after his article, the Pulitzer Prize Board and the New York Times have once again left Kennedy out on the sidewalk for doing his job as a reporter who, in a favorite Pulitzer phrase, knew “the  right and had the courage to do it.” Since this is a historic story of military censorship for political reasons, it is as timely and relevant now as it was then, since the Pulitzer Board and the Times still do not get the point.

So let me put the issue in context. Let me start by quoting Liebling’s main arguments and link his full six page piece, written in the heat of the censorship battle.

Liebling, who was himself a distinguished World War II correspondent, wrote,  ”The important aspect of the story of the row, I am sure, is not that Kennedy got his dispatch out of Europe before the SHAEF Public Relations bosses wanted him to but that only three representatives of the American press were admitted to one of the memorable scenes in the history of man, and only on condition that they promise not to tell about it until the brigadier general in charge of public relations gave them permission.

“No correspondent of a newspaper published in the United States was invited to the signing; besides Kennedy, Boyd Lewis of United Press, and James Kilgallen, of Hearst’s International News Service, the official list included four radio men, an enlisted correspondent for the Stars and Stripes, and a collection of French, Russian, Australian, and Canadian correspondents.

“Whether a promise extorted as this one was, in an airplane several thousand feet up, has any moral force is a question for theologians…I suppose Kennedy should have refused to promise anything and thus made sure of missing an event that no newspaperman in the world would want to miss, but I can’t imagine any correspondent doing it.

“I do not think Kennedy imperiled the lives of any Allied soldiers by sending the story, as some of his critics   have charged. He probably saved a few, because by withholding the announcement of an armistice you prolong the shooting, and, conversely, by announcing it promptly you make the shooting stop. Moreover, the Germans had broadcast the news of the armistice several hours before Kennedy’s story appeared on the streets of New York, and Alsie, the OWI’s American Broadcasting Station in Europe, broadcast it in 24 languages, including English, within an hour after.”

Liebling noted that the Russians “had their own surrender show in Berlin, and probably had a better publicity break on it than they would have had if the two surrenders has been announced simultaneously… One unconditional surrender of the Reich a day is as much as the public can absorb.” 

Liebling brought out the crucial political censorship point. “Moreover, the row can do a lot of good if it brings into the clear the whole disturbing question of military censorship imposed for political, personal, or merely capricious reasons and reveals the history of the prodigious amount of pure poodle-faking that has gone under the name of Army Public Relations.” Liebling was right on because it later turned out that a secret agreement between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill had imposed a 24 hour embargo on the surrender story so the Russians could announce it the next day in Berlin. Kennedy’s story was in effect the start of the Cold War.

Last year, almost 70 years later,  Tom Curley, as president and CEO of AP,  backed up Liebling’s Law and apologized publicly on behalf of  AP. for the way it treated Kennedy. “tt was a terrible day for AP,” he was quoted as saying on the AP wire.  “It was handled in the worst possible way,.” He wrote a strong  defense of Kennedy in an introduction to a book published last year by the Lousiana State University Press,  titled “Ed Kennedy’s War: V-E Day, Censorship & the Associated Press.” The book was a personal account by Kennedy of his career as a foreign correspondent and a detailed account of his side of the controversy. His daughter, Julia Kennedy Cochran, found Kennedy’s manuscript in his papers after he died in a pedestrian accident in Monterey in 1963 at age 58 where he was editing the Monterey Peninsula  Herald. 

Curley wrote that “Kennedy and his editors performed superbly. They delivered one of the most significant scoops in journalism history. They did four things right. A great correspondent was assigned to the story. He kept reporting even after the censors tried to shut him down. The London desk moved the news without hesitation. The correspondent and editors adhered to the wartime rules as they knew them.  Finally, Kennedy wins the argument on a technicality. With the signing of a surrender treaty, there was no longer a war in Europe and not any excuse to submit to censors.”

Curley said “the book matches the best memoirs by World War II combat reporters for the quality of writing and telling detail, some of it gripping.  And in one way it surpasses the others. Not only does Kennedy give his final, thoughtful explanation for what happened on May 7, 1945. In describing his struggles with censorship and bureaucratic red tape and stupidity over many months, not just on May 7, he provides the fullest first-person account we have of the difficulties World War II correspondents encountered every day trying to do their jobs.

“Perhaps in some small way we bring posthumous recognition to an American hero and embrace – too belatedly – what McClean and Cooper (B3: AP executives) and the AP board could not admit. Edward Kennedy was the embodiment of the highest aspirations of the Associated Press and American journalism.” Curley said his account drew upon newly available records held in the Associated Press Corporate Archives.

Curley’s co-author was John Maxwell Hamilton, founding dean of the Manship School of Mass Communications at LSU.  He is the editor of “From Our Correspondent,” a series of books that features forgotten works and unpublished memoirs by pioneering foreign correspondents and illuminates “the development of foreign news gathering at a time when it has never been more important.” Hamilton, once a foreign correspondent himself, is currently the executive vice chancellor and provost of LSU. The book was submitted by LSU Press for a Pulitzer in the book category but the board rejected the nomination and, in keeping with tradition, rejected it without comment.

Following V-E Day, Kennedy was out at AP and the big  mainstream dailies. He became a managing editor for two years at the Santa Barbara News-Press and then edited the Monterey County Herald, later the Monterey Peninsula Herald.   The Herald won lots of journalism awards under Kennedy and he wrote many international commentaries under the initials E.K. He loved his community and he loved his job. .A memorial to Kennedy stands in the form of a sundial in Laguna Grande Park in nearby Seaside. It reads: “He saved the world an extra day of happiness.”

Meanwhile, Ray March, editor of the Modoc (Calif.) Independent News  and a former reporter under Kennedy on the Herald, decided it was time to nominate Kennedy for a posthumous Pulitzer prize and help right a historic journalistic and public policy wrong. With the help of Eric Brazil, a former Examiner editor and reporter, he put together a committee and petition.  I signed up immediately when Brazil called me.  And I helped put together the first ever panel anywhere on the Kennedy story for last year’s annual meeting of the California Press Association. It featured as moderator Ward Bushee, the Chronicle editor whose father had been recruited by Kennedy to work on the Herald. (He turned down the offer.)  Ward’s father had earlier won a Pulitzer as editor of the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian for exposing corruption involving the local district attorney.

The historic panel included March, Kennedy’s daughter, and Dave Perlman, a Chronicle reporter at 93, who was in Paris as a reporter at the time of the surrender. Jim Ewert, general counsel of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, drafted  a stirring resolution supporting the nomination and the members approved it unanimously.  It was submitted as part of the nomination package, put together by the Chronicle’s promotion department. March, Brazil, and  Frank McCulloch, former bureau chief for Time magazine in Vietnam who later held top editorial positions at the LA Times, the Sacramento Bee, and the old San Francisco Chronicle, wrote the nomination letter. It stressed that Kennedy had been the victim of military censorship for political reasons.  Meanwhile, the nomination got much media coverage, including the Chronicle, Washington Post, Sacramento Bee, Atlantic Magazine, Portland Oregonian, Editor and Publisher, and many other print and online venues.

When the New York Times announced this year’s Pulitzers, the paper gushed that  it got four Pulitzers, giving it a total of 112 Pulitzers, ”far more than any other newspaper,” as trumpeted in full page promotion ads. Margaret Sullivan, the public editor, was even more glowing in her Sunday column (4/21/2013). Her lead:  “The Times, it is safe to say, had a very good week. On Monday, it won four Pulitzer prizes – “the third most in its history and twice a many as any other news organization this year.”  (She also quite properly gave credit to the Times for its coverage of the Boston bombings and in particular for staying on the safe side of the “Rubicon of inaccuracy” by not reporting that an arrest had been made and a suspect was in custody.) She concluded her appraisal by saying that “The Times is far from perfect.  But last week, in its intelligent and restrained handling both of images and facts, it looked like a newspaper worthy of this year’s Pulitzer glory.”

However,  I and many others weren’t as smitten by Pulitzer glory. We were disappointed to see that the Pulitzer Board  not only rejected a Pulitzer for Kennedy, but that it did so without reference or mention of the Kennedy nominations, made no special citation (such as the special citation to the late Chronicle columnist Herb Caen) and gave no reasons nor acknowledgment of any kind for the rejections or to the historic importance of righting a major  journalistic and public policy wrong on one of the most crucial issues of our time:  military censorship for political reasons of news the public needs to know. I couldn’t find any evidence that the Times ever changed its editorial opposition to Kennedy and that it ever properly covered Kennedy’s side of the story. And the Times, unlike AP and so many other papers, didn’t cover the current story of the nominations to award Kennedy a posthumous Pulitzer prize or the censorship issues, before or after the Pulitzer awards were announced. Will it do so now? I am sending this report to the public editor and other Times editors and public  for comment.

I emailed Sig Gissler, the former Milwaukee Journal editor who now administers the Pulitzers.as a journalism professor. I put the above points to him and asked why the committee “instead of coming down on the side of the free press that Pulitzer and his school and prizes represented, the committee in effect came down on the side of government censorship for political reasons and supported a politically charged embargo agreement that would allow Stalin to catch up on the surrender announcement and hold his own press conference in Berlin.” 

Specifically, I asked Gissler  “was there any discussion on the Kennedy nominations, was there a vote and what was it, who voted for and against, what were the reasons for the rejection, was there any real internal debate on the importance and timeliness of this issue, and anything else that you or the Columbia officials (Outgoing Dean Nicholas Lemann or incoming Dean Steve  Coll, President Lee Bollinger) or the committee chairs or member would like to add. Is there a spokeperson I can talk to?”  I also asked for the names and contact information of the full Pulitzer committee and subcommittees and the appropriate Columbia spokespeople.

Gissler is a good man in a tough job burdened with honoring a dated policy. He emailed me back promptly and thanked me for my “interesting note.”  He said that, “regarding Kennedy, your desire for an explanation is testimony to your earnestness. However, each year the Pulitzer process produces many similar situations. Entrants desire to know why they did not become finalists. Finalists desire to know why they didn’t become winners. Petitioners for special citations desire to know why no special citations were bestowed. The Board declines to provide explanatory details, consistent with its tradition of basically not discussing, debating or defending its decisions.

“I understand your disappointment. However, at the risk of eternal irritation, I can only reiterate that the request for a special citation for Ed Kennedy was duly considered and that we do not issue statements when a request does not result in a citation.” He didn’t send me the names or contact information of the board or Columbia spokespeople. 

To give Gissler every opportunity to explain, I emailed him again and asked more questions: “So, after all these years, are you saying that the Pulitzer Board has no way for anyone (entrants or journalists or the public) to comment on the awards or the contest or the process? If not, why not?” I also asked again how the Kennedy nominating committee and others could make comments this year, right now. I ended by saying there was now much interest in “making the Pulitzer process more transparent, representative, and accountable.” I hope you agree, I told Gissler, and that you “at least present the issue to the board and the proper Columbia officials.”  I got no further comment from Gissler.

The Pulitzer School of Journalism and the Pulitzer prizes are endowed by Joseph Pulitzer. The school has the venerable Columbia Journalism Review magazine with a mission to “encourage excellence in journalism in the service of a free society.” And it has the excellent  CJR.org website that “weighs in daily, hosting a conversation that is open to all who share a commitment to high journalistic standards in the U.S. and around the world” and that could, let me suggest,  display the Pulitzer winners properly and host a lively forum for congratulations and comment  on the Pulitzers and the Pulitzer process,  It has a large and distinguished faculty and hosts a wide array of newsworthy panels and programs. It attracts each year an excellent class of students. It has a huge statue of Thomas Jefferson, paid for by Pulitzer, standing as a beacon of press freedom in front of the entrance to the journalism building. It is situated in the media capital of the world and promotes itself as the best journalism school in the country and a source of many of the country’s best journalists. It can do better, much better, with the prizes that the New York Times proclaimed, in its full page ad promoting its four Pulitzers, as “widely considered journalism’s highest honor.” .

And so I recommend that Columbia, the Graduate School of Journalism, and its Pulitzer Prize Board use the rejected nominations of Edward Kennedy, the reporter who was tarred and feathered for the crime of committing journalism, as the catalyst for major Pulitzer reforms. I recommend making the Pulitzer process more transparent, more responsive, and more prepared in our militarized age to fight government censorship and more prepared to promote and defend the First Amendment values of free speech and free press.

I will keep you posted. B3

POSTSCRIPT:  THE RUSSIAN PLAN TO PREEMPT THE SURRENDER STORY:   Ed Kennedy writes in his book that in the turmoil over his dispatch the correspondents overlooked another story almost as big as the surrender story. It came from  “no less august an official spokesman”  than Brig. Gen. Frank A. Allen Jr., the SHAEF commanding officer,  who told the corresponents in a May 8 meeting that “the official announcement might be delayed even further beyond the time set for it–3 p.m., Paris time.  He revealed that the Russians, having induced Washington and London to hold up the announcement, until the hour set for their own ceremony in Berlin, now were asking that news of the real surrender at Reims be suppressed until some hours after the phony surrender of Berlin. HIs disclosure was ‘off the record’ at the moment but could have been legitimately been reported the following day. It never was. 

“The sole purpose of the Soviet request, it was later established–and even then was obvious–was to convince a large part of the world that the Russians had obtained the surrender of Germany, with but contributory help from the Western Allies, whom they had generously invited to share in the final honor.  The Berlin ceremony was staged purely for Soviet propaganda purposes. Although a Russian correspondent was one of those whom General Allen had invited to Reims to the exclusion of any reporter of an American newspaper, no word of the Reims surrender appeared in the Russian press. So far as I know, none has to this day.

“The Russian action was the inauguration of the propaganda build-up for the course of expansion on which the Soviet Union was shortly to embark in Europe. Its importance as news was that it was the first clue to Moscow’s postwar policy.  But it went unreported at that time.”

Bruce B, Brugmann, writing as editor at large of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, as editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Guardian with his wife Jean Dibble (1966-2012, now  retired), as a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism (’58), as a recipient of  the Columbia Journalism School’s  Distinguished Alumnus award (2011), as a former bureau chief of the Korea Bureau of the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes who encountered milItary censorship  (1959-60), and as a charter member of the Kennedy nominating committee. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not from around here

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Not from around here

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC It was a case of the French pop love that dared not speak its name, as earlier this month rumors roiled about a Coachella coupling — mon dieu, deux! — to truly rave about: headliner Phoenix along with possibly, just maybe, hush-hush special guest Daft Punk, returning to stage de triomphe that it dominated seven years ago. The Phoenix guest that materialized, R. Kelly, wasn’t exactly the faceless freak the audience had imagined springing from the closet, and instead the mob had to cool its jets and content itself with an old-school LP ad from Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.

The abbreviated 102-second spot saw the duo in glittery soft focus performing new single “Get Lucky” alongside Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers — the kind of clip you’d uncover on late-night TV during Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert — and announcing Daft Punk’s own special guest stars, including Giorgio Moroder, Panda Bear, past Daft Punk collaborator Todd Edwards, Paul Williams (who must have had Phantom of Paradise-tinged flashbacks), and Pharrell Williams. Just a taste, but enough to stir the pot in the lead up to the May 21 release of Daft Punk’s fourth studio full-length, Random Access Memories, on Columbia.

Is it so strange that Daft Punk and Phoenix should find their fortunes so intertwined out in the Cali desert, so far from Old World Paris and Versailles? After all, the two share a past — and a future: Phoenix guitarist Laurent Brancowitz, Bangalter, and de Homem-Christo all started out in a Beach Boys-inspired combo called Darlin’. And much like fellow French native Anthony Gonzalez’s M83, the two groups are managing to find creative juices to grease their wheels out west, in the fantasy industrial complex of LA — with Daft Punk stressing the importance of a West Coast feel à la Fleetwood Mac to Memories guest Edwards, and Phoenix telling MTV that its new CD, Bankrupt!, was inspired by its work on Thomas Mars spouse Sofia Coppola’s 2010 movie Somewhere.

Not to mention the fact that Bankrupt! and Memories are two of the most buzz-ridden releases of the year, particularly judging from the homemade “Get Lucky” remixes and videos already proliferating online. Long gone are the old rockist daze — the same that slurred “Disco sucks” — when French rock was derided as just another thing an entire country does wrong, like loving Jerry Lewis. Thoughts surely far from the minds of Daft Punk obsessives, though from the start the duo’s vocoder-obscured vocals and helmeted visages proudly proclaimed, “We’re alien, a.k.a. not from around here.” That tease is the name of Daft Punk’s space-rockin’ game this time around, taking control with a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign after a humbling day job scoring a sorry Tron sequel.

Working with its biggest crowd of collaborators yet, Daft Punk appears to be bursting the mythic bubble of an enigmatic twosome working solo behind the decks, letting others into the party, circling back to its clubland origins, and reaffirming that, as “Get Lucky” goes, its “ends were beginnings.”

And though indie seems leached of meaning, Phoenix sounds far deprived when it came to ideas for Bankrupt! Nate Chinen of the New York Times may quibble with Mars’s Dadaist “word salad” — why not attack a fellow for singing with an accent? — but then Phoenix isn’t the first band to privilege the sound of lyrics over content. Bankrupt! isn’t as “experimental” as promised early on, but it’s by no means as polished and predictable as your average Killers or Imagine Dragons product.

Starting with title and extending to the cover symbolism of a lucky peach, and the busy little rickshaw of an orientalist motif on opener “Entertainment,” Phoenix sounds as if it’s grappling with a Daft Punky notion of alien-ness, too — and the global economics of pop success, having hit it big at the height of an economic downtown with 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. The distorted, bristling synths grinding beneath songs like “The Real Thing,” in fact, make Bankrupt! one of the noisier mainstream rock albums of recent years. Scope out the lonely cries of the entitled asking to have their names put on lists on “SOS in Bel Air,” the fluty synths opening the languorous “Trying to Be Cool,” and hear the sound of a band conveying the seduction — and anxiety — of too many bright lights, big cities, and marathon tours and responding by mainly turning up on the volume.

So why French pop and why now? In fits and starts, leaps and stumbles, Daft Punk and Phoenix are creating less a pop language of diplomacy than a kind of lingua franca between classic sunny pop hooks, Beach Boys style, and the all-mighty often-electronic groove, be it analog or digital, IDM or EDM, boyish or girlish, human or alien.

LPs like Memories hark to another time, while satisfying on the primal level of da funk. As Pharrell Williams has said of “Get Lucky,” “The only click track they had was the human heartbeat, which makes it really interesting because these are robots.” So how does the sunlit, smoggy terroir of the west touch two French aliens and a band of Versailles refugees? Perhaps we’ll know when Daft Punk unveils Memories even further out West: May 17, at the the 79th Wee Waa Regional Show in Wee Waa, Australia.

Alerts

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 8

Tales from the Mission District 518 Valencia, SF. www.shapingsf.org. 7:30pm, free. Adriana Camarena, a longtime Mission District resident famous for interviewing everyone in her midst, unveils her new multimedia work, “Unsettlers: Migrants, Homies, and Mammas in the Mission.” Join Shaping SF for an evening of storytelling featuring the Mission’s most precarious residents: Indigenous migrant workers from Mexico, day laborers, war veterans, and youth in gangs.

THURSDAY 9

Debate: Hack the Sky? Richard and Rhoda Goldman Theater, David Brower Center, 2150 Allston, Berkl. www.earthisland.org/events/skyhack. 7pm, $10. Join Earth Island Journal and Grist.org for an important debate about geoengineering: Controversial proposals to artificially reduce the amount of sunlight filtering through earth’s atmosphere, using technological fixes, to solve climate change. Atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira and Australian professor of ethics Clive Hamilton will debate this timely, provocative issue.

SHOUT! Art by Women Veterans San Francisco Women’s Building, 3543 18th St, SF. www.swords-to-plowshares.org. 6-9pm, free. RSVP requested. Hosted by Swords to Plowshares, a San Francisco-based veteran service organization, the fifth annual SHOUT aims to engage with women veterans and bring about greater public awareness to the issues they face. The event, which began as an annual art show and celebration of women veterans, was inspired by the intersections of art, community, health, and healing.

FRIDAY 10

Jeremy Scahill Lecture on Dirty Wars First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St, Oakl. 7:30pm, $12 advance / $15 door. 800-838-3006 www.kpfa.org/events. KPFA Radio hosts author and journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times best-seller Blackwater. Scahill will discuss his latest book, Dirty Wars, tracing the consequences of the declaration that “the world is a battlefield.” From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond, Scahill reports from the frontlines of his high-stakes investigation.

SUNDAY 12

Conflict Kitchen: The two Koreas Headlands Center for the Arts, 944 Simmonds Rd, Sausalito. tinyurl.com/2koreas. 6:30pm, $35. RSVP requested. Artists Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski bring their Pittsburgh-based project, Conflict Kitchen, to the Marin Headlands’ Mess Hall. Serving cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict, the artists present flavors from North and South Korea. Featuring three courses, as well as guided discussion on the culture, politics, and issues at stake within the two countries.

The most bitter Bradley Manning-Pride piece yet

Zelda Bronstein
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The most bitter Bradley Manning-Pride piece yet

Lots of people angry about the Pride Committee’s decision to fire Bradley Manning as a grand marshal. But the most savage, all-out assault comes from Steven W. Thrasher, a former Village Voice writer who has nothing good to say at all about Pride or the people who run it — or for the more mainstream parts of the LGBT movement:

Listen up, fellow homos—you have been bought, paid-for and sold to the highest bidder. The military industrial complex is so far up the ass of the LGBT movement that it can feel what is being digested in its upper intestines. Talking points and “messaging,” not discussion and debate, are the preferred methods of “communication” in a movement now run and owned by PR-firm trained Professional Homosexuals. Dissent will not be tolerated, and the assimilation of homosexuals into the rest of the militarized American public is complete.

On Manning and Pride:

A regular homosexual can give Dan Savage handjob after handjob for his anti-bully “It Gets Better” campaign if he wants, and he can even scream from the rafters that Savage should be given the Nobel Peace Prize for saying that something must be done to protect the powerless who are bullied by the powerful. But that same homosexual becomes as beholden to the military-industrial complex as the Professional Homosexual when he fails to call out SF Pride as a bully. The powerful group found perhaps the most marginalized, powerless homosexual in the nation, pulled him into the spotlight for a few hours, took a giant shit on him, roughed him up a little, called him names, and then kicked him back into the gutter.

I had to smile when I came to the end of the post, which notes:

Steven W. Thrasher was named Journalist of the Year 2012 by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his staff writing for the Village Voice and his freelance contributions to the New York Times and Out magazine. Two weeks after receiving this award, he was laid off by the Voice.

Is he being too harsh? Is he channeling his inner Marc Salomon? Or does the guy have a point here?

 

 

‘Maximus’ through Flarf

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‘Maximus’ through Flarf

marke@sfbg.com

LIT Mm-hmm

Yeah, mm-hmm, it’s true

Big birds make

Big doo! I got fire inside

My “huppa”-chimpTM

Gonna be agreesive, greasy aw yeah god …

In 2000, Gary Sullivan’s grandfather fell victim to a then-familiar poetry.com scam. (“You’ve won a poetry contest! Order the book with your poem in it now!”) In revenge, he went on the scam site and wrote what he thought was the worst, most offensive poem ever — which of course won its own scam contest. Then a curious thing happened:

“When Sullivan sent his poem to friends online, they decided to write their own purposely bad poems,” editor Paul Hoover tells the tale in the introduction to his updated Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, released last month. Soon a whole listserv of sniggering poets were randomly Googling phrases from bad poems (this was when Google was brand new, mind you) and “plugging in” the random juxtapositions to create new, worse ones — which incidentally also captured the logorrheic splooge, misfired proto-snark, corrosive cuteness, pornographic troll-holes, and manic self-hype of the Internet itself.

Thus a new poetic movement called Flarf was born.

A lot has changed since the first edition of NAPAP came out, in 1994. Back then, hyperacademic multicultural poetics and practitioners of the Language school, which sought to “scatter attention” over the poem with discursive overload and deliberate (yet often hilarious) difficulty, were riding high. In the color-saturated days before the Internet, the first edition was a revelation. Hoover, a San Francisco-based poet and teacher with a knack for highlighting the emotional resonance in abstract practices, served as a perfect guide to postmodern poetry, or at least a certain exciting type, which he broadly defines as “an experimental approach to composition, as well as a worldview that sets itself apart from mainstream culture and the sentimentality and self-expressiveness of its life in writing.” In other words: “truth” is out, truthiness in. And enough weeping over your dead great-grandmother’s recipe book, already.

I met with the tall, calm Hoover in his frighteningly humble San Francisco State office, where he’d been “locked up for months” working on the second edition (see my full interview this week at www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision). “We called the anthology ‘post-modern’ rather than ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde’ mostly because those terms are problematic, and have enough cultural baggage to really turn people off. So we started with the poet Charles Olson, who was the first poet to label himself postmodern and attempt to break with the grand modernist past. ‘And had we not ourselves (I mean postmodern man) better just leave such things behind us — and not so much trash of discourse, & gods?’ he wrote to fellow poet Robert Creeley. And he put this into practice in his ‘Maximus’ poems.”

The anthology is chronological: after Olson, in almost 1000 pages, we get almost all the big avant-garde-y names like John Cage, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg … Uncontroversially, Hoover takes his lodestars to be the Black Mountain School, the New York School, and (somewhat shakily to me, in terms of intellectual rigor, yet still charming) the Beats. Then come the Language poets, near where the first volume ended, and afterward a multitude of newbies — Vanessa Place, G.C. Waldrep, Noelle Kocot, Ben Lerner — begin.

“In order for this book to not be 13,000 pages, I had to make some hard decisions, about who was not to be included, and who needed to go. It wasn’t so much a matter of redefining what is ‘post-modern’ or even what’s ‘American,’ although maybe those things have also changed. But so much has happened — the Internet, social media, September 11, the expansion of global capitalism, mass media, and multinational corporations. I don’t think there’s been such a fundamental change that we’ve moved out of this thing called ‘postmodernism’ into something completely different or new. But poetry reflects these changes with constant innovations of its own. There’s a lyricism completely of the time in the best of these poems, but also completely outside of it.”

So what are some of the innovations? Besides the hyperreal grotesqueness of Flarf poets like Sullivan, Sharon Mesmer, and K. Silem Mohammed, there is its nemesis — at least in a poetry beef possibly ginned up for attention — Conceptualism. Whereas Flarf adrenalizes visceral response within a poem’s span, conceptualism often makes the poem into nothing but the static result of grand idea: the best example of this is Kenneth Goldsmith’s epic “Day,” in which he reconstructed the entire September 1, 2000 issue of the New York Times into a 900-page book (excerpted in the anthology).

In between lie practices like Proceduralism (Christian Bök’s strangely affecting “Vowels” made out of words that contain the same letters as the title, and which ends “wolves evolve”), Google sculpting and cybernetics (Muhammed’s hilarious “Sonnagrams,” in which he puts Shakespeare’s sonnets through an online anagram generator, then “sculpts” the results in Microsoft Word, dragging the words around to form a new sonnet). There is also the deliberately “girly” “Gurlesque” poetry of Catherine Wagner, and the eerie and complex “ambient” poetics of Tan Lin, which is just a beautiful drift of words across a page, a “gossip of the mind.” And much, much more in this fascinating and necessary volume.

Funny, infuriating, dangerously familiar, hauntingly strange, way too intellectual, true despite itself: poetry is the same as it ever was. The next edition, in 2034, ought to be a real corker.

POSTMODERN AMERICAN POETRY READING CELEBRATION with Paul Hoover and 16 more poets: Fri/3, 6:30pm, free. Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF. 

 

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