Oakland

PG&E dropping the dime

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Last bus to Oakland! The cell phone photographer who sent us this shot said the driver of the rented vans had been hired by PG&E to bus people to City Hall from the East Bay to speak against the peaker power plants

Who got a robo-call last night about the city’s plan for new power plants? Was there something about three new fossil fuel power plants “right in the middle of the city” on your answering machine when you got home?

There was on ours:

“These new plants will further reliance of fossil fuels, add to global warming, and cost up to $500 million. And they aren’t even needed because there’s a green alternative. If you would like to join our efforts to stop the SFPUC, please press 1 or if you’d like more information please press 2. This call was paid for by the Close It Coalition with the proud sponsorship of PG&E. Find out more on closeitcoalition.org.”

PG&E…you’re so tricky. Your press office never has time to return our calls for comment but you’re dialing up half the city as part of your bogus campaign for clean energy.

The SFPUC will be discussing the peakers tomorrow — Wednesday Oct. 31 — at 2:30 in Room 400 at City Hall. Maybe PG&E will bus in some more people to speak against the peakers like they did for the last PUC hearing on Oct. 23.

Our source for that tidbit said he asked the driver of the rented Enterprise vans who had hired him and the response was PG&E and the A. Philip Randolph Institute. We asked APRI’s executive director Guillermo Rodriguez if they bought the vans. He denied it, and said he has complete control over APRI’s two credit cards and neither had been employed for such a task.

Up until two years ago, Rodriguez was Senior Director of Public Affairs for….Holy shit! PG&E. Last year, APRI received $85,000 in grants from PG&E. I wonder what they’re doing with all that money?

GCI was the Big Cheese

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You can’t possibly be thinking about how much alcohol you shouldn’t have consumed at the seventeen Halloween parties you went to this weekend, or what kind of witty and ironic costume you’re going to make for the ones you’ll attend on Wednesday (because lord knows you can’t show up in the same thing you wore all weekend). No, I’m sure what you’re really wondering is: how was Oakland’s first Grilled Cheese Invitational?

The answer: badass.

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Everyone knows it isn’t really a party until someone dons a horse head.

From our Bay to Norway

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› johnny@sfbg.com

I hear a new world calling me. It’s beeping transmissions from some faraway place in the future and the past where a mysterious craft hovers near calypso rock and choruses of friendly voices — some human, some not — echo or call to each other. It’s a free-floating territory charted by someone obsessed with creating and sharing sounds that would otherwise go unheard. Only those with a similar obsession seem to respond to its clarion call.

I hear a new world, so strange and so real. Something tells me this world has ties to Norway and the Bay Area, that it streams from Oslo to San Francisco and back. Along the way it opens doors — some familiar, some not — to unheard-of zones. In Norway it can’t help isoutf8g and celebrating a conga rhythm from a vintage Michael Jackson track. It also combines the famous chords of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and the roller coaster sensuality of Donna Summer’s Giorgio Moroder–produced "I Feel Love" in order to fill and feel space with as much pleasure as possible. In San Francisco it forms warm electronic waves, uses white magic to surf those waves’ white diamond tips at midnight, and then wakes up the next morning with a heartbreaking conversational hymn.

I hear a new world, haunting me from beyond the known realms of space disco, the shorthand term writers have applied to the music of Norway’s Lindstrøm (who has combined Strauss with Summer), Prins Thomas, and Todd Terje (the aforementioned Jackson mix master). It asks me to explore the songs of San Francisco musicians who offer clues to — and share — those Norwegians’ vast and prodigious love of sound and song. It suggests I contact Sorcerer (a.k.a. Daniel Judd) and Hatchback (a.k.a. Sam Grawe), brothers in oceanic melody and rhythm, who have both been remixed by Thomas. It tells me to talk with Dominique Leone, whose gorgeous and deranged pop will soon be released by Lindstrøm on his Feedelity label. It implores that I reach across this small town of super sounds to speak with Arp’s Alexis Georgopoulos, who has forged a cluster of electro-Nordic projects in which beauty emerges — with a sunlike glow — from intensity.

I hear a new world, calling me to chart links between musicians in San Francisco and in Norway, to discover that neighboring, unacquainted San Francisco sound makers can share friendships with the same Norwegian musicians. Perhaps this musical passage from Norway to our Bay is pure folly. Perhaps the seaside Northern European kingdom recently voted the most peaceful country in the world by the Global Peace Index doesn’t share the same spirit as coastal Northern California. Perhaps the country that remained neutral in World War I and rebelled against insurgent World War II Nazism doesn’t have much in common with Bay Area resistance. Perhaps Oslo and San Francisco only share a pocket-size but ferocious love of black metal. I still hear a new world — how can I tell what’s in store for me?

THE BEACHSIDE BRAIN WAVES OF SORCERER


Donna Summer has already come and gone on the jukebox of the Van Ness corner bar with the bright yellow sign as Sorcerer’s Daniel Judd looks at the cover art for Prins Thomas’s Cosmo Galactic Prism (Eskimo). Thomas’s epic, oft-resplendent two-CD mix opens with "I Hear a New World," the title track of producer Joe Meek’s innovative 1960 exploration of the outer spaces of stereo and studio sound. It then segues into the country twang and power-chord dub of "Devil Weed and Me," by the late-’70s Nashville, Tenn., session-player supergroup Area Code 615. "It’s funny that the CD starts that way," Judd says with characteristic almost-sly-or-shy understatement. "My friend Sam [Grawe, of Hatchback,] is a big fan of Area Code 615, and I love "I Hear a New World." The fact [Thomas] put those two songs together is weird, like he was reading our minds."

Encyclopedic musical passions bring serendipity. But Thomas and Judd’s bond dives deeper: Thomas has remixed "Surfing at Midnight," the slow-blooming single from White Magic (Tirk), the first album Judd has recorded as Sorcerer. White Magic is a casual labor of love (all too rare in these studied-yet-throwaway days) that’s easy to fall for on the first listen. Judd — who sometimes writes about music for the Web site Dream Chimney — is still capable of the Johnny Marr–like rush, push, and spangled jangle he brought to the band Call and Response, but freed from group strictures he lands on a relaxed approach to writing and recording that allows for gorgeous chord changes, compositions that morph, and keyboards and guitars that shimmer.

White Magic’s track listing primarily consists of two-word titles — "Airbrush Dragon," "Egyptian Sunset," "Bamboo Brainwave" — that inspire visualization, and on MySpace, Judd invents a variety of apt and funny pseudogenres, such as "’80s montage music," to describe the Sorcerer sound. "So many friends, when I played [Sorcerer’s] music for them, would say, ‘This would be great for an ’80s movie scene or a montage,’" he explains when asked about the various substyle terms he coined on a lark. "I definitely grew up during that period and watched the movies, so it’s ingrained. I thought I might as well just go for it. I like having some humor and playfulness, like Thomas Fehlmann, the Kompakt [label] guy who was in the Orb…. At some point [more recently] electronic music got caught up in always trying to do something new. That’s fun for the musician but not always for the listener. In my stuff the beat isn’t what’s making you go, ‘Oh wow.’ If it’s happening, it’s from the chords."

Judd and his girlfriend recently moved from Oakland — where he’d also spent much of his early childhood with a mom who loves Prince — into the Mission. Sorcerer, however, can usually be found loitering on either side of a magic door where kitsch transforms into loveliness. One side of that door definitely opens onto the beach. White Magic‘s "Blind Yachtsman" is a love child born from Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman and yacht rock. Judd often draws on whatever he’s listening to or watching, but other seafaring Sorcerer songs, such as "Surfing at Midnight" and "Hawaiian Island," flow directly from his experiences while surfing and scuba diving.

"Maybe the beach represents this free place, away from computers and technology," Judd posits when I mention that Norwegian counterparts such as Terje (whose MySpace interests are "Coconuts, Hawaiian sunsets, moose/dolphins/unicorn/practically everything in a sunset") share his fondness for littoral motifs. Whether discussing his girlfriend’s most recent Midnites for Maniacs–ready movie rental (Side Out, a beach volleyball drama starring C. Thomas Howell) or a weekend visit to Nippon Goldfish Co. on Geary ("You’re so close to the animals, and they look kind of crazy"), Judd keeps returning to the waterfront. "In the ocean," he notes, "you feel like there’s almost no rules. You’re having fun, and it’s almost dangerous fun — a kind that you don’t find in the city."

THE RISING AND SETTING SUNS OF ARP


A setting sun, bisected by clouds, hovers over darkening ocean waves on the cover of In Light, the first album by San Francisco’s Arp; the title, drawn in slim neon-tube cursive by San Francisco artist Tauba Auerbach, is suspended from the upper left-hand corner of a tangerine and gold sky. The summer sun happens to be setting outside the upper Guerrero living room window of Arp’s Alexis Georgopoulos as he talks about this image (partly inspired by the melancholic found-film cosmograms of visual artist Tacita Dean) and how it relates to the music on the album, which will be released by the Oslo label Smalltown Supersound next month.

"An overwhelming number of people still tend to think of electronic music as being cold," Georgopoulos says while sitar notes from an LP quietly resonate through his and roommate Kathryn Anne Davis’s blue-walled apartment, where a large chunk of coral rests on a clear Plexiglas coffee table. "I wanted to make something that was warm, that had human qualities, that was a little worn, and that — along with the imagery of the record — dealt with memory, the degradation of memory, and revisionist memory. I also wanted to make something that referenced landscape and light and natural things in a way that wasn’t new age." I point to a fat tome about the proto–new age label ECM on a nearby bookcase, which Georgopoulos built. "Proto–new age music, if you select carefully, can be amazing," he responds. "Even the kernels of early sequencing in Ash Ra Tempel sound really radiant."

If a new age of electronic music spanning from San Francisco to Oslo is dawning (or setting), then Georgopoulos — a chief member of Tussle until just after the group recorded last year’s Telescope Mind (Smalltown Supersound) — has taken it to the bridge and maybe even been the bridge. In 2002, after writing about the graphic design of Smalltown Supersound’s Kim Hiorthøy for Tokion, Georgopoulos — who edits the music section of SOMA magazine and sometimes contributes to the Guardian — offered to put together a Bay Area showcase at Club Six for the label. "I don’t think he had done anything like that before; he just wanted to have us over, which was very generous," label owner Joakim Hoaglund recalls via e-mail before turning to a discussion of his and Georgopoulos’s latest collaboration. With Arp, "it’s a relief [for me] to do a small personal project. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel [In Light] has this great and unique mix of US West Coast art and culture with European avant-gardism and kraut rock. It’s a very special album."

Clutter and clusters are on Georgopoulos’s mind as we discuss music and its surroundings. "I was a huge stacker [of books and records]," he says when I mention his well-ordered home studio. "But I take after my mother — she’s very neat and feels like she can’t do the work she needs to do unless things are organized." The first-generation American child of parents from France and Greece, Georgopoulos has chosen the dreamy, maternal lull of a track titled "St. Tropez" to open In Light before "Potentialities" surges out of speakers (or from headphones) with a subtly rising force that’s ultimately awesome to behold. Most of In Light‘s seven meditative tracks were first showcased in a 2006 group exhibition at New Langton Arts, where up to two listeners could climb into a feather bed enclosed in a small podlike space. "It wasn’t cerebral. It wasn’t about dissecting a suspended space," Georgopoulos says. "Though with a lot of [Arp]’s music, suspension is one of the effects I’m trying to create."

For Georgopoulos, Arp’s state of suspension runs counter to different kinds of tension. While discussing his love for the analog organ-drum machine sounds employed by groups such as Cluster (a few of whose albums have just been reissued by Oakland label Water), Suicide, and Spacemen 3, he notes that "too much electronic [today] sounds like coke-related music." In contrast, Arp’s electronic music is humane — a rarity not just in electronic music but also on the streets of San Francisco during the Gavin Newsom era, when homelessness has become more difficult and abject and attitudes toward it more hostile. "I can’t remember the last time I left the house and didn’t have a confrontation with a very disturbing sight, and after a long time that really starts to chip away at you," Georgopoulos says. "I drove a cab for four years, until 2004, and when I think about it I can’t believe that I did. It suited my life at the time, but you’re interacting with [people on] PCP, meth, and all kinds of shit — you just never know. Now that I don’t drive a cab I’m hardly ever in the Tenderloin."

PRINS THOMAS, LINDSTRØM, AND THE INTERNATIONAL UNDERGROUND


Wearing a pair of shades, Prins Thomas is chatting with the doorman of his hotel in the Tenderloin when I stumble out of a taxi to interview him. It’s a sunny, hot late afternoon, but Thomas — who has just woken up — isn’t exactly on Norway time or California time. Later in the evening he’ll be DJing Gun Club’s night at Temple Nightclub. Right now, though it’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner, the moment calls for a meal, so we settle into a restaurant on Polk Street. "I used to play in Oslo for the same people again and again," he says after we order food. "Now I can travel and meet like minds. It’s inspiring to meet people who can help you out and who you can help out."

In San Francisco two such people are Sorcerer’s Judd and Hatchback’s Grawe. Only after remixing tracks by Judd’s and Grawe’s solo projects did Thomas discover (by following Web links) that they also record together as Windsurf. Next year he plans to release some Windsurf recordings on a new label, Internasjonal, that will step outside the Norwegian and dance music confines of his established label, Full Pupp. This season, though, he and Lindstrøm have released — in addition to a variety of vinyl projects — a full-length collaboration (Reinterpretations, the beat-driven follow-up compilation to their 2006 debut on Eskimo) and individual mix CDs. Lindstrøm has contributed a chapter to the mix series Late Night Tales (released by the label of the same name), while Thomas has unleashed Cosmo Galactic Prism (Eskimo), a two-and-a-half-hour CD cornucopia that moves from strange and delightful multigenre tracks by Glissandro 70 (the bizarrely beautiful "Bolan Muppets") and Metalchicks (the awesome "Tears for Fears/Conspiracy") through Hawkwind into the classic disco of "Get Down Boy" by Paper Dolls.

"I thought it fit the whole collection as an introduction," Thomas says when I ask him about Cosmo Galactic Prism‘s opener, "I Hear a New World," which Arp’s Georgopoulos also says he’s included in mixes. "It kind of sets the tone — it’s so freaky that anything that comes after it is going to sound pretty normal. When I first heard it I couldn’t tell if it was new or old. There’s a similar quality to a track by Art Blakey called "Oscalypso" [from the 1956–57 album Drum Suite, now on Dusty Groove]. The drums are so distorted that it sounds relevant next to new, compressed dance music, even though it’s 50 years old."

It isn’t surprising that Thomas’s expansive love for and knowledge of music stems from his family. "My stepfather has been as obsessed with music [as I am]," he explains while charting Lindstrøm’s background in country and gospel bands and his own early days DJing hip-hop records at youth clubs. Thomas’s stepfather "would play Ry Cooder and the Sex Pistols for me. He had the Robert Christgau Consumer Guide books, which are great. I think it’s funny how [Christgau] can write similarly about an Eric Clapton album and a Chic album. For me, it really isn’t about bad music or good music, but about music that excites you and music that doesn’t."

It also probably isn’t surprising that one genre Thomas’s stepfather didn’t like — prog rock — figures heavily in his and Lindstrøm’s music. As for newer terms or styles, like Lindstrøm (who good-naturedly told me, "I guess the good thing is that some people are telling me I invented a genre"), Thomas has a sense of humor about the phrase space disco. "It could have been a lot worse," he says. "It could have been called crunk or syrup [Houston’s cough syrup–influenced hip-hop sound]. In my hometown, at underage school dances 15-year-old girls used to soak their tampons in moonshine. I guess that’s the Norwegian version of syrup."

UP, UP, AND AWAY WITH DOMINIQUE LEONE


When I meet Dominique Leone, he’s sitting in a San Francisco café that might have the highest number of laptops per square foot. Leone has one too, but instead of staring into its screen he’s feverishly using a pencil to draw on a page in a sky blue Strathmore sketchbook. I’m not surprised, because scribbler nonpareil Sol LeWitt caps a list of audio and visual influences on Leone’s MySpace page. That site also offers an opportunity to hear the gorgeous song "Conversational," on which Leone’s spare keyboard arrangement and ascendant choirboy-gone-slightly-cuckoo voice update the plaintive yet celestial highlights ("I’ll Be Home," "Living Without You") of Harry Nilsson’s classic 1970 cover collection Nilsson Sings Newman (Buddha).

Leone’s MySpace page contains audio treats, but what about his sketchbook page? It turns out he’s drawing, in his words, "a giant skyscraper-sized robot that streams music and scents into the air and every 10 minutes or so spews out free kittens." Indeed, Leone’s sketch does look a bit like that, so when he says he’ll try his hand at an idea I have — a constellation that playfully demonstrates links between San Francisco and Norway musicians — I take him up on the offer.

Though Leone doesn’t include himself in the finished rendering ("More an exploding molecule than a constellation," he says), which accompanies this article, he belongs in a nearby orbit, thanks to his collaborations with Lindstrøm. In addition to providing the quiet heart of that artist’s Late Night Tales mix, "Conversational" is also featured on an EP, simply titled Dominique Leone, that Lindstrøm is releasing next month on Feedelity (with art by Hiorthøy) as a precursor to Leone’s album. The gonzo centerpiece of the EP is "Clairevoyage — a Medley Performed by the 16th Rebels of Mung," on which Lindstrøm and Oslo Bee Gees maniacs Mungolian Jet Set, responding to Leone’s song "Claire" (on the EP’s B-side), construct a 12-minutes-plus propulsive fantasia that builds to a helium-voiced climax not far from the munchkin antics of Meek’s "I Hear a New World." Leone is no slouch at reaching countertenor octaves naturally or through tape manipulation. But since the EP also credits Mungolian figures named Katzenjammer and Izzy Tizzy as vocalists, it’s anyone’s guess as to who has inhaled a few balloons before singing.

Leone says he grew up listening to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and the latter’s influence is especially apparent in the semielated, semiagitated high harmonies that fly through intricately braided compositions like his "Nous Tombons dans Elle." A self-described "band nerd" in high school and music major at Texas Tech University, he feels a kinship with the more overtly postmodern academic songwriting approaches of friends such as Matmos and Kevin Blechdom. To Lindstrøm, though, he’s a 21st-century answer to the progressive pop of Todd Rundgren (who happens to be a favorite of Sorcerer as well). "I remember the first time Lindstrøm wrote to me [about my music]. He was talking about Paul McCartney, but his big thing was Rundgren," Leone says with a laugh. "I wasn’t a big Rundgren fan, but [Lindstrøm] wasn’t the first person to listen to my music and mention Rundgren.

"The first track [‘Forelopic Bit’] on Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas is, to me, the best example of how to make a dance track from prog and fusion influences," Leone notes before adding some observations that probably stem from his experience as a freelance music writer for Pitchfork more than from his far-flung everyday listening tastes, which have ranged from salsa to bluegrass over the past few months. "A lot of people are trying to [bring prog and fusion to dance floors] right now. You can go out [to a club] and hear these Balearic and beardo DJs just playing tracks. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But Lindstrøm is one of the few guys who are actually trying to make original songs incorporating those influences."

A HATCHBACK DRIVE TO WINDSURF


Sam Grawe of Hatchback and Windsurf sings the praises of his Sony tape recorder as I place my old, cheap, and wonderful Panasonic next to some glasses of wine on a table in his home recording studio. Plastic owl wall fixtures and a rug with shaded steps of color that resemble the volume bars of a digital stereo rest above and below the assortment of keyboards (including that prized prog possession, the Rhodes) in the room. "You can listen to instrumentals as background music, but I’ve always been into [moments] when music connects you with what’s happening or what you’re doing," Grawe says. "So much of my [youth] was spent driving around the rural countryside and finding the perfect song. Sound can fulfill an opening or void in your emotional experience. Images can be part of it, smell can be part of it, but sound can take it to another level."

Grawe’s sympathy for trusty old tape recorders, his playfully decorated recording space, and the attentiveness to setting in his reminiscence all make sense — by day he is the editor in chief of the modern architecture and design magazine Dwell. By night and whenever else he can find the time, he listens to and makes music. It’s an enduring passion that goes back to high school years spent using MIDI to put music theory into practice and compose fugues in the manner of Rick Wakeman and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. "The guy who stocked the import section [at a nearby record store] was some crazy prog freak," Grawe remembers. "A friend of mine had The Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock, so I could read about some crazy Italian or German band and then go to the mall and buy the CD."

"White Diamond," the 21st-century prog rock of Gibraltar that Hatchback has just made public (on the UK label This Is Not an Exit), showcases the fuguelike interplay between simplicity and complexity in Grawe’s compositions. While a 17-minute remix by Prins Thomas adds club elements, the original version, with its hallucinatory, starlit varieties of arpeggio, makes for an ideal personal soundtrack. Hatchback’s next 12-inch release on This Is Not an Exit, a track called "Jet Lag," is funkier yet similarly majestic, layered, and emotive. In both cases vocals would be a pointless distraction — synthesizers seem to sing to one another, becoming increasingly, endearingly creaturelike by song’s end. "Friends chide me for not knowing the words to songs I’ve heard a thousand times," Grawe says after testifying to his love for the film scores of Vangelis, Piero Umiliani, and Francis Lai. "But often a little synth part [in a song] is more interesting to me."

Grawe sings on some of the Windsurf songs that he and Judd have recorded for Prins Thomas to release on Internasjonal. Windsurf allows him to tap into a longtime interest in duos and groups ranging from the many projects of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono and Neu!’s Michael Rother (Grawe recently contributed liner notes to an upcoming reissue of Rother’s first solo album, 1977’s Flammende Herzen, by Oakland’s Water) to … Steely Dan. "To a lot of people they embody what’s wrong with music," Grawe says of the last. "But to me they embody everything that’s right. Not only is their music well crafted, but some of their lyrics, to me, are on a par with [Bob] Dylan."

As for Oslo and San Francisco, Grawe — who recently created a Venn diagram for Mike Bee of Amoeba Music that illustrates the fusion of influences within Sorcerer, Hatchback, and Windsurf — welcomes the growing, glowing galactic prism formed by artists from both areas who have an affinity for one another’s music. "I think it’s interesting that all these records happened without [the people involved] ever meeting in person or sometimes even talking on the phone," Grawe says. "It’s all been through the Internet. It was great to finally see [Thomas] when he came to town and hang out, have dinner, and play records. We connected instantly."

I HEAR A NEW WORLD


To trace musical connections between a pair of geographical areas is reductive. The artists I’ve written about love music from a number of other countries (Germany and Brazil, to name just two) and cumulatively have friendships with contemporary musicians from all over the globe. But in focusing on sonic signals being sent forth between Norway and our Bay, signals that have yielded some of my favorite recordings of the past year, I also discovered unexpected commonalities that open into new words about — and worlds of — sound. Almost all of the San Francisco musicians I spoke with also write about music, and three of them are journalists, for example. It seems the divisions between writers and musicians continue to blur, leading to the formation of a new music of the spheres.

When Joe Meek composed and recorded I Hear a New World: An Outer Space Music Fantasy (RPM) in England in 1960, his intense, obsessive love of music and sound resulted in the audio equivalent of what is called visionary. But he remained isolated. Today it’s great to see — and hear — figures such as Meek and disco innovator Arthur Russell living on, their spirits floating through many people’s songs and being revived in upcoming documentaries. Meek heard a new world of sound, calling him and haunting him. He couldn’t tell what was in store for him, but his new world of sound has arrived. It spans from Norway and our Bay to the farthest reaches of inner and outer space.

Hear it!

www.dominiqueleone.com

www.feedelity.com

www.myspace.com/feedelity

www.myspace.com/arp001

www.myspace.com/dominiqueleone

www.myspace.com/fullpupp

www.myspace.com/hatchback76

www.myspace.com/mungolianjetset

www.myspace.com/prinsthomas

www.myspace.com/sorcererjams

www.myspace.com/toddterje

www.myspace.com/windsurfmusic

www.smalltownsupersound.com

www.sorcerermusic.com

Green City: Saving people and the planet

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY The average young person doesn’t pay much attention to things like wind turbines and energy efficiency. Friends and family, yes. School or work, sure. Green technology? Probably not. And for youths in underserved communities, where violence and economic hardship are a backdrop for everyday life, the likelihood of thinking green is even lower.

Enter activist groups like the Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and watch as things begin to change. Under the leadership of cofounder Van Jones, the Ella Baker Center has received widespread attention for its role in the development of the Oakland Green Jobs Corps program, set to begin in early 2008.

The Green Jobs Corps will provide training opportunities for hard-to-employ populations (read: at-risk youths, low-income people, and those formerly incarcerated) while supporting the development of a greener economy. It’s no small task. For decades the environmental community has looked for ways to make green relevant to marginalized communities. And it hasn’t been that successful. Ian Kim, campaign director for the Green Jobs initiative, says the program is significant in that it bridges the gap between the environmental and social justice movements.

"The connections are obvious once you start to look at them," Kim told the Guardian. "Just as there are no throwaway resources or species, there are no throwaway people or communities."

The Ella Baker Center has worked closely with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to anchor a larger coalition of activists called the Oakland Apollo Alliance. Together, these groups are propelling the initiative forward. The collaboration is a significant one. Historically, labor activists and environmentalists have been at odds. The assumption: there can be good jobs or a clean environment, not both. Victor Uno, a spokesperson for the IBEW, says that dynamic is changing.

"We think it’s important to partner with community groups, and we need alliances with environmental groups," Uno said. "Economic growth is going to mean green jobs, and we’re working together to create opportunities for people who have been historically locked out."

The Green Jobs Corps program received $250,000 in seed funding from the Oakland City Council in June — part of $2.3 million of unspent settlement funds the city received after the California energy crisis nearly a decade ago. The program will be administered through Oakland’s Community Economic Development Agency, and job training will focus initially on renewable-energy technology and efficiency — a requirement of the settlement funds. Forty young men and women are expected to participate in the nine-month program, which includes six months of training, a three-month paid internship, and services like case management and job placement. Kim says the likelihood of participants obtaining well-paying jobs afterward is good.

"Green-collar employers have jobs that pay a living wage, have benefits and good working conditions," he said. "They offer career ladders and real pathways out of poverty."

While recruitment for the program has not yet begun, Kim is aware that the initial draw will likely be the word job and not the word green. Still, it’s progress.

"There’s no shortage of people looking for job training," Kim said. "It’s within the course of the program that they’ll receive education about environmental awareness and sustainability. We need to educate people where they’re at."

Late last month the Ella Baker Center took the Green Jobs training initiative to the national arena by launching the Green for All campaign.

"We have definitely realized the green job idea is too big for one organization or one group," Kim said. "It’s turning into a really big movement with a lot of players."

The launch comes shortly after Congress approved the Green Jobs Act of 2007 (HR 2847) as part of the proposed energy package. It is legislation that would direct millions of dollars toward green job training and is now awaiting approval or, more likely, a veto from President George W. Bush. Kim said defeat wouldn’t be a surprise.

"We’ll just come back next year," he said. "We’ll come back with more political will and more ideas. There’s a lot to look forward to."

Cheap, loud, and reunited

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Hey, dude, while you were busy abiding, you totally snoozed on last year’s Budget Rock Showcase. We came, we were conquered, we rocked, we rolled, we had joy, we had fun, we had seasons at the Stork. Oh yeah, and we wet our lips, shook our hips, and swore we’d never dip back into that pretty, pretty poison of a garage rock fest, yet said soiree kept dragging us back the weekend of Nov. 10, 2006, for more wonderfully ear-piercing, guitar-centered punishment from the Guilty Hearts, the Shrugs, SLA, the Omens, and the Original Sins, spotlighting a barefoot and blissfully uncontrite Brother JT singing an awesomely odd cover of "I Want Candy." All crack for the rawboned rock ‘n’ roll crank.

This year’s Budget Rock busts the bank with two reunions to squander your spare change on and write home to your pasty-faced, pageboyed collector head–fanbo about. Primo: Boston’s real punk lost treasures the Real Kids, now pushing fiftysomething and still playing the gloriously hook-laden songs off their 1977 self-titled debut (Norton). Yeah, they looked like the Ramones, but the Real Kids eschewed comic book music stylings for heartfelt, rockin’ teen angst more in line with early wavers like Eddie and the Hot Rods or Rockpile. They looked forward by stripping down and glancing back to teen dreams and prepube debauchery.

And yeah, most of their songs are about girls, but that doesn’t mean the tunes haven’t stood time’s tests, which is why pockets of fanatics can be found from France ("They like us and Jerry Lewis," vocalist-guitarist John Felice says) to Japan, especially since the Real Kids regrouped in 1999 to play the Purple Onion. The group is only now rebounding after a year and half of casts and three surgeries on Felice’s left hand, injured by years of playing and arthritis, but the Realest Kid is looking forward to meeting old fans like Rancid’s Lars Frederickson, who came out for their Onion show. "He turns out to be a big Real Kids fan. The first records he ever got, from his older brother, were a Ramones album, a Voidoids album, the Sex Pistols album, and the Real Kids album," Felice recalls. "We had an influence on him!"

Influence can go all sorts of ways. Secundo on the Budget Rock reunion tip are the Bay’s all-female garage punk–surf combo the Trashwomen, who haven’t played since ’95. Trashwomen drummer Tina Lucchesi — late of the Bobbyteens and co-owner of Oakland salon Down at Lulu’s — remembers the band as the brainchild of Phantom Surfer Mike Lucas back in 1991. Guitarist Elka Zolot was already in the punk band Eight Ball Scratch, but Lucchesi and bassist Danielle Pimm had never played before. So, Lucchesi confesses, her boyfriend Russell Quan, once of the Mummies and now of the Flakes, taught her to bash three weeks before their first show. "We were shitty, so shitty," Lucchesi remembers, though the band managed to generate a fun Estrus album. In the interim, she says, "I’ve learned a lot. I’m a better drummer now. We’re older now. We’re not little girls. We’re not young and out of tune." *

BUDGET ROCK SHOWCASE

With the Trashwomen (Fri/26) and the Real Kids (Sat/27–Sun/28)

Call for times and prices

Stork Club

2330 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 444-6174

www.myspace.com/budgetrock

ARE THE GOOD TIMES KILLING TWO GALLANTS?

There can be such a thing as too much of a good time, attests Adam Stephens, 26, of Two Gallants, who call San Francisco home when they aren’t gallanting around the globe. The duo’s new self-titled Saddle Creek LP has got to be their best yet — and it’s their first working with a producer, Alex Newport, an experience that came with some tough love. "If he thought there was something inappropriate or inconsistent, he would point it out to us, which is really hard for us because Tyson [Vogel, the Gallants drummer] and I use our first takes as much as possible."

After their forthcoming shows at the Independent and a six-week European sortie, Stephens is finally hoping to chill out in the Bay. "When you’re touring as much as we are your sanity comes into question," the SF native admits. "I have a very deep love affair with the city, and after being gone so much I like to reexplore it. To me that’s a really peaceful, rejuvenating thing to do, just bike around the city all day and try to reclaim it." *

TWO GALLANTS

Fri/26–Sat/27, 9 p.m., $16

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

GET DOWN, BOY

SLEEPING STATES


Carve out a niche for There the Open Space (Misra). With Man Man. Thurs/25, 8 p.m., $13–$15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

DIGITALISM


Electro über Alles. Fri/26, 10 p.m., $15. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

CARIBOU


After delivering one of the best shows of 2005 at Bottom of the Hill, electronic-rock maestro Don Snaith, a.k.a. Manitoba, comes back with Andorra. Sat/27, 9 p.m., $13–$15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

COCONUT COOLOUTS


Tunes about pizza and the movie Twins. Sat/27, 2 p.m., call for price. Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 444-6174, www.storkcluboakland.com. Sun/28, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

UNKLE


Boasting a dynamic War Stories (Surrender All), the UK production collective makes its maiden live outing. Sat/27, 9 p.m., $20. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

And the dreidl will rock

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I have a new obsession: www.jewsrock.org. I found the site while researching an old obsession, NOFX’s “The Brews” (I was trying to prove to a friend that it wasn’t a cover of another song, and that, in fact, the song she thought was the original was actually Manic Hispanic’s cover of “The Brews,” called “Cruise”), and nearly fell off my chair. The only thing I love more than punning and pro-Jewish jokes is rock music. And combining all three? Holy chutzpah, I’m a happy little semi-Semite. Check out the site to find for a guide to who’s who in Jewish rock (The Challah Fame), Q&As with famous Heebs (The Four Questions), features on musical icons like David Lee Roth (“And the Dreidl will Rock”), and essays on music and Jewishness (“Heavy Shtetl”). Even more perfect? Cruise the site while listening to Oakland’s parody of racist punk band Screwdriver, called (of course) Jewdriver. Just make sure you visit before Friday at sundown, because we sure as shit don’t rock on Shomer fucking Shabbos.

www.robertabayley.com
Photo courtesy of Roberta Bayley.
Who knew? Joey Ramone (a.k.a. Jeffrey Hyman) is one of the Chosen. But I wish the goyim could keep Kenny G.

Ready to break out of the farm leagues

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

You can’t imagine all the types of shit I’ve seen in my life

You can’t imagine all the pain ’til you look in my eyes

Ike Dola, "This Is My Life"

I met Ike Dola two days after his father died. Not only did the 23-year-old East Oakland MC keep our appointment, but he’d also performed the same day his father succumbed to cancer. As Ike said, he’s "been strong through it all.

"I wasn’t going to do it, but Moms and my auntie told me to do it," Ike (né Isaac Walker) explained of his family’s show-must-go-on ethos. "They were both DJs. My daddy was a DJ and a truck driver. He’d come home late after driving the truck and still hit the club and DJ. He was real supportive. He’d knock my shit in the car. His favorite track was ‘Fuck What You Think.’

"Now I’ve got to take care of everything," he concluded. "It’s a little big for me."

ALL IN DA FAMILY


Ike’s increased responsibilities come at a time when his reputation has grown a little big as well. Having dropped his first two major solo projects — the mixtape Dope Illustrated and the more albumlike Beast Oakland (Nickel and Dime Ent.), mixed by DJ Fresh — in addition to guest spots on tracks by Husalah, Lee Majors, even Mac Dre himself, Ike is widely considered the next local MC who will blow up around here.

"He’s definitely next," said DJ Impereal, who, as a member of mixtape kings Demolition Men, touches all major Bay Area talent.

"He’s got his own style," Impereal said of the MC’s rapid-fire twang, delivered at a much higher pitch than his speaking voice. Ike’s unique vocals betray more than a hint of the Southern drawl that influences black Oaklandese, partly because his family moved to its ancestral Mobile, Ala., when he was 15.

"It’s hard out there," Ike recalled of those high school years. "It’s cool, though. At lunch we had the freestyle battles. A lotta guys knew me as ‘Dude from Oakland’ — I was rippin’ it." If Ike had an unfair advantage, it was simply because his auntie’s son happened to be Keak Da Sneak, already signed to Virgin as a member of 3X Krazy.

"I was always freestyling with Keak and them," Ike explained. "But when I moved to Alabama, my brother-in-law was rapping, and he was raw. I was, like, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ He’s, like, ‘Nigga, you need to write some shit.’

"When I got back I had a song called ‘Try Me,’<0x2009>" he continued. "I spit it for Keak. He was, like, ‘You ready!’ I wasn’t going to school, though, so he was damn near not fucking with me. He said if I go to school, he’d start fucking with me. But my credits didn’t transfer. They tried to put me in a low grade. I was, like, ‘Fuck that,’ but I went back and got my GED."

FARM AID


After that, Ike’s career took off, particularly when Keak formed the Farm Boyz with Ike and Bra Hef.

"We’d go to my auntie’s farm in [Sacramento to record]," Ike said. "The Farm Boyz was big in Sac even before the album came — that put me on the map." Their first, self-titled album (2002) quickly sold out and was never re-pressed. Their second album, Farm Boyz 2 (Thizz Ent., 2005), was even more successful.

"That was the time around Mac Dre dying," Ike said. "They were looking for something hot to put out. So we dropped that — that was some songs we already did. I’d been in Lee Majors’s lab, writing songs. Keak had songs, so we put them together."

Now Ike is concentrating on his solo career, and his distinctive voice — different from Keak’s but just as far out — has earned him huge underground buzz as he prepares for his first proper album for Nickel and Dime, collaborating with in-house producers like Trademark Traxx and 17-year-old phenom Swerve. Currently touring with J-Stalin’s Livewire, Ike hopes to build his buzz beyond the region, and his distinctive flavor provides more proof that the Bay Area’s rap resurgence is far from over.

www.myspace.com/ikedola

By any other name

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Fish chili is still chili. Everyone else was wondering or grumbling, but there was never any question in my mind. Fish chili is chili. It just is. If you call a thing a thing, then it is what it is. Ask Popeye.

It was chili because it had chiles in it, or chili powder, and because it was at a chili cook-off and, most important, because the guy who made it called it chili. We live in a free country, and even if we didn’t, fish chili would be chili.

You don’t like that, move to Texas. In Terlingua, at the famous annual "international" chili cook-off, you are not allowed to put beans in your chili. Or pasta. Or rice. Or "other similar items."

Fish? I wonder….

I love Texas-style chili. I prefer it by a mile to your average ground-beef-with-bean varieties. And I love that you can call a chili cook-off an "international" event and then disallow beans and things, pretty much eliminating all the other kinds of chili in the world except Texas-style.

Oh, but chili was invented in Texas.

Give me a break. If so, it has since migrated to New Mexico, where, in Old Mexican fashion, it’s more about the peppers than the meat or the beans or whatever they happen to flavor. Ever been to Cincinnati? Chili has. It’s cinnamony. Beans, onions, and cheese are optional; spaghetti is standard.

Not to blow its cover, but chili lives incognito in Providence, RI, home of the oddly named New York system, which basically means chili dogs slapped together in a line of buns on a guy’s arm. They don’t call it chili, but it’s ground beef with chili powder and cumin, somewhat distinctified by soy sauce, ginger, and — my personal favorite — celery seed.

Now, Oakland is not Terlingua or Cincinnati or Detroit or New York City or New York system or New Castle, Pa. — or a lot of other places, if you think about it. It’s where Joe Rut lives, in a warehouse, and I’m jealous because he gets to vote for Barbara Lee and host chili cook-offs.

I get to go. I get to vote for my favorite chili. In a field of more than 20 contestants, which included a couple of excellent pork chilies, a wild-turkey chili (dude shot the bird hisself!), and an elk and bacon one, among the many beef-and-bean, just-beef, and vegetarian entries, my hands-down, hats-off, and belly-up favorite was the fish chili I’ve been trying to tell you about. It was ridiculously delicious, well stocked with several kinds of fish and shellfish, colorful with peppers, and just all-around pretty. Plus I liked its politics, and philosophy.

My only dilemma was whether to vote for it for best meat chili or best vegetarian. Joe Rut’s chili cook-off ballot, like life, gave me only two choices, neither one quite right, and I had to find my way around that.

This time it was easy: I put number five on both lines. The fish chili was the best meat chili and the best vegetarian one. This from a pork-barbecuing chicken-farmer chick whose favorite two things to eat are raw beef and green salad.

For the record, if there had been a line on the ballot for gumbo, I’d have fived that line too. Hell, if we were voting on pancakes, I’d have voted for the fish chili. You know how sometimes a bowl or plate of food just speaks to you, and speaks your language?

Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one listening. I just got forwarded a mass-mailed e-mail from Joe Rut announcing the winners: fish chili won best meat chili. I love the world!

My guess is about a hundred people voted. Very few were wearing cowboy hats. There must have been at least probably about 150 folks there, you gotta figure, because it was a warehouse and it was crowded. There were bands. There were pies for dessert and a big fruit salad just so everyone could at least have a chance of pooping the next day.

The name of the guy who made this fish chili, also for the record, is — hold on a second — Russ Leslie … and I publish that journalistic fact right here (of all the crazy places) in the wild but sincere hope that he will read this and invite me over for leftovers. Or next time he makes a pot, I guess, because it’s been more than a week.

I miss it.

Arnie takes over ferries, does Newsom take ferry?

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ferry_under_baybridge.jpg
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s calvacade zoomed past me today as I left Alameda island. They were coming from the Alameda ferry terminal, where Arnie and SF Mayor Gavin Newsom and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums had just held a press conference to mark the formation of a new agency.

It’s called the San Francisco Bay Area Water Emergency Transportation Authority, or WETA,and it’s aimed at bolstering ferry service as a fallback if a disaster takes out area bridges and highways. Like an earthquake or a Maze meltdown, we guess.

WETA was created by a bill that the Governor signed on Friday, October 12, and will get $250 million in infrastructure bonds passed last November to begin building more ferries and ferry terminals.

I suppose that means that there won’t be money for more free rides if and when emergencies happens. Remember the Maze meltdown earlier this year? At the time, I naively thought they’d make the ferries free for as long as it took to replace the freeway connector that had melted to toffee after a truck driver lost control of his rig and crashed.

But, no-oooo.

Machine Head’s Robb Flynn responds to House of Blues banishment

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machineheadsml.bmp

Machine Head’s Robb Flynn blogs in response to his Oakland band’s canceled dates at House of Blues venues:

In the six years since the attacks of Sept. 11, the United States has become a better place in a number of ways. As a country, we have implemented a few common sense security procedures and protective measures that have made the nation little more secure; as a people, we are a little more conscious of our surroundings and what we can do to increase our safety; and, as a society, we are (to some degree) a little more aware of our effect on the rest of the world, both positive and negative. On the night of Sept. 11, when I asked the crowd in Tucson, Arizona, to please give 15 seconds of silence to pay respect to those whose lives were lost on that tragic day, for that one brief moment, we all felt like one. These are good things.

However, in those same six years, the United States has also managed to deteriorate into a place much worse than it was on Sept. 10, 2001. Since that infamous day, many ugly truths have surfaced, many of the liberties we once took for granted – freedoms we once thought invincible – have been quietly erased by men that have taken it upon themselves to ignore the Constitution and write their own rules. These are the same men that fed the world lies in order to justify a war that it wouldn’t agree to, men who value power and control over human life and exercise it with an unprecedented audacity and disdain for the law. And these are very bad things.

But worse than any of that, in my opinion, is the fact that, for the most part, we are allowing it. We, the people, are sitting idly by while all of this is happening, watching it slowly unravel in front of our very eyes. The scale of it all so large, the stage so vast that it’s impossible not to feel helpless and detached in the shadow of everything that’s happening — that is, until the same kinda s–t happens to you, on a much smaller scale. You tend to turn a blind eye, until you see the same tyrannical attitudes and repressive tactics trickle down into your daily life, absorbed by corporate America and dictated to you as “the way it needs to be.”

Too metal for Mickey? Machine Head vs. Disney

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machineheadsml.bmp

By Ben Richardson

Thirteen years have passed since Oakland metal stalwarts Machine Head promised to “let freedom ring with a shotgun blast” on their album Burn My Eyes, and it now appears that frontperson Robb Flynn and company should consider cramming new casings into the figurative chamber. The band’s ongoing Black Tyranny tour – which stops at the Warfield on Friday, Oct. 12 – has been marred by a pair of bizarre last-minute venue changes, both prompted by the inscrutable and unexpected objections of international media conglomerate the Walt Disney Company.

Disney owns the land under the Anaheim and Orlando branches of the House of Blues chain, venues that were slated to host Machine Head and support acts Arch Enemy, Throwdown, and Sanctity during stops on September’s national tour. Two days before the long-since-booked concert in Anaheim, the show was abruptly moved to a different venue by concert promoter and House of Blues parent company LiveNation, which cited pressure from the landowning behemoth as the reason for the switch.

Machine Head claimed on their Web site that Disney objected to the “violent imagery, undesirable fans, and inflammatory lyrics” associated with the band. According to an interview conducted with the Los Angeles Times, Flynn also suspects that the group’s “anti-war and anti-administration lyrics” had an effect on Disney’s decision.

The Chauncey Bailey Project

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Just as the Chauncey Bailey Project makes its presence known in Oakland and in the U.S. media,
I am off to Miami for an assembly of the InterAmerican Press Association (IAPA), the international free press association for the Americas.

For years, the hardy U.S. journalistic souls who are members of IAPA have helped do resolutions, go on free press missions throughout the Americas, and support impunity projects to investigate the murders of journalists and turn the evidence over to prosecutors and then push for successful prosecutions.

This year, for the first time, I will be pushing the IAPA for help on the deaths of two U.S. journalists who were killed in the line of duty. The first is Brad Will, the New York video journalist who filmed his own assassination last fall while filming violent demonstrations in Oaxaca province in Mexico. The second is Chauncey Bailey, the Oakland editor who was gunned down in August on his way to work at the Oakland Post by a man wearing a ski mask.

The good news is that an impressive array of journalists, news organizations, and journalism schools have come together to form the Chauncey Bailey Project and to take on the job of finishing his reporting on the suspicious activities of the Your Black Muslim Bakery. This coalition has already had some success. The San Francisco Chronicle was asked to join the project, but declined and said that it preferred to do its own reporting.
And so, for the last four days, anticipating the project’s investigative reports, the Chronicle has rolled out extensive and detailed front page stories on the murder.

The investigative team plans to go further and deeper and research the activities of the Bey family empire, which operates the bakery, and their thuggish operations for the past two decades and the protection they have gotten from the Oakland political establishment. “This is a unique collaboration and we hope our work goes beyond Bailey’s murder and reveals broader issues that impact the lives of Oakland’s citizens,” said Robert J. Rosenthal, editorial coordinator for the project and former managing editor of the Chronicle.

This amounts to an unprecedented collaboration among competing news organizations and promises to be the largest collective journalistic project since the Arizona Project was formed 31 years ago following the murder of Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles for his reporting on the tangled Arizona underworld.

The resulting collaboration and story led to the formation of the group called Investigative Reporters and Editors. But significantly, the Arizona Republic in Phoenix didn’t run the story and a Tucson daily was the only daily in the state to run the story. The New Times, the local Phoenix alternative paper, ran the story, as did the Guardian in San Francisco. The story was widely run in other papers throughout the country.

This time around in Oakland, the hometown media stand fully and publicly behind the Bailey Project. “We cannot stand for a reporter to be murdered while working on behalf of the public,” vowed Dori J. Maynard, president and CEO of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland. “Chauncey’s death is a threat to democracy, journalists will not be intimidated. This type of crime cast a chilling effect over our community. We will not be bullied. We have to prove that there is no gain, and hell to pay, when the very structure of society is challenged.”

Moreover, Maynard said that the team would insure that “Chauncey did not die in vain.”

Pete Wevurski, executive editor of the Oakland Tribune, said, “I’m happy that the Oakland Tribune, and our Bay Area News Group-East Bay partners the Contra Costa Times and San Jose Mercury News, are involved in this noble effort and extremely pleased that the Tribune has been able to take a lead role.” Wevurski is also managing editor of BANG-EB. “Chauncey Bailey was a colleague and friend to many of us and we want to honor his work and our profession by picking up the standard that fell the morning he was assassinated. I’m extremely gratified by the numbers and caliber of journalists who have joined the coalition, and I’m astounded by the work they are turning in already.

“The project is essential to Oakland and essential to us as journalists who wish to emphasize the point that you can kill the messenger, but the message is still going to get through. Based on this alone, I believe this will be the most important work any of us have ever done and ever will do.” Let me add, as an occasional critic of Dean Singleton, owner of the Media News Group, that this project may be the most important work that he or any of his papers have ever done or will do. I congratulate him for allowing his troops to plow forward on a tough story that everyone involved knows how high the stakes are.

The coalition’s message is profound and dramatic: you can’t kill a journalist, in the Bay Area, in California, in the United States, and get away with it. Because the best reporters and editors and news organizations in the area are going to go after you and see that the story is told and justice is done.

Journalists from the following organizations are working on the project:

Bay Area Black Journalists Association
Bay Area News Group
Center for Investigative Reporting
KGO-AM
KPIX-TV
KQED Public Radio
KTVU-TV
Maynard Institute for Journalism Education
National Association of Black Journalists
New America Media
New Voices in Independent Journalism
San Francisco State Journalism Department
San Francisco Bay Guardian
San Jose State University Journalism Department
Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California chapter
University of California, Berkeley; Graduate School of Journalism

I’ll keep you posted from IAPA in Miami. Continue reading to learn more about IAPA. B3

Click here to read the Guardian’s story on the Chauncey Bailey project.

Local media form the Chauncey Bailey Project

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When journalist Chauncey Wendell Bailey Jr. was murdered Aug. 2, questions arose as to who could have committed such an act, in broad daylight, and what could have motivated the killing. Shortly after the slaying, police arrested Your Black Muslim Bakery handyman Devaughndre Broussard, 19, and charged him with the crime. But deep questions remain, starting with who really called the shots in the killing — and what they were trying to cover up.

In an effort to pick up where Bailey left off, a rare coalition of media rivals and scholastic colleagues — more than two dozen reporters, photographers, and editors from print, broadcast, and electronic media — have formed the Chauncey Bailey Project, an investigative team that will continue and expand on the reporting Bailey was pursuing at the time of his death.

"We as an industry cannot stand for a member of the press to be gunned down in the course of doing his job. That’s a threat to democracy; that’s a threat to journalism," said Dori J. Maynard, president and chief executive officer of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

Although several local media outlets have reported on the circumstances that may have led to Bailey’s death and his connection to Your Black Muslim Bakery, this project will delve deeper into his investigative work prior to his death.

The project promises to be the largest communal journalistic endeavor since the Arizona Project was formed 31 years ago in the aftermath of the murder of Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles. The Guardian is committing the efforts of award-winning reporter G.W. Schulz and other resources to the project. Our media partners include the Bay Area Black Journalists Association, Bay Area News Group (including the Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, and San Jose Mercury News), Center for Investigative Reporting, KGO-AM, KQED Public Radio, KTVU-TV, KPIX-TV, Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, National Association of Black Journalists, New America Media, New Voices in Independent Journalism, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, San Francisco State University Journalism Department, San Jose State University Journalism Department, and Society of Professional Journalists (Northern California Chapter).

"This project is essential to Oakland and essential to us as journalists who wish to emphasize the point that you can kill the messenger but the message is still going to get through," said Pete Wevurski, executive editor of the Oakland Tribune.

The first stories from the Chauncey Bailey Project will be available at www.sfbg.com. For more information about the project and its collaborators, contact the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education at (510) 891-9202.

Port tack

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› news@sfbg.com

The Oakland City Council made an unprecedented move toward environmental justice Oct. 2 by appointing Margaret Gordon to the Oakland Port Commission. It is the first time that a community activist, rather than a businessperson or a political insider, has been named to that powerful body.

The action was roughly equivalent to naming Michael Moore to the board of the National Rifle Association. For years Gordon has led an effort to hold the port accountable for poisoning the air in her neighborhood, where the American Lung Association has found that one in every five children suffers from asthma.

Gordon’s nomination, along with that of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers business manager Victor Uno, signals a clear call for reform from Mayor Ron Dellums, who issued a prepared statement commending the council "for recognizing the importance of appointing individuals who are capable of understanding both the economic and the environmental impact of the various Port facilities."

Gordon’s appointment almost didn’t happen. Dellums withdrew his two nominees from consideration at the council’s July 17 meeting after it became clear that Gordon would have trouble winning the necessary votes. Since that time Dellums has lobbied hard for their confirmation and finally saw Uno approved unanimously and Gordon on a 7–1 vote (Councilmember Desley Brooks voted no).

"The mayor has emphatically stood behind Victor and I," Gordon told the Guardian. "He has a vision for the port. He wants it to be efficient, to grow, but not to cost people’s health. The port is supposed to make money, but it’s not supposed to make people sick."

The appointments come at a critical time. The port is now drafting a long-overdue clean-air plan, while state regulators are developing stringent clean-air requirements for ports. The Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, a national consortium of labor and environmental activists, is also advancing a proposal at Oakland and other US ports that would radically change the way port trucking is structured.

The two appointees, who begin serving immediately, will play key roles in shaping the port’s proposal. The Port Commission could vote on a final comprehensive clean-air plan as early as December. Doug Bloch, coordinator for the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, told us he is "cautiously optimistic" that the seven-member Port Commission will approve his group’s proposal. "We have two votes now," he said.

The coalition seeks to clean the air by improving the sweatshoplike working conditions of port truckers, who often drive the cheapest, most polluting trucks. Its plan calls on the port to require trucking companies to maintain vehicles and hire truckers as employees. The California Trucking Association and the Pacific Maritime Shipping Association have aggressively opposed the plan, which could herald the return of the Teamsters Union. Since they are classified as independent contractors, it is illegal for truckers to join a union. As employees, they would receive benefits and have the option to organize (see "Importing Injustice," 7/18/07).

Uno told us, "Truckers becoming employees is definitely part of the solution. It is clearly one of the ways to address this issue." Asked in July if he thought a proposal could succeed without requiring trucking companies to hire truckers as employees, he said, "I do not see how that is possible, given the lack of regulations in the trucking industry. It’s a dog-eat-dog world among independent truckers."

Gordon told us she is in favor of any plan that improves air quality and truckers’ lives but is not convinced that making them employees is the only way. "All I’m worried about is that small businesses, unions, and community health organizations can work together," she said. "We have to be unified in resolving these issues."

Ray King, general manager of marine operations at the port, told the Guardian that a tentative outline of the port’s plan will be posted to its Web site in the coming weeks, after which it will accept public comments for 30 days.

City Council president Ignacio de la Fuente had been Gordon’s key opposition in July. He told the Oakland Tribune that an appointee was needed "who understands [the port’s] need to be competitive, to be efficient, and to grow. The fact is, we have the responsibility for balance." But at the Oct. 2 meeting, he called Gordon "a great asset" and said her appointment will lead to "the creation of a balanced Port Commission."

For the past year and half Gordon has sat on the cabinet-level working group appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that developed allocation guidelines and detailed clean-air requirements for more than $3 billion in Proposition 1B bond funds approved by California voters last year for port expansion and environmental mitigation projects. Port spokesperson Libby Schaaf told the Guardian that its success in securing these funds will play a central role in its expansion plans.

Councilmember Brooks, the sole vote against Gordon, worries that the plan could hurt the port’s fiscal viability. "This is the fourth-largest port in the US. This is the economic engine of the region. We need to ensure that we move in a direction where it will continue to grow. The port is getting ready to see some very tight times," she said at the meeting. "I told the mayor I hope he proves me wrong with this appointment."

Postmortem

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Being named journalist of the year is a significant distinction. It’s just too bad that Chauncey Bailey isn’t around to receive the award.

The Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists named Bailey the winner of its top award Sept. 21, citing his "his fierce commitment to investigative journalism in the face of personal danger."

"At a time when journalists around the world are under threat for simply doing their jobs," the group said in a statement, "Bailey was a forceful presence in print and on radio and television in the Bay Area for the past 15 years. A tireless advocate for the African American community, he was assassinated while pursuing a story, and evidence presented thus far shows that he was assassinated because he was pursuing that story."

The longtime reporter and editor was shot to death Aug. 2 at the shady intersection of 14th and Alice streets in Oakland. That intersection, the site of Bailey’s Oakland Post office, sits in the center of the city’s power structure, with county court and government office buildings situated nearby.

An employee of Your Black Muslim Bakery — a group that has a history of both political influence at Oakland City Hall and severe money woes, which Bailey was investigating — is accused of shooting Bailey twice in the chest and once in the head with a black Mossberg shotgun as Bailey walked to work at the Post.

Devaughndre Broussard, the 19-year-old alleged shooter, was arrested during a raid at four locations, including the bakery’s main address, following the killing. Also arrested in the raids were three other people associated with the bakery and political movement; they were charged with kidnapping and torture following an earlier incident.

At the center of this story is the family of the late black Muslim leader Yusuf Bey Sr., who maintained a violent fiefdom now linked by law enforcement officials to an alleged assassination, vigilantism, child rape, and the abuse of a disadvantaged-business loan to the Bey family and its associates, as earlier media accounts and criminal charges revealed.

Police say they caught Broussard tossing a black shotgun out the window of a 59th Street address during one of the raids and that he admitted the gun belonged to him. Police have told the media that shells found at the intersection where Bailey was killed were linked to the gun.

But Broussard’s attorney has waged a public campaign to prove that Broussard wasn’t the assailant. The Oakland Tribune, where Bailey once worked as a reporter, has reportedly obtained police notes from interrogations that contained details of an unrecorded conversation between Broussard and Yusuf Bey IV, heir to the bakery chain and the black liberation movement that surrounded it.

Broussard’s attorney has insisted that Bey IV, during that brief exchange, coaxed Broussard into confessing to the murder. Broussard later did exactly that and reportedly claimed he pulled the trigger because Bailey was investigating the bakery’s deteriorating finances, which grew worse after Bey IV took over as CEO.

In mid-September, Alameda County reached a $188,000 settlement with three women who filed suit alleging that Bey Sr. assaulted them after local child welfare officials placed them in his custody. The three women first claimed in 2003 that Bey Sr. defecated on them and forced them to have sex with him and drink his urine and semen. But Bey Sr. died of cancer that year before he could face related criminal charges in court.

Bailey joins the growing roster of international journalists attacked or killed for reporting the news. On Sept. 27, Japanese photojournalist Kenji Nagai, who was working for the French news service Agence France-Presse, was shot to death by Burmese troops as they assaulted demonstrators in an increasingly bloody suppression of dissent still taking place in that country.

Reporters Without Borders notes that 75 journalists were killed worldwide in 2007, triple the number in 2002. Fifteen were killed in the Americas, according to the Inter American Press Association, which is preparing a resolution on Bailey’s death.

In early August two dozen Association of Alternative Newsweeklies newspapers published a story written by longtime Guardian Mexico City correspondent John Ross (and edited by the Guardian) outlining the events that led up to the shooting death of videojournalist Brad Will in Oaxaca, Mexico, during social and political unrest in the fall of 2006.

Gonzalo Marroquín, chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information and editor of the Guatemala City, Guatemala, newspaper Prensa Libre, stated in early August, "We urge the authorities to investigate the [Bailey] murder in depth and promptly, so that the case does not become just another on the list of unpunished crimes in the Americas."

Girl power – with goodies!

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By Soo Oh

Every year in September, Girls Incorporated holds its Women of Taste event at the terraced gardens of Oakland Museum to support young girls in Alameda County, encouraging them to be “strong, smart, and bold.” It doesn’t hurt to be a patron (matron?) to the cause when it involves three levels of catered food from Bay Area restaurants on a slightly breezy Saturday night in the East Bay.

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Porno for peggers…and everyone else

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By Amber Peckham

All dressed up with nowhere to go? Not anymore. Dig those funkalicious duds and worn-out sex toys out of your attic (you know they’re up there) and head over to Oakland’s Parkway Theater tonight, where Babeland is holding a screening of the erotic film The Opening of Misty Beethoven. The screening kicks off with a “Sexy 70’s” costume contest, where three lucky winners will receive $30 Babeland gift cards, and the film will be followed by a raffle in which three more filmgoers will receive Babeland Body Kits.

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Mad chatter

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER What flying snacks do not kill me only make me harder, better, faster, stronger — come all ye children of Kanye West and Friedrich Nietzsche. I love San Francisco. Where else can you catch hell and come this close to getting brained by a pupusa hurled by a nattering, nutty nutbag in orangey pink stretch pants? I’m all the rage, ready for the crème de la Salvadoran vittle missiles.

I’m just cranked on shady luck like that, and was oozing my everyday allotment of pure, untrammeled harassability on a recent Sunday, just minding my own bad bidness strolling through the Mission District. Plenty of lukewarm trade in cell chargers and black velvet paintings of howling wolves and solemn American Indians with ghostly hands emerging from over their maws. Fresh-faced, black-eyed kids in Sunday finery toddled by as I finally landed in Las Palmeras to sample yuca frita con chicharrón. The familias around me were busy cracking crab when an elderly lady with an extremely fashion-damaged Phyllis Diller fright wig cruised alongside me and started in with "You better understand …" before launching into a diatribe en espagnol. Oh, to be the object of so much obsession — as she hobbled outside in royal snit, returning only to yell at me further through the restaurant window. Later, when the good folks at Las Palmeras handed her a conciliatory pupusa — balm to all that ails ya — she flung it, as hard as she could, at my offending, chomping image. Oh, but I don’t understand — I really, really don’t.

Ah Ess-Eff, as if you could ever stop providing safe harbor — or serving up mucho psychotic triggers — for so many mad men and women. You needn’t throw a pupusa far to find classic only-in-SF, Emperor Norton–<\d>style eccentrics or lunatics everywhere you wander. Yet my favorite inspired obsessive this week has to be Chicago’s Galactic Zoo Dossier zine impresario and psych king in his own write-right Steve "Plastic Crimewave" Krakow (least beloved: food-fighter lady marma-lardbutt).

Now out in all its hard-to-read yet lovely-to-behold DIY hand-drawn glory, Galactic‘s issue no. seven, published by Drag City, discharges a wealth of info — and interviews with the Incredible String Band’s Clive Palmer, Gary Panter, Ed Askew, the Strawbs, and Kevin Coyne — for all of us acid- and otherwise damaged lysergic eminencies. Ravin’ spot-on spotlights on dark psych creators like Sam Gopal and Crushed Butler make you wanna bolt out the door — or start up the eBay eye strain — to acquire these jewels. Krakow does give you a taste of the mind expansion under way with the included hot-rockin’ double CD of aged rarities like the Ukuleles of Halifax (a more than 30-strong, all-teen-girl ’70s Canadian uke orchestra) and contempo freak-beaters headed up by Bay Area locals like Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound, Charalambides, and the Stooges’ Steve MacKay and his Radon Ensemble. Shoving in a track by his wondrous Plastic Crimewave Sound and sprinkling his writing with more wells and OKs than a high school speech class, Krakow coughs up 100-plus pages for this issue — making it more booklike than zine-ish.

Still, Galactic foregrounds the fan in fanzine and hews more closely to the spirit of an obsessively handwritten letter than to that of a more sterile blog. And Krakow’s sincerity, knowledge, and breadth of taste — dude delves into Giorgio Moroder and the Banana Splits, revisits overplayed hit makers like the Bee Gees, and resuscitates faded pharaohs like Edwin Starr — inspire you to penetrate his dense scrawl. Also beyond cool: sheets of Astral Folk Goddesses and Damaged Guitar Gods trading cards — collect ’em all, from Jacqui McShee and Erica Pomerance to Jukka Tolonen and Keith Cross, shop hobbits! So this is new reading material for those wondering where to take their Windowpaned stares post–<\d>Ptolemaic Terrascope (now under the editorial leadership of Oakland drummer Pat Thomas of Mushroom and Runt/Water) and Arthur.

Being a lamezoid at crucial moments, I missed the previous six installments of Galactic, but you can catch the first four 300-run issues in the Galactic Zoo Dossier Compendium book-CD (Drag City). Don’t pooh-pooh, sir — you’re as likely to learn about Santa Cruz supergroup Druids as vanguard blues distortion peddler Pat Hare. And you just might like the way your mind feels, blown.

GET THE ROCK OUTTA HERE

N. LANNON


The dreamy former Film Schooler taps a new CD, Pressure (Badman). With Pancho Sanza and the Matinees. Wed/26, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

BONDE DO ROLE


Office boys and girls come out for the baile funk cuties’ armed and dangerous With Lasers (Domino). With JuiceBoxxx and Magic Bullets. Fri/28, 9 p.m., $13. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

LADYTRON


When you’re 21 you’re no fun, but then you can get in to see a rare live performance by the English combo. With Great Northern. Sat/29, 10 p.m., $25 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

REMEMBERING NICK DRAKE


Nick’s sis, Gabrielle Drake; producer Joe Boyd; and songwriter Jolie Holland talk about the late artist. Tues/2, 8 p.m., $19. Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg., 401 Van Ness, SF. www.cityboxoffice.com

The long day closes

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While, over the years, I privately deplored the food-obsessive practice of giving dogs such names as Mocha, Latte, and Basil — even Matzoh — I was hardly in a position to deplore, for we had named one of our dogs after a pizzeria. The pizzeria, Due, was in Chicago, where we once lived, but the dog Due knew nothing of Chicago, having been born near Petaluma in the summer of 1991, nor of pizza, beyond enjoying leftover crust. She preferred the white corn kernels that sometimes fell to the floor when I cut them from cobs. But due means two in Italian, and as Due was our second chow, and then our only chow, after her longtime mate died five years ago, the name seemed to suit.

A dog is an education, and for an omnivore, not all the lessons are easy ones. For a dog, in commanding your love and returning it to you as eager licks and whimpers, in searching your eyes for clues just as you are searching hers, reminds you countless times every day that other animals’ lives may not be all that different from our own. And why would we think otherwise, since we are animals too, peerers into the eyes around us?

Sharing our lives with dogs did not make us give up meat, quite, but as the years passed, we increasingly found occasion to wonder, and to make or order something meatless for dinner. There is probably no way to live on this earth without getting at least a little blood on your hands, but the less blood, the better. To keep the suffering of sentient creatures to a minimum: is this not the basis of a moral life? Do we not begin with these small creatures for whom we are everything — gods, in fact, shapers of the world?

How bitterly ironic that such loving and conscientious gods should find themselves in the position of having to decide when a beloved’s life must end. Due, who had come to her gods as an eight-week-old puppy on the day of the great Oakland hills fire, lived to see her 16th birthday in August, but by then she was stiff and skeletal, and the long light in her eyes had dimmed. A van came to the house on a September afternoon, and the gods wept when she died.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Will the US bomb Iran?

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OPINION Half the warships in the US Navy are sitting within striking distance of Iran. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have stepped up their rhetoric, accusing Iran of killing Americans in Iraq and of threatening to start a nuclear holocaust. The British media is predicting that the Bush administration will bomb Iran in the near future.

The White House is using the same propaganda techniques to whip up popular opinion against Iran that it used four years ago against Iraq. Here’s the real story:

•Iran has no nuclear weapons and couldn’t have them for years. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body that was right about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, says it has no proof of Iranian plans to build nuclear bombs. The IAEA recently reached a binding agreement for Iran to reveal its past nuclear activities and allow full inspection of nuclear-power sites.

•The sophisticated explosively formed penetrators supposedly supplied by Iran to militias in Iraq are easily made in Iraqi machine shops and can be purchased commercially for mining operations.

•For years Iran has given political, economic, and military support to Shia and Kurdish militias, but the Bush administration has never proved that Iran is intentionally targeting US soldiers.

•For two years the United States has helped splinter groups among Iran’s ethnic minorities to blow up buildings, assassinate revolutionary guards, and kill civilians in an effort to destabilize the Tehran regime. In short, the United States does to Iran what it accuses Iran of doing in Iraq.

The hardliners in the administration, led by Cheney, see a dwindling opportunity to bomb Iran before Bush leaves office. They hope to launch a massive bombing campaign to so weaken Tehran that the regime will fall and Iranians will see the United States as their savior. Does this sound the faintest bit familiar?

In reality, a US attack would be disastrous. Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 25 percent of the world’s oil supplies passes. Oil prices would skyrocket. Iran could encourage Hezbollah to launch missiles into Israel. Muslims would hold demonstrations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Iran could mobilize that anger and encourage Shiite parties in Iraq to attack US troops.

In a truly nightmare scenario, Iran could encourage terrorist attacks inside the United States and in allied countries. When I interviewed Syria’s President Bashar al-Asad in 2006, he said, "If you do a military strike, you will have chaos. It’s very dangerous."

The decision to bomb Iran depends, in part, on actions by the American people. Now is the time to let your national and local politicians know that we don’t need another human disaster in the Middle East. Code Pink is organizing a national campaign to get city councils to pass resolutions against attacks on Iran (www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?list=type&type=135). US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has introduced a Senate bill to prohibit an attack on Iran without congressional authorization.

I can’t predict with certainty that the United States will bomb Iran, but the danger is greater today than anytime in the past 25 years. The question is, what will you be doing to stop it?

Reese Erlich

Reese Erlich (www.reeseerlich.com) is author of the new book The Iran Agenda: the Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis (Polipoint). Oct. 2 will be Reese Erlich Day in Oakland to honor his work and that of all investigative journalists.

Treasure Island fest – another view

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Pulling it together: Doug Martsch of Built to Spill at Treasure Island fest. All pics by Kimberly Chun.

By Steven Touchton

This past Sunday was the first time anyone had ever rented out West Oakland’s DeFremery Pool in order to throw a late afternoon pool party featuring spazzy bands. Since it was a private rental, you could only attend by purchasing advance tickets from the Club Sandwich Bay Area Web site. It nearly sold out. The weather was perfect for the occasion.

My band KIT shared the bill with Los Angeles’s Captain Ahab and Foot Village, as well as local band Cell Block. Cell Block, which includes people from Ex Pets and Coughs, got things going with their brand of aggro-distorto noisy hardcore. People were already pumped just to be at an event like this, and Cell Block’s set just ramped up the excitement level that much more.

Foot Village are a vocals-and-percussion-only quartet who stole the show, in my opinion, with a sweat-drenched set of primal energy. Captain Ahab (winner of the Snakes on a Plane-song competition) closed it out, rave style. He brought along a fancy sound system and a dancer guy whose job is to “sexually harass” dudes in the crowd while singing along sans microphone. The dance-party covers included a Vocoder-soaked version of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8ter Boy.”

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Earlimart wear their fall colors.

Most of those who attended left this party excited and energized, making plans for one of the post-show hangouts that ensued. But I had to load out my gear and take off right away, skipping the after-parties, in order to catch Built to Spill at the Treasure Island Music Festival.

Letters as leverage

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› news@sfbg.com

It’s a thin, seemingly innocuous letter. The Social Security Administration mails it when names and Social Security numbers don’t match on an employee’s I-9 form. The intent is to make sure workers receive their benefits.

But unions and immigrants have long charged that unscrupulous employers use SSA "no match" letters to harass undocumented workers and squelch union organizing efforts. Now, after a failed immigration debate in Congress, the George W. Bush administration wants to pass a regulation that would explicitly turn the letter into an immigration enforcement tool.

Activists fear this could result in massive firings and retaliation against workers organizing with unions. Employers complain it could lead to an economic slump in industries dependent on undocumented labor. A temporary injunction granted by a San Francisco judge is the only thing holding back letters across the country; it ends Oct. 1.

Bay Area activists have been national leaders at the intersection of immigrant rights and labor movements. They are now shaping national policy on this new regulation in the courts and promise wide-scale street action and workplace walkouts if it goes into effect.

A look at past and present related Bay Area organizing may shed light on the future of the national issue.

BAY AREA ORGANIZING


US companies file hundreds of millions of W-2 forms with the SSA every year. The SSA uses them to calculate how much it owes workers at retirement. When the name and the Social Security number do not match, the SSA sends a "no match" letter to the employee to clear up the discrepancy. The letters are also sent to employers who have more than 10 employees with no match. These letters have nothing to do with immigration law, and employers are not required to take any adverse action against these employees.

But under the new Department of Homeland Security regulation, no-match letters may be seen as evidence that an employer knowingly employed an undocumented worker. The letters would include a leaflet from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement informing employers that they must fire workers who cannot resolve no matches with the SSA or reverify their work authorization within 93 days. If the companies do not, they may be subject to fines or criminal charges.

The rule was drafted more than a year ago but was not announced by Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff until Aug 10. "The magnet that brings most economic migrants into this country is work," he explained. "And if we have worksite enforcement directed at illegal employment, we strike at that magnet."

Brooke Anderson, an organizer with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, told the Guardian that this is an unlikely scenario. Workers will not leave the country; they will simply be forced into underground economies, rotate through different jobs, and become even more vulnerable.

Anderson was among a delegation of more than 30 labor, faith, and community leaders that presented a letter Aug. 30 at the regional SSA office in Richmond. The letter outlined their concerns and asked that the SSA send out no-match letters only to employees, not employers.

"DHS is using an incomplete, hodgepodge system intended to ensure our economic security to implement a regressive immigration policy that Bush failed to pass in Congress," Anderson told us. "The SSA as an agency should have a spine and say no to DHS and no to the Bush administration."

If the ICE inserts do go out with no-match letters, she predicts walkouts and massive street actions.

The regulation is also being challenged in a lawsuit filed by the Central Labor Council of Alameda County. The AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the San Francisco Central Labor Council have joined it. The plaintiffs claim that because the SSA’s database is full of errors, many citizens and legal immigrants could end up losing their jobs. They also argue that the DHS has exceeded its authority by seeking to use the SSA to enforce immigration laws.

US District Judge Maxine Chesney in San Francisco granted a nationwide temporary restraining order Aug. 31, blocking the SSA from sending letters with ICE inserts. The order is in effect until Oct. 1, when another federal judge here, Charles Breyer, will decide whether to grant another injunction.

"DHS is trying to create a huge terror, to give the illusion that they are doing something," Bill Sokol, a lawyer with Weinberg, Roger, and Rosenfeld, the firm representing the Central Labor Council of Alameda County, told us. "Workers are afraid, but we must dial down people’s fear and terror under our new gestapo."

He said the law will have little impact if employers understand it and do not abuse it. If employers overreact, however, the result could be disastrous. Sokol said employers are already firing employees immediately after receiving the letters.

HISTORY


Unions and immigrant workers across the country have charged that no-match letters have been used to stifle workers’ rights since the SSA began sending them to employers in 1994. Activists in the Bay Area have played a key role in resisting these efforts, setting national precedents upholding worker rights.

When a San Francisco Travelodge fired workers after they began organizing with a union in 1999, allegedly due to Social Security no matches, the terminated employees took it to court. The next year they won an arbitrator’s decision that the firing, based solely on no-match letters, was a violation of their union contract.

Local community pressure on the SSA also resulted in the inclusion of cautionary text in the letter. The no-match letter now states that employers "should not use this letter to take any adverse action against an employee…. Doing so could, in fact, violate state or federal law and subject you to legal consequences."

Activists at Oakland’s Labor Immigrant Organizers Network wrote a resolution in 1999 asking the AFL-CIO to renounce its support of the employer-sanctions provisions of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the federal law that for the first time made it illegal for an undocumented worker to hold a job. Their agitation is credited in part for a resolution the AFL-CIO passed in 2000 calling for the repeal of sanctions and for a legalization program for undocumented workers.

The letters remained a potent tool for antiunion activity. A 2003 survey by the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that 25 percent of workers listed in no-match letters reported that their employers fired them in retaliation for complaining about inadequate worksite conditions. More than one in five workers reported that their employer fired them in retaliation for union activity.

San Francisco opposed the DHS no-match regulation when it was proposed last year. An August 2006 resolution by the Board of Supervisors said it may lead to employers "using it as a device to fire, intimidate, harass, or underpay employees." It promised that the city would defy the regulation if it received a no-match letter for a city employee.

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce also came out against the regulation.

But some employers embraced the proposed regulation. Uniform manufacturer Cintas fired hundreds of employees across the country, allegedly responding to the proposed guidelines after receiving no-match letters during a union organizing drive. Organizers said the company targeted employees involved in the union and jumped the gun on new regulations.

The Woodfin Suite Hotel in Emeryville fired 21 housekeepers in December 2006, also allegedly due to no-match letters. The workers claim the Woodfin retaliated against them for organizing with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, a labor-affiliated think tank, to enforce the living-wage law (see "Calling in the Feds," 6/13/07).

A yearlong campaign targeting the Woodfin has brought the issue to a national audience.

FALSE INFORMATION


Organizers say the regulations are far less strict than the news media has portrayed them, adding to an atmosphere of hysteria and fear among employers and workers. Francisco Ugarte, a lawyer with the Oakland firm of Leonard Carder, held up several San Francisco Chronicle articles at a Sept. 13 workshop for union organizers as examples of media inaccuracies.

An employer is not required to fire an employee after 90 days, as news accounts have stated. The employer has 90 days to fix discrepancies, and the worker has three days after that to fill out another I-9 form with a new Social Security number. If it appears credible, employers must accept the new I-9, Ugarte said.

The ICE insert in the SSA letter will terrify employers, he predicted, but the rule does not create any new information sharing between the SSA and other governmental agencies. The SSA is actually prohibited by law from sharing private data with any other governmental agencies.

There are also no automatic fines assessed to employers, as news accounts have implied. ICE will only levy fines if it raids employers and finds that they did not address no-match discrepancies. It is unlikely that the DHS will be able to enforce the regulations; in announcing them, Chertoff said the agency would rely largely on self-policing.

Even if this is the case, organizers fear that the DHS’s no-match regulation will provide employers with another tool to squelch immigrant workers’ rights. Comprehensive immigration reform is still needed to reconcile employers’ demands for workers, immigrants’ needs for employment, and US immigration policy.*

Swede ‘n’ hoedown

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Bad gay hair is back! From Chris Crocker’s "Leave Britney Alone!" bilevel blond bob apocalypse to Perez Hilton’s ever-changing lamebow of neon locks (bitch looks as though the Planet Unicorn creatures from YouTube exploded on her giant head), the homo hair horrors of the past are rising like silk-shirted, Daisy Duked zombies, tearing through a screen near you. Pull up a Rent-a-Center white vinyl sectional and dig into a plate of fried wig. These are the Famous Gays of Our Moment. This is our culture. So fuck your stinkin’ herbal Fructis — plaster me with Queen Helene, suck me into Manic Panic, pump me up like L’Oreal. I wanna be fa-mousse.

Speaking of Planet Unicorn: I went to Oakland. This column’s become San Francisco–centric (not to mention gayer than a third grade playground), and I almost feel guilty. There’s a Bay full of hot boys out there! So, over Labor Day weekend, me and Hunky Beau saddled up the ol’ BART — which, in a windfall for stoned revelers, was running 24 hours a day — and high-tailed it to Bench and Bar, Oakland’s premier queer downtown dance palace for lusty Latinos.

There we found a proud brown Urban Cowboy wonderland. Saturdays play host to La Bota Loca, an overflowing evening for lithesome vaqueros in white Stetsons and kicky Tony Lamas hopping to regional Mexican hits and line-dancing to the Spanish version of "Achy Breaky Heart" ("Mi Pobre Corazón"). I recently bemoaned the lack of queer club nights where I could polka my pixie boots off to norteño and banda music. This is where I finally got a joyous earful of Sinaloense, Duranguense, and "Hey, what’d he say?" I’ve got to learn española.

The 3 a.m. BART ride home was a party. Hazy hyphy kids, tattooed punk nymphs, cowboy-hatted queens, and various future rehabbers piled on to cause unique havoc on the SF streets. Unfortunately, the car with the portable DJ setup was packed — we’d have to squeeze in next to the drunken Cal rugby team, stripping off their shirts and challenging one another to wrestling matches. Hurriedly we acquiesced.

MUCHO MACHO MALMÖ Much like the "Gabbo is coming!" ads on The Simpsons, a mysterious, gaudy poster has been plastered about the city, causing much flurry and flutter. On it, a slick-mulleted playboy with an Angelina-forearm-thin mustache is flanked by two busty blonds in spandex strips. Giant text screams "Günther — LIVE!!!" Who? What? Why?

"Is this some kind of joke?" Hunky Beau asked aloud when he first saw it. But really, isn’t that the cry of a dance floor generation?

In the tradition of, er, Fischer Spooner and Junior Senior, Günther traffics in the kind of poker-faced genius ambiguity that kicks your ass on the dance floor while shoving your tongue far enough into your cheek to block your bowels. (Although maybe that’s the coke.) Günther’s first huge release, "The Ding Dong Song," rides an infectious beat so stereotypically generic techno that it comes out the other side of awful, emerging into brilliance. It’s about his dick. He calls his dick his "tra la la." His press release describes it as a "gangling manhood." I e-mailed him immediately.

"My massage is love," he wrote back from Malmö, Sweden, where he resides. "I start my day off surrounded by Sunshine Girls" — his writhing lesbotronic backup vocalists — "have a champagne breakfast, and spread my massage of champagne, love, sex, glamour, and respect! I have always lived my own glamorous, sexy life of fun!!!" Who could argue? Other bouncy songs — and videos — of head-scratching wonder include "Teeny Weeny String Bikini," "Tutti Frutti Summerlove," and, yes, "Christmas Song." Sweeede …

SEWN UP Fashion Week is more over than irony, but you still need a look. Hit up Thread, an underground fashion blast featuring a plethora of killer local togs, no-host bar grog, and something about lots of great DJs that ends in og. Best part: discounts! OK!*

LA BOTA LOCA

Saturdays, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $20

Bench and Bar

2111 Franklin, Oakl.

www.bench-and-bar.com

GÜNTHER AND THE SUNSHINE GIRLS

Sat/22, 10 p.m., $30

Sound Factory

525 Harrison, SF

www.gunthernet.com

THREAD

Sat/22, noon–6 p.m., $10

Festival Pavilion

Fort Mason Center

Marina at Laguna, SF

www.threadshow.com

These charming men

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Last night I dreamed that Morrissey played San Francisco. And waking, stumbling out of the top bunk, and triggering an avalanche of promo CDs, I was happy in the haze of that Estaban-drunken hour, but heaven knows I’m wondering, what difference does it make when that charming man has teased us so often before? Now I know how Joan of Arc felt, charging into Mr. Steven Patrick Morrissey’s onetime Los Angeles hood to flyer his street with mash notes. And on the cusp of Mr. Smith’s first San Francisco–<\d>proper shows since his two-night stand at concrete box Maritime Hall in 1999, I can’t help but wonder, my PETA poster child, why you have ignored your acolytes so, playing seemingly everywhere but here since canceling your 2004 Now and Zen Fest turn due to sinusitis and laryngitis. Do we make you sick? Is it my forlorn fashion sense? Our inability to untangle your artful Gordian knots of pop-song allusion? Is it my Kahlua breath?

Pop professionalism is such touchy subject these days — poke it with a stick and turn it over to find the now-chastened Britney Spears. Give it another nudge and find, on the other shining side, perhaps Prince and Morrissey, who’s fired away at his share of prefab stars who have no business fingering the hem of his tear-away dress shirt. Regardless of his latent music- and cultural-crit tendencies, Mr. So-Called Bigmouth is one of the greatest performers alive. I finally saw him in 2002 at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, opening for Los Jaguares and utterly besotting the seething mass with "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores," "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," and plenty of scrumptious previews of his You Are the Quarry tunes, and his magnificent feints and swoons, his fetal and Christlike poses during "Meat Is Murder," his heartfelt "Mexico," and the moment he tossed his shirt to the snatching crowd made me badger anyone who’d listen to give Morrissey a regular Vegas gig, years before Prince held down a brief lounge act there. So all those who have been missing the King (or are so green they don’t even remember one) or never believed he left the building, take (Irish blood, English) heart — Morrissey carries forth his flaming rock ‘n’ roll torch, embodying all the sexiness, expressionism, originality, professionalism, and subversion of long-gone rock regents like Elvis Presley. If you are a follower, this will only fan the fire. If you’re not a fan, you will be. Maybe Brit would have been forgiven if she had mumbled, "Gimme Moz," instead.

SOUNDING OFF James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem knows of what I speak, rasping amiably from New York City before embarking on a tour with the Arcade Fire. Hot on the heels on the infectious electro rock ‘n’ disco of Sound of Silver (DFA/Capitol), Murphy talked up the forthcoming vinyl and CD release of his "Nike thing," 45:33 (DFA) ("It was just a download thing, which infuriates me because MP3s sound like shit!") and a comp EP of remixes evocatively titled A Bunch of Stuff (EMI). Why the release frenzy — add in a Fabriclive mix CD by Murphy and LCD drummer Pat Mahoney — when the DFA Records cofounder could be enjoying his downtime watching The Fashionista Diaries and Ultimate Fighting with the missus?

"I don’t like things coming out on difficult formats," Murphy, 37, grumbles. "I don’t like it if something’s not on vinyl or CD, so I kinda regularly remember my roots as a big Smiths fan, scrabbling around. I know they put out [Louder Than] Bombs and Hatful of Hollow, where they compile all the little things so that you can find them on the right format. I try to diligently do that."

At least he can look forward to some carefree, cutthroat fun with the Arcade Fire. "We have band crush!" raves Murphy, who’s expecting to battle Win and Will Butler over a steaming croquet set. "Win is very competitive — there’s no i in team, but there is one in ‘Win’!"

Not to mention a declarative "Win." But what does the a in "James" stand for? "Aaayiii!"

MORRISSEY

Sun/23–Mon/24 and Sept. 26–27, 8 p.m., $65

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM

With the Arcade Fire

Fri/21, 6 p.m., $26–$46

Shoreline Amphitheatre

1 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View

www.ticketmaster.com

For more of the interview with James Murphy, go to the Noise blog at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

PARTY WITH ME, PETA

SAMARA LUBELSKI


The mind-morphing NYC psych songstress partners with Tom Carter and Christian Kiefer in Oakland and Giant Skyflower Band, Glenn Donaldson’s "bummer psych" outing, in San Francisco. Wed/19, 9 p.m., sliding scale. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. www.21grand.org. Thurs/20, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

DIPLO


After editing the film Favela on Blast, Wesley Pentz touches down in Jessie Alley with collaborator Switch. Sat/22, 10 p.m., $20 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN


The fusion guitar maestro offers a taste of the SFJAZZ fall season. Sat/22, 8 p.m., $25–$80. Nob Hill Masonic Center, 1111 California, SF. www.sfjazz.org

OAKLEY HALL AND MIST AND MAST


The Dead live! Brooklyn’s bucolic sing-alongers strum along with Oakland’s indie chantey rockers Mist and Mast. Sat/22, 10 p.m., $10–$12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

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