Police Archives — Page 83 of 99 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Killing in the dark

March 11, 2008

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Police Department doesn’t want people to know about Asa B. Sullivan, a case that illustrates how difficult it is to get even basic information about law enforcement, which leaves the public in the dark about a public agency that makes life-and-death decisions.

Officers filled Sullivan with 16 bullets nearly two years ago on June 6, 2006. Sullivan was unarmed and hiding in the cramped attic of a townhouse at the Parkmerced complex near San Francisco State University when the shooting occurred.

The Guardian has spent the intervening time trying fruitlessly to obtain public records and other information from the department about what happened to Sullivan and about the officers involved, including the results of now-completed investigations.

Sullivan’s death briefly grabbed headlines, but beyond what police told the press at the time, the department has rejected several requests for reports and other documents related to the shooting. The department in February of this year rejected another records request, one of four rebuffed since Sullivan’s death.

Police initially claimed Sullivan’s gun was found at the scene, but that story changed significantly within a short period of time. Police later said the officers who shot him believed an eyeglasses case held by Sullivan was a gun.

It all started when the neighbors of 2 Garces Drive called police believing squatters had taken over the townhouse, but Sullivan was helping the tenants clean up so they could get their security deposit before moving out.

When police arrived, they ordered Sullivan’s friend, Jason Martin, to the floor after the officers aimed their weapons at him without explanation while Sullivan fled into an attic, according to allegations that later appeared in a federal civil suit filed by Sullivan’s family.

Sullivan was on probation for pot and any contact with police would surely have caused him more problems, but as we reported shortly after Sullivan was killed, the department’s General Orders instruct that when a suspect is barricaded, the responding officers should call in a negotiator. A K-9 unit was called that night, according to the suit, but it doesn’t appear the officers waited for it to show up.

Two officers tried to call Sullivan down before pursuing him into the attic. The rest is unclear except that the officers, John Keesor and Michelle Alvis, shot Sullivan to death believing he was armed and intended to shoot them first. But no gun was ever found. The 25-year-old Sullivan, a San Francisco native, was working for Goodwill Industries at the time and had a young son named Asa Isaiah Sullivan.

We first sent a public records request to the SFPD shortly after Sullivan’s death asking for "any and all documentation" related to the shooting including e-mails, notes, and witness statements. The department’s legal division responded that the material was exempt from disclosure laws because they were part of an ongoing law-enforcement investigation, a common response when reporters seek such documents.

After learning at a September 2006 San Francisco Police Commission meeting that some elements of the investigation were complete, we filed another request. The department’s rulebook requires that two divisions in the department — the homicide detail and internal affairs — complete their examinations of deadly officer-involved shootings within two months of the incident.

But again, citing the state’s Government Code, which allows them to withhold material considered part of an ongoing probe, the department responded that an investigation by the district attorney and an analysis of Sullivan’s body by the medical examiner were not complete.

Two months later, we confirmed through Sullivan’s autopsy that he’d been shot 16 times, so we filed another request for documents related to the shooting. But again the department’s legal division claimed the investigation was still open and disclosure would endanger its successful completion.

The alternative by then was to wait for the federal civil suit filed against the city by Sullivan’s family to unfold slowly: through that, perhaps we could determine if new evidence from the shooting would appear in the public record. No success there either. The parties requested a protective order in August 2006 that made crucial information in the case confidential, including personnel records of the officers involved as well as audiotapes, videotapes, photographs, and transcripts related to the investigation.

Through the suit, however, we did learn last November that the Office of Citizen Complaints and the police department’s Management Control Division, a.k.a. internal affairs, had completed their investigations of the shooting.

So we filed another request in February of this year. Yet again, however, the department’s legal division responded that the records were protected under the state’s Penal Code, which grants special exemptions for information related to the conduct of law-enforcement personnel. The OCC responded the same way in its denial of our request.

Making matters worse, California’s State Supreme Court ruled in an unrelated case in August of 2006 that citizens and the press would no longer be able to access most public information about why individual officers are charged with misconduct or even possibly breaking the law.

Records of misconduct charges filed by the OCC or the police chief against officers had largely been open to the public until then through summaries that appeared on the agenda of the police commission. The public could also attend misconduct hearings at the Hall of Justice which included testimony from officers.

But the Supreme Court ruling — known as the Copley decision — put a stop to it by broadening the scope of privacy laws that exclusively protected cops from the disclosure of disciplinary records. Since then, stories from Bay Area media outlets about police misconduct have been few and far between despite a steady stream of cases.

Of course, there’s a way around it all. Sometimes documents show up at the Guardian building in Potrero Hill without a return address, and literally dozens of people with potential access to records related to Sullivan’s death could plausibly deny knowing how they were accidentally sent to G.W. Schulz, San Francisco Bay Guardian, 135 Mississippi St., San Francisco, Calif., 94107.

Maybe by the June anniversary of Sullivan’s shooting, a fuller story of what happened that day (from any number of perspectives — we’re interested in talking to anyone) could land in front of readers. Maybe.

One ear to the ground

March 5, 2008

>a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Ah, the morality police — you’ve gotta love ’em. At least artists who get free publicity from the overzealous watchdogs should. With freedom of speech still miraculously in decent shape in this country, one might be forgiven for forgetting the unique dilemma of the banned book: once branded immoral, it automatically becomes sought after.

Such is the case with Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s Wolves of the Crescent Moon (Penguin, 192 pages, $14), which was banned in Saudi Arabia by theocratic thought-cops for casting too many spotlights on societal problems that the authorities insist don’t exist. Upon being labeled dangerous and sinful, the book gained a large audience throughout the Arabic-speaking world. It has since been translated into French, and now, into English by Anthony Calderbank. While hardly as inflammatory as Saudi authorities might lead one to believe, the novel paints a troubling portrait of a traditional society embracing and fighting modernity. Government claims notwithstanding, Saudi Arabia is not free from abuse, prejudice, racism, and religious hypocrisy, and the author minces no words in giving voice to the marginalized, the abandoned, and the otherwise ignored. While the titular animal does figure prominently in the story, the main wolves appear to be of the human variety.

Wolves of the Crescent Moon reveals itself in fevered rushes of storytelling that concern three characters: a one-eared bedouin, a eunuch, and a one-eyed orphan. Turad, the one-eared tribesman who has tolerated an endless run of degrading jobs since leaving the desert for the city, arrives at a Riyadh bus station without a plan. Paralyzed by indecision, he finds himself trapped in nightmarish reminiscence and speculation; thus, we are introduced to Tawfiq, Turad’s elderly eunuch coworker, whose life of misery is retold by the bedouin. While trying to decide which bus ticket to buy, Turad discovers a discarded government file involving an abandoned one-eyed baby; from there, the experimental narrative expands to include anecdotes about the orphan’s distressing childhood, as well as reveries imagined by Turad in an effort to fill in the gaps left by the impersonal official documents. His inability to inject even the briefest respite into the child’s conjectured history speaks volumes. For Turad, life is an endless chain of pain and suffering.

Told over the course of an evening, and engulfed by mental fatigue, Al-Mohaimeed’s novel presents a variant of the existential dread found in works by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, albeit with more violence. The spellbinding narrative rarely feels anchored to its chief time and place, but instead hangs suspended within a hellish realm governed by fear, agony, and resentment.

In volleying between carefully recalled memories of his own suffering, detailed anecdotes about Tawfiq’s forced slavery and eventual castration, and embellishments about the abused orphan he never knew, Turad takes the role of a downtrodden Scheherazade. He’s capable of spinning 1,001 tales without the faintest hope of saving a single life. But his creator — at least until he was censored — speaks directly to those huddled in the margins of a secretive society. Wolves of the Crescent Moon might remain banned in Saudi Arabia for the foreseeable future; for now, Al-Mohaimeed will receive his well-deserved audience elsewhere in the world.

SFIAAFF: Are you lonesome tonight?

March 5, 2008

› kimberly@sfbg.com

Brad Renfro wasn’t the only cinematic figure neglected in the recent Academy Awards’ "In Memoriam" montage: the academy fumbled even harder in its omission of Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang, who died last June of colon cancer in Los Angeles at 59. The self-taught father of Taiwan’s cinematic new wave and a runaway Seattle software engineer who abandoned the tech field that made his classmates wealthy for his true love of filmmaking, Yang only created only eight films during his short, multi-career life, but during that brief span the Shanghai-born, Taipei-raised auteur managed to lend an influential, helping hand in the difficult birth of serious Taiwanese movie making.

Yang’s so-called old drinking buddies, screenwriter Wu Nien-chen and fellow director Hou Hsiao-hsien, were more than just sodden shoulders to cry on; they grappled with manifold frustrations of working independently in the Taiwanese film industry (described by Yang as "fragmented and run-down," with only a limited pool of experienced actors). This gang of three supported each other financially and artistically: according to Jeff Yang’s account in Once upon a Time in China (Atria, 2003), Wu spearheaded the anthology In Our Time (1982), which showcased Yang’s first theatrical film, and Hou mortgaged his house to underwrite Yang’s second feature, Taipei Story (1985), which Hou also starred in — and ended up losing his shirt for after it lasted all of four days in theaters.

Twin brothers by different mothers and both born in 1947, Hou and Yang created their breakthrough films in 1986: the former’s Dust in the Wind was also — surprise! — written by Wu, while the latter’s The Terrorizers is a handsome, cerebral urban psychological drama that flaunts new wave roots like a glittering pop offspring of Jean-Luc Godard. Inspiring critic Fredric Jameson to praise its "archaically modern" textures, The Terrorizers broke down, as writer David Leiwei Li writes in Chinese Films in Focus (BFI, 2003), the hidebound binaries of East and West as "tradition versus modernity, enabling readings that recognize both the border-transcending flow of global commerce and the reflexive capacity of residual local cultures."

It’s easy to read Hou’s and Yang’s early works as responses to one another, a relic of their barroom-pal give-and-take back in the day, and some might view Yang’s masterpiece, A Brighter Summer Day (1991), as simply a rejoinder to Hou’s critically acclaimed, box office record-breaker City of Sadness (1989), though it was made amid far more hazardous conditions — 1989 was the year the bottom fell out of the Taiwanese market for locally produced films, and audiences turned to Hong Kong–made entertainments. A few critics might even tag Yi Yi: A One and a Two as Yang’s greatest feature — for its warm, humanist blend of The Terrorizer‘s postmodern urban landscape, Yang’s evocative roundelay of reflective surfaces, and the gentle gaze he levels on its quietly deteriorating family, headed by a software company manager pater familias, played by Yang’s old friend Wu, and a mother in the throes of spiritual crisis (Day‘s Elaine Jin).

For its unseen but subtly telegraphed depths, referential richness, and the sheer breadth and long-shot scope of its four-hour running time, Day nonetheless deserves the praise lavished on it. Much like City, writes Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis in Taiwanese Film Directors: A Treasure Island (Columbia University Press, 2005), Day‘s "local history turns the lock on long-suppressed ideas," convincingly plunging the personal into an epic sphere. Rarely screened and unavailable on DVD (much like The Terrorizer), Day has been described as a Taiwanese Rebel Without a Cause (1955) — a true descriptor if one discounts the very specific mise-en-scène of early ’60s Taipei and the film’s dense connective web of cultural, political, and familial allusions, obligations, and affiliations, one that’s as many-tendrilled and enmeshing as that of your average multigenerational Chinese family.

Ensnared by filial duty as well as street gang politics and placed in the sweepingly de-centered core of Day is its proto–James Dean, Xiao Si’r, portrayed by the baby-faced Chang Chen (the nomadic hottie in Yang’s Taiwanese cohort Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [2000]). The director opens Day with Si’r’s Shanghainese intellectual father arguing with teachers about his son’s grades, and then widens his aperture imperceptibly, ingeniously onto the arboreal byways, flat-lit classrooms, vertigo-inducing corridors, and shadowy hideouts of Si’r’s world. It’s a realm in which the children of the Kuomintang live an uneasy existence much like their elders: residing in Japanese houses less than 20 years after their parents fought the Imperial army on the mainland, these Taiwanese teens listen to American doo-wop and early rock and form street gangs that parallel the battling political factions of the People’s Republic. Tanks rumble by as brownouts underline the sense of rupture.

Resembling in its panorama and chapterlike parts such historical epics as Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976), Day unfurls like a scroll, peppered by the shouts and orders of parents, peddlers, and teachers, and peopled with pungent characters like the Tolstoy-reading, romantically heroic hood Honey and his guilelessly calcuutf8g survivor of a sweetheart Ming — as well as Si’r’s bookish father, who’s torn from his self-absorption when taken into custody by the secret police. All bear the marks of severance from one’s past, papers, homeland, and other familiar signposts of identity. The quiet, troubled, and piercing irony that Yang applies to the scene of Si’r’s father’s arrest, one in which his children repeatedly play Presley’s "Are You Lonesome Tonight" in order to translate the lyric "Does your memory stray to a brighter summer day" to sing at some future sock hop haunted by the specter of Honey’s death — shades of the Jesus and Mary Chain — makes this teeming opus worth turning over again and again in your own memory. It’s like a battle hymn to a faltering family, or a love song to the death of innocence.

TRIBUTE TO EDWARD YANG

The Terrorizer

March 14, 9 p.m.

Yi Yi: A One and a Two

March 20, 7 p.m.

Pacific Film Archive

A Brighter Summer Day

March 19, 7 p.m.

Clay Theater

>> Complete Asian American Film Fest coverage

SFIAAFF: Manila: the drama

March 5, 2008

› johnny@sfbg.com

Over roughly the past year, Brillante Mendoza has brought a pair of films to festivals that pack a particular one-two punch when they are programmed to play at the same event. Foster Child first bears witness to the final day that caretaker Thelma Maglangqui (superb veteran actress Cherry Pie Picache) mothers three-or-four-year-old mestizo John-John (Kier Segundo), and as sunlight gives way to night, it follows her from a Manila slum into the ostentatious hotel where she passes him over to wealthy white foster parents from San Francisco. Slingshot also uses a real-time conceit, but in an entirely different manner — locked within the mazelike alleys and shanties of Manila’s Mandaluyong City, it foregoes long takes and methodical passages to careen as if the camera were a baton passed from one preoccupied, panicky person to another. Or perhaps more aptly, as if the point of view was a valuable that one character fleeces from another’s pocket.

As a melodrama, Foster Child fits into the dominant genre of Filipino feature films that screen at international festivals — a genre that certain North American critics might enjoy more than writers such as Richard Bolisay and Alexis Tioseco, whose critical conversations are as vital to thriving "CineManila" activity as any current filmmaker. In a piece on one of Tioseco’s excellent Web sites, Criticine, Noel Vera recalls a Rotterdam screening where fellow film scholar and Chicago-based critic Jonathan Rosenbaum compared Mike De Leon’s Kisapmata (1981) to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Martha (1974). Perhaps in that spirit, Rosenbaum’s contemporary, the critic and influential programmer Tony Rayns, has likened Foster Child to Fassbinder as well.

I’d add another comparison that, however Eurocentric, is meant as a great compliment: Foster Child shares a number of similarities with Douglas Sirk’s mother of all melodramas, Imitation of Life (1959), such as a harshly ironic perspective on maternal bonds in a racist, capitalist world. When Mendoza’s film reaches its final wrenching moments — and Thelma seems stripped, at least temporarily, of life (even the future repetition of her foster maternal duties is harrowing) — a lesser director would have simply milked the pathos. Instead, Mendoza allows no mercy to invade his sympathy, presenting a sequence that calls to mind a scenario depicting Lana Turner’s selfish protests by the bedside of her dying maid Annie (Juanita Moore) in 1959’s Imitation of Life, a sight that is extra bitter because Annie’s lost daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) can be seen smiling in a nearby framed picture within the shot. Foster Child‘s climactic heartbreak is set against a backdrop of vulgar department store displays that privilege white glamour and which celebrate a false vision of familiar perfection. "The house that love built," proclaims one callow ad, depicting a mother and child. The cruel gods of capitalist marketing provide perfectly horrible set design.

Those last glances, leading to a weary climb up a concrete public transit stairwell, also ricochet off Foster Child‘s sustained (and indeed Fassbinder-like) first shot: a silent, postcard-perfect view of Manila’s high-rise cityscape that gives way to a noisier look at the ramshackle slums at the feet of those skyscrapers. A more subtle echo occurs between two scenes that take place nearer to the narrative’s center: an idyllic, sunlit view of Thelma bathing John-John outside her home, and a later moment when she has to wash him in a hotel’s many-mirrored, intimidating bathroom.

Engaged Web sites such as Bolisay’s Lilok Pelikula (Sculpting Cinema) have greeted this neorealist symbolism, and Foster Child‘s standing ovation at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, with some wariness. Indeed, it is frustrating if international audiences take Mendoza’s movies for the whole of Filipino independent film today, when thanks to the punk-fueled Khavn de la Cruz, the monumental Lav Diaz, the prodigiously visionary Raya Martin, and the autobiographical John Torres, CineManila is frankly more inspired than almost all of the indie film — and much of the experimental work — currently coming from the United States. Mendoza’s talent equals or bests anyone who has passed through the Sundance factory in the past decade, but he and his more formally radical contemporaries have to vie for the same too-few spaces allocated to feature films from the Philippines at most festivals.

By working within relatively linear narrative structures and feature-length frameworks, Mendoza veers toward the mainstream currents of vital Filipino independent cinema. But he’s demonstrating great versatility. Slingshot‘s burnt-brown palette, verging on black-and-white in nighttime scenes, contrasts greatly with the more colorful, sun-dappled view of slum life in Foster Child, which is so pleasant that soap bubbles blown by children float through one shot. But it would be a mistake to see Foster Child‘s view of cramped city blocks as purely idealized, simply because a fresh array of mothers with newborn babies can be found on every corner — a scene in which foster system overseer Bianca (comedienne Eugene Domingo) greets these women and knowingly checks in on their offspring has a sinister underpinning.

Its title translated from a term (tirador) denoting a street hustler, Slingshot is harder and faster — money or valuables are frequently handed from one character to another on the sly as people move in an out of a shot that is itself moving forward. A viewer had best be on the top of his or her game while watching, because everyone in the film is on the make. But the gay Mendoza brings a subversive eye to the masculine genre of action: he knows that harder and faster might seem tougher, but it doesn’t necessarily mean one is savvier. Interestingly, while Slingshot‘s critical reception in CineManila realms seems warmer than that given to Foster Child, the film has had its share of semiblind assessments in English-language publications. More than one critic has complained that the film wears a viewer out with its frantic pace before it abruptly ends. The reviews fail to note that Mendoza frames his many-stranded story line and slum-stranded characters amid a broader view of societal and political corruption. He kicks the story off with cops raiding blocks of Mandaluyong City to round up and arrest people who are then bailed out by politicians in exchange for votes. He fades out with a glimpse of a pickpocket at work during a quasireligious campaign rally dominated by empty, clichéd speeches.

Between those crowd scenes, Slingshot joins a wide variety of characters for intimate treks through semi-anonymous acts, only to abandon them — just as fate might and a politician’s promises are certain to. Tess (Angela Ruiz) steals video equipment to pay for a pair of dentures. Her illicit lover Rex (Kristofer King) neglects fatherhood in favor of druggy reverie. In an example of tail-biting irony, the impulsive Caloy (Coco Martin, whose open-faced melancholy carries over from Mendoza’s debut feature The Masseur [2005]) needs to scrape together cash to keep the pedicab that he’s using to earn money. Meanwhile, Leo (Nathan Ruiz, the gamine title character of Aureaus Solito’s 2005 The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, now adolescent and pimply) begins what will eventually become one of the worst days of his life by accidentally getting his dick caught in his pants zipper. The two-dimensional faces of political candidates — including actor Richard Gomez, then running in real life for a Senate position — look on from the campaign billboards and posters that dominate public spaces.

In the eyes of the official system, Lopez’s Leo is the thief character of Slingshot‘s Tagalog title, but in the real world he’s just one of many everyday bandits, who are doing whatever they can to survive while a faceless upper class profits from their votes. There’s a potent undercurrent to Lopez’s performance perhaps being the titular one, though, since it’s much harsher than the similar turn he delivered as Maximo in Solito’s comparatively romantic film festival favorite. The differences in pace and look between Foster Child and Slingshot demonstrate that Mendoza is capable of sculpting widely contrasting true visions of Manila’s streets, which in turn shows that the exact same setting can take on widely varying characteristics based on one’s perspective at any given moment.

Part of Mendoza’s versatility might be grounded in his background as a production designer under the name Dante Mendoza. It also might reflect a developing, nuanced queer sensibility, one that has forsaken forebear Mel Chiongo’s eye for international markets to also produce a feature, 2007’s Pantasya, that possibly plays off of Slingshot‘s view of corrupt police forces and probably adds a critical dimension to the age-old "I love a man in an uniform" motif of gay porn. After half a dozen features as a director, Mendoza has ranged from melodrama to action, from a pentet of gay sex fantasies to a story about education amid the Aeta tribe (2006’s Manoro). His next step will probably be hard to predict, and it’ll definitely be worth watching.

FOSTER CHILD

March 14, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki

March 16, noon, Kabuki

SLINGSHOT

March 15, 7 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

March 18, 7 p.m., Kabuki

>> Complete Asian American Film Fest coverage

Newsom to clubs: Curb it!

February 28, 2008

Bad partiers! Go to your room!

Today our former pAArtying mayor (bitter?), himself a nightlife magnate, proposed some rather sketchy “Nightlife Reform Legislation” aimed at, he says, curbing all the violence going on in the vicinity of clubs. Because nightclubs are really the ground zero of violence in this city, of course.

The only violence we see here is the muffin top on the right.

The proposed legislation will now go to the Board of Supervisors for approval, was co-sponsored by Supervisor Sophie Maxwell (in whose district a recent shooting at Jelly’s occurred), and was announced this afternoon by Newsom alongside Police Chief Heather Fong, members of the Entertainment Commission and local nightclub owners and promoters. We’re all for stopping the violence, but we’re also all for being able to throw a party free of governmental intrusion — hey, we’re nightlife libertarians! — and price tags in the thousands, both of which may be incurred by the below. Send an email to your supervisor now in protest — this legislation could wipe out a ton of independently produced parties, folks.

****It will be illegal, between the hours of 9pm-3am, to loiter within 10 feet of any nightclub (no word yet on bars). People waiting for the bus are excluded. What about people waiting for taxis? Or talking on the phone? And better drag on those smokes pretty quick! And hey, bangers, you’ll just have to shoot each other in the parking lot across the street, k? Update: according to SF Gate, people waiting for taxis and smoking will also be exempted

****Promoters will be held directly responsible for any incidents that happen at nightclubs they’re throwing parties at (Is that why local nightclub owners are excited about it?)

****The legislation proposes that ALL promoters who throw more than two parties a year obtain permits (wonder how much those will cost — and if the “promoters” in on the talks were high rollers looking for an easy way to quash competition?)

****All afterhours nightclubs will have to create “security plans” to be approved by the Executive Director of the Entertainment Commission (again, no word on what the cost will be).

We’ll clear up some of the details above and follow the story here. Full proposed legislation press release after the jump.

Don’t phunk with my hope

February 27, 2008

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER You probably can’t tell, but I’m totally high. I gotta be because I can’t stop watching this Kennedy family endorsement and that Texas debate clip, this crushed-out cult of personality vid and that hip-hop remix ode. I’ve admitted I’m powerless over my addiction — that my life has become unmanageable. And I’ve come to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. That power is will.i.am — I mean, Barack Obama. Look, I know I got a problem: I can’t stop watching Black-Eyed Pea will.i.am’s celeb-studded "Yes We Can" video in praise of the Illinois senator. Frankly, I lo.a.the the Peas — "Let’s Get Retarded," yo, I didn’t think up that title — and I can’t stop wanting to repunctuate will.i.am’s gooberish stage handle, and even "Yes We Can" is a bit embarrassing.

But the tune is queued up there along with the Oprah clips, the 60 Minutes sound bites, and the "john.he.is" parody. You know Obama’s got something going on when his speechifying inspires such spontaneous music-making — and oh yeah, I’m tripping on the fact that we went to the same Honolulu prep school, and I’m drunk on the possibility of electing the first African American president, and I’m getting dizzy looking back through the media’s looking-glass lens at him, myself, and a shared past through yearbook photos of a now strikingly diverse-looking Punahou school. Sure, he complained about the school in his memoir, much like me and my friends have — at the time it seemed like a lily-white beacon of privilege on a brown island. I feel like I’m tumbling down a historically revisionist rabbit hole, seeing it as both exotic — and for presidential candidates of a certain age, class, and region, it is — and familiar. Now it looks like the culturally diverse rainbow gathering of kids that civil rights activists were fighting for. Maybe I’ll have to write a song about it.

Get on the Bus, Part Two Hope is in the air, and I’m feeling it, listening to Evil Wikkid Warrior’s John Benson talk about his recent troubles with the Bus, the 40-foot AC Transit behemoth he converted into a vegetable oil–swilling clean machine and mobile-as-a-dinosaur, all-ages, all-fun free underground music venue. Noise and party starters from here and away like Warhammer, Fucking Ocean, and Rubber O Cement have been playing down-low shows in the vehicle while it was parked on quiet, oft-industrial San Francisco and East Bay streets, but that all seemed to screech to a dead halt when, on Dec. 22, 2007, after a West Oakland show put on by a Benson cohort, the Bus was vandalized.

Bored neighborhood youth, Benson theorized, smashed all its glass windows, busted its solar panels, and threw bricks on top of it. "It was probably just a bunch of bored kids in the middle of the night. They saw this big thing, and it was like, ‘Duh, throw rock at big thing,’<0x2009>" offered Benson, who at the time was on a trip to Detroit. When he returned a few days later, the former A Minor Forest and Hale Zukas member faced compounding problems: the winter rain had flooded the exposed interior, damaging the electricity, warping the wooden floorboards, and causing the oriental rugs to molder.

Benson had planned to take the bus to Mexico to shoot a film, but that was out of the question. "The police told me that I wasn’t allowed to keep any vehicle on the street with a broken windshield and windows and they’d have to tow it," he recalled. "But then I also wasn’t allowed to drive a vehicle with a broken windshield. It was a catch-22, and with no place to keep it, the cops visited me on a daily basis." He also couldn’t find glass that would fit in the windshield, since most of the AC Transit fleet from back in the Bus’s day had been sold to Mexico, according to Benson, and it appeared that the only glass available would have to come from there — at more than $1,000 a piece.

Fortunately Benson’s friends and the noise community-of-sorts came together to support him. Guardian contributor George Chen threw a benefit that raised about $300, and word got out on the message board Spockmorgue that Benson needed money to repair the bus and a PayPal account was started on his behalf. Benson told me, "I did spend a lot of money on new solar panels and new skylights," but what kept him going were the many people "e-mailing me privately, saying ‘Keep it up, John. Don’t give up. Don’t give up.’ I just got a huge amount of support from people I don’t even know." One Boston member of the message board donated $100 simply because he said he had heard about the Bus through his friends who had performed on it and wanted to help.

An artist friend welded new metal frames to fit the vintage 1962 windshield glass that Benson discovered were the closest fit for the Bus, and after a few months of work the Bus was finally completed at the beginning of February. "It was miserable," he remembered. "We were literally working in rain under tarps, broken glass everywhere, bleeding fingers, miserable. There was a 24-hour paint job with a lot of volunteers. Someone said it was like Fitzcarraldo — there were so many times we were burned and bloody and freezing cold in rain, trying to the get floor replaced and carpet. Definitely insane."

Fortunately, work was completed in time for Benson to drive the mammoth vehicle down to Miami for the International Noise Festival, picking up pals and playing shows along the way. Later this spring he’ll head back to Florida to do more work on the Bus — it’s resting in Orlando in a friend’s backyard — and then drive it north for an East Coast tour. "In terms of love the bus is doing better than ever," Bensons said happily, while eating chicken with his 12-year-old daughter, who’s also his Evil Wikkid Warrior bandmate. "Mechanically it’s just a little wrinkled." *

NEW WRINKLES

TAKEN BY TREES

Pretty! The Concretes’ Victoria Bergsman (who contributes vox on Peter Bjorn and John’s "Young Folks") takes to dreamy chamber indie, written around her love of arboreal life, with Open Field (Rough Trade, 2007). With White Hinterland. Sat/1, 9 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

RICKY LEE ROBINSON

The Oakland rock ‘n’ roller cuddles up to classic ’60s and ’70s pop values at his CD-release show while playing drums and guitar simultaneously, somewhat like "that sad guy in the straw hat at Six Flags whose eye contact you and your punk friends made sure to avoid," according to Robinson. With the Dilettantes and the Pandas. Sun/2, 9 p.m., $10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

MAMMAL AND MANSLAUGHTER

Detroit’s Animal Disguise artisto embraces a darker breed of death-beat mesmerism, alongside Manslaughter, a "stupor group" including Sixes and Noel von Harmonson. With Chinese Stars and Pod Blotz. Sun/2, 8 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

LANGHORNE SLIM

The Philly native gives a few hard hugs to a freewheeling brand of full-band electric folk on his soon-to-be-acclaimed Langhorne Slim (Kemado). With Nicole Atkins and the Sea, and the Parlor Mob. Mon/3, 8 p.m., $12–<\d>$14. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Bent empire

February 19, 2008

REVIEW Holy glowing gonads! That’s what popped into my head — as my eyes popped out — when I entered the second room of the de Young Museum’s gorgeous "Gilbert and George" exhibition, which encompasses 30 years and 65 pieces of the British duo’s video, graphic, and two-dimensional sculpture work. There, two neon-explosive series of four humongous photomontages — Death Hope Life Fear (1984) and Shitty Naked Human World (1994) — are hung directly opposite each other, tugging the viewer into a phosphorescent hallway of actual shit and roses.

The first quadripartite series is peppered with the pair’s customary images of ethnically diverse underage hustlers, English roses, and collaged ziggurats of the artists themselves, magically combined to suggest all that was evil and delicious about the Thatcherite ’80s. The second, famously, floats giant turds against a backdrop of luminescent color and naked shots of the artists’ ass cracks and shriveled penises. Both sets are gloriously naughty, and when I caught a glimpse of prim society matron Dee Dee Wilsey standing perplexed beneath World‘s giant ball of flying crap, I almost lost it.

The rest of the exhibit goes on like this: feces fly, sperm spurts, blood boils, men and boys bare all, and enough sacred cows are roasted to fill a few Sizzler menus. And always, the deadpan artists peek through the mayhem like two chipped teacups adrift on a postcolonial ocean of desire. Even though Gilbert was born in Italy, the inseparable pair, with their matching worsted suits, impeccable manners, and sexually coy public personae, are so very British. Surely they’re commenting, from their tidy little studio in Spitalfields, East London, on the wreck and temptations of empire?

The show’s first room, dedicated to the artists’ early graphic work, contains some excellent aesthetic tingles but mostly concerns itself visually with a rote investigation of the possibilities of red, white, and black. You can sense Gilbert and George limiting their palette to a trio of fussy tones perhaps to excuse their content, fairly outré for the ’70s fine art world: spray-painted penis graffiti (1978’s The Penis), sticky puns on orientalism (1974’s Cherry Blossom No. 1), and other furtive steps into the realm of rebellious hyperinfantilism they would soon make their own.

It was during this nascent period that Gilbert and George developed their singular style: mixing multiple photographs of themselves with those of their immediate environs to make a single image, then blowing it up enormously and subdividing it into a grid of framed panels hung flush with one another, like a stained-glass window of perfect squares. As their artistic journey progressed and as the show winds through the basement galleries, their pictures burst with clashing tints and increasingly weirder experiments with displaced symmetry.

Various themes — ’80s youth-culture fetishism (for hipsters infatuated with fluorescent leg warmers, this is the show of the century), the tormented and fashionable spiritual journeys of the ’90s, a pungent streak of antipapism, and more than a few dips into pedophilia — are given the scatological Manic Panic rainbow treatment. Then the 2006 Terror pictures arrive, made in response to the London bus bombings, and the palette recollapses into a stunned black, red, and white, the English roses become torturous thorns, and pilfered headlines like "Police Quiz Bomb Suspect’s Father" are scrawled across each panel. So maybe there are limits?

Crime cameras for the defense

February 19, 2008

EDITORIAL We’ve always been dubious about San Francisco’s crime cameras. Filming everyone who passes through a public space creates severe civil liberties problems. There are real First Amendment issues. And as far as we can tell, the spy cams don’t work very well: none of the 178 cameras on Housing Authority property have ever led to an arrest in a homicide case. Chief Heather Fong told the Police Commission on Feb. 6 that her officers have requested footage nearly 80 times but only twice was it at all useful.

From the first days when the city began talking about installing the cameras, the American Civil Liberties Union and others pointed out that all the electronic surveillance on high-crime street corners would do was drive crime to other places. The commission has mandated that the cameras be turned off during political demonstrations, and some critics, including commissioner David Campos, are watching very closely to see if all of this intrusive electronic surveillance is making the city any safer.

But if we’re going to have crime cameras, they ought to be used to protect the innocent.

As G.W. Schulz reports on page 16, the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office has an interest in using the footage. Last August two young African American men were arrested and charged with robbing a pair of airline workers at the corner of 14th Street and Mission. The alleged robbers insisted they hadn’t been at that corner; in fact, they said, they were two blocks away, at 16th Street and Mission, the entire time.

That should have been easy to prove: there are cameras at 16th Street and Mission. But the city’s Department of Emergency Management refused to turn over the video footage to the public defender. Only by chance and the intervention of a conscientious police inspector was the lawyer for the two men able to get the tapes — which proved that the young men, who faced long prison sentences, were entirely innocent.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi says there are at least a dozen other examples of incidents when the cameras could have proved one of his clients innocent — but the local law enforcement authorities won’t give up the pictures.

That’s crazy. If the cameras can be used for prosecution, they ought to be available to lawyers for people who want to establish an alibi. There’s little or no risk here: defense lawyers are officers of the court, sworn to protect confidential evidence, and they are routinely given access to sensitive law enforcement information. The entire principle of a fair trial requires that the defense have as much opportunity to prove innocence as the prosecution does to prove guilt — and in most cases all of the state’s evidence has to be turned over to the defense. If cops and prosecutors can see the city’s crime-camera tapes, why can’t the other side?

Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, a former public defender, has introduced legislation that would allow defense lawyers access to the tapes; it’s a sensible, practical measure that ought to win easy approval. But Kevin Ryan, the Republican former United States attorney who runs Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office of criminal justice, is trying to scuttle Sandoval’s bill. This is exactly the sort of thing we were worried about when Newsom gave that job to an old-fashioned law-and-order type.

Newsom needs to show his cards on this issue. Does the mayor really think the cameras should be used only to lock people up and never to set them free? That would be an astonishing stance for a San Francisco mayor. Instead of leaving this to his aides, Newsom needs to come out in support of Sandoval’s bill and give Ryan a little primer on justice, San Francisco–style.

Sharing the Panopticon

February 19, 2008

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

When two airline workers were robbed at 14th and Mission streets last August, the victims called 911 and described their attackers to the dispatcher as a pair of African American males.

At the time, several groups of people stood two blocks away at the always manic intersection of 16th and Mission streets, a high-crime area where the city installed four public surveillance cameras as part of an ongoing pilot project that began in 2005.

Police nabbed two suspects there whom they believed fit the description, and the victims later identified the duo as their attackers. Case closed. Except for one problem: the suspects claimed they were standing at 16th and Mission streets the whole time and never ventured two blocks away, to where the robbery occurred.

So a deputy public defender, Eric Quandt, tried to obtain footage from the city’s controversial public safety cameras to confirm their story. He was denied access to it by the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management because, according to the city’s Administrative Code, only police officers with a written request can review the recordings.

Other government agencies must get a court order, and since the recordings are held by the city for no more than seven days, by the time defense attorneys realize crucial evidence might exist, it’s likely to be long gone.

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s expansion of public surveillance cameras across the city has been the subject of regular criticism from privacy advocates who say no substantial evidence exists that they reduce crime or provide valuable evidence to prosecutors. But few imagined Big Brother could serve as an alibi proving someone’s whereabouts when police placed the wrong suspect at the scene of a crime.

Quandt managed to get the footage in time after appealing to a police inspector, and 23-year-old Neil Butler and 21-year-old Robert Dillon, who had served 70 days in jail, were freed. However, the city’s elected public defender, Jeff Adachi, said there have been almost a dozen or so other instances when his office believed surveillance footage from the cameras could refute a prosecutor’s claims, but city officials have barred PDs from accessing it.

"These two men would have faced decades in prison," Adachi told the Guardian, "so I find it shocking that law enforcement would object to the defense obtaining these tapes. It has to be a two-way street."

"[City officials] act as if they have a proprietary right over the footage," added Rebecca Young, the managing attorney for Adachi’s felony unit. "We are officers of the court. We should not have to deal with bureaucratic red tape to access and review the footage."

Few cities in the United States have rules in place reguutf8g the use of surveillance footage to begin with, so determining procedures for how defense attorneys might use the cameras to free innocent people once again puts San Francisco on the cutting edge of public policy.

After learning about the robbery case last August, Sup. Gerardo Sandoval decided defense lawyers need access to the recordings if they could be used as evidence to free people wrongfully charged with crimes.

Sandoval’s legislation would require the city to preserve the footage for 30 days instead of seven, giving defendants more time to access the footage. Their lawyers would only need to submit a written request to the Department of Emergency Management, which controls the tapes.

But Newsom’s newly appointed top criminal-justice aide, Kevin Ryan, and the mayor’s chief of staff, Phil Ginsburg, want to kill the legislation, claiming it would cost the city too much money and could potentially compromise ongoing criminal investigations by exposing witnesses or confidential informants who appear in the footage.

"It’s safe to say that they tried to derail the legislation," Sandoval told the Guardian.

Ryan, you may recall, is the former US attorney for the Northern District of California who attempted to define his law enforcement career by prosecuting the steroids scandal in major-legal baseball and later the stock options backdating imbroglio that consumed Silicon Valley.

His last major imprint on the public, however, came when the White House ousted him from the Justice Department along with seven other chief federal prosecutors. While his colleagues were said to be let go because they weren’t fully cooperative with the GOP’s political agenda, it was reported that Ryan was asked to resign because of mounting criticism that he’d poorly managed his office and alienated staffers, despite being an eager loyalist of President George W. Bush.

After that, Ryan worked briefly in the private sector before Newsom surprised the city at the beginning of the year by making him director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. While a prominent San Francisco Democrat making a Republican devotee his top aide on issues related to crime raised eyebrows, Ryan’s inaugural act in that capacity epitomizes the outlook of a conservative law enforcement official.

Sandoval has attached to his ordinance a string of amendments to satisfy law enforcement, such as instituting punishments for defense lawyers who publicly disclose videos and allowing the district attorney and the Police Department 180 days to review footage and block its release if it’s deemed too sensitive for any reason.

However, the supervisor says he’s still not sure that Newsom, through his new conservative crime-fighting proxy, will accept making a traditional tool of law enforcement the new weapon of public defenders who serve indigent criminal suspects.

"I got the impression from Ryan that he outright opposed it," Adachi said. "But I’m not sure where the mayor stands on it."

Ryan and mayoral chief of staff Ginsburg did not return calls for this story, nor did the mayor’s press spokesperson, Nathan Ballard, respond to a detailed e-mail.

But Ryan has already shown a willingness to flout Newsom’s caution on the cameras. After the Feb. 6 Police Commission meeting, Ryan told the San Francisco Chronicle that police should be permitted to monitor the city’s surveillance cameras in real time to identify crimes about to occur or already in progress.

When the safety cameras were first launched, however, Newsom made a major concession to privacy advocates, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California most notable among them, by prohibiting law enforcement officials from watching the cameras live, in part to protect against potential voyeurism or racial profiling.

Ryan’s desire to expand the camera program is "all the more reason to make sure there’s a process in place," Adachi said, for defense lawyers to obtain the footage.

The Police Commission, meanwhile, has made it clear that the footage should not be widely available as public records and the cameras ought to be shut off during political demonstrations to protect First Amendment rights and keep federal agents from using them to target undocumented immigrants.

"If the public defender or a defense lawyer needs it, to me that’s an appropriate use of the information," police commissioner David Campos told the Guardian. "The concern should be: is there any way to keep the feds from getting this footage? We don’t have a way of doing that right now."

San Francisco launched its surveillance program in mid-2005 with two cameras outside public housing tracts in the Western Addition. Two and a half years later, 74 cameras are spread across the city in 25 locations, even though city officials were still calling this a pilot project as recently as this month.

The city was supposed to provide the Board of Supervisors and the Police Commission with a report by last year that evaluated how well the cameras were performing, but city administrator Ed Lee has missed several deadlines, and now it’s not due until March.

Jennifer King, a research analyst for the University of California at Berkeley’s Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic, is leading the study and says it’s one of only two that she’s aware of taking place in the US at this time.

A preliminary report done by the Berkeley team will only include an analysis of crime statistics, but a second study will involve comparing camera locations with control sites that are the same size and have similar demographics and crime profiles, because "there could have been changes in the background crime rate citywide that had nothing to do with the cameras," King told the Guardian.

In the meantime, Police Chief Heather Fong told the commission Feb. 6 that inspectors had requested footage nearly 80 times but in only two instances was it "useful in a prosecution."

At another public meeting last year, an official acknowledged that of the 178 cameras controlled by the federally subsidized San Francisco Housing Authority, none has ever led to an arrest in a homicide case, despite the fact that a large percentage of the city’s violent crime occurs in public housing developments.

Even Sandoval’s not convinced of the cameras’ efficacy: "We have to do everything we can to make sure everyone has fair access to the cameras…. But I’m fairly certain that the cameras really are just an intrusion into our privacy and the risk greatly outweighs any benefit."

Milked

February 19, 2008

OPINION It seems that everyone, from current politicians to former friends and lovers of Harvey Milk, is scrambling to serve as a spokesperson for the new Hollywood movie about the life of Milk, the first openly gay elected official in a major United States city.

Milk joined the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, only to be assassinated (along with then-mayor George Moscone) one year later by Dan White, another member of the board.

Cleve Jones, who worked as a student intern in Milk’s City Hall office (and later started the AIDS Memorial Quilt), is now serving as a consultant for the Gus Van Sant film. At the Castro Theatre on Feb. 4 he encouraged a crowd of extras gathered to re-create the candlelight march that took place after Milk’s murder by saying, "We made history on these streets, and we’re gonna do it again tonight."

But remaking historical moments from the pain and glory days of the past is hardly the same thing as making history in the present. In the 1970s queers fled abusive and stifling families and places of origin to move to San Francisco by the thousands and join dissident subcultures of splendor and defiance. Of course, queers still flee similar conditions; it’s just that the hypergentrified San Francisco of 2008 barely offers the space to breathe, let alone dream.

The excitement around reenactment obscures the reality that some of the same smiling gay men who came to San Francisco in the 1970s have consistently fought misogynist, racist, classist, ageist battles — from carding policies to policing practices to zoning and real estate wars — to ensure that their neighborhood (Milk’s Castro) remains a home only for the rich, white, and male (or at least those who assimilate to white middle-class norms).

Check out a quote from Dan Jinks, one of the producers of the movie, in the Dec. 27, 2007, Bay Area Reporter: "Our great hope is this will revitalize this district and make it a major tourist destination."

Revitalize the Castro, where you’re lucky if you can rent a flat for less than $4,000 or buy property for less than $1 million? Everyone who’s ever set foot in the Castro knows it’s filled with tourists from around the world!

Oh, I know what Jinks means: straight tourists. Some gay people are so anxious to participate in their own cultural erasure.

After White’s 1979 trial, at which he was convicted of manslaughter instead of murder and given a lenient sentence, rioting queers torched police cars and smashed the windows and doors of City Hall. Later that night vengeful cops went to the Castro and destroyed the windows of the Elephant Walk (now Harvey’s), entered the bar to beat up patrons and trash the place, and swung their batons into anyone they encountered.

I’m wondering if the new Van Sant film will end at the candlelight march, thus avoiding talk about such market-unfriendly issues as systemic police violence and property destruction as a political act.

Unfortunately, San Francisco is now more of a playground for the wealthy than a space for the delirious potential of dissidence. But there are still plenty of reasons to protest. Got housing? Got health care? Got citizenship? Nope, we’re just getting milked.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (www.mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is the editor, most recently, of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Seal Press, 2006) and an expanded second edition of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (out in June from Soft Skull Press).

Solo budgeting

February 19, 2008

› sarah@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom is giving his department heads until Feb. 21 to draw up a list of services and positions to be reduced and eliminated, but Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin notes this isn’t how city government is supposed to work.

"Technically, things aren’t being cut," Peskin told the Guardian. "Instead, the mayor is signaling that he is refusing to spend the money that has been appropriated by the board in the budget that was voted on and signed last year."

Last summer the Board of Supervisors used the add-back process to appropriate funds the mayor hadn’t sought, thus funding services such as the Workers Compensation Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital and Buster’s Place, the city’s only 24-hour homeless shelter, until the end of fiscal year 2007–08.

But now these same services are being targeted midyear. The mayor announced last November, shortly after he was reelected, that the city faces a projected $229 million budget, so he was demanding an immediate hiring freeze and across-the-board cuts.

As mayoral spokesperson Nathan Ballard reportedly told the San Francisco Chronicle last fall, "Although he wants to trim the fat, the mayor made it abundantly clear he doesn’t want to see a reduction in people sweeping streets or police officers walking beats."

But while city department heads spent the past few months trying to tighten belts, the mayor apparently expanded his, according to budget analyst Harvey Rose’s Feb. 13 report, which details the monetary impact of changes to Newsom’s staff — changes the mayor first announced Jan. 4.

"Don’t think that the irony of the revelations that have been made over the past few weeks has been lost on anyone," Peskin told us, referring to how Newsom added two entirely new positions, increased the pay of senior staff and newly appointed department heads in the Mayor’s Office, and raided the budgets of other agencies to pay for it all.

According to Rose’s report, the budgetary impact of Newsom’s staff changes amounted to an increase of $553,716, with other city departments funding about $1.34 million in annual salaries and benefits for 10 positions assigned to the Mayor’s Office.

These include two newly created jobs — namely, the mayor’s climate change director, Wade Crowfoot, and the mayor’s homelessness policy director, Dariush Kayhan.

Peskin admits that the spending Rose identified is a relative drop in the bucket, compared to the city’s $229 million deficit. "Yes, it’s not enough to significantly close the gap or save a significant number of services, but it’s symbolic," Peskin said, noting that even as homeless shelters are being fingered for elimination, the Human Services Agency is paying $169,624 annually for the mayor’s new homelessness policy director.

"And when voters approved more money for Muni, the mayor used it to hire people to pound out messages about climate change, when the best way to reduce greenhouse gases is to get people out of their cars," Peskin said, referring to Newsom’s new climate change director, hired at an annual cost of $130,112, using the Municipal Transportation Authority’s Safety and Training funds.

"It’s very frustrating and unfortunate," Peskin said, further noting that the $401,392 to terminate Susan Leal without cause as general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission will come from the city’s water fees.

"This is indicative of the misplaced priorities of the mayor," said Peskin, who doesn’t deny that spending control is required in the face of a looming deficit but resents how the mayor has been trying to do it unilaterally and not in cooperation with the board.

"The budget, by design, is a two-way street," Peskin observed.

Sup. Chris Daly claimed the services being targeted for Newsom’s midyear elimination are "a who’s who of the board’s priorities…. These are human and health services that the mayor has proposed be cut multiple times."

Daly’s legislative aide, John Avalos, who is running for District 11 supervisor, notes that while Daly wanted $33 million for affordable housing, a onetime amount, the mayor took a budget surplus and used it for multiple years, with the police, firefighters’, and nurses’ contracts accounting for his biggest expenditures.

Asked why the city’s deficit has ballooned by $144 million — from the $85.3 million the Controller and Budget Analyst’s offices identified in March 2007 to the $229 million that Newsom’s administration was suddenly projecting last fall — Tom DiSanto, budget and revenue manager for the Controller’s Office, cites an extra $82 million in salaries and benefits.

These include the four-year contracts that nurses and police and fire departments secured last summer, along with five extra police academies, said DiSanto, who also listed $7 million in police crime laboratory debt service, $7.4 million for sheriff inmate housing (required by last year’s Supreme Court order that prisoners can’t sleep on floors), and the $29 million transit set-aside that voters approved last November when they passed Proposition A.

But as DiSanto explains, the city’s budget problem is due not to lack of revenue but to baseline funding and rainy-day reserve requirements, not to mention the political process.

"Right now, with baselines and reserves, 96¢ out of every dollar goes into set-asides, and we’re required to adopt a balanced budget," DiSanto said. "That’s where the cuts come in. If we could access all the city’s revenues, we wouldn’t have a $229 million projected deficit," he added, noting that revenues are up, property taxes are higher than budgeted, and the hotel tax continues to be strong.

Ken Bruce, senior manager at the Budget Analyst’s Office, notes that unlike the federal government, the city of San Francisco has to balance the budget. He also says the current deficit projection comes from the Controller’s and the Mayor’s offices, not the Budget Analyst’s Office.

"In mid-March we get to do a joint forecast," Bruce told the Guardian. "It may paint a better picture, less of a doomsday scenario, but it still leaves us facing difficult policy choices. [The deficit] won’t drop from $230 million to $100 million."

Peskin envisions several long-term solutions, hopefully including positive changes in the White House this fall.

"With every passing year, as the federal government has abandoned the cities, we’ve taken more of a burden, and labor and capital costs have increased," says Peskin, who is mulling changes to the real estate transfer tax and closing a loophole whereby lawyers and accountants in limited liability partnerships have escaped paying payroll taxes.

That said, Peskin sees no easy fixes in the city’s upcoming budget hearings:

"It’s a fluid situation, and it’s all bad."

Talking points

February 12, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The two women invited to a mysterious dinner party in the American Conservatory Theater–commissioned Brainpeople have no idea why they’re there. For some time we’re not sure why we are either. After detouring into the uncharacteristically straightforward screenplays of The Motorcycle Diaries and Trade, playwright José Rivera is back in quirky magic-realist overdrive. Too much of this 80-minute one-act feels propelled by a willful eccentricity less delightful than pointless. There is a point, though — and it’s worth the wait.

Dressed-to-kill beauty Mayannah (Lucia Brawley) has summoned two houseguests to her Los Angeles manse, which is heavily fortified against the violent police state outside. Both are promised substantial monetary reward for their attendance, though it seems all they’ve got to do is arrive (via armored limo) and enjoy "the meal of your lives."

This must be too good to be true. Garrulous wallflower Ani (Sona Tatoyan) voices our suspicions by nervously inquiring if the huge platter o’ mystery meat is, er, people. (It ain’t, but it is something equally seldom masticated.) Fellow guest Rosemary (Rene Augesen) doesn’t care what it is — she is hungry. She also displays odd shifts in mood and accent, soon exposed as a whole cacophonous chorus of schizoid "brainpeople" taking turns à la Sybil with her body and behavior.

In Daniel Ostling’s creepy-elegant dining room set, beautifully lit by Paul Whitaker, all three women reveal their demons via flamboyant yet unfelt monologues. Augesen in particular contorts through multivoice fireworks more actor punitive than audience rewarding. But Rivera and director Chay Yew’s premiere production are heading somewhere. When the "miracle" Mayannah hoped would occur this evening does, performers and play transcend all prior filigreed excess. Brainpeople ends on a sustained grace note that’s unsettling, poignant, and haunting.

CURVY, BALLSY?

There’s just one woman’s voice revealing all in Curvy Widow, the Cybill Shepherd showcase that’s opened here after a reportedly very rough Atlanta tryout and considerable retooling. But it’s the kind that can suck air out of a room all by itself.

A first playwriting effort by Bobby Goldman, widow of stage and screen writer James Goldman (The Lion in Winter), this plotless autobiographical monologue is the precise equivalent of an experience everybody suffers sometime: you’re stuck with that worst-case-scenario stranger who views every social contact as a passive admirer to regale with dazzling banter about their adventures, knowledge, professional stature, and general fabulousness. Yet all you’re hearing is the deafening roar of hot air. Under such circumstances even an elevator ride can seem interminable. Curvy Widow is 90 minutes long.

Shepherd’s "character" (the program leaves no doubt that Goldman "IS The Curvy Widow") is a 57-year-old professional fixer who does everything from choose furniture to chase squirrels out of the house, enabling other rich folk to do zilch for themselves. Her meant-to-be-hilarious dating travails include many descriptions of men who are rude, unattractive, "dumb as posts," or otherwise less than worthy of her. But just what does the widow deserve? Not jury duty, vaginal dryness, or various other complaints that amazingly made it into this revised script. It’s true men get away easier with being pushy and abrasive — they’re "ballsy," not "bitchy." But when women like Goldman and (in interviews) Shepherd celebrate having those qualities as empowerment, are they inverting a stereotype or just making excuses for being spoiled jerks?

There are a handful of funny lines, plus others Shepherd sells as funny. One can’t really blame her mostly awkward performance, Scott Schwartz’s direction, or the ugly physical production for everything else. You want to tell the Curvy Widow, "Shaddap and get a vibrator." But she already has an autopleaser. This play is the ultimate act of self-love.

BRAINPEOPLE

Thurs/14–Sat/16, 8 p.m. (also Sat/16, 2 p.m.), $12.50–$20.50

Zeum

221 Fourth St., SF

(415) 749-2228

www.act-sf.org

CURVY WIDOW

Through March 9

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 3 p.m.); Sun., 3 and 7 p.m.; $50–$75

Post Street Theatre

450 Post, second floor, SF

(415) 771-6900

Shelter shuffle

February 12, 2008

EDITOR’S NOTE Guardian reporter Amanda Witherell and intern Bryan Cohen spent almost a week staying in various San Francisco homeless shelters. To get an unfiltered look at the conditions, they didn’t identify themselves as journalists, so some names in this story have been changed to protect people’s privacy. Their undercover reporting was supplemented with extensive research and on-the-record interviews with key officials, providers, and recipients of homeless services.

>>Read Amanda Witherell’s nightly shelter journals, with photos

>>Read Bryan Cohen’s nightly shelter journals, with photos

>>Homeless people share their stories

>>The mayor’s Feb. 14 press conference about homeless shelters

It’s about quarter past seven on a Thursday night, and I’m late for curfew. Not even during my wildest high school days did I have to be home by a certain time, but tonight, 29 years old and sleeping in a homeless shelter, I’m supposed to be in by 6:30 p.m.

Heading down Fifth Street toward the shelter, I wonder what I’ll do if I lose my bed for being late. Can they set me up at a different shelter? Will I have to head back to a resource center in the Tenderloin or the Mission District to wait in line for a reservation somewhere else? Either way, I could be walking the streets for the next few hours, so I adjust my heavy backpack for the journey. Waiting to cross Bryant Street, I stare up at the large, hulking building with its utilitarian name, Multi-Service Center South, and notice there are no shades on the windows in the men’s dorm. Since it’s lit from within, I can clearly see someone standing beside his cot, clad in nothing but blue plaid boxers, obviously unaware that he’s so exposed. I wonder if the windows would be shaded if it were the women’s room. Maybe that’s why we sleep in the basement.

Inside the door I shed my pack and step through the metal detector. The security guard dutifully pats it down and pushes it back into my arms. At the desk I give the last four digits of my Social Security number and am checked in. No questions about being tardy. I’m in.

I’m also late for dinner. A staffer hands me two unwrapped sandwiches from a reused bread bag under the counter. Ham, mustard, and American cheese between two pieces of cheap, sliced bread. After two days in the shelter I still haven’t seen a piece of fruit or a vegetable. I wrap the sandwiches in the newspaper under my arm and head down to my bunk. On the stairs I pass a guy and nod hello. He nods back, then calls out, "Hey, can I ask you something?"

I turn. "Sure."

"What’s a nice girl like you doing in here?"

I shrug and step back, unsure of what to say.

"I’m not trying to mess with you," he says. "I’m not fucking with you. I don’t do drugs. I’m straight. I don’t mess with anything," he goes on, trying to reassure me.

I believe him and dish it back. "Then what’s a nice guy like you doing in here?"

He laughs and shrugs. He tells me he doesn’t really stay here. It’s just for a couple of days. He lives in a $200 per week hotel in Oakland, but if he stays there more than 28 consecutive days, it becomes residential and the rates go up, so he clears out for a few days every month and comes here. The hotel’s nicer than this, he claims. It’s clean and safe, and he has his own space. "I can walk around in my underwear," he says.

We sit on the stairs, talking about how you lose all your privacy when you stay in a shelter, how the regimentation is reminiscent of prison. There are no places to go and be on your own, rest, and be quiet. Once you’re in for the night, you can’t leave except to step out for a smoke.

I ask if he has a job. He tells me he’s a chef for Google. I raise an eyebrow, recalling that the company’s stock is hovering somewhere between $600 and $700 per share right now. The pay isn’t the problem — he gets $16 an hour, but he’s been out of town for a while, caring for a sick family member, and has just returned. He got his job back, but only part-time, and he lost his home.

He’s wary of being on welfare — that’s not the way his mother raised him — but he’s in the County Adult Assistance Program, which gets him $29 every two weeks, a guaranteed bed at the shelter, and a spot on a waiting list for a single-room-occupancy hotel room, the bottom rung on the permanent-housing ladder.

What he really wants is a studio, but his searches haven’t turned up anything affordable. He needs a little boost of cash for a security deposit on an apartment, but when he asked the General Assistance Office if it could help him out with that, the answer was no.

His brow furrows with concern, and then the conversation turns to me. "You got a job?" he asks.

What can I say? I’m a reporter for a local newspaper. I’ve heard that some of the city’s homeless shelters are lacking basic standards, accessing a bed can be complicated, and services are scattered. I thought I’d come find out for myself.

Here’s what I learned: San Francisco has a cumbersome crazy quilt of programs, stitched together with waiting lists and lines. Policies that are written on paper and espoused in City Hall are often missing in shelters. Some rules don’t seem to exist until they’ve been broken. Others apply to some people, but not all. Getting a bed is a major hurdle, and I say that as a stable, able, mentally competent, sober adult.

And once you’re in, it’s sort of like sitting in a McDonald’s for too long. Years ago a friend told me the interiors of fast food restaurants are deliberately designed to make you feel a little uncomfortable. They don’t want you to get too cozy; they want you to eat and leave, making way for the next hungry mouth they can feed.

In other words, shelters are designed to make people not want to use them.

The only information I took with me was a one-page handout I got from a San Francisco Police Department Operation Outreach officer. He said it’s what cops and outreach workers give to people they come across who are sleeping on the streets. I figure if it’s good enough for them, it’s all I need to navigate the system.

The map, as it were, is a cramped, double-sided list of places to get free meals, take showers, store your stuff, sober up, and, of course, get a bed.

For the bed, it instructs, you have to go to a resource center and make a reservation. Some of the resource centers are also shelters. Some aren’t. Some are just reservation stations. They all have different operating hours and are located all over the city, but mostly in the Tenderloin and South of Market.

It takes me a while to puzzle out which ones are open, where exactly they are, then which is closest to me. Phone numbers are also listed, so I assume it’s like making a hotel reservation and dial one up on my cell phone.

The first number doesn’t work. There’s a digit missing. Dialing methodically down the list, I discover that none of the numbers connect me to a person. This is obviously not the way to go.

The way I ultimately get into a shelter is not the way you’re supposed to. In San Francisco’s system, you’re not supposed to just walk up to a homeless shelter and get a bed, but that’s what I do.

At first the woman behind the counter at MSC South tells me the only open beds are across town, at Ella Hill Hutch in the Western Addition. Then another staffer looks at the clock and says he’s not sending me out there. He’ll "drop" beds instead.

The city’s 1,182 beds for single adults are managed through an electronic database called CHANGES. It’s a modern-day improvement on people roaming from shelter to shelter everyday, putting their names on lists for possible beds. Launched in 2004, CHANGES now does that electronically and maintains profiles of people who use the system. If you’ve been kicked out of a shelter, missed your tuberculosis test, or not shown up for curfew, CHANGES knows and tells on you.

Every day around 8 p.m. shelter staff trawl through the reservations and drop the no-shows, cancellations, and reservations that have expired or whose makers have moved on to hospitals, rehab, the morgue, or — less frequently — housing.

MSC is allowed to make reservations for any shelter except itself — that’s against policy. I learn this the next morning, and I’m told it’s because there’s too much corruption and favoritism. MSC is apparently one of the better shelters, so to keep clients from cutting deals with staff, the policy doesn’t allow clients to reserve a bed there.

But after half an hour the staffer hooks me up for a two-night stay, bending the rules to do so. While I’m waiting, he turns away a client who had a seven-day bed but didn’t show up the previous night. The guard confiscates his fifth of vodka, and he gets an earful about drinking.

When the city’s shelter system was born in 1982, it was first come, first serve at the doors of churches and community centers. President Ronald Reagan’s cuts to federal domestic spending landed hard on low-income people, so then-mayor Dianne Feinstein called on local organizations to temporarily house and feed the growing number of street sleepers.

Throughout the ’80s wages stagnated while the cost of living soared: between 1978 and 1988 the average rent for a studio apartment in San Francisco jumped 183 percent — from $159 a month to $450. Twenty years later it’s $1,114. In 1978 the Housing and Urban Development budget was $83 billion. Today it’s $35.2 billion, almost nothing by federal budgetary standards, and almost no new public housing units have been built since 1996, while 100,000 have been lost.

Every year the federal government spends almost twice as much on a single attack submarine as the Department of Housing and Urban Development spends on homeless assistance. State and local governments have been left to pick up the hefty price tag.

San Francisco spends more than $200 million on homelessness, through services, financial aid, supportive housing, emergency care, and shelter beds. There are 13 city-funded shelters, four resource centers, and three reservation stations in San Francisco. The Human Services Agency spends $12.5 million per year on shelters through contracts with nonprofit managers. The Department of Public Health also manages two contracts, for a battered women’s shelter and a 24-hour drop-in center.

But it’s not enough: the nonprofits supplement operating expenses with grants and private donations and recently relied on a special allocation of $300,000 to purchase basic supplies like soap, towels, hand sanitizer, sheets, pillows, and blankets.

James Woods, a spry 51-year-old wearing a red Gap parka barely zipped over his thin, scarred chest, rattles off the places he’s lived: Detroit, Atlanta, Seattle, San Francisco, Louisville, Ky., and his hometown, Nashville, Tenn. "Out of all the cities I’ve been in, this is the only city where you have to go and make a reservation for a bed at the rescue mission all the way across the city in order to come back to the place you started," he says, jabbing the floor of MSC with his cane. "I can’t even make a reservation here for a bed here. They’ll send me across the city to another place to do that."

Woods has been pounding the pavement between MSC and the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center for eight months. Every day around 3:30 p.m. he heads to the Tenderloin, where he gets in line for a bed. Woods has a fractured hip and arthritis, pins in his knees and feet, and hepatitis C. He’s been HIV-positive since 2002. He walks with a limp that can transform into a springy, stiff-legged canter when he chases the 27 bus down Fifth Street.

Rather than tote all of his possessions with him, he hides them in the drawer of an emergency bed at MSC, so it’s imperative that he get back there every night. Sometimes he waits hours for an MSC bed to open up.

Though Woods speaks highly of some city services, swooning a little when he mentions his doctor at the Tom Waddell Health Center, the daily bed hunt has left him exhausted and disgusted with the city. "They’ve got the program designed to run the homeless off," he says. "They have it as hard and difficult as possible for you to take a breath, take a rest, get a routine."

While a person can reserve a bed for one to seven nights and, if on General Assistance, make arrangements through a caseworker for 30- to 90-day stays, Woods has rarely been able to procure a bed for longer than one night. "Maybe twice I’ve gotten a seven-day bed," he says.

The inability to connect people with beds is not lost on city officials. Mayor Gavin Newsom’s recently hired homeless policy director, Dariush Kayhan, told me, "I really want to solve the issue of the juxtaposition of vacant beds and homeless people on the streets. That to me is untenable."

However, he only discussed the issue in terms of people who’ve chosen not to use the shelters and are sleeping in the street. To him, empty beds signify that there’s more than enough shelter for people. "At this time there’s no plan to expand any shelter beds, and I think homeless people, in many ways, many of them vote with their feet and have decided that shelter’s not for them," he said.

But the Guardian found that even if you are willing and waiting for a bed in a place where someone can presumably connect you with one, it often doesn’t happen.

According to the 2007 Homeless Count, there are 6,377 homeless people in San Francisco. The nine year-round single-adult shelters have enough beds to accommodate one-third of that population. Other emergency facilities shelter some of the overflow on a seasonal basis. The remaining homeless sleep in jails and hospitals, respite and sobering centers, parks and sidewalks.

People also pile up at Buster’s Place, the only 24-hour drop-in resource center in the city, where they slump all night in chairs, forbidden by staff to sleep on the floor.

It took Guardian writer Bryan Cohen five nights to find a spot at a shelter. He spent Jan. 20 and 21 at Buster’s waiting to see if a bed would open up. None did. According to the shelter vacancy report for those two nights, there were 108 and 164 beds set aside for men that went unfilled. On an average night this January, a month marked by cold weather and flooding rain, 196 beds were empty.

Buster’s does not have access to CHANGES but can apparently call shelters and ask about empty beds. I was at the Providence Foundation shelter one night and overheard a call come through and shelter staff tell whoever rang that no, they couldn’t bring more people here. There were four empty mats beside me.

Laura Guzman, director of the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, said CHANGES was a breakthrough in getting people into beds, but when it was first launched in 2004, things were different. "You had a choice. Shelter of choice was much easier to achieve. Then Care Not Cash happened," she said.

Most of the city’s beds are assigned to beneficiaries of certain programs, like Swords to Ploughshares and Newsom’s signature plan Care Not Cash, or to people with mental health or substance abuse issues who have case managers.

Though beds can be turned over to the general public when they are dropped after curfew, one wonders how effectively that happens.

The challenges are worst for Latinos, refugees, and immigrants, who face language barriers and the potential hurdle of illegality.

As a result, they flood one of the few places they can get in. Dolores Street Community Services reported the second-lowest vacancy rate in January, just 5 percent. The 82-bed program hosts a waiting list and is one of the more flexible in the city — deliberately so, as many of its Latino participants have jobs or work as day laborers. Marlon Mendieta, the executive program director, says, "They have a plan and just need to save up some money to move into a place."

However, rising rents have made moving on difficult. "We have people who are basically just cycling from one shelter to another," Mendieta said. "We see some who exit our shelter, find housing, but might end up back at the shelter if rent goes up or they lose work."

Providence is one of the sparest of homeless facilities and is located in a Bayview church. Unlike at other shelters, there’s no hanging out here. When the doors open at 9:30 p.m. about 90 people with reservations are already lined up in the rain on its dark side street.

We receive one blanket apiece, and the men shuffle into the gym while I follow the other females into a smaller side room, where 12 mats are laid out on two ratty tarps. Several women immediately lie down, speechless.

The cook gives a quick blessing when plates of food arrive on two sheet pans: spaghetti, heavily dressed salad, limp green beans mixed with cooked iceberg lettuce, and a very buttery roll. It’s all heavy and slightly greasy, but also warm and a closer approximation of a square meal than any of those offered by the other shelters I’ve stayed in so far.

Moments after I finish eating the lights are turned off, even though a couple of women are still working on their meals. A shelter monitor comes through and confiscates our cups of water, saying she just refinished the floors in here and doesn’t want any spills. I notice that unlike at other shelters where I’ve stayed, none of the women here have bothered to change into pajamas. Some haven’t even removed their shoes. I follow suit, tucking my jacket under my head for a pillow and pulling the blanket around me.

When the lights come back on at 5:45 a.m., I understand why no one changed: there’s no time to get dressed. Shelter monitors enter the room, rousting sleepers with catcalls to get up and get moving. One turns on a radio, loud. They’re brisk and no-nonsense, grabbing blankets and shoving them into garbage bags, pulling mats into a stack at the edge of the room.

A woman becomes perturbed by being hustled and talks back to the shelter monitor. A verbal battle ensues, with the client picking up her mat and throwing it across the room, scattering her possessions. "What a woman, what a woman," the shelter monitor yells. "We’ll see if you get a bed here tonight."

Another staffer comes through with a toxic-smelling aerosol, which she sprays around us as we get ready to leave. The bathroom, the cleanest I’ve come across in the city’s shelter system, is still a clusterfuck as a dozen women wait to use the three toilets and two sinks. One stall has a broken door, and the only morning conversation is apologies to the occupant.

Even though the contract between Providence and the HSA says the former will provide shelter until 7 a.m., it’s a little after 6 a.m. and all 90 of us are back out on the street, rubbing sleep from our eyes, shivering in the dark dawn, and waiting for the Third Street T line. When the train comes, most of us board without paying and ride back toward the city center to get busy finding some breakfast and making preparations for where to stay tonight. I have four hours before I have to be at work.

Shucrita Jones, director of Providence, later tells me the shelter’s materials have to be cleaned up by 7 a.m. because the church is booked for other activities. "We turn the lights on at 6. The clients have at least until 6:10 to get up. We encourage everyone to be out of there by 6:15 so we can be clear of the building by 6:30," she says. To her defense, she adds that the shelter monitors often let people in earlier than the contracted time of 10 p.m. and that when the weather is particularly nasty she’ll open the doors as early as 8:30 p.m. to let people in out of the cold.

As for the discrepancy between empty mats in the shelters and people going without beds, she blames the reservation system. "CHANGES has a lot of glitches," she says. "It’s got a lot of errors the city and county [are] trying to fix."

What I witness isn’t as bad as what I hear. In the shelters everyone has a horror story — some are about how they got there, others about what’s happened to them since they arrived. Nearly all include a questionable experience with staff — from witnessing bribes for special treatment to being threatened with denial of service for complaining. Their observations echo mine: the administration and certain high-level staffers exhibit genuine concern and an ability to help when you ask, but lower-tier workers aren’t as invested in providing good service.

Tracy tells me she sent her daughter to private school and considers herself a victim of the dot-bomb era and an illegal eviction that landed them at the Hamilton Family Center. "We were given one blanket. It was filthy. It had poo on it, and, I’m not kidding, there were even pubic hairs," she says.

She describes the shelter’s intake process as similar to that of jail bookings she’s seen on television. Six days later she and her child were thrown out. No reason was given, though she’s convinced it’s because a staff member overheard her complaining about a recent incident involving another client sneaking in a gun. When she was told to leave immediately, she wasn’t informed that she had the right to appeal. So she and her daughter hastily gathered their things and hit the dark Tenderloin streets.

A grievance system exists for people who’ve been hit with denial of service, or DOS’d, the colloquial term for kicked out. But the process can take months. Shelter managers I spoke with don’t deny that stealing is rampant, favoritism exists, and complaints occur — the greatest number about staff and food.

General complaints are supposed to be handled within the shelter, though they may be copied to the city’s Shelter Monitoring Committee. The SMC submits quarterly reports to the Board of Supervisors, Mayor Newsom, and the public, which show regular instances of inconsistent and unsafe conditions, abusive treatment, and a lack of basic amenities like toilet paper, soap, and hot water.

Those reports prompted Sup. Tom Ammiano to sponsor legislation mandating standards of care for all city-funded shelters (see "Setting Standards," 1/30/08). The new law would create baseline standards and streamline a complaint and enforcement process.

According to the HSA, many of these standards are already policies included in the contracts with the nonprofits that run the shelters, requirements such as "provide access to electricity for charging cell phones."

During my stay at the Episcopal Sanctuary, I asked the shelter monitor on duty where I could plug in my cell phone and was told I couldn’t. When I asked why not, the only reply was that it’s against shelter policy. At Ella Hill Hutch Community Center, Cohen was told he could plug in but at his own risk — his unattended phone would probably be stolen.

I reviewed all of the contracts between the city and the nonprofit shelter providers, as well as the shelter training manual that’s given to staff. I was unable to find the same list of policies the HSA gave to the budget analyst. I asked HSA executive director Trent Rhorer how these policies have been communicated to the shelter staff, but he did not respond by press time.

While the ability to charge a cell phone seems relatively minor, its ramifications can be huge. The first time James Leonard met with his case manager at Next Door shelter, he knew exactly what he needed to get back on his feet: bus fare to get to and from three job interviews he’d already scheduled, a clothing voucher so he’d have something nice to wear when he got there, and a couple of dollars for the laundry facilities at the shelter. He also needed to charge his cell phone to confirm the interviews. He said he was denied all four things.

The standards of care, if passed, could improve access to those basic provisions, but some in the Mayor’s Office have balked at the estimated $1 million to $2 million price tag. The budget analyst’s final report is scheduled for release Feb. 14, in time for a Feb. 20 hearing at the Budget and Finance Committee.

Deborah Borne, medical director of the DPH’s Tom Waddell clinic, is a proponent of the standards from a public health perspective. "For me, I’m looking at decreased funding and how can I best affect the most population with what remains," she said.

Dirty shelters can help spread disease outside their four walls, as clients leave every day to use municipal services like buses, libraries, trains, and restaurants, which we all enjoy. Borne says this is something that’s been tackled by other facilities that house large numbers of people and is long overdue in the shelters.

"You can argue about whether we should or shouldn’t have shelters, but there are no city, state, or federal regulations for them. There are tons of regulations for the army, for public schools and colleges, but we put people in shelters and there’s none," she said. To her, San Francisco is on the cutting edge of care with this legislation. "I can’t wait until we do this on a state level," she said.

Kayhan said he and the mayor support the spirit of the legislation and have no problems with most of the no-cost items, but the price tag for staffing, training, and enforcement is a concern. "I think when you’re looking at how much money you’re going to spend on homelessness overall," he told us, "I would rather allocate additional resources to create another unit of housing for someone as opposed to enhancing the service model of the shelters."

Every day he’s on duty in the Tenderloin, police captain Gary Jimenez comes across homeless people — or people who seem homeless but aren’t.

"One day on Turk Street, I came by a long line of people drinking. I was walking with a Homeless Outreach Team officer, and he said he knew them all. Only about 20 percent of them were actually homeless. They don’t want to sit in their rooms drinking. We give people housing but we don’t acclimatize them, get them used to being inside. They want to do what they’ve been doing, and they go out on the streets to do it. It’s social," he said.

Larry Haynes agrees. "It’s lonely and depressing in your room," he says. He lost his Beulah Street apartment through an Ellis Act eviction and has been living in the Vincent Hotel for three years, after a nine-month stint in the shelter system. He’s a tenant representative now, advocating for improved conditions in the SROs, which still beat the shelters.

"The criticism I hear from people on the streets is that there are some good shelters but you can’t get in them," Jimenez said. "Then there are shelters that are open that you can go to, but you wouldn’t want to because they’re really bad."

He tells me he’s visited shelters but finds it difficult to get a feel for how valid the complaints are. "I can’t tell without waking up there or knowing what it’s like to be thrown out on the street at 6 a.m. in the cold when there’s nothing open," he said.

The Shelter Monitoring Committee has requested that HSA staff stay in shelters at least once to get firsthand experience, but it’s yet to receive confirmation that this has occurred. When we asked Rhorer about the policy, he said, "There are 1,800 employees who work for HSA, so there is no way of knowing if any of them have been homeless and used the shelter system."

In our first conversation, Kayhan told me he had never stayed in a shelter. In a later interview, when I asked what he thought about the public perception of the shelters, he said, "I’m just not sure that the criticism that I hear around the shelters as being dangerous hellholes — or whatever has been said — matches what I see in the shelters or what I read with respect to incident reports or what I hear at the Shelter Monitoring Committee or at the shelter directors’ meetings. So perception is reality."

"Housing first" has been Mayor Newsom’s modus operandi for handling homelessness, and it’s a good one — the idea being to stabilize people, whatever condition they’re in: drunk or sober, clean or using, ill or able, young or old, alone or with family.

The city’s 10-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness, released in 2004, recommended 3,000 units of supportive housing to get the chronically homeless off the streets. Kayhan confirms the Mayor’s Office of Housing is on track to meet that goal through master-leasing SROs and building or renovating new affordable units, where occupants will get supportive services.

The chronically homeless, a catchall term for folks who stick to the streets and don’t or aren’t able to use the system, have been the mayor’s target and Kayhan’s priority. This makes sense because they’re the most visible face of homelessness.

Last year’s city budget allowed a tripling of staff for the Homeless Outreach Team, which works diligently to move the most entrenched homeless off SoMa side streets and out of encampments in Golden Gate Park. A special allocation of shelter beds was set aside for them, and those who refused shelter were put directly into stabilization units in SROs, bypassing the shelter system entirely.

For some, this has been great. It’s how Leonard finally started to make some progress. He bailed on the shelters after having his possessions thrown out three times by staff and hit the streets, where HOT found him, deemed him "shelter challenged," and moved him into a stabilization unit.

"I feel almost as good today as the day before I became homeless," he tells me one afternoon in January. The Bay Area native is hoping to transition into a subsidized rental soon.

Twenty-five percent of shelter staff are required to be homeless or formerly homeless. Some shelters hire up to 80 percent. Tyler is one of them — he lives at MSC South but works for Episcopal Community Services, which runs Sanctuary, Next Door, and the Interfaith Emergency Winter Shelter Program. He shows me his pay stub to prove it, and I note that every two weeks he takes home more than I do. "Yeah, I make good money," he agrees.

He’s been looking for an apartment, but rents are high and he hasn’t found anything good. A plan to move in with a family member fell through, so he’s just hanging out on the housing wait list. "What I really want to do is see what they’re going to do for me. I’ve been on [Personal Assistance Employment Services] for six months. Where is my SRO if I can afford to pay for it? So obviously that shit doesn’t work," he says.

He’s bitter about the effect the Golden Gate Park sweeps have had on the SRO stock. "They got SROs right away," he said of the 200-plus people who were removed from the park by HOT, put into stabilization beds, and transitioned to SROs. "They took them right away ’cause Gavin had to clean that shit up," he says.

Tyler, like many people I spoke with, keeps as sharp an eye as possible on City Hall. They read the papers and have opinions informed by firsthand experience about programs like Care Not Cash. They know Kayhan is making $169,000 per year and they’re making $29 every two weeks.

One morning, coming out of the bathroom at Sanctuary, I stop to study a posting for affordable housing on a bulletin board. It’s a studio for $863 per month, more than I pay for my one-room Mission flat. The longer I stay in the shelters and the more people I talk to, the less secure I feel in my economic stability.

Ruby Windspirit has been homeless since Jan. 14, two days before I started my tour of the shelters. The 59-year-old Irish Navajo was attending school in Portland, Ore., studying photography and science, when she became ill with bone cancer. She came to San Francisco to convalesce closer to her daughter, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in the Castro with three other people.

Windspirit knew she couldn’t stay on the couch for too long and made a reservation for a $27 per night hotel in the Tenderloin. Despite the reservation, she couldn’t get in for two days and the bed she was ultimately given was two box springs with a piece of plywood for support. The sheets were dirty. She left after two weeks and entered the shelter system. She says Next Door is "150 percent better" than the hotel. She has a bed off the floor and the extra blanket her doctor recommended, though she was scolded for trying to plug in her phone.

I try to imagine what people like Windspirit would do if there weren’t shelters. But the Ten Year Council also recommended a phasing out of shelters within four to six years, to be replaced by 24-hour crisis clinics and sobering centers.

There are 364 fewer shelter beds in San Francisco than when Newsom became mayor. This year more may go. The city is currently requesting proposals to develop 150 Otis, which serves as a temporary shelter and storage space for homeless people, into permanent supportive housing for very-low-income seniors. About 60 shelter beds will be lost.

The HSA confirmed there are currently no plans to open any more shelters in San Francisco. The last plan for a new shelter — St. Boniface — fell through, and the money that was set aside for the project still languishes in an HSA bank account. Midyear budget cuts proposed by the mayor put that money on the chopping block.

Buster’s Place is also on the list of cuts. By April 15, the only place where someone can get out of the elements at any time, day or night, could be closed for good.

Kayhan, who previously oversaw Project Homeless Connect, Newsom’s private-sector approach to the problem, agreed that shelters will always be needed. What he worries about are the people who become dependant on them and refuse housing offers, although he’s also thinking about ways that shelters could be more amenable.

"I’d like to look at the next step with Homeless Connect to try and institutionalize that in the way we do business specifically in the shelters," he said, imagining a shelter pilot of one-stop shopping for services.

But just three weeks into his new job Kayhan was reaching out to constituents to try to figure out what isn’t working. He told us, "What I’m trying to do since I came into this position is be on the street and measure the impact the system is having on those that are on the street day in and day out and try to see what part of the system isn’t working properly or needs to be resourced differently so that we don’t see homeless people, long term, on the streets."

One night at MSC, in the bathroom before bed, a young woman tells me her story while I brush my teeth and she washes off her makeup. Not too long ago she drove here from Florida to meet up with her boyfriend. They were hanging out on the street one night when a cop came by, cited him for an open container, and discovered he had a warrant. Now he’s in jail in San Rafael.

She started sleeping in her Suburban while she looked for job and a place to stay. One night while she slept, parked at Castro and Market, she was hit by a drunk driver. She lifts a hank of long blond hair and shows me a bright pink tear of stitches above her temple. An ambulance took her and the drunk to the hospital. Her totaled car was towed. When the hospital found out she had no place to go, it sent her here.

"Now I’m in a fucking homeless shelter," she says, genuinely aghast at the situation and truly lost about what to do. She has her bed for five more days.

She could get a job. She says, "I have hella references," from working in restaurants for years. She could sleep in one of her friends’ cars, but it seems like so much work: waking up in the car, going to a resource center or shelter to wash up, then going to work.

We joke about living in the shelter. "Yeah, you can come over," she imagines telling her friends. "Dinner’s at 4:30."

"You’ve got to leave by 10," I say.

"It’ll be fun. We can hang out and smoke on the patio," she says.

I don’t know what else to say, except "Good luck." I know what it’s like to chase a boyfriend to San Francisco. I remember sleeping in my car when I was 21, during a strange time between graduating from college and getting a place to live for the summer in a town where housing was tight. I think about my little sister, packing up her Subaru one day and taking off to Miami, where she didn’t know a soul. You have a little money, a lot of hope, and that youthful sense of invincibility, but sometimes it all comes down to luck.

I bid her good night, pack up my toiletries, and wipe my face with my shelter-issued towel. It smells vaguely of bleach and shit.

› amanda@sfbg.com

Bryan Cohen contributed to this report.

Political football season

February 5, 2008

› sarah@sfbg.com

With Mayor Gavin Newsom predicting a big budget deficit and seven Board of Supervisors seats up for grabs, everyone knew 2008 would be acrimonious.

But few suspected the war between Newsom and the supervisors would get so nasty so soon, even before the lunar Year of the Rat had officially dawned. The most telling development was the swift and nasty retaliation board president Aaron Peskin endured after he requested that Newsom return the $750,000 the mayor siphoned from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to pay the salaries of seven mayoral aides.

At the Jan. 29 Board of Supervisors meeting, Peskin publicly called for "an end to the budget shell game that has resulted in monies being shifted from Muni and other city departments to fund political employees who do not work for or directly improve services for the departments paying for their positions." Newsom’s predecessor, Willie Brown, was the master of such budget games, but Peskin said, "There are those who defend this shell game by saying it is a long-standing practice here at City Hall. That may be true. But it doesn’t make it right."

Peskin’s demands came at a horribly awkward moment for Newsom: two months earlier the newly reelected mayor announced an immediate hiring freeze and across-the-board cuts to city departments, citing a projected $229 million budget deficit in fiscal year 2008–09. His administration blamed this looming deficit in part on the creation of 700 new city positions, including 100 new police officers and 200 public health nurses, plus pay raises for nurses, firefighters, and police officers.

Also blamed were a projected windfall loss of property transfer taxes and a bunch of voter-approved spending requirements, including the November 2007 voter-approved and Peskin-authored Proposition A, which transfers $26 million more annually from the city’s General Fund to the MTA.

Newsom press secretary Nathan Ballard defended the use of MTA funds to pay mayoral staff salaries, claiming that all but one of the positions have a direct relationship to the work of the MTA, including the new director of climate change initiatives, Wade Crowfoot. "I know it’s not pretty, but it is an efficient way of getting city business done. We are following the letter and the spirit of the law," Ballard reportedly told the San Francisco Chronicle.

But within a week the mayor’s point person on transportation, Stuart Sunshine, announced he’ll be leaving City Hall in February, while the Mayor’s Office scrambled to explain why Brian Purchia, who developed Newsom’s reelection campaign Web site last year and who last month started working in Newsom’s press office for $85,000 per year, was hired as an MTA employee.

"The MTA has not and will not be paying any part of his salary," Ballard responded by e-mail Jan. 24 to a Guardian inquiry. "As of January 28, Purchia will be on a Mayor’s office requisition." Ballard also blasted Peskin in the Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, using incendiary language normally reserved for political campaigns and rarely employed by city employees talking about the president of the Board of Supervisors.

Retaliation for Peskin’s publicly announced MTA refund request has also included two splashy Chronicle hit pieces attacking Peskin and the board that ran on the front page, above the fold, on two consecutive days. One includes a photo of Peskin alongside extracts from a five-month-old letter that was possibly leaked by the Mayor’s Office (the confidential letter was copied to Newsom chief of staff Phil Ginsburg) in which Port of San Francisco director Monique Moyer alleges that Peskin made bullying late-night phone calls last August, when the Port was trying to get a measure passed to increase building heights along the Embarcadero — a land-use issue that was resolved last year.

But Peskin isn’t the only elected official to get his wrists slapped by the mayor in recent weeks.

In mid-January, Newsom upbraided San Francisco’s entire delegation in Sacramento for lending their support to the board-approved affordable-housing City Charter amendment, which will be on the November ballot and seeks to set aside $33 million annually in affordable-housing funds for the next 15 years.

As Sens. Carole Migden and Leland Yee and Assemblymembers Fiona Ma and Mark Leno noted in a Jan. 7 letter to Peskin, local voters have not approved a renewal of the 1996 housing bond, and the board’s proposed amendment builds on prior successful ballot measures to fund libraries, parks, and children’s programs, which have been successfully implemented without significant budget impacts.

But Newsom wrote the delegation Jan. 11 to express his "disappointment."

"I cannot support the Charter Amendment, because it has significant implications for the future fiscal health of our City and the backbone of our public health care system — San Francisco General Hospital," Newsom claimed, noting that the General Hospital bond is also on the November ballot. Then again, Newsom is also backing a Lennar Corp.–financed measure that would approve the building of 10,000 housing units at Candlestick Point but wouldn’t guarantee affordability levels (see "Signature Measures," page 10).

Meanwhile, fearing that Newsom is seeking to exert excessive control over several key commissions, the Board of Supervisors’ progressive majority is seeking to ensure that the seven members of the MTA board are elected officials beginning November 2009 and to divide the power to nominate members of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission between the supervisors and the mayor.

These moves are coming at a time when Newsom has decided to replace three members of the MTA board who had alternative-transportation credibility but whose loyalty he apparently questioned: San Francisco Bicycle Coalition executive director Leah Shahum, Peter Mezey, and Wil Din. To fill those slots, Newsom appointed disabled-rights activist Bruce Oka, attorney Malcolm Heinicke (both of whom served on the Taxi Commission, which Newsom hopes to merge into the MTA this year), and Jerry Lee, a member of the Transportation Authority’s Citizen Advisory Committee.

But the Board of Supervisors can block the mayor’s MTA picks — and that showdown looks likely, in light of Newsom’s alleged misuse of MTA funds and his refusal to heed Peskin’s call for a mayoral representative to appear before the board to explain Newsom’s vision for the MTA.

Meanwhile, Sup. Jake McGoldrick told the Guardian he introduced a Charter amendment to make the MTA board seats elected positions. He argues that Prop. A not only increased the MTA’s budget but also reduced the board’s MTA oversight, so the body now needs to be more answerable to San Franciscans.

"It’s about not having accountability at the legislative branch," McGoldrick said. "The MTA ridership and residents need to have a way to voice their concerns."

McGoldrick said the mayor’s early removal of MTA members and his raid on MTA funds are troubling.

"Their removal reinforces what’s going on, how the MTA is viewed as a milking machine for the Mayor’s Office," McGoldrick said, noting that he asked for a budget analyst’s report on the MTA several weeks ago to keep the discussion objective and that he also asked for an accounting of the 1,600 to 1,700 jobs that Newsom declared frozen last fall. That report should be available at any time.

"I wanted to see which jobs were frozen and which were defrosted," McGoldrick said, "but I didn’t want it to become a political football."

However, with battles between the board and the mayor likely to get even intenser during the coming budget and election seasons, it’s starting to look like 2008 could be one long political football season.

The governor’s spending addiction

February 5, 2008

OPINION Just five months after boasting that California’s "budget deficit is zero," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently came back to tell us the state is facing a staggering $14.5 billion shortfall over the next 18 months.

To deal with this amazing turn of events he is now proposing that we slash funding for our court system; virtually close down our state parks system; cut more than $4.5 billion from K–12 education; decimate our AIDS Drug Assistance Program; further reduce reimbursement rates for health care providers; put the children of mothers on state assistance at risk of homelessness; deny the blind, the elderly, and the disabled even a minimal cost-of-living adjustment; and continue to underfund our higher education systems.

Voters should rightfully be bewildered and seriously concerned. How and when did this crisis happen? How could the state go from a budget deficit of zero to one of $14.5 billion in just five months?

The governor’s earlier boast about our nonexistent budget deficit was a great line from a great showman. But it failed to tell the real story.

The fact remains that Schwarzenegger created the beginnings of this budget catastrophe on his very first day in office, when he followed through on a campaign pledge he made during the 2003 recall election. His promise was to rescind the restoration of the vehicle license fee.

The VLF was created in 1935 as a 1.5 percent tax on the purchase price of every automobile sold in California. Iconic Republican governor Earl Warren raised it to 2 percent in 1948. VLF revenue does not go to the state’s General Fund. Rather, it goes to local governments to pay for fire and police protection, keep libraries and parks open, and keep our streets clean.

In 1998, at the height of the dot-com boom, when California had surplus tax revenue, the Stage Legislature offered car owners a temporary relaxation on the VLF. The average 2 percent VLF was then $300. The "good times" tax break lowered the amount car owners paid to just $100. The state picked up the remaining $200 so local governments would continue to receive the entire $300. At the time this cost the GF around $5 billion annually. The deal was to continue as long as there were "sufficient general funds" to make up the difference.

In 2003, after the boom went bust, we faced a $38 billion state budget deficit. Then-governor Gray Davis’s finance director correctly determined that there were no longer sufficient general funds to continue the good times tax break. The VLF was restored to where it had been for 50 years.

Candidate Schwarzenegger seized on the issue, and the rest is history. Unfortunately, the $6.15 billion that Schwarzenegger is now spending annually on the VLF tax break is money we don’t have. Neither are the billions he’s spending to cover that debt, which stands at more than $20 billion over the past four years. Combined, the cost of the VLF tax break and the debt to service it account for almost 90 percent of our current budget deficit.

Without the governor’s reckless and profligate spending habit, our state would have no budget crisis and there would be no need to dismantle essential governmental services.

We need to finally have an honest conversation with the voters of California. One can debate whether or not the VLF spending program is a good idea. What is not debatable is that the ongoing GF cost of the VLF spending program is the main cause of our budget woes.

An immediate intervention is necessary. We must break the governor’s spending addiction to correct the course of our state.

Mark Leno

Mark Leno represents Assembly District 13 in Sacramento.

All quiet at City Hall

February 5, 2008

San Francisco City Hall — normally a beehive of activity on election nights — is nearly empty. One reporter (Rick Knee, stringing for AP), a couple of political junkies … and that’s about it. The Department of Elections doesn’t even have its usual display screen for election results.

Frankly, nobody’s paying attention to the local election. California’s a big deal tonigh, and the state primary is huge news; municipal elections are lost in the whirlwind. (Of course, let’s remember that the state’s delegate total, which is what really counts, will probably be split pretty close to even, whoever “wins” the state; Paul Hogarth has a good analysis here.

But there IS a local election, and there are results, and we can pretty much call the three ballot measures now.

Prop. A, the parks bond, needs 66 percent of the vote, and has 64.9 percent in the (generally conservative) absentees. That should pass. Prop. B, the police retirement plan, is a slam dunk and will probably get 70 percent of the vote. The rather wacky Prop. C, the Alcaraz “peace center,” is toast, with 73 percent voting no.

An interesting note the the local vote: Hillary Clinton’s absentee-vote effort had paid off, big time. 65,000 people voted absentee, and Clinton is ahead in those votes, 53-38. I think we’re going to see this statewide — Obama will probably win on election day, but Clinton has a huge bank of absentees that he will have to overcome.

Brad Will and the politics of oil

January 30, 2008

MEXICO CITY – Flash back to October 27th, 2006. American photojournalist Brad Will is splayed out on a sidewalk in Oaxaca, Mexico, mortally wounded by the pistoleros of rogue governor Ulisis Ruiz during tumultuous street battles in that southern city. His killers have never been prosecuted.

Now fast forward to this past January 10th. Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the unctuous leader of the once-ruling (71 years) PRI party faction in the Mexican Senate, announces to a gaggle of reporters that the PRI is prepared to back President Felipe Calderon and his right-wing PAN in passing an “energy reform” package that would permit transnational corporations to generate 49% of the nation’s electricity and open PEMEX, the state petroleum monopoly expropriated from its Anglo-American owners in 1938 and nationalized by President Lazaro Cardenas, to such oil titans as Exxon, British Petroleum, and Shell. Beltrones’ personal preference to initiate the proposed “association of private capitals”: Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil company which opened itself to private investment back in 1997 and which has extensive experience in deep water drilling.

What is the connection between these two apparently unconnected events? Just this: the cover-up of Brad Wills’ death smoothed the way for the PRI-PAN partnership to privatize PEMEX.

Although his killers were plainly identified as plainclothes police on Ulisis’s payroll, Wills’ inconvenient death was ignored by then-president Vicente Fox despite demands by human rights and journalist protection organizations for a full investigation of the killing, one of 26 perpetrated by Ruiz’s death squads between August and October of 2006. Fox’s successor, Felipe Calderon, followed suit and stonewalled an inquiry into Wills’ murder. Similarly, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico never sought justice for a slain citizen despite the personal pleas of the dead man’s family.

Why such studied indifference?

Because holding Governor Ruiz, a prominent PRIista, accountable for the killing(s) would have upset the burgeoning alliance between the PRI and the PAN to ratify Calderon’s legislative agenda, the most pertinent item of which was “energy reform” i.e. the privatization of PEMEX.

Embassy inaction on Brad Wills’ murder followed the same logic. As U.S. ambassador, Bush crony Tony Garza is charged with representing U.S. interests in Mexico and Washington’s interest in opening up Mexican oil to U.S. transnationals far outweighs its interest in bringing the killers of a freelance anarchist reporter to justice. The U.S. has long contemplated a North American Energy Alliance that would guarantee access to Mexican and Canadian reserves.

To this end, Washington has played an active role in facilitating the impending privatization of Petrolios Mexicanos. Over the past months, U.S. transnationals and their associates in government have orchestrated an extraordinary campaign to hoodwink Mexicans into swallowing the lie that PEMEX is hopelessly broken and must be opened to private capital forthwith for the salvation of the Fatherland.

Last July, ex-Federal Reserve czar Alan Greenspan was beamed into Mexico for a teleconference with the nation’s most exalted business council to deliver an ultimatum: if PEMEX was not fixed quickly, the country faced fiscal crisis. Indeed, the petroleum giant (the 11th largest on the planet) generates 40% of Mexico’s total budget and 100% of a social budget that keeps 70,000,000 Mexicans who live in and around the poverty line, in relative quiescence. By “fixing” PEMEX, Greenspan meant privatizing it.

It should be noted that Alan Greenspan is an expert on fiscal crises – his monetary policies just helped to tripwire such a crisis in his own country, the sub-prime disaster.

The Greenspan game plan was echoed December 13th in a memo issued by the International Monetary Fund urgently counseling legislation to allow private capital into PEMEX before the government went broke. Garza’s embassy chimed in the next day, warning of massive capital flight if the Mexican Congress did not pass Calderon’s “energy reform” package. On December 19th, The Economist, which ironically was founded on the fortune reaped by Anglo oil companies in Mexico that eventually became British Petroleum, opined that “the obvious solution to the disaster of PEMEX is to privatize.” Finally, the U.S. Department of Energy delivered the death knell on January 9th: the lack of investment in PEMEX’s Exploration and Exploitation (PEP) division spelled energy catastrophe – not a good sign for Washington’s North American Energy Alliance strategy. On January 10th, the PRI came on board to back Calderon’s “energy reform.”

Despite the Jeremiads, the putsch for privatization has lost considerable steam globally. In fact, a moderate swing to nationalization seems to be in process. Amidst prognoses of irreparable damage to the Venezuelan economy, Hugo Chavez renationalized sectors of PDVSA, the state oil company, and ran a 12% surge in domestic growth in 2007 in spite of it. Bolivia has renationalized natural gas production and Ecuador is on the brink of doing so. The most successful renationalization has been in Putin’s Russia where Gazoprom and Yukos became major world players overnight.

According to Mexican strategic resource writer Alfredo Jalife, 32% of the world’s petroleum supply is in the hands of private transnationals, 20% is nationalized or in the process of being renationalized, and the rest is held by mixed state-private corporations.

But despite their exaggerated anguish at an energy meltdown if PEMEX is not privatized, the doomsayers do have a point: Petrolios Mexicanos is in deep doo-doo. Daily accidents such as the unquenchable fire that took 21 workers’ lives on a Caribbean oil platform and contaminated surrounding waters last fall, pipeline bombings by the guerrilla Popular Revolutionary Army, and the failure to modernize infrastructure – no new refinery has been built in 20 years – is stark evidence of corporate corrosion.

Despite 100-weak-dollar-a-barrel prices (Mexican light crude tops out around $80 USD these days) that generated $2.3 billion in enhanced revenues during the first ten months of 2007, lack of refining capacity forces PEMEX to shell out $5 billion Yanqui dollars each year to import 40% of its gasoline needs – which is to say that for every $1 of the increased revenues PEMEX takes in, two bucks go out for gas.

Calderon’s solution? The so-called “Gasolinazo”, the President’s gift to the driving public on January 6th, the Day of the Kings (Mexican Christmas), that will increase prices at the pump incrementally each month indefinitely. Increased transportation costs are expected to impact food prices across the board.

But the bad news doesn’t stop there. The big battle over Mexican oil is really a battle over crumbs. If U.S. Department of Energy calculations are on target, Mexico only has 12.9 billion barrels in proven reserves, depletion of which could turn PEMEX into a net importer by 2018 if no new petroleum sources are uncorked before then – although Mexico is the sixth largest international oil producer, it has only 1% of the planet’s proven reserves.

With the Cantarell field in the Sound of Campeche, the magnum star of offshore production that has motored PEMEX since the 1990s, just about tapped out, the clock is ticking. To exacerbate this doomsday scenario, Mexico is pumping out what it has left at a record clip to capitalize on the booming barrel price – PEMEX now produces about 3.2 million barrels daily, fully 1.7 million of which are sent up the Gulf to the U.S., an export platform that is accelerating depletion and subsidizing Washington’s wars around the world.

Given this bleak picture, most experts concur that the only place PEMEX can go to drill for new reserves is deep water, five miles down in the Gulf of Mexico. The only catch is that Petrolios Mexicanos does not have deep water drilling capacity. That’s where Petrobras, as contemplated in the PRI/PAN privatization scheme, would come in handy.

What exactly constitutes privatization? Auctioning off the corporation from the top

to the highest bidder or selling it off piece by piece from the bottom? During 35 years of oil boom and bust, PEMEX has systematically dismantled its Exploration & Exploitation division and handed it over to transnational subcontractors, emphasizes Autonomous National University researcher John Saxe- Fernandez who heads up the UNAM’s Strategic Resources Institute. At the top of Saxe-Fernandez’s list of prominent subcontractors is Halliburton with 159 PEMEX contacts since 2000 worth $1.2 billion USD – Halliburton moved into Mexico in the 1990s during the development of Cantarell when Dick Cheney was CEO.

But subcontracting out choice contracts goes back generations. George Bush pere partnered with PEMEX director Jorge Serrano (who later went to jail) in Zapata Offshore, a drilling outfit that operated in the Sound of Campeche in the 1970s. Today, virtually every major transnational driller has a piece of the Mexican action.

A recent daily La Jornada investigation by energy reporter Israel Rodriguez revealed the signing of a series of secret “pre-privatization” covenants to exploit Mexican fields with Shell (the mysterious “Project Margarita”), Exxon, Petrobras, Nexen (Canada), and StatsOil (Norway.) The contracts, accessed through Mexico’s Freedom of Information Act, contained clauses whose contents cannot be divulged for the next five years.

The PRI/PAN energy scam is currently being hatched in the Mexican Senate’s Energy Commission chaired by Francisco Labastida, a former secretary of energy (as is Calderon) and the PRI’s losing presidential candidate in 2000. Those who have gotten a peek at the details label the energy reform legislation “privatization lite” with foot-in-the-door measures that will allow for the “association of private capital” in such areas as pipelines and refineries. The legislation stops short of amending the Mexican Constitution’s Article 27, which stipulates that the petroleum belongs to the nation.

Skirting a constitutional amendment will deny ammo to AMLO – leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who many believe was swindled out of the presidency in 2006 and who has emerged as the leader of the fight against privatization. This January, Lopez Obrador announced formation of a cross-party Movement In Defense of Petroleum whose battle cry is “Mexico is not for sale!”

The ex-presidential candidate proposes that PEMEX can raise sufficient revenues without opening itself up to private investment by simply cleaning house – the corporation has long been riddled with corruption, bribe-taking, kickbacks and rampant dirty dealing. For decades, the PRI siphoned off millions to finance its electoral campaigns – in 2000, $110 million USD in PEMEX funds were funneled through the gangster-ridden petroleum workers union into Labastida’s campaign coffers, the so-called “PEMEXgate” scandal.

AMLO has also long advocated the construction of three new refineries to offset the escautf8g cost of importing gasoline which he tags “an absurd situation” for the world’s sixth largest oil producer.

In the opposite corner, Lopez Obrador’s archrival Felipe Calderon insists that opening PEMEX to private capital will somehow make Petrolios Mexicanos “more Mexican” (“more productive, more competitive, more Mexicano.”)

“To hand over our natural resources to foreign powers is an act of treason,” AMLO responds, quoting the man who expropriated and nationalized Mexico’s petroleum in 1938, President Lazaro Cardenas. Lopez Obrador’s defense of Mexican oil will be a first test for the grassroots base the leftist has been cultivating since the tainted 2006 election and is sure to frame the next round of his ongoing bout with Calderon and his allies. AMLO, who in the past has been able to mobilize millions, is calling for nationwide protests this March 18th, the 70th anniversary of Cardenas’s expropriation.

Petroleum is a patriotic fluid here. Expropriation of the oil industry from the “extranjeros” (foreigners, literally “strangers”) was the high point of revolutionary nationalism in Mexico. But in a globalized world, the coming battle around the privatization of PEMEX is not just a Mexican matter anymore and, indeed, has far-reaching implications for the future of neo-liberalism in the Americas.

Sprawled in the Oaxaca street, the life blood leaking from him, the last thing Brad Will could have imagined is that in death he would become an accidental pawn to the transnationals’ ambitions to privatize Mexican oil. Tragically, in the end, that may be Wills’ most significant legacy.

“Blindman’s Buff” has opened it lists to new subscribers. Contact the Blindman (his vision is improved) at johnross@igc.org for your lifetime subscription. Warning: there is no way to get off these lists. You will receive BMB until either you or I croak.

Slim’s slimed

January 30, 2008

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER There are eight jillion stories in the naked, nervous-Naughties city, and one of the increasingly common tales is that of the wannabe slicker who lays out that down payment for a little piece of gritty ‘n’ shitty, gorgeous ‘n’ porous, wild ‘n’ wooly San Francisco. And then supposed slick realizes, "Hey, I’m tired of stepping over panhandlers, looking for parking, and listening to car alarms, building fans, BART musicians, construction blare, and city hubbub in general." Translation: "I actually want to live in Concord, San Carlos, or Corte Madera." So the square spoiler in this happily unholy round hole of a town decides to wreck things for everyone.

That sort of inane, fish-outta-water resolve is, unfortunately, threatening Slim’s, the linchpin of the 11th Street–SoMa club scene since chart topper Boz Scaggs first opened the respected nightspot two decades ago, the site of many a memorable night of music and a venue that, legend has it, bands like Built to Spill have pledged their loyalty to because of its dedication to stellar sound. One of Slim’s neighbors tipped me off last month that the hall — which has consistently passed all sound tests conducted by the city’s Entertainment Commission — was being besieged weekly by a lone complainer living in Juniper Alley. All of this came to a head in December 2007 when the accuser ordered citizen’s arrests of two of Slim’s night managers on three occasions — after, Entertainment Commission industry representative Terrance Alan says, police refused to issue noise-violation citations of their own because they couldn’t hear any vioutf8g sound issuing from Slim’s. The arrests have led the Department of Alcohol Beverage Control to bring an enforcement action against Slim’s liquor license, which may close the club for 15 to 25 days after an April hearing.

"She has been threatening to do this for a while," Slim’s co-owner Dawn Holliday told me. The complaining neighbor and her partner have been registering noise complaints for the past two years, Holliday added, though no other neighbors have complained, and in 2000 all of the area’s condo and live-work residents signed a deed restriction making it clear that the district is a mixed-use neighborhood subject to noise, odors, and other industrial activities 24-7. Nonetheless, Holliday continued, "she calls the police on average four nights a week. The Entertainment Commission has gone into their house and done readings in the house, done readings out in front of house, and we do readings in front of their house every night with a decibel meter on the most sensitive reading you can get, and we are always compliant. It didn’t satisfy them."

One of the charges against a Slim’s manager was dismissed, but both staffers are still due to go to court for the two arrests in February and March. "I’m hoping they let these kids off," Holliday said. "I’ve gone to [San Francisco Police Department’s] Southern Station and asked them to wait for me to come over or Boz to come over and arrest us. It’s not fair that employees get arrested. We’re the two owners that live the closest, and both of us would take tickets before our employees."

Holliday is confident — after going into mediation, consulting with sound guru Charles Salter, and taking actions like installing a new insulated roof and a special four-tiered back door — that a resolution is possible. Still, the idea that one sour grape can pull down another great venue is troubling. "This is a situation where you can see how the system, which was designed to have respect for all the citizenry, can be used by this vexed complainer," Alan said. "They’ve created this history of complaints based only on their complaints. It’s going to cost Slim’s a lot of money and cost their managers a lot of sleepless nights, who want to go on and have a life. And they won’t be able to if they are found criminally liable for this. Imagine, you’re just doing your job …"

And hey, that’s another reason why so many of us come to this cow town in the first place: to work and to cozy up closer to that golden cow pumping pomegranatinis, the raucous crafters of musical ambrosia, et al. Fess up: you didn’t move to SF to feel good about driving a Prius or down Starbucks. What you can’t find regularly in Concord or Corte Madera — and what so many of us continue to crave — is that non-government-regulated minimum requirement of fun: loud, smelly, still safe, inconvenient, sprinkled with homeless parking valets, and still unlike anything you’ll get in the sticks.

For more, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

HOWLIN RAIN MAKE THEIR MOVE

Howlin Rain and Comets on Fire’s Ethan Miller has plenty of news about: HR’s superfine new LP, Magnificent Fiend, will be released March 4 on SF’s Birdman label and HR’s new imprint, Columbia Records cohoncho Rick Rubin’s American Recordings. Why jump? Miller told me he was enticed by larger studio budgets and the opportunity to be produced by Rubin, whom the frontman praised as someone who "seems to chip away at all those extraneous things and just draw out the essential fluids onto the tape.

"Those are the reasons," Miller said. "This is not the type of record deal where you get a million-dollar check and drive away in a Rolls-Royce, and you’re, like, ‘Fuck, cool, man, they bought me a Corvette, and now everyone can just go get wasted on coke and it doesn’t matter now, man!’ And then, whoa, a year later you’re kicked off the label, and you’re, like, ‘Fuck, I blew my $2 million advance now. This sucks! Now I’m a fucking nobody!’ That’s not this."

HOWLIN RAIN

With Black Mountain

Mon/4, 8 p.m., $14

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

Bound for better

January 30, 2008

› kimberly@sfbg.com

INTERVIEW You probably stumbled over it during your holiday shopping travails: a little 2008 pocket date book branded "Slingshot" with a hand-drawn cover of kids wearing engineer boots and "A is for anarchy" garb, picking flowers, vegetables, and fruit in an idyllic garden scene, a cityscape looming in the distance. Inside, each page is embellished with a quirky hand, oddball fonts, and quintessentially activist remembrances like "1979 Police machine-gun a mass rally on the steps of San Salvador cathedral, killing 25" (May 8) and "1925 Lenny Bruce b. ‘If you can’t say FUCK you can’t say FUCK THE GOVERNMENT!’" (Oct. 13), as well as faithful reminders for all of the Berkeley Critical Mass rides in ’08. The bold-faced coups de grâce: the international radical contact list, quasi phrasebook, and quick tips to "Resist Government Repression." Other anarchist groups throughout the world put out calendars, but this year Berkeley collective Slingshot published an organizer that allows you to literally organize more than just the crap that surrounds you.

This year is a banner one for the planner, and for the 20-year-old nonprofit as well. After several cryptic bouts of phone tag, I spoke to a group representative — who appropriately called himself Slingshot — earlier this month, and he said the group printed 30,000 pocket and spiral-bound 2008 editions, a jump from the wee 400 copies issued when the organization began printing them 14 years ago. Now with distribution in 50 states and a dozen countries, they’re almost sold out, though copies are still available at Bound Together Books at 1369 Haight.

What started out as a fundraiser — inspired by the radical organizers made by European collectives — for Slingshot’s free newspaper has taken on a somewhat anarchic life of its own. "Technically we’re trying to promote historical knowledge about liberation struggles and trying to disseminate contact info for those engaged in social justice work," Slingshot explained, though the handmade, cut-and-pasted, non-computer-generated paperback is also a pure product of a pre–digital age, DIY aesthetic.

Each collective member worked independently on four pages per organizer, drawing from a huge compendium of historical events for each date, so no one person controlled the overall style or process. "It’s contrary to the way the mainstream press looks, where everything [is] programmatic," Slingshot stressed. "Just like life, each page has a different look." The artists, whom Slingshot described as "the people who were filling the streets at the [World Trade Organization]," remain anonymous, except on the cover, which is signed Molly Crabapple.

"Anyone can make art. If we waited for professionals to start the calendar or the paper, we never would have gotten there," he continued. "I think that’s why people like our calendar. People want to feel engaged and not just spectators in their lives."

Next up in Slingshot’s own organizer: the collective hopes to create a zine-making space in its office at the Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley, complete with typewriters and other materials. "We’re not really against computers per se," Slingshot confessed. "But it’s not a good thing to not question whether everything has to be computerized. We can make it accessible here: people don’t have to have skills other than using scissors."
slingshot.tao.ca

Who wants change?

January 30, 2008

› steve@sfbg.com

On the rainy afternoon of Jan. 8, Mayor Gavin Newsom strode through the familiar Delancey Street Foundation complex’s main courtyard — a bodyguard holding his umbrella over him — and entered a conference room filled with local political luminaries just as the taiko drummers finished their performance.

A few hours earlier Newsom had taken the oath of office and given his second-term inaugural address during a lavish ceremony at City Hall, where he told the crowd, "Here in San Francisco our point of reference is often our minor political disagreements." But now he joined his fiancée, Jennifer Siebel, in the front row of a relatively spare ceremony to watch District Attorney Kamala Harris take her oath of office.

Although Newsom and Harris are more like political rivals than allies, their speeches sounded similar themes — accountability, unity, addressing systemic problems with common sense governance — and were liberal by national standards but safely centrist by San Francisco’s metric.

Yet these two top politicians, like many others in the Bay Area, have cast their lots with two very different national political movements, as the well-connected crowd was subtly reminded when Sen. Dianne Feinstein prepared to administer Harris’s oath of office.

The choice of Feinstein already seemed notable to those who remembered when she publicly chastised Harris for refusing to seek the death penalty for a cop killer in 2004. It was the old, white, establishment stalwart hectoring a rising black star from a new generation for a gutsy decision to stick with her professed progressive values.

But Feinstein now spoke admiringly of how women run the District Attorney’s Office and Police, Fire, and other departments. "San Francisco today is in the hands of women. Who would have thought?" the former mayor said, extending her hopeful assessment to mention that "a woman is likely to be our nominee for president of the United States."

There were murmurs from Harris’s corner and an awkwardness that hung thick in the air. This was because unlike Feinstein, Newsom, and most of the powerful establishment Democrats in San Francisco, who have endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, Harris was an early and high-profile supporter of Barack Obama.

That difference seems especially significant to San Francisco progressives and others who are wary of another Clinton returning to the White House and excited about the upstart candidacy of a younger black man who got into politics pounding the streets of Chicago as a community organizer.

Political endorsements are often like ideological tea leaves. Sometimes support stems from a personal relationship with the candidate, but usually it signals more of a philosophical affinity, a desire to either take a chance with something new or stick with a known quantity, which seems to be the case with this presidential primary election.

"It boils down to this: are you part of the Willie Brown, John Burton political machine, in which case you’re with Hillary, or are you part of the free-thinking folks who really want to see change?" Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin — who considers himself part of the latter group and has endorsed Obama — said to the Guardian.

Peskin noted that all of the elected officials in San Francisco who got their jobs through a Newsom appointment — Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Michela Alioto-Pier, Assessor Phil Ting, and Treasurer José Cisneros — have endorsed Clinton, whose campaign has been notorious locally for pressuring top Democrats to get on board.

"We are the campaign of inspiration, not obligation," said Debbie Mesloh, a former Harris spokesperson now on loan to the Obama campaign. "I think people are really tired of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton."

But Elsbernd — like many other Clinton endorsers — played down the differences between the top two candidates and doesn’t see much symbolism in the endorsements, although he does acknowledge that those who prefer to work within the system tend to support Clinton, while those "who are always pushing the system to go further" seem to be backing Obama, or John Edwards in some cases.

"If Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton were on the Board of Supervisors, they’d probably be to the right of me," said Elsbernd, whom most observers consider the board’s most conservative member, later adding, "Whoever wins the nomination, San Francisco will be heavily supportive of [him or her]."

But Sup. Chris Daly — who, like Peskin and many others, backed Edwards four years ago and supports Obama this time — thinks an Obama victory would be hugely important both locally and nationally in terms of opening up the Democratic Party and the country to new ideas.

"Hillary Clinton clearly represents the establishment, closely aligned to the [Democratic Leadership Council], and Obama represents a change from that. If Obama wins, it would send a serious wave of change through the Democratic Party and open up opportunities for progressives," Daly told us.

He also said progressive Democrats are "like the redheaded stepchildren of the party," consistently marginalized by leaders like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Feinstein, and Newsom. Daly said he liked the policies and messages of Edwards and Dennis Kucinich but identifies with Obama’s roots as a community organizer and feels he’s the best hope for change. Daly said an Obama victory would "mainstream activist politics, which is what I practice."

Many Clinton supporters aren’t afraid of the establishment label, which progressives often use as an epithet and indicator of a brand of politics mired in status quo constructs.

"To me, that’s one of her strengths. She knows how government works and will be ready to lead on day one, and if that’s called establishment, that’s OK with me," said Laura Spanjian, a vocal Clinton campaigner and elected member of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee.

There are some mainstream candidates who have bucked the norm. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is definitely to Feinstein’s left, and Pelosi have decided not to endorse any of the Democratic primary candidates. And Sup. Bevan Dufty, who is often a Newsom ally, has endorsed Obama.

"I truly feel he is unique among the candidates as far as being able to repair our relationship with the rest of the world," said Dufty, who said he identifies with African American politics, having been raised by a civil rights activist and later working for groundbreaking Congressperson and presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm and former mayor Willie Brown. "I think Obama is much better situated to bring about a new dynamic."

Eric Jaye, owner of Storefront Political Media and the top consultant to Newsom’s two successful mayoral campaigns, told us, "There’s no doubt that prominent endorsers, like Kamala Harris for Barack Obama or Gavin Newsom for Hillary Clinton, stake some political capital in their endorsements. But I don’t think it matters that much."

In fact, rather than altering local political dynamics or the careers of aspiring politicians, Jaye said, the split endorsements of local officials is positive: "We’ve hedged our bets, so whoever wins is going to love San Francisco and our top leaders."

Messy Marv at large

January 16, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Even the short list of elite Bay Area rappers — say, Too Short, E-40, Keak Da Sneak, and Mistah FAB — must include the Fillmore’s own Marvin Watson Jr., a.k.a. Messy Marv. Since selling 15,000 units of his debut, Messy Situations (Ammo, 1996), at age 16, Mess has consistently earned impressive independent numbers: his solo discs Disobayish (Scalen/Sumday, 2004) and Bandannas, Tattoos, and Tongue Rings (Scalen/SMC, 2005) both sold 20,000, while his collaboration with San Quinn, Explosive Mode (Presidential, 1998), has moved more than 50,000.

Mess began 2007 with Da Bidness (Gateway/SMC), the creation of a supergroup formed with Keak and PSD, which, according to SMC’s Will Bronson, was last year’s best-selling local independent disc, at 19,000 and counting. Mess’s current project, Draped Up and Chipped Out 2 (Scalen/SMC), dropped at the year’s end. By mid-December, Draped was the number one independent and number 13 overall album on the Music Monitor Network, which tracks sales from major United States indie chains.

The soundtrack to an uncompleted film, Draped consists mostly of songs by Mess — spitting alongside national talent like Mike Jones, Juvenile, and Sean Paul — plus tracks from local heavyweights like G-Stack and B-Legit. Despite its various hands, the disc still has an album feel, containing some of Mess’s best work since Bandannas. Highlights include his singles "My Life Is a Movie," which showcases a hook by the late Mac Dre, and "Sei Luv," a rare foray into romantic R&B. With multiple business ventures in the works — including a clothing line and a reality TV show — and perpetual major-label interest, Mess is as likely as any Bay rapper to go nationwide.

Coming from the Fillmore’s projects, however, presents challenges most artists don’t face. When I spoke with Mess, he was fresh out of Santa Rita Jail, where he spent the past year on a weapons charge.

"I was charged with felony possession of a firearm, my second firearm case," he said. "The deal was three years’ state pen, but my legal defense got me a year. Now I’m back out, trying to turn my negative situation into a positive.

"Jail didn’t stagnate anything as far as my label Scalen," continued Mess, who even recorded a Draped intro behind bars. "They had a phone so I could do my business and my time. I have a strong team behind me."

Nonetheless, given California’s three-strikes law, another felony gun charge could land Mess serious prison time. When asked if he’s worried, however, he got a little heated.

"Now you sound like the SF police," he said — the last thing a rap reporter wants to hear. "Are we trying to make people think I don’t care about going to jail?" he asked, citing his displeasure with a May 15, 2007, San Francisco Chronicle article implying his gun toting had ruined his career opportunities.

"I felt real exploited by that article," Mess said. "I said I’d rather be caught with than without, any day. The way the murder rate is, it’s like that. I don’t regret any of it. I’d rather people read about me in jail than read about me dying or being shot."

He has a point. I absolutely hate guns, as do SF voters, who passed Proposition H — banning possession and sale of firearms within city limits — in 2005. But Prop. H was struck down Jan. 9 by the First District Court of Appeal, based on a challenge by the National Rifle Association, for conflicting with state law, and I think it’s hypocritical to condemn rappers for carrying guns in a society that refuses to ban them. Street rappers like Mess have to maintain a presence in the hood to preserve their credibility and fan base. But money and fame make them targets for violent crime.

"We need some kind of protection," insisted Bay legend Spice 1, who was shot in the chest during a Dec. 3, 2007, attempt to break into his Escalade while he slept inside. The bullet pierced his lung, leaving him in critical condition, though he’s now out of danger and recovering.

"Entertainers should get a break, but we can’t even wear [bulletproof] vests," added Spice, who has had six gun charges, including four in California that predate the three-strikes law. "Marv ain’t trying to jack nobody. He’s trying to protect himself."

In any case, despite the risks, Mess has no intention of abandoning his hood. Beyond the usual rapper’s neighborhood pride, he has taken on an active role in attempting to turn negatives into positives. Aside from using his label to employ youths whose criminal records and/or poor education make getting jobs nearly impossible, he’s put out two volumes of Fillmore Nation (Scalen/SMC, 2006) to help young rappers launch their careers. He intends to donate a portion of the profits to two Fillmore community centers.

"When I got my position in the music industry, I didn’t turn my back on the kids," Mess said. "I’m out here with these kids, these criminals, and they look at me as hope because I was the same way. When they look at me, they can say, ‘If Messy Marv can do it, I can do it.’<0x2009>"

All told, I think San Francisco — or at least the Fillmore — is better off with Mess on the street than in a cell.

Pinball Machine

January 16, 2008

› amanda@sfbg.com

INTERVIEW Toni Mirosevich thinks imagination has a prominent place aboard the great ship of nonfiction, and she knows that vessel travels on waters as wide as an ocean. The Rooms We Make our Own, her first book of prose and poetry, was published in 1996 by Firebrand Books; most recently, she’s authored a collection of creative nonfiction, Pink Harvest (Mid-List Press, 203 pages, $16). Mirosevich teaches at San Francisco State University and lives in Pacifica, but I caught up with her by phone in Seattle, on the last leg of her Pacific Northwest book tour. She’ll be back in the Bay Area for a Feb. 14 reading at the Poetry Center at SFSU.

SFBG When I saw you read at Modern Times Bookstore, you said you had a very wide definition of creative nonfiction.

TONI MIROSEVICH Memoir and nonfiction have become very big. A lot of people are doing it, but everyone has a very different definition. Some people have a very strict definition: you have to have evidence, almost like a police report. But nonfiction, for me, includes the imagination.

SFBG How is that different than writing an essay and specuutf8g in it or wondering aloud?

TM That’s a nice way to define it. It really is wondering aloud. I read last night my story "Pinball." I’m driving down the coast with a friend, and he says, "I’m lonely when I pump gas." All of the rest of the story is wondering and specuutf8g on what it’s like to be lonely. That’s as nonfiction as sitting in that car seat with him.

SFBG I was speaking with Candice Stover, another writer and teacher. She was saying what she doesn’t like about creative nonfiction is that she doesn’t know what she’s stepping into.

TM Yes, isn’t that great? [Laughs] I think that’s wonderful. The messier it is, the more excited I am.

SFBG Genres have specific expectations — did you find yourself employing any kinds of rules or restraints when you were putting these stories together?

TM Not many. The thing I like to do is make what I call the net of association as wide as I can, so that I try not to limit when memory comes in or goes out, or the projection of the future that comes in or goes out. There’s a cross talk of past and present, a cross talk [between] genres.

SFBG One of the stories in Pink Harvest that I thought manifested that is "The Nutria." So much of the physical act of writing is being in the moment and not being in the moment, because you have to focus on the task of writing, but your mind is not in the room. It’s elsewhere.

TM That’s exactly it. You have to not have many strictures or limitations to allow your mind to pinball off the past and present like that.

SFBG Who are some of the writers whose work you have students read?

TM W.G. Sebold is a real favorite of mine. Jamaica Kincaid. Oh, and one of the most gorgeous, poetic writers in the Bay Area is Brian Hoffman. He does the Fishing Report on Thursdays in the Sports section of the San Francisco Chronicle.

SFBG What do you read?

TM Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead [Farrar, Straud and Giroux, 2004]. I’ve always loved Jamaica Kincaid. I love, love, love Carolyn Chute. I read a lot of poetry. One of my favorite poets is Truong Tran. And Tsering Wangmo Dhompa.

SFBG A lot of my good ideas, or what I think are good ideas, come to me in the middle of the night. Do you have the discipline to get up, turn on the light, break out the pencil, and do it?

TM If it’s a really good idea. And I get up a lot at night. You gotta do that. I used to be a truck driver, and I would write down little things as I was driving along, and I think that still happens. But if you’re talking about the discipline to sit down and work it into something else, that takes time. Then you really have to sit down.

www.midlist.org

www.tonimirosevich.com

Endorsements

January 16, 2008

President, Democrat

BARACK OBAMA

This is now essentially a two-person race for the Democratic nomination, and no matter how it comes down, it’s a historic moment: neither of the front-runners for the White House (and by any standard, the Democratic nominee starts off as the front-runner) is a white man. And frankly, the nation could do a lot worse than either President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama.

But on the issues, and because he’s a force for a new generation of political activism, our choice is Obama.

Obama’s life story is inspirational, and his speeches are the stuff of political legend. He can rouse a crowd and generate excitement like no presidential candidate has in many, many years. He has, almost single-handedly, caused thousands of young people to get involved for the first time in a major political campaign.

The cost of his soaring rhetoric is a disappointing lack of specific plans. It can be hard at times to tell exactly what Obama stands for, exactly how he plans to carry out his ambitious goals. His stump speeches are riddled with words like change and exhortations to a new approach to politics, but he doesn’t talk much, for example, about how to address the gap between the rich and the poor, or how to tackle urban crime and poverty, or whether Israel should stop building settlements in the occupied territories.

In fact, our biggest problem with Obama is that he talks as if all the nation needs to do is come together in some sort of grand coalition of Democrats and Republicans, of "blue states and red states." But some of us have no interest in making common cause with the religious right or Dick Cheney or Halliburton or Don Fisher. There are forces and interests in the United States that need to be opposed, defeated, consigned to the dustbin of history, and for all of Obama’s talk of unity, we worry that he lacks the interest in or ability to take on a tough, bloody fight against an entrenched political foe.

Still, when you look at his positions, he’s on the right track. He wants to raise the cap on earnings subject to Social Security payments (right now high earners don’t pay Social Security taxes on income over $97,000 a year). He wants to cut taxes for working-class families and pay for it by letting the George W. Bush tax cuts on the rich expire (that’s not enough, but it’s a start). He wants to double fuel-economy standards. His health care plan isn’t perfect, but it’s about the same as all the Democrats offer.

And he’s always been against the war.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of that. Obama spoke out against the invasion when even most Democrats were afraid to, so he has some credibility when he says he’s going to withdraw all troops within 16 months and establish no permanent US bases in Iraq.

Hillary Clinton has far more extensive experience than Obama (and people who say her years in the White House don’t count have no concept of the role she played in Bill Clinton’s administration). We are convinced that deep down she has liberal instincts. But that’s what’s so infuriating: since the day she won election to the US Senate, Clinton has been trianguutf8g, shaping her positions, especially on foreign policy, in an effort to put her close to the political center. At a time when she could have shown real courage — during the early votes on funding and authorizing the invasion of Iraq — she took the easy way out, siding with President Bush and refusing to be counted with the antiwar movement. She has refused to distance herself from such terrible Bill Clinton–era policies as welfare reform, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and don’t ask, don’t tell. We just can’t see her as the progressive choice.

We like John Edwards. We like his populist approach, his recognition that there are powerful interests running this country that won’t give up power without a fight, and his talk about poverty. In some ways (certainly in terms of campaign rhetoric) he’s the most progressive of the major candidates. It is, of course, a bit of a political act — he was, at best, a moderate Southern Democrat when he served in the Senate. But at least he’s raising issues nobody else is talking about, and we give him immense credit for that. And we’ve always liked Dennis Kucinich, who is the only person taking the right positions on almost all of the key issues.

But Edwards has slid pretty far out of the running at this point, and Kucinich is an afterthought. The choice Californians face is between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And Obama, for all of his flaws, has fired up a real grassroots movement, has energized the electorate, and is offering the hope of a politics that looks forward, not back. On Feb. 5, vote for Barack Obama.

President, Republican

RON PAUL

We have a lot of disagreements with Ron Paul and his libertarian worldview. He opposes the taxes that we need to make civil society function and the government regulations that are essential to protecting the most powerless members of society. From its roots in the Magna Carta and Adam Smith’s economic theories to the Bill of Rights, it’s clear the United States was founded on a social compact that libertarians too often seem to deny. And Paul compounds these ills in the one area in which he departs from the libertarians: he doesn’t support federal abortion rights. He’s been associated with some statements that are racially insensitive (to say the least). He clearly shouldn’t be president.

But he won’t — Paul isn’t going to win the nomination. So it’s worthwhile endorsing him as a protest vote for two reasons. His presence on the ballot serves to show up some of the hypocrisies of the rest of the GOP field — and he is absolutely correct and insightful on one of the most important issues of the day: the war.

Paul is alone among the Republican candidates for president in sounding the alarm that our country is pursuing a dangerous, shortsighted, hypocritical, expensive, and ultimately doomed strategy of trying to dominate the world militarily. He opposed the invasion of Iraq and thinks the US should pull out immediately. It’s immensely valuable to have someone like that in the GOP debates, speaking to the conservative half of our country about why this policy violates the principles they claim to hold dear.

Paul is absolutely correct that if we stopped trying to police the world, ended the war on drugs, and quit negotiating trade deals that favor multinational corporations over American families and workers, we would be a far more free and prosperous nation.

President, Green

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY

We endorsed Ralph Nader for president in 2000, in large part as a protest vote against the neoconservative politics of the Bill Clinton administration (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, welfare "reform," etc.). And Nader’s Green Party campaign had a place (particularly in a state the Democrats were going to win anyway). We’ve never been among those who blame Nader for Al Gore’s loss — Gore earned plenty of blame himself. But four years later we, like a lot of Nader’s allies and supporters, urged him not to run — and he ignored those pleas. Now he may be seeking the Green Party nomination again. Nader hasn’t formally announced yet, but he’s talking about it — which means he still shows no interest in being accountable to anyone. It’s too bad he has to end his political life this way.

Fortunately, there are several other credible Green Party candidates. The best is Cynthia McKinney, the former Georgia congressional representative, who has switched from the Democratic to the Green Party and is seeking a spot on the top of the ticket. McKinney has her drawbacks, but we’ll endorse her.

The real question here is not who would make a better president (that’s not in the cards, of course) but who would do more to build the Green Party and promote the best course for a promising third party that still hasn’t developed much traction as a national force. We’ve been clear for years that the Greens should be working from the grass roots up: the party’s first priority should be electing school board members, community college board members, members of boards of supervisors and city councils. Over time, leaders like Mark Sanchez, Jane Kim, Matt Gonzalez, and Ross Mirkarimi can start competing for mayor’s offices and posts in the State Legislature and Congress. Running a presidential candidate only makes sense as part of a party-building operation. (That’s what Nader did in 2000, and for all the obvious reasons he’s incapable of doing it today.)

But the Greens insist on running candidates for president, so we might as well pick the best one.

McKinney has a lot to offer the Greens. She’s an experienced legislator who has won several tough elections and taken on a lot of tough issues. As an African American woman from the South, she can also broaden the party’s base. She was a solid progressive in Congress, where she was willing to speak out on issues that many of her colleagues ducked (she was, for example, one of the few members to push for an impeachment resolution).

McKinney has her downside — in recent years she’s been flirting with the loony side of the left, getting a bit close to some Sept. 11 conspiracy theories that hurt her credibility (although she’s also made some very good points about the attacks and the lack of a serious investigation into what happened). And some of her supporters have made alarmingly anti-Semitic statements (from which, to her credit, she has attempted to distance herself). But she has to come out now, strongly, to denounce those sorts of comments and show that she can build a real coalition.

With those (serious) reservations, we’ll give her the nod.

Proposition 91 (use of gas tax)

NO

Prop. 91 is essentially an effort to ensure that revenue from the state’s gas tax goes only to roads and highways. It’s a moot point anyway: Proposition 1A, which passed last year, did the same thing, and now even proponents of 91 are urging a No vote.

But we’re going to take this opportunity to reiterate our opposition to Prop. 1A, Prop. 91, and any other ridiculous effort to restrict the use of gasoline tax revenues.

It should be clear to everyone at this point that the widespread overuse of automobiles is having far bigger impacts on California than just wear and tear on the roads. Cars are the biggest single cause of global warming, and they kill and injure more Californians than guns do, causing enormous costs that are borne by all of us. Driving a car is expensive for society, and drivers ought to be paying some of those costs. That should mean extra gas taxes and a reinstatement of the vehicle license fee to previous levels (and extra surcharges for those who drive Hummers and other especially wasteful, dangerous vehicles). That money ought to go to the state General Fund so California doesn’t have to close state parks and slash spending on schools and social services, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing.

Proposition 92 (community college funding)

YES

Prop. 92 is another example of how desperate California educators are and how utterly dysfunctional the state’s budget process has become.

The measure is complicated, but it amounts to a plan to guarantee community colleges more money — a total of about $300 million a year — and includes provisions to cut the cost of attending the two-year schools. Those are good things: community colleges serve a huge number of students — about 10 times as many as the University of California system — many of whom come from lower-income families who can’t afford even a small fee increase. And, of course, as the state budget has gotten tighter, community college fees have gone up in the past few years — and as a result, attendance has dropped.

Part of the way Prop. 92 cuts fees is by divorcing community college funding from K–12 funding — and that’s created some controversy among teachers. Current state law requires a set percentage of California spending (about 40 percent) to go to K–12 and community college education, but there’s no provision to give more money to the community colleges when enrollment at those institutions grows faster than K–12 enrollment.

Some teachers fear that Prop. 92 could lead to decreased funds for K–12, and that’s a real concern. In essence, this measure would add $300 million to the state budget, and it includes no specific funding source. This worries us. In theory, the legislature and the governor ought to agree that education funding matters and find the money by raising taxes; in practice, this could set up more competition for money between different (and entirely worthy) branches of the state’s public education system — not to mention other critical social services.

But many of the same concerns were voiced when Prop. 98 was on the ballot, and that measure probably saved public education in California. The progressives on the San Francisco Board of Education all support Prop. 92, and so do we. Vote yes.

Proposition 93 (term limits)

YES

This is pathetic, really. The term-limits law that voters passed in 1990 has been bad news, shifting more power to the governor and ensuring that the State Assembly and the State Senate will be filled with people who lack the experience and institutional history to fight the Sacramento lobbyists (who, of course, have no term limits). But the legislature isn’t a terribly popular institution, and the polls all show that it would be almost impossible to simply repeal term limits. So the legislature — led by State Assembly speaker Fabian Núñez, who really, really wants to keep his job — has proposed a modification instead.

Under the current law, a politician can serve six years — three terms — in the assembly and eight years — two terms — in the senate. Since most senators are former assembly members, that’s a total of 14 years any one person can serve in the legislature.

Prop. 93 would cut that to 12 years — but allow members to serve them in either house. So Núñez, who will be termed out this year, could serve six more years in the assembly (but would then be barred from running for the senate). Senators who never served in the assembly could stick around for three terms.

That’s fine. It’s a bit better than what we have now — it might bring more long-term focus to the legislature and eliminate some of the musical-chairs mess that’s brought us the Mark Leno versus Carole Migden bloodbath.

But it’s sad that the California State Legislature, once a model for the nation, has been so stymied by corruption that the voters don’t trust it and the best we can hope for is a modest improvement in a bad law. Vote yes.

Propositions 94, 95, 96, and 97 (Indian gambling compacts)

NO

We supported the original law that allowed Indian tribes to set up casinos, and we have no regrets: that was an issue of tribal sovereignty, and after all the United States has done to the tribes, it seemed unconscionable to deny one of the most impoverished populations in the state the right to make some money. Besides, we’re not opposed in principle to gambling.

But this is a shady deal, and voters should reject it.

Props. 94–97 would allow four tribes — all of which have become very, very wealthy through gambling — to dramatically expand the size of their casinos. The Pechanga, Morongo, Sycuan, and Agua Caliente tribes operate lucrative casinos in Southern California, spend a small fortune on lobbying, and convinced Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to give them permission to create some of the largest casinos in the nation. Opponents of this agreement have forced the issue onto the ballot.

The tribes say the deals will bring big money into the state coffers, and it’s true that more gambling equals more state revenue. But the effective tax rate on the slot machines (and this is all about slot machines, the cash engines of casinos) would be as little as 15 percent — chump change for a gambling operation. And none of the other tribes in the state, some of which are still desperate for money, would share in the bounty.

The big four tribes refuse to allow their workers to unionize. While we respect tribal sovereignty, the state still has the right to limit the size of casinos, and if the tribes want the right to make a lot more money, they ought to be willing to let their workers, not all of them Indians, share in some of the rewards. We’re talking billions of dollars a year in revenue here; paying a decent salary is hardly beyond the financial ability of these massive operations.

The governor cut this deal too fast and gave away too much. If the tribes want to expand their casinos, we’re open to allowing it — but the state, the workers, and the other tribes deserve a bigger share of the revenue. Vote no on 94-97.

Proposition A (neighborhood parks bond)

YES

This $185 million bond has the support of a broad coalition of local politicians and activists, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and every member of the Board of Supervisors. It would put a dent in the city’s serious backlog of deferred maintenance in the park system.

The measure would allocate $117.4 million for repairs and renovations of 12 neighborhood parks, selected according to their seismic and safety needs as well as their usage levels. It would also earmark $11.4 million to replace and repair freestanding restrooms, which, the Recreation and Park Department assures us, will be kept open seven days a week.

The bond also contains $33.5 million for projects on Port of San Francisco land, including a continuous walkway from Herons Head Park to Pier 43 and new open spaces at regular intervals along the eastern waterfront. While some argue that the Port should take care of its own property, it’s pretty broke — and there’s a growing recognition that the city’s waterfront is a treasure, that open space should be a key component of its future, and that it doesn’t really matter which city agency pays for it. In fact, this bond act would provide money to reclaim closed sections of the waterfront and create a Blue Greenway trail along seven miles of bay front.

One of the more questionable elements in this bond is the $8 million earmarked for construction and reconstruction of city playfields — which includes a partnership with a private foundation that wants to install artificial turf. There’s no question that the current fields are in bad repair and that users of artificial turf appreciate its all-weather durability. But some people worry about the environmental impact of the stuff, which is made from recycled tires, while others wonder if this bond will end up giving control of 7 percent of our parkland to the sons of Gap founder Don Fisher (their City Fields Foundation is the entity contributing matching funds for city-led turf conversions). Although the Rec and Park Department has identified 24 sites for such conversions, none can take place without the Board of Supervisors’ approval — and the supervisors and the Rec and Park Commission needs to make it clear that if neighbors don’t want the artificial turf, it won’t be forced on them.

Prop. A also earmarks $5 million for trail restoration and $5 million for an Opportunity Fund, from which all neighborhoods can leverage money for benches and toilets through in-kind contributions, sweat equity, and noncity funds.

And it includes $4 million for park forestry and $185,000 for audits.

With a 2007 independent analysis identifying $1.7 billion in maintenance requirements, this is little more than a start, and park advocates need to be looking for other, ongoing revenue sources. But we’ll happily endorse Prop. A.

Proposition B (deferred retirement for police officers)

YES

We’ve always taken the position that relying exclusively on police officers to improve public safety is as useless as simply throwing criminals behind bars — it’s only part of the solution and will never work as an answer all on its own.

But we’re also aware that the city is suffering a dramatic shortage of police officers; hundreds are expected to retire within a few short years, and those figures aren’t being met by an equal number of enrollees at the academy.

So we’re supporting Prop. B, even if it’s yet another mere stopgap measure the police union has dragged before voters, and even though the San Francisco Police Officers Association is often hostile to attempted law enforcement reforms and is never around when progressives need support for new revenue measures.

Prop. B would allow police officers who are at least 50 years of age and who have served for at least 25 years to continue working for three additional years with their regular pay and benefits while the pension checks they’d have otherwise received collect in a special account with an assured annual 4 percent interest rate.

The POA promises Prop. B will be cost neutral to taxpayers, and the city controller will review the program in three years to ensure that remains the case. Also at the end of three years, the Board of Supervisors, with a simple majority vote, could choose to end or extend it.

POA president Gary Delagnes added during an endorsement interview that department staffers in San Francisco who reach retirement age simply continue working in other police jurisdictions. If that’s the case, we might as well keep them here.

No other city employees are eligible for such a scheme, which strikes us as unfair. And frankly, one of the main reasons the city can’t hire police officers is the high cost of living in San Francisco — so if the POA is worried about recruitment, the group needs to support Sup. Chris Daly’s affordable-housing measure in November.

But we’ll endorse Prop. B.

Proposition C (Alcatraz Conversion Project)

NO

We understand why some people question why a decaying old prison continues to be a centerpiece of Bay Area tourism. A monument to a system that imprisoned people in cold, inhumane conditions doesn’t exactly mesh with San Francisco values.

But the Alcatraz Conversion Project, which proposes placing a half–golf ball–like Global Peace Center atop the Rock, is a wacky idea that looks and sounds like a yuppie tourist retreat and does little to address the island’s tortured past. People don’t have to support everything with peace in the title.

The proposal includes a white domed conference center for nonviolent conflict resolution, a statue of St. Francis, a labyrinth, a medicine wheel, and an array of what proponents call "architecturally advanced domed Artainment multimedia centers."

We agree with the ideal of dedicating the island to the Native Americans who fished and collected birds’ eggs from this once guano-covered rock for thousands of years and whose descendants carried out a bold occupation at the end of the 1960s. But this proposal seems based on wishful thinking, not fiscal or environmental realities.

The plan is backed by the Global Peace Foundation, which is a branch of the San Francisco Medical Research Foundation, a Mill Valley nonprofit founded by Marin resident and Light Party founder Da Vid. It’s just goofy. Vote no.

Next week: Alameda County endorsements.

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