Politics

Lit: What about Iraqi women?

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By Marke B.

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To a slightly lesser extent than the invasion of Afghanistan — where Taliban assholes are still spraying young girls’ faces with acid — the occupation of Iraq was touted as a women’s liberation project. We were the white knights coming to tear the veils off and throw open wide the doors to fancy new schools, theaters, community centers, and business opportunities.

Boy, that turned out to be quite a bit of presumptive hash. In the giant WTF that followed “shock and awe,” many learned the limits of such blanket assertions — but of course the deaths of tens of thousands are still seen here as nothing but a big fat lesson for Westerners. What about the people who had to live through it all?

One incisive complaint is that the West has failed to include enough voices from Iraq to give a fuller picture of the occupation’s effects — both the disastrous and the hopeful. Iraqi women, especially, seem even more invisible now than before the invasion.

Co-authors Nadje Al-Ali, Reader in Gender Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and Nicola Pratt, Lecturer in Comparative Politics and International Relations at the University of East Anglia, just released a new UC Press book that attempts a corrective. What Kind of Liberation?: Women and the Occupation of Iraq is the first book to examine how Iraqi women have fared since the invasion, and attempts to “expose the gap between rhetoric that placed women center stage and the present reality of their diminishing roles in the ‘new Iraq.'”

A 20-foot high controversy

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By Rebecca Bowe

At the Feb. 3 Board of Supervisors meeting, District 6 Supervisor Chris Daly expressed disgust at what he called “pay-to-play politics” and charged that Mayor Gavin Newsom had insisted upon a 20-foot height extension for the proposed redevelopment of the New Mission Theater as a favor to a developer who’d given him a political boost.

“At the very least, there is a massive and unprecedented appearance of impropriety and I think ethical malfeasance,” Daly told his colleagues. Before the meeting, he handed out photocopies of a blog post he’d written to back up his argument.

Nathan Ballard, Mayor Newsom’s press secretary, refuted Daly’s claim. “If the legislation had gone forward, the project would have been killed,” Ballard wrote in an email to the Guardian. “We reject Supervisor Daly’s false allegations. The Mayor made his decision, as he always does, on the merits alone.”

Commercial politics: Yes we can!

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It’s something like an Obamanenon, the way his campaign catchphrases have infiltrated the wholly commercial realm quicker than you can say, “Yes we can!”

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We all know the most obvious instance, the fusion of Pepsi and Obama. Perhaps he triggered it by adopting a remarkably similar campaign symbol:

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But Pepsi is determined to consume him — and us. It’s impossible to walk through certain BART/Muni tunnels downtown without the special form of mind control that comes from placards that tease the corners of your eyes no matter which way you turn:

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Yet, without a doubt, my favorite Obama-imitator is a much smaller commercial entity, the TV ad specialist Roni Deutch. There’s something very Peppermint Patty about Roni. Yes you can fight the IRS, Chuck!:

I’m sure there are dozens of other Obama-influenced jingles out there. Yes you can tell us about them!

Fallout from the union clash

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› steve@sfbg.com

Fallout from the power struggle between Service Employees International Union and its Oakland-based local, United Healthcare Workers, has been felt particularly strongly in the Bay Area since SEIU took over UHW and ousted its leaders Jan. 27 (see "Union showdown," 1/28/09).

After SEIU replaced UHW head Sal Rosselli and more than 70 elected leaders of that union for defying SEIU demands, Rosselli and his team formally resigned from SEIU Jan. 29 and formed a new union, National Union of Healthcare Workers, hoping to draw thousands of current SEIU members disgruntled with the top-down management style of SEIU head Andy Stern.

It took a few days for SEIU to take physical control of UHW’s Oakland offices, where Oakland police officers were called Jan. 30 to mediate a final showdown between UHW loyalists and the new SEIU management team, which is under the direction of two SEIU executive vice presidents that Stern appointed as trustees: Eliseo Medina and David Regan (see "SEIU seizes last holdout: UHW’s Oakland headquarters," Guardian Politics blog).

"It’s not about the building, it’s about the members," Regan told the Guardian Jan. 30, later adding, "At the end of the day, the members of the union get to decide if they want to be in the union or not be in the union."

And after a weekend when Rosselli said SEIU was aggressively trying to close outstanding contracts with many employers, a move that would make it difficult for members to disaffiliate from SEIU and join NUHW, he filed petitions showing that many members do indeed want to leave SEIU.

"We don’t trust them with our contracts and we don’t trust them with our dues," Shayne Silba, a psychiatric technician with Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland, told reporters during a Feb. 2 teleconference announcing that about 9,000 workers at 62 medical facilities have filed petitions with the National Labor Relations Board asking to leave SEIU and join NUHW.

Rosselli said that more than 50 percent of workers at most of these facilities signed the petition, and he’s asking SEIU to honor the request and let them go.

The list of facilities includes some prominent Bay Area medical centers such as Children’s Hospital in Oakland, Alta Bates, and California Pacific Medical Center and other entities run by Sutter Health. Sutter has clashed with union members and community leaders over numerous issues, including the future of St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission District.

"The Sutter Healths of the world are colluding with SEIU just like they did before the trusteeship," Rosselli told reporters, echoing his persistent theme that SEIU is too cozy with employers and doesn’t negotiate good contracts.

SEIU spokesperson Michelle Ringuette disputed that characterization and the accusations that the union was trying to quickly sew up outstanding contracts with employers to forestall moves to NUHW. "There were an astonishing number of contracts left incomplete," she said. "It’s callous to leave contracts open for whatever purpose."

Regan said SEIU will challenge the NUHW petitions. "We are not going to let these discredited, deposed members weaken UHW," he said, adding that the petition drive "is incredibly cynical and reckless in this economic climate."

But the wheels are now set in motion for a protracted fight over who will lead UHW’s 150,000 members, as well as the question of whether Rosselli’s highly democratic management style might be attractive to members of other unions.

"We’re getting calls from other SEIU members from other locals about joining NUHW," Rosselli said, citing Alameda County Medical Center, whose employees are part of the San Francisco–based SEIU Local 1021, one of many locals that have been reformulated in recent years by Stern, who then appoints its leaders.

Rosselli plans to hold a founding convention for NUHW in March, when members would vote on bylaws and a constitution, and elect their leaders, while Regan said SEIU will work to win the confidence of its members: "We have to show people that we’re on their side and we care about the work we have to do together."

>>Read more union struggle coverage here.

The District Six dance begins

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Walker, Kim

By Tim Redmond

Chris Daly will be the district six supervisor for the next two years (minus a couple of weeks), but already the dance to replace him is underway — with some surprising names floating around.

It’s no secret that Debra Walker is running, and with her long record on land-use and planning issues and her LGBT community leadership, she starts out as the leading progressive in the race. SOMA activist Jim Meko has joined the fray, too.

And the rumor mill is abuzzin with talk that School Board member Jane Kim, who by all accounts has a bright political future, is considering the race. Kim recently moved to D6, and we’ve heard from a number of people who’ve been contacted by Kim supporters about a possible supervisorial bid. Kim herself is a bit more coy: “I’m not announcing a campaign,” she told me. But she didn’t entirely rule it out: “Right now, I’m not a candidate. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do in 2010; everything’s on the table.”

And then there’s Michael Yarne, who last year left Martin Builders to take a job with the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development. Mayor Newsom doesn’t have a clear horse in that race yet (Rob Black, who works for the Chamber of Commerce, may run again, but he lost last time and is clearly a Chamber toadie, so his hopes in the liberal district aren’t that good). Yarne told us that he’s been contacted by people who think he’d be a good candidate, and he hasn’t entirely ruled it out, but “there’s no way I could run right now because I don’t live in the district.” Yarne rents in D9.

For my money, Kim is one of the brighest young stars in local politics, and she ought to stay on the school board, where she’s doing a great job, for another term, then start looking at other offices.

Budget woes show new political calculus

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By Rebecca Bowe

About 150 labor representatives and health-service providers turned out at last night’s Board of Supervisors meeting to sound off on drastic budget cuts that many said would weaken an already-strained safety net for populations who are most in need. For more than four hours, representatives from homeless-advocacy groups; clinics serving the uninsured, sex workers or other disenfranchised populations; youth organizations that strive to keep kids off the street; labor-union representatives; stressed-out hospital staffers and many others gave the board an earful. The overwhelming majority urged the Board of Supervisors to approve a special election for June 2, which would give voters an opportunity to decide whether to establish new taxes as a way of generating revenue, rather than relying solely on deep cuts to solve the city’s budget woes.

The city is facing a budgetary crisis of unprecedented scale, with a daunting $576 million deficit. When Mayor Gavin Newsom appeared before the supervisors last December to ask for their cooperation in tackling the budget shortfall, he described it as arguably the most daunting crisis the city has seen since the Great Depression. (Newsom was attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland yesterday.)

While the members of the board put off the decision as to whether or not to actually hold a special election, they did pass a measure allowing for the option to stay open. With Supervisors Alioto-Pier, Chu and Elsbernd voting no, the board approved an emergency measure to waive regular election procedures that would have prevented the tax measure from being placed on a June 2 ballot.

Nor did the board vote on an amended budget package, which was introduced by Supervisor Chris Daly to counter Mayor Gavin Newsom’s mid-year budget cuts. Daly’s list of alternative cuts targeted management-level positions, mayoral communications staff and funding for the opera, ballet and symphony in an effort to free up funds that could then be diverted to sectors such as public health.

Instead of adopting Daly’s amended list of cuts, supervisors voted 6-5 on a motion — called by Supervisor Sean Elsbernd — to send the whole thing back to the Budget & Finance Committee for a closer look. “All of this needs to be analyzed,” Elsbernd said after questioning a few management-level cuts included in the list. “To push this forward today without total understanding of the impact of each and every one of these — and these are just the ones I’ve caught while sitting here! — God knows what else is in there. I’m just saying, let’s have this fully vetted.” Supervisors Alioto-Pier, Chiu, Chu, Dufty, Elsburnd and Maxwell supported the motion.

That left an interesting and somewhat mixed message about the politics of the new board. Supervisors Dufty and Maxwell, who will be the swing votes on anything that requires a supermajority (to override a mayoral veto) stayed with the progressives on the vote for a June election. But Chiu – elected board president entirely with progressive support – sided with the mayor’s allies and the moderates on the budget re-allocation vote.

We’ll have to see how this new calculus plays out in the next few weeks.

A scar is born

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› johnny@sfbg.com

What does Gary Indiana think of Obamamania? I have to ask, because Indiana is a peerless dissector of contemporary American political symptoms. The evidence includes his blistering appraisal of Jerry Brown’s blank gaze and sun-scorched face and other facets of the 1992 presidential campaign in Let it Bleed: Essays 1985-1995. Or more recently, the combination of laugh-out-loud descriptive power and pointed investigative fact (as opposed to typical journalistic trivia) in 2005’s The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt, a petite volume that somehow manages to depict the 2004 Republican National Convention, for the record, in words that do full justice to that historical event’s baleful hilarity and bottomless horror.

Indiana might be best known today as a novelist whose inspirations have ranged from pre-Disney Manhattan junkies and hustlers to jaundiced, post-In Cold Blood original fakes such as Andrew Cunanan and homicidal con artist and subconscious Liz Taylor impersonator Sante Kimes. Clearly this is a man who has something to say about American delusion, and the new Utopia’s Debris: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 320 pages, $28.95) includes a few brief but scathing riffs on the theme. "Kindergarten Governor" renders the 2003 California gubernatorial recall with great flair — the "aptly named" Gray Davis is likened to an "an especially depressive funeral director"; Arianna Huffington is tagged "inestimable" — while tracing the effort’s birth back to criminal business dealings in an office behind a Krispy Kreme in Sacramento. "The Excremental Republic" provides a sensible, revealing, and thus utterly unique reading of Bush vs. Gore and its impact.

Organized into five parts, beginning with the Nico-quoting "Desertshore" and ending with the title section, Utopia’s Debris collects Indiana’s journalistic writings, which are reliably several flights above almost all prose found in newspapers and magazines today, while never once stiff or pretentious. Quite the contrary: Indiana’s ever-active bullshit detector makes for the opposite of PR pablum, even when he flirts with the sin of log-rolling by sending a little textual love his to his frequent book jacket contributor Barbara Kruger (a better writer than artist, in my opinion), paying tribute to actress (and friend) Bulle Ogier, or eulogizing another close ally, Susan Sontag. To say Indiana is a writer who welcomes argument is an understatement. When he refers to one published eulogy as a "fulminating, hateful dismissal of Sontag’s entire lifework," his own hateful dismissal of the late Pauline Kael in Artforum — complete with a memory of himself and Sontag raiding a newsstand for a fresh opportunity to mock Kael’s writing does spring to mind.

As its name suggests, the pleasures and the value of Utopia’s Debris stem partly from the manner in which Indiana organizes these short examples of writing for a paycheck. In a one-two punch, an assessment of presidential election thievery ("The Excremental Republic") is followed by a look at the cultural relevance and role of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls ("Uberdolls"). A posthumous look at Leni Riefenstahl and her last years (checkout this whiplash truth: "[She’s] relaxed, genial, reflective in an undefensive way, and genuinely likable. Rather like the giant toad who has, at last, eaten its fill of flies and can’t see any buzzing in her immediate vicinity") arrives shortly before his tribute to Sontag, who famously attacked Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetics. The book’s final roll call of subjects — Robert Bresson, Georges Simenon, Brecht, and Weill as filtered through Harry Smith — is vital and dramatically potent.

A lifetime of sharpening sentences like so many knives means that Indiana knows how to write an intro: "You could infer from the production notes that Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain would be useful if it came in a spray can. Spritz a little on a fundamentalist and change him into a liberal, or neutralize a whole church of basement of rednecks with a full-strength tolerance bomb." When he detonates explosives by pious pop culture it makes for entertaining reading. But the peak stretches of Utopia’s Debris occur within assessments of a wide variety — Gavin Lambert, Mary Wornov, Caroline Blackwood, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Witold Gombrowicz, Thomas Bernhard, Curzio Malaparte, Jean Echenoz, Emmanul Carrère — of anti-canonical novelists. Through them, Indiana wrestles with his own ideas about life and chosen calling in a manner that is revelatory.

Mom and pop lose their voice

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› rebeccab@sfbg.com

Bank of America and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. are quite the opposite of mom-and-pop operations, yet two of the seven members appointed to San Francisco’s Small Business Commission hail from these corporations, much to the chagrin of true small business leaders.

In a heated e-mail fired off to an assortment of City Hall staffers Jan. 13, Small Business Commissioner Michael O’Connor criticized the Mayor’s Office for diluting the commission — which was set up to go to bat for the little guy — with big business appointees.

Meanwhile, funding for the Small Business Assistance Center was almost eliminated last month by the Board of Supervisors. And a report that was supposed to streamline the unwieldy permitting process for small businesses, which the administration was required to complete under the 2007 measure Proposition I, never materialized.

At a time when small businesses are struggling in the face of a dour economic landscape, strong advocacy on their behalf is needed now more than ever. But even as former Small Business Commissioner David Chiu ascends to the presidency of the Board of Supervisors, small business leaders are decrying their lack of support in City Hall.

The Small Business Commission is a seven-member body composed of three members appointed by the Board of Supervisors and four appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom. Set up to serve as an advocate for the small business community, the commission was also chartered to oversee the Office of Small Business, a branch of the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

Last May, the office opened its Small Business Assistance Center, created to lend startups a helping hand with navigating the bureaucratic maze of permits, fees, licenses, and other hoops to be jumped through to legitimately set up shop in the city.

Regina Dick-Endrezzi, acting director of the Office of Small Business and one of four people staffing the center, says there’s a real need for the service. She said that about 99 percent of all San Francisco businesses fall into the category of "small," which she defines as having fewer than 100 employees, making it one of the most important sectors of the city’s economy.

Since the center opened, more than 1,300 small business clients have received assistance there, according to Dick-Endrezzi. Many lack the resources and capital that larger enterprises might have at their disposal, so SBAC case managers act as counselors for people who are trying to get a new business off the ground.

Entrepreneurs have sought help with things like obtaining a permit to open a vegan taco truck, acquiring a license to start a cleaning business, or filing for tax credits for an organic baby food business, to name a few examples. "This is something we really need," Dick-Endrezzi told the Guardian, "and this is something politics shouldn’t get in the way of."

Nonetheless, the center and the commission haven’t been spared from controversy. In December, the Board of Supervisors considered slashing SBAC funding. The $800,000 annual budget was ultimately granted, but it weathered midyear budget cuts of around 10 percent.

Now a new issue of contention has emerged: O’Connor has sounded the alarm that the SBC is becoming weakened by mayoral appointees who represent the large corporate interests that are often quite different from those of small businesses.

The conflict went public at the Jan. 12 SBC meeting when it came time to elect a new vice president. Richard Ventura, who heads a consulting firm and serves as executive director of the downtown-based Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, had just won commissioners’ approval to serve as president. Before a second round of votes were cast, O’Connor — who served as president for two years but declined to try for the post again — voiced his fervent opinion that "an actual small business owner" should be chosen for the other leadership slot.

"I think we need the balance of a small business owner in either the presidency or the vice-presidency position," said O’Connor, who owns the Independent music venue in the Western Addition. "If we have a president and a vice president that both come from downtown, and if three out of the four mayoral appointees on this commission are from downtown, I will be incredibly embarrassed to be on this commission. And I’m sorry, this is nothing personal — I like everybody on this commission — but small business is in a fight for its life, in this building and in City Hall."

Despite his plea, Commissioner Irene Yee Riley — a retired Bank of America executive — was elected. Although not a small business owner, Yee Riley told commissioners that she was qualified to serve as vice president thanks to her "many years of experience working with small business owners as a banker."

"I’m retired, and I have time, so I want to use this opportunity to give back to the community," she added.

Yee Riley won after receiving one vote more than Commissioner Janet Clyde, a bartender and general managing partner of Vesuvio Cafe in North Beach. "I live in the Mission District in a solid working-class neighborhood that is rapidly changing," Clyde told the other commission members during her pitch. "I know the challenges of small businesses operating far from the power and economic center of San Francisco, and I intend to work to recommend their interests … even in this difficult budgetary time."

The following morning, a dismayed O’Connor vented his frustration in an e-mail to mayoral staffers, typing "Small Business Commission … or … Big Business Commission" into the subject line. Installing commissioners with ties to large corporations rather than direct small business experience constitutes "a neutralization of the only real voice small businesses have in San Francisco," he charged.

The most recent mayoral appointee to the SBC was Darlene Chiu (no relation to David Chiu), a spokesperson for PG&E who formerly served as deputy director of communications for the Mayor’s Office. When the Guardian queried the Mayor’s Office last March on what qualifications a PG&E spokesperson brought to the Small Business Commission, Press Secretary Nathan Ballard responded with this statement: "Darlene has first hand knowledge of the challenges facing small businesses in San Francisco. She grew up working in her family’s … retail businesses in Chinatown, managing nine to l5 employees. She will also bring her knowledge of city government and communications to the commission, which will be important to the successful operations and promotion of the assistance center." (See "Newsom to small business: drop dead!" March 18, 2008 Bruce Blog.)

But since her appointment last March, public records show that Chiu has missed four of the monthly meetings. Excessive absenteeism at city commission meetings briefly emerged as an issue in September 2006, prompting Newsom to introduce a new standard with a working goal of 100 percent attendance for commissioners.

Meanwhile, not everyone agrees with O’Connor’s assertion that "San Francisco’s Office of Economic Development seems to believe small business is just an annoying little rock in its shoe."

"The Office of Economic Development is incredibly committed to keeping this commission strong," counters Jennifer Matz, managing deputy director of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, who played a role in starting the Small Business Assistance Center. "Michael is very disappointed about what happened, but I don’t think it reflects a lack of commitment to small business on the part of the city or the Mayor’s Office."

Matz said the challenge to the SBAC came from the Board of Supervisors — not the Mayor’s Office — when they considered revoking the center’s funding. She also contends that the Small Business Commission’s voting record doesn’t demonstrate a downtown vs. small business split.

From January 2008 to this January, commissioners voted unanimously 34 out of 38 times, the record shows. But it’s on the divisive issues where small and big businesses differ that can have the most impact.

Sup. Chiu served on the Small Business Commission before being elected to the Board of Supervisors. He said commission members usually saw eye-to-eye on most items that came before the commission regardless of whether they were board or mayoral appointees. But for him, the frustration was that "it didn’t feel that either the mayor or the Board of Supervisors were focused on small business."

In his new capacity as board president, he said measures that aid small businesses will be moving up on the list of priorities. For example, he has asked for a hearing on why the report on streamlining small business regulations, which Prop. I required the Office of Small Business to complete by 2007, was never done.

Although doubts about the commitment to small business seemed to be cast on all sides, everyone we spoke with seemed to agree on one point: in these stormy economic times, San Francisco’s small businesses need all the help they can get.

Two reports released in December by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Automatic Data Processing (ADP) provide some insight into the challenges facing small businesses nationally. BLS reported that 524,000 jobs were lost during December, bringing the 2008 total to 2.6 million lost jobs — the highest since 1993.

The ADP report showed that 281,000 jobs had been shed from companies with fewer than 50 employees. This signifies a drastic increase in job losses from this sector: between October and November, small businesses cut just 79,000 employees, according to ADP, and between September and October, they let go of 25,000 employees.

"That was the first time since 2002 that small businesses had net job losses," says Scott Hauge, president of Small Business California. What’s frightening, he says, is that the small business sector traditionally acts as an economic stabilizer.

During the battles it the mid-1980s over accelerating downtown office building construction, the Guardian commissioned a study from noted MIT economist David Birch that found that small business accounted for most net job creation in San Francisco, and that catering to corporate demands downtown actually cost the city jobs.

Yet now, with the small business community sometimes serving as a political football tossed between downtown and City Hall, the city’s economic base is in trouble and hoping for help from political leaders who are now contemputf8g deep budget cuts.

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Here’s a list of all the small business commissioners:

Commissioner Darlene Chiu
Occupation: Communications, PG&E
Appointed by: mayor

Commissioner Janet Clyde
Occupation: General managing partner / bartender, Vesuvio Cafe
Appointed by: Board of Supervisors

Commissioner Kathleen Dooley
Occupation: Florist / owner, Columbine Design
Appointed by: Board of Supervisors

Commissioner Gus Murad
Occupation: Owner, Medjool (restaurant) and Elements (hotel)
Appointed by: mayor

Commissioner Michael O’Connor
Occupation: Co-owner, The Independent (music venue)
Appointed by: Board of Supervisors

Commissioner Irene Yee Riley
Occupation: Retired senior vice president and market executive, Bank of America
Appointed by: mayor

Commissioner Richard Ventura
Occumpation: Executive director, San Francisco Hispanic Chamber of Commerce
Appointed by: mayor

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Previous Guardian coverage:

>>Volume 20.02 (PDF) An exclusive Bay Guardian study in 1985 challenges the convention wisdom that downtown development creates jobs. Instead, our study by an MIT economist shows that small business have created virtually all the new jobs in San Francisco since l980.

>>Volume 21.02 (PDF) Our updated study in l986 shows that as highrises have gone up, downtown San Francisco has lost jobs. In fact, all the net new jobs in the city have come from new and small businesses in light industrial areas and the neighborhoods

>>October 1, 2003 (PDF) The Guardian’s small business agenda for San Francisco

Emily Postfeminist

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Andrea is on vacation. Check out this column originally published Jan. 3, 2007.

Dear Andrea:

Recently, my boyfriend and I were at a strip club and bought a lap dance. My experience has been that, as a girl, the hands-off rule generally doesn’t apply to me. However, out of respect for the girl, I don’t touch until she invites me to. This one invited me to touch her. Caught up in the moment, my boyfriend asked, "Can she touch your pussy?" I was a bit shocked because I assumed that was off-limits — but she said, "She can, but you can’t." So I started touching her on the outside of her G-string. I got a little braver and went under her G-string but still stayed outside. She moved a certain way during her dance, and my thumb kind of slipped right in. A few seconds later, she stopped. She was nice and hugged me, and told us to come back any time. Did I go too far? I feel guilty that I may have made her feel like a hooker. Or is it really no big deal? I’m embarrassed to go back, and I’ve asked my boyfriend to not make that request in the future. How often does this sort of thing happen to a dancer?

Love,

Thumbelina

Dear Thumb:

Just what we needed, a new set of ethical dilemmas and moral failings to keep us awake and tossing on those long dark nights of the soul that tend to hit around this time of year.

I really don’t think this is the sort of thing that used to bother people before half the female grad students in the country started stripping and writing books and doing performance art (oh, so much performance art) about it. For that matter, I don’t think other girls used to feel as permitted or as obligated to go grope those girls for money at their places of work. I’m not entirely sure that what we’re seeing here is really an accurate demonstration of human sexual behavior in the wild — there are too many layers of politics and performance in there to tell what’s really happening — but I’m confident we’re at least seeing some genuinely new situations and their accompanying etiquette issues.

I’ve known any number of post-everything strippers, hookers, and dominatrices, but one in particular comes to mind. She’d been working at a womyn-owned, crunchy-organic peep show, but — surprise! — she could barely make her rent. So like so many before her, she’d given up her ideals and gone where the money is. Once she was hired by the grimy mainstream porn theater and Olde Lappe Dance Emporium, she was coming home with her pockets and God knows what else stuffed with fifties every night but complaining to me that some guy came while she was wiggling around on him and ew, ew, gross, yuck, how dare he? I commiserated at the time because I’m a wimp like that, but honestly, isn’t that an occupational hazard? If you’re going to be a sex worker, you deserve to be treated with respect and decency, of course, and what you say goes as far as who’s allowed to touch where with what and so forth, but come on. Into each stripper’s life a little semen must fall. If that’s absolutely not going to work for you, dance behind glass (for lower tips) or, hey, get your Realtor’s license or something.

Most of the female sex workers I’ve known have been at least passingly bisexual, but even those who really aren’t seem quite genuinely enthusiastic about female customers, both prospective and actual. There are elements of novelty to the appeal, I’m sure, just as there are elements of safety and sisterly enthusiasm. What there ought not to be, and what you ought not to worry about, is an expectation that female customers aren’t really customers — that is to say, that they’re not paying the sex worker for sex. While many women who go to strip clubs or book time with a dominatrix may be doing it to please a (male) partner, or as a learning experience or a lark, or just to make a statement of some sort, it would be pretty silly for a sex worker to be surprised when a customer, male or female, appears to be interested in having some sort of sex with her.

Your dancer granted you access. Maybe she liked you (or likes girls in general) or maybe she was milking you for tips, but whatever, she said yes. She has a sense of how sturdy or flimsy a barrier her G-string presents to curious fingers and was probably not surprised when you got where you got. The most telling thing was that she invited you back whenever, which she was certainly under no obligation to do. I think it would be fine to go back there and fine to whisper, "Sorry I got fresh last time" and fine not to. It would also be fine for her, in turn, to refuse you service, but I bet she doesn’t.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is teaching Sex After Parenthood at Day One Center (www.dayonecenter.com), Recess (info@recessurbanrecreation.com), and privately. Contact her at andrea@altsexcolumn.com for more info.

Ask not what SF can do for you …

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› molly@sfbg.com

It’s been a depressing decade for progressives. In fact, it seems our inability to fight the Bush administration and its misadventures in Iraq and elsewhere left us with the symptoms of a kind of collective Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: disillusioned, disappointed, and tired. That is, until Barack Obama’s election woke us up with a little thing called Hope™.

Now that we have all this energy, though, where should we direct it? How, on an individual level, can we support the Obama administration in making real change? Michelle Obama started to answer this question when she announced the Call to Service, asking Americans to devote time to neighborhood organizations and causes on Jan. 19 and beyond, via www.usaservice.org.

We’d like to add to the discussion by highlighting some local groups, causes, and nonprofits who could use year-round help.

ADVOCACY

Perhaps the best way to use your renewed political energy is putting it toward a cause you care about. For example, if you’re worried about how this year’s massive budget deficit might devastate healthcare in San Francisco, you might want to get involved with Coalition to Save Public Health (415-848-3611 ext. 3628, home.comcast.net/~mylon01/publichealth). Also check out nonprofits and grassroots groups working towards marriage equality, energy reform, or whatever pet issue you’re passionate about.

CITY GOVERNMENT

An even more direct way to be involved in local government is to volunteer inside City Hall, particularly with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (1 Carlton B. Goodlett, SF. 415-554-5184, www.sfgov.org). Every supervisor has two aides, who in turn rely on donated labor to maintain the busy officials’ schedules and duties. To get involved, visit the Web site and fill out an application specifying your skills, availability, and preferred supervisors. Keep in mind four current supervisors once worked as staff or interns in these same offices, so this is a great way to get into politics while helping our government run more efficiently. It’s win-win.

BIKES


Though SF might seem like a bicycle-friendly city, we’ve still got a lot of work to do, from promoting the bike as primary transportation to representing bicycle interests in local government and city planning. If you’re a fellow velo-fanatic, give your time to the Bicycle Coalition (995 Market, SF. 415-431-BIKE, www.sfbike.org). Check the Web site to volunteer in the office, at Volunteer Nights, with bike valet parking, or with outreach.

PARKS

It’s easy to forget how important beautiful, open spaces are to a community until you don’t have them. But just imagine how different the Mission would be without Dolores Park, or the Lower Haight without Duboce. Support the maintenance, beautification, and continued improvement of these and other green spaces by volunteering with the Neighborhood Parks Council (451 Hayes, F. 415-621-3260, www.sfnpc.org). The Council welcomes everything from one-time feedback or participation in a scheduled work day to longer-term internships for youth 16-23 years old, and everything in between.

… AND MORE

One of our favorite recent-ish developments on the Interwebs is the proliferation of Web sites connecting philanthropic types to specific causes — especially two SF-based organizations who work specifically with volunteers. Check out Chinatown-based Volunteermatch.org for a list of specific opportunities and a chance to upload your volunteer résumé — great for medium- to long-term volunteering — or former Best of the Bay winner One Brick (www.onebrick.org), which hosts an event calendar of upcoming volunteer events — great for one-time, short-term, and short-notice involvement.

Most important, we’d like to point out that community service, though incredibly important, is only one way to address our society’s ills. "It can be a Band-Aid approach to systemic problems," said Sup. Chris Daly. What we really need, he said, is "to demand more from elected leaders, for people to put themselves forward and take control of political institutions. There’s no greater service than keeping elected leaders accountable to the people they serve."

True dat.

Profiles of change

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› amanda@sfbg.com
Photos by Pat Mazzera

"Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America," President Barack Obama told US citizens on his Inauguration Day. "For everywhere we look, there is work to be done."

He’s not just cheering himself on — he’s asking his constituents to embrace what’s to come and to consider what more we can be as the individual moving parts of this incredibly complex country.

Even as far back as the Democratic National Convention, Obama turned his campaign slogan into a call to action. "All across America something is stirring. What the naysayers don’t understand is this isn’t about me — it’s about you."

That rang in the ears of people profiled below, who changed their lives in response to his call. That inspired other changes, suggesting that the effort to elect Obama is having a spillover effect on organizing at other levels — which may become a part of how US citizens respond to his actions in office.

Expectations are high for the changes he will order and already there’s indications of what’s to come, such as the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the end of the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy on homosexuality, and a commitment to action on climate change.

Many are eager to see more fundamental change in areas such as war, jobs, housing, energy, and transportation — areas we explore in this issue — as well as greater engagement between the White House and the grassroots groups that helped elect Obama.

In the profiles and stories that follow, the Guardian asks questions about what and who will change and how to move past a pithy slogan to trigger the transformation this country desperately needs.

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MARIA GOMES

Maria Gomes was committed to Obama from the beginning. "I signed up right after he announced," said this Menlo Park resident, who joined Silicon Valley for Obama and volunteered on the campaign.

Her first big assignment was in Iowa, where she spent 10 days campaigning before the caucus along with her husband and two teenage children. For Gomes, Obama’s Iowa win was a particularly powerful and pivotal moment. "I just realized the power of the volunteers and how awesome it was," she said. "It was clear to me after Iowa that he was going to win, so I just dove in."

Gomes, a 60-year-old lawyer, took an eight-month unpaid leave from her work as an immigration and dependency attorney for San Mateo County to devote herself fulltime to Obama’s campaign. It was the first time she devoted her life to get a politician elected.

"In fact, I [had] steered away from politics because I don’t really like politics," she said. "This was different. I really strongly felt the people carried this campaign. I canvassed with CEOs, doctors, young people … nobody took a back seat in this campaign. We did not take it lightly."

She and her husband served as precinct captains in California. After the primary, she coordinated volunteers and voter registration efforts for the general election. Gomes traveled to seven states in the months leading up to Nov. 4, spending Election Day working on voter protection in Las Vegas.

"I felt that the only way he was going to get elected was if people got in there. It wasn’t just going to happen," said Gomes, an immigrant from Cabo Verde, off the western coast of Africa.

And it’s not over for Gomes. Her whole family went to Washington DC for the inauguration, where she answered Michelle Obama’s call to volunteer on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Gomes has also signed up to work on Kamala Harris’ run for attorney general and she’s still active with her fellow workers at Silicon Valley for Obama.

"About a week after the election I went to a meeting for our field office. Five hundred people were there. We brainstormed how to stay involved in his campaign," she said. They ranked issues they’d like to see addressed by Obama and organized themselves into teams to work on messaging them to the new administration. "We received a survey from the national team…. The [Silicon Valley] team took the national survey and made it local, community by community. That’s the kind of movement that’s happening now. I’m sure it’s going on everywhere because the campaign wanted every state and every county involved." Her husband is now on the tech team and she’s doing fundraising work for the inauguration.

"It’s not over. Nothing has stopped," she said, adding that she believed this kind of organizing would be very present in the administration. "It’s going to be governed by the people. I plan to be involved for the next four years at whatever level I can. I still write e-mails to whoever I think can change something. I hope it will be transparent enough that we can still communicate to people higher up in the administration — all the way to Barack and Michelle Obama."

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AARON KNAPP

Aaron Knapp graduated from law school in 2002 and spent the subsequent six years working for big corporate law firms. By 2008, he began to feel that all of the major decisions in his life had been made based on money and materialism, an certain emptiness that changed suddenly at summer’s end.

"Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention was a real turning point for me," he recalled. "The change that I needed in my life was to join in this campaign that transcended the individuals."

He said he did what he always wanted to do: "I quit a job I don’t enjoy." Knapp went to work instead on the Obama campaign, spending about four months in Nevada. Putting Obama in office became too important to not give it his all: "I just wanted to make sure on November 4, I could say to myself I did everything I could."

On election night, with the feeling of victory rushing through him, there was also a kind of malaise, a feeling of "now what?"

"Our roles in the campaign were predetermined — there are a finite amount of things you do in a campaign. Make phone calls, gather data, knock on doors…. After the election, after we won…. What do we do now? Those predetermined roles are no longer set up for us," he said.

Knapp said it required some soul searching to find the next important thing to do: "The task is to get real specific."

He’s now writing a book and working to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed by Congress. The act would amend existing labor laws to make it easier for workers to create unions that are recognized by employers. In 2007, it passed in the House and failed in the Senate, but it was part of Obama’s platform during the primary season, and one of the reasons he garnered support from organized labor.

But, said Knapp, "It’s one of those things that’s being put on the back burner as we transition in this administration…. While Obama was championing this cause during the campaign, there’s no sign of it now."

The waning of enthusiasm for it is indicative of how Obama’s administration may start to handle some of those crucial campaign promises that drew so many people into his fold. That piqued Knapp’s interest and reminded him of the goals of his grandfather, an auto worker for Chevrolet during the 1940s, who passed away during Knapp’s first year of law school: "My grandfather always would plead with me to do whatever I could to get the labor laws back in order. So that’s an issue that’s really important to me."

Knapp also said that it’s important to keep the grassroots Obama movement alive by continuing to push crucial legislation that was part of his platform for change.

"It goes right to the controversial pieces of law and policy that he’s addressing," Knapp said. "If he’s able to keep this mobilization together, that will help him significantly in getting policies through."

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PAULI OJEA

Pauli Ojea, who’s about to turn 30 years old, says that she’s spent her entire adult life "voting for the loser" and advocating for change that’s been slow to happen.

A New Jersey native, Ojea came to California to work for the San Francisco Conservation Corps on environmental education programs. That lead to a position with Breast Cancer Action as a community organizer, where she found that hopeful efforts were often frustrated by political pitfalls.

Then, Ojea attended a 2004 event where she heard Van Jones speak about how a new green wave was coming and it needed to lift all boats. When a position opened with Jones’ new organization, Green for All, she applied to be a policy analyst for the Oakland-based green-jobs advocacy group.

In between the two jobs, she spent a week campaigning for Obama with her mother, a Spanish immigrant who groused that if he lost, she’d be spending more time back in Spain.

Ojea now works on federal green-jobs policy and climate change equity, and has already been deeply affected by the Obama election. "For most of my career in advocacy, there’s been this sense that we probably don’t want to work on federal policy because we’re not going to get anywhere," she explained. "I started at Green For All with Barack Obama elected as president and we’re actually putting a lot of resources into federal policy, and there’s this whole feeling like we’re going to get somewhere. That’s shifted for me. I imagine that for a lot of other environmental and social justice advocates, there seems to be a door opening."

She’s even more enthused after meeting with members of the Obama transition team who were tasked with a review of the Department of Energy. About 30 to 40 people, representing organizations including the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council as well as renewable energy business leaders and public officials doing energy work in different states, convened in Washington DC to discuss energy policy.

"I’ve been to a lot of public agency meetings and what usually happens is you have maybe an hour and a half of presentation from the agency and maybe a half hour for all the organizations and people trying to get in their piece," she said. "This was different. It was about a two-hour meeting and the whole time it was dedicated to hearing from the community, from businesses, from people with experience in energy efficiency. The transition team members were fully engaged, actually listening, asking questions, asking for clarifications if they didn’t understand something. They were really humble and they seemed really excited about what kinds of changes were possible. I’d never been part of a process like that."

Ojea sees more potential than ever for the activist community in the Obama administration. "It could provide more opportunity and open more doors for what your activism is about. There’s such a difference between being used to being on the outside of the fence, behind the barricade, screaming because it’s the only way to be heard. Is that going to change? Are we going to be inside the fence?"

She recalled Obama’s campaign observation that "change doesn’t come from Washington, change comes to Washington." She’s hoping the Obama team’s outreach will continue.

"We’re at a really strange and critical time," Ojea said. "As Van says, in America, in terms of the economy, the floor has dropped out from under us. But with the election of Obama, the ceiling has come off. There’s a lot of opportunity, and things could also go downhill. What are we going to do?"

Guardian team leaves to cover the inauguration

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The Guardian’s reporter/photographer team of Paula Connelly and Rebecca Frank prepare to leave on Friday to cover the Inauguration. Being from Brooklyn (Paula) and Pittsburgh (Rebecca), they will have no trouble with the weather. See their dispatches and photos in the Guardian, the politics blog, and the Bruce blog. B3

Street fighters

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› steve@sfbg.com

StreetsBlog (www.streetsblog.org) isn’t your average blog, but rather a well-funded institution that helped promote and propel a major transformation that has taken place on New York City streets since the site was founded in 2006, sparking rapid and substantial improvements for bicyclists and pedestrians.

In the process, StreetsBlog — which is part of the Livable Streets Network, along with StreetFilms and the StreetsWiki, started by urban cyclist Mark Gordon, founder of the popular file-sharing site LimeWire — developed a loyal following among alternative transportation planners and advocates in cities across the United States.

"There was nothing like it," said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. "They put out these inspiring images and really helped people envision better streets."

So when a group of about two dozen of these Bay Area transportation geeks made the trek up to Portland, Ore. last summer for the Towards Carfree Cities International Conference (see "Towards Carfree Cities: wrap-up," Guardian Politics blog), one of their secret goals was to try to lure StreetsBlog to San Francisco.

What began with a long, beer-soaked meeting at a Portland brewpub has turned into substantial new voice in the local media and transportation landscape since StreetsBlog San Francisco (www.sf.streetsblog.org) launched at the start of this year.

"All this really came together in Portland during the Carfree conference," said Aaron Naparstek, executive editor of the three StreetsBlogs (SF, NYC, and Los Angeles) and executive producer of the LivableStreets Network. "The No. 1 reason we decided to open up SF StreetsBlog is because so many people were asking us to do it, particularly from the bike activist community. Most important, we also had a guy with money asking us to do it — [San Francisco bicyclist] Jonathan Weiner … There’s a vibrant activist community that thinks we can be useful and there are people willing to fund the work."

It also dovetailed nicely with the organization’s push to influence the quadrennial federal transportation bill reauthorization that Congress will consider later this year, which environmentalists hope will shift money away from freeway projects. "There was a sense that now is the time to build a nationwide movement," Naparstek said. "The freeway lobby guys are very organized and embedded in all the state [departments of transportation] and it’s tough to counter that. We want to use the Internet to foment a national movement."

StreetsBlog SF has two full-time staffers, editor Bryan Goebel, a San Francisco-based journalist who worked for KCBS) and reporters Matthew Roth, part of the team that started StreetsBlog in New York. StreetsBlog also pays as a contributor longtime local author and activist Chris Carlsson, who was part of the SF crew in Portland.

"I think they have an opportunity to bring close attention to the texture of life on the streets, something print journalism doesn’t do very well," Carlsson said. "It’s about reinhabiting city life."

Shahum said she’s thrilled at the arrival of StreetsBlog, which she says will help local leaders envision a less car-dependent city: "We as advocates are not always so good at helping people visualize what something better looks like."

And that, says Naparstek, is his network’s main strength. "We’ve actually had a lot of success in New York moving these livable streets models forward and we have a lot of best practices to share," he said, noting their network of 175 bloggers in cities around the country and world.

With Mayor Gavin Newsom’s penchant for "best practices"; San Francisco’s experimentation with innovative ideas like market-based parking pricing, congestion fees, Muni reform, and creation of carfree ciclovias; and the imperatives of climate change and the end of the age of oil, activists say this is the ideal time and place the arrival of StreetsBlog.

"There is an interesting convergence of issues that has made it bigger than it might have been," Roth said.

"And in San Francisco, who’s covering these issue besides the Guardian? There is a big need for this," Goebel added. "From a journalists’ point of view, we need to call people on their inconsistencies and not just let leaders govern by press release, which Mayor Gavin Newsom has a tendency to do."

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I guess Mayor Gavin Newsom really wants to cut the budget. He wants to force city employees (and not just the cops) to accept pay cuts. He wants to lay people off and eliminate services. He wants to solve the budget crisis entirely on his terms — and honestly, it baffles me.

Anyone who runs a public or private enterprise has to make tough decisions and tough choices in tough times. I know that. I’ve had to cut spending and lay people off — and I can tell you, it sucked. It didn’t make me feel like a strong leader or a hard-nosed manager, it just made me sad.

In politics, I guess, there’s some advantage to looking like you can stand up to organized labor and the left. Maybe Newsom thinks he can run for governor as the mayor who refused to raise taxes during a budget crisis. Maybe he, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, thinks taxes are for girlie men.

But does he really want to preside over the decline of his own signature health care plan? Does he want to be mayor of a city that recovers more slowly from the recession? Does he want to be the environmental leader who cut public transportation funding?

He doesn’t have to do that. There’s another alternative. He can work with the supervisors — and labor, and business, and community activists — and look at ways to bring in some more money. It shouldn’t be that hard a sell, really. The budget gap is huge — Aaron Peskin, who served on the Board of Supervisors for eight years, said before he left office that he’s having a hard time even getting his mind around the monstrosity of the necessary cuts. I’ve been watching local politics for 25 years, and I’ve having a hard time too. We could be looking at eliminating half the discretionary spending in the general fund.

Do people who live and work in this city (including business owners) want to see public health cut by 25 percent? Do they want to see libraries closed, and neighborhood fire stations eliminated, and police stations shut down, and recreation programs that keep kids off the streets eliminated, and the Small Business Assistance Center defunded, and more mentally ill people wandering the streets, and longer waits for more crowded Muni buses? Is this the city we all want to live in?

Or are the wealthier residents and bigger businesses willing to pay just a little bit more each year to keep basic services in place?

If Mayor Newsom, who is still quite popular in town, asked that question, in that fashion, and presented budget cuts that everyone knows are necessary and better oversight and good government programs to let us all know that the money isn’t being wasted, and then promoted a couple of fair and progressive new revenue measures in a June special election, the worst of the bloodbath could be avoided.

I can’t understand why he wants this to be so hard.

Six aren’t enough

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› news@sfbg.com

The historic Jan. 8 vote electing Sup. David Chiu as president of the Board of Supervisors — rare for its elevation of a freshman to the post and unprecedented for a Chinese American — clearly illustrates the ideological breakdown of the new board.

The six supervisors who claim membership in the progressive movement (Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi, David Campos, John Avalos, Eric Mar, and Chiu) gave Chiu the presidency after their efforts to give it to Mirkarimi or Avalos fell short, while the other five supervisors voted for Sup. Sophie Maxwell in each of the seven rounds, refusing to support any of the progressive picks.

But there are limits to what a bare majority of supervisors can do in San Francisco, particularly when the mayor is threatening vetoes and the city is wrestling with a budget deficit of gargantuan proportions. Overriding a mayoral veto or approving some emergency measures requires eight votes.

So the first question is whether Mirkarimi and Daly can come together after their split divided progressives and led to Chiu as a compromise candidate. But the second, more important, question for progressives is whether they can attract swing votes such as Maxwell and Bevan Dufty when the need arises.

The answers to those questions could start coming immediately as supervisors consider proposals to close a looming $575 million budget gap, including the proposal for a special election on revenue measures in June. Mayor Gavin Newsom opposes that election, so the board would have to muster eight votes in the next month to move forward with it.

They might even need more than that. A confidential memo to supervisors and the mayor by the City Attorney’s Office that was obtained by the Guardian sorts out the complex requirements needed to approve new taxes, including the requirement of unanimous board approval to place tax measures that can be passed with a simple majority vote on the ballot this year.

So President Chiu, who pledges to bring his colleagues together, certainly has his work cut out for him.

 

POLITICS AND POLICY

Achieving a unanimous vote on anything significant or controversial seems impossible right now. Mirkarimi is unhappy with Daly for thwarting his presidential ambitions; Maxwell and Dufty are unhappy with progressives for keeping her out of their club; and Chiu must quickly learn his new job during a time of unprecedented turmoil.

Chiu told his colleagues that he was “incredibly humbled” by an election that he didn’t think he’d win, and said that he is “acutely aware that I am new to the institution and the body.” But observers say Chiu’s temperament, intelligence, and connections to both the business community and the progressive movement could serve the city well right now.

“I think Chiu is a great choice. He has the humility that will help him,” outgoing Sup. Jake McGoldrick told the Guardian.

This compromise pick for president was praised by all sides, from the progressive coalition that feted him after the vote at a party at the SoMa club Temple. Rob Black, government affairs director for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, told reporters that “David seems to be someone who is very willing to listen and willing to ask questions.”

“We have a progressive supervisor running the board,” Mirkarimi told the Guardian as he walked back to his office following the vote. Or, as Daly told us, “In the end, the progressive coalition stuck together and I’m happy about that.”

Walking back to Room 200 after the vote, Newsom told reporters that Chiu was “an outstanding choice” who represents “a fresh air of progress.” Asked whether he expects to have a better working relationship with Chiu than with outgoing president Aaron Peskin, Newsom replied, “That’s a gross understatement.”

“We’re looking forward to working with the new Board of Supervisors,” Newsom spokesperson Nathan Ballard told the Guardian after the vote. “The mayor has a long relationship with David Chiu. In fact, he was on our short list to be named assessor just a few years ago.”

Yet at the progressive party that night, Chiu sounded like a rock-solid member of that group, promising to help Mirkarimi with police reform, Campos with protecting undocumented city residents, Mar with strengthening city ties to the schools, and Avalos with safeguarding progressive budget priorities.

“I think this is the best outcome we could have,” Mirkarimi told the Guardian shortly after Chiu was elected. “I was the deciding vote that delivered Sup. David Chiu, the first Asian American president of the board. That doesn’t mean that the seasoned experience of Maxwell and myself wasn’t hard to pass by.”

In fact, both Dufty and Maxwell groused about the progressive bloc’s opposition to Maxwell, noting her positions on issues such as public power, affordable housing, and transportation issues. “The people that voted for me did so because they felt I would at least listen to them,” Maxwell told us, expressing frustration at not being accepted “by the board’s progressive clique” which, she noted, “are all males.”

“I think David will be great,” Dufty told the Guardian. “Obviously there was a desire to have someone strongly aligned with the progressive movement. I think it’s a mystery that Sophie isn’t considered part of the progressive movement.”

Progressives are going to have to work at resolving those differences if they are going to play a leadership role in the midyear budget cuts and prevent an expansion of the bloc of five supervisors who stuck with Maxwell and often align with the mayor.

“There has been tension between Ross and myself, but also between Sophie and Ross,” Daly told us. “Sophie is feeling that she might be a progressive, too. And some of the things we do on the board need eight votes. The rift between Ross and I is little. The real question is, when do we get Bevan and Sophie back?”

After fending off a progressive challenger in his reelection bid two years ago, Dufty seemed to move to the left, only to return to Newsom’s centrist faction — which mixes social liberalism with fiscal conservatism — in the last year. He prevented progressives from being able to override a mayoral veto of their decision to cancel $1 million in funding to Newsom’s Community Justice Center. And on Jan. 6, the old board delayed a vote on a mayoral veto of an ordinance that amends the Planning Code to require Conditional Use hearings and permits for any elimination of existing dwelling units through mergers, conversions, or demolitions of residential units, something sought by the tenant groups that are an important part of the progressive coalition.

Those issues, and the thicket that is the budget debate, illustrate what Daly admitted to us last week: “We can’t run this city with six votes.”

 

THE BUDGET MESS

The most pressing problem facing the new board is the budget, which requires $125 million in midyear cuts for the current fiscal year and will be an estimated $575 million out of balance for the fiscal year that begins in June. Chiu’s first move to deal with it — one lauded by progressives — was to name Avalos as budget chair.

“John Avalos has more experience on budget issues than me,” Daly, who chaired the Budget Committee for two years, said of his former board aide. But even Avalos was awestruck by the tsunami of bad budget news hitting the city, telling us, “I was visibly shaken.”

Mirkarimi and Elsbernd, the Budget Committee’s two other current members, also admit they face a daunting task.

“We can’t put a Band-Aid on the problem,” Elsbernd told the board last week. “This is not just about San Francisco now, but about San Francisco 20 years from now. We need to think about the next generation.”

Mirkarimi agrees with Elsbernd, at least in terms of the enormity of the problem.

“We cannot be incrementalist. We can’t dance around the edges,” Mirkarimi told his colleagues, shortly after making the surprise announcement that he’s expecting a child in April with Venezuelan soap opera star Eliana López, who he’s dated since meeting her last year at a Green Party conference in Brazil. Elsbernd and his wife are also expecting their first child.

Progressives strongly argue that such a large budget deficit can’t be closed with spending cuts alone, so one of Peskin’s final acts was to create legislation calling a special election for June 2 and having supervisors hold hearings over the next month to choose from a variety of revenue measures, but Newsom and the business community opposed the move.

“Basically, it’s not fully baked. It will take a citywide coalition (à la Prop. A) to win something like this and the coalition just hasn’t been built yet,” Ballard told the Guardian. Even Mirarimi echoed the sentiment, telling the Guardian, “I’m not opposed to a June election, but you can’t put something on the June ballot that’s half-baked because I doubt we could win in November if we put something half-baked on in June. My preference is that we work harder to create alliances to assure a healthy chance of getting something on the ballot and delivering a victory.”

Yet many progressives and labor leaders say it’s important to bring in new revenue as soon as possible, particularly because the cuts required by the current budget deficit would slash about half the city’s discretionary spending and devastate important initiatives like offering health coverage to all San Franciscans.

“For Healthy San Francisco to survive, the Department of Public Health has to have a minimum level of funding,” said Robert Haaland, a labor representative with the public employee union SEIU Local 1021. “Given the cuts that have been proposed, it’s not going to survive.”

While Peskin was criticized for acting prematurely, the City Attorney’s Office memo indicated that he couldn’t have waited and still allowed supervisors to play the lead role in determining what ended up on the June ballot. The memo was requested by Daly.

“In response to your specific inquiry about maximizing the amount of time a committee could deliberate the underlying measures and ensuring that the Board would have enough time to override a Mayoral veto, the emergency ordinance and the resolution calling for the special election should be introduced today,” the City Attorney’s Office wrote Jan. 6, the day Peskin introduced his revenue package.

Even then, supervisors would need to vote to waive certain election procedures, such as the 30-day hold for proposed ballot measures, and to move expeditiously forward with hearings, selection of the tax measures, and preparation of findings related to the special election and declaration of fiscal emergency.

The City Attorney’s Office wrote that the package needs final approval by Feb. 17. “We recommend that to meet this deadline, the Board adopt the resolution at its January 27 meeting and that the Mayor sign the resolution no earlier than February 2,” they wrote.

But Newsom has indicated that he would veto it, thus requiring eight supervisors to override. “Aaron had the right to do what he did, but in some ways he rushed the discussion, so it’s been a bit rockier than it otherwise might have been,” Dufty told us, noting that he’s still open to supporting a June ballot measure. “There is no way to avoid spending cuts, and we need more revenues and more givebacks from public employees … I think labor is spending a significant amount of time with the mayor, and he’s making a strong effort to work with the board. I’m trying to encourage us all to work together to the maximum extent possible.”

In fact, San Francisco Labor Council director Tim Paulson told the Guardian he couldn’t talk about the tax measures yet because of intense ongoing discussions. Ballard said Newsom might be open to tax measures in November, telling the Guardian, “Ideally we could do it all by streamlining government, reducing spending, etc. But the mayor lives in the real world and so he is open to the possibility of a revenue measure with a broad base of support.”

So, can the new board president help coalesce the broad base of support that he’ll need to avoid cuts that would especially hurt the progressive base of unions, tenants, social service providers, affordable housing activists, and others who believe that government plays an important role in addressing social problems and inequities?

“In light of the global meltdown, national slowdown, local crisis, and largest budget deficit in history, I believe this board understands the importance of unity and working together,” Chiu told his colleagues. “We don’t have time for the politics of personality when we have the highest murder rate in 10 years, when businesses are failing, and the budget deficit grows exponentially.”

This land was your land

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Anyone paying any kind of attention has a deep-gut feeling that things aren’t going well for Earth. No matter how fancy or technologically advanced we get, everything humans make and break is fashioned from the resources at hand — water, air, petroleum, minerals, soil and its nutrients, and plants and trees and their fruit. Your MacBook may look space age, but it didn’t fall from the sky. "Nearly everything you use every day is based on minerals mined somewhere, often leaving behind disfigured land and a toxic mess," Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson, and Richard W. Hazlett write in The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery (Oxford University Press, 619 pages, $35)

"Mining is the prow of America’s consumer-propelled ship. Its whole purpose is to dig up resources for transformation to consumer goods," the authors go on to note, with the kicker that such resources are nonrenewable. "A three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom house of about 2,000 square feet, with a two-car garage, central air conditioning, and a fireplace, contains more than a quarter-million pounds of mined metals and other minerals."

The American West at Risk explains the exact effects mining has on Western ecosystems — in other words, the other living things trying to survive alongside humans. Beginning with forests, the authors outline the history of logging and how the right to do it on public lands was weasled from a weak Environmental Protection Agency made even weaker over the last eight years. All professional geologists, the three authors draw upon science in their argument for preservation.

An EPA library in condensed form, The American West at Risk presents a coherent survey of forestry, agriculture, water use, outdoor recreation, road building, military operations, garbage disposal, and nuclear power. "Western US public lands, about 47 percent of the region, are this nation’s patrimony — the bulk of its remaining natural capital," the authors observe. In each of the book’s 13 chapters, they study a single major resource and its uses. The chapters are tidy and stand on their own, but read together, they reveal an abuse of public lands and resources for the benefit of a very few. They also reveal how government science has been warped to perpetuate myths — for example, the idea that grazing on rangelands doesn’t harm the soil, or that military testing shouldn’t have bothersome effects on downwind populations.

The conclusions reached by Wilshire, Nielson, and Hazlett aren’t all doom and gloom — solutions are included — but amid climate change, the authors deserve great credit for not mincing words. The American West at Risk is being marketed as a textbook, and although schools are one ideal realm for its ideas, they aren’t the only one. This book appeals to anyone with an interest in environmental issues, and is essential bedside reading for any environmentalist or activist. It should be read by all Westerners — and by anyone who cares about this great, vast, once bountiful planet, now on the brink of death.

HOWARD G. WILSHIRE, JANE E. NIELSON, AND RICHARD W. HAZLETT read from The American West at Risk. Thurs/8, 7 p.m. at Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness, SF. (415) 776-1111, www.losingthewest.com

>>Read Amanda Witherell’s interview with the authors here

LIT: Authors and SFBG talk saving the earth

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by Amanda Witherell

amandawindbook.jpg

Yes, even careless placement of renewable energy is hurting the land — addressed in chapter five.
Photo courtesy of losingthewest.com

This week we reviewed The American West at Risk, a recently-published tome that details how ongoing environmental issues are destroying the general livability of Earth for all species, including humans. In short, this book shouldn’t just be on every wannabe Greenpeace activist’s nightstand. Each of the 13 chapters explore one subject in depth — forestry, mining, military operations, road building, to name a few — and balances science with politics and reality to sharpen the argument for preservation of natural resources.

We spoke with two of the authors, Howard G. Wilshire and Jane E. Nielson, who will be reading and discussing the book with co-author Richard Hazlett on Thursday, Jan. 8 at Books Inc, 601 Van Ness Ave.

SFBG: I’m curious why you wrote this book and who you feel you wrote it for.

Howard G. Wilshire: We wrote it because the three of us, all geologists, have a great deal of experience working on environmental issues in the West and we were concerned about it. We get a lot of inquiries from reporters and lawyers and others about specific issues and we figured that since we’re not going to be around forever we should write down our responses and make them available.
When we began the book we told Oxford University Press that we were writing it for nonscientists as well as for academic use, but they’re pretty fussy and decided they would market it only as an academic book. But we wrote it for people who have a problem in their own backyard and want to get some background information on how to respond to it.

Jane E. Nielson: Or for decision makers and environmental lawyers. Often they are not people trained in science and they may not know all the ramifications. Reporters often don’t know all the questions to ask when presented with some sort of a program that’s going to improve things or they have a hard time figuring out what the answers mean. These are the kinds of people who would call us, as well as people from a citizens group who have some kind of major problem coming up and want to know what they needed to think about and what they should be concerned about. This is really the reason we wrote the book. There’s a lot of expertise here and a lot of consideration of things that most people don’t think about.

Nat Hentoff’s last column in the Village Voice

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Nat Hentoff, a graduate with honors from the George Seldes/I.F. Stone School of Journalism and a great journalist on his own, wrote his last column for the Village Voice on Tuesday, Jan. 6.

The Village Voice newspaper chain laid off Hentoff, 83, on Dec. 30 of last year, signalling that the New Times owners from Phoenix, Arizona, had officially and formally ruined the legendary alternative paper.

Read Hentoff’s last column and see what the Voice since 1958 had as a writer, talent, jazz critic, First Amendment guru, and distinguished civil libertarian with a civil sense of rage and what they will have no more. And read Louis Menard’s Jan. 5 piece in the New Yorker that told how the Voice was once “one of the most successful enterprises in the history of American journalism.” Alas. Alas.

Click here to read, Nat Hentoff’s Last Column: The 50-Year Veteran Says Goodbye

Click here to read the Guardian’s politics blog, How New Times ruined the LA Weekly.

Click here to read Stephanie Clifford’s December 30th article in the New York Times, Village Voice Lays Off Nat Hentoff and 2 Others.

Senioritis

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It seems inevitable that no matter how admired and lauded the actor, a time comes sooner or later when there ain’t much left but the Crotchety Comedy Coot roles. Some, like Peter O’Toole, Helen Hayes, Walter Matthau, or Maggie Smith, build entire second-act careers out of them; others are dragged kicking and screaming into those twinkle-eyed support slots. (You’ve got to respect Glenda Jackson, who quit acting for politics at age 55, snorting "I don’t fancy hanging around to play Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Life’s too short.")

Not all such parts are demeaning. But there often is something bleak about seeing actors of great range reduced to formula cuteness and sentimentality — the kind of emotional marks that often make old people on screen roughly equivalent to doggie reaction shots.

Perhaps the biggest wallow of this type since 1988’s Cocoon: The Return is now upon us in How About You, a crusty codgerfest that’s like tapioca for the soul. It’s the kind of "crowd-pleasing" movie a particular crowd likes no matter how poorly it’s made (and it is poorly made), because it gives you exactly what’s expected, on cue: broad geezers-behaving-badly laughs, canned nostalgia, a maudlin turn or three and plenty of forced joie de vivre, all enacted in handsome Tourist Board settings by comfortingly familiar faces.

Trouble is, when the familiar faces are ones you still vividly remember as, say, Vera Drake, or Christy Brown’s mum, or — yeesh, where to even begin with Vanessa Redgrave, possible Greatest Actress of Her Generation? — such innocuous matinee fluff can start smelling like a form of hazardous waste.

A terribly picturesque Irish country estate is the site for an elderly care facility run by a young widow, Kate (Orla Brady). Like managing a B and B, it’s one of those neverending jobs, made worse here by four residents so obnoxious they’ve sent some other patrons scurrying for other accommodations. The culprits: grandiose retired showgirl Georgia (Redgrave); sobered up but still fight-picking jerk ex-judge Donald (Joss Ackland); and gnomish sisters Hazel (Imelda Staunton) and Heather (Brenda Fricker), a disagreeable society of two who are really too young to be here. But the latter have led such a sheltered life that once their mother died, they opted to find another hole to hide in rather than face the outside world. It’s not the world’s loss.

A rather humorless workaholic, Kate isn’t all that happy when her perpetually footloose younger sister Ellie (Hayley Atwell) turns up wanting short-term employment to fund another global party trot. After a distressingly long time spent on narrative dead ends, disconnects, and anecdotal errata unhelped by Anthony Byrne’s direction, the screenplay by Jean Pasley — based on a short story by Maeve Binchy, and you can really feel that original material stretching thin — finally locates a plot engine. This occurs when a family emergency forces Kate to leave over the holidays, when all staff and residents have briefly disappeared back into family life.

All save the quarrelsome quartet, of course, whom no one will have. So it falls to inexperienced, irresponsible Ellie to tend this impossible lot (who don’t even like each other) by herself. Naturally it all goes hilariously horribly … and then life-affirmingly wonderfully! Awww. Yes, there is geriatric dancing and snowball-throwing.

The dears!

Binchy is Ireland’s most popular living author; one gleans her work is more of the Literary Tea Cozy than Booker-winning type. (A quote on her latest: "Only a curmudgeon could resist this master of cheerful, sit-by-the-fire comfort.") Still, it can’t be her fault that much of How About You handles its uncomplicated agenda so sloppily, with some scenes that appear missing (particularly those involving Ellie’s off-screen boyfriend) while others meander pointlessly. Why do the seasons seem to change from scene to scene? Irish weather is changeable — but not that changeable.

Of course the old and not-so-old pros ably ham it up in the desired "colorful" fashion. But these actors can do just about anything — watching them asked to do so little, for so little real reward, is dispiriting. Hearing Redgrave bray the titular Tin Pan Alley standard over and over, gowned and painted like a drag queen’s Cruella De Vil, is somehow ever so much less fun than that might sound. Could be worse: she could be doing Nunsense. Or Juliet’s Nurse.

HOW ABOUT YOU opens Fri/9 in Bay Area theaters.

The class of 2008: an agenda

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OPINION Every few years, San Francisco’s political landscape is remade. But we, the new arrivals of the Board of Supervisors’ Class of 2008, know that the last decade of district elections helped ensure that the supervisors truly represent our neighborhoods and our shared San Francisco values.

Despite various efforts by special interests to paint us as out of step with everyday San Franciscans, the very strength of our campaigns was that they were rooted in the lives of actual residents who understood the choices before them. We campaigned on the best of our experiences — neighborhood activism, labor and community organizing, running nonprofits and small businesses, and championing public education and police accountability.

Despite our different districts and diverse constituencies, we rallied voters around real San Francisco values — the faith in the role of government to protect the most vulnerable and bring forth justice and equity; the trust in grassroots democracy and neighborhood-based activism; the pursuit of a safe and clean environment and sustainable development; the belief in the sanctity of immigrant, labor, and LGBT rights; the dignity of working families, seniors, and people with disabilities; and the pursuit of housing justice and economic opportunity for all.

While the Class of 2000 paved the way on many of these progressive values, we enter public office ready to build on this foundation while rising to the new and enormous challenges of today. San Francisco is not just facing a fiscal crisis; we are facing a quandary in which city government cannot do all that it aspires to do.

Our agenda is no less ambitious for the crisis we are in. It is because of the crisis that we need to create opportunity, direction, and hope where there is violence, confusion, and despair. Our San Francisco values mean that we will tackle public safety by addressing the root causes of violence by seeking rehabilitation and restorative justice and push for real police reform by promoting the kind of community policing that is built on relationships between neighborhood residents and the police.

Our San Francisco values prompt us to make our city budget more transparent. We will initiate new programs only with the certainty that important services are not cut in the process. We will do our best to protect critical frontline city workers from privatization and layoffs.

We will work collectively to maintain the city’s commitment to its public schools; promote public transit; foster sustainable development and new affordable housing connected to green and well-conceived public infrastructure; promote community choice aggregation and public power based on renewable energy; support local businesses and the hiring of San Francisco residents; safeguard our sanctuary city to make sure that immigrants can live free from fear of ICE raids; and fight to keep our vital neighborhood services working and our parks, libraries, and senior centers thriving.

We are committed to ushering in a new tone of cooperation and unity in San Francisco. Despite the enormous challenges and contending political views within the city family, we will work to ensure that our neighborhoods always win out over special interests. After all, politics is about improving the lives of everyday people. We look forward to working with you in this noble effort.

Supervisor John Avalos represents District 11. Supervisor David Campos represents District 9. Supervisor David Chiu represents District 3. Supervisor Eric Mar represents District 1.

Obama Inaugural

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@@http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics@@

Chris vs. Ross on the board presidency

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The Guardian last week wrote an editorial endorsing Sup. Ross Mirkarimi for the presidency of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Sup. Chris Daly and Mirkarimi responded. Here are their letters that will appear in Wednesday’s Guardian. The president will be chosen by the new board on Thursday in a special board session following the swearing in ceremony of the supervisors at noon in the supervisors’ chambers at City Hall. B3

DALY MAKES THE CASE FOR AVALOS

I support John Avalos for board president because I believe he is the best choice to lead the new progressive Board of Supervisors in these tough times (See “The next board president,” 12/31/08). His progressive politics are grounded in decades of community and labor organizing work. Avalos is universally liked and respected (which seems to differentiate him pretty well from me!) and has an uncanny ability to bring people together.

Let’s be honest with everybody here. There are maybe five or six legislative assistants who are more involved in the day-to-day running of the board (and the city, for that matter) than several members of the board. Over the last four years, I have watched as Avalos adroitly guided the budget process, always taking time to hear from everyone while watching out for our city’s most vulnerable. He may know more about the city budget than I do. Putting the supervisor with the most hands-on budget experience in our top leadership spot is not risky, it’s smart.

I am not angry with Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, and I never claimed to be. Mirkarimi did, however, compromise the progressive position in 2007 when he chose to fund more cops over affordable housing and gave the People’s Budget little to no political cover when the mayor’s forces unleashed a full assault against our budget priorities.

Mirkarimi’s four years on the board does not automatically make him the best candidate, but it should provide him with enough insight to make the same choice I did to allow another progressive to lead.

Chris Daly

San Francisco

MIRKARIMI: IT’S ABOUT ISSUES

I thank the Guardian for the endorsement for Board of Supervisors president. The contest for the presidency needs to reflect our values and focus on record and vision.

The leadership fight thus far has taken on an unprogressive machine-like demeanor, bullying for a desired outcome. This sets a troubling tone, one that I haven’t responded to because the real fight is defending our city and those most vulnerable from the economic crunch that threatens to claim all. The real challenge is to innovate revenue enhancement and job creation measures that hedge against a sustained downturn. The real need is to develop an inclusive climate on the Board of Supervisors that respects our differences while advancing progressive governance. And the real difference is that I am independent enough where I see consensus building as a more effective method than division and dysfunction.

Ross Mirkarimi

San Francisco

Pop hope

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

The "shoe-in" for my moving-image man of the year: Barack Obama or Iraqi journalist and footwear hurler Muntadhar al-Zaidi? Both have been well-lubed by YouTube and have been given a good, hard-soft spin from multiple angles by every news outlet, citizen blogger, and self-starter with iMovie. The vid that jump-cuts between Obama’s high school hoop shots and latter-day pickup games, the proliferating replays of George W. Bush’s duck-and-cover face-save (and the swelling parade of shoe-throwing online games) — all were duly devoured and disseminated. Al-Zaidi’s act of protest — captured with Rashomon-like variation, though the marks that might substantiate allegations of torture in his post-incident detention remain conveniently invisible and off-camera — was the perfect kicker to a year in which politics on film and video were given prime 24/7 eyeball time by viewers more accustomed to rolling their peepers or averting them in disgust from the White House and the evening news.

Oh, ’08 — the year that welcomed the ‘Tubing of the president-elect via the outpouring of readily replayable speeches, endorsements, and "Yes We Can" and Obama Girl clips as guilty-pleasure eye-candy respite from the workday grind. And oh, the withdrawal — assuaged only by grainy images of a shirtless Obama on Hawaiian holiday. Hollywood may have prepped America for a black president in the form of Dennis Haysbert on 24 and Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact (1998) — but this year the president elect’s cinematic corollary really seemed to be Milk, an adept, accessible, and inspirational bon mot that put its trust in viewers’ intelligence and ability to fix their attention on city supervisor meetings and California state politics.

Through a viewfinder, the parallels between Barack Obama and Harvey Milk were numerous: the change-centered career trajectory of a community activist, the against-all-odds and unique but tough-sell narrative, the bridge-building wherewithal, and the gotta-have-it charisma. Even the Milk trailer tagline, "You gotta give ’em hope," read like a direct pull from an Obama war-room session. Yet the differences also glared with the passing of Proposition 8 in ’08. Add to that the strange fact that likely more couch potatoes of every political persuasion around the country have glimpsed the lengthy Obama infomercial — and even the Obama commemorative coin or plate TV ads — than have seen Milk.

If Obama and Milk succored with romantic promise and possibility, the stumbling close of the Bush years and his party’s latest last-ditch follies provided the bitterest laughs, with doses of unexpected sympathy for the devil. The handful of movies that critiqued the overseas skullduggery committed in the name of the US of A — including the grim-faced Body of Lies and black-humored Burn After Reading — resembled the mutant brethren of Dubya, taking subtle and slapstick aim at the politics hatched by someone’s CIA-head pater familias. Also injecting considerable comedy into the country’s sad plight was, you betcha, the vice presidential candidate drummed up to succeed such-a-Dick Cheney. The tabloid-friendly talker from the Dubya school of gab first and let God sort it out later, Sarah Palin lent herself beautifully to self-skewering by way of Katie Couric and the genius sendup that followed by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live.

The politically liberal Oliver Stone’s treatment of the sitting prez himself in W. was almost kind-hearted in contrast, with Josh Brolin adding a measure of nuanced oedipal angst to the now-beyond-tiresome good-old-boy facade. You had to love the way the young W. is lensed: his mouth perpetually open and his fists full of brewskis and/or a barbecue throughout the first part of the movie. Stone’s prez is as innocent as an identity-free frat boy — even though the filmmaker does conclude with a recurring dream sequence that ends up referencing traditional horror tropes. It’s not over till the monster screams. Or is hit by a shoe.

The year closed with the ticket-clinching bookend to W., ideal for every disgraced presidential library: Frost/Nixon. Its bracing, sexy blend of meta-Medium Cool media savvy and humanizing Milk-y goodness and characterization managed to slightly sweeten the sour old manipulator, the worst US leader since our latest. Bringing more than an ounce of the creepiness cloaking his noted disco-sleaze turn in Dracula (1979), Frank Langella transformed Nixon into the most menacing and identifiable blood-sucker entangled with an all-too-human dissembler/interrogator amid this year’s Twilight and True Blood vamps. As divulged in the dark of the movie house, Frost/Nixon‘s and W.‘s rogue presidents were united in at least one thing, besides the fact that their real-life counterparts made us embarrassed to be Americans. Their backstory — their real, pathetic will to power — had little to do with public service or serving anything but their damaged, mysterious, played-out egos.

KIMBERLY CHUN’S FIVE FOR FLESH, FANTASY, AND FIGHTING:

Best use of Google Earth-cam: Burn After Reading (Ethan and Joel Coen, USA/UK/France)

Best post-Planet of the Apes Statue of Liberty desecration: Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, USA)

Most phun without pharmaceuticals: Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

Best vampire-human love story: Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

Best mix of mudflaps, hair bands, and mystery flab: The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, USA)

>>More Year in Film 2008

The Year in Film 2008

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Starring: the bromance. With: the political biopic, economic-crisis cinema, guilty-pleasure musicals, superheroes, Swedish vampires, and more! Plus: local critics’ and filmmakers’ top flicks picks.

>>BFFFs!
2008: the year of living dude-tastically
By Cheryl Eddy

>>Don’t look back
Movies that saw hard times coming
By Max Goldberg


>>Top tendencies
Signs of life (and a death) in American cinema
By Johnny Ray Huston

>>Pop hope
Politics as entertainment –shot by shot, shoe, or screen
By Kimberly Chun

>>Tuneless, yet tempting
Assessing the year’s mu-suck-als
By Louis Peitzman

>>Play it again
Notable releases kept our Blu-Rays less than blue
By Matt Sussman

>>Is that your final answer?
Slumdog Millionaire explores class and corruption
By Kevin Langson

>>Horrible! Overlooked! Best!
A Guardian cinemaniac counts down his 2008 hours in the dark
By Dennis Harvey

>>Reel leaders
Top flick picks from critics and filmmakers
Lists, lists, lists

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