Politics

Leftovers

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CHEAP EATS Rack of lamb. Smoked turkey. Smoked salmon. Seared tuna. Scallops in a saffron cream sauce. Roasted beets. Couscous. These things are in my refrigerator. They are leftovers from a holiday party I helped cater. Two, four, five, six people I called. None could come, so that leaves me, one person, your chicken farmer truly, to knock it all over, all by my lonely lonesome.

[Insert sound of chomping and chewing, tearing, lip-smacking, the gulping of bottles of cheap red wine, the grunting of 5,000 pigs, the burping and farting of four fat football players, a symphony of jackhammers, chainsaws, and meat grinders … and one small sweet-and-greasy chicken-farmerly sigh.]

Thus endeth a pretty weird year. Politics, the economy, my personal life … I’m not going to montage you, don’t worry. I’m going to sentence you. One sentence: Near the beginning of 2008 I left a sexy city boy to find me someone closer to home, and what I found was a woodsy, wonky couple watching slasher movies over barbecue, a couple of local married men, a foot fetishist, and a guy with lots of bondage gear and a rifle leaning against his bedroom wall who wanted to tie me up and I let him.

This is another sentence, agreed, but there was also the neighbor whose young son came out as bisexual while we were dating and probably could have used a little fatherly camaraderie (just a guess) … but dad couldn’t bring himself to tell the boy that, hey, he was sleeping with a tranny.

When, near the end of the year, I finally did fall in love, it was not with a Californian. Dude lived a couple thousand miles away and across an international border. Ah, and he was a wonderful man, but by the time the article came out and everyone started congratuutf8g me on my feat of Sir Reality, it was over.

I have a feat fetish. I like to take on absurd challenges, try to find innovative ways around them (usually involving rubber bands, duct tape, and wax paper wings) … and then invariably crash my latest weirdo flying contraption into the first tree stump I see, or get all tangled in hammocks and chicken wire.

You try to learn a little bit along the way. Like all great and not-so-great inventors, I keep records and take notes … hey! That’s what Cheap Eats is. Has become. But I have to confess (because I always do) that there is a small, strange thought buried deep in my inner bucket of bacon grease, which sometimes gurgles to the surface and astounds the crap out of me. It’s that twisted — a hankering to write actual restaurant reviews.

Don’t get your hopes up. I’m just saying.

I tried to squeeze in one more Mr. Yeah, Right before the end of oh eight. There wasn’t a lot of time left, so things moved way faster than usual. Coffee turned into dinner turned into a walk in the rain turned into his arm around me turned into me pressed against a brick wall, his hands on my breasts and his tongue down my throat. The sex was terrible. He accused me of being a good Catholic girl, which hurt, even though he admitted I was a bad Catholic girl too.

I dressed in the dark, at the foot of his gigantic bed. He got up too, put his clothes on, and then offered to walk me to my car, which was how I knew I wouldn’t see him again. I said, "Nah. Thanks. That’s all right."

And drove home in tears, as usual.

I’m thinking of an Alanis Morissette song. I ask too many questions, I learn. I leap, I learn. I cling, I learn. I’m needy, I learn. Bad in bed, I learn. Beat myself up, I learn. I expect, I learn. I’m neurotic. I lack motivation. I can’t sing for shit or remember the words. I’m demanding, fickle, and a dangerous driver. When I need a friend, I withdraw.

My New Year’s resolution is to get an egg poacher.

But Christmas Day morning, driving home to the woods, scenic route, I saw a coffee cup on the top of a car in a driveway where there weren’t any people. I thought this was the most beautiful thing I’d ever see, until moments later I crested the big hill on Walker Road and there were the greenest fields spooning the bluest sky ever, and, on both sides of me, cows and cows and cows.

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Reinventing journalism

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› news@sfbg.com

Journalism, the critics say, is dying. The model of news reporting that has dominated the United States for most of the past century — big, well-funded outfits paying reporters and editors to choose and produce what the public reads or views — is crumbling. The main culprits are media consolidation and corporate cutbacks, but the downward spiral is also being fed by declining readership, competition from the Internet, investor expectations, demographic shifts, self-inflicted wounds, and myriad other factors.

This years-long trend is hardly even news anymore, but there were some troubling developments in 2008. Some of the problems facing newspapers and broadcast outlets are the result of a bad economy, but everyone agrees the issues run deeper.

At the same time, however, countervailing forces are gathering momentum, many of them based in California and some in the Bay Area. People who believe in the indispensable role that reporters and editors play in this society are developing news models, ideas for reinventing journalism that could blossom in 2009.

From the Huffington Post and its 8 million monthly visitors to journalism experiments such as Spot.us and the San Francisco Public Press being hatched right here in San Francisco, the media landscape is shifting. As traditional newspapers contract and wrestle with relevance in the online age, Internet-based news organizations are filling the void and seeking to change the rules along the way.

Nowhere was this new reality more on display than last summer at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, where Bay Area new media powerhouses that included MoveOn.org, the Daily Kos, and Digg.com created the Big Tent, which played host to everyone from small-time bloggers to the most powerful politicians and big time political thinkers.

Among them was Arianna Huffington, the HuffPo founder who has become a leading voice for media reform and reinvention. The vision for journalism she espoused from the stage is a familiar one to Guardian readers but apostasy to believers in journalistic objectivity: writing from a progressive perspective to hold the powerful accountable to the public.

“Our highest responsibility is to the truth,” Huffington told us in a recent interview. “The truth is not about splitting the difference between one side and the other. Sometimes one side is speaking the truth … The central mission of journalism is the search for the truth.”

But the HuffPo has come under some criticism for not paying its legions of bloggers and for occasionally lifting content from media outlets that do pay their people. Searching for truth may be the central mission of journalism, but news organizations still have to find ways to fairly compensate the people who do so. Citizen journalism and blogging may be wonderful additions to the landscape, but in the end, democracy require reporters. You can’t properly cover City Hall or monitor the White House unless it’s a full-time job. And that seems to be the big challenge in this era of overextended resources.

 

TOO MANY MERGERS

The mainstream media landscape is bleak. Nearly every major newspaper in the country laid off significant numbers of reporters in the past year. The Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, among other properties, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December, and it’s entirely possible that several other big media companies will follow the same path in 2009.

It’s not that these papers aren’t making money — the LA Times, for example, remains profitable. But in the past decade, waves of mergers and consolidations led the giant conglomerates that own many US newspapers to take on huge debt. And private investors are demanding returns that may have been possible in the boom years of a decade ago but are only possible today if costs are cut so deeply that the basic journalistic mission of the nation’s great newspapers is in danger.

The alternative press isn’t exempt. The past decade has seen a wave of increased consolidation in the weekly industry, and at least one chain is now in serious financial trouble. Creative Loafing, which has its flagship paper in the big and growing Atlanta market, filed for bankruptcy this year. The company borrowed millions to buy Chicago Reader and Washington City Paper. Although all three papers were making money, when advertising slowed down, debt payments overwhelmed revenue.

Westword, a paper owned by Village Voice Media, a heavily leveraged chain, reported Dec. 18 on rumors that its parent company was facing financial problems. The conclusion of media critic Michael Roberts: the chain is doing fine. (Full disclosure: The Guardian won a lawsuit against VVM this year; the $18 million verdict is on appeal.)

So the scene is wide open for new approaches.

Among the San Franciscans who have taken a lead role in creating a new model for print journalism is Michael Stoll, the former San Francisco Examiner city editor who for the last few years has been spearheading creation of Public Press (www.public-press.org), which aims to create a non-commercial daily newspaper supported by readers and foundation grants.

The project (which Steven T. Jones has been involved with supporting) has a working business plan, began offering limited content during the last election, and recently received a grant from the San Francisco Foundation. Stoll said the time has come for a new newspaper model.

“It seems like the existing commercial models of journalism were always problematic, but their faults only became apparent when the economy started to fail. And we’re now faced with an abandonment of the core principles that media companies said they would never stray from,” Stoll said, listing basic government and corporate accountability among those core principles.

“The daily, routine coverage of public policy is now performed very selectively, even as the optional, more entertaining coverage is beefed up. There comes a point when the public’s patience with those priorities wears very thin and it increasingly demands straight talk,” Stoll said.

 

SHOW ME THE MONEY

The problem is how to fund it. News Web sites like ProPublica.org and journalism collectives such as the Center for Investigative Reporting have relied on large foundation grants to fund investigative and other public interest journalism. That’s fine for some things — but foundations often have their own political agendas, and the influence of foundation agendas on grant recipients can be pernicious (see “Pulling strings,” 10/8/1997). Foundation funding isn’t reliable, and a news outlet that became critical of the pet causes of a major funder could quickly find its income cut off.

Another model is being developed by Spot.Us (with the help of a two-year, $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation).

Spot.us founder David Cohn wrote for Wired and the Columbia Journalism Review before going on to work as both a freelance journalist and technical consultant to news organizations. That unique combination, during a time of industry decline, got him thinking about how to fund good, public interest journalism.

Cohn developed the idea of creating a Web site where writers could pitch news stories and solicit funding for them directly from the public, a concept that drew from bloggers such as Christopher Allbritton and his Back-to-Iraq blog, as well as innovative charity sites such as DonorsChoose.org.

Stories published by Spot.us are then licensed under the Creative Commons, allowing anyone to use them for free and spread the work. News organizations can also buy the rights to an article by repaying Spot.us, or they can get the site to help fund their freelancers by paying for half up front and letting donors cover the rest.

“Everyone can benefit: the news organizations, the writers, and the public. But the market needs to be rethought,” Cohn told us, noting that the success of his venture will be up to the users. “It depends on whether people will see journalism as a public good and want to fund good stories.”

Media outlets that aim to have a full-time news-gathering staff need to tap into more stable funding sources — or they have to start slow and hope their new ideas catch on.

“With the extremely limited funding we’re starting out with, we’re planning to start a hybrid freelancer/volunteer news operation, and that’s not terribly sustainable in the long run,” Stoll said. “But we hope to increase our financial wherewithal on pace with increasing our news operations.”

Although finding resources for his new model is a difficult task in the current fiscal climate, the need becomes stronger all the time. “When talk centers on how long the commercial press will be able to operate in our community, it’s never too soon to talk about long-range alternatives,” Stoll said.

Stoll left the Examiner in November 2002 after clashing with the owners, the Fang family, about how to cover the city. After that, Stoll joined the media watchdog group Grade the News and taught journalism at San Jose State University, where he still works.

“The readers probably guessed that public interest coverage was not the Examiner‘s top priority, and they voted with their quarters not to support the paper long enough to see it survive in that incarnation,” Stoll said, referring to how the Examiner was sold to Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz after the Fang’s court-ordered subsidy ended. “And I see the same thing happening with the Chronicle.”

 

WHO GETS PAID?

Still, there are some new journalism experiments that have shown they can be moneymakers, most notably HuffPo, which has translated its enormous popularity into a substantial revenue stream from its online ads, a dynamic it has parlayed into increasing venture capital funding to expand its operations.

But HuffPo is still struggling to find a business model that allows it to expand its original reporting and pay journalists a living wage, a problem highlighted recently by a controversy about HuffPo stealing content without permission.

In an interview with the Guardian, Huffington admitted that HuffPo did inadvertently steal content from newspapers including Chicago Reader, which highlighted the issue on its blog, triggering a lively online discussion.

“With regards to the Chicago Reader, that was completely our editor’s fault, and it completely violated our guidelines, so I sent a letter to them wholeheartedly apologizing,” she told us.

Huffington said it’s important to honestly admit mistakes and use integrity to win the public trust. “We want to be very transparent about what we’re doing,” she said.

As for the larger issue of not paying for content, she makes a distinction between journalism and blogging, citing the mantra, “Facts are sacred, opinion is free.”

That means HuffPo bloggers benefit from a large audience for their work and from a team of moderators who filter out the flames and personal attacks that constitute so much of the online commenting. But they don’t get paid.

“We pay our reporters, we pay our editors, we pay anyone who works to report the news. But we don’t pay anyone who blogs their opinions,” she said.

In this media transition period, original reporting is being done on blogs (such as the politics blog at sfbg.com), that line isn’t so clear. But it does single out the important role that professional, full-time journalists play in the media landscape.

She said HuffPo now has six editors and writers on the payroll in Washington, DC, on top of the 50 employees (which includes technical, administrative, and advertising staff) in New York. And the outfit is in the process of launching an investigative reporting fund and story funding service, with models similar to Spot.us and Propublica.org. As Huffington said, “We’re all basically trying to reinvent journalism.”

But HuffPo’s model of journalism isn’t really that radical. The notion that reporters are allowed to have opinions, that news outlets can take on causes, push issues and represent the public interest, has been a part of the nation’s media landscape since before the American Revolution. The technology that allows almost anyone to publish a blog, and allows the public to comment on and challenge what’s written, is only a modern version of a long tradition. Small printing presses and small publishers with influential pamphlets date back to before Thomas Paine helped spark the revolution with Common Sense. And before the news media got huge, reporters and editors were part of the communities they covered and heard from their readers every day.

In many ways, the media pioneers these days are looking at reestablishing the best roots of the American press. The only thing missing at this point is the business model that, in 2009, works well enough to pay for it.

Politically courageous act of the year

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jerry brown.jpg

By Steven T. Jones

As the year winds down, I’d like to note what I consider to be the most politically courageous act of 2008: Attorney General Jerry Brown’s decision to reverse his position and urge the California Supreme Court to overturn Prop. 8.
This was a deeply principled decision that went against Brown’s political self-interest considering the fact that he’s planning to run governor in a state where a majority has approved Prop. 8. And that political danger was exacerbated by Brown’s post-election statement saying he would defend Prop. 8, as attorneys general are generally required to do, opening him up to the dreaded flip-flopper label.
But his new position is consistent with important constitutional principles (as I outlined in the Guardian almost a month before Brown adopted his new stance) and well-worth taking a gamble to do what’s right, the kind of act that is all too rare in modern American politics.
We’ve seen lots of different Jerry Browns through the years, from Governor Moonbeam to the We The People presidential populist to the tough-on-criminals, easy-on-developers Oakland mayor. Perhaps this act heralds Jerry Brown as the kind of governor California desperately needs right now: someone willing to tell the people “no,” that we can’t have everything we want, that some sacrifice and selflessness and tolerance are needed, that this nation was founded on principles more important than majority rule.

Furor in the sheriff’s union

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The president of the San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association, who has made no secret of his larger political ambitions, is fighting a lawsuit by union members who allege that he embezzled money and improperly donated union funds to local campaigns.

The suit seeks to oust David Wong as president and force an audit of the union’s financial records.

Captain Johna Pecot, Chief Deputy Thomas Arata, senior deputy Rick Owyang, Lieutenant Stephen Tilton, and deputy Joseph Leake allege in the lawsuit that Wong collected a double salary, used union money to pay his personal mortgage, made numerous unauthorized political contributions, began an outside foundation using the SFDSA’s name, and ended an important union affiliation, all in violation of the SFDSA bylaws.

On top of that, they say he led a campaign to kick Pecot and Arata out of the union after the two began requesting to look into the SFDSA finances.

The lawsuit has obvious political implications. Wong is an elected member of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee. He challenged incumbent Sheriff Mike Hennessey for the elected post in 2007, and has said that he would consider running again in 2011. Some observers say that Hennessey, who has been in office 28 years, may be ready to retire at the end of this term.

Pecot and Arata are senior officers and close to Hennessey.

Wong’s attorney, Larry Murray, says the complaint, filed in federal court Nov. 10th, has "no specific information" about the alleged fraud. He’s asked that the case be dismissed. "The Complaint reveals nothing more than a round of an ongoing local dispute between union management and a few disgruntled members whose allegations long ago have been independently investigated and proven without merit," according to Wong’s motion.

Wong wouldn’t comment to us about the case, although he told Vic Lee of KGO-TV that "This is purely politics, political." But if any of the serious charges stand up in court, it could complicate any future run for office.

"We have not asked for any money in our lawsuit, we have asked that there be accountability and the books be opened," Tilton told us.

WHO PAID WHOM — AND HOW MUCH?


In 2002, the union board approved a plan to pay the salary of a full-time union president, the suit states, and between 2003 and 2005, funds totaling $285,367 were appropriated to pay Wong. However, it states, "in 2003 SFDSA members learned that the sheriff’s department was continuing to pay David Wong his regular … salary." Upon the discovery the board cut his union pay to $24,000 a year, but "the excess funds … have never been restored to SFDSA," the suit charges.

The exact financial figures would come out in a trial, but at this point, the picture is murky. Susan Fahey, a spokeswoman from the sheriff’s department, said that Wong is considered a permanent civil servant and that under the collective bargaining agreement between the city and the DSA, 40 percent of his $86,538.92 salary is paid by the sheriff’s department and 60 percent is paid by the SFDSA.

"It’s not double salary," Murray said. "There’s two employers: one hires him for 40 percent of the time, the other 60 percent."

The lawsuit claims that the union used a rather unusual procedure to compensate Wong. Instead of paying his salary directly to him, it alleges, the union paid the money to the banks that held Wong’s mortgage.

A 2004 report on an internal union investigation of the practice, a copy of which was filed with the suit, notes that the plan was a "Creative way to compensate the President of the DSA for the salary difference … in a manner that did not create liabilities to the Association as an employer." The investigation found that Wong "has not committed any violation of law" but stated that the judgment used to devise this compensation method was "extremely poor."

Eileen Hirst, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department chief of staff, wouldn’t comment on the case, calling it "entirely internal" to the SFDSA.

THE GENDER LAWSUIT


This isn’t the only lawsuit involving the union, Arata, Pecot, and Tilton. The three senior staffers are named defendants in a gender-discrimination lawsuit filed last year against the sheriff’s department.

Murray — Wong’s lawyer — also represents the plaintiffs, 35 male and female deputies, in the 2007 case that alleges that the sheriff’s department practice of allowing only female deputies to enter women’s jail pods exposes those deputies to greater harm and amounts to gender discrimination. Wong isn’t mentioned in the suit by name, but his response to the more recent case refers to it as "round one of this dispute."

In the fall of 2007, shortly after the gender discrimination case was filed, Pecot and Arata began looking into the SFDSA books. Pecot, who is a sheriff’s captain, told the Guardian that after she requested access to the records, Wong began a campaign to have the SFDSA bylaws amended by vote so that captains and chiefs — who are senior managers in the department — could no longer be SFDSA members.

The union membership approved the change in April, Pecot told us. According to the 2008 complaint, Wong had been "disseminating false and misleading information regarding Plaintiffs in attempt to wrongfully expel them from membership in the SFDSA."

The lawsuit also alleges that Wong and SFDSA’s treasurers have "divest[ed] the SFDSA of more than $500,000 of its funds" since 2002. That money, the suit claims, may have gone to the SFDSA Foundation — an organization that, according to the complaint, has no affiliation with the SFDSA.

The complaint states that Wong "deliberately chose the name for his sham organization to deliberately confuse and mislead the public" and "used the income derived from his racketeering activities to establish or operate the SFDSA Foundation."

The suit charges that Wong made $65,000 in political contributions that weren’t approved by the union board. Since 2002, the SFDSA has made contributions to candidates such as Assemblymember Fiona Ma, former state treasurer Phil Angelides, state senator Leland Yee, former secretary of state Kevin Shelley, and other state politicians.

Another point of contention revolves around a building fund that Pecot said was created by the SFDSA to purchase a headquarters building. The union’s been doing business at 444 Sixth Street for the past six years. Pecot says that until recently, she thought the property was owned by the SFDSA. She found out that in fact Wong was leasing it with nearly $200,000 from the building fund, and the complaint specifies that Wong and the treasurer at the time "falsely represented to the SFDSA membership that the SFDSA had purchased a building and was paying a mortgage."

Another money issue that the plaintiffs say they tried to resolve before going to court concerns funds that allegedly have been missing since the termination of the SFDSA’s affiliation with Operating Engineers Local 3. When Wong became SFDSA president in 2002, the SFDSA was affiliated with OE Local 3, another union that handled some legal work for deputies, a service for which each SFDSA member paid $27 per month. But Wong ended the affiliation in May of this year — a move plaintiffs say was not approved by the board.

Wong sent out a memo at the end of May that explained why he ended the affiliation. The document states that the Operating Engineers wanted SFDSA members to pay twice the amount for the same legal defense and since that wasn’t "fair to the membership," he reached a new agreement with a private law firm for legal representation.

After ending the affiliation, however, the SFDSA continued to collect $27 a month from each member, totaling more than $67,500, according to the complaint.

During a Nov. 21 press conference, plaintiff Leake read from a statement that said, "Because of President Wong’s concealment and refusal to provide access to DSA records, we are not able to determine the exact amount of missing funds, nor are we able to identify all the recipients of the misappropriated funds."

"President Wong has thus far avoided accountability for these missing funds by conducting a practice of concealing and refusing to provide access to SFDSA records," said Leake.

Even though SFDSA bylaws say that "all members in good standing shall have the right to examine the books," Owyang said the union members found it necessary to file a lawsuit to get internal financial information. "It’s a sad situation," Tilton said, "when we have to get books opened up in federal court."

Murray said that he’s provided the plaintiffs’ attorneys with all of the information they need. "Some financial information was provided to us," said Louis Garcia, attorney for the plaintiffs. "But we have no confirmation or information regarding its authenticity. Also, the information is only a small portion of the total records that we’re entitled to inspect."

Dick in a box

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

If the assassination of JFK was a defining, traumatic blow to American hopefulness, the Watergate scandal a decade later arguably created something worse: a deep collective cynicism that our politics could never escape corruption, or that the guilty would be truly punished even when caught red-handed. How much worse have we shrugged off since?

As the most secretive White House in modern memory pulls up stakes, there’s a fear that particular history may repeat itself. What if Bush blanket-pardons his cabinet, as Gerald Ford did for Richard Nixon, of any and all crimes not yet formally accused? In 1974, that move informed our great nation that at certain high levels, the concept of justice need not apply. In fact, it meant Dick. Nixon left the country in far better (shaky, but better) shape than W., but arguably suffered a greater popular backlash than Bush will. He never admitted any criminal wrongdoing, copping to vague "mistakes made" instead. He resigned to avoid impeachment, and the full airing of dirty laundry that would have required. Thus, the sweatiest president ever avoided total humiliation. But didn’t he owe us repentance?

The pardon and Nixon’s subsequent shrinking from public life left a majority feeling cheated. He owed us that pound of flesh — withholding it was intolerable arrogance. Adapted by Peter Morgan from his widely produced play, with the originating lead actors reprising their roles, Frost/Nixon dramatizes the moment when Tricky Dick did get called onto the public carpet to confess his sins. Which he did — well, sorta kinda. The disgraced prez (Frank Langella) is offered tempting scads of money to be interviewed on TV by an odd candidate for interrogator, the rather garish Brit chat show host David Frost (Michael Sheen) — a showbiz personality more akin to contemporaries the Galloping Gourmet and early Geraldo Rivera than, say, Walter Cronkite (or even Dick Cavett).

Nixon’s people (including Kevin Bacon as security chief) figure this presumably softball platform will provide opportunity to burnish his tarnished legacy as statesman. The team that womanizing, cheerfully shallow Frost assembles to prep for this American broadcast "comeback" worry that he lacks the depth of knowledge, experience, or backbone to pin subject to mat. All suspense here hinges on whether Frost can give his armchair opponent "the trial he never had." He’s seemingly outmatched: fallen yet not feebled, the ex-president proves a master of spin, evasion, and subterfuge.

George Clooney was reportedly eager to direct Frost/Nixon; he might’ve made something slyer and subtler than Ron Howard, who sometimes underlines performance nuances as if wielding a bullhorn and flashing neon sign. But it’s still the best movie he’s done, a nimble opening-up of a talky stage entity that only slightly exaggerates the import of real-life events. Langella makes one realize how seldom the most widely caricatured president in history has been portrayed as more than a collection of grotesque tics; Sheen is as expert here as he was playing Tony Blair in 2006’s The Queen. While its contemporary echoes aren’t overt, Frost/Nixon prods an important question: why do we demand even less accountability of our Commander-in-Chief now? What should have been lessons learned from Nixon instead begat heightened apathy, gullibility, and stupidity. As an electorate, we got the Commanders-in-Chief we deserved.

FROST/NIXON opens Fri/12 in San Francisco.

Breaking ground

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› steve@sfbg.com

The long-awaited process of rebuilding the Transbay Terminal formally begins Dec. 10 with a groundbreaking ceremony led by Mayor Gavin Newsom. But the agency pushing the project is still a long way from finding the money to build the project’s voter-mandated centerpiece: a high-speed rail and Caltrain station.

Even as the Transbay Joint Powers Authority embarks on the fully funded, $1.2 billion first phase of the project — which includes building a temporary bus station, demolishing the current building, and rebuilding the 1 million-square-foot transit hub by 2014 — the agency still hasn’t included the crucial $300 million "train box" in its plans.

Transportation planners say the train box, which is essentially the shell structure in which the train station would be built during the project’s second phase, is very important both logistically and financially (doing it later could be very expensive and disruptive to the station’s operation), particularly since the TJPA has secured little of the $3 billion needed for phase two.

"It would be a misuse of taxpayer money not to build the train box now," Dave Snyder, transportation policy director for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, told the Guardian. "The most urgent thing now is to make sure the train box is built as part of phase one."

"We are working hard to identify the funding for the train box in phase one," TJPA executive director Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan told the Guardian. "It’s more expensive to build it later."

But that source must be found by spring to be included in construction contracts.

Critics have questioned whether the trains will ever arrive at Transbay Terminal’s downtown location, and those doubts grew in recent weeks after Judge Quentin Kopp, the California High Speed Rail Authority chair, publicly suggested that the existing Caltrain station at Fourth and Townsend streets would be a fine high-speed rail terminus and that tunneling the final 1.4 miles to Transbay might not be worth the money (see "High speed derailment?", SFBG Politics blog, 11/18/08).

Kopp’s comments were prompted by premature TJPA efforts to secure funding guarantees from the $10 billion in high-speed rail bond money approved by voters Nov. 4 and by his concerns about how the project is being managed by Ayerdi-Kaplan and the high-priced public relations firm she relies on, Singer & Associates.

That rift, its lingering aftermath, and the failure of the TJPA to identify funding for Transbay Terminal’s rail components have rattled those who see the project as the linchpin for the region’s transportation system.

"I don’t think it works with the rail terminal at the current Caltrain station at Fourth and Townsend," Snyder said. "The access to downtown just isn’t good enough. The trains have to come downtown."

The Transbay Terminal was built in 1939 as the truly multimodal facility that supporters want it to become again. It received both buses and the commuter trains that traveled along the lower deck of the Bay Bridge until the bridge was converted to handle cars alone in 1959. At its peak at the end of World War II, 26 million passengers used the station annually, but those numbers dropped off precipitously as private automobile use increased.

The neighborhood around the terminal at First and Mission streets deteriorated and became a redevelopment district full of dormant public land, which the state turned over to facilitate development activity that includes the terminal rebuild (with a rooftop park), a neighborhood of 2,600 new homes (35 percent of which are required to be affordable), and a series of towering office buildings (including the tallest one on the West Coast).

Land sales expected to total $429 million are the single biggest funding source for phase one of the Transbay Terminal project, with the rest coming from state and federal funds, participating transit agencies such as AC Transit, a loan that will be repaid by increased property taxes, and increases in the sales tax and bridge tolls that were dedicated to the project by past ballot measures.

The prospects of bringing trains into the terminal seemed to rely on the high-speed rail project, which Kopp instigated as a legislator in the mid-’90s. Since then, the project has been studied and certified, with its documents explicitly spelling out how trains will travel from Transbay Terminal to Los Angeles Union Station in about two hours and 38 minutes.

After years of delays in bringing the $9.9 billion high-speed rail bond measure to the ballot, Proposition 1A was narrowly approved by voters Nov. 4. The TJPA immediately asked CHSRA for priority funding and was rebuffed by Kopp, who on Nov. 13 wrote, "Please do not attempt to secure California High Speed Rail Project funds to defray the enormous cost of the 1.4 mile ‘downtown rail extension.’ Such effort will not be welcomed by me."

In comments to both the Guardian and the San Francisco Chronicle, Kopp raised questions about wasteful spending at TJPA, the leadership of Ayerdi-Kaplan (who has met with Kopp and CHSRA director Mehdi Morshed just once), and the TJPA’s use of Singer and Associates, whose multiyear contract of up to $900,000 calls for paying the TJPA’s main contact, Adam Alberti, $350 per hour. "We don’t have a PR person deflecting media inquiries," Kopp said of his agency.

Ayerdi-Kaplan, who had little transit or executive experience before being appointed to the post at the urging of then–mayor Willie Brown, met with the Guardian editorial board last week and glossed over her past inaccessibility and conflicts with Kopp, saying the project is on track, she’s engaged with it, and she’s confident of its success.

"We have raised over $2 billion for the project and have a fully funded phase one. We’re still working on identifying the funding for the rail," Ayerdi-Kaplan said. TJPA has developed a list of possible funding sources, the biggest item being $600 million from the CHSRA.

She admitted that she hasn’t personally tried to contact Kopp about the funding request or worked to develop a good relationship with him or his agency, both of which Kopp has criticized. "At some point, we are going to sit down and talk," Ayerdi-Kaplan said.

She said there’s strong public support for the project. "We take a very positive approach," she told us. "You have to believe in what you’re working on, you have to believe it’s going to happen — as anything in life: you have believe your relationships are going to work, that your business is going to work, that your project is going to happen — or you have no business doing it," she said. Ayerdi-Kaplan said the project is fully certified and just waiting for funding, which should make it attractive to increased infrastructure spending proposed by President-elect Barack Obama. "There’s a lot of things that are in the works immediately with his economic stimulus package," she said.

Alberti said he has reached out to Morshed and received assurances that the CHSRA is still planning to use Transbay Terminal, something Morshed also confirmed for the Guardian — but with some hedging.

"Transbay Terminal is our terminal station in San Francisco as of now, based on our environmental documents," Morshed told the Guardian. Yet he said the authority is beginning more project-specific environmental studies, "and part of the requirements of environmental analysis is we need to look at all options."

Kopp said it’s unlikely that the Transbay Terminal — or any other project — will get a commitment for bond money soon: "We’re not going to be spending money or making funding commitments for years."

Kim Gale, the world’s nicest guy, 1941-2008

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A celebration of the life of Jeremy Kimball (Kim) Gale, a colorful Guardian graphic artist who died Nov. 28, in Marin General Hospital of diabetes and renal disease, will be held at 5 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 11 at the Paper Mill Creek Saloon in Forest Knolls in Marin County. He was 67.

It is most fitting that Kim’s memorial service will be held in a saloon. He loved the Paper Mill, he loved saloons, and he loved to attend and put on parties.

Kim was born in Portsmouth, N.H., and graduated from the New England School of Arts in Boston, then headed west and ended up in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. He soon made his way to the Guardian newspaper and our cramped little office at 1070 Bryant. There he found a home, fast friends, a cast of characters, his kind of leftist politics, a rollicking good time, and a perfect place for his free-spirited lifestyle.

He was also a talented graphic artist who could do everything from whipping out illustrations on deadline to designing front pages, to laying out and pasting up pages quickly, to keeping things flowing with professional casualness. Best of all, he could make sense out of and fit nicely into our often chaotic production department.

Through all the pressures of production and bartending, Kim was always the essence of affability and good humor. I never saw him get angry or raise his voice. He was, as we often remarked at the Guardian, "the world’s nicest guy."

Read a full obituary here.

Kim Gale, the world’s nicest guy, 1941-2008

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Kim Gale.jpg

Kim Gale

1941-2008

By Bruce B. Brugmann

A celebration of the life of Jeremy Kimball (Kim) Gale, a colorful Guardian graphic artist who died on Friday, Nov. 28th, in Marin General Hospital of diabetes and renal disease, will be held at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 11th, at the Paper Mill Creek Saloon in Forest Knolls in Marin County. He was 67.

It is most fitting that Kim’s memorial service will be held in a saloon. He loved the Paper Mill and he loved saloons and he loved to attend and put on parties.

Kim was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and graduated from the New England School of Arts in Boston, then headed west and ended up in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. He soon made his way to the Bay Guardian newspaper and our cramped little office at 1070 Bryant Street. There he found a home, fast friends, a cast of characters, his kind of muckraking left politics, a rollicking good time, and a perfect place for his free-spirited lifestyle.

He was also a talented graphic artist who could do everything from whipping out illustrations on deadline, to designing front pages, to laying out and pasting up pages quickly, to keeping things flowing with professional casualness. Best of all, he could make sense out of and fit nicely into our often chaotic production department.

He was a big guy, with the build of a high school football tackle on a winning team, and he had enormous stamina and energy. I remember him standing at his drawing board, hour after hour, grinding through the piles of ad and editorial copy, and getting the page flats to the printer on time. Then he would head out to the old Ribeltad Vorden bar near Precita Park for his second job of the day as a bartender. Some of us would follow him to the Ribeltad, where Kim would again be standing, this time behind the bar pouring us drinks until closing time.

Through all the pressures of production and bartending, Kim was always the essence of affability and good humor. I never saw him angry or raise his voice. He was, as we often remarked at the Guardian, “the world’s nicest guy.”

Kim loved our Guardian parties and could outlast anybody at the bar or on the dance floor. “He could organize a party like few others,” according to his brother Jon. “He put together a full day of fun for nearly 200 people for his 40th birthday. There were two nationally known bands and other musicians who performed. Children of all ages, their parents and grandparents danced, ate grilled ribs, and barbecued oysters and the wine flowed freely.

“When he was 17, he put together an ice-skating party that included half of Portsmouth High School and college students home on Christmas break. That party was talked about for years. When I attended my 40th high school reunion, it seemed my classmates asked about my brother before they asked me what I’d been doing over the years. Everybody loved Kim. He was a load of fun.”

His favorite job, after leaving the Guardian, was working as a public relations man for the Golden Gate Fisherman’s Association. Executive Editor Tim Redmond remembers Kim calling him one day and asking if he wanted to go fishing. “Sure,” Tim said, quite startled, “but why do you want me to go fishing?” Kim replied, “Because that’s my job, to take reporters out fishing.”

It was the perfect job for Kim – beer, fishing, and a chance to talk with interesting people. He loved every minute and often seemed to marvel at the fact that he was actually getting paid to do it.
Tim and then Reporter Martin Espinoza spent a day with Kim drinking beer and fishing out on the Farallone Islands. With Kim’s guidance, they caught lots of fish and Kim would give the name and nature of each fish.

Kim transformed his fishing expertise into a fishing report and website. Kim had a host of sources out on the lakes and rivers and he would call them and find out where the fish were biting and how to catch them. He put the information up on his website and fisherman would pay to visit the site.

Kim lived for many years in Forest Knolls where, according to daughter Natasha Pemberton, “he enjoyed visiting and dancing with friends at the Pepper Mill. He also loved fishing, telling stories, and being surrounded by family and food. We will remember him for his sense of humor, love of life, and his gentle, good heartedness.”

Kim was preceded in death by his parents Arline and Edwin and son Christopher. He is survived by his brother Jon Gale of Waterboro, Maine, daughters Justine Huntsman of Twist, Montana, and Natasha Pemberton, of Lagunitas, and partner Zoila Berardi, of Grass Valley, and the entire “Berardi” clan, as Natasha puts it. Condolences may be sent to Tashapemberton@hotmail.com.

Nat Hentoff’s Last Column

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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.

Torch songs

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

In the best promo photo for Sébastien Tellier’s third album, Sexuality (Record Makers), he sits in a shaft of light before a piano, his ever-present fitover sunglasses pushed up on the crown of his head, and a burnished gold hand rests on the shoulder of his Members Only jacket. Hovering over his left shoulder is a blank, benevolent casque belonging to the album’s producer, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo — one half of Daft Punk. It’s a silly scene of symbolic torch-passing. Outside of France, Daft Punk’s role as a synecdoche for modern French pop as a whole has previously only been played by Serge Gainsbourg, and imagining the Jesus-like Tellier trying to fill out Gainsbourg’s Repetto footwear and the Punks’ Gap khakis simultaneously is awkward.

At points, Sexuality makes that mantle fit better. The recording starts with "Roche," its gently slapping rhythm and Moroder-esque synth-sequencing mimicking the Biarritz surf Tellier conjures as he sings, "Je sens la chaleur de l’été / C’est ahh, c’est ahh." After tackling family and politics with his debut, L’incroyable vértité (2001), and his still-more-ambitious Politics (2005), respectively, Sexuality is Tellier’s latest go at finding what he calls a "master subject." The challenge here has nothing to do with taboo, but instead with how to approach such a massive topic without parroting the clichés that make it possible to talk about it in the first place.

In terms of pacing and mood, much of Sexuality stays with the tight knot of anticipation that forms in your gut before foreplay or even making out. De Homem-Christo is a light touch, and his main purpose is to keep Tellier from plunging into the masturbatory. Even if nothing here attempts to encompass the whole of human experience as Tellier’s "La Ritournelle" did, the album’s greatness is sublimated and spread out over its 11 tracks — plenty of time to warm up your lover, with no dips in concentration.

As with everything else on the full-length, "Roche" is nothing if not paced: the drum programming in particular has a Cartesian precision to it and the sounds are arranged in rational space. Having little to do with the labyrinthine wind-ups of Modeselektor’s Eurocrunk beats and none of the oversize, bitcrushed rock kits in Justice’s arsenal, Tellier seems to be working within another decade’s technological limitations — the results, if not always sexy, feel somehow closer to the mood, texture, and pace of actual sex.

More than half a dozen listens into the disc, the lyrics have already given up on revealing themselves as narrative or typically poetic. The meaning is only half there on a song like closer "L’amour et la violence," with the words’ other halves rolling off into pink steam over roiling classical arpeggios. With few established roles and nothing resembling an erotic scenario, Sexuality‘s bi-curious Franco-Teutonic funk is not quite enough to establish sensuousness and romance in brains scorched by the general availability of hardcore porn and its imaginary, but it’s one of the best places we can start. *

SÉBASTIEN TELLIER

With Hearts Revolution, Lilofee, and DJ sets by Black Shag, BT Magnum, and Safety Scissors

Thurs/4, doors 9 p.m., $15 advance

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was out of town the day Tom Ammiano appeared at his final meeting as a San Francisco supervisor. Too bad; I would have gone, no matter how busy I was, just to be a part of history.

I know that sounds silly. The Barack Obama inauguration will be part of history. The election of Harvey Milk was part of history. Ammiano’s last day? Hey, the guy’s moving on to Sacramento. Take a bow, everyone says thanks, and another local politician takes another political job. History?

Well, yeah, actually. Because when the history of progressive politics is written in this town (and I hope some other poor sucker takes on that job so I don’t have to) Tom Ammiano will go down as a central figure in the movement that turned San Francisco around.

It’s worth noting that the movie Milk, celebrating the life of the gay pioneer, opened around the same time Ammiano was clearing out his City Hall office. The connection goes deeper than the fact that they were both queer men fighting for basic human rights and dignity at a time when that was a huge uphill struggle.

Milk was part of an urban movement that came out of the 1960s and came of age in the 1970s that sought to wrest control of San Francisco from a cadre of military and big business leaders who had been running it since World War II. The agenda of the crew that we collectively refer to as "downtown" was turning the sleepy port city of the 1930s into the financial headquarters for Pacific Rim trade. They wanted San Francisco to be another Manhattan; they laid plans, they put the machinery in place — and they never asked the people who lived here whether that was the future we wanted.

Because all that downtown development meant higher rents, more evictions, gentrification, budget deficits, too many cars, the death of small businesses … and by the mid-1970s, the activists had figured out how to fight back. It started with electing supervisors by district so that big money didn’t always carry the day.

Milk was elected supervisor as part of the progressive push that put George Moscone in the Mayor’s Office. And if Moscone and Milk had lived, it’s possible that the tide could have turned right then. But the assassinations derailed district elections, turned the city back over to downtown, and sentenced the San Francisco left to more than 20 years of tough political dark ages.

Ammiano got elected in that era, when the developers called all the shots, when tenants and environmentalists and neighborhood people were lucky to get two or three votes on the Board of Supervisors. His pro-tenant and anti-development proposals never even reached the desks of mayors who would have vetoed them anyway.

But he didn’t give up, and in 1999, in the bleak days of the dot-com boom, he took on a long-shot campaign for mayor that, in one six-week period, reenergized the San Francisco left. With his help, district elections came back; and with his leadership, a decidedly progressive board took office in 2001. Living wage, sick pay, universal health care, bike plans, real estate transfer taxes, tenant protections … these are all products of that change.

Ammiano was an odd sort of leader, someone with a sense of humor who didn’t take himself anywhere near seriously enough. He would be the first to credit the movement, not the man — and he’d be right. But when we needed him, he was there.

Cue the clowns

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› steve@sfbg.com

The circus doesn’t come to San Francisco, but its performers do, sexy and talented dreamers who bring a creative energy that has transformed the city’s nightlife and counterculture. Spinning aerialists and dancing clowns now proliferate at clubs and parties, and their number has more than doubled in recent years.

They come from towns across the country — often via Burning Man, where they discover their inner performers, dying to burst out, and other kindred spirits — to a city with a rich circus tradition, which they tweak and twist into something new, a hybrid of the arts and punk sideshow weirdness. It’s the ever-evolving world of Indie Circus.

One of the biggest banners these performers now dance and play under is Bohemian Carnival, which draws together some of the city’s best indie circus acts, including Vau de Vire Society, the clown band Gooferman, and Fou Fou Ha, acts that fluidly mix with one another and the audience.

Last Saturday, as families across the country shopped and shared Thanksgiving leftovers, this extended family of performers rehearsed for that night’s Bohemian Carnival. Fou Fou Ha was in the Garage, a SoMa performance space, working on a new number celebrating beer with founder/choreographer Maya Culbertson, a.k.a. MamaFou, pushing for eight-count precision.

"Do it again," she tells her eight high-energy charges, who look alternatively sexy and zany even without the colorful and slightly grotesque clown costumes they don for shows. I watch from the wings as they drill through the number again and again, struck by how the improvised comedy at the song’s end changes every time, someone’s new shtick catching my eye and making me smile.

"That’s what we love the most, the improv element to it," Culbertson tells me. "We see how far you can take it and not break character."

As Fou Fou Ha wrapped up and headed home to get ready for the show, Gooferman and Vau de Vire were just starting to rehearse and set up over at the party venue, DNA Lounge. Reggie Ballard was up a tall ladder setting the rigging, the dancers stretched, Vau de Vire co-founder Mike Gaines attended to a multitude of details, and Gooferman frontmen Vegas and Boenobo the Klown played the fools.

"I feel like I’m on acid," Vegas said evenly, his long Mohawk standing tall.

"Are you?" Boenobo said, perhaps a little jealous.

"No, I wish," Vegas replied. "But that’s why it’s weird."

"Huh," Boenobo deadpanned. "Weird."

Fucking clowns. I decide to chat up a dancer, Rachel Strickland, the newest member of Vau de Vire, who stretched and unabashedly changed into her rehearsal clothes as she told me about why she moved here from North Carolina in July 2007.

"I waited a long time for this. I always knew I wanted to come to San Francisco and work on the stage, doing something in the line of Moulin Rouge, with the costumes and that kind of decadence and debauchery," Strickland said, oozing passion for her craft and the life she’s chosen, one she said has met her expectations. "I danced as much as I could my whole life and I have an overactive imagination, so it’s hard to shock me."

Not that Vau de Vire hasn’t tried. Shocking people out of their workaday selves is what the performers try to do, whether through vaudeville acts, dance routines, feats of skill, or just sheer sensual outlandishness. Vau de Vire choreographer Shannon Gaines (Mike’s wife of 19 years) also teaches at the local indie circus school Acrosports and, with beatboxer and performance artist Tim Barsky, directs its City Circus youth program, which combines hip hop and other urban art forms with circus.

Gaines has been a gymnast and dancer all her life, skills that she’s honed into circus performances she does through five different agencies, often doing corporate events "that involve wearing a few more clothes" and other more conventional performances.

"The other seems like work to me. But this," she said, a wry smile coming to her lips, "is like dessert. This is what excites me."

She’s not the only one. With their growing popularity, San Francisco’s indie circus freaks are juggling an increasingly busy schedule and developing even bigger plans for the new year, including a national tour and an extravaganza called Metropolus that would reinforce San Francisco’s reputation as the best Big Top in the country.

As Boenobo told me, "It’s a moment in time when there’s something big developing in San Francisco."

MIMES AND PICKLES


The circus arts are ancient, but San Francisco’s unique role in morphing and perpetuating them trace back to the 1970s when Make-a-Circus arrived here from Europe — where circus traditions are strong — and the local, organic Pickle Family Circus was born.

Wendy Parkman, now a board member at San Francisco Circus Center, the circus school she helped develop in conjunction with the Pickles and legendary performer Judy Finelli, worked for both circuses and described how they derived from San Francisco’s vibrant arts scene and its history of grassroots activism.

"It was just a wonderful, spontaneous bubble, a renaissance of circus activity," Parkman told the Guardian. "It was an outgrowth of the fabulous ’60s and the involvement of people with community and politics and art."

Parkman and many others trace the local lineage of a renaissance that came to be known as New Circus back to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which in 1959 started doing political theater that incorporated comedy (or more specifically, Commedia dell’Arte), music, farce, melodrama, and other aspects of clowning.

"It really started with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and it flourishes here because of the rich arts culture that we’ve always had here," Jeff Raz, a longtime performer with both original SF troupes who started the San Francisco Clown Conservatory and recently had the title role in Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo, told the Guardian.

"San Francisco felt like a place where things could happen that were socially and politically relevant," Parkman said. "Circus has always been a people’s art form. It’s a great way of getting a lot of people involved because it takes a lot of people to put on a show."

Perhaps even more relevant to the current indie circus resurgence, both Make-a-Circus and the Pickle Family Circus reached out to working class neighborhoods in San Francisco, where they would do parades and other events to entertain the people and generate interest in the circus.

"It was happy, healthy, and accessible to people of all ages, classes, and backgrounds," said Parkman said, who noted that things began to change in the 1980s as funding for the arts dried up and Pickle hit hard times.

"The Pickle Family Circus was a grassroots circus that was part of a real renaissance. Unfortunately, it didn’t go very far," Dominique Jando, a noted circus historian who has written five books on the circus and whose wife teaches trapeze at the Circus Center, told the Guardian.

Still, the Pickle legacy lives on in the Circus Center and Acrosports, making San Francisco and Montreal (birthplace of Cirque du Soleil, whose influence has also propelled the indie circus movement) the two major hubs of circus in North America. Unlike Europe, Russia, and China, where circus training is deeply rooted and often a family affair passed from generation to generation, Jando said, Americans don’t have a strong circus tradition.

"We are really the poor children of the circus world. There is not the same tradition of circus here that there is in Europe," said Jando, a native to France who now lives in San Francisco. "Learning circus is like ballet, and it’s not really in the American psyche to work and train for seven years for a job that offers modest pay."

Homegrown spectacles like Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus commercialized the circus and transformed it into the three-ring form that sacrificed intimacy and the emphasis on artistry and narrative flow. Traditionally in Europe, the clowns and music structured a circus performance, with the punctuation and interludes provided by the acrobats and other performers of the circus arts.

"It’s the superhuman and the supremely human, who are the clowns," is how Raz defines circus. "Clowns are becoming more central to the circus, the supremely human part, and that has a lot to do with our times."

Raz, Jando, and Parkman all pointed to the sterile excesses of the televised, digitized, Twittering, 24/7 world we live in as feeding the resurgence of circus. "It points to a demand by the audience to see something more down to earth and real," Jando said. "There is a need to go back to basics."

"It’s a response to the overly technological world we’re living in. People want to go back to what the human body can do and be in the same place as the performers," Parkman said. "One of the concepts of the Pickles was that it was drawing on the European model. I’d say what’s going on now in San Francisco is an offshoot of what the Pickles did."

Raz said the rise of Indie Circus and its influence on the local arts scene is consistent with his own experiences as an actor and clown. He used to keep two resumes, but performers today are often expected to be steeped in both disciplines, letting one inform the other and opening up new forms of creative expression.

"That melding that you’re looking at, from the club scene to Burning Man, is seeping into a lot of the world," Raz said. "Circus is very much a living art form."

Somehow," Jando said, "it has become a sort of counterculture on the West Coast."

INDIE, THE NEW NEW CIRCUS


Boenobo and Vegas haven’t done any real training to become clowns. They’re performers who use the clown shtick to build a fun and fantastical world off their solid musical base.

"There has to be whimsy. People take themselves so seriously," Boenobo said, noting that it was in response to the serious-minded Winter Music Conference in 2001 where he had the idea of having the members of his new band, Gooferman, dress as clowns. It was a lark, but it was fun and it stuck, and they’ve been clowns ever since.

"The clown thing floats my boat. It is a persona I really dig. And the band kicks ass. We’re all just super tight. The Bohemian Carnival is just a bunch of friends, like a family ejected out of different wombs," he said.

The band does kick ass. Setting aside the clown thing, their tunes are original and fun, evoking Oingo Boingo at its early best, particularly since the summer, when Boenobo and Vegas brought in a strong new rhythm section. But it’s the collaboration with Vau de Vire and the other groups that round out Bohemian Carnival and really bring it to life.

"People say it just blew my mind, and that is the immortality of it," Boenobo said. "It’s super-fucking gratifying, really. It’s just stupid."

They performed last month at the Hillbilly Hoedown inside a giant maze made of hay bales in Half Moon Bay, with the clowns and circus performers creating a fantastical new world for the partygoers. As Gooferman played, Shannon broke the rules and danced atop a hay bale wall behind the band, conveying pure danger and backwoods sex appeal.

"The Gooferman character is called Bruiser or Shenanigans," Shannon said of her performer alter egos. "She does the things that you’d get kicked out of a party for, but I can get away with it."

She considers herself more of a "fluffer" than a dancer, and while Gooferman plays, she gets the band and crowd charged up by pushing the limits of silliness and composure herself and seeing if they’ll follow. "So they’re thinking, wow, if she can do that, I can do all kinds of things."

Their world not only includes practitioners of circus arts (contortionists, aerialists, trapeze artists, clowns, and the like), but also the fashion scene (including outlandish local designers such as Anastasia), painters, sculptors, dancers, actors, fire artists, and DJs like Smoove who bring a certain zany flair to the dance parties.

"It’s hybridized. So it’s not just circus arts with some musical backing," Boenobo said. Instead, it creates a fun and whimsical scene that makes attendees feel like they’re part of something unusual, fun, and liberating. "Immersion is very important."

That’s why the Bohemian Carnival and its many offshoots try to break down the wall between the performers and the audience, who often show up in circus or Burning Man styles, further blurring the borders.

"When you break down that big third wall, there’s no pretense," Mike Gaines said. "It’s really about the party and the community."

Clowns circulate in the crowd, interacting with the audience while aerialists suddenly start performing on ropes or rings suspended over the dance floor. It draws the audience in, opens them up, makes them feel like they’re part of something.

"All of the sudden, people get to realize the dream of running away with the circus, but they get to leave it at the end of the night," Boenobo said with a wink, "which they generally like."

"The line of where circus starts and ends has been blurred," said kSea Flux (a.k.a. Kasey Porter), an indie circus performer who earlier this year started Big Top Magazine (www.bigtopmagazine.com) to chronicle the growing culture. "I love the old-school circus, but as with everything, it needs to be able to evolve to continue to grow."

When he joined the indie circus movement five years ago, performing with the Dresden Dolls, Flux said it transformed his life. He quit his corporate job and started developing his art and trying to make a living in the circus arts, including promoting the culture through the magazine.

"I found the circus and was completely filled with a new life," Flux said, noting that it was through his long involvement with Burning Man that he was exposed to the circus scene. "I think Burning Man gives a platform for it. People get stuck in their jobs and there’s this great week when you can let go and be what you want to be."

That’s also how the talented aerialist and hooper who calls herself Shredder got into this world, which she’s now explored in both the traditional circus and the indie variety, preferring the latter.

"I didn’t even know it was possible, but I just love it," said Shredder, who worked as a firefighter, EMT, and environmental educator before getting into performing through Burning Man, where Boenobo set up the Red Nose District in 2006 for all the many offshoots of the indie circus world that attend the event.

Shredder developed hula hoop and aerial routines, training hard to improve her skills and eventually was hired by the Cole Brothers Circus in 2006 to do aerial acrobatics and hooping. Founded in 1882, Cole is a full-blown circus in the Ringling Bros. tradition, with a ringleader, animals, and trained acrobats. Shredder toured 92 cities in 10 months until she felt the creativity and joy being snuffed out by the rote repetition of the performances.

"We did the exact same show everyday. It was like Groundhog Day but worse; same show, different parking lot," said Shredder, who later that Saturday night did a performance with more than a dozen hula hoops at once. "Then I heard about Vau de Vire through some fellow performers and I just heard they were doing really well and I wanted to be with a group like that … I was just so happy that they were willing to help me design my vision as an artist."

COMING TOGETHER


The Bohemian Carnival name and concept was actually an import from Fort Collins, Colo., where Mike and Shannon Gaines created the Vau de Vire Society as part of the performance and party space they operated there in a 100-year-old church that they purchased.

Mike’s background was in film; Shannon was a dancer; and the world they created for themselves was decidedly counterculture. So was their space, the Rose Window Experimental Theater and Art House, which they operated from 1997 to 2001 and lived in with 20 of their bohemian friends.

"It allowed us to really get to know ourselves. We had all day to just rig up any kind of performance we could imagine," she said. "If you had a crazy idea, you could just come on over at 3 a.m. and do it."

Their signature events were themed parties that would open with performances of about 30 minutes, usually combining music, dance, and performance art, followed by a dance party that was essentially an all-night rave. Initially the performances just drew off of the creativity of their friends, including those Shannon danced with. The themes were often risqué and sometimes included nudity.

The performances evolved over time, bringing in talent such as Angelo Moore of the band Fishbone, who is still a regular part of their crew. They were all attracted to the freaky side of performance art, which drew them toward sideshow, vaudeville, and circus themes and expanding what was technically possible. "We ended up getting a rigger in and just flying around the theater," Mike said.

In 2000, they did their first Bohemian Carnival event. "That’s when we started dabbling in the circus," Mike said.

While the events gained regional acclaim in newspapers and were supported by notables figures, including the town’s mayor, there was a backlash among local conservatives, including some who objected to how a traditional church was being used for raves by these bohemian freaks.

In 2001 they decided to search for a new home. "We looked around for the place that would be most accepting of what we were doing," Mike said.

San Francisco was known to be accepting of their kind, and there were groups here that were edging toward similar kinds of parties, including Infinite Kaos and Xeno (and its predecessor, Awd), as well as the band Idiot Flesh, not to mention the more serious circus being done at the Circus Center and Teatro Zinzanni.

"San Francisco, in this country, is a real hotbed for circus. So we were like, ‘Now we can bring in legitimate circus performers," Mike said. Shannon got a job teaching at Acrosports, allowing her to be immersed full-time in her art and to help grow her community.

Serendipitously, in August 2001, indie rocker Boenobo of the band Chub — a funky ska outfit whose members would wear different costumes to each of their performances — formed Gooferman, which wasn’t originally the clown band it is today: "The idea was you had to be in a costume and you had to be stoned." They morphed into a full-blown clown band, and began collaborating with circus performers.

"But it never coalesced until recently," Boenobo says.

That process probably began around Halloween 2004 at the Vegoose Festival in Las Vegas, when Vau de Vire Society was asked to fill eight hours’ worth of programming and turned to their San Francisco brethren for help, Mike said. They drove or flew about 100 people to the event.

It was also the year Boenobo staged the GoofBall in San Francisco, drawing together a variety of entertainment that helped change the nature of the traditional dance party. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also the year that reviled President George W. Bush won a second term and when longtime Burning Man artists staged their ill-fated revolt against the event (see "State of the art," 12/10/04).

"When people get too serious, they need this shit even more," Boenobo said of the increasingly irreverent, naughty, and participatory parties he was throwing.

Meanwhile Fou Fou Ha was developing its act. Culbertson and Raymond Meyer were waiting tables at Rose Pistola in 2000 and decided to put their big personalities to work for them, bringing in other performers such as Slim Avocado and setting up routines to perform at CellSpace and other venues.

"We’re sort of like the children of Cirque du Soleil in a way, but we wanted to give it an edge," Culbertson said. "It’s sort of like the second wave vaudeville … now with more of a rock edge."

Fou Fou Ha’s shows play off the dark and surreal kind of performance that is more European than American, a style Culbertson was exposed to while studying choreography during her Fulbright scholarship in Holland in the late 1990s. When she returned to the United States in 2000, "I wanted to form a [dance] company." But she wanted it to be fun. "People really like the idea of serious dance combined with comedy, where you can fall out of your pirouette," she said.

"We’re kind of like guerilla circus," Slim, a trained ballerina, said. "It’s a whole new movement. It’s like ’30s cabaret, but edgier."

Boenobo started the Red Nose District on the playa at Burning Man in 2006, drawing together his Bohemian Carnival friends, a local group of stilt- walkers known as Enhightned Beings of Leisure, installation artist Michael Christian’s crew from the East Bay, the Cirque Berserk folks from Los Angeles, and others from the growing circus world.

"It’s a safe environment to be and do what you want," Gaines said of Burning Man, noting how those breakthroughs on the playa then come back home to the city. And that ethos carries into Vau de Vire, which is truly a collective of like-minded friends, one that eschews hiring outside performers for their shows. "They’re all just part of it," he said.

What they’re all part of — Vau de Vire, Gooferman, Fou Fou Ha, and the rest of the Indie Circus folk — has begun to make a strong imprint on San Francisco nightlife and counterculture. From a performer’s perspective, Boenobo said, it feels good. "Our local family is super comfortable with one another," he said, something he’s never felt before after 25 years as a indie rocker. "It’s rare to not have a lot of ego to deal with, and it’s super rare with this kind of high-quality performance."

But they want more. As Flux said, "We want to take over the world."

WHAT’S NEXT


Slowly, the circus collective members are moving toward becoming full-time freaks. Already, Mike Gaines said most of the 12 to 15 regular Vau de Vire performers practice their art full-time, subsidizing their performances by being instructors in dance or the circus arts.

That’s not to say the parties, with their large number of performers, are lucrative. "With circus, you get a million more people on your guest list, so circus is complicated from a promoter’s perspective," Joegh Bullock of Anon Salon, which incorporates circus acts into its parties, including the upcoming Sea of Dream party New Year’s Eve. "But we love it and wouldn’t do a show without it."

To pay the bills, "we also do a lot of corporate gigs," Gaines says, not proudly. Fou Fou Ha does as well, including performing at the Westfield San Francisco Centre this holiday season. They’re all dying to take their show on the road, but that, too, takes money. "Sponsorship is the key if we’re going to tour with 60 people," said Mike, who’s been working hard on a deal and said he feels close.

Boenobo’s latest plan is Metropolus, a circus-style extravaganza he’s planning (along with Bullogh and Gaines) for next Halloween, hoping to ferry guests (using buses or perhaps even art cars from Burning Man) among several venues in town (such as Mighty, 1015, Temple, and DNA Lounge) and a huge circus tent he wants to erect in Golden Gate Park.

In addition to circus-style entertainment drawn from across the country, he wants to precede the Saturday night finale with three days and nights of workshops and smaller-scale performances. His goal is for Metropolus to because a signature event for San Francisco and the indie circus scene, the equivalent of the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas; the Winter Music Festival in Miami; or the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

The time seems right, with the current financial meltdown creating opportunities even as it makes funding their world domination plans difficult. "Each time you have a crisis like we’re having now, it’s a ripe time for circus," Jando said, noting that circus boomed during the Great Depression and after each of the two World Wars.

And after going through years of pure absurdity in Washington, DC, and on Wall Street, Raz said the clowns of the world — from Stephen Colbert’s conservative television character (who Raz says employs clown techniques in his comedy) to a singer named Boenobo — now have a special resonance with people. As he said, "One of the things clowns do is they live the folly large."

———–

CLOWN’S EYE VIEW

I’ve been following Indie Circus for years, intending to add it to the profiles of various Burning Man subcultures (see www.steventjones.com/burningman.html) that I’ve written for the Guardian, but my reporting on this story began in May. And at the suggestion of Gooferman frontman Boenobo the Klown, I decided to start from the inside and let him turn me into a clown.

As makeup artist Sharon Rose transformed me into a happy clown backstage at DNA Lounge, I asked Boenobo what I should do (besides interview people). We just needed to clown around, keep the drunks from crowding the performers, help clear the stage between acts — whatever needed doing. "We’re the scrubs," he told me, clown-to-clown.

As we spoke, the acrobats stretched, a corpse bride goofed off as she prepared for her aria, members of the Extra Action Marching Band started to slink in, clowns applied their makeup, and female performers occasionally came back from the stage and whipped off their tops.

When Gooferman went on, I still didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, so I stood next to the stage, watched, and awkwardly tried to be a little goofy in my dancing. A tall, beautiful blond woman stood next to me, catching my eye. She was apparently alone, so after a couple songs, during a lull, I asked her, "So, do you like clowns?"

"I am a clown," she said with a grin.

"Really?" I said. "You don’t look like a clown."

"But I am," she said. "I even do clown porn."

She turned out to be 27-year-old porn star Hollie Stevens, who told me she "grew up as a clown" in the Midwest before moving to California and getting into porn seven years ago. She even starred in the film Clown Porn and still sometimes dons the red nose and face paint for her public appearances, usually just for her own amusement. Stevens once appeared on the Jerry Springer Show as a clown, even getting into the requisite fight on stage with a friend.

"Clowns, you either love them or you hate them," she said, and she loves them.

I asked why she was there and she said that she’d come to see Boenobo. They had talked but never met, and shared a sort of mutual admiration. It was a clown thing. Clowns … they get all the hot chicks.

While we talked, an acrobat worked the pole on the stage, followed by an aerialist performing above the dance floor, one scene woven seamlessly into the other. The clowns of Gooferman puttered around the stage, removing equipment to get ready for the next act, flirting with the girls, trying to scam more drink tickets, or simply entertaining others and themselves.

The life of a clown is rarely dull.

————

UPCOMING INDIE CIRCUS EVENTS

DEC. 5–6


Acrosports Winter Cabaret

639 Frederick, SF

8 p.m., $5–$15

www.citycircus.org

DEC. 12


Auditions for Acrosports’ City Circus

Call (415) 665-2276, ext. 103 for appointment

DEC. 12-14


Frolic: CircusDragBurlesque Festival

Featuring Fou Fou Ha, Anna Conda, and more

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

8 p.m., $100

www.counterpulse.org

1-800-838-3006

DEC. 20


Open House and Holiday Carnival

San Francisco Circus Center

755 Frederick, SF

10 a.m.–4 p.m., free

Pratfalls and Rising Stars

7 p.m., $12 adults, $8 children

San Francisco Circus Center

Tickets and info at www.circuscenter.org

DEC. 20


Storytime Festival, featuring Vau de Vire Society

4–7 p.m., "Tales of Enchantment," (G-rated show) 8–11 p.m., "Storytime for the Inner Child," (R-rated show)

$30–$50

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

www.storytimefestival.org

————

>>More: Read Marke B.’s club review of Bohemian Carnival

Armed love

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The struggle of young, white activists aspiring to the authenticity, confrontational stance, and street credibility of groups like the Black Panthers has generated some of the most enduring myths and storylines of the 1960s. Among these ’60s groups, perhaps the least documented is New York City’s mythical Motherfuckers, the "street gang with an analysis." Former Motherfucker and current Berkeley activist Osha Neumann’s colorful but uneven memoir Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (Seven Stories Press, 240 pages, $16.95) is the first book-length treatment of the so-called "group with the unspeakable name."

Much like the Diggers (members of the San Francisco Mime Troup who left the stage in 1966 to act out revolutionary change in the streets), the Motherfuckers got their start in art. In January 1967, Neumann attended a meeting for "Angry Arts Week," which called for Lower East Side artists to make politically engaged work against the war in Vietnam. There, he met anarchist painter Ben Morea. Morea and his art group Black Mask had been responsible for a series of actions that brought the heavy street vibe of the Black Panthers to the art world, including an announced "shut down" of the Museum of Modern Art that ended with riot cops ringing the museum. From Angry Arts Week evolved a new group with Morea and Neumann at its core that took its name from a poem by Leroi Jones.

A product of the tenements and rat-infested streets around Tompkins Square Park, the Motherfuckers roamed the Lower East Side in leather jackets, carrying knives and handing out manifestoes. Their political identity, worldview, and brutal tactics were all neatly encapsulated by their first action in January 1968. During a garbage strike in the Lower East Side, they gathered rotten trash from the streets and took it uptown to dump on the steps of Lincoln Center, where they handed out flyers that read, "We propose a cultural exchange: garbage for garbage." Similarly to the Diggers out west, UAW/MF operated a Free Store, and held regular free community feasts for hippies and dropouts. But the Motherfuckers also taught free karate classes; eventually, they stockpiled guns. As Neumann puts it today, "We didn’t fuck around."

Preaching "flower power but with thorns," the group’s politics of escalation anticipated today’s Black Bloc. At the October 1967 march on the Pentagon, while Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies were linking arms and chanting to "levitate the Pentagon," Morea and company tore down a chain-link fence, battled with federal marshalls, and fought their way inside. Although Neumann now mostly dismisses the Motherfuckers’ tactics as macho and ineffective, he skillfully evokes the paranoid, volatile time and place in which they made total sense. Unfortunately for the reader, the group disbands midway through the book, and the back half is devoted to deadly dull soul-searching about the meaning of the ’60s.

Assessing the Motherfuckers’ legacy, Neumann writes, "It is easy to dismiss (their) politics as nothing more than childish tantrums and to profess that a baleful acceptance of the status quo is more ‘mature.’ It is more difficult to disentangle, delicately, as one would a bird caught in a net, the genuinely radical and uncompromising elements in this politics from those which are self-defeating." Though Neumann never satisfyingly solves this challenge for readers or himself, perhaps that’s the point. The group that started out as artists ultimately ended where they began, leaving behind a myth with an irreducible riddle at its core that is perhaps best considered as art. *

Stiglitz: What went wrong

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This article by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prizing winning economist and professor of economics at Columbia University in New York City, is one of the best I’ve seen on what went wrong with the economy and what can be done about it by the Obama team. It appeared in the November Vanity Fair magazine, shortly before the election.
His monthly column will appear in the Bruce blog. B3

Getty.jpg
The past as prologue? Lining up for food and water, Louisville, Kentucky, 1937. By Margaret Bourke-White/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Reversal of Fortune

Describing how ideology, special-interest pressure, populist politics, and sheer incompetence have left the U.S. economy on life support, the author puts forth a clear, commonsense plan to reverse the Bush-era follies and regain America’s economic sanity.

by Joseph E. Stiglitz November 2008

When the American economy enters a downturn, you often hear the experts debating whether it is likely to be V-shaped (short and sharp) or U-shaped (longer but milder). Today, the American economy may be entering a downturn that is best described as L-shaped. It is in a very low place indeed, and likely to remain there for some time to come.

Virtually all the indicators look grim. Inflation is running at an annual rate of nearly 6 percent, its highest level in 17 years. Unemployment stands at 6 percent; there has been no net job growth in the private sector for almost a year. Housing prices have fallen faster than at any time in memory—in Florida and California, by 30 percent or more. Banks are reporting record losses, only months after their executives walked off with record bonuses as their reward. President Bush inherited a $128 billion budget surplus from Bill Clinton; this year the federal government announced the second-largest budget deficit ever reported. During the eight years of the Bush administration, the national debt has increased by more than 65 percent, to nearly $10 trillion (to which the debts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae should now be added, according to the Congressional Budget Office). Meanwhile, we are saddled with the cost of two wars. The price tag for the one in Iraq alone will, by my estimate, ultimately exceed $3 trillion.

Click here to continue reading Joseph E. Stiglitz’s article published in the November 2008 issue of Vanity Fair.

‘Fight’ songs

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

On the night of Nov. 4, while President-elect Barack Obama was giving his victory speech in Chicago, Flobots were performing at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC.

"We ended up performing just after McCain gave his concession speech, and then we stopped when Obama gave his acceptance speech," remembers Jonny 5, the rap band’s lead vocalist, on the road to New Haven, Conn. He calls the moment "full of euphoric disbelief." Outside the club "there were people everywhere in the streets, giving each other hugs, and impromptu parades."

It wasn’t the first time Flobots’ career path had intertwined with that of the president-elect. In September, when the Democratic Party held its convention in the group’s hometown of Denver, they participated in several ancillary events, including a concert with Rage Against the Machine. "The entire event was planned to support the Iraq Veterans Against the War, who had a march immediately after the event," says Jonny 5. "So we used the stage to rally people."

Flobots’ rise from regional upstarts to modern-rock radio stalwarts mirrors Rage’s emergence more than 15 years ago. Just as Zack de la Rocha and company did with their fuzzy emo-punk, Jonny 5 — along with rapper Brer Rabbit — adds rhymes to an exotic mix of jazz horns, funky breaks, and hard-rock guitar. And the six-member crew are equally consumed with progressive politics. Each song on Fight with Tools (Universal Republic/Flobots Music, 2007), the outfit’s second album, overflows with righteous anger and activist fervor.

Flobots, “Handlebars”

"We want money for health care and public welfare! Free Mumia and Leonard Peltier!" Jonny 5 and Brer Rabbit offer on "Same Thing." "We say, ‘Yes,’ to grassroots organization, ‘No,’ to neoliberal organization! Bring the troops back to the USA and shut down Guantanamo Bay!"

"Handlebars," of course, was Flobots’ breakout moment. Much of Fight with Tools, which Flobots released independently last year, before Universal Republic signed them and reissued the album this spring, feels overwhelmed by earnest slogans. But on "Handlebars," Jonny 5 weaves a stream-of-consciousness allegory about American exceptionalism while the rest of the band build, like an orchestra, to a cacophonous conclusion.

Jonny 5 says his influences range from hip-hop collectives such as Project Blowed to organic music ensembles like Ozomatli. The unusual chart success of "Handlebars," which soared into the Billboard Top 40 last summer, helped Flobots sell more records than any of their inspirations.

"Personally, I had this obsession or insecurity about whether we were really hip-hop, and whether we were representing the hip-hop community correctly. I don’t know … I was hung up on it," Jonny 5 explains. "[Influential indie rapper] 2Mex was with us for four or five dates on the West Coast, and the minute we would mention any criticism we’d get, he’d say, ‘Fuck that, man. Keep expanding. That’s what hip-hop is.’<0x2009>"

FLOBOTS

Sun/23, 8 p.m., $27.50–<\d>$30

Warfield

982 Market, SF

www.goldenvoice.com

Behind “the Twinkie Defense”

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This month marks the 30th anniversary of the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, who wanted to decriminalize marijuana, and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay individual to be elected to public office in America. November also marks the release of a film about the case titled Milk. Although a former policeman, homophobic Dan White, had confessed to the murders, he pleaded not guilty. I covered his trial for the Bay Guardian.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I said “Thank you” to the sheriff’s deputy who frisked me before I could enter the courtroom. However, this was a superfluous ritual, since any journalist who wanted to shoot White was prevented from doing so by wall-to-wall bulletproof glass.

Defense attorney Douglas Schmidt did not want any pro-gay sentiment polluting the verdict, but he wasn’t allowed to ask potential jurors if they were gay, so instead he would ask if they had ever supported controversial causes–“like homosexual rights, for instance.” One juror came from a family of cops — ordinarily, Schmidt would have craved for him to be on this jury — but the man mentioned, “I live with a roommate and lover.”

Schmidt phrased his next question: “Where does he or she work?”

The answer began, “He”–and the ball game was already over–“works at Holiday Inn.”

Through it all, White simply sat there as though he had been mainlining epoxy glue. He just stared directly ahead, his eyes focused on the crack between two adjacent boxes on the clerk’s desk, Olde English type identifiying them as “Deft” and “Pltff” for defendant and plaintiff. He did not testify. Rather, he told his story to several psychiatrists hired by the defense, and they repeated those details in court.

At a press conference, Berkeley psychiatrist Lee Coleman denounced the practice of psychiatric testimony, labeling it as “a disguised form of hearsay.”

* * *

J. I. Rodale, health food and publishing magnate, once claimed in an editorial in his magazine, Prevention, that Lee Harvey Oswald had been seen holding a Coca-Cola bottle only minutes after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He concluded that Oswald was not responsible for the killing because his brain was confused. He was a “sugar drunkard.” Rodale, who died of a heart attack during a taping of The Dick Cavett Show — in the midst of explaining how good nutrition guarantees a long life — called for a full-scale investigation of crimes caused by sugar consumption.

In a surprise move, Dan White’s defense team presented a similar bio-chemical explanation of his behavior, blaming it on compulsive gobbling down of sugar-filled junk-food snacks. This was a purely accidental attack. Dale Metcalf, a former member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters who had become a lawyer, told me how he happened to be playing chess with Steven Scheer, an associate of Dan White’s attorney.

Metcalf had just read Orthomolecular Nutrition by Abram Hoffer. He questioned Scherr about White’s diet and learned that, while under stress, White would consume candy bars and soft drinka. Metcalf recommended the book to Scherr, suggesting the author as an expert witness. In his book, Hoffer revealed a personal vendetta against doughnuts, and White had once eaten five doughnuts in a row.

During the trial, one psychiatrist stated that, on the night before the murders, while White was “getting depressed about the fact he would not be reappointed [as supervisor], he just sat there in front of the TV set, bingeing on Twinkies.” In my notebook, I immediately scribbled “the Twinkie defense,” and wrote about it in my next report.

This was the first time that phrase had been used, and it was picked up by the mainstream media.

In court, White just sat there in a state of complete control bordering on catatonia, as he listened to an assembly line of psychiatrists tell the jury how out of control he had been. One even testified that, “If not for the aggravating fact of junk food, the homicides might not have taken place.”

* * *

The Twinkie was invented in 1930 by James Dewar, who described it as “the best darn-tootin’ idea I ever had.” He got the idea of injecting little cakes with sugary cream-like filling and came up with the name while on a business trip, where he saw a billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes. “I shortened it to make it a little zippier for the kids,” he said.

In the wake of the Twinkie defense, a representative of the ITT-owned Continental Baking Company asserted that the notion that overdosing on the cream-filled goodies could lead to murderous behavior was “poppycock” and “crap” — apparently two of the artificial ingredients in Twinkies, along with sodium pyrophosphate and yellow dye — while another spokesperson for ITT couldn’t believe “that a rational jury paid serious attention to that issue.”

Nevertheless, some jurors did. One remarked after the trial that “It sounded like Dan White had hypoglycemia.”

Doug Schmidt’s closing argument became almost an apologetic parody of his own defense. He told the jury that White did not have to be “slobbering at the mouth” to be subject to diminished capacity. Nor, he said, was this simply a case of “Eat a Twinkie and go crazy.”

When Superior Court Judge Walter Calcagno presented the jury with his instructions, he assured them access to the evidence, except that they would not be allowed to have possession of White’s .38 special and his ammunition at the same time. After all, these deliberations can get pretty heated. The judge was acting like a concerned schoolteacher offering Twinkies to students but witholding the cream-fillng to avoid any possible mess.

Each juror originally had to swear devotion to the criminal justice system. It was that very system that had allowed for a shrewd defense attorney’s transmutation of a double political execution into the mere White Sugar Murders. On the walls of the city, graffiti cautioned, “Eat a Twinkie — Kill a Cop!”

* * *

On the 50th anniversary of the Twinkie, inventor Dewar said, “Some people say Twinkies are the quintessential junk food, but I believe in the things. I fed them to my four kids, and they feed them to my 15 grandchildren. Twinkies never hurt them.” A year later, the world’s largest Twinkie was unveiled in Boston. It was 10 feet long, 3 feet 6 inches high, 3 feet 8 inches wide, and weighed more than a ton.

In January 1984, Dan White was released from prison. He had served a little more than five years. The estimated shelf life of a Twinkie was seven years. That’s two years longer than White spent behind bars. When he was released, that Twinkie in his cupboard was still edible. But perhaps, instead of eating it, he would have it bronzed.

In October 1985, he committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. He taped a note to the windshield of his car, reading, “I’m sorry for all the pain and trouble I’ve caused.”

I accepted his apology. I had gotten caught in the post-verdict riot and was beaten by a couple of cops. My gait was affected, and ultimately, as a result I now walk with a cane. At the airport, I have to put the cane on the conveyor belt along with my overnight bag and my shoes, but then I’m handed another cane to go through the metal detector. You just never know what could be hidden inside a cane.

Paul Krassner is the author of Who’s to Say What’s Obscene: Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today, to be published by City Lights Books in July 2009.


Click here to read Krassner’s original coverage of the Dan White Trial from the Guardian in 1979.

>>Back to the Milk Issue

Political Theater

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Pair an effusive and extroverted, larger-than-life politico like Harvey Milk — complete with community-forging charisma, panoramic outlook, and labyrinthine City Hall machinations — with a reserved, perpetually-outside-looking-in independent, à la director Gus Van Sant? That feature-film odd-coupling might have understandably strained some brains in Hollywood. Making the seldom-seen moments of otherwise-secret or neglected lives visible has seemingly been Van Sant’s calling, and his most memorable films — 1985’s Mala Noche, 1989’s Drugstore Cowboy, 1991’s My Own Private Idaho, 2003’s Elephant, and even the Oscar-gathering 1997 Good Will Hunting — have relied on his coolly unblinking, surprisingly cerebral yet gently empathetic eye, whether focused on Mexican immigrants, ’70s-era oblivion-seekers, Northwestern hustlers, a hidden savant, or disaffected teenagers.

Still, those leitmotifs — entwined with Van Sant’s terrible, tangible sense of romance with his outsiders, artists, and lost souls, as well as the way his camera seems to fall head over heels for his characters — made Van Sant a natural to make Milk, after Oliver Stone’s aborted feature-film attempt to tell the slain San Francisco supervisor’s story. "There is always that question: why I haven’t done a film like this earlier," Van Sant confessed, clearing his throat for the umpteenth time while agreeing that he hasn’t ever quite done a film like Milk. "Yeah, I hadn’t done a big movie, so there were people around who were like, ‘Can you handle it? Can it be done?’ They think that way. Since there was no business model, they were like, ‘No, he can’t, because he makes these scruffy, little movies. Too big a gamble, you know.’

"That’s a part of Hollywood, but it’s kind of like safe bets: it can make bad stuff happen as easily as good stuff, and it has its own closed policies like the old conservative City Hall-type policies. ‘New supervisors who haven’t handled the job before are incapable and they’re screwing things up.’"

Thankfully the gamble paid off and the tale of California’s first openly gay politician has been told with elegance, poetry, and not a little heart-stirring, inspirational grace, by the man whom biographer James Robert Parish describes as "the standard bearer of America’s ‘queer cinema’" — one who fuses extreme close-ups, handheld shots, and found footage in a collaborative, textural approach that lends a Kodachrome pop-culty feel to his films. The process makes for "beautiful pictures every time," as a windblown Sean Penn put it at a Ritz Carlton press conference after Milk‘s Oct. 28 world premiere at the Castro Theatre.

Seated at the middle of a long table between Penn and Josh Brolin, who portrays Milk’s killer Dan White, as they traded friendly jabs, Van Sant remained mostly silent — physically at the center, but an observer apart at the same time. Later in a hotel suite, face to face with a single interviewer, the director seemed equally out of place, folded uncomfortably into a plush chair, arms tightly crossed over a tan jeans jacket sporting a "No on 8" sticker, with a small, nylon, bright-blue dollar-store-style backpack by his side. He more closely resembles a 56-year-old teacher or elder-care worker than a Hollywood insider.

The latter role is evidently still alien to him. His first brush with Milk came in 1978 while he was driving across the country and heard on the radio that the supervisor was shot. Though he later saw the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, it never occurred to him to make a film about the politician. "It seemed like a very big story," Van Sant said. Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy "were stories that were devised to be made with really low budgets, like $20,000. So it was never like, ‘Oh, we can make a story about City Hall with $20,000.’ I guess I was always coming at filmmaking from not really being in the business, but knowing that I could get a hold of or save up my own money to the point where I’d have $20,000 and I could actually make a feature."

In the process of making Milk, the filmmaker admitted that he had to leave out many details that "I really like and things that sort of explain the situation. We suggest things. We explain this new law that enabled people to elect their supervisors from their districts, but we didn’t explain that the people up to that point that had to run city-wide resembled a different and maybe more antiquated type of politician. They were more, I guess, conservative. They were more business-oriented."

If San Francisco is palpable as a character in Milk, then City Hall is that elegantly shambolic figure’s brain, and Van Sant effectively used the Beaux Arts space, which harks back to classical forms, to his own dramatic ends. A down-the-rabbit-hole corridor leading to supervisors’ chambers becomes a pulsing nerve center visually rhyming with the characters’ stratagems. The sweeping staircase and balconies become the backdrop for Milk’s and White’s clashing trajectories, and the building itself becomes the spotless stage for Milk’s political birth and death.

"What I usually try and do, in general, is to connect the characters to a timeless quality, so it’s not necessarily situated in the specific time they’re in," said Van Sant. "So if they’re in City Hall and there’s a beaux-arts classical relief on the ceiling, if you frame it correctly, they can kind of look like Roman senators. You can get this timeless quality of people trading votes and betraying each other for as long as there’s been a forum and a senate.

"There were certain things in the script and in Harvey’s life — the famous line is ‘How do you like my new theater,’ which is what he says to Cleve [Jones, played by Emile Hirsch]: ‘Always take the stairs, never dress up, never blend in, make a show of it, use the whole space.’ I thought of that as a centerpiece of the whole film. That scene is one of my favorites because it was kind of like Harvey, who was a stage manager and was in theater. This was his new forum, his new theater, his new proscenium, with which to create new stuff — in this case, gay rights and other things that he thought were important, like education and help for minorities and seniors."

The question that arises so often among those who care about gay rights is: Why wasn’t Milk released before the Nov. 4 election, when it might have energized voters to shut down Proposition 8, a battle so similar to Milk’s charge against Proposition 6? As Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black said, "I didn’t know this [movie] would be about Prop. 8, but I don’t think this fight is over."

"I don’t really decide when movies should come out," said Van Sant. "The distributors came up with that." He spelled out some of the thoughts behind the Nov. 26 theatrical release: worries included "whether or not the elements of the story were so like the political moment that the film wouldn’t have a life after the election," and "whether people are too busy with the election to go see the movie. Are people overtaxed with politics to go see a political movie?" As a compromise, the late-October Castro Theatre premiere was arranged to get Milk and its overall message into the media eye, while still opening it into November through January, the Academy campaign season.

"Yeah, I didn’t make the call," repeats Van Sant, somewhat regretfully and shedding perhaps a smidge of that cherished detachment. "Harvey would have opened it in October."

Milk opens Wed/26 at the Castro Theatre, with additional Bay Area openings Fri/28 and Dec. 5.


>>Back to the Milk Issue

Past, present, future

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> johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW As a programming move, the Roxie Theater’s decision to screen Rob Epstein’s classic 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk is both a no-brainer and a bit of casual brilliance. It’s a no-brainer because of Milk mania. It’s a little stroke of genius because this great documentary’s return, one week before the theatrical premiere of Gus Van Sant’s feature at the Castro, provides plentiful compare-and-contrast opportunities for all those wise enough to know that they need to see both. This isn’t the first time that the Roxie — which presented Tsai Ming-liang’s homage to movie theaters Goodbye, Dragon Inn during the Castro’s days of turmoil in 2004 — has chimed in like a smart kid brother.

Epstein’s movie is a classic partly because of its historical contents, but there’s a definite mastery to the way in which he assembles and presents that material — if today’s makers of stylized docs haven’t learned from his command, that command has at least influenced Van Sant. The Times of Harvey Milk doesn’t dig into day-to-day San Francisco politics with the same relish or perhaps even specificity of the Van Sant movie (which recalls Barbet Schroeder’s 1990 Reversal of Fortune in its affection for scenes of creative, energetic groupthink). But journeying through candlelight vigil and through riot, it remains the most dramatically powerful response to Harvey Milk. His life and death were the stuff of great drama as well as of history.

The time for The Times of Harvey Milk is now, once again: more than a number connects and separates Proposition 6 of Milk’s era with Proposition 8 today. Thanks to Epstein’s compassionate documentary eye, his talking heads are fully realized human characters, with a range of personalities: the fervor of Tom Ammiano, the gruff candor of union machinist Jim Elliot (who thought the police raids on gay bars were fine until he met Milk), the contemplative sadness and strength of Sally M. Gearhart. Other touches, such as Harvey Fierstein’s uncharacteristically stoic voice-over, are surprising. And Epstein doesn’t glorify or beatify Milk when presenting the relationship between Milk and Dan White — his look at their interactions shows the sharp, competitive edges of Milk’s humanism.

The 2004 anniversary edition of the Times of Harvey Milk DVD is a treasure trove of material providing greater insight into Dan White. But it’s important to revisit this movie outside of the isolated home box office. There are generations of people who, if they’ve seen it, have only seen The Times of Harvey Milk on video at home. Like the man at the core of its subject, Epstein’s documentary thrives in a public, theatrical setting. The events it collects and captures are still relevant to all the random people who will find themselves united by a decision to watch this movie in a cinema — people who will step outside of the Roxie into a city and a world not that different from the one where Harvey Milk died and lived, one that is demanding collective action, and his spirit, once again.

THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK

Opens Fri/21, $5–$10

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 431-3611

www.roxie.com


>>Back to the Milk Issue

Politics behind the picture

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› news@sfbg.com

The new Harvey Milk movie, which opens later this month, begins as a love story, a sweet love story about two guys who meet in a subway station and wind up fleeing New York for San Francisco. But after that, the movie gets political — in fact, by Hollywood standards, it’s remarkably political.

The movie raises a lot of issues that are alive and part of San Francisco politics today. The history isn’t perfect (see sidebar), but it is compelling. And while we mourn Milk and watch Milk, we shouldn’t forget what the queer hero stood for.

Milk started out as something of a pot-smoking hippie. “The ’70s were a hotbed of everything,” Sup. Tom Ammiano remembered. “Feminism, civil rights, antiwar.” Milk’s early campaigns grew out of that foment. “Sure, he wanted to be elected,” Ammiano told us. “But the main ingredient was courage. He was fighting with the cops when they raided the bars … what he did was dangerous.”

Milk never would have been elected supervisor without district elections — and the story of district elections, and community power, ran parallel to Milk’s own story, for better and for worse.

Milk tried twice to win a seat on the at-large Board of Supervisors and never made the final cut. But in the mid-1970s, a coalition of community leaders, frustrated that big money controlled city policy, began organizing to change the way supervisors were elected. The shift from an at-large system to a district one in 1976 was a transformational moment for the city.

“I think that San Francisco doesn’t always appreciate the sea change that district elections brought,” Cleve Jones, a queer activist and friend of Milk who helped Dustin Black write the script for Milk, told us. “It wasn’t just important to the various communities that had been locked out of power at City Hall — it was the glue that began to grow the coalitions.”

Milk was elected as part of what became the most diverse board in the city’s history, with Asian, black, and gay representatives who came out of community organizations. The board, of course, also included Dan White, a conservative Irish Catholic and former cop. And it was the assassination of Milk and Mayor George Moscone by Sup. White — and the civic heartbreak, chaos, and confusion that followed — that allowed downtown forces to repeal district elections in 1980. That gave big money and big business control of the board for another 20 years, a reign that ended only when district elections returned in 2000.

Milk was a gay leader, but he was also a tenant activist, public power supporter, advocate for police reform, supporter of commuter taxes on downtown workers, and coalition-builder who helped bring together the labor movement and the queer community. It started, ironically, with the Teamsters.

“Those of us who came out of the antiwar movement remembered that the Teamsters supported Richard Nixon until the very last moment,” Jones said. “And they were seen as one of the most homophobic of all the unions.”

But in the 1970s, the Teamsters were at war with the Coors Brewing Company, and trying to get San Francisco bars to stop serving Coors beer. Allan Baird, a Teamsters leader who lived in the Castro District, saw an opportunity and contacted Milk, who agreed to help — if the Teamsters would start hiring gay truck drivers.

“It wasn’t just San Francisco and California,” Jones recalled. “We got Coors beer out of every gay bar in North America.” And gays started driving beer trucks.

Today, the queer-labor alliance is one of the most powerful, effective, and lasting political forces in San Francisco.

Milk was never popular among the wealthier and more established sectors of the gay community; he believed in a populist brand of politics that wasn’t afraid to take the fight to the streets — and beyond San Francisco. A central theme of the film is the fight against Proposition 6, a 1978 measure by conservative state Sen. John Briggs that would have barred homosexuals from teaching the public schools.

Milk, defying the mainstream political strategists, insisted on debating Briggs in some of the most right-wing parts of the state. He refused to downplay the gay-rights issues. And when Prop. 6 went down, it was the end of that particular homophobic crusade.

Milk was always an outsider, and he ran for office as a foe of the Democratic Party machine. “His campaign for state Assembly was all about Harvey vs. the machine,” former Sup. Harry Britt told us. “His main supporter was [Sup.] Quentin Kopp. He didn’t run as the liberal in the race; he ran against the machine.” And for much of the next 20 years, progressives in San Francisco found themselves fighting what became the Brown-Burton machine, controlled by Willie Brown and John Burton.

It’s too bad the movie wasn’t released early enough to have had an impact on Prop. 8, the anti same-sex marriage measure that just passed in California. Some critics of the No on 8 campaign say the message was far too soft, and that a little Harvey-Milk-style campaigning might have helped.

But for us, one of the most striking things about the movie is the fact that Milk and his lover, Scott Smith, were able to leave New York with very little money, arrive in San Francisco, rent an apartment on their unemployment checks, and open a camera store. That wouldn’t be possible today; the Harvey Milks of 2008 can’t live in the Castro — and many can’t live anywhere in San Francisco. The city is too expensive.

In fact, for all the victories Milk won, for all the successes of the movement he helped to build, much of his agenda is still unfulfilled, even in his hometown.

The first time Harvey Milk gives a public speech in the film, he’s standing on a soapbox … literally. He brings out a box with “soap” written on the side; a funny gag, but a serious and telling moment for him and San Francisco.

The issues that Milk spoke so passionately about in that speech included police reform, ending the war on drugs, protecting tenants and controlling rents, and improving parks and protecting people’s rights to use them liberally — all issues with as much resonance today as they had back then.

The movie leaves us with a painful question. For all the celebration of Milk’s legacy by San Franciscans of various political stripes, why have we made so little progress on some of his signature issues? We celebrate the martyr — but often forget what the man really advocated.

Support for gay rights is de rigueur for anyone who aspires to public office in San Francisco. But a quarter of city residents still voted to take away same-sex marriage rights in this election. Many older gay men today are barely able afford their AIDS medication and rent. And transgender people and other nontraditional types are still ostracized, unable to get good jobs, and sometimes treated contemptuously when they seek help from their government.

Sure, marijuana is supposedly legal for medical uses in California and pot clubs proliferate around San Francisco. But even these sick patients are still targeted by the federal government and its long arms in San Francisco, including former US Attorney Kevin Ryan, whom Mayor Gavin Newsom named his top crime advisor and who is now seeking to crackdown on the pot clubs. Why, 30 years after Milk was shot, does one have to claim an ailment or illness to smoke a joint in this town?

Two-thirds of city residents are renters, a group Milk championed with gusto, but we barely beat a state initiative in June that would have abolished rent control. Housing is getting steadily more expensive. And in this election, Newsom and his downtown allies opposed Proposition B, an affordable housing measure, and Proposition M, a common sense measure to prohibit landlords from harassing their tenants. Such harassment is a common tactic to force tenants from rent-controlled units, even though the City Attorney’s Office is currently suing the city’s biggest landlord, Skyline Realty, for its well-documented history of harassment. Newsom may be the champion of same-sex marriage, but when it comes to issues like tenants’ rights, we suspect that Milk would be appalled at Newsom’s gall.

Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union noted that in the wake of Milk’s death and before the repeal of district elections, San Francisco established rent control and limits on condo conversions. The tenant movement has grown steadily stronger and more sophisticated, he said, as it had to in order to counter increasing economic and political pressures and creative gambits by landlords.

“The city has gentrified phenomenally since that time, and that’s put tremendous pressure on tenants and on condo conversions,” Gullicksen told us. “It continues to be a real struggle.”

Police reform was also a huge issue for Milk and his gay contemporaries, who suffered more than most groups from the behavior of thuggish cops protected by weak oversight rules and a powerful union. And today, the Police Officers Association is stronger and meaner than ever, but the oversight has improved little, as both the Guardian and San Francisco Chronicle have explored with investigations in recent years.

And in our public parks, San Francisco officials in recent years have banned smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, playing amplified music, and even gathering in large numbers without expensive, restrictive permits. Even in the Castro, where Milk and his allies took it as a basic right to gather in the streets, Newsom and the NIMBYs unilaterally cancelled Halloween celebrations and used police to chase away citizens with water trucks.

Is this really the city Harvey Milk was trying to create? In the film, he talks about transforming San Francisco into a vibrant, tolerant beacon that would set an example for the rest of the country, telling his compatriots, “We have got to give them hope.”

Well, with hope now making a comeback, perhaps San Francisco can finally follow Milk’s lead on the issues he cared about most.

>>Back to the Milk Issue

Meatballs

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Earl Butter made the sauce and I put meatballs in it. You could smell this on the stairs. Between the first and second floors it was something, and between the second and third it was something else. The meatballs had beef and pork and cheese, garlic, parsley, an egg, some old bread crumbs … basically, whatever I could find in Earl Butter’s kitchen. I browned them in bacon fat; then, while they were bobbing in the saucy gurgle, I washed the soccer off of me in Earl Butter’s shower.

Five zip we’d lost. I tossed a salad, boiled spaghetti, Wayway brought the bread, and it was Sunday afternoon all over again. My hair air dries. I do not use hair dryers.

I use a towel.

The occasion: a visit from our own private Idahoan, Johnny "Jack" Blogger, né Johnny "Jack" Journalism, né Johnny "Jack" Poetry, the master of doing what he does, and being what he does, and words and I guess horses.

There were eight people total gathered around a couple of makeshift tables, spinning mismatched forks and raising glasses and bottles and eyebrows to bad jokes, good food, and questionable politics. We laughed until it hurt, ate until it hurt, and then one of us had to go give a massage, another was late for load-in and sound check, a couple needed a nap, and dirty dishes beckoned.

Somehow Johnny "Jack," our guest of honor, wound up doing most of them. I helped. When I go to Idaho, Johnny "Jack" and his wife, Mrs. "Jack," always have a big pot of something or other waiting for me. Mac and cheese. Red beans and rice. It’s a long drive.

When he showed up here, a couple nights before spaghetti, I had jambalaya, which is my new favorite thing to make. And eat. I am eating the leftovers as we speak, and I gotta say: yum. Every time I make jambalaya I have to call Crawdad de la Cooter five times to ask about this or that or rice, and I suppose that’s partly what I love about jambalaya. That tech support comes with it.

You can toast the rice first, or not, or sauté it a little with the "holy trinity" of onions, celery, peppers, and garlic, and, oh, you can imagine how a chicken farmer loves four-thing trinities!

But this time Crawdad called me. "What are you cooking?" she asked.

"Jambalaya," I said. "Here. Talk to John." And I handed him the phone. My two favorite laughs, his and hers, but I could only hear one of them and wished I had a speaker phone.

At the show that night three of our spaghetti friends were playing in two different bands. Everyone was there and I talked to a lot of people I hadn’t seen in some time and lost my voice. That’s just one reason why this column isn’t exactly saying anything.

On the way back to the woods we stopped at a late-night Chinese joint for something to eat. Up high near the ceiling in a corner was a medium-size fish tank with medium-size fishes swimming back and forth, winding around like letters, trying real hard to spell P-O-R-K and B-E-E-F and even C-H-I-C-K-E-N, and really only looking like fish in a fish tank. And tasty ones at that. Which reminded me of this article even before I started to write it.

Johnny "Jack" Blogger has been blogging and talking a lot about nostalgia. This ain’t that. My own happy happy sizzly sadness is set some time in the future. I don’t want to be fried, or cooked in a clay pot either, but there is something delicious in my medium-size heart, flop and roll and apropos of none of the above. I twist, I turn, I sink and spin, and can’t even begin to spell it.

My new favorite restaurant is Lee Hou, which claims to be "the very first Chinese restaurant on Clement." So … OK, so they’ve had a long time to perfect their salt and pepper chicken wings. We also got lamb sticks, because that seemed like good road food, but the wings were 10 times better and soared us, and we got crumbs and bones all over Johnny "Jack"<0x2009>‘s car, not mine. Damn it! Some things we didn’t eat: snails, duck tongue, and goose intestines. Oh, and fish. *

LEE HOU

Sun.–Thurs., 8 a.m.–1 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 8 a.m.–2 a.m.

332 Clement, SF

(415) 668-8070

Beer and wine

MC/V

I remember Harvey

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Toward the end of the supervisorial campaign in 1973, I got an intercom call from Nancy Destefanis, our advertising representative handling political ads. Hey, she said, I got a guy here by the name of Harvey Milk who is running for supervisor and I think you ought to talk to him.

Milk? I replied. How can anybody run for supervisor with the name of Milk?

Nancy laughed and said that wasn’t his big problem, it was that he was running as an openly gay candidate, but he had strong progressive positions and potential. Nancy, a former organizer for Cesar Chavez’ farm workers, was tough and savvy, and I always took her advice seriously. "Send him in," I said.

And so Harvey Milk came into my office, at the start of his political career, looking like a well-meaning amateur. He had a ponytail and mustache, wore Levi’s and a T-shirt, and talked breathlessly about his issues without a word about how he intended to win. His arguments were impressive, but he clearly was not ready for prime time. We gave him our "romantic" endorsement. He got 17,000 votes.

I also advised him, as diplomatically as I could, that if he wanted to be a serious candidate, he needed to clean up his act.

Two years later, Milk strode into the Guardian in a suit and tie as a serious candidate ready to win and lead. As our strong endorsement put it, "Now he’s playing politics for real: he’s shaved his mustache, is running hard in the voting areas of the Sunset, and has picked up a flock of seemingly disparate endorsements from SF Tomorrow, the Building and Trades Council, Teamsters (for his work on the Coors beer boycott) and the National Women’s Caucus." On policy, we said he "would put his business acumen to work dissecting the budget" and "would fight for higher parking taxes, no new downtown garages, a graduated real estate transfer tax, an end to tax exemptions for banks and insurance companies, dropping the vice squad from the police budget, and improved mental health care facilities." He couldn’t get enough votes citywide to win, but he came closer.

In 1976, Milk decided to run for a state Assembly seat against Art Agnos. We decided to go with Agnos, largely because he was familiar with Sacramento as an aide to former assemblyman Leo McCarthy and also because our political reporter covering the race, Jerry Roberts, said that Agnos was much better on Sacramento issues during the campaign. We decided that Agnos was right for Sacramento and that we needed Milk in San Francisco. I have often wondered if we had endorsed Milk, and he had won, if he would still be alive.

The next year, when the city shifted to district supervisorial elections, Milk won and became the first openly gay elected official in the country. He would always say, "I am not a gay supervisor, I am a supervisor who happens to be gay."

On the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 24, 1978, Milk dropped by to see me at the Guardian. He was a bit dejected. Things were getting tougher for him on the board. He was getting hassled by his friends and allies who were telling him, as he put it, "if you don’t vote for me on this one, I’m going to stop supporting you." He said he was going to press on, but from then on he was going to work more closely with the Guardian on legislation and on giving us information.

Then he smiled the famous Harvey Milk smile and said as he left my room, "I want to be your Deep Throat at City Hall."

Those were the last words I ever heard from Harvey Milk. He was assassinated three days later.

Holiday Guide 2008

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Think global, shop local

Funny how quickly this holiday season has snuck up on us, isn’t it? That election sure was distracting. Here’s hoping our ultimate holiday gift guide can help you navigate these next few months while you’re busy celebrating President Obama and protesting Prop. 8. Speaking of politics, the Guardian has joined a national effort to support local businesses this year as a way to boost our economy. Read Tim Redmond’s explanation. May this be a holiday season of change!

Molly Freedenberg

Holiday Guide editor

All illustrations by Justin Renteria

>>Think global, shop local
Saving SF’s economy one gift at a time
By Tim Redmond

>>Guilt-free gifts
A guide to supporting good causes
By Katie Baker

>>Head Bangin’
Too much metal for one gift
Photo by Arlene Romana, styling by Ben Hopfer

>>Graphic gifts
Epic comics for your twisted loved ones
By Justin Hall

>>The game room
Fantastic new releases for computers and consoles
By Daniel N. Alvarez

>>Burner bourgeois
Leather and feathers trump fun fur and faux fabrics
Photo by Arlene Romana, styling by Ben Hopfer

>>Seasonal sounds
Sifting through the year’s albums and shows for melodic gifting
By Brandon Bussolini

>>Bike-ster
Retro, velo-inspired ideas for hipster gifts
Photo by Arlene Romana, styling by Ben Hopfer

>>Giving on a shoestring
Cheap and DIY ideas for the financially-challenged
By Molly Freedenberg

>>Not your pilgrim’s pie
Modern pumpkin desserts for the historically-minded
By Meghan McCloskey

>>So fresh, so clean
Hip-hop duds for your homies
Photo by Arlene Romana, styling by Ben Hopfer

>>A holiday from the holidays
Spa ideas for the weary shopper or lucky gift-getter
By Chloe Schildhause

The Milk Issue

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It took Hollywood 30 years to make a feature film about the life of Harvey Milk, and when Gus Van Sant finally got the gig, and Sean Penn agreed to play the title role, it came out too late to have an impact on the California election. Would Milk, the movie, have helped defeat Prop. 8? Nobody knows. But the movie is inspirational, and with any luck will carry the message of Milk’s life to the masses. Milk always said that the more straight Americans got to know gay and lesbian people, the more they would be open to equal rights.

The Guardian covered Milk’s career as it was happening, devoted a special issue to him when he was assassinated, covered the trial of Dan White and the infamous Twinkie Defense and the riots afterward. And with the movie hitting theaters this month, we’re taking a look not just as the movie but the political legacy of Harvey Milk.

>>Political theater
Gus Van Sant gives Harvey Milk his close-up
By Kimberly Chun

>>Politics behind the picture
Would Harvey Milk be happy with San Francisco today?
By Steven T. Jones and Tim Redmond

>>I remember Harvey
Guardian memories of the long-haired young hopeful
By Bruce B. Brugmann

>>The apathy and the ecstacy
St. Harvey inflames, but does he inspire?
By Marke B.

>>Hot flash gallery
Now and then in the photography of Daniel Nicoletta
By Johnny Ray Huston

>>Behind the “Twinkie Defense”
The reporter who coined the infamous phrase looks back at the White trial
By Paul Krassner


>>Past, present, future
The time is now for The Times of Harvey Milk
By Johnny Ray Huston

BONUS
>>Where’s Harry?
Harvey Milk’s political torchbearer gets written out of film history
By Tim Redmond

From the archives (PDF)
How the District Attorney Joe Freitas’s office blew the Dan White murder case, May 23, 1979
By Robert Levering and David Johnston

Join the Impact rally

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