Radio

Guardian lawsuit: Opening statements

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The Guardian v. SF Weekly trial swung into high gear today with both sides presenting opening statements and the first Guardian witnesses taking the stand. The early presentations gave a clear sense of where the trial will go.

Ralph Alldredge, representing the Guardian, laid out the essence of the case:

Over the past 11 years, the SF Weekly, later joined by the East Bay Express, have systematically sold ads below cost. The cost-cutting was so dramatic, he said, that during that period the two papers lost a total of $25 million, and those losses have been escalating.

That, he explained, was not because the people who run the Weekly and ran the Express are bad managers. It’s because they were attempting to damage the locally owned competitor. “If you’re not trying to make a profit,” he asked, “what are you trying to do?”

In fact, while the Weekly lawyers have argued consistently (and would argue later in the day) that the market is packed with different competitors, and that the Weekly didn’t see the Guardian as its only or even primary competition, internal memos show that Weekly and New Times staffers were obsessed with beating the Guardian. The memos consistently refer to the “battle” and “the way” and use terms like “frontal assault.” And those memos weren’t discussing the entire universe of competition – they focused only on the Guardian.

In fact, New Times executives put together a quarterly “Guardian report” focused entirely on how well the Weekly was doing taking ads away from the local paper.

In just one instance that Alldredge mentioned, The Weekly inked a deal with Clear Channel in 2005 that was designed in part to take ads away from the Guardian. Under the terms of the deal, the Weekly would get the bulk of the company’s alternative weekly ads – and “the competing paper [the Guardian],” a memo from a Clear Channel official states, “gets 15% to 0.”

H. Sinclair Kerr, attorney for the Weekly, didn’t deny that his client had sold ads below cost; in fact, he admitted it, right up front. But he insisted that all of those sales were perfectly legal because they were done either to increase the paper’s market share or to meet competition.

Kerr posted a graphic showing that the Bay Area is home to more than 140 newspapers and scores of radio and TV stations, and he argued that all of those outlets were part of the Weekly’s competition. “The reason we were selling below cost,” he said, “is because that’s the only price we could get.”

However, memos from his clients that were presented by Alldredge don’t mention any other newspapers or other types of media. It appears clear from the evidence presented so far that the Weekly and New Times executives considered the Guardian their single most important competitor.

The presentations today suggest that the trial will come down to the question of intent and the damage that the Weekly and its chain owners have done to the Guardian.

Video Mutants: Kalup Linzy washes your eyes (and mind) out with soaps

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Welcome to the party, welcome to the show. What are sweetberry club cakes? Wouldn’t you like to know!

To find out, you’ll just have to listen to “SweetBerry Shuffle” by Kalup Linzy, where Labisha will break it down for you. It’s worth the search: Whether it manifests as phone-crazed soap opera societal satire, animation, painting, or music, Linzy’s creativity — which can be glimpsed and heard on his own site and MySpace pages and seen in person through his gallery, Taxter and Spengemann — is pointedly funny. I recently spoke to him for a profile in this week’s video issue.

Asshole

Guardian: I want to begin by talking about the role or presence of soap opera within your videos. Did you have affection for the soaps and for melodrama?
Kalup Linzy: I grew up watching soap operas. I was raised by grandmother, but it sort of goes back to my great grandmother – she used to listen to Guiding Light on the radio. When it switched over to TV, she grew deaf, and somehow she would sit and watch soap operas all day long. We couldn’t turn the channel. If we were playing and went over to one of our aunt’s houses down the street, the same soap opera would be on.
By the time I turned 10 or 11, I knew what was going on [on the shows] and I started watching them as entertainment. They sort of inspired me to want to act and write. They struck that chord in me.

The Pursuit of Gay (Happyness)

Escape from planet Indie Rock

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

With so many indie rock bands riding the wave of all things post-punk or psych–this and that at present, it’s rare that fans of subversive music are able to listen to subterranean songs as a means of escape. I mean, Band of Horses permeate Ford commercials during the NFL playoffs, and little brothers and sisters everywhere are air-guitaring to everyone from Mastodon to the Rapture.

So it makes perfect sense that Brooklyn, NY, band Yeasayer has managed to engage even the most cynical of indie veterans with its escapist realm filled with an uncompromisingly authentic helping of psychedelic — and extremely technically proficient — guitar noodling, hypnotic pop vocals, and worldly percussion that’s as reminiscent of Carlos Santana as it is of Animal Collective or the Cure. How can you not escape when listening to something that trots along so many unexpected musical paths?

It’s no surprise that this extension of the avant-indie wing is composed of two ex–barbershop quartet members and a rhythm section that employs a bounty of instrumentation including but not limited to accordions, bongo drums, sitars, and sequencers. Driven by guitarist Anand Wilder, the group is a four-piece, genre-eradicating machine, with each member trading off vocal and instrumental duties by track. Eleven months in the making, Yeasayer’s debut, All Hour Cymbals, was snatched up by Jason Foster of Monitor Records (Battles, Early Man) and eventually became the initial — and cornerstone — release of his newest imprint, We Are Free.

After a gazillion positive reviews, rumors of the band’s outstanding performances at Austin, Texas’s 2007 South by Southwest Festival, and yes, acclaim from MTV as part of the burgeoning Brooklyn scene, the band has become one of the few tripper acts that render a true sense of escapism as indie rock’s merge with mainstream culture becomes a reality. I strongly recommend listening to the goth-pop–meets–Middle Eastern music psych-epic "Germs," followed by a serious bong rip. Then turn to the haunting, shoegazing barbershop bhangra of "Waves" and attempt to question what mental plane and planet you inhabit.

But what makes the mysticism of Yeasayer more mind engulfing than that of the mountain of other Dave Sitek– and Paw Tracks–approved artists (e.g., um, Celebration, Panda Bear, Ariel Pink)? One should first look at the group’s penchant for gospel. While it may be hard to associate any of the long-haired and art school–ish members with that genre’s religious core, just about every track on All Hour Cymbals radiates some sort of spiritual a cappella à la TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe — if he were ever a member of a South American Baptist choir. Even more interesting, the band’s lyrics take the proverbial 180 degree turn from gospel’s posi-vibes. Take, for instance, Yeasayer’s single "2080": the members switch off melodically chanting, "I can’t sleep when I think about the times we’re living in / I can’t sleep when I think about the future I was born into," only to follow with "I’ll surely be dead / So don’t look ahead / Never look ahead." Now we have an apocalyptic, uplifting, shredding whirlwind of pop innovation. Whoa.

With a European tour under their belt and an extensive United States tour in progress with their fellow Brooklyn troupe of indie revolutionaries MGMT, Yeasayer are spreading the bounty of escapism worldwide. Experiencing this fearless entity, which is staring indie rock’s mainstream monster directly in the face, should be an entertaining, if not enlightening, glimpse into the future of progressive songwriting as we might know it. *

YEASAYER

With MGMT and the Morning Benders

Mon/28, 9 p.m., sold out

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Video Mutants: Prince of theme parkness

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>>Click here to view some Damon Packard vids

› cheryl@sfbg.com

Try explaining a Damon Packard film to someone who hasn’t seen one and you will fail. The best you can achieve is a description: "It’s a sequel to Logan’s Run, kind of, but with a lot of 1984, clips from Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator, and roller skaters jamming to ‘Never Knew Love like This Before.’<0x2009>"

Seriously, can you even imagine what that’s like? Step inside 2007’s SpaceDisco One and enter the world of a filmmaker who makes movies unlike anything you’ve seen before — except for the parts you have seen before. Every time he uses nonoriginal footage, it’s worth paying extraclose attention; though Packard would rather use only his own material, his choices of appropriated footage are never random. Why else would he include a clip of Dirk Benedict (Starbuck on the original Battlestar Galactica) padding dejectedly around the British Celebrity Big Brother house in a film that pays homage to — and mourns the lost aesthetic of — 1970s sci-fi movies?

"I’m not really into mashup-type stuff," the Los Angeles–based Packard explained to me. It was New Year’s Eve eve, and we were sitting in the basement at Artists’ Television Access — a dark, chilly space crammed with TV monitors and other electronic odds and ends. "In SpaceDisco, I didn’t plan on using any [nonoriginal] footage. It’s just a case of not having the money. It takes money to go out and shoot original footage. You need actors, props, costumes, and locations. That’s the short answer to it. [The nonoriginal footage] was just replacing things that I needed — I needed some shots of spaceships and things like that. For the most part the film is all original."

SpaceDisco One, in which Hollywood’s Universal City Walk stands in for the Ministry of Truth during the film’s 1984-inspired scenes, works real news footage into its narrative. At one point, a giant screen beaming the face of radio host Alex Jones attracts the attention of SpaceDisco‘s Winston Smith character — himself a result of Packard’s interest in recontextualizing familiar or favorite characters.

"I love the idea of taking characters from other films and utilizing them in some way — taking Arthur Frayn from Zardoz [and using him in] SpaceDisco," he said. In keeping with SpaceDisco‘s positioning as a Logan’s Run sequel, several of Packard’s leads are written as the daughters of characters from that film. "And of course Smith and O’Brien from 1984 — all sort of meeting up in the same universe. I like that idea, taking characters and settings from other films and coming up with a new adventure."

Anticipating my next question, he added, "I don’t know how that will ever translate into something in the [mainstream film] world professionally, because of copyright issues."

So far Packard hasn’t run into any cinema-related problems with the law, aside from being booted from a theme park while grabbing shots for 2002’s Reflections of Evil, an epically surreal study of LA paranoia. "[My films have all been] independent films made for no money and no distribution, or very minor distribution," he said. "Once it gets to a point where I have a budget and there’s real distribution, [using copyrighted material] would be a whole different situation."

He’s also never heard a peep from his celebrity targets, specifically Steven Spielberg (his childhood idol, who might frown on Reflections‘ depiction of Schindler’s List: The Ride) or George Lucas, who’s showered with ire in 2003’s The Untitled Star Wars Mockumentary. That film manipulates DVD featurettes from the newer Star Wars films, with wraparound footage (reaction shots, responses to conversations, the occasional porn snippet) adding a whole new level to the average Jedi’s beef with Lucas. It’s payback for Greedo shooting first and Jar Jar Binks, but to Packard, Lucas’s addiction to technology is symptomatic of a bigger issue — how Hollywood films have changed dramatically in the past 30 years.

"I don’t dislike Lucas," Packard noted, though a viewing of the hilarious Mockumentary might suggest otherwise. ("Angry black people became a strong inspiration for George," a faux Industrial Light and Magic animator notes while working on the schematics for a character described as Mace Windu’s streetwise brother, pointedly referencing the observation that some of Lucas’s Phantom Menace creatures seem ever so slightly racist.) "I would actually hope that he would have a good laugh at it if he ever saw it. [With Mockumentary] I was just expressing my disappointment in the new generation of Star Wars films and how Lucas has become part of that whole system of becoming obsessed with CGI and digital effects."

But Lucas is hardly alone, according to Packard. "It seems like all of the film industry is operating in this vacuum where they aren’t aware of what they’re doing. They’re out of touch with what audiences are interested in seeing — [although] maybe it’s just the reality that I’m experiencing. I don’t understand how most [mainstream] films get green-lighted; it’s just more of the same thing over and over, just variations on playing-it-safe themes, following the same formulas. Like Transformers. It was a film that I just — why? I was baffled by that film. It was kind of entertaining — I saw it in IMAX — but who would think that was a great idea? There’s nothing new or special about doing a Transformers movie."

That’s not to say Packard hates every new movie; you may have noticed he submitted a top 10 list to the Guardian‘s 2007 year in film issue, with favorites like No Country for Old Men and Paris, Je T’Aime. One of his friends in LA gave him a hard time for not including Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.

"He was really upset," Packard said of the Dead fan. "He thinks it’s Sidney Lumet’s best film. I disagreed. I thought it was OK, but it doesn’t compare to his early works at all. It would have been much better if it was made in the 1970s with a sleazier cast, sleazier characters, and not [set in] a modern strip mall. The characters didn’t feel credible — they just weren’t very interesting. Things aren’t that interesting these days."

Watch a Packard film — and if you haven’t, you must; Other Cinema is working on a release of SpaceDisco One for later in 2008, and at least one version of Reflections of Evil is available at Amazon.com — and it’s clear he’s inspired by the 1970s and more than a little nostalgic for them. At 40, he’s too young to have been part of what he views as Hollywood’s last golden age.

"The late ’70s and early ’80s were the beginning of the downfall of cinema — the beginning of the blockbuster film and special effects. Suddenly the quality levels, the character-driven films, were diminishing [in favor of] special-effects extravaganzas," he said. "If I went back in time, it would probably be even more difficult to get into the film business [than it is now]. Still, I think it was a better time in a lot of ways. My films are always making a statement about the way things have changed for the worse."

Though he’s a YouTube user and sees the finer points of shooting on video (though he prefers film), Packard’s view of his future as a filmmaker is surprisingly old-school. Specifically, he would like to make more narratives. His dream projects are an "analog fantasy film without the overuse of CGI" and a longer version of SpaceDisco One, which now clocks in at less than an hour.

"I’ve always wanted to make big films, not small independent art movies. But my creative sensibilities seem to be so off the wavelength of the average person. The way people react to my films — they can’t understand them. They need to have something palatable," he said. He blames Hollywood — at one time a creative haven where up-and-coming directors like Robert Altman could make offbeat films like 3 Women — for creating the apathetic-audience monster. "I don’t know if there’s any hope [for the future of movies]. That should be a theme of [your] article: is there any hope? God only knows." Insert your own A New Hope wraparound — the exploding Death Star, perhaps? — here.

www.myspace.com/choogo

Video Mutants: Guiding light

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>Click here to view some Kalup Linzy vids

A phone interview is a routine aspect of writing an article, but there’s a uniquely rich comedic irony to conducting a phone interview with Kalup Linzy. Since 2001, Linzy has been making soap operatic short videos in which a host of characters, most played by himself, converse by phone. In Conversations Wit De Children IV: Play Wit De Churen (2005), for example, one of Linzy’s personae, or churen, budding art star Katonya, is fired via phone by her boss — then dumped via phone by her boyfriend when he finds out she lost her job.

"I grew up watching soap operas," Linzy says when asked about the soapy underpinnings of pieces such as Da Young and Da Mess (2005), As Da Art World Might Turn (2006), and the installments of his All My Churen series. "I was raised by my grandmother, but it goes back to my great-grandmother — she used to listen to Guiding Light on the radio. When it switched over to TV she was going deaf, but somehow she would sit and watch soap operas all day long. We couldn’t turn the channel, and if we were playing and went to one of our aunt’s houses down the street, the same soap opera would be on. [The soaps] sort of inspired me to act and write. They struck that chord in me."

Whether set in the South or the Manhattan art world, Linzy’s videos dig deep, past the generic surfaces found in Springfield, Pine Valley, Genoa City, or any other fictional TV town. Cumulatively, his recurrent video presentations of phone conversations satirize social power plays — and unexpectedly create and illustrate familial and romantic bonds. Like the filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, though in a less languid manner, Linzy is capable of lacing his affection for the soaps’ dramatic pleasures with sharp referential observation: Da Young and Da Mess features a shot of Linzy’s woebegone character Taiwan that updates Édouard Manet’s Olympia, for example.

Linzy has stolen the show at a number of New York group exhibitions, and he’s represented by a gallery in Manhattan, Taxter and Spengemann. But his work and creative identity extend beyond traditional art spaces via YouTube, an official Web site, and two different MySpace accounts. Collectively, they present video excerpts, performance clips, and songs. One highlight on Linzy’s Web site is a clip of him (as Taiwan) at New York’s PS1 Contemporary Art Center performing the gospel-inflected dirge "Asshole," accompanied only by keyboard. "Asshole, asshole, asshole, why’d you do this to me?" Taiwan bellows in the chorus, his blunt question arriving with gut-busting comic impact after a melancholy and poetic intro. As the song goes on, Taiwan shifts the focus to his body, wondering, "Why did my asshole fuck it up for my soul?"

Returning to the subject of rich ironies — or in this case paradoxes — none other than Modern Painting magazine published perhaps the most incisive recent piece about new waves of video art activity. Author Michael Wang uses work by Linzy and this week’s Super Ego star Ryan Trecartin to assert that queerness is perhaps the preeminent form of postmodernism; his opening salvo suggests that the old dialectical relationship between experimental video and commercial television has effectively exploded in the Internet era. Considering this, it’s hard not to note similarities or connections between the outrageously popular — or perhaps antipopular — gay YouTube phenom Chris Crocker (see Trash, page 24) and figures such as Jonathan Caouette, Trecartin, and Linzy. Crocker’s housebound, familial acting out forms dozens of tiny sequels to Caouette’s performative diary feature Tarnation (2004). When Crocker asks "What’s your tea?" he might as well be wishing he were on a party line with a character from one of Linzy’s videos.

More evocatively, the helium-high and macho-low voices of the characters in Linzy’s videos are similar, though not of a piece, with the manic munchkin voices of the Day-Glo "streaming creatures" (to use the Jack Smith–inspired title of Wang’s article) who cavort through videos by Trecartin; and like Trecartin’s art, though again in a more casual manner, Linzy’s has strong connections to club culture. In fact, Linzy’s currently working on a project that, framed by original and dance versions of "Asshole," translates Taiwan’s misadventures, as well as a scathingly funny cameo by Labisha, another Linzy alter ego, into songs.

"Basically, [the album] tells the story of someone sad at home who goes out to the bar and ends up getting laid by trade and wakes up the next day with a hangover," Linzy explains with a laugh. He drops hints about a couch-potato parody of Otis Redding’s "(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay," adding that whenever he tells people he’s making a video anthology for the album, they mistakenly "ask if it’s going to be like R. Kelly."

Based on tracks such as "Melody Set Me Free," with its drag-ball life-as-an-awards-show lyric, and "SweetBerry Shuffle," with its baton passes between feisty female Labisha and depressive gay boy Taiwan, Linzy’s debut album might be an American cousin of the amazing, unjustly obscure Dislocated Genius (Get Physical, 2006) by Chelonis R. Jones. There and on singles such as the fierce "Black Sabrina" (sample lyric: "Black Sabrina never pushes or shoves / She’s a foot up your ass / She then questions why you walk so funny / And utters ‘Punk bitch’ under her rum-tinted breath"), Jones embraces and expresses a multitude of voices, transcending prejudicial diagnoses of schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder. (You could also draw a line from a cover version of Klymaxx’s "Cherries in the Snow" by veteran artist Vaginal Davis — like Jones, an American expat living in Germany — to "Asshole." Or, in return, from Linzy’s videos to "Gossips," a scandalously hilarious YouTube excerpt from Davis’s most recent show, Cheap Blacky.)

Betty Davis, Dorothy Moore, and Dionne Warwick are just three of the ladies of song who’ve provided Linzy with inspiration recently. Though some of his recent video projects — especially the offhandedly brilliant black-and-white linguistic mystery The Pursuit of Gay (Happiness) — have lampooned old Hollywood, lately he’s been looking at ’80s music videos when he isn’t visualizing his music. "Back then the medium was new to [bands and video makers]," he says. "They were excited and it came across, even though some of the videos are cheesy." Today Linzy represents a new wave of audio and video excitement — hold the cheese. (Johnny Ray Huston)

www.kaluplinzy.com

www.myspace.com/kaluppresents

www.myspace.com/kalup1

www.youtube.com/kklinzy

>>Back to Video Mutants: The Guardian video art issue

Video Mutants: Ryan Trecartin streams/flows into onlive timeslot, TOtal nowhere emotion expansion

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In this week’s Super Ego nightlife etc. column, as part of our Video Mutants issue, I handheld display my growing obsession with young artist Ryan Trecartin, who somehow squares club culture and diverts the neon identity parade into a tributary of parodied obnoxion (with Internet hyperquotes). By which I mean, “Damn! I think I just got dissed in a nextdoor dimension, but I like it that way.”

I-BE AREA (Double Jamie, Ramada Omar, and Sally Man Pause)

Ryan – who’s represented by the bigtime Elizabeth Dee Gallery in NYC – has a total Pro Tools grasp on irreality and its obverse reality, what’s beneath people performing, and his video work combines Mardi Gras parade giddiness (he spent time living in New Orleans), Web 2.0 blank paradise, and head-trip introspection with way incredible about me’s. Electronic ghosts, phased identities, realtime spots and trailers .. the online is performed in trashy afterlife/live/death here, and it wears a sparkling wig. Plus, Ryan does fabulous things with windows. JK/JK

I like to think there’s a deep current of nightlife reference running through feature-length works like A Family Finds Entertainment and I-BE AREA. Although who the hell knows? Ryan’s worked with at least one local beloved club presence, Patrik Sandberg — of ‘90s-flashback pirate radio show “Cobain in a Coma” and “drugged out goth shoegaze dream pop party” Spaced, at the Knockout — who plays space-waif gift-giver Craig Ricky in I-BE AREA and tells me that Ryan’s “holding a mirror up to a generation that lives a significant part of their lives online, in a way that makes fun of but also adores it. Not only that, I can’t stop quoting him.”

OK Agreed. And more than guilty above. So, yeah, I freaked and zoned and freaked again when Ryan agreed to answer some art critic avatar agenda questions over one whole e-mail about his digital video mental.

SF Bay Guardian: In I-BE AREA, the Wood Shop is like the most nightmarish gay dance club I’ve never been to. I dream about it a lot. How did you put together the Wood Shop scenes?

I-BE AREA (WoodShopBoys Ramada Omar and Jamies Band)

Ryan Trecartin: It was a three shoot workout, in a space called The Woodshop Drama Room one of three rooms that make up Jamie’s Area which is a conceptual part-Cyber-hybrid Platform that obeys and functions with in both laws of Physics and virtual-non-linear reality and potential in Web 2.0/ultra-wiki communication malfunction liberation flow, add-on, and debate presentation. The main structure is the character Jamie her self- a total control damage freak with independent log-ins, muse extension people, and live-links. The Wood Shop is a situation stage where pho-male-cyber-gays login to over posted anti-productive decisive message board dead-end faggoting activities. Jamie has a composer status in this scene during another timeslot using her saw and wood dictating with wireless momentum control and influence over her haters at work, while mirroring in Dark Jam Band form, on cell-phone with Ramada Omar in Class Room separated by a closed Window (3 time slots being viewed). The Wood Shop Fags search-out wanting a free channel edge and perform a permanent Window opening on Ramada Omar Freeing it to an independent Multi-tasking shape shifting reality pool. The actual shoot was really fun. It had a script but was the most abstract shoot of the whole movie-lots of improvisations and an everyone talked at the same time, making a don’t be quiet on the set situation. Like planed home video- script-destruction theme over goal. My favorite part is when Solomon (black hair pig-tale mall goth wig) has a brick ready for the Break Down, in cell phone placement and says nothing about someone calling him on his phone an “Said”, over and over like it’s a presidential victory speech with supporters and reason promoting a total nowhere emotion expansion with self eating content, saying… what?—don’t use hotmale log out to log In father fucker.

Reviving Reagan: A burst of Durst

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B3 campaign note: Durst is right: there are no real Republican candidates and there is no president for them to fall back on except Reagan. I think the Republicans made a terrible mistake when they left Cheney on the ticket, probably the worst vice president since Aaron Burr, and the kind of bull who carries his own china closet around with him. They should have kicked him off the ticket four years ago and put in the most electable candidate they could find to run as vice president and emerging presidential candidate. Those mistakes are fatal in politics. Thank God the Republicans are making them, one after another.

By the way, I miss Will on the old Will and Willie show on the Air America/Quake radio via Clear Channel. He did a “burst of Durst” on every show, which was always a clever and biting commentary on the day’s news.
Quite a performance. I can almost hear him doing his “burst” as I read his latest column. Willie was of course ex-Mayor Willie Brown. Will and Willie were an excellent show, getting better all the time, and giving San Francisco
a marvelous showcase on Air America radio. Now there are only shows centered from God knows where.
However, John Scott is holding down the 4 to 6 p.m. slot with a creditable left-leaning news program on 960 the Quake. B3

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I had this eerie feeling last week as news reports began to come in of a naval engagement in the Strait of Hormuz. It was starting to feel like 1964.

The way the initial stories had it, a group of Iranian speedboats approached the USS Port Royal and the USS Hopper in the narrow strait, which controls access to the Persian Gulf. Commanders on both ships went on high alert and ordered their gunners to track the speedboats. They were probably responding to a Navy war game simulation of a few years back, in which a swarm of small boats was able to attack and disable a United States warship.

It got worse: as the small craft approached, the ships received a radio message in English, warning that "I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes." The ships’ captains were within a few seconds of directing their crews to open fire.

Now it turns out, according to the Guardian of London, that a widely known radio hacker who calls himself Filipino Monkey — a guy who often pesters ships in the Gulf — may have been the one sending the radio message. There was, apparently, no real threat.

But the George W. Bush administration has protested to the Iranians, the Navy commander in the Gulf says he takes the threat of attack on US ships "deadly seriously," and Bush has personally warned that "provocative actions" could lead to military retaliation.

Let’s see now: On Aug. 2, 1964, the US destroyer Maddox was conducting a spy mission in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam, when the captain reported coming under attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The destroyer opened fire, and aircraft from a nearby carrier pursued the boats, allegedly sinking one. Two days later the Maddox and another destroyer fired on what they said were hostile targets in the gulf.

Turns out both reports were total lies, the hostile actions by North Vietnam fabricated, and the entire event almost certainly set up as a casus belli — and the result was a war that killed 50,000 US troops.

And we know Bush wants to attack Iran. Eerie.

The man who fell to Saul Williams

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niggytardust.jpg

By Benedict Sinclair

As far as Saul Williams albums go, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust (available for download here) is a success. As far as Trent Reznor(-produced) albums go, it’s also a success.

This all-around decent pop album includes an endearing U2 cover and on a number of songs linking up with the sounds of TV on the Radio. It has all the attitude of Nine Inch Nails – with Saul’s vocals often eerily resembling Reznor’s – and Public Enemy, whose Chuck D is sampled for a loop in “Tr(n)igger” and whose influence can be seen all over Williams’s rapping. The recording is laced with the vocalist’s soul and anger, which are cocooned within Reznor’s layered guitars, pianos, synths – and moments of softness and programmed, post-grime beats. For Williams it’s a Ziggy Stardust/The Love Below type of performance, borrowing Andre 3000’s dress-up delivery for the title track, a narcissistic collage playing with the “the one” archetype.

Reznor’s melodies can get a bit, erm, familiar, for an hour-long album. And Williams’s lyrics can only keep up with his performance half the time, falling in that inarticulate, lukewarm space between the rhetoric of liberation and revolution. Much of the lyrical ideas and content seem to hint at more than they can really express: the N word gets casual, ineffective treatment, in perhaps a good way.

How Oakland’s fearful politicos enabled waste: Part III

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In 1996, Your Black Muslim Bakery lieutenant Nedir Bey had a wealth of ammunition with which to lobby city leaders for a $1.1 million loan to fund his health care company, E.M. Health Services.

The previous year, the city of Oakland had agreed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to bring the Oakland Raiders back from Los Angeles, a deal that quickly soured and has cost the city and Alameda County taxpayers more than $20 million a year ever since.

The developers of a new downtown ice rink had defaulted on $11 million in bonds just three months after the facility opened.

The city had also given plenty of money to other businesses, most white-owned. As a result, the City Council was getting a relentless drubbing from bakery members and black business associates who lined up at meetings to speak on behalf of E.M. Health Services and its efforts to obtain the loan.

They argued that white business owners had an easier time obtaining credit, unsecured loans and support from the city while black-owned businesses endured undue scrutiny. Elected officials endured hints and outright accusations of racism if they dared ask questions about the company or collateral for the loan.

Some of those accusations occurred during the June 4, 1996, council meeting where the officials discussed giving E.M. Health an interim start up loan of $275,000 in city funds. The loan was needed because the company’s application for a $1.1 million share of federal Housing and Urban Development funds for job training programs had not yet been distributed to the city of Oakland.

During the meeting, Shannon Reeves, then-president of the NAACP Oakland chapter, accused the city’s black elected officials of forgetting where they came from.

“It’s time to deliver for the people in the community…,” Reeves said. “We need those who look like us to advocate for us.”

Beth Aaron, executive director of the Bay Area Black Contractors Association also testified at the meeting that night. She said the record proved that white-owned businesses had a much easier time getting Oakland to open its purse strings.

“Those who are white or friends of friends get things done very quickly,” she charged. “Those of us who are of color… do not.”

Even Nedir Bey got into the act.

“A few years ago we wouldn’t have been able to come here and ask for anything without getting run out,” he said. “Cut us a check on Friday for $275,000. Compare us to other projects that you have passed.”

A decade later, E.M. Health is just an unpaid debt on the city’s books, its license suspended by the California Franchise Tax Board. Principal payments first due in May 1998 never materialized, and by the time city staff knocked on its doors in October 1999, the offices had been cleared out.

But the story of how the business, a subsidiary of the now-bankrupt Your Black Muslim Bakery, received the money despite a flawed business plan and a disturbing criminal incident in Nedir Bey’s past illustrates the extent politics and pressure played in officials’ decision to approve the loan.

Bakery members have also been linked to several violent incidents, including the shooting death of journalist Chauncey Bailey, as well as alleged real estate and welfare fraud and child rape. ‘Intimidation factor’

“In reality it was political pressure that got them the loans,” said now-City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, who was a councilmember at the time. “Deep down inside everybody knew it was bull—. No business plan, no records anyone could show. … And they kept saying they were failing because they didn’t get the city’s money soon enough.”

Retired councilmember Dick Spees, who is white, remembers how heated those meetings were, of being accused of racism because he dared question the business plan or ask about collateral or a missing business license. Bakery members would line up along the wall and refuse to sit, he recalled.

“It sounded good (on paper), this training program to help black people who were not getting opportunities,” Spees said recently. “But there was this intimidation factor, it just didn’t feel comfortable.”

Spees said he grew suspicious when Nedir Bey started racking up ineligible expenses even before federal government lenders had determined E.M. Health’s job training program met its criteria for financing.

Spees said he ended up voting for the loan and for several thousand dollars in advances from city coffers after he was assured by city staff on more than one occasion that HUD would approve the loan and that Bey had put up collateral.

De La Fuente, now council president, said he understood that the HUD money was intended for riskier loans, but that was no reason to cave in to pressure and give the money without trying to protect the city’s resources.

“I never got their support,” he said, referring to his black council colleagues, Nate Miley, Dezie Woods-Jones, Elihu Harris and Natalie Bayton.

Kidnap, torture

The city gave Nedir Bey money despite a disturbing incident that occurred on March 4, 1994, when Qiyamah Corporation, E.M. Health’s nonprofit parent company was still in its infancy.

On that date, Nedir Bey and Abaz Bey, another spiritually adopted son of bakery founder Yusuf Bey, were arrested and charged with abducting, assaulting, torturing and robbing a man they believed had cheated them on a real estate transaction.

Abaz Bey and other members of the bakery lived in an apartment building on 24th Street in North Oakland, the same one Nedir Bey wanted to buy with his very first request for city money, that ultimately was reduced in scope. The owner had hired the bakery to provide security after being sued by tenants fed up with rampant drug dealing and other crime.

According to police and court records, three men, led by Nedir Bey, beat the man with a flashlight and burned him with a hot knife. The arrests sparked a tense, full-scale standoff between more than 40 police officers and a similar number of male bakery members.

According to news reports, then-Mayor Elihu Harris agreed to meet the demand of bakery patriarch Yusuf Bey to discuss the standoff and the arrests.

Nedir Bey pleaded no contest to one felony count of false imprisonment. He was sentenced to three years’ probation after a veteran Oakland police officer and members of the community wrote a support letter on his behalf.

The probation report noted that two other prominent Oakland residents acted as character references for Nedir Bey: Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson and Larry Reid, then aide to Mayor Harris. However, Reid, now an Oakland city councilmember, said he never wrote a letter or served as a reference for Nedir Bey.

When Tribune reporters Diana Williams and Paul Grabowicz questioned whether the the arrest should impact his loan application, Nedir Bey said such details were irrelevant.

“Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, and he was respectable enough to become president of South Africa,” he was quoted as saying in a June 1996 Oakland Tribune article.

Unapologetic support

Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley, who was an Oakland council member and pushed hard for the E.M. Health loan, said recently that he never knew about Nedir Bey’s felony conviction or other clashes between bakery members and the police.

“Then-police chief Richard Word and I chaired the Public Safety committee and I didn’t know about it,” Miley insisted. “Clearly, I had a sense that the police had some concerns (about bakery members), but not how it’s been depicted recently.”

Miley is unapologetic about his unflinching support of E.M. Health during his time on the council. He wasn’t overly concerned when the company defaulted, he told his colleagues at the time, because the federal money was intended to fund higher-risk ventures.

He recalled in a recent interview that African-Americans had good reason to believe black businesses weren’t getting a fair share of city contracts or loans. Oakland’s leaders had poured millions in public money into bringing the Raiders home from Los Angeles and bailing out the Ice Center, Miley said, and African-Americans never let them forget it.

It’s also possible that city staff and some council members were intimidated by the accusations of racism, he added.

“I think we were very sensitive (about accusations) of being racist and Uncle Toms,” said Miley, who is African American.

“When E.M. came in to get a loan … on the face of it that looked like very worthy cause, something that would serve the public. So we decided to give them a chance,” Miley said, adding that there was some concern over the money being used for a car and consultants.

“We gave them some technical assistance and guidance rather than pulling the rug out from under them completely,” Miley recalled. “Still, even if it’s federal money they got, it’s still public taxpayer dollars down the toilet.”

Miley said he admired Yusuf Bey and the way he preached self-reliance, spirituality and discipline. Oakland was suffering record homicides and here was someone who was reaching out to ex-cons or those who might otherwise get caught up in the cycle of violence and helping them turn their lives around and earn money legitimately for their families, Miley said.

In February 1996, a smiling, soft-spoken Nedir Bey stood before the City Council and told them as much.

“This is an excellent program and it will target men and women who are not working presently and have no job skills,” Bey said. “We can train them in the home health care field and start them on a better way of life.”

‘Brilliant’ concept

Redevelopment Agency Director Gregory Hunter said the company’s goals were hard to turn down even if E.M. Health’s promises lacked details.

“The concept was brilliant, absolutely brilliant,” he said, adding that the business proposal drew applause from as far away as Washington, D.C. “Unfortunately, the execution fell somewhat short of the expectations the city had.”

Elihu Harris, now the chancellor of Peralta Community College District, was reluctant to discuss the matter recently because he said he did not recall many details. Harris said his dad received home health care from employees of E.M. Health, but it was his mother who handled the contract.

He added that a community loan advisory committee _ a body the federal lenders required _ had voted to fund E.M. Health, and the council debated that recommendation back and forth for many months. He said the council was not provided with a lot of details about the company.

“The (loan committee)… had really done the research,” Harris said. “The council was between a rock and a hard place.

“(E.M. Health) had made some mistakes and they were going to try and rectify those mistakes,” Harris said. “There was a lot to be concerned about, but they had strong community support.”

One supporter who turned out early and often to lobby for Nedir Bey was Theodora Marzouk, an administrator for Oakland-based Community Care Services, Inc.

She testified more than once about the shortage of training programs for nurses’ aides and said her own company couldn’t supply enough of them. She urged Oakland’s leaders to fund E.M. Health.

But Marzouk ended up on E.M. Health’s payroll for the last two quarters of 1996 earning more than $20,000, city records show.

Marzouk refused to comment for this story, but she sounded surprised to hear that she’d once been listed as an employee.

In any case, by 2000, the company’s business license was suspended, and by 2003, Alameda County records show, state and federal tax officials during the intervening years had imposed tax liens on the company’s assets totalling nearly $200,000.

But today, E.M. Health’s motto “Big enough to serve, small enough to care” is little more than a failed promise.

MediaNews investigative reporters Thomas Peele and Josh Richman, KQED reporter Judy Campbell, and radio reporter Bob Butler contributed to this report. Cecily Burt is a MediaNews staff writer. G.W. Schulz is a staff writer at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

How Oakland’s fearful politicos enabled waste: Part II

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E.M. Health Services, a home health care company founded by a high-ranking member of Your Black Muslim Bakery, opened for business in July 1996, flush with a $1.1 million loan from the city of Oakland.

But shortly over a year later, signs of trouble already plagued the business — and a review of documents shows that the founders of the struggling company paid themselves lavish salaries, and lucrative consulting contracts went to bakery associates and family members.

More than a decade later, the city hasn’t received one penny in repayment for the loan, and questions remain over why city officials granted the loan in the first place.

Under the terms of E.M.’s loan, the company wasn’t scheduled to make principal payments for two years — until 1998 — but just 15 months after getting the money, CEO Nedir Bey asked to defer repayments until 2000.

The city, which had already questioned several invoices submitted by the company, did not approve the extension. Instead, officials responded by requesting an audit of E.M.’s books.

In his request for an extension, Bey did not mention that in May 1997, E.M. Health had applied to the California Department of Insurance for a $2 million loan to purchase a 4,000-square-foot office building on 17th Street in downtown Oakland.

In his application to the state, Bey cited Oakland’s loan approval as proof of his good reputation, even though by then the city was already questioning tens of thousands of dollars in operating expenses claimed by his company.

The $1.1 million loan agreement called for E.M. Health to begin repaying monthly interest and principal payments of $19,692 on May 1, 1998, the date the company was projected to have enough billable clients to break even.

But May came and went with no payments.

And, documents show, E.M. Health would ask for more.

But the story of how the business, a subsidiary of the now-bankrupt Your Black Muslim Bakery, received the money despite a flawed business plan and a disturbing criminal incident in Nedir Bey’s past illustrates the extent politics and pressure played in officials’ decision to approve the loan.

Bakery members also have been linked to several violent incidents, including the Aug. 2 shooting death of journalist Chauncey Bailey, as well as alleged real estate and welfare fraud and child rape.

Details of the company’s financial growth were outlined in correspondence between Nedir Bey and various city staff who reviewed documentation to support the original $1.1 million loan application, as well as documents surrounding Nedir Bey’s later attempts to obtain a $2.5 million loan that was never granted.

In a January 1997 letter to the city, E.M. Health said it had contracts with 13 patients between October and December 1996, which should have generated more than $23,000 in revenues for the three-month period.

The same letter said seven would-be home health aides had graduated from a training program run by a different company. Those aides could not be sent out to care for Medicare/MediCal patients until they passed their certification exams that month, the letter said.

The letter also reveals that E.M. Health had a goal of generating $1.2 million in income in 1997 by providing services to 50 clients. The company instead reported large losses in 1996 and 1997.

It started to pull in more revenue early the following year, according to a letter from former Economic Development Chief Bill Claggett addressed to then-City Manager Robert Bobb.

Clagget’s letter stated that the company had a net profit of $30,068 for the first two months of 1998, but was still experiencing delays in receiving reimbursements for its Medicare/MediCal clients.

By June 17, 1998, Nedir Bey stated in a letter to city loan department manager Teri Robinson-Green that E.M. was “doing about $80,000 a month.” In another letter listing E.M.’s achievements, Bey claimed the company had hired 55 people, trained 30 people and served more than 200 patients.

But still no loan payments.

E.M. Health’s agreement with the city stated that the company and its employees, many of whom were also trusted bakery associates and family members, would not profit from the business. Any extra income after expenses would be funneled back into Qiyamah, a nonprofit organization founded by the bakery to further Yusuf Bey’s community work. Qiyamah was E.M. Health’s parent company.

But the salaries, car lease and billing rates charged by bakery members who moonlighted as consultants to E.M. Health coupled with too few billable clients and delays in reimbursements by Medicare and MediCal all but ensured there wouldn’t be enough money left over to pay back the city’s loans.

“It’s interesting how that millionaire from the skating rink got $12 million and declared bankruptcy and never paid the city back,” Nedir Bey said, referring to the builders of Oakland’s downtown ice rink, who defaulted on an $11 million loan before E.M. Health Services was funded. The city took possession of the rink. “Is the city calling him and trying to ask him those kind of questions?

“The bottom line for me, I’m trying to move forward with my life. Everything that you’re discussing is in my past,” Bey said.

A popular message

E.M. Health’s business model resonated with Oakland’s black politicians who were eager to even the playing field for black businesses that had not gotten an equitable share of city contracts and loans. They lauded the accomplishments of Yusuf Bey — the controversial but charismatic founder of Your Black Muslim Bakery — and viewed the health care proposal as a continuation of his good works.

The plan also resonated with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and appeared to meet its criteria for loan funding. E.M. Health’s $1.1 million loan came from a $44 million pot of money the federal agency offered Oakland to fund start-up organizations that sought to provide jobs in low-income communities.

Still, in a June 4, 1996, letter to Kofi Bonner, Oakland’s then-director of community development, local HUD director Steven Sachs wrote that “E.M. Health Services business plan is still being developed …” with many “issues still to be worked out.”

Sachs urged the city to consider “providing a much smaller amount of financial assistance to this start-up business.”

That same night, despite Bonner’s warning that Nedir Bey had not yet provided several documents the city required for the loan, nor procured a provisional license from state health officials, the council voted to give the company a $275,000 advance on the $1.1 million HUD loan.

In fact, even though E.M. Health was $63,000 in arrears in its business taxes, the company ended up getting $538,000 in interim loans from the city of Oakland over the next six months, before HUD officials reimbursed Oakland for the money in April 1997.

Nedir Bey relied on that type of sentiment when he approached the city in February 1998 and asked for an additional $2.5 million — half loan, half grant — to buy a shopping center in West Oakland to house a new urgent care clinic, in addition to funds he sought unsuccessfully from the state department of insurance.

The shopping center plan lacked numerous financial details and included no downpayment or personal investment by Nedir Bey.

Nonetheless, he lined up his supporters and produced letters of recommendation from well-respected medical experts, including David Kears, director of the Health Care Services Agency for Alameda County; Michael Lenoir, president of the Ethnic Health Institute at Alta Bates/Summit Hospitals; and H. Geoffrey Watson, president of the Golden State Medical Association, which represents 2,000 African-American physicians in California.

Claggett said he would have loved to have someone revitalize that blighted shopping center, but nothing about E.M.’s finances by then suggested it could support a new business venture. City records show that E.M. Health incurred losses of $425,000 during 1996 and $343,000 in 1997.

E.M. Health was already three months behind on the payments for the $1.1 million loan, and a mere six months later, E.M. Health’s parent, the Qiyamah Corporation, would default on a

$100,000 bank loan originally signed by Saleem Ali Bey, also known as Darren Wright.

‘I don’t think they ever gave up’

Nedir Bey nonetheless again pressured the city into rushing the review of his new loan request. By July 1998, he sought direct backing from then-Mayor Elihu Harris, whose father was an E.M. Health patient for a short time, according to company records on file with the city.

“Staff should be more inform (sic) on the procedures and policies of the city of Oakland as opposed to me having to check with the mayor and then letting you know what you can and cannot do,” Bey said in a July 1998 letter to Gregory Hunter, now Oakland’s redevelopment agency director, apparently unhappy that the request had not yet been forwarded to the loan review committee.

Kears recalls Nedir Bey first approached him for a letter of recommendation, but that evolved into a request for money to finance outreach efforts for new patients. The county wound up giving Bey a $25,000 contract, the most it could provide without approval from the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. Kears said he doesn’t know whether E.M. Health ever submitted invoices to use any of the money.

The $2.5 million loan application eventually stalled as Nedir Bey failed to produce documentation requested by the city related to the first infusion of cash, the repayment of which was falling further and further behind.

By the time the city sent its first default letter to E.M. Health in December 1998, the payments were eight months past due and the company had crumbled.

City employees would later discover that the company’s offices had been cleaned out, office furnishings and computer equipment pledged as collateral gone.

Claggett said that not long afterward, he was questioned by the FBI about E.M. Health and Nedir Bey. The FBI’s San Francisco office did not return a call seeking comment about the probe.

No way to collect

The Oakland city attorney sued E.M. Health

in December 2000 in an attempt to recover $1.45million in loan funds and $98,600 in unpaid interest. The city won a default judgment, but no one could collect on it, in part because there was no personal guarantee made when the loan was awarded.

City Attorney John Russo said recently that it is up to the city’s Finance Department to collect on the $1.5 million judgment, which remains unpaid today.

The city wasn’t the only one left holding worthless paper when E.M. Health deteriorated. Orthopedic and Neurological Rehabilitation, Speech Pathology Inc. of Los Gatos sued Nedir Bey and Cecil R. Moody, an E.M. Health agent listed among business registration records, in 2000 to recover $8,700 worth of services it provided to the company’s patients over a two-month period. According to the lawsuit, E.M. Health billed MediCal and Medicare but never reimbursed the company.

In May, Daulet Bey, a Muslim wife of Yusuf Bey and mother of current bakery CEO Yusuf Bey IV, 21, and her daughter Jannah Bey filed papers to revive Qiyamah’s state business license. It’s not clear whether bakery associates plan to use Qiyamah to attempt a new business venture.

The license was promptly suspended again by the state Franchise Tax Board for failing to file an information report in 2005, according to spokeswoman Denise Azimi.

Nedir Bey’s costly experiment was finished and thousands in unaccounted for public funds were left in his wake.

MediaNews investigative reporters Thomas Peele and Josh Richman, KQED reporter Judy Campbell, and radio reporter Bob Butler contributed to this report. Cecily Burt is a MediaNews staff writer. G.W. Schulz is a staff writer at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

How Oakland’s fearful politicos enabled waste: Part 1

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Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series examining a $1million city loan to a Your Black Muslim Bakery affiliate that was never repaid.

It was a noble cause: Train welfare recipients as home health aides and put them to work caring for homebound sick and elderly clients.

A decade ago, while Your Black Muslim Bakery founder Yusuf Bey enjoyed unwavering support and adulation from black businesses and politicians, his spiritually adopted son, Nedir Bey, pressured and shamed city leaders into giving him a $1.1 million loan to help finance the promise of black entrepreneurial independence.

But the venture, E.M. Health Services, swiftly collapsed. The failure of CEO Nedir Bey to repay a dime of the loan made headlines at the time and prompted most to assume the company’s demise was caused by a combination of poor business decisions, bureaucratic hurdles and simple bad luck.

But was it?

City officials overlooked flaws in the company’s business plans and relented to black community leaders who insisted they award the loan, according to interviews, documents and other correspondence reviewed by the Chauncey Bailey Project.

The loan was granted to Nedir Bey despite his well-publicized arrest for the torture and kidnapping of a man two years earlier. Bey pleaded no contest to one felony count of false imprisonment and was sentenced to three years’ probation.

In awarding the loan to Nedir Bey, nearly every elected official lauded the accomplishments of Yusuf Bey in turning around the lives of troubled young men. Yet dozens of those men had armed themselves during a standoff with police two years earlier. And a few years later, Yusuf Bey himself would be accused of raping and fathering children with young girls who were placed in his care.

And the Chauncey Bailey Project has learned that in late 1999 and early 2000, the FBI investigated E.M. Health Services’ loan and Nedir Bey, although it’s not clear how the probe was resolved.

In the wake of reported real estate and welfare fraud allegedly committed by the wives and children of Yusuf Bey _ as well as the August arrest of a bakery member accused of the Aug. 2 shooting death of Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post _ a deeper review of the E.M. Health Services loan reveals several questionable expenses that suggest an internal pattern of cronyism that enriched nearly every facet of the bakery empire’s inner circle including:

-Tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees paid to companies controlled by Nedir Bey and his wife, Rosemarie Boothe-Bey, as well as other bakery insiders.

-Thousands of dollars in security fees paid to yet another company controlled by Your Black Muslim Bakery and thousands more in advertising fees paid to Universal Distributors, a company operated by associates of the bakery.

-$20,000 paid to the administrator of an Oakland home health company who had urged the city to award the loan to E.M. Health Services.

-Top-end salaries paid to Nedir Bey and his wife, Rosemarie Boothe, as well as to two of the Muslim wives of bakery patriarch Yusuf Bey who are accused of receiving fraudulent welfare payments at the time, and a second woman with whom Nedir Bey fathered children. Other bakery insiders filled the company’s payroll.

-15-day loans made to E.M. Health by Nedir Bey and other bakery associates that were repaid with hefty loan fees.

The beginnings

On April 30, 1996, the Oakland City Council awarded E.M. Health conditional approval for a $1.1million federal loan to establish a training program for home health aides.

According to loan documents and internal memos, the city approved that loan despite flaws in the company’s business plan and no discernible collateral or equity to back up the debt.

The money was part of a $44 million pot — half loan, half grant — awarded to the city by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to fund start-up ventures or help expand existing businesses in three distressed areas of Oakland with high unemployment rates. The federal money was supposed to create jobs, and it was intended for borrowers who could not qualify for conventional loans.

E.M. Health’s share of that pot — through the leadership of then-bakery lieutenant Nedir Bey — would further Yusuf Bey’s efforts to empower poor black residents and ex-cons by giving them training and job opportunities at various bakery outlets and private security companies affiliated with the patriarch’s expanding empire.

The loan proceeds were supposed to be used for start-up costs to recruit workers and patients, establish the home health training program and provide ongoing operating expenses.

The company never lived up to its promise. Ten years have passed and still not a cent has been repaid. The equipment pledged to secure the proceeds never surfaced. The promised jobs for low-income residents, as well as the promised services for sick and elderly clients, evaporated. The Oakland city attorney sued to recoup the debt, plus interest, but the city’s finance department has not been able to collect.

Nedir Bey, whose last listed occupation is business development consultant, would not answer questions about the business operations or why the company failed to take hold, saying that was “in the past.” In a brief telephone conversation, Bey said there were other Oakland businesses that defaulted on city loans and he asked if they were receiving the same level of scrutiny. Bey remains in Oakland but says he is no longer affiliated with the bakery.

Former bakery associate and businessman Ali Saleem Bey has spent the last several months trying to save the heavily indebted bakery enterprise from liquidation. Saleem Bey said he hasn’t spoken to Nedir Bey in years, but he defended E.M. Health’s efforts to provide job training and services to poor Oakland residents.

Saleem Bey, reached by phone, said the city subjected the business to undue scrutiny compared with others seeking public money. That scrutiny also led to the company being underfunded, Saleem Bey said, and contributed to its demise.

“We really felt we were sabotaged by the city, …” said Saleem Bey, who worked alongside other bakery associates to help launch the business.

“Politically, they never wanted to give us the money … and when it came time to work with us and make it go, they made it as hard as possible,” Saleem Bey said. “They wanted to wag their fingers at us.”

But the only thing that remains today from the ashes of E.M. Health is a considerable outstanding debt to taxpayers — a debt that could have been much larger.

Big plans, big loan requests

The Qiyamah Corp., E.M. Health’s nonprofit parent company, first filed state business registration papers in October 1993. The nonprofit organization was formed to expand the bakery’s community work and job training programs, and it wasn’t long before bakery members sought the city’s help in financing a new home health care venture.

Nedir Bey originally approached the city in approximately 1994 for a $3.4million loan to buy an apartment building on 24th Street in North Oakland. That would be used, he said at the time, as a base for his home health care program.

The building purchase didn’t qualify for HUD funds, and over time it was dropped from the plan. The loan request was whittled down to the $1.1 million, which was conditionally awarded to Qiyamah’s for-profit subsidiary, E.M. Health.

The company promised to create 32 full-time jobs, more than half of which would be filled by residents of West Oakland, East Oakland or San Antonio/Fruitvale — the three economically depressed areas targeted by HUD.

The company also promised to train 120 low-income residents and welfare recipients as home health workers, who would in turn provide services to Medicare and MediCal patients and other clients who were privately insured. According to E.M. Health’s business plan accepted by the city, insurance reimbursements would be more than sufficient to repay the loan. It might have worked if Nedir Bey had started small.

Instead, he purchased expensive office furniture and loaded the payroll with bakery insiders, most of whom had no health care experience, while spending little initially on actual medical supplies, according to loan documents.

Bill Claggett, the former director of Oakland’s Community and Economic Development Agency who inherited the E.M. loan in late 1997, said he couldn’t believe the city gave the company “a dime,” let alone $1.1 million.

“They didn’t know what they were doing,” Claggett said. “The cost per person served was much higher than any other similar business. It was clear (Bey) didn’t have the kind of staffing he needed for that operation.”

E.M. Health opened its doors on July 10, 1996, in an office storefront on Grand Avenue. That first year’s tax return posted income of $6,007 and a loss of $437,802. It spent $85,886 on consultants, $10,600 on security and only $5,708 for medical supplies. It survived almost exclusively on the city loan.

The list of employees included Nedir Bey’s wife, Rosemarie Boothe; and another woman, Kathy Leviege, with whom he has two children; family associate Janet Bey; and Madeeah Bey and Farieda Bey, two wives of bakery patriarch Yusuf Bey who are alleged to have received illegal welfare payments at the time, according to civil depositions taken recently in an unrelated case.

Within three months of receiving start-up funds from the city, Nedir Bey was on track to earn $108,000 a year, a figure that was out of line with what similar agencies in the Bay Area paid their CEOs, according to a spring 1997 memo in the city’s loan files.

Quarterly wage reports filed with the state show that Nedir Bey’s wife earned $47,000 as the assistant administrator, and Yusuf Bey’s wives — whose occupations were listed as marketing director and LVN/outreach coordinator — earned nearly $60,000 each, the same as Janet Bey, a registered public health nurse. Other than Janet Bey, none of the women had nursing degrees or related licenses, according to a review of state documents. Saleem Bey said it should not seem suspicious that members of the bakery’s extended family ended up on E.M. Health’s payroll. He said they worked many different jobs to help support the bakery empire and to further Yusuf Bey’s edict to be self-reliant.

He said they also worked alongside Nedir Bey to try and make the enterprise a success. To infer otherwise would be a mistake.

“It behooved the organization to be successful, so it wasn’t as if everybody was just eyeing this money and they wanted to steal a million,” Saleem Bey said. “If the business plan was successful, by this time it would have created 10 times that amount of money and created many jobs.”

Even so, the city’s loan staff requested that the compensation for E.M.’s three top executives be reduced by 20 percent, a move Nedir Bey protested in a memo to city officials.

Other questionable expenses

There were other missteps and invoices that city officials questioned before the city received the HUD proceeds, including a lease on a Cadillac and reimbursements to a security company controlled by the bakery.

One city staffer flagged the vehicle lease, $64,000 in consulting contracts, and thousands budgeted for security as ineligible uses of the federal funds. “Staff is exploring options for recovering these costs,” reads one memo from April 1, 1997.

That same year, in addition to their salaries, E.M. Health paid approximately $40,000 in consulting fees and service payments to Nedir Bey and relatives either directly or through companies that he and other associates of the bakery controlled, according to records on file with the city of Oakland.

Bakery associates also made 15-day loans to E.M. Health to cover operating expenses and charged substantial interest fees in return. Nedir Bey earned a $750 fee for a $9,000 loan he made to the company, and Ali Saleem Bey charged $1,000 interest for a $13,750 loan. Time after time, city staff questioned the invoices E.M. Health submitted for reimbursement, asking for more details or supporting documentation. But the money was never withheld for long.

MediaNews investigative reporters Thomas Peele and Josh Richman, KQED reporter Judy Campbell and freelance radio reporter Bob Butler contributed to this report. Cecily Burt is a MediaNews staff writer. G.W. Schulz is a staff writer at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

New Hampshire: The ‘Bradley Effect?’

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B3 note: “Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?” was the headline over today’s New York Times column by Maureen Dowd. Dowd wrote that “the Obama campaign calculated that they had the women’s vote over the weekend but watched it slip away…in the end, she had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim, both of Obama and of the press. Hillary has barely talked to the press throughout her race, yet the Cllintons this week whined mightily that the press prefers Obama.”

I liked the line by an interviewee on Quake radio who mentioned an Ellen Goodman column in the Boston Globe earlier on. Goodman argued that, if the men piled on Hillary, the women would vote for her. But I mainly liked the fact that the voters of New Hampshire, not the pollsters and the pundits, decided the outcome and surprised everyone. That is good news.

Then there is “The Bradley Effect,” which is a reason why many thought Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley lost a gubernatorial election in l982 after having a substantial lead in both the pre-election and exit polls. Will Durst
wonders if “The Bradley Effect” kicked in in New Hampshire and if it won’t be a major factor in the campaign.

SHADOWS TRUMP HOPE.

By Will Durst

Listen my friends and you will hear a tale of a
fateful night. It’s a tale no other dare speak of. Not
a matter of political correctness. It is shame. Of
which I have little. If any. Okay. None. So here goes.
What follows is the real and true story of how Hillary
Clinton overcame a double digit same day deficit and
won the New Hampshire Primary. A tale of a race and of
race.

We all know what happened, but like the knickers of a
Guatemalan nanny bent over a laundry basket in the
room just off the kitchen, we pretend not to notice.
Tom Brokaw knows. John King knows. Okay, maybe Laura
Ingraham doesn’t know, but how is that different?
Hillary knows. Barack not only knows, he feels it in
his bones like a creeping worm of osteoporosis every
day of his life but he’ll never say a word.

It was not a polling glitch. It was not co- opting the
mantra of “change.” It was not Hillary’s vulnerability
in Saturday’s debate or her moist eyes in that
Portsmouth coffee shop. It was not Bill turning into a
60 foot George Bailey Transformer rampaging through
Bedford Falls. It was a little bit of the teeniest
kind of invisible fear. A form of prejudice detritus
known as “the Bradley Effect.”

In 1982, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-
American, was 10 points ahead in the polls the day
before his California Gubernatorial election against
George Deukmejian. 10 points ahead. Day before the
election. He lost. Sound familiar? Ding. Ding. Ding.
Give that man a kewpie doll.

To add insult to injury, Bradley led in the EXIT
polls. Which means people not only lied about how they
were going to vote, they lied about how they did vote.
Proof positive that something crazy happens inside the
heads of white people when they get behind that
polling curtain. But after two terms of George Bush,
that ain’t new news.

Why didn’t the “Bradley Effect” rear its ugly head in
Iowa? Simple. We’re not talking about racism, we’re
talking about nervousness. A fear that attacks your
marrow in the dark. In Iowa, everyone watches you
vote. No curtain to hide behind in a caucus. You bunch
in a corner in full sight of all your neighbors under
a bright fluorescent light. In New Hampshire, it’s
just you and your demons. Your inner New England
demons. And hope tends to dissipate in those lonely
enclosures. No matter how warm the January night, it
gets dark at five up there. Northwoods dark, where
shadows trump hope.

The difference was women over 40. Which, forgive me,
but in both New Hampshire and Iowa means white women.
In the Hawkeye State, they went with the black guy in
the wide open. In the Granite State, behind the
curtain, they chose the white woman. I know. I know. I
know. Sacrilege! Implying discrimination exists in
America today. Blaspheme! Accusing DEMOCRATS of
possible prejudice. Heresy! But its not bigotry so
much as it is dread. Obloquy! “What?” Never mind.
Suffice to say that in the last six years, we’ve been
taught to fear. Bang! Salivate.

One can only hope the Clinton campaign understands
this and doesn’t convince themselves it was their
wacky emotional leakage weekend strategy that turned
the tide, because that would mean 10 months of Bill
shrieking and Hillary keening, and nobody wants that.
The only thing worse would be to go on pretending this
Effect does not exist, because future opponents are
already drawing up plans to ramp it up.

Comic, actor, writer, Will Durst had to look up
“obloquy.” It means the same kind of stuff the other
words do.

will durst
wing commander
durstco
“you want the best, so do we”
2107 van ness ave
suite 402
san francisco 94109
877 SATIRIST service
415 441 3669 office
415 298 1874 cell
durst@willdurst.com
willdurst.com

“Hello-Now, From Everywhere”

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On the corner of 20th and Valencia streets, there’s a window that makes people think of the dead. The reason is a series of annotated sketches that, over the past few years, has gradually accumulated on the glass to the right of the doorway at Dog Eared Books. A sort of eulogistic message board for drifting window shoppers, these paper notices gently call attention to the passing of poets, visual artists, writers, teachers, and other cultural heroes, some renowned, some formerly celebrated, and others largely unknown — though not to Oakland artist Veronica De Jesus, the creator of this memorial window.

Now, with the window grown crowded, another local artist and a friend of De Jesus’s, Colter Jacobsen, has published a collection of the memorials (Allone Co., $18). Tributes to Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, Robert Creeley, Octavia Butler, Will Eisner, Quentin Crisp, Richard Pryor, and Rick James are interspersed among pages dedicated to death row prisoner Stanley "Tookie" Williams; Al "Grandpa Munster" Lewis, whose roles also included circus performer, Pacifica radio host, and Green Party candidate for governor of New York; the New Zealand experimental novelist and poet Janet Frame; and "Don" Magargol, a folk dance instructor at San Francisco’s Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

The spiral-bound notebooks in which these memorials are collected — and the cover image, a drawing of a largely denuded but vibrant dandelion superimposed on what looks like crumpled paper that’s been imperfectly smoothed out — suggest a continued meditation on impermanence and remembrance, the attempts we make to prolong or enlarge the presence of our heroes and loved ones in the world after they leave us.

Angels with dirty faces

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The Bay Area boasts some of the most forward-thinking film programmers in the country, but even here there’s often no getting around the circuitous, arbitrary workings of foreign film distribution. No matter how big a hit in its festival travels, the foreign film must dutifully wait untold months until it is dressed up by Sony Pictures Classics or released to no fanfare by a small distributor like Film Movement. That particular company is backing the belated American opening of Francisco Vargas’s The Violin, a plainly appealing sleeper that picked up major festival awards from Cannes to San Francisco as well as major props from star director Guillermo del Toro (quoted as saying, "In The Violin lies the future of Mexican cinema").

I mention all of this here only to emphasize that it’s something of a coincidence that The Violin is opening in the shadow of several American movies obsessed with death in the open West, a landscape in which violence congeals as fast as the pop of an air gun or the rush of an oil geyser. A coincidence perhaps, but a bracing one for the way it compounds the eerie calm of Vargas’s debut feature, which, completely contrary to the excellent No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood (let alone Redacted), works to profess the fullness of the soul locked in dubious battle.

As with many overtly lyrical westerns, The Violin‘s coordinates — mountains and village, the bar and the barracks, guerrillas and soldiers — aren’t specific. Whichever war is being fought, it has already spiraled into abstraction; the opening credits roll over a ravishingly composed torture sequence in which military men maim peasants for no reason other than their being indistinguishable from the guerrillas. The sequence establishes the tone through its look, with soft black-and-white cinematography suffusing the villagers’ tragedy with an ennobling grace reminiscent of Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men portraiture.

This prologue is unnerving for being a composition before it is an action — even as that action is so despairingly brutal. As Vargas slips into the main of The Violin, though, this predilection for romantic chiaroscuro inscribes his fable with the dangerous delicacy of a daydream. The plot, such as it is, gets under way when an old man and his adult son go busking with their violin and guitar, the youngest member of this patrilineal trio, Lucio, collecting the change. Later the adult son, Genaro, slips into the back room of a bar (another space painted in shadow and smoke) to procure weapons for his village’s guerrillas. It’s to no avail, since by the time he returns to the town with his child and his violinist father, the magisterial Don Plutarco (the Cannes-awarded Ángel Tavira), the Army has already done its cruel work, taking over the village and its hidden cache. Flashing modesty and feigned foolishness as another person might their teeth, Plutarco wins the favor of the presiding captain, serenading with his creaky violin ballads while surreptitiously smuggling out supplies with every adios.

Instead of drumming up dramatic impact with the story’s inherently suspenseful elements, Vargas’s film floats by with its head in the clouds, tragedies and trivialities enfolded in caressing close-ups and violin whistles. This dreamlike ambiance paradoxically seems to dovetail with Vargas’s laudable neorealist technique, especially in his work with a nonprofessional cast and his easy command of direct sound. So many films overplay their hand here; drunk on Terrence Malick movies, the nature score is often magnified to absurd sharpness, crickets chirping in your ear, blades of grass aflame in song. Vargas’s sound is comparatively obscure, but besides being pleasurably spacious, it’s true to his vision of a humble poetry of the everyday. The music too is appreciably authentic, as Vargas (who spent five years producing radio shows featuring traditional Mexican melodies) uses Tavira’s wobbly pitch to seam together his loose narrative.

All of this lyricism can have a flattening effect, as scenes of torture and vignettes of tacos hold the same smoky finesse. Innumerable close-ups of Tavira’s cracked hands aside, there is nothing gritty about the film, which is a problem insofar as it can give The Violin‘s realism a bitter aftertaste of simplistic moralism. And yet, in the film’s refined emotional palette (the final shot seals it), Vargos achieves something that the recent tongue-tied American pictures don’t. Wordless in long stretches, The Violin demonstrates a visual command of faces and editing on par with those of D.W. Griffith’s expert melodramas — minor masterpieces that recognize cinema’s strange ability to summon reality without being beholden to it.

THE VIOLIN

Opens Fri/11

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

http://www.roxie.com

www.filmmovement.com
=

Good luck

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS We’re not related by blood, but he’s as much of a brother to me as my many brother brothers are. He has brothers too, but no sisters, and he always wanted one. So there’s that.

My brother Boomer makes poetry out of radio news like I turn food sections into fiction, sports, gossip, society, philosophy, agriculture, gender studies, travel, apolitical commentary … If, during the past 20 years, you have found yourself in Boston with a radio on, you may recognize his voice.

"Sister!" he boomed, and I heard it in the pay phone receiver and in the room. (Here room = Logan Airport.) I turned and saw him walking toward me, cell phone pressed to his silvering head with the big goofy grin and shining eyes.

"Brother," I said. We hugged, and he took my bags.

It had been some years. A lot had changed. He was skinnier. I’d been long divorced; he was getting there. His wife, always the insanely jealous type, had been cheating on him and was in love with some guy in LA.

Boomer had taken a couple of days off work to chauffeur me to the University of Maine, where I was giving a reading. It’s five hours from Boston to Orono — plenty of time to catch up, but not enough time, apparently, to eat.

Starving, I dropped hints. "Hilltop Steakhouse still there?" I asked, perhaps too casually.

He nodded. Then: "I tell you, Sis," he said. "I don’t know what I’m going to do. The boys …"

Route 1 was a parking lot. Boomer called his station’s traffic desk: "Hi Jim. Boomer."

While he was getting the inside scoop and then getting us out of it, I sat there seat belted and safe, feeling kind of cushy, or soft, like I was in good hands. Informed. I wondered if this was how people expected to feel when they ate in restaurants with me or came over to cook something.

"Why are you laughing?" Boomer asked.

There was the Hilltop. "Nothing," I said, twisting in my seat.

Surprisingly, little had changed on the Saugus Strip in the 20 years since I’d haunted it. I looked at my now silver-templed, golden-voiced newscaster friend and remembered him shirtless behind a drum kit, spit-shouting angry, stupid, and inspiringly poetic punk.

Over barbecued chicken, jerked chicken, and chicken sausages at the party after the reading, Boomer confessed. We were pressed between a table and a refrigerator, holding paper plates and drinking fizzy water while all around us the academics, grad students and their teachers, were drinking hard.

Years ago Boomer had driven back and forth, he told me, between a tree and a telephone pole — tree, telephone pole, tree, telephone pole — in the end settling on the pole, which snapped like a bean.

Power outages, burned houses, abandoned babies, train-wrecked lives, gang bullshit …

"Do you think you knew deep down it would do that?" I asked. "Is that why you picked the pole, do you think?"

"I don’t know," he said.

Call me crazy, but I think that — compared to at least one alternative — half-assed suicide attempts rock.

On the way back down to hard news, as on the way up, Boomer periodically rolled his funny car’s window down and shouted at the trees, at Maine, at the way life should be, "Good luck!"

Environmental disasters. Assassination. God. Government. There’s a cat, a fox, and a hawk stalking my chickens. Not to mention the farmer.

"Good luck!" Boomer booms, and you can hear him clear across the country.

——————————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Taqueria Reina’s. It has the cheesiest chiles rellenos ever, very good carnitas, and excellent salsa. My only complaint was we had to eat with gloves on, it was so cold in there. And speaking of cheesy, there were Mexican soap operas instead of soccer on TV.

TAQUERIA REINA’S

Daily, 9 a.m.–11:45 p.m.

5300 Mission, SF

(415) 585-8243

Takeout available

Beer

Careers & Ed: Paid by Pandora

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› culture@sfbg.com

Before Tim Westergren founded the Music Genome Project and Pandora, an online radio station–music recommendation site that’s developed a cultlike following, he had no idea what he was going to do for a living. After all, how do you prepare for a job that doesn’t exist yet?

He wasn’t like the scores of people who go through school with specific goals in mind — for instance, major in computer science or business administration, get an entry-level position, start climbing the corporate ladder to become an engineer or manager, and acquire a 401(k).

No, for the venture capitalist, for the entrepreneur, life is more abstract. Westergren’s career path was blazed on a hunch and an intense passion for music, which he’d loved ever since learning to play piano in the suburbs of Paris as a child.

"It’s more, kind of, personal instinct," Westergren said when asked how he found his niche. "Looking around thinking, ‘OK, the problem that I have and that all my friends and everyone I know has is that they love music but they have a hard time finding new stuff.’ That’s the problem that just about every single adult faces. I also knew, as a musician, that there was an awful lot of really great music around that nobody was hearing because it was all buried. And so I figured, ‘Gosh, there’s got to be an opportunity in there of connecting those two.’<0x2009>"

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?


If you don’t happen to be one of the many people who have already pledged their allegiance to Pandora’s wide selection of music and uncanny ability to predict what other artists you might like, let me explain.

At its simplest, Pandora is Internet radio with a brain. Signing up is free and surprisingly quick. Then you choose an artist or song as your "station," and music begins to play. Each successive song is chosen by Pandora, creating a customized streaming playlist based on the attributes of the songs you’ve chosen (and on whether or not you like the songs the site chooses for you). If you like Manu Chao, Pandora might play Los Cafres next. If you start a station around Weezer, Pandora might recommend a song by Jimmy Eat World. If you like Prince, you’ll probably soon be jamming to the Time. And if your Nine Inch Nails station is playing too much hard, dark Marilyn Manson, you can give feedback that’ll lead the station toward a more melodic NIN relative, like Tool.

It’s this system — the combination of radio station and the Music Genome Project, which offers carefully crafted music recommendations based on your tastes — that sets Pandora’s suggestions apart from those of other music sites.

"We’ve created a taxonomy of musical attributes that kind of collectively describe a song," Westergren said, sitting in the main room of Pandora’s headquarters, which looks like a computer lab crossed with a record store thanks to rows of computer stations backdropped by stacks of CDs. He showed me an example, clicking on a tune by Chet Baker at one of the stations. A form popped up on the flat screen, filled with about 40 drop-down menu fields rating musical characteristics. One, for example, says "Fixed to Improvised" and lets the user rate a song from 1 to 10 on that scale. A graphic at the bottom of the screen shows that this is the first of seven pages.

"An analyst goes through and scores each one of these, one by one," Westergren said. Around him the stations were speckled with sleepy-eyed musicians clutching Monday-morning coffee cups, while downtown Oakland glistened through large windows. "So in the end, they have a collection of about 400 individual pieces of musical information about the song. Everything about melody and harmony, rhythm and instrumentation, etc. And it’s this sort of musical DNA that connects songs on Pandora. So when you type a song in, it’s using this information to create playlists."

The criteria for these selections, much like Westergren’s qualifications for steering this funky music boat across the World Wide Web, have been gathered from scratch.

MUSIC BUSINESS


Born in Minneapolis, Westergren moved to France with his family when he was six years old. He went to high school in England, where he sang in a choir and learned a smattering of instruments: clarinet, bassoon, drums, and the recorder. But school in Europe was too tracked for his tastes, and by age 16 he knew he wanted to return to the United States. In college he majored in political science but kept finding himself drawn further into music.

"I tried a bunch of things out. The last couple of years, though, I really got deep into music and recording technology," Westergren said. With his tousled hair and green sweater, the 41-year-old has the clean-cut but cool appearance you’d expect of an Internet executive. "I went to Stanford as an undergrad, and there’s a place there called the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. It’s a place where science and music come together. There’s a lot of study of sound and sound creation and sound recording, and I [practically] lived there my senior year."

After graduating in ’88 and working as a nanny for several years, he began practicing piano eight hours a day, studying with jazz pianist Mark Levine in Berkeley, and performing at the Palo Alto Holiday Inn. But he always played in rock bands, which he says aren’t that different from start-up companies, and moved to San Francisco to be closer to the nightlife. He began writing jingles for radio ads; it was a short step from there to composing soundtracks for student films.

"The idea for the Music Genome Project, the whole sort of foundation for Pandora, actually was really hatched when I was a film composer. Because when you’re a film composer your job is to figure out someone else’s taste. So you’ll sit down with a film director with a stack of CDs and play stuff for them and try and learn what they like about music," Westergren said. "Then, as a composer, you’ve got to go back to your recording studio and write a piece of music they’ll like. So what you’re doing is, you’re transutf8g that feedback into musicological information."

But this was all just pointing in the right direction. There was still no road map, no clear way of making a musical-taste machine profitable. About this time, Westergren read an article about Aimee Mann, the singer-songwriter you may remember for sacrificing her toe in The Big Lebowski or for covering Harry Nilsson’s "One" for Magnolia. Mann had a decent fan base from her success with the band ‘Til Tuesday, but her record company had shelved her because it didn’t think she could sell enough records.

"It was really that article that prompted me to think, ‘Wow, if there was a way to let people who like her kind of music know that she had a new album coming out, then maybe she’d release her albums, because you could find the fan base.’ That was the original idea: to help connect artists with their audience," Westergren said.

In 1999 he started developing that idea. He sought the business advice of Jon Kraft, a friend from college. Kraft tapped Will Glaser for his computer expertise, and the trio began moving forward with the Music Genome Project, forming Savage Beast Technologies, the name still emblazoned on Pandora’s software today.

"We weren’t originally a radio station. In the beginning we were actually a recommendation tool," Westergren said. "You know how Amazon has ‘If you buy this book, you should also read these books?’ We thought we were going to be that kind of a recommendation tool used on other sites to help people find stuff."

The company got its first push in January 2000, when a few angel investors, or wealthy individuals, loaned it enough money to start developing software. It was on its way, but there was still no clear moneymaking mechanism, and for years the company ran on faith and credit cards. After a while cofounders Glaser and Kraft decided they had to move on. Westergren stuck with the project and kept looking for investors.

"I had been pitching venture funds for a couple of years. I had pitched over 300 times to different venture firms. I didn’t get a yes until 2004," Westergren said.

That was when Pandora.com was created, the Music Genome Project was plugged into personalized radio stations, ad space started selling, and revenue began to flow. It’s also when Westergren’s idea was paired with the shift the Internet has taken toward interactive marketing. Today Pandora has offices in Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York and sells ads connected to sounds that consumers like — and therefore products to consumers. The field of interactive marketing is booming, and Westergren says anyone looking to break into Internet radio should first look into a background in advertising.

Then again, you could just follow his example: use your instincts and see what develops.

Tim Westergren is traveling the country promoting Pandora with town hall meetings. See blog.pandora.com/pandora for information.

Great Scott!

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Though orchestra leader and electronics pioneer Raymond Scott may not exactly have been a household name, his sonic inventiveness succeeded in seeping across the larger social synapse of America’s television generation. Credited with founding 20th-century music’s dubiously named exotica genre — a kind of pop counterpart to art brut that included everything from Claude Debussy’s Javanese tribalism to Clara Rockmore’s theremin, Arthur Lyman’s vibes and chimes to electronic voice phenomena séances — Scott created a corpus that was as unique as it was bizarre.

In fact, Scott’s variety of assorted musical approaches was extraordinary: he composed everything from syncopated so-called cartoon jazz to proto-synthesizer radio jingles to ambient albums for toddlers. "The concept of electronic music for babies in the early 1960s usually strikes folks as either extremely clever and useful or totally insane," says Jeff Winner, aficionado, RaymondScott.com archivist, and coproducer of many Scott reissues. And truly, Scott’s role as a radiophonic designer and a thoroughly American surrealist in the autodidactic tradition of Joseph Cornell or Stan Brakhage is unparalleled in the almanac of recorded music.

It’s appropriate, then, that this new year marks the centennial anniversary of the birth of a man in whose absence the ether of the 20th century may have sounded radically different — or, at the very least, would have had fewer blurbs, blips, and zoinks. In celebration, the Raymond Scott Archive and Basta Records — the geniuses behind the comprehensive Manhattan Research Inc. (2000) and the 1997 reissue of Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby, Volumes 1–3 (Epic, 1963) — are planning a yearlong audio bacchanal that will revisit every major era in the composer’s 50-year career. According to Winner, this will include the release of a documentary by Scott’s only son, Stan Warnow; a series of electronic and jazz rarities recordings; and live tribute concerts on the East and West Coasts.

Born Harry Warnow in 1908 to a Jewish Russian immigrant family in New York City, Scott pursued his early passion for science and music by attending a local Brooklyn technical school before entering the Institute of Musical Art (later the Juilliard School) in the late 1920s. He began his professional career as an in-house musician at CBS, where he worked in varying capacities for the television and radio network — as a session man, orchestra conductor, and creative director — for decades.

In the interim, the always resourceful musician recruited five compeers and formed the Raymond Scott Quintette — so called because, according to Scott, using the correct "<0x2009>‘sextet’ might get your mind off music." Under Scott’s direction, the Quintette produced a striking oeuvre that blended the compositional and stylistic aesthetic of big band jazz, the amorphous motifs of soundtrack and sound effects records, and the playful narratives of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. The song titles alone are surrealism in miniature — "New Year’s Eve in a Haunted House," "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals," "In an Eighteenth Century Drawing Room," and Scott’s most celebrated and oft-repeated piece, "Powerhouse." So successful were these instrumentals that within months of their debut the Quintette were contracted with 20th Century Fox to score major motion pictures. These songs would also become the adolescent soundtrack of Saturday morning after Warner Bros. secured the rights to the Quintette’s catalog in 1943 and Warner musical director Carl Stalling inserted huge swathes of Scott’s work into the immensely popular Looney Tunes.

Using the generous salary from his work at CBS, Scott bankrolled his own electronics studio — a sort of junior BBC Radiophonic Workshop — which he christened Manhattan Research in 1946. Though its initial function was to produce radio ads and jingles, the Long Island, NY, laboratory’s true purpose was to develop unheard and unimagined forms of electromechanical and synthesized tones. Predating the widespread use of integrated circuits and analog synthesis, the photocell tone generators and polyphonic sequencers constructed at Manhattan Research were completely unprecedented in sound technology.

"Given the amazing, tiny, and cheap technology that’s everywhere today, it’s a real challenge for us moderns to appreciate how difficult and s-l-o-w the process was," Winner explains. "It was always laborious, tedious, and extremely time-consuming. Designing, theorizing, soldering, then testing…. Wiring, rewiring, and testing again and again…. Hour after hour, year after year — literally — decade after decade."

The records spawned from these contraptions — the Clavivox, the Electronium, and the Circle Machine — often consisted of limpid pools of sustained sound multitracked with sharp sine wave helices and processed glitches. The almost childlike primitivism and free-form tonality that template Scott’s work bely its enchanting subtlety, prefiguring the kraut rock pastoralism of Brian Eno and the lush microtones of contemporary digital artists Christian Fennesz and Nobukazu Takemura. In fact, Winner recalls that when a colleague introduced Eno to Scott’s music years ago, Eno "was indeed impressed. He agreed that some of Scott’s electronic music is similar to some of his own."

Though his success as a producer and inventor was subordinated to his very popular role as an orchestra conductor and jazzman — creating a kind of night-and-day personality that alternated between the smiling TV bandleader and the dial-twisting mad scientist — Scott continued his nocturnal research unabated. Along the way, the once-gregarious musician became more obsessive and secretive regarding his unwieldy instruments, some of which extended wall to wall with their untranslatable, blinking consoles.

The fruits of his labor only became clear later, as the impact of Scott’s brilliance was measured in the younger technologists and musicians who joined his mission in the ’50s and ’60s. Budding musical technician Robert Moog began working with Scott long before he invented the first modular synthesizer that bears his name. Motown impresario Berry Gordy was so impressed with Scott’s mysterious Electronium that he recruited the inventor to the label’s expanding R&D department and bankrolled Manhattan Research’s 1971 move to California, where Scott would spend his final professional years toiling unapologetically on the apparatus.

"During [those years,] among the very few who were thinking about electroinstruments, no one foresaw a consumer market for hardware," Winner explains of Scott’s lifelong work. "Almost no one wanted those kinds of sounds yet." With this centennial celebration — and a bevy of new studio discoveries — Scott’s work may finally be recognized for its uncompromising beauty and understood as the revolving soundtrack for a century of technology and dreams, human and machine.

Year in Film: The other side of the mirror

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Is defining I’m Not There the same thing as defending it? Todd Haynes’s kaleidoscopic antibiography of, to quote the tagline, "the music and many lives of Bob Dylan" has inspired all sorts of platitudes since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, so many that it’s hard not to feel late for the party only a few months after. Still, the fact remains: from listening to Biograph cassettes in the backseat of my mom’s car to reading Greil Marcus’s visionary accounts of The Basement Tapes and "Like a Rolling Stone," I’ve had Dylan on my mind, always prepared to apprehend another side of him.

It’s hard not to feel privileged watching I’m Not There as both a Dylan enthusiast and a cinephile. You can read it between the lines of an erudite review like J. Hoberman’s — didja catch the references to Suze Rotolo and Masculine Feminine? So then, a solipsistic designation for a solipsistic movie: I’m Not There is a catalog and a critique, a hall of mirrors, multivalent and prismatic, like Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) turned inside out. It is epigrammatic rather than evocative, and made to be written about.

It is also a twisted kind of biopic, something worth noting with everyone from Ray Charles to Scott Walker getting the treatment. The fad for music biopics and documentaries isn’t unrelated to the tendency toward remakes and tie-ins now apparent everywhere in the entertainment business. Only a couple of years after Walk the Line and Ray, some biopic conventions are already brittle enough to encourage both a throwaway parody like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and a hardcore dissertation like I’m Not There (the films have more in common than you might think). Haynes takes the biopic’s tendency toward flashback-reliant storytelling, for instance, and transforms it into a looping, fractured portrait. Name-dropping is the biopic’s natural territory, but Haynes’s esoteric (Moondog in the opening credits) and cryptic (it’s alright, Ma, it’s only Ritchie Havens) references only add to his film’s foggy rendition.

This is as it should be with Dylan, the singer who at the tender age of 22 began a protest song with the lyric "Oh my name it is nothing, my age it means less." The feedback loops produced by the film’s strategy of quotation and fragmentation work to elucidate Dylan’s critical velocity, the way his different eras seem both terminal (the electric Dylan played by Cate Blanchett is shown in a morgue, and there are intimations that other versions of him are dead too) and porous. Where other music biopics seek to ground a singer’s aura in terms of biography and motif, Haynes runs in the opposite direction, prioritizing an abstract organizing principle like that of D.W. Griffith’s innovative 1916 foray into multiplanar cinematic storytelling, Intolerance.

It should be noted that Weinstein’s ad campaign pointedly undercuts Haynes’s game. Dylan only materializes twice — in text during the opening credits and in person for the movie’s final, mesmerizing close-up — but the I’m Not There poster lists the main cast with the misleading line "All are Bob Dylan."

Blatant Oscar pandering? Perhaps. But what does it say that some of my favorite sequences in I’m Not There are the most conventional? Haynes accesses the "romantic" Dylan of Blonde on Blonde–New Morning–Blood on the Tracks with an interesting Russian-doll trick — Heath Ledger’s Robbie Clark is introduced as an actor portraying Jack Rollins (The Times They Are A-Changin’ Dylan, played by Christian Bale) in a biopic within the biopic titled Grain of Sand. With the exception of an Arthur Rimbaud insert, Robbie is the only Dylan facsimile who never plays a guitar, and this makes sense since the Dylan of "I Want You," "Shelter from the Storm," and "Idiot Wind" always seemed more man than musician. Meanwhile, Robbie’s thorny relationship with Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) provides I’m Not There with some desperately needed warmth. A François Truffaut–ish meeting in a diner, a montage of bohemian New York, and a divorce in the late-day light of the Richard Nixon era: they’re all strands of a singular story, which is exactly what I’m Not There is not.

I felt fully prepared to dig Haynes’s panoply, and after seeing the movie three times I’m pretty sure I do. In its constant double-edged critiques and heady invocations of the nonexistent, I’m convinced the film represents one of the most energetic (and perhaps cathartic) directing performances of the year. And yet something’s lost in I’m Not There‘s reshuffling of the biopic deck. Dylan has indeed spent much of his career putting us on, but this is only one part of his impact, with the other more elemental component encompassing the sound of his voice, the exciting bite of his phrasing, and the lightning crack that opens "Like a Rolling Stone."

These sparks of electricity are, after all, the kind of thing rock biopics were made for. The brute power of cinema is such that with a Dolby soundtrack, heavy close-ups, and a gliding camera, even the hammiest dramatization can achieve moments of rock ‘n’ roll bliss. Insofar as Anton Corbijn’s portrait of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis (Control) prizes re-creation over fragmentation, it might fairly be seen as the polar opposite of Haynes’s broken mirror. Corbijn takes the biopic conceit of mimicry to dizzying, self-aware heights thanks to location shooting, a performer (Sam Riley) who learned to match Curtis’s every twitch, and brilliant cinematography evocative of Corbijn’s own iconic photographs of the band.

Control is very good, with excellent acting and convincing performance scenes (two things that go a long way toward making a satisfying rock biopic), though it fails where biopics typically do. Indeed, it’s always a bad sign when a voice-over is introduced more than an hour into a movie. As Curtis shuts down, Corbijn flails to unpack the singer’s psychology, and the voice-over contrivance only fudges the moment of Curtis’s maximum anguish. Still, there is at least one unforgettable scene here — when Curtis stalks the street toward his day job, the soundtrack raw with punk, a graceful camera turn revealing the back of his jacket, emblazoned in chalky white with the word "HATE" — that offers the euphoric, sexy blast that is so often lost in I’m Not There‘s complex din.

There are other forms of music biopic, including the kind that’s genuinely happy to take liberties (see: 8 Mile, Almost Famous). Kurt Cobain about a Son sounded like an interesting experiment on paper, with a soundtrack culled from Michael Azerrad’s late-night interviews with Cobain jutting up against lyrical images from the Pacific Northwest. But the film is ultimately soured by its unresolved discrepancies (it’s hard to make out what such self-consciously pretty images are doing running under Cobain’s gravely, often vitriolic voice-over) and its discussion-ending lack of original Nirvana music. Cobain relates his thrill at hearing "Love Buzz" on college radio for the first time, and we listen to … Iggy Pop?

What does it say about Cobain’s legacy that both cinematic attempts at his life (the other being Gus Van Sant’s evocative 2005 Last Days) have been narrated from such a remove? For one thing, that the slightest morsel of Kurt is good enough to buy distribution. The parade continues, leading one to compile a wish list of future biopic subjects. Arthur Russell, maybe, or perhaps Nina Simone? Cat Power, a.k.a. Chan Marshall, is certainly building toward a good one with all of those onstage breakdowns behind her, and I’d like nothing better than for Haynes to take an honest crack at Karen Dalton or Judee Sill. What of Big Star, John Fahey, Tropicália’s icons, Elizabeth Cotten, Galaxie 500 (directed by Andrew Bujalski), or the Mamas and the Papas? And won’t someone think of poor Donovan, patiently waiting his turn ever since being put down by you know who in Don’t Look Back? *

MAX GOLDBERG’S BAKER’S DOZEN

ON BEAUTY


•<\!s>Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, US/France)

•<\!s>Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany)

•<\!s>En la Ciudad de Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, Spain)

•<\!s>Boarding Gate (Olivier Assayas, France)

•<\!s>In Between Days (Kim So-yong, US/Canada/South Korea)

REMNANTS OF THE REAL


•<\!s>Useless (Jia Zhangke, China)

•<\!s>My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)

•<\!s>V.O. (William E. Jones, US)

•<\!s>The Unforeseen (Laura Dunn, US)

NERVOUS NIGHTMARES


•<\!s>Zodiac (David Fincher, US)

•<\!s>Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

•<\!s>Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands/Germany/Belgium)

•<\!s>No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US)

Year in Film: Beauty lies

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Unsettling subjects such as fatality by bestiality and landscapes ravaged by industry might conjure coarse, sensationalist images — straightforward visions of debauchery and exploitation. But if you are Robinson Devor or Jennifer Baichwal, they conjure bittersweet visual poetry: Devor’s Zoo and Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes are two stunning documentaries released this year that cleverly wield visual beauty to convey an apparent distortion in the human relationship with animals and with the environment, respectively.

Just as there are horror films and melodramas that use intensity and abrasiveness as crutches to make transitory impressions on their audiences, there are well-intentioned social-issue documentaries that amplify atrocity in order to shock viewers into caring. Zoo and Manufactured Landscapes are refreshing and poignant for countering this impulse. They are from the school of subtlety — not subtlety of content, but of form.

Zoo‘s opening shot seems to encapsulate its spirit of patient, elegant reveal. A prick of blue light amid blackness slowly expands and comes into focus as the blue-washed tunnel of a mine where the film’s first narrator — Coyote, a paramedic — worked before he made his way to Washington. It is a scene that contains a discomfort vague enough to be missed, as if we are gradually homing in on a world that will prove unpleasant. The mine’s elongated confinement also portends the halls of the grand stable where mischief occurs later in the film. Concomitantly, the music begins as a delicate support and escalates into a complex, slightly unnerving amalgamation of sounds, including those of a computer modem. The use of a computer’s noises of labor is meaningful because it prerelates to one zoophile’s explanation of how important the Internet was to the solidification of the group that is the film’s focus.

It is partially Zoo‘s structure that lends it an air of elegant subtlety. There is a linear story being told, from the online discovery to the convergence in Washington to the main event and its aftermath, but within that conventional structure is a fluid, relaxed traveling between narrators that has a less obvious logic. This befits the visual style, which is a poetic approximation of events rather than a recording of actuality. Bits of perspective from the various players cohere with a pacing and an order that feel carefully calculated to mimic the way in which uncertainty is slowly dispelled and truth, while withholding promises, comes into focus, fragment by irregular fragment.

Zoo glides between members of the zoophile group and a horse rescuer, a radio show host, and a politician, who all — in varying manners — offer commentary confronting the offensiveness of the men’s behavior. The film’s lightness is largely a result of its minimal contextualization and identification of location and character, as well as its refusal of a rigidly organized rise to climax. When the subjects of its investigation appear in the film at all, it is in an indirect manner. Actors fill in for the condemned men, liquidly guiding viewers through events, but faces are unimportant. Voices, which exude a certain ease even when confidence gives way to defensiveness or befuddlement, are the integral thread in the film’s subjectivity. Zoo features the voices of H and the Happy Horseman, two participants on the ranch, and does an exquisite job of extracting bits of anecdote and emotional response that give a full account with very little. There is a wise reticence here, like a conversation between lifelong friends who speak uninhibitedly but with the understanding that all need not be vocalized. The viewer, as if the film’s friend, can fill in gaps and mentally expand on the subjects’ pointed statements.

There are moments in Zoo when harshness or avidness peeks through the mostly even tones of the voices, such as when a local senator declares that animals — like children — cannot consent to sex with men, but this is diffused by quiescent visuals, the absence of a physical presence, and a refusal to linger on or delve further into these objections. Similarly, Manufactured Landscapes skirts a direct and impassioned address of the offense against humans and nature that it depicts and relies more on the awe of imagery and fastidiously selected and placed bits of commentary. Edward Burtynsky, the photographer whose work the film extends and considers, explains that he wants his daunting photographs of dramatically botched landscapes to be left to viewers’ interpretation. The role of the artist is to competently capture and present in a way that encourages discourse rather than to project a prefabricated message or force a critique.

In Manufactured Landscapes, Baichwal’s vision is consistent with Burtynsky’s. Her video footage of devastation such as that associated with the Three Gorges Dam and gargantuan mounds of e-waste, both in China, is accompanied by Burtynsky’s narration, which contains a rather discreet lament but foregrounds a more ambiguous combination of fact and feeling. A notable difference between her product and his is that hers includes the process of his, so in her film we are able to see that he choreographs the laborers in his photographs. Toward the beginning, he directs the innumerable yellow-clad Chinese workers on the premises of a huge factory, seemingly creating symmetry to convey the atmosphere of this immense and oppressive world. Also, Baichwal uses the clever device of pulling out of a site that Burtynsky photographs to reveal his picture hanging in an upscale gallery. In this way the viewer is delivered a powerful juxtaposition — a suggestion of the conflicted, perhaps ridiculous, consumption of these ironically beautiful photographs by the privileged people who can only relate to the images through their vague complicity in the dusty and oily oppressions of globalization.

It is mostly the visual style — the exquisiteness of the shots — that renders the reception of these films frustrating in a rewarding way; it is a frustration of sensibility and of fundamental sentiments about human nature. Burtynsky briefly comments on the symbolism of the gigantic ships under construction that he photographs in Bangladesh — ships that are built by teenagers who are up to their necks in oil, working in life-risking conditions, and that are used to deliver the oil he uses for his art and transportation. As in other scenes of the film, he and Baichwal enact a subtly sinister symbolism to nudge viewers toward absorbing the absurdity of development without empathy. One triumph of their work is that they slyly fuse concern for the environment (as in alien landscapes blistered with toxins) with concern for fellow humans (as in foreign factory workers who assemble our consumables). Another gorgeous and telling image is of an endless heap of computer parts of various shapes and sizes. It resembles an art installation of some sort, but as the camera slowly pulls out, a gasp forms in reaction to the heap’s vastness, and the viewer learns that the Chinese who rummage for valuable metal are exposing themselves to toxic metals that also make their way into their water.

In Zoo the visual style is more a product of finding a literal representation of the story being recounted and presenting it as a pleasing near-abstraction. Both Devor’s film and Baichwal’s feature a visual poeticism that threatens to detach viewers from the repugnance of reality; but because Zoo is such a cinematic construction, it is particularly susceptible to this numbing effect. So, when it shows a soft-focus, high-lit close-up of blackberries on their thorny vine or a snorting Arabian horse twice framed by square barn windows in the rich blue of evening, it is easy to forget for a moment that the narrators speak of a horse repetitively puncturing his eyes, or of the methods of forced submission.

Because Devor seems to have established a pact with his audience that he will only convey these acts through photo-book semblances of offensiveness, it is especially jolting and seemingly a betrayal when he actually reveals glimpses of bestial sex as the camera pivots around a half circle of flabbergasted witnesses to a video record. Zoo seems to be mocking the audience for wanting this salacious moment, and Devor withholds satiation. He also seems to be playing with the boundaries of effective reveal and withholding and their relationship to juxtaposition. Are these flashes of difficult-to-fathom sex more potent when surrounded by poetic suggestion? Are they a betrayal of the audience, and, if so, are they a meaningful betrayal?

Zoo shares contemplative aerials and slow, smooth pans with Manufactured Landscapes, and these seem integral to the films’ peculiar sort of poeticism. Their aerial views are not the informational establishing shots one would expect from straightforward documentaries, but almost ethereal windings through the air. Rural Washington and a pretzel-like Chinese highway system seem softly haunting, both suggestive of a subterranean depravity of sorts that the filmmakers are hinting toward. The calm control of the gliding camera is more apt to lull than unsettle, but this is counterbalanced by its uneasy turns and a voice-over that, in Zoo, ironically tells of the community’s innocence and, in Manufactured Landscapes, earnestly considers the film’s thematic ill.

Likewise, in Zoo, when the camera languidly pans across peacefully grazing horses in a pasture at night while a horse rescuer describes the profound relationship she has with these beasts, there is a cool, ironic innocence undercutting the otherwise soothing shot. In Manufactured Landscapes, Baichwal’s memorably interminable opening pan across a colossal Chinese factory serves a more direct purpose, but it also creates the same sort of ironic beauty that runs through Devor’s movie. The grace present in these shots may glaze over the horror they convey for some viewers at certain moments, but the manner in which this grace galvanizes a sense of horror that reverberates deeply and authentically after viewing is more interesting. *

KEVIN LANGSON’S TOP 10

1. Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, Canada)

2. Sicko (Michael Moore, US)

3. The Witnesses (André Téchiné, France)

4. Zoo (Robinson Devor, US)

5. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Sidney Lumet, US)

6. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US)

7. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, Malaysia/China/Taiwan/France/Austria)

8. Protagonist (Jessica Yu, US)

9. Buddha’s Lost Children (Mark Verkerk, Netherlands)

10. The Other Side (Bill Brown, US)

Politics as cryptography

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› news@sfbg.com

In his new book, Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America’s Original Vision (Berrett-Koehler), author and Air America radio personality Thom Hartmann offers a how-to manual for expressing political viewpoints. He says the left’s struggles are not the fault of liberalism as an ideology; the problem is that many liberal politicians simply do not know how to talk to people.

Part self-help book, part populist polemic, Code puts our country’s political discourse under the knife and dissects how master communicators like Bill Clinton, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan won elections by talking their way deep into voters’ consciousnesses. He spoke with me by phone.

SFBG The poet Muriel Rukeyser said, "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." You have a similar view of the political universe, don’t you?

THOM HARTMANN Story is the way we transmit culture. Story is the way we remember things…. The story we call politics is the story of how to best accomplish the common good.

SFBG In Cracking the Code, you trace the lineages of the modern conservative and liberal stories to two philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

TH The conservative worldview is grounded in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. You could argue that the Adam and Eve story is an early articulation of it as well. This [story] suggests that people are intrinsically evil, and because of that we have to find the most meritorious, the few who are good, and put them in charge. And small-d democracy with a lot of people participating is not such a good idea….

The liberal story came out of John Locke, but also [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau and eventually Thomas Jefferson. It says the vast majority of people are good and therefore collective wisdom can be trusted. The more people that participate in democracy the better. That’s why the liberal founders of this country put "We the People" as the first three words of the Constitution. It wasn’t "Us the meritorious few, us the ones who are in charge." It was "We the People."

SFBG You say that after Sept. 11, George W. Bush was able to get even liberals to buy into the conservative story. Do you believe it’s still a powerful enough narrative to bring another Republican into the White House?

TH Yes, I think it’s possible. Particularly if we don’t have Democrats stand up and say, "I’m not afraid anymore." I’m still waiting for a Democrat to stand up like Franklin Roosevelt did and say, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and we will not be frightened."

We’re wired for survival first and foremost. The reptile brain is the most primitive part of our brain. [It] is where fear is processed, and it’s all-powerful. So those people who motivate us with fear and danger are, over the short term anyway, typically going to have success. The problem is, it’s sort of like whipping a horse, these "moving away from pain" strategies. The more often you whip a horse, it’s going to go faster and faster until it hits a limit, and then it’s going to fall over dead…. At some point people say, "Wait a minute, you’re fearmongering. You’re the little boy who cried wolf."

SFBG You speak in the book about effective communication inducing a kind of trance.

TH If you want to teach somebody something, they have to be in a kind of trance state. And I refer to the techniques for bringing that on as "inducing the learning trance." Mostly these have to do with pacing and using different modalities as you speak.

The big mistake that John Kerry made against George [W.] Bush in 2004 was that he induced a boredom trance while Bush induced a feeling trance. Bush communicated feelings. They were clumsy, yes, but that made it more intense, frankly. Kerry communicated ideas and concepts. But people don’t vote on ideas and concepts. They vote based on their feelings.

SFBG Ronald Reagan was pretty much the master at appealing to emotion, wasn’t he?

TH Ronald Reagan, FDR, and Jack Kennedy were three of the greatest communicators that we’ve had in the White House…. What made them great was, first of all, their ability to be multimodal in their communication. They talked about their vision for America, they talked about their story of America, and they gave America a sense of what they thought it could be.

Number two, they all principally used "moving towards pleasure" strategies instead of "moving away from fear" or "pain avoidance" strategies. In other words, they held up an ideal of what we wanted to move towards as a country and made us proud of ourselves.

Number three, they communicated emotion and always used story and emotion to pass along information.

SFBG You point out how Reagan picked up one of Kennedy’s themes, which Kennedy himself picked up from John Winthrop: the "America as a city on a hill" theme. Except Reagan inserted a key word into its phrasing, didn’t he?

TH Yes, shining. He dramatically improved the "America as a city on the hill" metaphor by making us a shining city on a hill. He put that word in, and it gave the image even more power.

What’s interesting is … Reagan’s notion of America as the city on the hill was very different than Kennedy’s. John Kennedy’s idea of the city on a hill was that the entire world is looking at [America], and every single one of us in the country is the city. From the highest and best to the poorest economically, we are all part of that city on the hill, and we welcome people in to participate in it. Reagan, on the other hand, his version of the city on the hill was we’re the castle, we’re the fortress, we’re the place where Cinderella the lowly commoner hopes one day to get in and dance with the prince.

SFBG I noticed your Wikipedia page says you campaigned for Barry Goldwater in your youth.

TH When I was 13 years old, my dad was active in the local Republican Party, and I went door-to-door with him. I read [Goldwater’s] autobiography Conscience of a Conservative [Victor Publishing Co., 1960]…. I even went to a John Birch Society meeting. I was convinced that the communists had infiltrated the State Department and they were coming to get us. But within two years I had completely shaken myself out of that trance. There’s nothing like growing up, going off to college, and discovering that you’re of draft age and your government wants to kill you. Not to mention being exposed to ideas beyond what I had learned up to that point, [like] the core concepts of the Enlightenment.

SFBG So you heard a different story.

TH Exactly, and I lived a different story. I really saw America differently the first time one of my friends came back in a box from Vietnam.

SFBG My mother is a big fan of your radio show. But she lives in San Diego, and the Air America affiliate there is either going off the air or has already gone off the air.

TH It went off the air last week, actually.

SFBG Can you talk about the future of progressive media in light of that kind of setback?

TH The first two or three years that conservative talk radio was on the air, it struggled terribly. But then it reached the point where advertisers realized they were getting results and program directors realized that they had a core listenership, and it started to take off….

In the next year or few years I think there’s going to be a broad perception shift across radiodom that beyond the ongoing feast and famine of Air America, liberal talk radio is here to stay…. Right now the conventional wisdom [for program directors] is "nobody ever got fired for putting Rush Limbaugh on the air." When the conventional wisdom becomes "nobody ever got fired for putting Thom Hartmann on the air," then everything will change, and I think we’re very close to that.

There will be blood

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› Kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Bay Area, puh-leeze: can you get up, pull your shirt back over your treasured chest, trot your bad ‘elf over to the bar, and fetch me another New Year’s Eve teeny pomegranatini? I like them wet and wild and deliciously unsettling, like an extrabratty, ultraseasonal, El Nino–style holiday storm, or like the $1.99 drugstore silver glitter paint I dab on Bay-bee’s claws. And while you’re on your hind legs, kick those ugly Xmas sweaters to the curb along with those faded concert memories of souped-up Daft Punk, daffy Hannah Montana, and residencies by everyone from the Smashing Pumpkins to Morrissey. That heat rash from Coachella has healed nicely, so prepare to hoof with me over those white-watery storm drains toward this year’s choice musical New Year’s Eve entertainments. Yes, Mr. Area, you have to keep your pants on — though you’re allowed to doff the hoodie for the hangover-slung, hard-nippled, underwear-only touch-football game in honor of the first day of ’08. In the meantime, read it and reap.

ROCK OUT TILL A COCK’S OUT


Blowing up your punkoid politico consciousness for more years — and fixed gears — than we can count, This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb explode with post–Buy Nothing Day charm alongside zany Sacto melodikins Bananas at the Hemlock Tavern (www.hemlocktavern.com). Fruit rules! Shades of Josie Cotton: singer-songwriter starlet Katy Perry debuts her "Ur So Gay" laters to an ex in San Francisco at Live 105’s bash at Mezzanine (www.mezzaninesf.com), with Capitol Records kin Blaqk Audio, ever-popular popsters Moving Units, and a Junior Boys DJ set. The mind-blowing antics continue — lovin’ you big time and a long time — as the Mars Volta bust out the electrified and acoustic jams during a seven-hour splashdown at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium (www.livenation.com). Betcha those guys never, never sleep alone. The Eternals, DJ sets by Peanut Butter Wolf and Nobody, and an old-school light show are a few of the big eve’s diversions. Also kicking out the post-punk heavy rawk weather is Alternative Tentacles’ newest Bay band, Triclops!, matching ecstatic earache bouts with the Melvins and wailin’ faves Comets on Fire at Slim’s (www.slims-sf.com). Raising consciousness in bigger rooms for longer than the Internet: Cake take it and bake it at the Warfield (www.livenation.com) alongside the Lovemakers’ dark delights.

BA needs some hair on his pretty pecs, so we’ll ask Old Grandad to put the grizzle in the shizzle and the metal in our muddle at the revived and reopened Bender’s Bar and Grill (www.bendersbar.com). Yet all that hair just won’t do for spunky Scissors for Lefty, who spit-shine and cuten up well-scruffed indie rock at Bottom of the Hill (www.bottomofthehill.com). It’s all about the brothel creepers and rockabilly jeepsters at Big Sandy and His Fly Rite Boys’ showdown at Bimbo’s 365 Club (www.bimbos365club.com) and then the debauched hard rock horseplay at Drunk Horse’s rendezvous at the Stork Club (www.storkcluboakland.com). Got a case of the Jam-a-lamas? Les Claypool’s third annual NYE Hatters Ball Extravaganza can take care of that for you at the Fillmore (www.livenation.com), as can ALO, Animal Liberation Orchestra (www.theindependentsf.com), applying a suave, boogie-based touch. Expect the dudes in untucked striped shirts in force.

Cover me, kid, when Fat Wreck Chords supergroup Me First and the Gimme Gimmes put the punk rock spin on the AM-FM radio dial at Thee Parkside (www.theeparkside.com), whereas Wonderbread 5 yuk it up with oldies at Red Devil Lounge (www.reddevillounge.com). And for the real thing — sorta — old-schooly hardcores with refreshed Germs burns might want to catch the Germs and the Adolescents at the Uptown in Oakland (www.uptownnightclub.com). Still got hair in dire need of a band? Well, if you missed Y&T last NYE at the Avalon in Santa Clara (www.nightclubavalon.com), you can make up for lost time — if not lost locks — with the SF retro metalists and ex–Rainbow howler Graham Bonnet’s Alcatrazz. No escape from the rock, indeedy-do.

SWANKIN’ BEATS


Massive is as massive does: True Skool, Dee Cee’s Soul Shakedown, and Daddy Rollo dreamed up a doozy with "Champions of the Arena 3: Clash of the Titans" downtown at Club Six, though there’s no CGI on dancehall star Shinehead or the Bay’s hip-hop ensemble Crown City Rockers. Expect everything from electro to reggaetón, hip-hop to breaks from DJs like Ren the Vinyl Archaeologist, Apollo, and DJ Sake 1. Uptown, those nice men in Crystal Method make you believe it’s the tweekend once again at Ruby Sky (www.rubyskye.com), lording over — say, what? — Trapezeworld (if the opening night of Kooza was any indicator, this could also be Almost-Slipped-and-Fell-to-the-Death World). School’s out, but Berkeley’s Lyrics Born is in at the Shattuck Down Low (www.shattuckdownlow.com). San Franthizzgo’s electronic new-schoolers Futuristic Prince, Lazer Sword, and Ghosts on Tape gather at Hotel Utah (thehotelutahsaloon.com). Brazilian Girls and Kinky strut sexed-up beats at "Sea of Dreams: Metamorphoseas" at the Concourse Exhibition Center (www.seaofdreamsnye.com). On the bluesier side of the street, expect award-snagging son of a big gun John Lee Hooker Jr. to turn up the temp at Biscuits and Blues (www.biscuitsandblues.com). Creole codgers the Radiators sonically spice BA’s Brut at Cafe du Nord (www.cafedunord), while Topaz cooks up a soul-funk-blues goulash at the Boom Boom Room (www.boomboomblues.com). And throw those jazz hands in the air at the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, ringing it in at Yoshi’s in Oakland, or at local soul songbird Ledisi’s stand with the Count Basie Orchestra at Yoshi’s SF (www.yoshis.com).

So there you have it — don’t Tase me, bro Area — a brief menu of all the flavas of NYE love, with plenty of ear and eye candy for the senses, lots of places to watch the ball drop, and oodles of alleys to toss ye olde cookies in. What more can you want, Bayz? A "decadent breakfast buffet" to go with your $50-plus cover? Just remember, you can stand under my umbrella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh. Under my umbrella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh … [Fade from consciousness] *

Oh no, you’re not: Reimagining the “I’m Not There” soundtrack

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im-not-there-poster sml.bmp

By Marcus Crowder

Ever since listening to that multi-song pileup of a soundtrack for I’m Not There, I’ve been plotting my own alternate album: a compilation, to paraphrase Barry (Jack Black) in **High Fidelity** that does not “suck ass.” To begin with, the pathetic hipster pandering is gone. No Stephen Malkmus, Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, or Mason Jennings. Jack Johnson? Are you fucking kidding me?

Here’s the replacement – a **I’m Not There** soundtrack that should have been: Tunde Adebimpe and TV on the Radio doing “All Along the Watchtower,” Ivy on “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” Dean and Britta doing “I’m Not There,” Kurt Wagner and Lambchop on “Can’t Leave Her Behind,” Mark Eitzel and American Music Club doing “Fourth Time Around,” Greg Dulli on “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Peter Case doing “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol,” Andy Bey on “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Mark Kozolek doing “Mama You’ve Been on My Mind/A Fraction of Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,” and Paul Westerberg on “Maggie’s Farm.” I can live with the rest, even freaking Bob Forrest doing “Moonshiner.”

Gifts for good causes

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› molly@sfbg.com

Everyone loves the two-birds-with-one-stone approach to gift giving: a piece of furniture that covers both Mom and Dad, a pair of event tickets for your SO that means you get to go too, or the ever-popular this-item-is-so-big-it-covers-Christmas-and-your-birthday gift.

But in most cases, this gift-that-keeps-giving approach only benefits you and the giftee. How about letting one of the worthy organizations below in on some of the action? These gifts for good causes will benefit your loved ones and the planet, giving you the gift of a good conscience.

UNDER ONE ROOF


For everything from sleek kitchenware to funky, rainbow-themed holiday ornaments, this HIV/AIDS service provider has it covered with its "A Home for the Holidays" holiday store and event center, through Dec. 31.

2278 Market, SF. www.underoneroof.org

826 VALENCIA


Pirate gear from this Mission District store helps support mentorship programs in writing skills.

826 Valencia, SF. (415) 642-5905, www.826valencia.org

GOLDEN GATE NATIONAL PARKS CONSERVANCY


Books, art, toys, and games from the Crissy Field Warming Hut Bookstore and Café (Presidio Bldg. 983, SF; 415-561-3040), the Crissy Field Bookstore (603 Mason, SF; 415-561-7761), Alcatraz Island Bookstores (415-561-4922), and the Muir Woods Visitor Center (415-388-7368) all benefit the conservancy.

www.parksconservancy.org

CREATIVITY EXPLORED


When you choose the ceramic masks, tiles, handmade pillows, note cards, or other wares at the Creativity Explored Holiday Art Sale going on through Dec. 28, 50 percent of the proceeds go directly to the artist, while the rest helps maintain this nonprofit visual arts center for artists with developmental disabilities.

3245 16th St., SF. (415) 863-2108

ARC OF SAN FRANCISCO


DRAWBRIDGE


Buying ArcAngel holiday cards will benefit Arc of San Francisco, which serves, supports, and advocates for individuals with developmental disabilities. Or get individual cards or 10-packs from San Rafael’s Drawbridge, a program for homeless children. In both cases, the cards are designed by clients.

www.thearcofsanfrancisco.org

www.drawbridge.org

iGIVE


GREATERGOOD


Shopping online doesn’t disqualify you from do-gooding — even if you want to shop at major retailers. Before buying that radio from Best Buy or that towel set from Target, check online malls that donate a portion of proceeds to organizations like the March of Dimes and the Nature Conservancy (at no extra cost to you).

www.igive.com

www.greatergood.com

WORLD OF GOOD


You can also try the more direct approach at World of Good, a Berkeley organization that works with artisan cooperatives around the world to import high-quality goods, like fuzzy scarves from India and olive trays from Tanzania, while providing living wages, safe working conditions, and career stability to the artisans.

www.worldofgood.com

ORGANIC BOUQUETS


If you’re a sending-flowers kind of gifter, try Organic Bouquets, the Marin florist that not only sells and delivers organic flowers, plants, and chocolates online, by phone, and at Whole Foods Markets nationwide but also dedicates a percentage of its profits to charities like the Red Cross and the National Wildlife Federation.

1-877-899-2468, www.organicbouquet.com

FIFTY CROWS FOUNDATION


The purpose of this organization is to effect positive social change through documentary photography. Support it by gifting one of its prints.

49 Geary, Suite 225, SF. (415) 391-6300, www.fiftycrows.org

CASA BONAMPAK


This Mission fair-trade shop’s paper cutouts, party streamers, clothing, and Day of the Dead items are gorgeous — and proceeds support indigenous artisans from Chiapas and central Mexico.

3331 24th St., SF. 1-888-722-4264, www.casabonampak.com

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