CHEAP EATS They said we could stay and eat, but most of the band already had plans for dinner, and loved ones to eat it with, and East Bays to be in, etc. Me and Earl Butter, city dwellers, poor fucks, hungry, looked at each other. We looked at our hostess, and I popped the question: "What’s for dinner?"
By the book, beggars aren’t supposed to be choosers. But did I say we were beggars? No. I said we were poor fucks. We were invitees, and you have to be careful at these places. Sometimes they invite you to stay and eat, and what that means is institutional meatloaf, instant mashed potatoes, over-reheated canned green beans, sliced white bread with margarine, and other things that old people can chew. And that poor fucks like me and Earl Butter eat at home every single day. So what’s the point?
"Hold on. I’ll go ask," our hostess said.
And we finished setting up and played our songs. A sweet woman with black plastic glasses as big around as corn tortillas danced by herself, then with another woman. Then they both danced with a younger guy. Dude with a walker with a small paper plate full of snacks stopped in front of the stage and, oblivious, stood there eating. There were drinks too. A stooped, handsome man with eyes like William Burroughs and maybe Parkinson’s disease was sloshing a glass of red wine all over the white carpet and his white pants.
Rock ‘n’ roll, I thought. Right on! But I still didn’t know what was for dinner, so I got distracted and muffed my solo. It didn’t matter, of course, because nothing does.
When our hostess asked again, afterwards, if we wanted to stay and eat, I said, again, "Um, what’s for dinner?"
"Trout," she said. My eyes must have bugged. "We have a French chef," she explained. "It’s good food."
Goddamn it, now I have to get rich so I can afford to live in one of these places some day when my glasses are as big as tortillas. Just when you think you finally know your place in the world (with the meatloaf) … someone or something (such as trout) bonks you on the head and it’s right back to I-ain’t-good-enough.
I want to eat trout when I’m 90. Slivered almonds, twist of lemon. Side of real mashed potatoes, whipped to perfection, butter butter, and a salad bar. Actually decent coffee …
Forget it, kid. I can barely make my rent. In fact, I can’t. That’s why I had to sublet my place. How am I supposed to sock away savings into my late-life trout account? Forget it!
And Earl Butter’s worse off than I am. We treated this, therefore, like a special occasion. A taste of the good life. Dinner for two on top of Cathedral Hill. At a nursing home, yes — but still it felt almost like a date.
It wasn’t a nursing home. It was the Carlisle Sunrise, an independent-living facility. Meaning the people there can make some choices for themselves. The dining room is more like a restaurant than a cafeteria. Cloth tablecloths.
A man in a suit and tie served us wine. The tomato-basil soup was delicious. And they waited until we had finished our salads before they brought out our trout. Then they showed us a dessert menu.
"I’ll have the mouse," Earl Butter said.
The waitress looked horrified. "Did we misspell it?" she asked, looking over his shoulder at the menu. He’d been flirting with the waitresses all meal long, either ruining the illusion that we were a couple or strengthening it. I can’t decide.
"Kidding!" he said. She laughed. He laughed.
I was disturbed. It had nothing to do with his mice or my cattiness. I was sociologizing. I’d noticed something about the way the old folks were arranged around the room. There was a big, round table in the center, full and boisterous, another cluster of talking, laughing people at one long table, and then a lot of little satellite tables, some with pairs of people, and some with just one.
The woman eating alone at the table closest to ours reminded me of me in high school. And me at camp a couple weeks ago. And I thought that even if I live to be 90, and even if I get rich, and even if I change change change change change … some things just stay a certain way. Probably. And that can be sad. *
You’d think that this was a Republican town, with the way the local news media have been bashing not only the left but also some of the better, more effective, and more functional progressive institutions in San Francisco. I wouldn’t waste my time with this stuff, but there are real issues here.
I woke up Aug. 21 to a San Francisco Chronicle headline proclaiming "Anti-gentrification Forces Stymie Housing Development." The piece, by Robert Selna, opened with the sad, sad tale of a poor auto shop owner who wants to "build eight apartments and condominiums on an empty lot next to his Mission District auto shop and rent some of the apartments to his mechanics."
Well, it turns out that the evil Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition is fighting that plan, Selna reported, "insisting that [the] project not go forward until the city evaluates how new development on the city’s east side will affect industrial land, jobs, and housing."
The message: a little entrepreneur is getting hosed by a big, bad "not in my backyard" group that wants to stop new housing. The implication (and this is just the latest example of this stunning lie): the left in San Francisco is against building housing.
Well, for starters, MAC is playing only a modest sideline role in fighting the 736 Valencia project, a five-story structure that is designated legally for condos and includes no affordable housing. The real opposition is a group called Valencia Neighbors for Community Development. The issue, Valencia neighborhood activist Julie Ledbetter said, is that as many as nine new market-rate housing projects are in the pipeline for a short stretch of Valencia, and they shouldn’t be approved one by one without any regard for the cumulative impact.
MAC activist Eric Quezada told me that the organization has indeed taken the position that the city shouldn’t go forward with any more market-rate housing projects until it’s completed a legally mandated environmental study of the cumulative impacts of high-end condos on displacement, blue-collar jobs, and overall land use.
But that doesn’t mean MAC is against housing.
In fact — and this is the killer here — MAC emerged in the dot-com era almost entirely out of the nonprofit housing community. Some of its earliest and most prominent members were (gasp) housing developers. Just for the record, nonprofits have built something like 25,000 low- and moderate-income housing units in this city in the past 25 years. That is housing the city needs, housing that meets the city’s own clearly stated goals. And the progressives, people like the MAC members, are essentially the only ones who have built any affordable housing in the city at all.
Selna told me that he didn’t write the headline and "isn’t taking sides in this." I realize it’s not all his fault that he’s stumbled into a political hornet’s nest — but he has.
Then in the Aug. 22 SF Weekly, Matt Smith wrote that the left is turning this city into nothing but a tourist trap by promoting "a price-goosing apartment shortage of 30,000 to 70,000 units." That’s what, 140 giant new towers, or 7,000 10-unit buildings … that will go where? And what if (as is likely) rents still don’t come down? (Smith had no comment when I called him.)
And now C.W. Nevius of the Chronicle wants to shut down the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council Recycling Center so that homeless people won’t have any money … and will what — panhandle more aggressively? Break into cars? Makes perfect sense to me.
Kelly Michaels was following the San Francisco dream when she escaped her small Alabama hometown at 17 and hitchhiked westward. It was 1989.
"I had stars in my eyes," Michaels told the Guardian, sitting on the floor of her friend’s small single-room occupancy Tenderloin apartment, hints of a Southern drawl now paired with Tammy Faye mascara and bleached-blonde hair. "When you’re 16 or 17 and have dreams of being famous, you come to California — and you probably end up on Polk Street in drag."
Michaels arrived on Polk with little more than blue jeans, a bra, and rubber falsies to her name, making ends meet as a street sex worker. It wasn’t what she was looking for; the Polk was plagued with drugs and violence. But her dad was embarrassed by his transgendered daughter and didn’t her want her back. The neighborhood was a home.
She found a community at fierce Polk Gulch trans and boy-hustler bars like Q.T. and Reflections, where clientele included one "big, tall, black Egyptian transsexual hell-raiser" known to draw a gun. Scores of boy hustlers "coming in daily from the Greyhound station" danced naked on the bars. At the end of the night, Michaels’s new family members would pool their money and rent a hotel room for $30.
"The bars were the churches, the sanctuaries," Michaels’s friend Terri, an African American man in his 50s, told us. "You weren’t really going to be hassled there."
Not any more. "Polk Street is dead," Michaels told us. "Dead as fuck now."
THE NEW POLK STREET
The new kids on the block are calling it "revitalization."
After the three-decades-old gay bar Kimo’s is transferred to a new owner at the end of September, there will be only two queer bars left on a street that was San Francisco’s gay male center in the 1960s and a gritty, affordable home for low-income queers, trans women, and male sex workers in the following decades. Where scores of hustlers lined up against seedy sex shops and gay bars just a few years ago, crowds of twentysomething Marina look-alikes now clog the sidewalks in front of upscale clubs.
Polk’s queer residents and patrons are now being priced and policed out of their neighborhood — and their city — as business and tourism interests continue to eat away at the city’s center. Lower Polk Gulch, just blocks north of City Hall and one block east of Van Ness, has in the past few years succumbed to multimillion-dollar businesses, upscale lofts, increased rents at SRO hotels and apartments, and a new million-dollar city streetscape beautification plan. The related increase in policing and new efforts to clean up the street is making the area an unwelcoming place for the marginal queers who for so long called it home.
It has been the most down-and-out segments of the queer population — male sex workers, trannies, young people, poor people of color, and immigrants — who have often been the queer population’s boldest and most innovative actors, pushing the movement forward in new ways. What does queer San Francisco lose when our most marginalized members are pushed, policed, and priced out of the city?
HEART OF A COMMUNITY
Michaels stood under a neon purple Divas sign, advertising the three-story transgender club that has stood in Polk Gulch for more than three decades. Divas manager Alexis Miranda, a friend, stepped outside to chat, and a dozen characters from the neighborhood stopped by to shoot the shit. One man rubbed Miranda’s belly through her leopard bodysuit. "This is my baby," he told us jokingly.
Divas is as much a community center as it is a club. Girls from out of town and out of the country know to come to Divas when they step off the boat, plane, or bus. Many trans immigrants make a living as prostitutes, and while Miranda insists that she does not allow them to work inside the club, the close vicinity of San Francisco’s tranny prostitute district has meant tension for Divas.
Miranda told us the police have been targeting the club because of complaints from new merchants. "Some of the people who have new businesses don’t want the people who live here to stay. They want to close us down," she said. "They’re trying to gentrify the neighborhood."
Neville Gittens, a police spokesperson, told us that the San Francisco Police Department performs "regular enforcement in that area" but said any targeted operations cannot be discussed.
Theresa Sparks, a trans woman who chairs the Police Commission, said Miranda made the same claim at the commission meeting Aug. 15. "I don’t know if that’s true or not," Sparks told us. "My intent is to find out what is going on."
Sparks agreed that gentrification is driving trans people out of the Polk Gulch neighborhood: "It is very, very difficult for a transgendered person to survive in this city."
Miranda pointed to a bar across the street. Until 2000, the Lush Lounge was the cruisy trans and hustler bar Polk Gulch Saloon. Now, under a new owner, white twentysomething heterosexuals sip apple pie martinis.
Sonia Khanna, a 28-year-old trans woman with long, curly brown hair and mocha skin told us she doesn’t feel welcome there. "If you’re a tranny, they think you’re a whore," she said.
Miranda said the owner, Steve Black, ejected her when she went to welcome him to the neighborhood. Miranda, a former empress in San Francisco’s Imperial Court System, reported him to the Human Rights Commission. The inquiry was closed when the owner informed the commission that he allows transgendered people into the bar. He didn’t deny tossing out Miranda; he said he just disliked her personally.
The bigger problem may be the neighborhood’s increased property values. Divas owner and Polk Gulch resident Steve Berkey told us that rents have pushed out other established queer businesses on Polk. The only reason Divas stays open is that he owns the building. "It used to be that so many girls lived in the neighborhood," he said. "They packed the place. But now rents have driven them off."
CENTER OF THE STORM
The reasons behind the death of the queer Polk are complex, likely including the ascendance of the Internet as a social networking tool, rising property costs, and the aging of the bars’ core clientele and owners. But most of the community’s rancor has focused on the most visible manifestation of change: neighborhood associations representing new, upscale businesses working with police and the city to clean up the streets.
At the center of the storm is a glass-walled architecture studio at the bottom of Polk Gulch, around the corner from Divas. Two freshly planted palm trees in front of the studio are conspicuous on a site next door to a bleak, institutional homeless shelter outfitted with security cameras and across the street from a porn shop promising "Hot Bareback Action!"
Case+Abst Architects has been the workplace and home of husband and wife Carolyn Abst and Ron Case since they were lured by the area’s low cost in 1999. The trees were the first of 40 planted in a campaign they initiated last year as cofounders of Lower Polk Neighbors. Abst told the San Francisco Chronicle in September 2005 that she "wants a fruit stand [on Polk Street], and we’ll take a Starbucks too."
The group has had an impact: District Attorney Kamala Harris said at a recent community meeting organized by the LPN that she has responded to association agitation by having representatives of the District Attorney’s Office walk the neighborhood with police and installing high-tech surveillance equipment to gain more criminal convictions. Sup. Aaron Peskin has asked the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to include the Lower Polk in its Neighborhood Marketplace Initiative, a program designed to revitalize neighborhood business districts. As part of this program, a part-time staff person now acts as a liaison between Lower Polk merchants and police. Another city program is scheduled to spend $1 million on installing new lights and planting trees later this year.
Activists say the LPN focus is not on outreach, therapy, or support for the Polk’s marginalized residents but on pushing undesirables out of the neighborhood and ejecting outreach programs like a local needle exchange.
Last year Abst was the subject of a "wanted" poster put up on Polk by the group Gay Shame. The group calls the LPN a "progentrification attack squad" whose goal is to "remove outsider queers and social deviants from our neighborhood in order to accelerate property development and real estate profiteering."
The hustler bar Club RendezVous lost its lease in 2005 after the property was bought and razed. Its co-owner, David Kapp, didn’t return our phone calls seeking comment, but he told the Central City Extra in February 2006 that a "smear campaign" by the LPN stopped him from relocating down the street. A First Congregational Church is now being constructed where RendezVous once stood. The church was designed by Case+Abst.
Case told us that the Planning Department wanted to see neighborhood support for the RendezVous move. The LPN asked that RendezVous provide security, but the bar’s owners refused. "They always had younger, underage boys hanging out," Case said. "There are a lot of families in this neighborhood. We wished them well, but it’s also a community." He told us he wants not to gentrify the neighborhood but to make it clean and safe.
But safe for whom?
Chris Roebuck, a medical anthropologist at UC Berkeley, told us that the increased policing has also meant increased harassment of trans women. Sex workers, many of them immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines, and Thailand, are "increasingly being pushed into the alleyways, into unsafe spaces," he said. He’s also noticed a criminalization of what he called "walking while trans" in the six years he has spent interviewing trans women on Polk Street.
At a community meeting with the district attorney earlier this month, two trans women said the police, despite sensitivity trainings, do not take them seriously when they report a crime.
"Getting rid of the public space for trans women and drug users is not safe for them," Polk resident Matt Bernstein Sycamore (a.k.a. Mattilda) told us. "Deportation [of immigrant sex workers] is not a safe space. The needle exchange actually does make people safer. Getting rid of it does not make people safer."
Sycamore, editor of the book Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients, is concerned with what he calls a "cultural erasure" in the area. "Polk Street has been the last remaining place where marginalized queers can come to figure out how to cope, meet one another, and form social networks," he told us. "That sort of outsider culture has been so dependent on having a public space to figure out ways to survive. That is the dream of San Francisco — that you can get away from where you came from and cope, and create something dangerous and desperate and explosive."
POLK VILLAGE?
When Kimo’s changes hands at the end of September, San Francisco will lose one of the last vestiges of a hustler culture housed on Polk Street since at least the early 1960s.
On a recent night, six gray-haired men sat chatting or reading the paper, relics of Polk Street’s heyday. A young man with a shaved head and black hoodie stood outside the front door and gave a suspicious look to a young blonde woman in bikini straps who breezed in with two friends, laughing, oblivious to him. A sign in front read "No Loitering In Front of These Premises."
The state’s Department of Alcohol Beverage Control mandated the warning, Kimo’s bartender John David told us. He said he thinks that was the result of pressure from the LPN. "Kimo’s is the new whipping boy," he told us. "RendezVous is out, and now it’s our fault that people are on the streets."
Case denies that his group had anything to do with the crackdown on Kimo’s.
A tall man with shaggy brown hair standing on the sidewalk near Kimo’s, who asked to be identified by his porn-actor name, Eric Manchester, complained that a way of life is coming to an end. Manchester said he started hustling on Polk at age 17 after leaving the "redneck, racist town" of Martinsville, Ind., in 10th grade and being stationed in San Diego by the Navy.
"It wasn’t just money for me," Manchester told us. "This was a good place to come and get advice, comfort, support. There are people that need people, and they’re going to take that all away. San Francisco is going down the tubes. All the heterosexual people are moving in. They like the police-state mentality."
Among the new arrivals is the owner of the $6.5 million O’Reilly’s Holy Grail Restaurant that stands just a few doors down Polk Street from Kimo’s. On a recent evening, a musician played soft jazz on a black grand piano, while men in starched pastel button-down shirts stood around on the hickory pecan floor.
Myles O’Reilly opened the restaurant two years ago, when he also transformed a low-rent residential hotel above the space into 14 European-style hotel suites. Neighbors point to the property as a tipping point in Polk’s transformation. But O’Reilly sounded almost defeated when he talked about his "multimillion-dollar jewel in the middle of the desert."
"We are only a couple blocks from City Hall and Union Square," he told us. "But tourism doesn’t come this way."
With the goal of transforming the area, he teamed up with John Malloy, the head of the recently founded Polk Corridor Business Association, who has also chaired the LPN.
One of their projects is on view outside the restaurant and along the street. Colorful banners read: "Welcome to Polk Village … working together to build a cleaner, safer, more beautiful community." The PCBA plans to circulate a petition to officially change the name of Polk Gulch to Polk Village in a few years, but O’Reilly isn’t waiting. He defiantly lists the restaurant’s address as 1233 Polk Village on his building.
That "village" will house a small army if these merchants have their way. "We need foot patrols up and down Polk Street," Malloy, who lives in the neighborhood, told us. "We’re going to get more police even if we have to go out there and hire them ourselves."
O’Reilly took out his cell phone and started showing me photos. "This is defecation on the sidewalk outside," he said, pointing to a smudgy image. "This is condoms on the sidewalk. You see this lovely photograph? That’s a condom in the flowerbed. That’s what my son had to see this morning. And nobody helps."
"There are 1,000 condos being built here," O’Reilly said. "Something has to be done to restrict the number of street people."
VANISHING NEIGHBORHOODS
The Tenderloin, and to a lesser extent Polk Gulch, risked being swallowed by the expanding downtown financial district and tourist industries in the late 1970s. But in the 1980s, community activism secured a moratorium on the conversion of residential hotel units, required luxury hoteliers to contribute millions of dollars in community mitigations, downzoned dozens of blocks of prime downtown property, and created a nonprofit housing boom.
It is these achievements that new merchants and residents point to when distancing themselves from the word gentrification. LPN cofounder Case told us that because apartments in the area are rent controlled, gentrification is "not possible."
Not so, said Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee. "Look at the Castro," he told us. "It’s full of rent-controlled buildings. All you have to do is evoke the Ellis Act, or you buy out the tenants."
Or look next to the Congregational Church construction on Polk. There stands an almost-completed four-story building whose 32 units are being sold for up to $630,000. A large glossy poster in its window advertises the units’ "open living and dining areas," along with "stainless steel appliances, custom cabinets, [and] granite counters."
Brian Bassinger, cofounder of the AIDS Housing Alliance, told us that in one of the buildings where his organization houses people a few blocks south of Polk Gulch, rent is now $1,700 a month, up from $1,325 just a few years ago.
Gayle Rubin, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and a historian of South of Market leather cultures, told us that gay neighborhoods are disappearing across the country as the core of major cities are transformed into high-value areas. This puts pressure on the economic viability of queer neighborhoods, most of which — despite the stereotype of the wealthy gay — have taken root in marginalized, poor neighborhoods.
"Polk Street is just one little battle in the war," Mecca told us. "The Mission was a working-class lesbian area. That whole lesbian culture got lost overnight. The bustling culture of queer artists in the Castro — all gone. The South of Market leather scene — gone. Parts of our culture, the very thing we came to San Francisco for, keep getting wiped out."
Kelly Michaels did develop a certain amount of celebrity as a performer at the famed club Finocchio’s and as a porn star; fans still post photos and gush over her online. And she remains drawn to the Polk, even if her relationship with the neighborhood is deeply ambivalent.
"It’s so evil, so dark, full of drugs and despair," she told us outside Divas. "But this is my home and my family."
"The people left here are going to fight for their home," she said. "Some people have been here forever. Their whole life is here. It’s impossible to get an apartment in other places of this city."
"This is a sanctuary," she said. "They’re taking the sparkle out of San Francisco."
SONIC REDUCER As the summer squeezes out its last warmish days, we can safely say that we’re glad for one thing: that with the end of the season comes those last nagging reminders of the Summer of Love, all that was great and good about hippie Frisky, the perpetually remarketable, oh-so-remarkable boomer musical legacy, and how radical it was that so many acolytes drifted here four decades ago to gobble acid and find themselves. Yet are we in the clear to say that we’re all a bit weary of the free-floating miasma of hype? By Jerry’s beard, it happens only every five to 10 years, when the once anti-establishment boomer establishment turns on, tunes in, and pats itself on the back yet again as the 25th, 30th, or 45th anniversaries roll around. I know an overweening sense of self-importance seems to be an intrinsic part of one’s duty as an American citizen, but has there ever been a more self-congratulatory generation than the one that birthed the Summer of Love? Can we now unofficially rename it the Summer of Self-Love? Can I be excused from the creaky, walker-bound group grope that will accompany the big five-oh?
Yep, hippie-bashing, at this queasy, war-wracked juncture, is a tired, predictable, oft-rightie-instigated contact sport that’s far too easy to indulge in. Still, has there ever been a wave of so-called progressives so determined to look back, so intent in repackaging their relics for resale? You can stuff mewling protests against ageism in your tie-dyed Depends. Boomer rockers have been so busy crowing from the rooftops about their accomplishments for so many years that they’ve failed to notice how incredibly bored youngsters — and even not-so-young ‘uns — have become with Grandpappy’s zillionth sing-along to "Love Me Do." Indeedy, nothing can ever compare to your old-time rock ‘n’ roll, your first trip, orgy, no-nukes protest, Jell-O wrasslin’ bout, ad infinitum. But must we still hear about it? This from the same gen, captains helming a capsizing music industry, that turned the phrase “classic rock,” that has insisted on recognizing every anniversary of ’60s-era recording classics, from the Beatles to Sly Stone to Jefferson Airplane to brrrzzzzzzz …
Grrrzzzdhoooh-ha! Oh, were you saying? By the way, when the music’s over — turn off the light, OK? I know hippies weren’t the ones to self-aggrandizingly dub themselves the Greatest Generation. And perhaps we’ve all come to expect far too much from our self-promoting, self-obsessed, yet always self-critical forebears. Yet when word of bickering between competing SF Summer of Love events in August began drifting hither — rumors that Summer of Love 40th Anniversary producer Boots Hughston tells me are simply that: rumors (“We’d been promoting Summer of Love for a year and a half. They had been working on the Hope and Beyond AIDS project in other countries, but this year they decided to change the name of the event — we have a lot of respect for them”) — it seemed like a little peace was in order. After all, the entire purpose behind the Sept. 2 event, Hughston explains, is to “remind people there are other things rather than taking over other countries and going to war over oil — like compassion and understanding. Why not remind people where it all began in 1967?” That’s why Hughston says Country Joe McDonald, Taj Mahal, Canned Heat, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and others are performing free, in between the spiritual and political speakers.
Good intentions go far with even crankaholics like yours truly. But how did the event — which could have used some younger, relevant artists indebted to the San Francisco Sound in its lineup (look for a sampling at this weekend’s Ben Lomond Indian Summer Music Festival) — come to fall on the very day most of its younger demographic might be burning elsewhere? “There is a strong synergy between us and Burning Man, you’re right,” Hughston says. “But you can always go to Burning Man, and you can’t always go to the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.” He believes some burners will be leaving early to return for his 40th event. Smokin’.
One of the most seriously wonderful folk-rock LPs to come down the pike of late has to be Marissa Nadler’s Songs III: Bird on the Water, out last year on UK’s Peace Frog label and recently picked up for US distribution by Kemado. It’s anything but a purist artifact — "The reverb probably gives it that haunting quality. It’s something I’ve always used in abundance on my voice to many people’s distaste," Nadler, 26, says with a laugh, speaking from outside Boston.
Alas, Nadler has often struggled with intense shyness in presenting her creations. "Maybe it’s a masochistic thing that I want to put myself through the pain of performing," the songwriter says. "But at no point is the first song easy." Ever considered Blues Brothers–style shades? "I’ve definitely thought about it," she confesses.
Is this where today’s summer lovers are really headed? Bay Area and Los Angeles creatives like Entrance, Paula Frazer, and Mammatus converge. Fri/31–Sun/2, $12–$18 per show; $40–$45 three-day pass. Henfling’s Tavern, 9450 Hwy. 9, Ben Lomond. www.myspace.com/benlomondindiansummer
Sweetwater stemmed? The Bay Area singer-songwriter bids farewell to the historic club with its last show, the day before it shutters due to a drastic rent increase. Fri/31, 9:30 p.m., $15. Sweetwater Saloon, 153 Throckmorton, Mill Valley. www.ticketweb.com.
POLAR GOLDIE CATS
Paws for LA’s feral chamber post-punkers. Fri/31, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com.
SONIC REDUCER Roll over and let MF Doom give you the news: even during the soporific, sunlit waning days of summer, you needn’t wander far before tumbling headlong into a deep ditch of gloom. And is it any surprise, when even the top 10 is capped with hand-wringing, ditsy throwback-pop ditties like Sean Kingston’s suicide-dappled "Beautiful Girls" — just a few skittish dance steps away from Amy Winehouse’s anxious revamps of sweet soul music?
So when Danville-raised Film School headmaster Greg Bertens made the move away from the Bay to Los Angeles last September to be with his girlfriend and get some distance from 2006, his splintered group’s annus horribilis, it doubtless seemed like dour poetry that he ended up living just a few doors down from punk’s crown prince of dread, Glenn Danzig.
"Oh yeah, Glenn and I go way back!" Bertens said drolly from LA, describing Danzig’s lair as ivy covered and encircled by a gate topped with an iron fleur-de-lis. "Once in a while I see him walk by in a big, black trench coat. LA in general is a big amusement park, and Glenn Danzig happens to be an attraction close to my house."
That new home was where Bertens rediscovered his will to make music — and lost the old, jokey misspelling of his first name, Krayg. There he wrote and recorded Film School’s forthcoming album, Hideout (Beggars Banquet), alone at home with only a guitar, a keyboard, and a computer equipped with Pro Tools, Logic, and assorted plug-ins, while listening to old Seefeel, Bardo Pond, and Sonic Youth LPs. Guest contributions by My Bloody Valentine vet Colm O’Ciosoig, who also lived in the Bay Area before recently moving to LA, and Snow Patrol bassist Paul Wilson filled out the lush, proudly shoegaze songs that Bertens eventually took to Seattle for a mix with Phil Ek (Built to Spill, the Shins).
The recording is "the closest so far to what I’ve been trying to get to since Film School began," Bertens told me later, but it came at a price, following the release of the San Francisco group’s much-anticipated, self-titled debut on Beggars Banquet. Poised to become one of the first indie rock acts of their late ’90s generation to break internationally, after opening tours with the National and the Rogers Sisters, Film School instead found misfortune when Bertens was jumped outside a Columbus, Ohio, club.
Then the group’s instruments and gear were lost in Philadelphia when thieves stole their van, audaciously driving over the security gate of a motel parking lot. Despite benefits and aid from groups like Music Cares, the loss magnified band member differences, leading to the departure of guitarist Nyles Lannon (who also has a solo CD, Pressure, out in September), bassist Justin Labo, and drummer Donny Newenhouse, though longtime keyboardist Jason Ruck remains.
"Understandably, it kind of compounded any difficulties we might have had," Bertens recalled, still sounding a little tongue tied. After such events, he continued, "you definitely tend to reevaluate what is important in your life setup."
The loss of certain key pedals was particularly felt, although, he added, "ironically, after a year or so, one of the instruments showed up on eBay, and it was traced back to a pawnshop in Philly." The entire lot of gear had apparently come in three weeks after it was stolen, but though the store claimed it had checked with the local police department, and the band and Beggars had furnished the police with serial numbers and descriptions, no one made the connection. "We found a general unorganized response to the whole event," Bertens said with palpable resignation.
Yet despite the negativity Bertens associates with 2006 — "I think it was a heavy year globally as well, and Hideout comes a little from that, the impulse to hide out when external and internal factors are unmanageable" — he did find an upside to Film School’s downturn: the response to the theft "kind of restored my ideas about the music community within indie music. We’re a small band, and all these people — people we knew and people we didn’t know and other bands — all kind of came to our aid. I kind of knew that community existed, but I never experienced it." As a result, he said, the new CD’s notes will list the names of more than 150 people "we feel completely indebted to." Something for even Danzig to brood about.
ARTSF STRESSED What would we do without Godwaffle Noise Pancakes brunches and raucous noise shows stories above Capp and 16th Street? Let’s not find out, though word recently went out that the venue for those events, the four-year-old ArtSF, is being threatened. Allysun Ladybug Sparrowhawk has been handling art and music shows at the space for more than a year, and she e-mailed me to say she hadn’t been informed of an approximately $4,000 yearly building maintenance fee until the space received an eviction notice. "When there is a repair on the building, most of the cost is put on us," she wrote. "It should be split equally between all the tenants but most of the other floors are empty."
Since a slew of the organization’s art studio spaces is empty, she continued, "we are struggling to make the rent as it is. A fee like this has really threatened our existence." Does this mean even more artists and musicians are going to be priced out of this already-too-pricey city? Keep the pancakes coming: contact artmagicsf@yahoo.com and visit FILM SCHOOL
Girls really do love breakcore — and Journey reworks — by this son of a Taiwanese rocket scientist. With the Bad Hand and Bookmobile. Wed/15, 9 p.m., $10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com
WHITE SAVAGE
Look out — no wavy cacophony and apelike yelps. With the Go, Bellavista, and Thee Makeout Party! Fri/17, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com. Also with the Frustrations and the Terrible Twos. Sat/18, 6 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
THE DRIFT
Tarentel’s Danny Grody sails in, following the release of a limited-edition 12-inch of remixes by Four Tet and Sybarite. Sun/19, see Web site for time and price. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
SOMNAMBULANTS
The SF-by-way-of-Brooklyn synth poppers toast their new Paper Trail (Clairaudience Collective) with contemporary dance by peck peck. Aug. 23, 9 p.m., $8. Space Gallery, 1141 Polk, SF. www.spacegallerysf.com
Oaxaca, Mexico — Those of us who report from the front lines of the social-justice movement in Latin America share an understanding that there’s always a bullet out there with our name on it. Brad Will traveled 2,500 miles, from New York to this violence-torn Mexican town, to find his.
Throughout the summer and fall of 2006, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca was on fire. Death squads, the pistoleros of a despised governor, rolled through the cobblestoned streets of this colonial capital, peppering with automatic weapon fire the flimsy barricades erected by masked rebels. Hundreds were killed, wounded, or imprisoned.
Will, a New York Indymedia videojournalist, felt he had to be there. Xenophobia was palpable on the ground when Will touched down. Foreign journalists were attacked as terrorists by the governor’s sycophants in the media: "Si ves un gringo con cámara, matanlo!" the radio chattered — if you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!
For much of the afternoon of Oct. 27, Will had been filming armed confrontations on the barricades just outside the city. He was trapped in the middle of a narrow street while gunshots boomed all around him, but he kept filming, looking for the money shot.
And he found it: on his final bits of tape, two clearly identifiable killers are perfectly framed, their guns firing. You hear the fatal shot and experience Brad’s shudder of dismay as the camera finally tumbles from his hands and bounces along the sidewalk.
By all visible evidence, Brad Will filmed his own murder. But this is Mexico, where justice is spelled impunity — and Will’s apparent killers continue to ride the streets of Oaxaca, free and, it seems, untouchable.
Curiously, this egregious murder of a US reporter in Mexico has drawn minimal response from US Ambassador Tony Garza, an old crony of President George W. Bush. Why this lack of interest? Can it be that Washington has another agenda that conflicts with justice for Will — the impending privatization of Mexican oil?
HEADING SOUTH
Will was once a fire-breathing urban legend on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Whether perched atop the Fifth Street squat where he had lived for years and waving his long arms like Big Bird as the wrecking ball swung in, or being dragged out of City Hall dressed as a sunflower while trying to rescue the neighborhood’s community gardens, this child of privilege from Chicago’s wealthy North Shore was a legitimate street hero in the years before the World Trade Center towers collapsed and the social-change movement in New York City went into deep freeze.
Will hosted an incendiary weekly show on the New York pirate station Steal This Radio and was an early part of Indymedia, the Web publishing experiment born during the "Battle of Seattle," the World Trade Organization protests that rocked that city in 1999.
With his long hair neatly tied back and parted down the middle, with his granny glasses and fringe beard, and with his fierce commitment to building community, Will seemed to have emerged whole from a more utopian time in America.
He was an independent journalist, one of the growing number of people, such as Josh Wolf in San Francisco, who use the Internet and their video cameras to track and report on social moments and injustice. He wore no credential from any major news organization. But using outlets like Indymedia, he — like Wolf, who spent seven months in prison to avoid giving the police a copy of his video outtakes — represented part of the future of journalism.
Will’s journey to the land where he would die began right after Sept. 11, 2001. Dyan Neary, then a neophyte journalist, met Will in a South Street skyscraper elevator coming down from the WBAI studios from which Amy Goodman broadcast soon after the terrorist attacks.
"We walked down the piles. They were still smoking," Neary remembered in a phone call from Humboldt County. "We were both really scared. We thought this was not going to be resolved soon. Maybe never. So we thought we should go to Latin America, where people were still fighting."
Will and Neary spent most of 2002 and 2003 roaming the bubbling social landscape of Latin America. In Fortaleza, Brazil, they confronted the director of the Inter-American Development Bank during riotous street protests. They journeyed to Bolivia too and interviewed Evo Morales, not yet the president. They traveled in the Chapare rainforest province with members of the coca growers’ federation. They hung out in Cochabamba with Oscar Olivera, the hero of the battle to keep Bechtel Corp. from taking over that city’s water system. Everywhere they went, they sought out pirate radio projects and offered their support.
In February 2005, Will was in Brazil, in the thick of social upheaval, filming the resistance of 12,000 squatters at a camp near the city of Goiânia in Pernambuco state, when the military police swept in, killing two and jailing hundreds. On his videos, you can hear the shots zinging all around him as he captured the carnage. Will was savagely beaten and held by the police. Only his US passport saved him.
Undaunted by his close call, Will picked up his camera and soldiered back through Peru and Bolivia, and when the money ran out, he flew back to New York to figure out how to raise enough for the next trip south. He was hooked. In early 2006, drawn like a moth to flame, he was back, tracking Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign through the Mayan villages on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
In the spring of 2006, Will was back in New York as he tracked the Other Campaign and the incipient rebellion in Oaxaca on the Internet from his room in Williamsburg. (The rent gougers had forced him out of the Lower East Side.) He was poised to jump south again, friends say, but was worried that he would just be one more white guy getting in the way.
In the end, the lure of the action in Oaxaca pulled him in. He bought a 30-day ticket, caught the airport shuttle from Brooklyn to John F. Kennedy International Airport, and flew south Sept. 29. His return was set for Oct. 28. He never made that flight.
THE COMMUNE OF OAXACA
A mountainous southern Mexican state traversed by seven serious sierras, Oaxaca is at the top of most of the nation’s poverty indicators — infant mortality, malnutrition, unemployment, and illiteracy. Human rights violations are rife. It’s also Mexico’s most indigenous state, with 17 distinct Indian cultures, each with a rich tradition of resistance to the dominant white and mestizo overclass. Oaxaca vibrates with class and race tensions that cyclically erupt into uprising and repression.
The Party of the Institutional Revolution, or PRI, ruled Mexico from 1928 to 2000, the longest-running political dynasty in the world. The corrupt organization was dethroned by the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and its picaresque presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, former president of Coca Cola México.
But in Oaxaca, the PRI never lost power. While voters were throwing off the PRI yoke all over the rest of the country, in Oaxaca one PRI governor had followed another for 75 years. The latest, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, a protégé of party strongman and future presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo, won a fraud-marred election over a right-left coalition in 2004.
In the first 16 months of his regime, Ruiz proved spectacularly unresponsive to the demands of the popular movements for social justice. When, on May 15, 2006, National Teachers Day, a maverick, militant local of the National Education Workers Union known as Section 22 presented its contract demands, Ruiz turned a deaf ear. Then, on May 22, tens of thousands of teachers took the plaza and 52 surrounding blocks and set up a ragtag tent city. Each morning the maestros would march out of their camp and block highways and government buildings, which were soon smeared with anti-Ruiz slogans.
Ruiz retaliated before dawn June 14, sending 1,000 heavily armed police officers into the plaza to evict the teachers. Low-flying helicopters sprayed pepper gas on the throng below. Ruiz’s police took up positions in the colonial hotels that surround the plaza and tossed down concussion grenades from the balconies. Radio Plantón, the maestros’ pirate radio station, was demolished and the tent city set afire. A pall of black smoke hung over the city.
Four hours later a spontaneous outburst by Oaxaca’s very active community, combined with the force of the striking teachers and armed with clubs and Molotov cocktails, overran the plaza and sent Ruiz’s cops packing. No uniformed officers would be seen on the streets of Oaxaca for many months. And on June 16, two days after the monumental battle, 200,000 Oaxacans marched through the city to repudiate the governor’s "hard hand." The megamarch was said to extend 10 kilometers.
John Gibler, who closely covered the Oaxaca uprising as a human-rights fellow for Global Exchange, wrote that the surge of the rebels June 14 soon transformed itself into a popular assembly. The Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly, or APPO, was formally constituted June 21. The APPO had no leaders but many spokespeople, and all decisions had to be made in assemblies.
A CITY PARALYZED
For the next weeks, the actions of the APPO and Section 22 paralyzed Oaxaca — but the rest of Mexico took little notice. Instead, the nation was hypnotized by the fraud-marred July 2 presidential election in which a right-wing PAN-ista, Felipe Calderón, had been awarded a narrow victory over leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate of a coalition headed by the Party of the Democratic Revolution. López Obrador was quick to cry fraud, pulling millions into the streets in the most massive political demonstrations in Mexican history. Oaxaca still seemed like small potatoes.
But Oaxaca is an international tourist destination, and the APPO and Section 22 protests had closed down the tourist infrastructure, blocking the airport and forcing five-star hotels to shutter their doors. On July 17, Ruiz was forced to announce the cancellation of the Guelaguetza, an indigenous dance festival that has become Oaxaca’s premiere tourist attraction, after roaming bands of rebels destroyed the scenery and blockaded access to the city.
Ruiz began to fight back. By the first weeks of August, the governor launched what came to be known as the Caravan of Death — a train of 30 or 40 private and government vehicles rolling nightly, firing on the protesters. Ruiz’s gunmen were drawn from the ranks of the city police and the state ministerial police.
To keep the Caravan of Death from moving freely through Oaxaca, the APPO and the union threw up barricades; 1,000 were built in the working-class colonies throughout the city and its suburbs. The rebels piled up dead trees, old tires, and burned-out cars and buses to create the barricades, which soon took on a life of their own; murals were painted using the ashes of the bonfires that burned all night on the barriers. Indeed, the barricades gave the Oaxaca struggle the romantic aura of the Paris Commune uprising of 1871 and attracted droves of dreadlocked anarchists to the city.
An uneasy lull in the action gripped Oaxaca on Oct. 1, when Will arrived at the bus terminal, then found himself a cheap room for the night. The break wouldn’t last long.
ON THE BARRICADES
Like most non-Mexicans who style themselves as independent reporters, Will had no Mexican media credential and therefore was in the country illegally, working on a tourist visa and susceptible to deportation. To have some credential other than his Indymedia press card to hang around his neck, he got himself accredited with Section 22 and wore the rebel ID assiduously.
On Oct. 14, APPO militant Alejandro García Hernández was cut down at a barricade near Símbolos Patrios, a downtown plaza. Will joined an angry procession to the Red Cross hospital where the dead man had been taken.
In the last dispatch he filed from Oaxaca, on Oct. 16, Will caught this very Mexican whiff of death: "Now [García Hernández lies] waiting for November when he can sit with his loved ones on the day of the dead and share food and drink and a song … one more death — one more martyr in a dirty war — one more time to cry and hurt — one more time to know power and its ugly head — one more bullet cracks the night."
The dynamic in Oaxaca had gotten "sketchy," Will wrote to Neary. Section 22 leader Enrique Rueda Pacheco had cut a deal with the outgoing Fox government and forced a back-to-work vote Oct. 21 that narrowly carried amid charges of sellout and payoffs. If the teachers went back to work, the APPO would be alone on the barricades and even more vulnerable to Ruiz’s gunmen. But backing down was not in the assembly’s dictionary, and the APPO voted to ratchet up the lucha (struggle) and make Oaxaca really ungovernable.
Mobile brigades were formed — young toughs armed with lead pipes and nail-studded boards who hijacked buses still running in the city, forced the passengers off, and rode around looking for action. Later the buses would be set afire. Charred hulks blossomed on the streets of the old colonial city. The barricades were reinforced to shut down the capital beginning Oct. 27.
The escalation proved to be a terrible miscalculation. In Mexico City the postelectoral turmoil had finally subsided, and PAN was ready to deal with the PRI; bailing out the governor of Oaxaca was the PRI’s price of admission.
It wasn’t a good time for inexperienced foreigners. Ruiz’s people were checking the guest lists at the hostels for "inconvenient" internationals. Immigration authorities threatened extranjeros with deportation if they joined the protests. The local US consul, Mark Leyes, warned Americans that he would not be able to help them if they got caught up in the maelstrom.
Adding to this malevolent ambiance, a new pirate station popped up Oct. 26. Radio Ciudadana (Citizens’ radio) announced it was broadcasting "to bring peace to Oaxaca" and to celebrate the honor of "our macho, very macho governor." The announcers seemed to have Mexico City accents. Wherever they had been sent from, they let loose with a torrent of vitriolic shit — stuff like "We have to kill the mugrosos [dirty ones] on the barricades." The extranjeros, the radio said, were stirring up all the trouble: "They pretend to be journalists, but they have come to teach terrorism classes."
More frightening was this admonition: "Si ves un gringo con cámara, matanlo!" — "If you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!"
This poison spewed out of local radios all day Oct. 26 and 27, but whether Will heard the warnings — and if he did, whether knew what they meant — is unclear. He didn’t speak much Spanish.
SHOT IN THE CHEST
On Oct. 27, Will went out to do interviews on the barricade at Santa María Coyotepec, about 20 kilometers from the city. The three barricades at Coyotepec, Cal y Canto, and La Experimental were crucial to closing down Oaxaca the next day. The broad Railroad Avenue where the barricade was stacked was empty. Nothing was moving. Will walked on to the next barricade at La Experimental to check out the action.
Soon after the Indymedia reporter left, all hell broke loose at Cal y Canto. A mob of about 150 Ruiz supporters stormed down Railroad Avenue, led by what witnesses thought was a Chevy Blazer. The vehicle was moving very fast. "We thought it would try and crash through the barricade," Miguel Cruz, an activist and witness, recalled. But the SUV stopped short, and several men jumped out with guns blazing. The APPO people hunkered down behind the makeshift barrier and moved the women and kids who were with them into a nearby house. Then they went on the counterattack with Molotov cocktails, homemade bazookas that fired bottle rockets, and slingshots. Most of the mob had melted away, and with the gunmen retreating, the rebels torched their vehicle.
Will heard about the gunfire and hurried back to Cal y Canto with a handful of other reporters. They arrived a little after 3 p.m.
Will climbed under a parked trailer to film the shooters. He focused on a man in a white shirt. When an APPO activist (who is not seen on the videotape) came running by, Will indicated the shooter — "Camisa blanca." While all this was going on, the camera captured a bicyclist peddling dreamily through the intersection. Soon after, a large dump truck appeared on the scene, and the group on the barricade used it as a mobile shield as they chased the gunmen down the avenue.
Suddenly, the pistoleros veered down a narrow side street, Benito Juárez, and took refuge in a windowless, one-story building on the second block. The only access to the building was through a large metal garage door, and the reporters followed the APPO militants, many of whom were masked, as they tried to force their way in. Will stood to one side of the door for a minute, poised for the money shot. Then the compas tried unsuccessfully to bust down the big door by ramming the dump truck into it.
In the midst of this frenzy, five men in civilian dress — two in red shirts (the governor’s color) and the others in white — appeared at the head of Benito Juárez, about 30 meters away, and began shooting at the rebels.
Two of the gunmen were later identified by Mexican news media as Pedro Carmona, a cop and local PRI political fixer, and police commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar Coello. One of those in the white shirts, crouched behind Carmona, was Abel Santiago Zárate, a.k.a. El Chino. Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello were reported to be the personal bodyguards of municipal president Manuel Martínez Feria of the PRI. The other two would later be fingered as Juan Carlos Soriano, a.k.a. El Chapulín (the grasshopper), and Juan Sumano, both Santa Lucía del Camino police officers. All five are eminently identifiable in the film Will shot just moments before the bullets hit him.
When the shooting erupted, Will took cover on the opposite side of the narrow street from the rest of the media. He was crouched against a lime green wall when the first bullet came. On the video soundtrack, you can hear both the shot and Will’s cries of dismay as it tore through his Indymedia T-shirt and smashed into his heart. A second shot caught him in the right side and destroyed his innards. There was little blood spilled, the first slug having stopped his heart.
In footage that witness Gustavo Vilchis and others filmed, the entrance wound of the first shot looks like a deep bruise. The second shot was not recorded on the soundtrack and may have been fired simultaneously with the first.
Others were shot in the pandemonium. Oswaldo Ramírez, filming for the daily Milenio, was grazed. Lucio David Cruz, described as a bystander, was hit in the neck and died four months later.
As Will slid down the wall into a sitting position, Vilchis and activist Leonardo Ortiz ran to him. Will’s Section 22 credential had flown off, and no one there knew his name. With bullets whizzing by, the compas picked Will up and dragged him out of the line of fire and around the corner to Árboles Street, about 35 paces away. Along the way, his pants fell off.
"Ambulance! We need an ambulance! They’ve shot a journalist!" Vilchis, a tall young man with a face like an Italian comic actor’s, shouted desperately. Gualberto Francisco, another activist, had parked his vochito (Volkswagen Bug) on Árboles and pulled up alongside Will, who was laid out on the pavement in his black bikini underwear.
Ortiz and Vilchis loaded the dying Will into the back seat. They thought he was still breathing, and Vilchis applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. "You’re going to make it … you’re all right," they kept telling him. But Will’s eyes had already turned up — he was perdido (lost), as they say in Mexico.
The vochito ran out of gas, and while the frantic young men ferrying Will were stuck in the middle of the Cinco Señores crossroad, it began to rain hard. They tried to stop a taxi to take them to the Red Cross, but the driver supported the government and wanted to argue. Finally, they flagged down a pickup truck and laid Will out in the bed. He was dead when he arrived at the hospital, according to the report by the coroner, Dr. Luis Mendoza.
THE OUTRAGE BEGINS
Oct. 27 was the bloodiest day of the Oaxaca uprising. Four people were killed besides Will: Emilio Alonso Fabián, Esteban Ruiz, Esteban López Zurita, and Audacia Olivera Díaz.
Unlike their murders, Will’s death triggered international outrage. Because he was so connected — and because much of the episode was recorded on film —the shot of the mortally wounded Indymedia reporter lying in the middle of a Oaxaca street went worldwide on the Web in a matter of minutes.
There were instant vigils on both coasts of the United States. On Oct. 30, 11 of Will’s friends were busted trying to lock down at the Mexican consulate off Manhattan’s Park Avenue, where graffiti still read "Avenge Brad!" in December. Anarchists splattered the San Francisco consulate with red paint. Subcomandante Marcos sent his condolences and called for international protests. Goodman did an hour-long memorial.
On March 16, 2007, at its midyear meeting in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, the Inter-American Press Association, an organization devoted to freedom of speech and the press in the Americas, passed a resolution calling for action on the Will case.
"The investigation into the killing has been plagued by irregularities and inconsistencies, and no arrests have been made," the group said in a statement. IAPA called for the federal attorney general to take over the investigation, "in view of the lack of confidence in state authorities and the lack of progress in the case, so that it may apprehend the culprits, who, according to one theory of the investigation, may be indirectly linked to state authorities."
The official reaction to Will’s death was more cautious. "It is unfortunate when peaceful demonstrations get out of hand and result in violence," a US spokesperson told the media, seeming to blame the APPO for Will’s killing. After once again warning Americans that they traveled to Oaxaca "at their own risk," Ambassador Garza commented on the "senseless death of Brad Will" and how it "underscores the need for a return to the rule of law and order."
"For months," he said, "violence and disorder in Oaxaca have worsened. Teachers, students, and other groups have been involved in increasingly violent demonstrations."
Garza’s statement sent Fox the signal he had been waiting for. Now that a gringo had been killed, it was time to act. The next morning, Oct. 28, 4,500 officers from the Federal Preventative Police, an elite force drawn from the military, were sent into Oaxaca — not to return the state to a place where human rights, dignity, and a free media are respected but to break the back of the people’s rebellion and keep Ruiz in power.
On Oct. 29 the troops pushed their way into the plaza despite massive but passive resistance by activists, tore down the barricades, and drove the commune of Oaxaca back into the shadows.
In Mexico the dead are buried quickly. After the obligatory autopsy, Brad’s body was crated up for shipment to his parents, who now live south of Milwaukee. After a private viewing, the family had him cremated.
SHAM ACCOUNTABILITY
Killing a gringo reporter in plain view of the cameras (one of which was his own) requires a little sham accountability. On Oct. 29 the state prosecutor, Lizbeth Caña Cadeza, announced that arrest warrants were being sworn out for Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello, two of the five cops caught on film gunning Will down, and they were subsequently taken into custody.
The scam lost currency two weeks later when, on Nov. 15, Caña Cadeza dropped a bombshell at an evening news conference: the cops hadn’t killed Will, she said; he was shot by the rebels.
Will’s death, she insisted, had been "a deceitful confabulation to internationalize the conflict" and was, in fact, "the product of a concerted premeditated action." The mortal shot had been fired from less than two and a half meters away, Caña Cadeza said — although there is nothing in the coroner’s report to indicate this. The real killers, she said, were "the same group [Will] was accompanying."
In the state prosecutor’s scenario, the order of the shots was reversed: first Will had been shot in the side on the street, then rematado (finished off) with a slug to the heart on the way to the hospital in Francisco’s vochito.
The prosecutor’s plot was immediately challenged by the APPO. "The killers are those who are shown in the film," Florentino López, the assembly’s main spokesperson, asserted at a meeting that night.
And in fact our detailed investigation shows that there is very little evidence to support Caña Cadeza’s theory. Photos from the scene, some published in the Mexican media, show Will’s body with a bloody hole in his chest on the street near where he fell — indicating that his fatal heart wound occurred well before he was dragged into the car where he was supposedly shot.
There’s another problem with the prosecutor’s suggestion: nobody on the scene saw any APPO members, or anyone except the authorities, carrying guns. This reporter has talked to numerous eyewitnesses, and all told the same tale: the rebels at the barricade that day had no firearms with which they could have shot Will.
Miguel Cruz, who spent much of Oct. 27 with Will, first at the Council of Indigenous People of Oaxaca, of which he is a member, and then on the barricade at Cal y Canto and on Juárez Street, is a soft-spoken young Zapotec Indian, but he pounded vehemently on the kitchen table when he addressed Caña Cadeza’s allegations.
"The compañeros had no guns. What gun is she talking about? They had slingshots and Molotovs but no guns. The PRI-istas and the cops had their .38s, and they were shooting at us," he said. "We were trying to save Brad Will’s life, not to kill him."
And if Caña Cadeza had any proof of her allegations, she likely would have filed charges. But none of the protesters or Will’s companions has been formally charged with the killing. Prosecutors have never publicly presented the alleged murder weapon.
But by the time Caña Cadeza told her story, of course, the only way to determine for sure the order of the bullets and the distance from which they had been fired would have been to exhume Will’s body. And there was no body; he had been cremated the week before.
On Nov. 28, Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello were released from custody by Judge Victoriano Barroso because of "insufficient evidence," with the stipulation that they could not be rearrested without the presentation of new evidence.
Caña Cadeza, who is now running as a PRI candidate for the state legislature, collaborated closely on the case with Oaxaca secretary of citizen protection Lino Celaya. Both reported to Ruiz’s secretary of government, Heliodoro Díaz, who in turn reported directly to the governor. There seems little doubt that the prosecutor’s accusations of murder against Will’s comrades — and the determination of innocence for the apparent killers — came straight from the top.
ON THE EVIDENCE TRAIL
Dr. Mendoza was occupied when I stopped by the Oaxaca city morgue to ask for a copy of the autopsy report on which the state has based its allegations.
"Will died eight months ago," Mendoza complained testily. "Do you know how many others have died since? How many autopsies I’ve performed?" He gestured to a morgue room where cadavers were piled up.
The coroner was scrunched over his desk, filling out the paperwork for one of the dead. He didn’t have any time to look for the autopsy report. I was not the first reporter to ask him about the document. "What paper are you from anyway?" he asked suspiciously, and when I showed him my media card, he told me that it didn’t sound like a real newspaper to him. "I know what I’m doing. I worked as a coroner in your country," he snapped defensively and waved me out of the office.
But Mendoza might not be quite as cocksure as he sounded. A senior agent for the US government in Oaxaca, who asked not to be named in this article, told me later that Mendoza confided to him that he was no ballistics expert, nor could he determine from how far away the bullets were fired.
I walked into the police commissary under the first-floor stairs of the Santa Lucía del Camino Municipal Palace. The small room was crowded with cops and cigarette smoke. Three of the officers were in full battle gear, and the rest were plainclothes. I had been warned not to ask for Carmona, the most prominent red shirt on Will’s film. Carmona is described as a prepotente — i.e., a thug with an attitude who is always packing.
Instead, I asked the desk clerk if I could get a few minutes with Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello. For all I knew, the two were sitting in the room behind me. The desk clerk studied my card. "Qué lástima!" he exclaimed — what a shame. Santiago Zárate had just left and wouldn’t be back until after six. Aguilar Coello was off that day. When I called back after six, Santiago Zárate was still not available. Nor were he and Aguilar Coello ever available the dozen or so times I called back.
This sort of stonewalling is not terribly unusual for Mexico, where killer cops often sell their services to local caciques (political bosses) and go back to work as if nothing had happened. Those who direct this sort of mayhem from their desks in the statehouses and municipal palaces — the "intellectual assassins," as they are called — are never held accountable for their crimes.
A VISIT FROM HOME
In March, Brad’s parents, Kathy and Howard Will, and his older brother and sister paid a sad, inconclusive visit to Oaxaca. They had hired Miguel Ángel de los Santos Cruz, a crackerjack human rights lawyer who has often defended Zapatista communities in Chiapas. Gibler, the Global Exchange human-rights fellow, was the translator.
The Wills, upper-middle-class Americans, had little experience with the kind of evil that lurks inside the Mexican justice system; the trip was a traumatic, eye-opening experience.
The federal Attorney General’s Office had taken over the case from the state in December, but rather than investigating police complicity and culpability, it was pursuing Caña Cadeza’s dubious allegation blaming Will’s companions for his killing.
Gustavo Vilchis, Gualberto Francisco, Leonardo Ortiz, and Miguel Cruz were summoned to give testimony, with the Wills in attendance. Testifying was a risky venture, as the witnesses could have been charged with the murder at any moment, but out of respect for the family, the compas agreed to tell their story to the federal investigators. During the hearing they were repeatedly questioned about and asked to identify not the cops who appear on Will’s film but their own compañeros, some masked, who appeared on tape shot by Televisa, the Mexican TV giant. They refused.
When Los Santos accompanied the Wills to a meeting with Caña Cadeza, she touted her investigation and promised them a copy of its results. But she refused to allow the family to view Will’s Indymedia T-shirt and the two bullets taken from his body. They were, she explained, under the control of Barroso — the judge who had cut loose the cops.
THE POLITICS OF OIL
There are larger geopolitics at work here.
The US Department of State has a certain conflict of interest in trying to push first-year Mexican president Calderón to collar Will’s killers. The crackdown in Oaxaca was all about a political deal between Calderón’s PAN and Ruiz’s PRI: if PAN saved the governor’s ass, the PRI would support the president’s legislative package.
Indeed, the PRI’s 100 votes in the lower house of the Mexican Congress guarantee Calderón the two-thirds majority he needs to alter the constitution and effect the change that’s at the top of his legislative agenda — opening up Petróleos Mexicanos, or PEMEX, the nationalized petroleum corporation and a symbol of Mexico’s national revolution, to private investment, a gambit that requires a constitutional amendment.
Since then-president Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated Mexico’s petroleum industry from Anglo and American owners and nationalized it in 1938, the United States has been trying to take it back. "Transnational pressure to reprivatize PEMEX has been brutal," observed John Saxe Fernandez, a professor of strategic resource studies at Mexico’s autonomous university, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
During the run-up to the hotly contested 2006 presidential elections, candidates Calderón and López Obrador debated the privatization of Mexico’s national oil corporation before the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City; former US ambassador Jeffrey Davidow moderated the debate. When the leftist López Obrador insisted that he would never privatize what belonged to all Mexicans, the business leaders stared in stony silence. The conservative Calderón’s pledge to open PEMEX to private investment drew wild applause. Calderón was, of course, Washington’s horse in the fraud-marred election.
In order to accommodate Washington, Calderón needs a two-thirds majority in the congress — and the PRI’s votes in the lower house are crucial to guaranteeing passage of a constitutional amendment. "Without the PRI’s votes, PEMEX will not be privatized. That is why Calderón has granted Ruiz impunity," Saxe Fernandez concluded.
Washington is eager to see PEMEX privatized, which would create an opportunity for Exxon Mobil Corp. and Halliburton (now PEMEX’s largest subcontractor) to walk off with a big chunk of the world’s eighth-largest oil company. Pushing Calderón too hard to do justice for Will could disaffect the PRI and put a kibosh on the deal.
It is not easy to imagine Brad Will as a pawn in anyone’s power game, but as the months tick by and his killing and killers sink into the morass of memory, that is exactly what he is becoming. 2
John Ross is the Guardian‘s Mexico City correspondent. This story was comissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and is running in about 20 alternative papers this week.
SONIC REDUCER "It was a period where you thought anything could happen," Thurston Moore once told me, talkin’ ’bout the early ’90s alternative rock scene spawned by Sonic Youth’s widely regarded masterpiece, Daydream Nation (DGC, 1988).
One might say the MTV-coined catchphrase "Alternative Nation" went as far as to take its cues from SY’s double disc, which was self-aware enough to dub a track "The Sprawl" and heady enough to venture into the big-statement two-LP turf also being hoed by once–SST kindred Minutemen and Hüsker Dü. Honestly, back in those hazy days, I recall giving it a handful of spins, sensing the distinct odor of a masterpiece, and immediately stopping playing it. Daydream was much too much, too rich for my blood, too jammed with the brainy, jokey pop culture ephemera that had riddled Sonic Youth’s LPs up to that point — positioned as the polar opposite of a hardcore punk 7-inch, which was short, sharp, and built for maximum speed. Yo, you’d never catch Minor Threat doing a double album. Instead Daydream thumbed its nose at the closeted cops in the mosh pit and unfurled like a dark banner announcing: We can’t be contained by your louder, faster, lamer rules. We’re gonna speak to a imaginary country — off Jorge Luis Borges’s and Italo Calvino’s grids — of naval-gazing, candle-clutching misfit visionaries looking for clues in trash cults, Madonna singles, and the burned-out butt end of the Raygun-era ’80s.
Now nearly 20 years old, Daydream — recently given the deluxe reissue treatment with an additional disc of live tracks — brings back memories of prophesy and triggers reminders of mortality. Around the time it first came out, I recall ranting to kindred record store clerks — and anyone who stumbled into my predated High Fidelity daydream — how everything will change when Sonic Youth meets Public Enemy. And it sort of did on Daydream, coproduced by Nicholas Sansano, who engineered PE’s ’88 masterwork It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam).
Apparently we were also talkin’ ’bout nation building back then, finding a face and a place for a generation still living at home and struggling for an identity. Imagining a meeting of the most powerful forces in American rock and hip-hop seemed like the next best thing to moving out — and it foreshadowed Goo and touring collaborations to come. Little did I — or Moore — realize that a dozen years after Daydream Nation, the meeting of rock and rap would degrade into what Moore described as "negativecore" and rap-metal units like Limp Bizkit and debacles like Rapestock 2000. Daydream Nation offered a whole other, embracing view of a youth revolution with its opening track and college radio hit "Teen Age Riot." Sonic Youth had dared to write an anthem for a new age of kids, tagged with Kim Gordon’s "you’re it!" — and everyone was on the same page, stoned on Dinosaur Jr.–style Jurassic distortion and thinking-Neanderthal riffs and racing as fast as they could through dreamlike pop pastiche, as embodied by the accompanying video, a kind of decades-late Amerindie response to "White Riot" or "Anarchy in the UK."
On Daydream pop hooks emerged for the first time alongside the ever-coalescing SY aesthetic, with euphoric, charging chord progressions seemingly unrooted to the blues, and the way the group would open into intentionally pretty passages, flaunting the delicate uses of distortion and a feminized rock sensibility. We were all dreaming of Nirvana, a fringe seeping into the pop marketplace. Honestly though, listening to that Daydream again, I couldn’t help but be disappointed. Its brute approach has become a part of ’90s rock’s wallpaper — as Moore confesses in the reissue notes, black metallists have even owned up to copping licks from " ‘Cross the Breeze" — and therefore perhaps sounds more pedestrian. The triptych of "Hey Joni," "Providence," and "Candle" now sounds more charged than "Teen Age Riot" and "Silver Rocket," and I can’t help but think that Sister may be a stronger, more concise album. Perhaps we’re still too close to the stalled staling of the Alternative Nation, though maybe the faded nature of Daydream Nation is tagged to its very status as a classic — how does one pump life into, say, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?
There was a time when the Bay’s Lovemakers looked like they were going to get all the love nationally — an Interscope deal tucked neatly into their back pocket and a heavy-breathing following around town. So what happened?
"Interscope asked us if we wanted to do another record," vocalist-guitarist Scott Blonde says from Oakland, "and we said no, because our A&R guy was obviously really into us and he and his assistant worked really hard for us, but it didn’t seem possible to get Brenda Romano, who runs the radio department, to get into it enough to put it ahead of 50 Cent and Gwen Stefani." He chuckles.
These days, the band members are focusing on making love on their own terms: their Misery Loves Company EP comes out July 24, the first release on San Francisco’s Fuzz label.
"Obviously we got more cash dollars’ support on Interscope," vocalist-bassist-violinist Lisa Light adds from the Mission District. "But the thing is the way it gets spent. Interscope would spend $5,000 doing stupid things — in bad taste a lot of times too. Not only were you embarrassed by the dumb posters they did, they weren’t in the right places. We’ve been able to hire a radio promoter and a cool PR company. It’s all about finding the people who actually care. You cannot pay for that at all."
"We’re looking at the future of music a lot, and selling CDs isn’t really part of the future seemingly," Blonde continues. "So it’s kinda about coming up with really innovative ways of getting our music out there in the biggest way possible." He says the Lovemakers have already gotten more radio ads on stations like Los Angeles’s KROQ for the first single off Misery than anything off their major label release: "We thought Interscope was going to be our ticket."
Are more listeners seeking out music’s edgier tones? Edgetone New Music Summit mastermind Rent Romus believes that’s the case. "I’ve been running the Luggage Store series for five years now — last night we had 70 people," he told me. "It’s not about the hit song but about performance and performers." His fest has that critical mixture of daring performers: SF trumpeter Liz Allbee and bowed-gong player Tatsuya Nakatani, Wobbly, Darwinsbitch (sound artist–violinist Marielle Jakobsons), instrument inventor Tom Nunn, High Vulture (with MX-80 guitarist Bruce Anderson), Hammers of Misfortune vocalist Jesse Quattro, Eddie the Rat, and the Gowns. July 22–28. See www.edgetonemusicsummit.org for schedule
PUSSYGUTT
The noisy Boise, Idaho, bass-drum duo waxes darkly on Sea of Sand (Olde English Spelling Bee). Wed/18, 9:30 p.m., $5. Edinburgh Castle Pub, 950 Geary, SF. (415) 885-4074, www.castlenews.com
SHOUT OUT LOUDS
Sept. 11’s Our Ill Wills (Merge) is unveiled by Sweden’s shouters. Wed/18, 9 p.m., $15. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com
LET’S GO SAILING
Rilo Kiley keyboardist Shana Levy charts a sweet indie pop course with her debut, The Chaos in Order (Yardley Pop/GR2). With Oh No! Oh My! and the Deadly Syndrome. Wed/18, 8 p.m., $12–$14. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com
YOU AM I
Three number one albums strong, the tuneful Aussie rockers muscle onto the US scene with Convicts (Yep Roc). Wed/18, 8 p.m., $13. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com
JOHN NEMETH
The blues vocalist and harp player bubbles up with Magic Touch (Blind Pig). Fri/20, 8 and 10 p.m., $15. Biscuits and Blues, 401 Mason, SF. (415) 292-2583, www.biscuitsandblues.com
SHOTGUN WEDDING QUINTET
The Mission’s Jazz Mafia collectivists bring out the big guns for their CD release get-down. With Crown City Rockers. Fri/20, 9 p.m., $15–$18. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com
RED MEAT
Love Jill Olson’s "I’m Not the Girl for You" off the SF C&W combo’s new We Never Close (Ranchero). With Big Smith and William Elliott Whitmore. Sat/21, 9 p.m., $15–$17. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. $15-$17. www.gamh.com
San Francisco Ethics Commission executive director John St. Croix has admitted that his office knew in 2005 about the alleged laundering of public money into a San Francisco City College bond election campaign — well before the story broke in newspapers in April — but did nothing to investigate.
That startling revelation knits together two concurrent series that the Guardian has been running for the past two weeks: one on City College’s deceptive and unaccountable use of bond money and another on the uneasiness local watchdogs feel about the Ethics Commission’s ability and willingness to mete out balanced punishment to elections-law violators.
When news reports surfaced in April that City College allegedly had diverted up to $30,000 in public money to a bond election campaign committee, Chancellor Phil Day moved quickly to limit the fallout. So did independently elected trustee Rodel Rodis, who along with six other board members is responsible for controlling and managing the San Francisco Community College District.
During meetings organized that month to address the matter, Day came clean and blamed everything on a "relatively new" assistant vice chancellor. At least two trustees, one of whom had been recently elected, still wanted to know more about why it was allowed to happen. Rodis, on the other hand, complained that hiring an independent investigator at a cost of $75,000 to look into the matter was too expensive and framed the stories — written by San Francisco Chronicle investigate reporter Lance Williams — as an unfair attack on the college.
"Let’s be mindful that we’re still in a budget crisis and we still need to watch taxpayer money," Rodis said at one of the meetings.
Unlike Rodis, District Attorney Kamala Harris didn’t treat the allegations as insignificant and is now reportedly probing possible criminal violations in connection with the scandal. The investigation, Williams wrote recently, includes contributions made to the committee by contractors that did recent business with the school.
But where was the Ethics Commission during all of this? The controversy raises serious questions about why the agency never took any action against City College when, as its mission statement declares, its responsibility is to "actively enforce all ethics laws and rules, including campaign finance and open government laws."
Late in the commission’s July 9 meeting, St. Croix made the stunning admission that although his office knew about the allegations surrounding City College’s dubious handling of public funds all the way back in 2005, for some inexplicable reason it did nothing.
Staff shortages and poor financing have plagued the Ethics Commission since voters created it in 1993. Although the number of staffers has doubled during his three-year tenure, St. Croix nonetheless told the Guardian recently that his agency remains dependent on the public to help expose political candidates and campaign committees that break the law.
"We still rely on people and the city being watchdogs," St. Croix told us. "We’re supposed to be the eyes and ears for a lot of things, but we’re still extremely limited."
In this case, however, St. Croix’s office was well aware of allegations that City College bureaucrats had misappropriated public funds. The school’s Board of Trustees, along with Day’s office, created the Committee to Support Our City College in 2005 to convince voters to give the school $246.3 million in bond money to continue with a slate of capital works projects that began in 1997 and now are costing hundreds of millions of dollars more than anticipated.
The owner of a motorcycle training school claimed in a December 2005 letter to the Ethics Commission that he was told by the college to make a rent check for the regular use of school property payable to the committee instead of the school itself. Amazingly, the Ethics Commission pondered contacting the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission to disclose the allegations, which is the least it should have done, but never actually did so, as St. Croix has acknowledged only now.
"I take responsibility for that," St. Croix told us. "I don’t know who actually dropped the ball. But at the time we had less staff and there were a lot of things we were supposed to do and we weren’t doing."
Nor did the Ethics Commission contact the college to demand that it amend its campaign filings from that year to reflect the true source of that $10,000 payment and acknowledge itself rather than the motorcycle training school as a major contributor to the bond committee. St. Croix figured that could happen at the conclusion of the FPPC’s inquiry. Of course, the FPPC didn’t know about the allegations, at least not until the Ethics Commission finally contacted it in May, following the Chronicle‘s front-page stories.
The Ethics Commission’s lax approach to City College oversight also extends to trustees like Rodis, who has his own apparent campaign finance violations from his 2004 reelection campaign. That year, records show, his campaign failed to turn in three key election filings required to ensure that before heading to the ballot box, voters have a chance to see where candidates are getting their campaign money from. The commission sent his campaign several warning letters; just one of the filings finally arrived nine months later.
The trustee pointed to a campaign staffer when we contacted him regarding the tardy campaign statements. "We had someone working on the campaign who was supposed to do that," Rodis told us. "He indicated to us that everything was in order. We relied on him. We paid him. And then we found out later that he didn’t do what he was supposed to do…. It was one of those things that happen when you trust people."
The filing Rodis did manage to turn in shows that of the more than $44,000 he raised for his reelection effort that year, at least $1,700 had no identified donors, and other donations were marred by confusing data entry errors. An internal Ethics memo obtained by the Guardian that discusses the Rodis reelection campaign committee concludes that its poor reporting "appears to be a matter of willfulness and disregard for the law" and what belated filings do exist "present significant data problems." According to the memo, "Based on the record, significant questions remain regarding the true facts of the committee’s financing."
Rodis in 2004 won reelection to the board for the fourth time since he first became a trustee in 1991. According to our conservative estimates based only on the late filings, he could be liable for thousands of dollars in fines. *
More than 100 tractor trailers were lined up at 6:30 a.m., inching toward the Port of Oakland’s Terminal 7, waiting for their next load. Against the backdrop of the San Francisco skyline, a mammoth freight ship emblazoned with the name Hyundai glided toward the port, pregnant with multicolor shipping containers.
A driver told the Guardian that he expected to be in line for at least two hours waiting to drop off the empty container attached to his big rig. His 1989 truck lacks air-conditioning, so the windows were rolled down, allowing diesel exhaust to pollute the air he was breathing.
It’s the same scene at many of the port’s other terminals: long lines of ancient trucks slowly snaking toward their destinations, their primarily immigrant drivers performing the essential and thankless task of transporting cheap clothes from Asia to the nation’s big-box retailers or helping to export California’s agricultural goods to Hawaii.
The fourth-busiest container port in the nation, the Port of Oakland is the economic engine of the region, providing thousands of jobs and more than $1 billion in revenue. But activists say that the port system has also led to sweatshoplike conditions for truckers and created a health crisis for the surrounding community.
On their poverty-level wages, truckers are usually able to buy only the oldest, most polluting trucks. Their diesel pollution is a major factor driving asthma rates through the roof in the neighboring, primarily African American neighborhood of West Oakland, where, the American Lung Association says, one in every five kids has asthma.
A new national coalition of labor, environmental, and community activists has advanced a proposal that would make all drivers employees with benefits, radically changing the way work is done on the waterfront and possibly heralding the return of the Teamsters to the ports for the first time in more than 20 years. In the process, the proposal would make the port’s biggest customers responsible for its environmental problems.
The coalition places the blame for the current situation squarely on giant retail shippers such as Wal-Mart and Target and is calling for them to be held accountable for the full environmental and labor costs of the cheap goods they sell — a call the corporations are strenuously resisting. The American Trucking Association, whose members contract directly with the corporation, has threatened a lawsuit if the change is adopted. But port officials have voiced a willingness to seriously consider implementing the proposal.
Having long claimed that the trucking industry is outside its control, the Port of Oakland could embrace the proposal as a means of satisfying community, environmental, political, and business concerns. With impending directives to clean the air coming from Sacramento, trade planned to almost double by 2020, two new Port Commission appointees representing labor and environmental concerns, and a federal antiterrorism tracking plan slated for this fall, the port is poised to play a leadership role that could reverberate up and down the West Coast and across the country.
THE TRUCKER’S LIFE
The Port of Oakland’s estimated 1,500 to 2,500 drivers are a far cry from the middle-class, long-haul Teamsters and the Smokey and the Bandit–<\d>style freewheeling rebels who have long been engrained in the American imagination. Instead, they are at the bottom of the port’s food chain and are the most exploited trucking sector in the country, consisting primarily of recent immigrants struggling to make ends meet.
Dawit Fre, 39, immigrated to Oakland from the small nation of Eritrea two years ago. "I wanted to see a better life," he told us. Fre was a driver in Africa and went to work for the Port of Oakland after his cousin told him people start their trucking careers there. He said he works up to 60 hours a week for one company, making the equivalent of about $8 an hour after expenses.
Fre arrives at work every day no later than 6:30 a.m., waits for dispatches from his company, and spends a minimum of two hours in line for each container he picks up or drops off. He is paid $42 for each load by the company. He doesn’t know how much the trucking companies make but has heard that some get $200 per load. He returns home around 6:30 at night.
"The whole time I’m at the port, I’m thinking about my family," he said. "I got children. The only thing I’m thinking inside the terminal is, how many moves am I going to do? Am I going to do four or five or three or two?"
On a good day he can get four, on a bad day as few as one, depending on the length of the lines and the generosity of the dispatcher. Then there are his expenses. As an independent operator, Fre is solely responsible for a tankful of diesel that costs him up to $250 a pop. DMV registration is $178 a month, and 12 percent of his weekly earnings goes to his boss for insurance on his truck, not to mention annual federal income tax.
He receives no benefits, no overtime pay, and no health care coverage at a time when his wife, a diabetic, is suffering from severe stomach complications. "I’m taking her to Highland Hospital," he told us. "If it’s easy for them to fix, they can do it. But if she has a big problem, they can’t do it."
Fre has his own health problems. "Most of the drivers, we have old trucks," he said. "You don’t have AC, your windows are down, and you get sick in the truck" from the diesel. Fre’s remedy for his persistent coughing and the burning in his throat is several glasses of milk after each day of work.
A 1998 study published in the Journal of Independent Medicine found that truck drivers face a risk of cancer 10 times greater than Occupational Safety and Health Administration–acceptable levels, and a 1990 study published in the American Journal of Public Health showed that truckers face nearly double the average lifetime lung cancer risk.
Fre has little money to invest in his truck, a ragged 1987 model that he said needs $5,000 in repairs. He doesn’t trust it on the freeway, so he’s asked his dispatcher to send him only from pier to pier, not outside the port, further dipping into his earnings. "I came here to see a better life," he said. "When I got here, I found it is different. Here we don’t get paid for the overtime. We don’t get benefits. When I get into the terminal, there is no respect."
His experience is typical of those of port truckers across the country. A study by the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, a labor-affiliated think tank, found that the average Port of Oakland trucker makes as little as $8 an hour after expenses, works 11 hours a day, and spends two and a half hours in line per load. Almost none of the truckers reported receiving benefits on the job, and 66 percent don’t have health insurance.
This is consistent with data from a 2004 survey of port truckers in Los Angeles and Long Beach, conducted by a professor of economics at California State University Long Beach. That report found they had a median income of $25,000 a year after expenses and an average workday of 11.2 hours, with up to 33 percent of their time spent waiting in line.
Port truckers generally drive only the oldest, most polluting trucks because that’s all they can afford. An industry adage is that ports are "the place trucks go to die," a reality that has dire impacts on the surrounding communities.
POLLUTING THE COMMUNITY
West Oakland has long been a dumping ground for the Bay Area’s toxic waste. The community has one of the five highest asthma hospitalization rates in California, with an estimated 20 percent of its K–<\d>12 students suffering from the disorder, according to the ALA. Researchers at the University of Southern California have found that children living within a few hundred meters of freeways leading out of ports not only are more likely to suffer from asthma but also actually develop smaller lungs.
Margaret Gordon, a 60-year-old community health activist who has lived just blocks from the Port of Oakland for 15 years, told us that she and four of her grandchildren living with her all suffer from asthma. When one grandchild was born with severe asthma and her own asthma worsened after she moved to West Oakland, Gordon, then a housekeeper, started reading about the causes of asthma and made the connection to the port. Like many in the low-income neighborhood, she cannot afford to move elsewhere in the Bay Area.
Gordon has been fighting for clean air for more than a decade, and in April she was inducted into the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame for her work. In 2001, Gordon formed the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, which she now cochairs. The project has released more than half a dozen studies related to air quality. A 2003 report showed that trucks traveling through West Oakland in one day produce the same amount of toxic soot as 127,677 cars, leading to indoor air in some neighborhood homes that is five times more toxic than that in other parts of the city.
Still, Gordon told us that port officials are "only starting paying attention." Last year the California Air Resources Board passed a resolution related to air quality at ports and announced that it was developing a regulatory mechanism. A 2006 CARB report found that truck diesel exhaust accounts for the majority of the estimated 2,400 deaths related to freight transport each year and 70 percent of the state’s air pollution–<\d>related cancer risk. Freight transport will cost California residents $200 billion in health costs over the next 15 years. Most of this is borne by low-income communities of color near freight transport hubs.
The combination of state mandates and local community concerns is starting to spark a change. "They would sit down and talk with us before that, but there was not anything concrete done," Gordon told us. The port is now in the early planning stages of an air-quality-improvement program, working with Gordon and other activists.
That movement is getting vigorous new support from the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, a national partnership of labor, environmental, and community activists organizing at the country’s major container ports: Los Angeles, Long Beach, Miami, Oakland, New York–New Jersey, and Seattle.
"Every one of those ports has the same environmental and labor problems we have in Oakland," Doug Bloch, the coordinator for the coalition in Oakland, told us during a tour of the port’s heavy industrial landscape. Virtually all of its 900 maritime acres are covered by concrete and asphalt, monster cranes that inspired Star Wars‘ Imperial Walkers, and 20-foot steel containers stacked up like Legos behind chain-link fences.
The Port of Oakland has no direct relationship with its truckers at the present. Shippers take price bids from among roughly 100 trucking companies at the port, then contract the work to the independent-contractor truckers. The CCSP says bidding wars lead to poverty wages for truckers, older trucks and more pollution, and a chaotic port full of inefficiencies like long pickup waits.
Under the proposed system, ports would call on their ability as landlords to set standards for the trucking and shipping companies. They would require trucking companies to hire drivers as employees, shifting maintenance costs from the drivers to the companies, which would retrofit or replace all port trucks with more environmentally friendly rigs. The ports would allow only new, cleaner trucks to enter. The companies could then, in theory, pass the costs on to shippers and end users.
If drivers were paid as employees by the hour instead of by the trip, the coalition expects the market would reduce inefficient truck wait times and air pollution.
"When you rent an apartment you sign a lease," Bloch told us. "If you trash the place, you get evicted. Corporations are trashing this community, but they’re not being evicted."
A test case could soon be under way at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two largest in the United States, and the situation is being closely watched by ports and industries across the country. Port commissioners there had hoped by the end of this month to approve the coalition’s program, which they expect to reduce diesel truck emissions by as much as 80 percent over the next five years. But growing opposition and the threat of lawsuits by groups like the California Trucking Association, which represents the owners of truck companies, and the Waterfront Coalition, a consortium of major retailers, led the ports to delay their decision. The commissioners now expect to vote in September after completing an economic impact survey.
At the center of the storm is the fact that as employees, truckers would be able to organize and form a union. As independent contractors, they are barred from doing so because of antitrust laws originally created to oppose vast enterprises that dominated industries. (A further irony is that giant retail steamship companies have experienced incredible consolidation and enjoy a limited antitrust immunity.)
If passed by LA port officials, the plan would be implemented there starting Jan. 1, 2008, and could result in a domino effect at the other, smaller ports across the country. "The industry is fighting like hell in LA," Bloch told us. "They know that if they’re going to have to pay, the party’s over."
Meanwhile, Bloch told us that more than 1,000 truckers have signed a petition asking the Port of Oakland to pass a version of the coalition’s proposal, and it will be presented to the Port Commission, the seven-member body that would eventually vote on the proposal. Spokesperson Libby Schaff told us that the port "agrees with the coalition that the port can and should have a more direct relationship with its truckers" and is "very seriously considering the coalition’s proposal."
Because the proposal "constitutes a major overhaul of the way trucking is done today," Schaff said the port is currently holding stakeholder meetings with residents, truckers, terminal operators, elected officials, the business community, and labor to consider it in the context of a more comprehensive port plan. Schaff said a comprehensive plan could be crafted in less than a year.
The port has not taken a position on granting truckers employee status. It is also looking into other funding mechanisms for a clean-truck program, including money from a pending state bill that would impose a $30 fee on every 20-foot-equivalent unit passing through the Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Oakland port complexes, to be used for improvements in road and rail infrastructure and for clean-air programs.
The legislation, Senate Bill 974, by Alan Lowenthal (D–Long Beach), would generate more than $525 million annually. But it faces tough opposition from some very powerful interests.
RESISTING CHANGE
Bill Aboudi, president of Oakland’s AB Trucking and a member of the CTA, told us truckers are "treated like second-class citizens," and he believes long lines and trucker asthma are serious problems. But he strongly opposes the coalition’s proposal. Instead, he told us, state regulations like those forthcoming from CARB and other piecemeal reforms are the answer.
"The coalition’s main goal is to unionize the drivers," Aboudi said. He was wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with two American flags and the words "Oakland Trucker." An immigrant from Israel, he has been at the Port of Oakland since 1992. "If these guys choose to be owner-operators, why are you rocking the boat? You can’t be playing with my livelihood just because you want to get union dues," Aboudi said. "Truckers want to own a piece of the American dream. They want to own their own truck."
It’s an appealing image to many. Kevin Leonard, an owner-operator trucker who contracts with Aboudi and others, told us he doesn’t want to give up his independent status. "I have the freedom to work when I want," he said. "I don’t see how the Teamsters can represent me better than I can."
The trucking industry as a whole says the coalition plan will force away trade and drive out small trucking companies, which will have to maintain the trucks and start paying benefits such as health insurance and workers’ compensation.
Yet Assemblymember Sandré Swanson (D–Oakland) brushed aside those arguments. "I’ve been involved in Bay Area politics for more than 30 years," he told us. "I’ve seen these same claims made against farmworkers as they were organizing for better conditions. I’ve seen these arguments made when we were raising the minimum wage. I think the opposite is true. If you have a workforce with a livable wage, it’s a more productive workforce, and I think everyone benefits. Truckers deserve more, and we’re going to do what we can to help them."
Oakland City Council president Ignacio de la Fuente, who drafted and helped pass a minimum-wage law for port employees, told us he supports the right of truckers to unionize but labor and environmental concerns must be balanced with economic growth. "You can’t ignore the fact that you have the port of Oakland competing with other ports," he said. "I support the fact that the Teamsters are going to bargain collectively on a national level. This port competes with other ports, and you cannot be put at a disadvantage."
Bloch says the coalition’s target is the shipping companies, not the trucking companies. "The shippers are hiding behind the trucking companies," he told us. "On the one side there are the giant shipping companies, like Wal-Mart and Target, huge global companies that demand low prices from trucking companies. On the other side are tiny trucking companies, immigrant truckers, and communities of color. Wal-Mart’s slogan is ‘always low prices,’ but ‘always low prices’ means one out of five children in West Oakland with asthma and drivers making $8 an hour who can’t support their families."
Oakland mayor Ron Dellums may be signaling his support for reform with two new appointees to the Port Commission. Even before he took office, Dellums was working to influence the Port Commission; as mayor-elect, he requested that outgoing mayor Jerry Brown hold off on appointing a new nominee so Dellums could appoint someone working on environmental and community impacts. He lost this battle when a majority of the city council voted to appoint Mark McClure, the director of marketing at a business technology company focused on security.
Dellums’s latest appointees, announced earlier this month, are a marked contrast to the business-oriented appointees of the Brown era: Victor Uno, a financial secretary with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and Gordon, the longtime resident and environmental activist in West Oakland.
"The port’s policy has been all about business and not about the people," Gordon told us. "The mayor really wants someone there to talk about health issues. I have never known a mayor to put someone on the commission and one of their engagements is to talk about health." She would also like to see a public participatory-process policy built into the port. "This is about sharing the power," Gordon said. "I don’t think West Oakland residents know they have power." She has "no problem" with truckers unionizing but also wants to find a way for drivers to remain independent contractors if they prefer.
Uno told the Guardian that he is highly supportive of the proposal. "I think that if the whole commission takes the lead of Mayor Dellums that this proposal will be very seriously considered," he said. "I’m very optimistic." Asked if he thought a proposal could succeed without requiring trucking companies to hire truckers as employees, he said, "I do not see how that is possible, given the lack of regulations in the trucking industry. It’s a dog-eat-dog world among independent truckers."
DEREGULATION HISTORY
The ports were not always structured as they are now. Before the 1980s the Interstate Commerce Commission regulated trucking, and most truckers at California ports were members of the Teamsters. They had health care, pensions, and workers’ compensation insurance and were paid a middle-class wage.
As part of a national push toward deregulation in the late 1970s, Congress, spurred by President Jimmy Carter, deregulated the trucking industry in 1980. In the following few years, a flood of new trucking companies entered the ports, with shippers choosing between a growing number of companies for each job. As small trucking companies undercut one another in bidding wars, the falling rates translated into declining driver pay, the bankruptcy of Teamster-organized companies, and increasing reliance on independent contractors whom companies could hire without spending money on payroll taxes, health care costs, or other benefits that unions might try to extract.
Trucking expert Michael Belzer, an economics professor at Wayne State University, has shown that long-haul truckers now earn less than half of prederegulation wages and work an average of more than 60 hours a week, while retailers like Wal-Mart have thrived. "The low rates paid to truckers in this global-trade game acts as a subsidy for increasing the amount of trade," Belzer told us. "Pollution and safety hazards are the negative externalities." If all ports on the West Coast required employee drivers, he said, "the market result would be that cost and safety would go up, and pollution would go down."
There have been a handful of Teamsters-related or trucker-led rallies and work stoppages at the Port of Oakland since deregulation, including a technically illegal strike in 2004 protesting the soaring price of diesel fuel, which virtually shut down the port for eight days. Many of the same complaints of today’s port truckers were aired at that time — long waits in lines, poor pay, long hours, and no benefits.
"This business is like the Mafia," Lorenzo Fernandez, 36, said, standing in front of two metal taco trucks glinting in the noon sun, along with about a half dozen other truckers on their lunch break. "They’re doing whatever they want with us, between the [truck companies] and the shippers. There is so much competition between the companies, and they know that we need the job. They know that our kids will go hungry."
Muhammad Khan, 33, said he’s sometimes forced to make up for long wait times by driving dangerously fast on the freeways. "We have our families. We have to take care of them. We all risk our lives because we have to. We don’t make enough money if we don’t make a load," Khan told us.
"We’re all immigrants here," Fernandez said. "We make it possible for the economy to grow up, but they’re stepping on our faces…. We have to work together. Otherwise we are going to be slaves for life."
A sign on a chain-link fence near the taco trucks reads, "Got an old truck? The Port of Oakland can help! Replace your old truck today!" Call the number at the bottom of the sign, and a recorded message issues an invitation to an informational barbecue that took place four months ago. The message explains that the port will provide qualifying owners with up to $40,000 to replace trucks dating from 1993 or before with a 1999-model truck. But Schaff told us, "Due to overwhelming demand, new applicants are currently not being accepted."
Money for the program came from a $9 million settlement of a lawsuit West Oakland residents filed against the Port of Oakland in 1998, alleging that their health was being harmed by port operations. The port says it will replace a total of 80 of the estimated 2,500 port trucks with those funds. When asked if the port had a responsibility to truckers, Schaff said it was "consistent with the port’s commitment to social responsibility…. We’ve done a lot, and we’re going to do more."
But the only specific programs the port could point to were the truck replacement program, a trucker access committee and working group started after the 2004 strike, and new GPS cell phone technology that is being touted as a solution for bottlenecks. Chuck Mack, the Teamsters’ Western Region vice president, isn’t impressed. "They’re a joke," he said of the programs. "Very few independent contractors have utilized them."
The recent purchase of the GPS system particularly irritates Mack. "Here is a quasi-governmental agency supplying services to the trucking companies," he told us. "It’s bizarre that we’re using taxpayer money for this. Any other industry would buy the devices themselves."
"We don’t disagree with using this money" for truck replacement, Mack said, "but what you’re doing is blowing $2 million in taxpayer money. Years down the road they’re going to need a new truck and another million in taxpayer money. For Wal-Mart and Target it’s great because they can have the taxpayer pick up the bill. Without changing the model, it’s just a short-term fix at the expense of the taxpayer."
EMPLOYEE BENEFITS
Beyond the environmental and economic benefits of making truckers employees of the companies, the change also might improve port security. The federal Transportation Worker Identification Credential program, expected to be implemented in the fall, will check the identities of the nation’s 750,000 port employees, 110,000 of whom work as truckers. Under the present system, there is no way to track the independent port truckers.
Employees are easier to track, and they are also better for port security in other ways. Among low-paid port truckers, turnover rate is extremely high, according to the ATA. "We all know that having a stable, well-trained, reliable workforce only leads to more security," Bloch said. "If they’re trained, they can be the eyes and ears of the port."
Well-paid truckers also would lead to safer ports. In a 2005 report, Belzer showed that "a substantial fraction" of independent operators actually loses money each year, resulting in "a high risk of unsafe operations among those earning the least money." The low compensation also "presents a national security risk," his report read, "since those who desperately work to break even might be at risk to engage in activities that put the nation at risk, whether intentionally or unintentionally, just trying to find a way from not going under."
Driving past another long line of trucks idling outside a gate after lunch break, Bloch pointed out one truck. A placard on the back of the rig read, "End sweatshops on wheels."
The current port system "just heaps abuse and abuse on these truck drivers and this community," Bloch told us. "The big businesses like Wal-Mart don’t pay the cost of polluting Oakland. It’s the truck drivers and the community that pay the cost. People pay with their lives."
"You can’t fix the environmental problems without fixing the problems of the driver," he said. "And now you have labor and the community coming together, and that’s powerful."*
With the furor over her erratic driving incident still lingering and a primary challenge from Assemblymember Mark Leno starting to get nasty, state senator Carole Migden is now wading into another potentially pungent political pool.
This time around, the battle involves the state’s laws governing coastal land use, the Port of San Francisco’s revenue needs, and the competing interests of folks who live along, work near, or simply like to relax and recreate along the city’s bayside waterfront.
Migden’s Senate Bill 815 would make three major changes to the ancient and arcane laws that govern the use of the state’s tidelands. It would allow the port to rent out 11 seawall-protected properties, currently used for surface parking lots, for development over 75 years, after which they would return to the public trust.
It would also permit the port to sell off "paper streets" — lots that serve as view corridors, public rights-of-way, and connections between the city and its waterfront, including portions of Texas, Custer, Ingalls, and Davidson streets developed with warehouses, as well as the recently closed Hunters Point Power Plant.
Last, Migden’s bill would allow the transfer of the 36-acre, federally owned Jobs Corps parcel on Treasure Island to local control as part of an exchange of public trust and nontrust lands on Treasure and Yerba Buena islands.
Port special project manager Brad Benson told the Guardian that the local agency worked with the California State Lands Commission for two years on ways to help increase the port’s revenue-generating capabilities, and this bill was the result.
"We cc’d the neighborhood organizations on the amendments that we sent to Migden’s office on June 12, and we invited further discussion," Benson said of the proposal, which is intended to help cover the port’s estimated $1.4 billion cost for seismic retrofits and restorations, hazardous-material remediation, storm-water management, and improved waterfront access by relaxing the land-use restriction of the 1969 Burton Act.
The Burton Act gave the port control of San Francisco’s waterfront from Fisherman’s Wharf to Candlestick Point, including 39 historic finger piers between Fisherman’s Wharf and China Basin. But it also limited the port to leasing seawall lots for street purposes such as surface parking while giving it the financial responsibility of maintaining and restoring the historical waterfront.
Today just about everybody agrees that surface parking is a horrible use of the seawall lots — with the possible exception of the Giants, who want to retain 2,000 spaces on the 14-acre lot they lease next to Mission Creek. But in recent weeks disagreement has broken out over last-minute amendments that were added to Migden’s bill June 20 to impose height limits on four seawall lots in the Northeastern Waterfront Historic District and remove a fifth lot entirely.
Those amendments were added following input from neighborhood groups like the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association, and the Friends of the Golden Gate, a 1,400-member nonprofit whose stated goal is "to preserve open recreational space for the citizens of San Francisco."
In a June 20 letter to Migden, Telegraph Hill Dwellers president Vedica Puri argued for height limits on the basis of a "visual and historic connection between the waterfront and Telegraph Hill" created by "higher structures closer to the base of Telegraph Hill and lower buildings near the Embarcadero." Noting that three of the disputed lots are currently zoned for heights of 40 feet, with the fourth lot, closer to Telegraph Hill, zoned for 65 feet, Puri argued for respecting local height limits in place as of January.
Meanwhile, the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association, the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, and the Friends of the Golden Gate asked that lot 351, which abuts the Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Club, be excluded from the deal.
"There is an ongoing struggle in the Barbary Coast neighborhood over an outsize condominium project usually known as the 8 Washington Project," Jonathan Middlebrook of the association’s Waterfront Action Group warned.
Friends of the Golden Gate chair Lee Radner, in a June 29 letter to Loni Hancock, chair of the Assembly’s Natural Resources Committee, argued for keeping lot 351 under the public trust because it "abuts the open recreational space, along the Embarcadero, Washington, and Drumm streets."
"Lot 351, if removed from the public trust," Radner wrote, "will give a developer the option to build high-rise, exclusive, and costly condominiums that would spill over into the recreational space and change the open view corridors to Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower forever, limit the light and views of many neighbors, and impact the traffic on an already congested Embarcadero."
But two local planning and land-use groups argue that Migden’s amended legislation would wrest control of height restrictions from the local planning process and benefit a well-heeled few at the expense of everyone else.
Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, said he believes height limits and urban design should be decided at the local level. "The problem with stipuutf8g a 40-foot height limit is that you end up getting squashed retail space, creating a pokey, unpleasant atmosphere," said Radulovich, who’d rather see the lots taken out of the bill than included with those provisions. "To my mind the question is: how do builders create a great street? And what building controls help achieve that goal? We wanted to make these lots more walkable, bikeable, and accessible to contribute to the overall public good with the maximum opportunity for local control. The latest amendments tip the balance towards state interference, and that’s inappropriate."
Tim Colen of the Housing Action Coalition accuses the neighborhood associations of "not wanting any height increases or other uses to the extent that it might threaten their view." Colen said developer Simon Snellgrove of Pacific Waterfront Partners is interested in lot 351, which lies across from the Ferry Building, to create high-end condos, mixed-use residential units, and 34 below-market-rate units.
He acknowledges that the Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Club would lose three tennis courts under the legislation. "But this is a chance for 34 families to get housing and be able to stay in San Francisco," Colen said. "The Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Club is a really sweet facility, but it ain’t public recreation. Migden’s bill benefits some very well-heeled people when the interests of many are at stake."
Migden’s bill, which cleared the Senate but must return for final approval because of the amendments, is set to work its way through the Assembly by August. Benson said continued negotiations would be a good thing. "We appreciate Senator Migden’s work, but we believe height limits are a locals-only matter to be decided by the Board of Supervisors and the mayor."
But the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association’s Diana Taylor said her group "spent hours getting the community informed, telling the port what we wanted, until eventually we came up with a bottom line, what our compromises were…. That’s where senator Carole Migden developed amendments, and this was the first time that we came to a coordinated agreement. But now we find out that the port isn’t happy with some of the amendments. What we’d like to see is a more clear-cut strategy to bring the port and the communities together. We’re adversaries right now, but we shouldn’t be."
With the port set to have a public discussion July 31 about lot 337 (the Giants’ parking lot next to Mission Creek), Jennifer Clary of San Francisco Tomorrow notes that Mission Creek is home to 60 species of birds. As she said, "Isn’t habitat preservation and restoration part of urban development? Is it really a choice between people and birds? Is that the decision?"<\!s>*
I always read Matt Smith, the star columnist of the SF Weekly/New Times/Village Voice Media, with interest. But he often puzzles me. For example, in his column of May 30, he was banging away at his favorite target, those dread progressives, (“Lacking (Progressive) Definition, Lefty factions and a phony convention do not an effective political party make”). And he dropped this puzzling nugget:
“For more than a generation (liberals have been) opposing growth, while snubbing traditional liberal causes such as uplifting gays or African-Americans.
“When San Franciscans, for example, were dying en masse from AIDS during the l980s, progressives’ minds were more preoccupied with opposing ‘Manhattanization,’ the term they coined for new office buildings. Today, when African-Americans in the Bayview District are losing their sons, nephews, friends, and neighbors to drug-related
street violence, progressives’ official political pamphlet is concerned primarily with enacting a moratorium on construction of market-rate apartments.”
The truth, as anyone who was here and had friends and loved ones dying of AIDS knows, the progressives in San Francisco put together a world-renowned system for caring for people with AIDS and pressing for prevention and research funding. The ‘San Francisco Model’ did not come from Washington or Sacramento or Dianne Feinstein. The progressives, led by people like Harry Britt and Cleve Jones and leaders of the Harvey Milk Democratic Club etc., did it themselves. Progressives did, indeed, oppose Manhattanization (and fight for rent control and police oversight and a lot of other good causes) in that era, but AIDS was very much a centerpiece of the progressive agenda.
"Do you always have to offend everyone?" So ran a comment — anonymous, of course — on a piece I’d written for an undergrad creative writing class, a piss take on the Our Father titled "Our Father II." This was in the early ’90s, when I was still planning my escape from junior college and the burbs. Another classmate suggested that I "try going on a fishing trip or getting laid or something" so I could "write something positive for a change."
During this time in my life, Unsane (Matador, 1991), the eponymous debut by the East Village meat grinders, was in heavy rotation on my turntable, the cover displayed upright on the stereo cabinet: a man on the subway tracks, his head neatly severed by the downtown train. In an era rife with rawboned noise rock, the record was the ne plus ultra of anger and aggression: as violent and uncompromising as golden-age Slayer, but more immediate and less mythical. Whereas Slayer sang about historical creeps Ed Gein and Josef Mengele, Unsane’s Chris Spencer screamed his throat raw about that guy, right there, sitting across the aisle from you with an ice pick in his pocket, staring. Musically, he somehow managed to take the country staple Fender Telecaster and wring the twang out of it, giving it a metal-on-metal screech like that subway train with its brakes locked.
Years later, after logging a decent amount of coitus and fishing trips, I had lost neither my predilection for the aggro or for Unsane. I’d wander around the SF State campus stressed, thinking deep collegiate thoughts, scowling, and muttering to myself, borderline Trenchcoat Mafia and pre–selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. I got into a philosophical argument with a poet visiting one of my classes. She was heavily into Zen and read a few poems about sweaty horses and wild roses. They were well crafted and praiseworthy but raised hackles when their author, all blissed out on Mill Valley and whole grain, contended that the purpose of poetry is to convey beauty. That’s an option, sure, but what about ugly? If the only purpose of art is to strive for beauty, what separates it from a Cover Girl commercial, from the consistent mainstream message that things, such as they are, are not as they should be? "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," John Keats wrote in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." I prefer the adage "Beauty is only skin-deep, but ugly goes to the bone." Sure, the Lorax speaks for the trees, but who will speak for the twisted, ugly, and bitter?
It’s a rhetorical question, of course. Three albums — not counting singles and greatest-hits comps — and four labels later, Unsane are back with Visqueen on Ipecac, with its cover of a body wrapped in plastic sheeting and dumped in a meadow. Over the course of its career, the band has toured relentlessly, including an opening stint with Slayer; lost a drummer to a heroin overdose; and inspired dozens of noise bands, some the real deal, others merely aping it. In February 1998, Spencer was attacked by four people in Amsterdam and needed emergency surgery for internal bleeding. So while you can look at the photos on Unsane’s site and see the band members smiling and horsing around, their recordings are decidedly missing that "good day, sunshine" vibe. They’ve been there, and they’ve seen it. "This city is packed full of lowlifes," Spencer sings over a forlorn harmonica on the ominously titled "This Stops at the River," "and all I can see in your eyes is fear."
It can be argued that there’s a certain homogeneity in Unsane’s fixation on the shady side of the street. "I know it’s only pain / I know it’s all the same," Spencer reveals in a moment of self-awareness. Both Keats and my classroom visitor had it right — and they both had it wrong. Zen isn’t a hippie chill pill; it’s about seeing clearly what’s there. This is the picture, Pollyanna. This is the whole thing. You live in the city; there are no more truffula trees. There are no more barbaloots in their barbaloot suits. There’s a boot on your car, rent’s due, the phone’s been disconnected, and there’s a junkie sitting on the curb, shooting up in his foot.
There are things you can count on in this world, and that same, punishing Unsane sound, with minor variations, will be there when you need release. Keats died of tuberculosis at 25, coughing up blood. If "beauty is truth, truth beauty," then either his death was a lie or all the death and blood and bodies wrapped in Visqueen have some kind of underlying beauty. There is an aesthetic in violence and fear that forms a more satisfying whole than roses and Grecian urns alone. What does an urn hold, after all, but ashes? *
It was warmer than usual that Saturday morning in Golden Gate Park. Peter Cummings woke up behind a bush, took his shirt and shoes off, put on his headphones, and staggered down the hill with a bottle of whiskey and a big smile on his bearded, dirt-stained face. He sat down on the bench at Stanyan and Hayes and greeted passersby in his usual charmingly rambunctious way. For the past seven years, this had more or less been his daily routine.
The only thing that made this day different was the food and the heroin. That morning Cummings skipped breakfast. He usually went to the corner deli to buy some bread and soup, but not this particular Saturday. Then, around 2 p.m., a couple guys walking down the hill found Cummings convulsing in a quiet nook behind a fallen log. One of them gave him CPR and a Narcan shot, and a couple others ran across the street to St. Mary’s Medical Center to get the paramedics. But it was too late.
Hundreds of homeless people die every year in San Francisco, and many of them leave our world silently and with little impact on the city. But the loss of this particular alcoholic, bipolar, homeless man changed the landscape of one San Francisco neighborhood. As Gavin Newsom’s administration aggressively pursues its 10-year plan to abolish chronic homelessness, this man’s legacy shows how someone living in the park may actually be a good thing — if not for himself, then at least for the community.
"He watched out for me," Cirrus Blaafjell, who lives in the neighborhood, told the Guardian. "Some of the guys would harass me when I came out here at night to walk the dogs, and Pete would yell at them, ‘Leave her alone. She’s a nice person!’" When University of San Francisco student Amanda Anderson was followed through the park one day by a seedy character, Cummings launched his own inquiry. "Who tried to hurt Amanda? I’m gonna beat his ass when I find him!" Cummings yelled into the trees.
Even certain city officials agree. "He did seem to keep all the other drunks in line," Officer John Andrews of the San Francisco Police Department told us. "A lot of times when we had a problem, he’d come around and say, ‘Hey, Andrews, we’re taking care of things. Don’t worry.’ If someone was really intoxicated, he’d take them into the bushes. And he never argued with anyone."
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development considers people to be chronically homeless if they’re alone, disabled, and have been sleeping on the streets or in shelters for a year straight or intermittently for three years. Newsom’s initiatives aim to put all 3,000 chronically homeless residents of San Francisco into permanent homes by 2014. "It’s a concept based on Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point," Angela Alioto, the chairperson of the 10-year plan, explained. "If you take care of those who are the most chronic and use the most resources first, you will tip the scale of the whole problem."
But the Coalition on Homelessness, a nonprofit advocacy group, disagrees. "The phrase chronically homeless is misleading," director Juan Prada told us. "Chronic makes you think of general health issues, so you create an impression that homelessness is a condition. We see homelessness as a systemic failure to address poverty and the lack of housing."
Cummings, who lived in the park for the past seven years, was definitely chronically homeless. But had he survived another seven years to see the mayor’s initiative come to fruition, he may not have ever accepted the helping hand. "I live here by choice," Cummings once told me. "I have money, I have a place to go. I just like it here."
The corner of Stanyan and Hayes is almost never quiet. Belligerent drunks, ambulances speeding to the emergency room half a block north, and road-raged drivers blaring their horns at a badly designed left turn are part of the daily ruckus. Cops show up regularly. "People would call us about trash and shopping carts or about drunks yelling and screaming and fighting each other," Andrews told us. "And you have all types of guys up there in the horseshoe pit."
Hidden amid the trees in the northeast corner of Golden Gate Park, the horseshoe pit is known as a gathering place for hardcore drug users. Nothing remains of its original incarnation except some rusty equipment and a faded life-size mural of a horse. Today it’s a haphazard jumble of used needles, sleeping bags, and seedy characters often too messed up to talk. Despite having this hub as his home, Cummings stayed relatively drug-free for the past four years. And between his Veterans Affairs and Social Security checks, he was bringing home about $3,000 a month. Instead of paying rent, Cummings used his income to buy liquor for himself and food for everyone in the park. "Where does all my money go?" he used to ask people walking their dogs as his friends munched on hot dogs and piroshkis on the grass behind him.
"He used to buy cartons of milk and leave them quietly next to people who he thought would need it," remembers Jerry, a 52-year-old chronically homeless man and one of Cummings’s best friends.
Cummings kept his past well hidden from his park friends, but when he died, dozens of people in the Upper Haight–North Panhandle area came out with stories about him from the past two decades, back to a time when he was sober, happily married, and a model member of the community.
"People used to call him the mayor of Cole Valley," said Jacob Black, a cab driver. "He knew everybody in town."
Cummings was born in Melrose, Mass., on March 11, 1954. He lived there with his parents and two siblings until his father, an engineer at a forklift company, was transferred to Oregon in 1971. "[Peter] picked on me a lot, but I always outsmarted him," younger brother Rick Cummings, who is a sales rep in the health care industry, told us. "It was a typical brotherly thing." Cummings joined the Coast Guard at age 20 and developed a lifelong love for the ocean while stationed in Hawaii and Guam. He was honorably discharged in 1978 when he injured his knee on an open hatch cover.
For the next couple years, Cummings wandered around Northern California, growing pot and mushrooms in the mountains and sleeping on the beach. "He always attacked me for my middle-class, suburban lifestyle," Rick says. "He never wanted that." For most of the ’80s, Cummings lived under a seedy bridge in downtown Portland, with a heroin addiction and early symptoms of bipolar disorder. He ended up in San Francisco, where he decided to give sobriety a shot. As Rick said, "He had it together enough mentally to know that he had to either get cleaned up or die."
Once in San Francisco, Cummings took lithium for his bipolar disorder, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, and by all accounts stayed sober for almost 14 years. For the first time in his adult life, everything was going really well. He got married to a beautiful Peruvian woman, rented an apartment in Cole Valley, bought a used Jaguar and a Boston whaler, which he took out for salmon fishing in the bay, and was constantly surrounded by a solid group of friends. He even worked as a drug rehab counselor at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics.
Cummings was known among AA and NA circles as a handsome, spiritual role model with a killer sense of humor who always brought fresh fish to barbecues. "When I got sober, I was living on the streets and hated life," friend Dana Scheer says. "Pete reached out to me as he did to countless people. He was like a sober guru to me — I knew him as a very stable, rock-solid person."
Then, around 1998, things started to go downhill. His AA sponsor died of cancer; his wife left him; and the VA screwed up his bipolar meds. Cummings became increasingly isolated. He stopped attending meetings and moved out of the Haight, first to work as a building manager in SoMa and then to pursue a love interest in Mill Valley. "I went over to visit him one day, and he was drinking Coors," Scheer says. "This was my mentor from AA, so it was a little bit shocking." When Scheer left that evening, Cummings gave her a few of his belongings, including a stack of blankets. "I thought that was significant, because he always took care of me," Scheer says. "Blankets symbolize warmth and comfort, and he had always given me that. That was the last time I saw him before he ended up on the street again."
Cummings returned to the Haight around 2000, but this time he was drunk and high and incoherent. "When you’re that kind of addict, you don’t just start drinking a little wine," Scheer says. Cummings eventually ended up at the horseshoe pit, where he was reunited with some old AA friends who had also relapsed. And that’s where he lived for the last seven years of his life.
Despite recent city efforts to abolish camping in Golden Gate Park, Cummings continued to live in the bushes, often changing location to avoid getting caught. "It’s completely illegal for people to live in the park," Rose Dennis, director of communications at San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department, told us. "But if you’ve been on the streets for seven years, you become resilient."
Alioto told us she has no problem with homeless people not wanting a roof over their heads. "If a person truly wanted to live on the street, there is nothing we can or should do," she told us. "They have a constitutional right to live and travel."
On the outside, Cummings the homeless guy was nothing like Cummings the sober guru, but he continued to help people with drug and alcohol problems. "Peter helped a lot of kids get out of bad situations," Jerry told us. "He was in the Coast Guard, so he knew all the vital signs. He saved a lot of lives, including mine — twice. I owe him a pair of Levi’s from the time I bled all over his after falling down a 30-foot cliff."
Cummings apparently overdosed just a few feet south of the horseshoe pit that had seduced him back into this lifestyle. The week after Cummings died, the Hayes entrance of Golden Gate Park was eerily quiet. "The park is like a cemetery," Jerry said with tears in his eyes. "Everyone’s walking around like corpses." His homeless friends scattered to mourn the loss of a friend and source of nourishment in their own way. "When you’re living on the streets, people are dying left and right," Scheer says. "And when that happens, you just want to get loaded and forget about everything."
Residents of the North Panhandle didn’t have a reason to stop here anymore either." I used to sit on the bench and just talk to him," Christian Blaafjell says. "He was crazy, but he was great. I miss him." Even Andrews is well aware of the impact Cummings’s passing will have on the community. "He was the leader of this pack," he says. "I don’t know what’s going to happen to these guys over here." He pauses. "Hopefully, they’ll leave."
The sight of Cummings limping down Hayes Street might have looked bad for the city, but the services he offered to its most fallen people were indispensable. "Maybe he was just doing his job," says James Warren, a friend from Cummings’s AA days. "Maybe what he learned from the program, he took to the streets. Pete took his legacy, generosity, love, and compassion back to the streets so that they might know that there was a better place and that he’d been there. I know I wouldn’t have made it through if it wasn’t for him." *
Peter S. Cummings died May 5 in San Francisco. He is survived by his parents, Richard and Nancy; his sister, Pam; his brother, Rick; and dozens of friends.
It wasn’t going well for Ted Strawser, predictably. The alternative transportation activist faced an uphill battle March 14 trying to convince a San Francisco Chamber of Commerce committee to endorse Healthy Saturdays, a plan to ban cars from part of Golden Gate Park.
Representatives of the park’s museums and Richmond District homeowners had just argued their case against the measure. “Visitors want access to our front door, and we want to give it to them,” Pat Kilduff, communications director for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, indignantly told the group of two dozen business leaders gathered around a large conference table.
Strawser gave it his best shot: he talked about following the lead of other great cities to create car-free spaces; he said, “Golden Gate Park is one of the best parks in the nation, if not the world”; and he made a detailed case for closure. But around the table there were scowls, eye rolls, and other obvious signs that Strawser was being tolerated, not welcomed. Some — including chamber vice president Jim Lazarus — even started to interrupt and argue with him.
Then the man sitting next to Strawser spoke up. “I don’t think this is fair,” he said. And suddenly, everyone in the room shaped up. Strawser’s ally — his only supporter in the room — was somebody no chamber member could or would dismiss. Warren Hellman doesn’t shout or bang the table — but when he speaks, downtown pays attention.
Hellman, a prominent investment banker, told the committee members that he expected them to show the same respect for Strawser that they had for the previous two speakers. The nonsense ended, immediately.
And by the time Strawser turned the floor over to Hellman, the mood had changed. The group listened raptly, smiled, and nodded as Hellman spoke in his usual folksy, familiar, disarming style.
“It’s not a lot of fun when friends fall out,” he began, “because the previous speakers and many of you all agreed on the necessity of the garage [that was built in Golden Gate Park], and we worked together.”
He pointed out that many in the group had promised during the fall 2000 election to support Healthy Saturdays once the garage was built, although Hellman was now the only member of the coalition honoring that commitment. But he didn’t chide or shame his colleagues. That isn’t Hellman’s style.
Instead, he spoke their language. The garage has never been full and needs the money it can charge for parking to repay the bonds. This isn’t a fight that’s going away, since “part of the conflict is because this park is everybody’s park.” But there are “about 100 compromises not acceptable to either side that would move this forward.” And if a solution can’t be found, there will probably be an expensive ballot fight that nobody wants.
“My conclusion is we should attempt this test,” Hellman told the group. Ultimately, when the vote was later taken in secret, the chamber didn’t agree, although it did vote to back a trial closure after the California Academy of Sciences reopens next year.
At the meeting, Hellman openly called for Mayor Gavin Newsom to get involved in seeking a compromise, something Hellman said he had also just requested of the mayor at a one-on-one breakfast meeting. A couple of weeks later Newsom — who had already indicated his intention of vetoing the measure — did broker a compromise that was then approved by the Board of Supervisors.
As usual, Hellman didn’t take credit, content to quietly play a role in making San Francisco a better place.
Healthy Saturdays isn’t the most important issue in local history — but the significance of Hellman’s involvement can’t be underestimated. His alliance with the environmentalists and park advocates might even signal a sea change in San Francisco politics.
Warren Hellman represents San Francisco’s political and economic past. And maybe — as his intriguing actions of recent years suggest — its future.
This guy is a rich (in all senses of the word) and compelling figure who stands alone in this town. And even though his leadership role in downtown political circles has often placed him at odds with the Guardian, Hellman consented to a series of in-depth interviews over the past six months.
“Our family has been here since early in the 19th century, so we had real roots here,” Hellman told us. His great-grandfather founded Wells Fargo and survived an assassination attempt on California Street by a man who yelled, “Mr. Hellman, you’ve ruined my life,” before shooting a pistol and barely missing.
The Hellman family has been solidly ruling class ever since, rich and Republican, producing a long line of investment bankers like Warren.
Yet the 72-year-old comes off as more iconoclast than patrician, at least partly because of the influence of his irreverent parents, particularly his mother, Ruth, who died in 1971 in a scuba-diving accident in Cozumel, Mexico, at the age of 59. “She was entirely nuts,” Hellman said, going on to describe her World War II stint as a military flier in the Women’s Auxiliary Service Pilots and other colorful pursuits. “She just loved people, a little like I do. She collected people.”
Hellman grew up wealthy and cultured, but he also attended public schools, including Grant Grammar School and Lowell High School. In between, the young troublemaker did a stint at San Rafael Military Academy — “reform school for the rich,” as he called it — for stunts such as riding his horse to Sacramento on a whim.
After doing his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, Hellman got his MBA from Harvard and went on to become, at the age of 26, the youngest partner ever at the prestigious Manhattan investment firm Lehman Bros. He developed into an übercapitalist in his own right and eventually returned home from New York and founded Hellman and Friedman LLC in San Francisco in 1984, establishing himself as the go-to financier for troubled corporations.
“He is really one of the pioneers of private equity,” said Mark Mosher, a longtime downtown political consultant and the executive director of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California Commission on Jobs and Economic Growth, on which Hellman sits.
Hellman became what Business Week called “the Warren Buffett of the West Coast,” a man of extraordinary wealth and power. Among other accomplishments, Hellman took Levi Strauss private, recently made billions of dollars in profits selling DoubleClick to Google, and manages the assets of the California public employee retirement funds (CalPERS and CalSTRS), which are among the largest in the world.
Like many financial titans, Hellman has always been a generous philanthropist, giving to the arts, supporting schools in myriad ways, and funding the San Francisco Foundation and the San Francisco Free Clinic (which his children run). He vigorously competes in marathons and endurance equestrian events, often winning in his age bracket. And he has his humanizing passions, such as playing the five-string banjo and creating the popular Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival.
But he’s also been a prime facilitator of downtown’s political power, which regularly flexes its muscle against progressive causes and still holds sway in the Mayor’s Office and other city hall power centers.
Hellman founded, funds, and is a board member of the Committee on Jobs, which is perhaps the city’s most influential downtown advocacy organization. Hellman and his friends Don Fisher, the founder of the Gap, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein also started SFSOS, which now wages the most vicious attacks on left-of-center candidates and causes.
When the de Young Museum and other cultural institutions were threatening to leave Golden Gate Park, Hellman almost single-handedly had an underground parking garage built for them, in the process destroying 100-year-old pedestrian tunnels and drawing scorn from the left. The Guardian called it “Hellman’s Hole.”
“We at the Bike Coalition very much started out on the opposite side of Warren Hellman,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition executive director Leah Shahum told us. “We couldn’t have been more like oil and water on the garage issue.”
But over the past two years or so, Hellman’s profile has started to change. He went on to become an essential ally of the SFBC and other environmentalists and alternative transportation advocates who want to kick cars off JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park on weekends, crossing the downtown crowd in the process. He has shared his wealth with progressive groups such as Livable City, which often fights downtown, and has stuck up for edgy fun seekers over more conservative NIMBY types. He has also publicly repudiated the attacks of SFSOS and its spokesperson, Wade Randlett, and withdrawn his support from the group.
Hellman is still a Republican, but a thoughtful and liberal-minded one who opposed the Iraq War and wrote an article for Salon.com in February titled “If the United States Were a Company, Would George Bush Be Our CEO?” (His answer: hell no.) And to top it all off, Hellman sports a few tattoos and even attended 2006’s Burning Man Festival and plans to return this year.
Unguarded and reflective, Hellman’s comments to the Guardian foreshadow the possible future of capitalism and influence in San Francisco and point to potential political pathways that are just now beginning to emerge.
Our first conversation took place at the Guardian office two weeks before the November 2006 election, when it was starting to look like Nancy Pelosi had a good shot at becoming speaker of the House of Representatives.
“I think this election in two weeks is going to be really interesting,” Hellman told us.
This Republican was cheering for the Democrats to win. “They aren’t my kind of Republicans,” he said of the people in power. Hellman didn’t support the war or approve of how the Bush administration sold it, and he wanted Pelosi and the Democrats to hold someone accountable.
“What I’d like her to do is admit that we can’t get out [of Iraq immediately], but start to talk about what the fallout has been. Discuss the enormous cost in human life as well as money, and how it’s possible the war united the Middle East against us,” Hellman said.
The one thing he can’t abide is disingenuousness. Hellman speaks plainly and honestly, and he asked us to keep particularly caustic comments off the record only a few times during almost six hours’ worth of interviews. He was self-effacing about his political knowledge and seemed most interested in working through the problems of the day with people of goodwill.
Asked what he values most in the people he deals with, Hellman said, “It’s authenticity. Do they believe things because they believe in them, or do they believe in things because they’re cynical or they’re just trying to gain something?”
Locally, Hellman has reached out to people with varying worldviews and come to count many friends among those who regularly battle against downtown.
“I love to know people,” he said. “That’s probably the single thing that motivates me. When someone says to me, ‘How can you be friends with [then–head of SEIU Local 790] Josie Mooney?’ I say, ‘Look, I want to know Josie Mooney. And if she’s awful, then we won’t be friends.’ I’m just fascinated by getting to know people. And virtually always, they’re a little like Wagner operas: they’re better than they sound.”
Hellman was the chair of the Committee on Jobs when he got to know Mooney, who chaired the San Francisco Labor Council and was a natural political adversary for the pro-business group, particularly when Hellman was leading the fight to do away with the city’s gross receipts tax, which has proved to be costly for the city and a boon for downtown.
But after that victory, Hellman turned around and cochaired a campaign with Mooney to retool and reinstate the gross receipts tax in a way that he believed was more fair and helped restore the lost revenue to the city.
“We lost, but he put $100,000 of his own money into that campaign,” Mooney told us, noting that the proposed tax would have cost Hellman and Friedman around $70,000 a year. “I think he just thought the city needed the money. It was a substantive point of view, not a political point of view.”
Mooney considers Hellman both a friend and “an extraordinary human being…. He has made a huge contribution to San Franciscans that doesn’t relate to ideological issues. A tremendous thing about Warren is he’s not ideological, even in his political point of view…. On politics, I’d say he is becoming more progressive as he understands the issues that confront ordinary people.”
Mooney is one of the people who have helped bring him that awareness. When they first met, Mooney said, Hellman told her, “You’re the first union boss I ever met.” That might have been an epithet coming from some CEOs, but Hellman had a genuine interest in understanding her perspective and working with her.
“In a sense, I think that was a very good era in terms of cooperation between the Committee on Jobs and other elements of the city,” Hellman said. “Josie and I had already met, and we’d established this kind of logic where 80 percent of what we both want for the city we agree on, and 20 percent [of the time, we agree to disagree].”
Committee on Jobs executive director Nathan Nayman — who called Hellman “one of my favorite people in the world” — told us that Hellman feels more free than many executives to be his own person.
“He’s not with a publicly held company, and he doesn’t have to answer to shareholders,” Nayman said. “He takes a position and lives by his word. You don’t see many people like him in his income bracket.”
Hellman has become a trusted hub for San Franciscans of all political persuasions, Nayman said, “because he’s very genuine. He’s fully transparent in a city that likes to praise itself for transparency. What you see is what you get.”
Hellman expects the same from others, which is why he walked away from SFSOS (and convinced Feinstein to bolt as well) in disgust over Randlett’s scorched-earth style. Among other efforts, SFSOS was responsible for below-the-belt attacks on Sups. Chris Daly, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval (whom a mailer inaccurately accused of anti-Semitism).
“If all things were equal, I’d just as soon that SFSOS went away,” Hellman said. “SFSOS started doing the opposite of what I thought they would be doing, so it was fairly easy for me to part company with them. What I thought we were doing is trying to figure out ways to make the city better, not just being an antagonistic, nay-saying attack organization. I’m not a huge fan of Gerardo Sandoval, but I thought the attacks on him were beyond anything I could imagine ever being in favor of myself. And it was a series of things like that, and I said I don’t want anything more to do with this.”
Downtown, they’re not always quite sure what to make of Hellman.
“Every once in a while, he does things that irritate people who are ideologically conservative,” Mosher said. “He took an immense amount of heat for supporting the Reiner initiative [which would have taxed the rich to fund universal preschool].”
He’s given countless hours and untold riches to public schools, doing everything from endowing programs to knocking on doors in support of bond measures and often pushing his colleagues to do the same.
“My connection to him has been through the school district, and he’s really been a prince,” Sup. Tom Ammiano said. “He has even stopped calling me antibusiness. He put a lot of his energy into improving public education, and so he shows it can be done.”
Progressives don’t always agree with Hellman, but they feel like they can trust him and even sometimes win him over. “If you get a relationship with him and you’re always honest about the facts and your own interests, he will listen, and that’s pretty remarkable,” Mooney said. “He shows a remarkable openness to people who have good ideas.”
His appreciation for people of all stripes often causes him to reject the conventional wisdom of his downtown allies, who viciously attacked the Green Party members of the Board of Education a few years ago.
“Everybody said, ‘Oh my god, Sarah Lipson, you know, she’s a Green Party member, she’s the furthest left-wing person on the board,’ blah, blah, blah,” he said. “And I phoned her up one day and said, ‘I’d really like to meet you.’ And she’s — leave aside the fact that I think she’s a very good person as a human being, but she’s a very thoughtful, analytic person. Listening to her opinions about things that are happening in the school district, I really respect that. I mean, what do I know about what’s going on in the school district? I know more now than I did then. But just getting to know people, and maybe get them to understand my point of view, which isn’t that penetrating.”
Many of his efforts have received little publicity, as when he saved the Great American Music Hall from closure by investing with Slim’s owner Boz Scaggs and helping him buy the troubled musical venue. “There are things that you and I don’t even have a clue that he has done,” Nayman said.
“He’s an interesting guy,” Mosher said. “He’s one of a dying breed, a liberal Republican. He has a social conscience and wants to use his money to do good.”
Actually, calling Hellman liberal might be going too far. In the end, he’s still very much a fiscal conservative. He doesn’t support rent control, district elections for the Board of Supervisors, taxing businesses to address social problems such as the lack of affordable health care, or limits on condo conversions.
He also opposes the requirement that employers provide health care coverage, which downtown entities are now suing the city to overturn, telling us, “In general, I don’t think it’s a good idea, because I’m still, even in my aging years, a believer that the marketplace works better than other things…. Universal health care I do believe in, but what I worry is that it’s going to be another damned bureaucracy and that it’s not going to work.”
Yet he doesn’t believe wealth is an indicator of worth, saying of his fortune, “It is luck. Most of what you do you aren’t better at than everyone.”
He doesn’t believe in the law of the jungle, in which the poor and weak must be sacrificed in the name of progress. In fact, he feels a strong obligation to the masses.
As he told us, “My mantra for capitalism — and I didn’t invent this, but I think it’s pretty good — is that capitalism won, and now we need to save the world from capitalism.”
Hellman looms large over downtown San Francisco. His Financial District office offers a panoramic view of the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, the Ferry Building, and the rest of the city’s waterfront. He likes to be personally involved with his city and the companies in which Hellman and Friedman invests.
“Usually I’m directly involved,” he told us in an interview earlier this year. “I’ve always said that I don’t like to go to the racetrack to just look at the horses. The fun of being a principal is that you’re standing at the track and not saying, ‘Gee, that’s a beautiful gray horse.’ You’re saying, ‘Come on, he’s got to win!’ So I’m almost always invariably invested in the companies that we work with, either individually or through the firm.”
Unlike many Wall Street barons who strive to control a company and bring in new executives, flip it for a quick profit, or liquidate it, Hellman said his firm tries to identify solid companies and help facilitate what they do. “We don’t usually take over companies. I always think that we provide a service to help the businesses,” he said. “Our job is kind of the opposite of owning a factory. Our job is to be sure the people who run the business feel like it’s their business.”
Similarly, he thinks capitalists need to feel a sense of ownership over society’s problems, something he thinks is taking root in San Francisco and other economic centers, particularly among the younger generations. “It’s about understanding how much suffering there is on the other side and trying to figure out how that suffering can be alleviated,” he said. “I think it’s partly good economics that as you bring people up, they’re able to do more for society. If nothing else, they’re able to buy more and shop at a Wal-Mart or something — probably someplace you would wildly disapprove of — and buy goods and services. But I don’t think it’s that narrow.”
Rather, he believes that everyone has a little progressive in them, a little desire to cooperatively solve our collective problems rather than pass them off to future generations. He sees a marked change from his days at Lehman Bros.
“Everybody was into making it,” he said, noting that many capitalists then did charity work as a means of attaining social status but focused mostly on the accumulation of wealth. But, he said, the new generation of capitalists seems genuinely interested in improving the world.
“The feeling for giving back in the next generation, in the now 25- to 35-year-olds, it’s just an order-of-magnitude difference than it was for people who are now in their 40s and early 50s,” Hellman said. “I’m very encouraged.”
Yet the flip side is that, in Hellman’s view, downtown doesn’t wield as much power as it once did. Low political contribution limits have made politicians less dependent on downtown money, creating fewer shot callers, while democratizing tools such as the Internet have broadened the political dialogue.
“For the last 30 years we have become an increasingly tolerant city, and that’s great,” he said. “In the old days, [the Guardian] complained about downtown, and yeah, no shit, downtown really did control the city. The benefit was as that slipped away, the city became fairer and more open to argument. So now downtown hardly has any power at all anymore. In a sense, that’s a good thing. Tolerance grew tremendously when the city wasn’t dictated to.”
That tolerance caused street fairs to pop up all over town and festivals such as Hellman’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass to blossom in Golden Gate Park. Bike lanes have taken space from cars, events such as Halloween in the Castro have gotten crazier, street protests have gotten bigger and more frequent, and people have felt more free to fly their freak flags. And all that freedom eventually triggered a backlash from groups of isolated NIMBYs who complain and often find sympathetic ears at city hall.
“Sometimes you get the feeling in this city that in the land of the tolerant, the intolerant are king,” said Hellman, whose festival has endured noise complaints even though the music is shut off by 7 p.m. “There is a continuing pressure to do away with fun, because fun is objectionable to someone, [but] we need to think about not creating a new dictatorship of a tiny group of people whose views are not in line with the opinion of most of the people of San Francisco…. You should try to balance the good of a lot of people versus the temporary annoyance of a few people.”
Preserving fun and a lively urban culture is a personal issue for Hellman, who plays the five-string banjo and calls his festival “the most enjoyable two days of the year for me.” He helps draw the biggest names in bluegrass music and acts like a kid in a candy shop during the event.
“I feel very strongly that an important part of our culture is built on the type of music and type of performance that goes on at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass,” Hellman said. From parables set to music to songs of struggle and the old union standards, “that kind of music is the conscience of our country.”
He considers bluegrass a vital and historically important form of political communication, more so than many of the upscale art forms that the rich tend to sponsor. “I’m glad that we have first-rate opera, but it’s equally important that we foster the kind of music, lyrics, etc., that support all this,” he said. “Somebody once said that most of the great Western philosophy is buried in the words of country songs. And that’s closer to the truth than most people think. A big passion of mine is to try to help — and people have defined it too narrowly — the kinds of music that I think have a hell of a lot to do with the good parts of our society.”
Perhaps surprisingly for a Republican venture capitalist from the older generation, Hellman also considers the countercultural freaks of San Francisco to be some of the “good parts of our society.” That’s why he attended Burning Man for the first time last year and why, he said, he loved it, as much for the culture and community as for the art.
“I went to Burning Man because as much as possible I want to experience everything,” he said. “I want to just see directly what it’s like. I knew I’d enjoy it. I never doubted that. But what really overwhelmed me is it was 40,000 people getting along with each other. I mean, it’s pretty intense. There were dust storms and the world’s most repulsive sight: nude men over 70 just dangling along. But I never saw an argument. It was 40,000 people just enjoying each other.”
It was most striking to Hellman because of the contrast with the rest of society. As he said, “I’ve never seen this country so divided.”
While Hellman supports Schwarzenegger — calling him “a good advertisement to California” — he has nothing good to say about his fellow Republican in the Oval Office. He calls Bush’s tenure “an absolute four-star disaster.” The invasion of Iraq is the most obvious problem, he said. “Our war policy has slowly veered from being ‘Don’t tread on me’ to we’re going to jump on your neck.”
But his antipathy to certain aspects of the Republican Party began even earlier, when the religious right began to take over.
“I thought we were not that polarized during the Clinton administration. I was somewhat encouraged,” Hellman said. “Maybe there was an undercurrent of strident religious behavior or strident conservatism, but not the conservatism that I think the Republican Party used to stand for, which was fiscal conservatism instead of social conservatism. Somehow, there was this angst in this country on the part of religious people who I guess felt this country was being taken away from them, and they were the kind of stalwart or underpinnings of society. And they took it back.”
But in the wake of that disaster, Hellman thinks, there is an opportunity for reasonable people of goodwill to set the future political course. As Nayman said of Hellman, “He does believe there is a middle way pretty much all the time.”
Politically, that’s why Hellman gravitates toward the moderates of both major parties, such as Schwarzenegger and Newsom. He looks for people who will marry his economic conservatism with a regard for things such as environmentalism and social justice.
“It’s very tough to be a big-city mayor,” Hellman said. “[Newsom is] probably the best mayor we’re entitled to. He’s got this fantastic balancing act.”
Hellman said downtown hasn’t been terribly happy with Newsom for supporting striking hotel workers, getting behind Ammiano’s health insurance mandate, supporting tax measures, and generally letting the Board of Supervisors set the city’s agenda for the past two years.
“Their measure is he has 80-percent-plus popularity, and he ought to spend some of it. Well, they might not agree with what he would spend it on. And he’s been unwilling to spend very much of it. In some parts of the business community there is disappointment with him, but I don’t think that’s right. He didn’t hide what he would be like.”
What Newsom said he would be — a big reason for his popularity — is a mayor for the new San Francisco, a place where the city’s traditional economic conservatism has been tempered by a greater democratization of power and an ascendant progressive movement that expects its issues to be addressed.
“I don’t like people who are intolerant,” Hellman said. “I don’t like people that are telling you something to get some outcome that, if you understood it, you probably wouldn’t want. I like people that are passionate.”
Asked, then, about Sup. Chris Daly, the nemesis of downtown and most definitely a man of strong political passions, he said, “I admire Chris Daly. I disagree with Chris on a lot of things he believes, but there are also probably a lot of things I would agree with Chris on. And I respect him.”
Hellman is the rare downtown power broker who wants to bridge the gap between Newsom — whom he calls a “moderate to conservative establishment person” — and progressives such as Daly, Mooney, and the Bicycle Coalition. The middle ground, he said, is often a very attractive place, as it was with Healthy Saturdays.
“I’m sure you spend time in the park on Sunday, and it’s a hell of a lot nicer in there on Sundays than Saturdays,” Hellman said. But even more important to him, this is about integrity and being true to what Golden Gate Park garage supporters promised back in 2000.
“They were proposing Saturday closing at that time, which I’ve always thought was a good idea,” he said. “And we made a commitment to them, or I thought we made a commitment to them, that let’s not have Saturday closure now, but as soon as the garage was done, we’d experiment with Saturday closure.”
We brought up what Fine Arts Museums board president Dede Wilsey has said of that pledge, that it was under different circumstances and that she never actually promised to support Saturday closure after the garage was completed.
“There’s a letter. She put it in writing,” he said of Wilsey. “She signed a letter on behalf of the museums saying that when the de Young is done, we should experiment with Saturday closings.”
The Bike Coalition’s Shahum said that even when Hellman was an enemy, he was a reasonable guy. But it’s in the past couple of years that she’s really come to appreciate the unique role he plays in San Francisco.
“He showed decency and respect toward us,” she said. “We never saw him as a villain, even though we disagreed completely. Later he really stepped up and has been a leader on Healthy Saturdays. And what I was most impressed with is that he was true to his word.”
Supervisor McGoldrick, who sponsored the measure, echoed the sentiment: “Hellman was certainly a man of his word who acted in a highly principled way.”
So why does Hellman now stand apart from the downtown crowd? Has he parted ways with the economic and cultural power brokers who were once his allies?
No, he said, “I think they parted ways with me.” *
Divine messages are tricky, particularly for true believers who have no choice but to obey whatever directive the big G passes down. "God told me to!" can lead to heroic or comical or tragic ends; really, it’s a convenient excuse to do just about anything. For Richard Gazowsky, pastor at San Francisco’s Voice of Pentecost Church, the Lord’s message was simple if extravagant: "I want you to be the Rolls Royce of filmmaking."
Given that Voice of Pentecost is situated in an old movie theater and that Gazowsky received his vision in 1994 — soon after the then-40-year-old saw his first movie, The Lion King — this decree was not as surprising as it sounds. But as Michael Jacobs’s documentary Audience of One reveals, the quixotic Gazowsky has hit endless snags in his quest to be the next Mel Gibson (or George Lucas) with his "Ten Commandments meets Star Wars" epic, Gravity: In the Shadow of Joseph. It seems unquestioning faith can only go so far before naïveté, technical inexperience, and long-overdue rent get in the way.
Intrigued by Lessley Anderson’s Jan. 5, 2005, SF Weekly article on the church’s cinematic aspirations, Jacobs (at the time a newly rooted San Franciscan by way of Colorado) headed out to Ocean Avenue to take in a service. Before long, he’d found the topic of his first feature-length documentary.
"I walked into Voice of Pentecost, and it was like stepping onto another planet. I’d never seen anything like it: singing, dancing, falling down, speaking in tongues. I was really floored," Jacobs told me over the phone from New York City, where Audience of One (which premiered at the 2007 South by Southwest film festival and is slated for the 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival) screened as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s "New Directors/New Films" series.
Though Gazowsky’s production company, Christian WYSIWYG Filmworks (yep, it stands for "what you see is what you get"), has about 30 employees, the charismatic preacher was the natural choice for Jacobs’s primary subject. "The pastor [came] out and [updated] his congregation on the trials and tribulations of making this independent Christian blockbuster," Jacobs remembers. "I was immediately fascinated."
Having received his own calling of sorts, Jacobs asked Gazowsky and his congregants to appear in his doc. "I was really candid. I told them I’m Jewish and had no intentions of being a part of their church but that I wanted to observe their creation. I talked to Pastor Gazowsky about my philosophical approach to documentary and how I wanted to make an observational film. I wasn’t gonna use narration or come at it from a liberal or conservative perspective. I wasn’t gonna put it into the context of Christianity. I just wanted to make it as much cinéma vérité as possible."
Voice of Pentecost agreed to give Jacobs fly-on-the-wall access. For the next few months he captured WYSIWYG’s casting calls, stunt rehearsals, set-design meetings, and other bustling preproduction activities for a fast-approaching Italian location shoot. The footage comprises Audience of One‘s decidedly optimistic first half; anticipation runs sky-high among the (nearly all-volunteer) cast and crew despite several hints of challenges ahead. Gravity‘s massive wardrobe, including an abundance of Jediesque hoods, remains many stitches from completion, and the camera and sound equipment — at Gazowsky’s insistence, entirely state-of-the-art — is still being tested.
Soon before WYSIWYG uproots to Italy, one of the few pros involved in the production, cinematographer Jens Klein, tells Gazowsky he’s concerned about Gravity‘s abbreviated prep time. Something always goes wrong on the set, the experienced Klein cautions — and of course, it does.
By then Jacobs was "an inside outsider," his camera-toting presence a familiar sight. He traveled to Italy and documented WYSIWYG’s problem-plagued shoot. "I really did sort of blend into the scene," he says. "That relationship continued to grow and strengthen for about six months. When we came back from Italy, things got a little stranger. The lines got very blurry at times between subject and reality and responsibility and professionalism."
At first the blurry lines stayed off camera, and Jacobs’s cinéma vérité goals remained intact. For example, he helped the exhausted crew move stones before one of Gravity‘s outdoor scenes. "I saw them working so hard, and they weren’t getting anything done. I couldn’t not help them," he recalls. "All of a sudden, I was, like, ‘Wait a minute, what am I doing?’ That’s not my professional responsibility, but I have this personal thing here where I want to help them."
After the Gravity crew returned to the United States, they set up shop on Treasure Island, leasing an enormous film studio from the city of San Francisco. To Jacobs, and by extension the Audience of One viewer, it’s quite clear that the funding Gazowsky expects from a mysterious German source will never materialize. At one point he’s counting on $200 million — a huge amount for a Hollywood film, let alone an independent production created by unproven first-timers. Gazowsky’s faith in the Lord may be strong, but the faith he has in his investors is positively breathtaking.
His faith in Jacobs, however, wavers a bit. Midway through Audience of One, the WYSIWYG gang becomes increasingly paranoid that someone — Hollywood spies, perhaps — will try to steal its creative thunder; as a result, new security measures are introduced and Jacobs’s on-set freedom is restricted.
"It’s not in the film, but we sort of had an argument about it," Jacobs recalls. "I said to [Gazowsky], ‘If my film is about your film, what am I supposed to do?’ I remember leaving that day thinking, ‘The film’s over. I don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve got all this footage, and the story’s not complete.’ I was feeling pretty low about that."
A few weeks later, though, he was reviewing his tapes and had a revelation. Though WYSIWYG’s financial woes and creative differences among the staff had grounded Gravity, all was not lost for Audience of One.
"I realized, ‘Wow, this isn’t a film about filmmaking. This is a film about these people and specifically this one character,’ " Jacobs says. "I came back to them saying, ‘I don’t really care about your film anymore. You guys are the heart of my story, and it’s really more about you.’ I figured it would be a good way to engineer this paranoia into the narrative of my documentary, because that’s what was really happening — that was the vérité. They were trying to push everybody away, particularly me. Why can’t that be a part of the story as opposed to an inhibitor of the story?"
The tone of Audience of One reflects Jacobs’s self-described "celebratory and exploitive" approach to his subjects, about whom he remained "deeply ambiguous." This proved difficult with Gazowsky, who can be charming (he’s an intensely likable guy whose dare-to-be-great moviemaking approach is nothing if not admirable) and off-putting (he’s incapable of addressing WYSIWYG’s practical problems). "What’s so fascinating about him — and so complex and so frustrating — is how quickly he can go back and forth between being completely self-aware and being this visionary dreamer who’s crazy, if you want to call him that."
Gazowsky may have irrational moments in the documentary, but if there’s ever been a zeitgeist moment for faith-based entertainment, it’s now. There’s the obvious example of Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), which grossed hundreds of millions of dollars. Fox Faith has distributed at least three films (including 2006’s The Ultimate Gift) in the Bay Area in the last few months. And if you think San Francisco is too godless a city to support such releases, remember this: Voice of Pentecost is here, though its members hardly resemble the Harry Potter–hating evangelicals spotlighted in Jesus Camp, a 2006 Oscar nominee that shares Audience of One‘s secular-filmmaker-documents-Christians theme.
"Because this is San Francisco, these people are extremely creative," Jacobs says, referring to the Voice of Pentecost faithful. "A lot of them have been out in the world and experimented with drugs, and that’s why they’re trying to get back on God’s plan, as they call it. Most evangelicals see things in black-and-white, but in this group there’s a large gray area. I’ve never heard them say really harsh or judgmental things about others. They would much rather get out there and celebrate God and make a film."
With that in mind, Jacobs exercised restraint in the editing room. "That was by far the most challenging part of the film, because of that balance I wanted to create: Are we laughing with them, are we laughing at them? Is this funny because they’re naive or because they’re flawed like any human being? We definitely edited for laughs, but there are no cheap shots. The laughs are based around the folly of filmmaking, not based around laughing at their god. We have fun with the material and the people, but it’s not purely ridicule — it’s as much a celebration and an inspiration at the same time. More importantly, let’s let the audience make their own decision about how they feel."
So what does Gazowsky think of the film? As evenhanded as Jacobs tried to be, Gazowsky’s portrayal is not entirely flattering. From WYSIWYG HQ, Gazowsky — who’s still awaiting funding so he can finish Gravity, among other projects — said he found the film difficult to watch but appreciated its honesty. Seeing it was quite an experience, "because you’re watching the last few years of your life going up on the screen. And, of course, I don’t have control of anything — the way it’s edited is just the way it is. And I’m looking at it, going, ‘Boy, that is a crazy guy. Do I know him? Oh, it’s me!’ It’s hard to look at yourself, I would say."
Though Gazowsky has a healthy sense of humor, he’s 100 percent serious about his filmmaking aspirations. As Audience of One shows, he dreams big — maybe too big. (A firm believer that Hollywood has abandoned good storytelling, he cites Lawrence of Arabia as his favorite movie.)
"I feel Mike [Jacobs] was very sweet, but at the same time he did not fully understand what it is we’re doing. I don’t think anyone really looking on the outside understands it. And here’s the reason: it’s because everybody’s thinking there’s an angle somewhere and never realizes we really love movies," Gazowsky says.
Though WYSIWYG’s love of movies also includes a desire to make people "feel God — and what that means to you and me might be different," Gazowsky hopes he’ll complete a project that pleases not just the holy audience of one who set him on his cinematic path in the first place but also the masses. After all he’s been through — in Audience of One and beyond — he remains steadfast. "We really want to make the biggest film ever done." *
AUDIENCE OF ONE
Screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival
I get just as crabby and cynical as any other political reporter, but the truth is, on the index of basic competence and lack of corruption, San Francisco city government is doing way better than it was a decade ago.
We’re far from perfect: the Raker Act scandal still sours everything at City Hall, and the mayor hasn’t done much of anything in the past three years. I could go on.
But the reformers have made some tremendous inroads. I don’t know of anyone running a critical department at City Hall who is too drunk to make it back from lunch on a regular basis. Most of the senior staff actually shows up to work instead of spending the day at Nordstrom. The school district has gotten back to educating students, and the public schools improve each year. The supervisors are overall a remarkably smart, progressive bunch. I haven’t seen the FBI raid a local government office in a couple years.
And then there’s the community college district.
The board and the administration that run City College are, I think, one of the last bastions of the kind of inbred, secretive, corrupt rotten boroughs that used to dominate our dear city. Take Lance Williams’s fascinating City College story on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle on April 6.
Williams showed how a college official, assistant vice chancellor James Blomquist, allegedly steered $10,000 in rent money owed to the school into a campaign fund for a 2005 community college bond act. If that’s true — and nobody’s denying it — the deal was not only inappropriate but blatantly illegal. There should have been outrage all around — but so far only the three dissident members of the community college board have said a word. "Nobody else has said anything," said board member John Rizzo, who with Julio Ramos and Milton Marks III has called for a special meeting on this.
Perhaps that’s because what Blomquist allegedly did isn’t all that unusual at City College, where bond money is moved around and treated like personal scrip by the administration and some of the board members. Remember, these are the folks who promised the voters that they’d build a performing arts center, then turned around and spent the money on a gym — and later agreed to rent out the new pool to a private school across the street (see "Field of Schemes," 9/22/04).
This is the crew that has resisted sunshine, that has run roughshod over neighborhoods and pissed off thousands of people — for absolutely no good reason.
The district attorney needs to investigate this latest scam and ask, among other things, which board members knew about it — because I suspect this wasn’t just a junior official operating unilaterally.
This shit has got to end, folks. The chancellor, Philip Day, needs to go. The board members who have been involved in these past shenanigans (Natalie Berg, Rodel Rodis, and Lawrence Wong) all need to go. The progressives have to make this a priority; City College is a civic gem and a crucial part of the city’s future. It’s infuriating to see it run by political hacks.
And as long as this crew is still in charge, I hope they know better than to come around with their hands out, asking for more of the taxpayers’ money. *
We’re all having a tough time these days in the Bay Area. It might be the worriment of the imminent tax day, our skyrocketing rent, or the recent dissolution of a rocky relationship. Or it could be as mundane as the feeling brought on by chasing down your morning commute through the pouring rain, only to realize that you forgot your bus fare once you finally catch up to it. Whatever the case is, we’re all in need of a curative soundtrack, and Cleveland’s Six Parts Seven are here to help out.
Entwining reflective, subdued instrumentation with tame, wistful melodies on its fifth full-length, Casually Smashed to Pieces (Suicide Squeeze), the group concocts eight tunes that make you want to curl up on a floating cloud and leave your headaches at the runway strip. The core members — guitarist Allen Karpinski; his brother, drummer Jay; guitarist Tim Gerak; and bassist Mike Tolan — mingle meditative, winding guitars, low-end bass, and restrained drums with soothing elements such as brass, piano, and woodwinds. Focusing primarily on mood and space, the6P7’s instrumentals seesaw between joy and dejection, remorse and hope.
Though the sextet has considered adding a vocalist in the past, Allen Karpinski disclosed they were more interested in "making a very gorgeous sound together instead of worrying about lyrics or a singer."
He attempted to define the band’s sound over the phone while on a tour stop in Tallahassee, Fla. "There’s nothing very deliberate about the way we make our music — we just play what we play," he revealed. "One of the things that makes us unique is that we are able to project our personalities into the music that we choose to play: the melodies, the actual aesthetic of the sound. We let the instruments sing instead of having a voice, and it always has sort of a melancholy undercurrent to it."
The group first emerged in 1995 as a bass and drum duo, which Karpinski describes as "basement project" for his brother and himself. After breaking up for a short time to pursue other projects, such as the brothers’ Old Hearts Club, the two reassembled 6P7 in 1997, this time with Gerak in tow, to record their debut, In Lines and Patterns (Donut Friends). The years following saw numerous lineup changes, and the ensemble began introducing violin, lap steel, and piano and vibraphone harmonies into songs on the Suicide Squeeze–released Things Shaped in Passing (2002) and Everywhere, and Right Here (2004). But 6P7’s basic, signature sound remained unchanged.
"We would be writing exactly the same album if we stuck with the same instrumentation," Karpinski said. "We change it up not only to have different textures but also to challenge ourselves."
Casually Smashed to Pieces is no different. Cornet and trumpet blend to give songs such as "Stolen Moments" and "Confusing Possibilities" the jazzy meltdowns they seemingly beg for, while strummed guitar and twangy banjo administer a dose of backwoods Americana on "Conversation Heart." In contrast to 6P7’s past efforts, the new, shorter album sounds much more polished.
"We tried to give the new songs a little bit more of a pop feel and more of a verse-chorus structure," Karpinski explained. "Most of our older songs are sort of based on a repetitive motif of notes or something cyclical. The kind of experimentation I like to do with the band is not to change too much, but someone who knows our records well would be able to tell the difference."
In the past couple years, the band hasn’t gone unnoticed either. In 2003, Suicide Squeeze released Lost Notes from Forgotten Songs, reinterpretations of 6P7 songs by such artists as Modest Mouse, Black Heart Procession, and Iron and Wine. National Public Radio uses their songs as segue music for All Things Considered, and their current tour finds them acting as Richard Buckner’s backing band. Karpinski claimed that although they will be playing two shows a night for most of the tour, they plan on keeping 6P7’s sets short and sweet.
"Our live sets are rarely over 30 minutes long, and I don’t think people have the attention span to stand in a room with all the distractions and listen to instrumental music for more than that," he noted and laughed. "You know, they start to get bored even if they love it." *
SONIC REDUCER Once upon a time in the Mission, there was a gallery named Balazo. Not quite old enough to know better and a ways from 18, or 18th Street, the little walk-up art space that could blasted into many a local indie fan’s existence in the early ’00s with wall-rattling, hot ‘n’ clammy punk jammies overlooking the 24th Street and Mission BART station. From the beginning, this space was anything but Snow White pristine: noise kids littered the pavement outside with butts, and upstairs the humidity was high and the audience shank-to-elbow deep, packed into a onetime living room for bands like the Mae-Shi and the Lowdown who made it way loud for the crowd. Trailing into adjacent rooms were beer drinkers and art lovers, gazing at massive blowups depicting disappearing SF industrial buildings or paintings praising pubic pouches. Peddling metal too raw for larger stages, punk en español, and local ear bleed avant-gardians, Balazo proved the prince of the underground, Latino-run and Mission-bred, sweeping in on its black charger after Epicenter and Mission Records packed it in and keeping it all relatively under the radar, even as it hauled its bad self down the street to a space at Mission and 18th streets still greasily redolent of the past Chinese chop suey tenant. Rechristened Balazo 18 Art Gallery, the joint has hosted bands ranging from Beijing punkers Brain Failure to SF indie rockers Caesura, and artists including Michael Arcega and Liz Cohen — opening its doors to parties of all flavors.
But every fairy tale has an ending — whether Balazo 18’s is happy or not remains up in the air.
Guardian ears pricked up when we heard the gallery was forced to cancel an event planned for the relaunch of GavinWatch.com. Further, Guardian reporter G.W. Schultz obtained a letter sent to acting director Amy Lee of San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection from a resident living on Dolores Street who complained of "drug sellers and prostitutes hanging around all day and night" in the area. Though the author seemed to be attributing the activity to the general vibe of the hood, she did bemoan a "torn canopy" and "boarded up windows" at Balazo’s current 2183 Mission location.
Records show the city opened a file in mid-March, but an inspector noted the building’s "sign appears safe," and no apparent building violations were found. But we continued to scratch our collective heads, since Balazo’s online events calendar only lists dates through February. Was San Francisco about to lose one of the remaining all-ages venues for emerging hardcore, metal, and rock acts?
We finally got a hold of Juan Villanueva, who runs Balazo along with founder Txutxu Pxupxo, for a lowdown on the laid-low gallery. On his way to the first in a series of benefits for Balazo at Dolores Park on April 1, Villanueva explained that a neighbor had been complaining about the murals and denizens on the street, claiming the space was "bringing property valuation down," but it’s unclear whether that brought building inspectors to the gallery to check on the renovations that had been going on to make Balazo’s entrance and restrooms wheelchair accessible.
Unfortunately, at the same time the police began visiting Balazo, asking for an entertainment license, which Pxupxo and Villanueva don’t possess but have subsequently applied for. The $1,500 permit cost, the more than $2,000 needed for the construction, and the required month needed to post the permit application sign have caused the venue to cease shows for fear of incurring thousands in fines.
It sounds like a case of when it rains, all hell breaks loose. "Yeah, it’s a hassle," Villanueva agreed. "We pay rent from shows that come in. But right now we’re desperately in need of funds." Contrary to popular belief, Balazo is not a nonprofit, regardless of its work establishing a DIY community space in the area. Villanueva hopes that favorable letters will be sent to the Entertainment Commission by April 25 supporting Balazo’s application and that the community turns out for the May 1 entertainment-license hearing. But the gallery also has to find a way to pay its monthly $8,200 rent.
Perhaps the villagers will step up to rescue the hero this time around: Villanueva says bands such as La Plebe and Peligro Social have already volunteered to play benefits and the 924 Gilman Street Project has offered to host a throwdown. But we in the peanut gallery are all hoping other, more stealthy forces don’t snatch this independent space away. "Time influences our capability of whether we can make it," Villaneuva warns. "If it takes three months and we can’t get three months’ worth of rent, that would really affect us." *
Something ecstatic this way comes from the synth eccentrics of Modular Set, the electric bongo beaters of Ascended Master, and the free-psych natureniks of Three Leafs. Thurs/5, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
CASS MCCOMBS, ARBOURETUM, AND DAVID KARSTEN DANIELS
Making music that can be startling sublime, Scorpio McCombs plays tag with the golden, Will Oldham–esque Arbouretum and Fat Cat experimental roots wrecker Karsten Daniels. Fri/6, 9:30 p.m., $10. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
LIGHTNING BOLT
Mind-frying volume, a frenzied punk psych attack, much spilled sweat, and a whirlpool of quasi moshing made up the scene at the last Lightning Bolt show at Verdi Club a few years back. The Brians have been busy since then, generating a split import CD, Ultra Cross V. 1 (Sony), with Guitar Wolf. Brian Chippendale pulls out percussion on the next Björk disc, kept up his Black Pus side project, and whipped up a book of eye-blisteringly bright Ninja comics for Picturebox. And Brian Gibson recently birthed Barkley’s Barnyard Critters: Mystery Tail, an animation DVD. But résumé builders aside, you really must sink your teeth into LB’s ass live. Mon/9, 9 p.m., $7. LoBot Gallery, 1800 Campbell, Oakl. www.lobotgallery.com.Also Tues/10, 9 p.m., $8. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission,SF. (415) 970-9777 *
Splurging — not to be confused with surging — is one of those activities whose scale and pleasures tend to vary according to where the fluttering bill comes to rest. Who, in other words, is paying? Because San Francisco is to tourism something like what Rome is to Catholicism, with all roads leading here, we the citizenry of this city are certain to find wanderers from afar turning up on the doorstep sooner or later. They are glad to see you and perhaps accept your hospitality, and in return they offer to take you and yours out to dinner at the best restaurant in town.
It helps if these willing souls are rich, or parents, or both. (European friends aren’t bad either, since they probably wield the mighty euro, and America for euro wielders is one huge fire sale.) They will be grateful for your expertise in choosing the restaurant, and you will need take no notice of the bill, when at last it arrives, nor of its proportions, which, if there is significant wine involved, could vaguely resemble a month’s rent. Glance at the harmless-looking little chit if you must or if you are curious; otherwise, pay a visit to the restroom while the putf8um AmEx card does its work.
These kinds of blowouts are fun, like showing up empty-handed at somebody’s party and gorging on the food and drink everybody else brought, but the more meaningful splurges are those we pay for ourselves. Yes, there can be a certain pang when ordering, since we know the damage is coming right out of our pocket; there can be an even greater pang when the server presents what the French discreetly call l’addition. But there is also a sense of having earned the moment and its satisfactions and of having spent money not on a yacht or a marbled bathroom with gold-leaf fixtures worthy of Nero but on an experience that will last a few hours at most and will be just a memory even before we get into bed for the night. That is priceless. (For everything else, there’s MasterCard.)
What follows is a brief survey of places I consider splurgeworthy (not to be confused with spongeworthy). The first group consists of restaurants most suitable for the spending of other people’s money — i.e., they are expensive, quite a few of them hideously so. The second group is the spots that you should treat yourself to even if you can’t arrange for somebody else to pick up the tab. You live here, and experiencing these restaurants is part of your education: you are obliged. The last set is the best bang-for-the-buck ones; you’ll pay, but not quite so woundingly, and you’ll come away feeling that the money was well spent. (Paul Reidinger)
Somebody else pays
GARY DANKO
The experience of gastronomic luxury is nowhere more holistic than here. Everything is just right and in balance; the restaurant is handsome but not showy, lively but not overwhelming. Members of the service staff seem genuinely pleased to see you, and the food is sublime. I did notice on my last visit that the tables seemed closer together than a few years ago — the more the merrier, apparently, especially in the accounting department. Noise levels have risen a bit, and the staff seems slightly more in a hurry. Nonetheless, a visit is certain to be ethereal and unforgettable, and you will be lauded for your acumen and good taste if you agree to be taken here. NB: the food is quite rich, so adjust your cholesterol meds accordingly if applicable.
Even people who are wary of seafood will find much to like at Aqua, which really can’t be improved on. The look has softened and warmed subtly over the years, while the food is as good as it’s ever been, maybe better. Chef Laurent Manrique (who follows in the illustrious footsteps of George Morrone and Michael Mina) brings a muscular elegance to his maritime-leaning menu, and there is even foie gras, if you are so inclined. The wine list is huge and interesting, the ceilings high (noise vanishes up there like unwanted smoke or heat), the bread warm and fresh, the staff well schooled. There is a certain formality of tone that might have to do with the restaurant’s Financial District location; at weekday lunches, hordes of money changers descend. Evening’s the time, then.
Being inside Hubert Keller’s restaurant is like being inside A Thousand and One Nights; the walls ripple with loose, tentlike fabric. And you can’t possibly miss the huge pot of flowers that dominates the middle of the main dining room. The cooking combines elements of nouvelle with a certain whimsy. The prix fixe menus offer lots of wiggle room, bigger and smaller portions as you choose and so forth. There is also a vegetarian menu. The cuisine is among the most visually interesting in the city; individual courses tend to be highly architectural and to arrive in, or be sauced from, a wealth of dollhouse-size pots, pans, and pitchers. For those who like to play with their food before eating it, this adds to the fun.
Parents are a special case, and Campton Place is the special spot to bring them. Although the dining room is quite small, the tables are decently far apart, and a civilized hush obtains. The kitchen has launched its share of stars over the years; the alumni association includes Jan Birnbaum, Bradley Ogden, Laurent Manrique, and Daniel Humm. No matter who’s cooking, the food is superior — there is none better. What is most distinctive about Campton Place is its layered European feel; there is a sense of tradition and grandeur that does not call attention to itself because it doesn’t need to. It’s a given. Of all the city’s top-tier restaurants, Campton Place is perhaps the one that’s been most resolute in the face of fads and trends; it’s not stuffy, but it isn’t afraid of being what it is either.
If there’s one restaurant all Bay Area folk should have their passport stamped at (I am speaking metaphorically, of course), it’s Chez Panisse. All the mother-ship clichés are true; many if not most of our best restaurants and chefs can trace their lineage here, and they must be proud to do so. The restaurant’s understanding of California cooking remains distinctive in its unclutteredness; the big wood-fired hearth in the open kitchen means many dishes are grilled, and for rustic elegance, the kiss of wood smoke is unsurpassed. The wider experience is modulated with similar grace. Chez Panisse isn’t quite casual, but it isn’t overformal either. It’s in harmony with its arts and crafts setting, as are most of its patrons.
Notwithstanding a bit of the Parisian brasserie look, including a fair amount of dark wood and brass, chef-owner Nancy Oakes’s longtime jewel on the Embarcadero is really quite all-American in its own high-stepping way. The restaurant is a microcosm of the city, a place of power lunches and multigenerational family get-togethers. The food is as stylish as it gets, but if you want some glorious version of meat and potatoes, you will likely find it here — and if you want a main course that knows it’s a main course and not just a puffed-up small plate, you’ll find that too. Of all the city’s top-tier restaurants, Boulevard might be the least terrifying to heartland sensibilities.
And a quick digression to remember Hawthorne Lane, which closed at the end of the year (and an 11-year run) to be reborn a few weeks later as Two. I haven’t been to the new place, but I know that even if I like it, I will never stop missing the dearly departed. Hawthorne Lane was as comfortably gracious a restaurant as could be found in San Francisco: plush but not stuffy, vibrant but not loud, with a menu rich in style and short on intimidation. It was the sort of place 25-year-olds and their parents would be equally impressed by, and that’s saying something.
Chef-owner Craig Stoll’s Mission venue tilts toward youth — famous rock stars are said to like it, and the crowd (not to mention the service staff) has more than its share of tattoos and piercings — but beneath the hipster glamour is one of the best restaurants in the city. The kitchen turns out Tuscan-inflected dishes that reflect Stoll’s sojourn in that overfamous Italian region; Tuscan might be a cliché now, but it isn’t at Delfina. Noise has long been an issue, and while a large expansion a few years back (along with plenty of quilted sound-baffling material posted discreetly around the dining room) has helped dilute the clamor, Delfina is packed so reliably that it can never truly be calm. Older people can find it overwhelming. But … a glass of wine will help soothe any ruffled feathers.
A dance community is only as healthy as its humblest members, much the way a ballet company can never attain greatness without a fabulous corps. The team that runs Yerba Buena Center for the Arts knows this. According to associate performing arts curator Angela Mattox, "We want to nurture and support local artists and offer them an opportunity to perform at Yerba Buena." But when Ken Foster, the YBCA’s executive director, presented his first season in 2004, shock waves resulted. There was a new curatorial emphasis on bringing major performers to the Bay Area, and a legitimate fear arose among local dancers, particularly younger ones, that they were going to be shut out for good. (Larger local companies rent the theater; a few — including Joe Goode this year — have performed commissioned works.)
With last year’s "Under the Radar" program, the YBCA calmed the waters by presenting younger artists and their category-defying work. This year the shared performance event "Worlds Apart: Local Response" draws together work that aligns with the YBCA’s three-pronged seasonal theme: "deeply personal, worlds apart, and medium as message."
The participating artists are not beginners, but for both financial and artistic reasons they would not be able to present their own full-evening programs at the YBCA. So for them, a shot at performing in the YBCA’s Forum means a professional venue, exposure to a larger audience, and a paycheck. For the YBCA it’s a community-building, relatively low-risk gesture; also, highlighting up-and-coming local artists now may offer the venue an opportunity to say "we told you so" a few years down the line.
Performers at "Worlds Apart: Local Response" include Edmund Welles: The Bass Clarinet Quartet, surely one of the most unusual chamber music groups. It premieres 2012: A Requiem for Baktun 12 [the 13th and Final Cycle], inspired by a Mayan prophecy about the end of an evolutionary cycle in the title year. Erica Shuch Performance Project has been working on 51802, a piece in which an imaginative thinker examines the effects of incarceration on those inside and outside prison. For Clothes x Sun, performance artist Isak Immanuel of the "Floor of Sky Projects" weaves a personal narrative into installation pieces inspired by their environments. Also on the bill are Hagen and Simone, the brash, smart-aleck, and theatrically inspired Kevin Clarke and Monique Jenkinson. Their new duet, The Excused, promises to tussle with icons of common expectations. Finally, the reprise of Remote by Kraft and Purver takes a humorous, ironic, and compassionate look at how technology affects the way we relate to one another. (Rita Felciano)
Drinking is a fun, legal, and socially acceptable form of recreation … until things get ugly. For some people, rehab serves as an alibi for all the embarrassing and damaging mistakes they made while loaded. But many, for whatever reason, really are caught in the grip of a life-threatening addiction and feel like there’s no way out. Being broke — whether you’re homeless and panhandling or working part-time in a café and barely making the rent — certainly doesn’t make getting sober easier. It’s not like you can just dial Mimi Silbert at the Delancey Street Foundation or check into the Betty Ford Center, chill with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears for 28 days, and then pay the clinic 20 grand on your way out. It takes persistence to find low-cost recovery programs, but you can locate the help you need in San Francisco.
True, the bureaucracy is vast and probably intimidating for someone who is facing the shaking, the anxiety, and the possible seizures and pink elephant sightings that come with detoxification. Your next step, after admitting your problem, should be to call Ozanam Detox(1175 Howard, SF. 415-864-3057, www.svdp-sf.org/ozanam.htm), which operates several four- to 72-hour detox centers and only requests a $10 donation. If you don’t need immediate care, call the Treatment Access Program of San Francisco (1-800-750-2727). It can help you find your way to a subsidized, low-cost residential program treating people with alcohol dependency. Most programs are free to those on welfare and less than $600 for those who aren’t. Participants get three meals a day and lots of counseling.
The Asian American Residential Recovery Center(2024 Hayes, SF. 415-541-9404, www.aars-inc.org) has 24 beds for its six-month to one-year program, and the cost is negotiable.
Baker Places(600 Townsend, suite 200E, SF. 415-864-1515, www.bakerplaces.org) has 90 beds for its 60-day program. It also offers a separate 21-day medical detox program that accommodates 28 people.
The extensive and free program for rehabilitation at the Delancey Street Foundation (600 Embarcadero, SF. 415-957-9800, www.eisenhowerfoundation.org) lasts about two years and includes job training and education. The facility usually only accepts applicants who can’t find help anywhere else, such as those who have been in jail or have a history of violence.
Freedom from Alcohol and Drugs(1362 and 1366 48th Ave., SF. 415-665-8077) has 40 beds for men and currently has a couple vacancies. The six-month program ranges from free to $500. You must be clean for three days before entering.
Friendship House Association of American Indians(56 Julian, SF. 415-865-0964, www.friendshiphousesf.org) has 80 beds for men and women and a program specifically for women with children.
Run by Community Awareness and Treatment Services (CATS), Golden Gate for Seniors(637 S. Van Ness, SF. 415-626-7553, www.careforhomeless.org/services/ggate.html) has 16 beds for men and four beds for women. There may be a waiting list, and you must be clean for three days, but no one is turned away due to lack of funds. Its facilities are not wheelchair accessible.
The Good Shepherd Gracenter(1310 Bacon, SF. 415-337-1938, www.gsgracenter.org) has a six-month program for women. Currently, there isn’t a waiting list to occupy one of its 13 beds.
TheHaight Ashbury Free Clinic Drop-in Center(211 13th St., SF. 415-746-1915, www.hafci.org) is open 24 hours and can find you immediate help. The clinic also operates three residential centers, which can accommodate more than 50 people together. No one is turned away due to lack of funds.
Jelani(1601 Quesada, SF. 415-822-5977, www.jelanisf.org) specializes in family care. It has 40 beds for adults and 46 for children, and you don’t have to detox someplace else first. The program lasts six to nine months, and there’s currently no waiting list.
Of the nine locations the Latino Commission (301 Grant, suite 301, South SF. 650-244-1444) runs, two are in San Francisco. There is usually a waiting list, and the program can last anywhere from three months to a year.
Also run by CATS, the McMillan Drop-in Center(39 Fell, SF. 415-241-1180) is open 24 hours and can find you immediate care at many facilities.
The Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Center(1275 Harrison, SF. 415-503-3000, www.tsagoldenstate.org) has 21 beds for women, 40 beds for men, and another 18 beds just for veterans. Programs range from one to two years; the cost is free to less than $600. The waiting period is usually about three weeks.
TheWalden House(1885 Mission, SF. 415-554-1131, www.waldenhouse.org) has 220 beds. The cost ranges from free to $73 per day. The program’s average length is 94 days but can go up to a year. It currently has a two-month waiting list. *
San Francisco was crazy during the ’60s — the 1860s, that is. Back then the city’s beer halls and saloons were fueled by the gold-lined pockets and salty tongues of sailors, pimps, con artists, and whores. The city is actually pretty tame compared with how it used to be. Prostitutes no longer hang naked from windows, and bartenders have stopped drugging clients and selling them into indentured servitude on the high seas. About all that’s left from those early dens of debauchery are a few brass rails and some nice pieces of carved mahogany, to be found in the city’s oldest bars. Although many of the original bars at these establishments perished in fires, as soon as the ashes settled, people picked up the pieces and got right back to boozin’. The Saloon, Buena Vista, and Little Shamrock are your best bets for wetting your whistle above the same wooden counters where gold miners and shanghaiing sailors once drank.
The Buena Vista (2765 Hyde, SF. 415-474-5044, www.thebuenavista.com), which concocted the first Irish coffee, rates as San Francisco’s second oldest bar. An 1889 photo of the business shows its former location, across the street. When that building was damaged by the 1906 earthquake and fire, the café moved to its present spot, taking its rich mahogany bar with it.
Proud to have been a speakeasy during prohibition, Cafe du Nord (2170 Market, SF. 415-861-5016, www.cafedunord.com) — which opened its doors in 1907, before hooch was outlawed — retains its scary escape tunnel, now dead-ended, and has the nicest original, hand-carved bar you’ll find in any Bay Area basement.
A local historian from E Clampus Vitus, a secret SF historical society, scoured old city directories and traced boozing on the corner of 16th and Guerrero streets, where Elixir (3200 16th St., SF. 415-552-1633, www.elixirsf.com) currently hangs its sign, back to 1858. The place has gone through a number of hands — it was called Swede’s from 1865 to 1885 — and was leveled with the rest of the hood in the fire of ’06, but it’s always been a bar. Of course, during Prohibition it was officially know as a soft drink parlor.
The Hotel Utah(500 Fourth St., SF. 415-546-6300, www.thehotelutahsaloon.com)— which was once called Al’s Transbay Tavern, appeared in Dirty Hairy, and served President Richard Nixon, Joe DiMaggio, and Marilyn Monroe — has been a bar since 1908. Its back bar, obtained through a Fitchburg Brewery promotion, was shipped around Cape Horn in 1913 from Belgium and is thought to date back to the 1850s.
The wood booths and paneled ceiling at House of Shields (39 New Montgomery, SF. 415-975-8651, www.houseofshields.com) have been there since 1908, when the watering hole first opened for business. A tunnel, left over from Prohibition, connects the place to Maxfield’s. And the men’s room has a urinal roughly the size of a refrigerator — they don’t seem to make ’em that big anymore.
Last year the Little Shamrock(807 Lincoln Way, SF. 415-661-0060), an Inner Sunset bar established in 1893, put up a sign reading, "We’ve been here for 113 years and our prices prove it!" It’s true: a shot of Jameson goes for just four bucks at the cozy tavern. Its Victorian-era atmosphere, with broken velvet-upholstered parlor chairs and a potbellied stove in the dart room, will take you back in time.
Maxfield’s (Palace Hotel, 2 New Montgomery, SF. 415-512-1111, www.maxfields-restaurant.com) is named for Maxwell Parrish, the artist of the vibrant realist depiction of a man and his flute hanging above the back of the bar since 1909. Back in 1875 it was called the Pied Piper, and in 1906 it was gutted by the fire, along with the rest of the Palace Hotel. The owners turned it into an ice cream parlor during Prohibition — one with a gentlemen’s-only club in the back.
Turns out people have been drinking for 158 years at the corner of Pacific and Battery, where the Old Ship Saloon (298 Pacific, SF. 415-788-2222, www.oldshipsaloon.com) now stands. The plaque posted there by E Clampus Vitus tells you so. As the story goes, in 1849 the ship Arkansas crash-landed on Alcatraz Island. (UC Berkeley has a journal from one of the passengers.) The ship was towed to the shore of Yerba Buena Cove and, as the bay filled in, became landlocked on what became Pacific Street. In 1851, Joe Anthony, a Brit, cut a hole in the ship and posted a sign reading, "Gud, Bad and Indif’rent Spirits Sold Here! At 25 cents Each!" The ship was dismantled as a brick building was constructed around it. That burned down and was rebuilt in 1906. The east side of the building still proclaims the name of the business and its owner from that time: "Old Ship Saloon, Henry Klee Prop."
Everyone seems to agree that the stinky dive know as the Saloon (1232 Grant, SF. 415-989-7666, www.sfblues.net/Saloon.html) holds San Francisco’s oldest bar. The place also boasts the city’s first water-installation request on record — dated Oct. 8, 1861, made by Ferdinand E. Wagner, and fulfilled by the Spring Valley Water Co. In the 1850s, Wagner ran a fruit stand in the building, selling German toys and Christmas ornaments on the side. In 1861 he turned the shop into Wagner’s Beer Hall. Strong timbers and the volunteer firefighters who went out of their way to protect the scarlet women living upstairs saved the building from the 1906 earthquake and fire.
With its ornate bar dating back 100 years, belt-driven ceiling fans, and tiled floor, the San Francisco Brewing Co. (155 Columbus, SF. 415-434-3344, www.sfbrewing.com) is the salooniest spot around. Drinks first flowed over the bar in 1907, when the place was known as the Andromeda Saloon, according to a member of E Clampus Vitus.
The dinky alley spot known as Spec’s 12 Adler Museum (12 Saroyan Place, SF. 415-421-4112) first became a bar in 1919, but it’s been in operation on and off since then. The current owner has filled the place to the gills with historical memorabilia — well, junk — to immerse you in the city’s past.
Established just before the Volstead Act in 1919, Tosca Cafe (242 Columbus, SF. 415-986-9651) moved to its current location in 1946. During Prohibition it operated as a restaurant, but the owners continued cooking brandy in the basement, which they served on the sly to customers as the — wink, wink — house cappuccino. You can still order it by that name today. *
EDITORIAL It’s only because of a dark moment in San Francisco’s history that city officials are trying to figure out what to do about an underwater electricity cable that’s slated to run from Pittsburg onto port property and provide additional power for the tip of the Peninsula.
San Francisco was supposed to have its own power cable, carrying its own power over the bay from the hydroelectric dam at Hetch Hetchy. In fact, in the 1920s the city built 99 miles of cable, from the high Sierra to the South Bay … and mysteriously ran out of copper wire a few yards from a new Pacific Gas and Electric Co. substation in Newark.
That was a key moment in the Raker Act scandal, the ongoing violation of federal law that has allowed PG&E to operate a monopoly private power agency in a city that’s supposed to have public power.
But now PG&E controls all the power coming into town — and the California Independent System Operator, which is responsible for the state grid, says the supply coming into San Francisco is too limited and not sufficiently reliable.
As JB Powell reports in "Power Play" on page TK, Babcock and Brown, an international financial firm based in Australia, has put up $300 million for a Trans Bay Cable that would link the city to the East Bay. Ironically, a public power agency — in Pittsburg — would wind up making money off the project by selling power in San Francisco. Other than rent at the port, this city will get nothing out of the deal.
There are some basic conceptual problems with the project. Most of the power shipped along the 57-mile, 400-megawatt line would be produced by fossil fuel plants. That’s contrary to the direction the city is trying to go: San Francisco is in the process of building solar projects and is looking into using tidal energy. The Hetch Hetchy project, of course, is hydropower. And critics say that the new line would flood San Francisco with an oversupply of electricity, discouraging the environmentally sound approach of conservation.
But there’s a larger problem here: a private venture firm will own the cable — and could sell it to another entity, perhaps PG&E. So the city’s energy future under this scenario will still be tied to unaccountable private interests.
Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, whose Local Agency Formation Commission held a hearing on the cable plan in January, asked San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) staffers why the city doesn’t have its own line. The agency, staffer Barbara Hale said, has been looking into that — but any project would be years away.
Still, this line, if the city goes along with the deal, will be with us for decades — and the Board of Supervisors shouldn’t just approve it without looking at its role in a long-term municipal energy program. San Francisco is moving inexorably toward public power — too slowly, but inexorably. How, exactly, does this cable fit into a municipal power system? Does San Francisco even need it? Is a publicly owned transbay power line something that ought to be on the agenda? Why would the city want to go along with this private venture if there is (or ought to be) a city project in the wings?
Nobody has answered those questions, because the city still lacks a detailed public power plan. Before the supervisors approve this cable, the SFPUC needs to look at all the energy options, prepare a long-term plan, and evaluate whether this giant extension cord fits into it. *
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will soon decide the fate of the Trans Bay Cable (TBC), a privately financed, underwater power line that would plug the city’s electric grid into power plants in the East Bay.
Backers call the cable the best way to avoid blackouts, like those the city saw in the wake of the energy deregulation debacle of the late 1990s. But green power activists argue that the developer of this 57-mile extension cord is cashing in on California’s blackout fears and that approving the project would go against the city’s commitment to finding sustainable sources of energy.
Australian financial firm Babcock and Brown has staked $300 million on the cable’s construction and offered more than $28 million for a community benefits package if the project is approved. The developer plans to profit on its investment with a guaranteed 13.5 percent rate of return, granted to it by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the sale of power running through the cable. Power plants in and around Pittsburg would generate most of the juice going though the 400-megawatt-capacity line. Ratepayers across the state would foot the bill.
The California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), the public benefit corporation in charge of the state’s electric grid, has asked for San Francisco supervisors to approve the cable as soon as possible so that it can begin service by 2010. Cal-ISO’s sole mission is to keep the lights on, and when there isn’t enough power in the system, it coordinates the dreaded rolling blackouts that most Californians remember from the energy crisis. CAL-ISO representative Larry Tobias brought up those dark days at a San Francisco Port Commission meeting Feb. 27. "Without the Trans Bay Cable project," he warned, "we will be back in that situation again." Electricity from the TBC, Tobias told commissioners, will give the city’s system the "reliability" to prevent blackouts.
Tobias said if supervisors reject the cable project, CAL-ISO will have to seek alternative proposals. At a January meeting of the city’s Local Agency Formation Committee (LAFCo), Tobias brought up a plan previously put forward by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which looked to bring power across the bay from a substation in Moraga. In 2005, PG&E asked for more time to finish its design. CAL-ISO rejected its request and chose the TBC instead.
But some local activists say the city does not need the cable, or any other privately funded power line. Steven J. Moss of San Francisco Community Power told the Guardian a 400-megawatt cable would flood the power grid with "an enormous oversupply" of electricity. "That would be a waste of resources," he said. Moss claims CAL-ISO is understandably obsessed with reliability but the probability of its doomsday blackout scenarios is incredibly small. How small? At the Port Commission’s March 13 meeting, Moss said his calculations indicate there is only a "0.0002 percent chance that the [TBC] will be needed."
Even in the worst-case scenario, Moss told us, the city is only "looking at a 50- to 60-megawatt gap [in energy supplies] 10 years from now." His figures, he said, are based on Cal-ISO’s own estimates, adding, "The real way to plug that gap [is] demand management — solar, wind, all the things that San Francisco talks about constantly and that are good for us."
At the January LAFCo hearing, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi questioned officials from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) about the city’s plans to acquire its own power line from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir’s hydroelectric stations. The city already owns most of the 200-mile transmission route from the Yosemite power stations, but PG&E possesses the last 30 miles and charges the city fees to bring electricity up the Peninsula from Newark. "Why can’t we have our own cable?" Mirkarimi asked SFPUC stafferBarbara Hale. She said the agency has been "studying the feasibility" of the proposed city-owned line but cannot yet commit to a firm "coming online date" like the TBC’s developer can.
For years the city has been seeking a way to secure full ownership of the Hetch Hetchy lines as a step toward forming a public power utility, independent of PG&E control. Ironically, if the TBC is built, a public power agency would own the cableand profit from it, just not San Francisco’s power agency. Pittsburg’s municipal utility is slated to take over the line once Babcock and Brown finishes its construction.
At the same hearing in January, Moss pointed to such projects as the proposed Hetch Hetchy line, as well as the city’s evolving plans to implement more renewable power sources, as proof that supervisors should reject the TBC. Calling the cable a "potlatch," Moss said, "Time is our friend" in power matters. "Technology will change and improve, [and] we’re potentially rushing into a very expensive project." Mirkarimi did not return calls for comment, but at the hearing, he indicated he is still studying the cable and has not yet formed a position on it.
Philip DeAndrade, chair of the city’s Power Plant Task Force, expressed concerns that Pittsburg’s power plants burn "very available fossil fuels" for their generation and that these cheaper sources of electricity "might take out of the market mix" more renewable energy. DeAndrade also brought up the four gas-fired combustion turbines, known as peakers, that the city is in the process of bringing online. With these generators scheduled to go into service in 2009, as well as several PG&E transmission projects either in the works or already operational, DeAndrade said, "I’m not convinced [the TBC] is a good deal for San Francisco. What it looks like is a good deal for Babcock and Brown and the City of Pittsburg."
CAL-ISO insists that the TBC is the best reliability option for the region. Spokesperson Gregg Fishman said the peakers and other local energy projects will allow the system operator to stop relying on the inefficient Potrero Hill Power Plant. "But all that really does is keep us even in San Francisco. It doesn’t improve the reliability of the system at all — and in fact, with load [demand] growth we are actually falling slowly behind." Fishman later mentioned the added benefits of having power come in from a different direction. Currently, all power lines feeding the city travel up the Peninsula.
On March 13 the TBC cleared its first local regulatory hurdle when the Port Commission approved a licensing agreement for the cable’s facilities.Port officials, along with staff from the Mayor’s Office and other city agencies, spent weeks negotiating the terms of the deal with Babcock and Brown. The agreement grants the port annual rent payments in excess of $1 million, a needed cash infusion for the strapped agency.
The community benefits package gives the port an additional $5.5 million, with an as yet undetermined portion of those funds to be spent on open-space and energy-related projects on port-owned land. In addition to payments to the port, Babcock and Brown pledged more than $23 million to the SFPUC for sustainable energy programs, such as solar, wind, and tidal power initiatives.
Despite passing the licensing and benefits packages, port commissioners and their staff said they were not ruling on the project’s merits in terms of energy policy. Port special projects manager Brad Benson, who spearheaded the negotiations, told us, "Port staff does not believe we have the required expertise to rule on energy policy aspects [of the TBC]. We believe the Board of Supervisors is the preferred venue" to settle those questions.
Reached for comment, several San Francisco supervisors, either directly or through staff, told us they are still making up their minds about the project. Sup. Sophie Maxwell told us even if the cable is built, the city will not allow the new power line to sidetrack its efforts to use more environmentally friendly energy. "The city’s policy is renewable energy. Fossil fuel is not our first and primary desire." But, she added, Cal-ISO "determine[s] our power needs, and so we have to go along with that. We can’t say, ‘No … you’re wrong.’ "
Babcock and Brown vice president Dave Parquet praised the Port Commission for approving the licensing agreement and benefits package, telling us, "We are very pleased with the port’s [approval] and look forward to the Board of Supervisors’ decision." Samuel Wehn, the TBC’s project manager at Babcock and Brown, said, "I don’t think San Francisco [officials are] going to put their city in the position where they’re not going to be able to provide the kind of energy that’s needed to keep this city running."
Moss said those kinds of arguments are "business as usual" for the state in terms of energy policy. "Here [we] go again with another large infrastructure project that doesn’t contribute to solving climate change or moving our energy agenda forward."
He added, "It’s classic political science. Out of [the average ratepayer’s bill] it’s pennies per month, so nobody cares about it … but that doesn’t mean it’s not an expensive project. It is." Babcock and Brown, he said, "saw an opportunity to make a very fat profit margin, and they went for it like any good profiteer." *
