San Francisco

The case closes

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I’ll start with a correction: I wrote last week that Cleveland and San Francisco were the only two cities where the chain that owns the SF Weekly faces direct competition from another alternative paper.

Actually, Village Voice Media, which used to be called New Times, owns the Seattle Weekly. The Stranger, owned by Tim Keck, competes directly against the Weekly.

And the LA Weekly, also a VVM paper, competes against the much smaller Los Angeles City Beat.

My point – and the point that we brought up in trial – was that VVM does very well in markets where there is no direct, head-to-head competition from another alternative paper of the same size and market share, but does badly when it faces real competition. I’m not the only one who thinks this; allow me to quote a Jan 27, 2003 filing by the U.S. Department of Justice, which had accused New Times and VVM, which were still separate companies, of conspiring to kill competition in two cities.

“In markets where they faced no direct alternative newsweekly competitor,” the federal complaint reads, “both defendants had double-digit annual profit margins. However, in Cleveland and Los Angeles … their profit margins were pinched.”

So I think that’s pretty clear.

The bigger story, of course, is that testimony ended today in the Guardian’s predatory-pricing case against the SF Weekly and its corporate parent. Judge Marla Miller has set closing arguments for Thursday morning. Then the case, which has been pending since 2004, will finally go to a jury.

The Weekly’s lawyers pulled a weird move at the very end of the trial, recalling Guardian publisher Bruce Brugmann to the witness stand and asking him a question that had almost nothing to do with the issues at hand. Brugmann had testified early in the trial, and on cross-examination, he was asked if he knew that the San Francisco Chronicle had lost some $300 million over the past few years.

No, Bruce said; Hearst Corp, which owns the Chron, is a privately held corporation and nobody’s sure exactly what the numbers are.

This time around, Weekly lawyer H. Sinclair Kerr pulled out a Guardian story from a year ago that reported on court records showing a $330 million Chronicle loss. I guess the implication was the Bruce didn’t remember what was in his own paper (frankly, I didn’t remember the exact figure either; I review almost every one of the hundreds of news stories we run every year, but I can’t swear to recall every detail of every single one).

Bruce’s response: Sure, we reported on the best figures we could find. And the point was?

Of course, the Weekly is trying to argue that since some daily newspapers are losing money, it would be reasonable to expect any an alternative newspaper in San Francisco to lose money, too. And thus any financial hit the Guardian has taken over the past seven years is the fault of market conditions, not predatory pricing by a big Phoenix-based chain.

The final witness in the case – Bill Johnson, the publisher of the Palo Alto Weekly, called by the Guardian to rebut the Weekly’s financial experts – made a strong case that the whole “dailies-are-losing-money-so-the-weeklies-should-too” line of argument is deeply flawed.

Johnson, whose company also owns the Pacific Sun and four community papers, testified that “there are big differences between the way market forces have affected dailies and non-daily papers.”

He pointed out that dailies have been hit much harder by the Internet: Before sites like Craiglist emerged, a large percentage of the revenue of daily papers came from classified ads, most of which have moved to the web. Weeklies were never as dependent as classified, he said.

Perhaps more important, much of the information that readers used to get from their morning daily paper – national and international news – can now be found just as easily on the web.

But papers like the Guardian still offer unique local content that can’t be found anywhere else. “Local papers have this connection with their local audience,” he explained. In fact, he said, “most non-daily publishers I know have done very well” during the past seven years, the time period the lawsuit covers.

He explained that the Palo Alto Weekly saw its display-ad revenues drop in 2002, but quickly rebounded. The dot-com bust and 9/11 had an impact, of course, he said, but after a year or so, “we held our ground and regained ground.” That was also true of his other Bay Area papers, Johnson said.

Johnson also discussed the Weekly’s theory that the San Francisco market is so full of media that the two alternative papers aren’t direct competitors in their own market. “Those two papers are looking for the same audience,” he said.

Johnson, who sat through the testimony of Harvard economist Joseph Kalt, completely dismissed the eminent professor’s theory that it would be irrational for the Weekly to try to damage the Guardian through below-cost selling. If one paper has deeper pockets and can drop its prices, it will gain market share. The smaller competitor will be forced to lower its prices, and both papers will start to lose money. But the paper with greater resources can continue to grow, showing advertisers that it’s becoming dominant in the market, and the paper with no source of outside capital won’t be able to keep up.

“It happens all the time,” Johnson said.

Kerr objected, and Judge Miller ordered that last remark stricken from the record.

Tooth and consequences

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› culture@sfbg.com

It’s two days after Christmas and I’m sprawled out on a plastic-lined chaise lounge, sipping fluoride and waiting for the blood to stop gushing from my gums so the doctors can get back to work. Beyond the noise of drills and X-ray machines I hear grunts from several other patients and the sounds of merchants outside hawking sombreros, sweetbread, bootleg Fendi bags, and pottery. Kind of strange, but I’m not worried anymore. This is my second day at Dr. Rafael Lopez’s dental clinic, and I’m no longer freaked out that it’s nestled among trinket stores and cantinas in a bustling bazaar in Mexico.

I also don’t care that the dentists here speak hardly any English, nor I any Spanish. I mean, it’s not like I’m alone. All the other patients at Dr. Lopez’s office are either Canadian or American, and all the people shopping out front are too. In fact, nearly every person I’ve met on the streets here is Caucasian and an English speaker. We’re all dental tourists, and we’ve come to Los Algodones — a sunny border town near Yuma, Arizona, which allegedly has more dental clinics and pharmacies per block than any other city in the world — to save money. In my case, I’m in for three root canals with posts and crowns for the price of a secondhand scooter on eBay: $1,850, about a third of what I’d pay for the same procedures in the States.

I’d heard about Dr. Lopez’s clinic through a friend of my mother’s, but Los Algodones, like other dental tourism destinations, was easy to find on the Web. In fact, the town’s Web site, www.losalgodones.com, is actually a dental clinic referral network, with pictures of smiling clinicians and graphic before and after shots flashing across its home page. Clinics like Dr. Lopez’s, which often handle 10 to 20 patients a day, are set up exclusively for foreigners. Dr. Lopez estimates that 80 percent of his customers are American and 20 percent are Canadian; most Mexicans in the area can’t afford his rates. Many of them come to towns like this for big-ticket procedures like bridges and reconstructive surgery, some of which can cost more than $10,000 at home.

And they’re coming in increasing numbers. According to HealthCare Tourism International, a nonprofit accreditation and information organization set up to monitor the medical tourism boom, an estimated 1 million Americans will travel abroad this year for some of sort of medical service, up from the National Coalition on Health Care’s figure of about 150,000 in 2004. Of the procedures sought, 40 percent will be dental related. A recent article in the New York Times on the dental tourism phenomenon cited a boom in luxury travel packages designed around dental procedures. A root canal followed by a little fly-fishing in Costa Rica? Why not? The money you save can justify a short vacation.

ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM


Dr. Lopez’s clinic is, hopefully, the end of the road for me. I’ve been struggling with dental problems (and the potential resulting bills) for years. With all this talk of health care reform, you’d think I would have been able to find a decent low-cost US dentist, especially in civic-minded San Francisco. But it just wasn’t happening. For whatever reason, dental care and health care are viewed as two separate issues in the United States. When it comes to diseases, colds, and broken bones, you can usually catch a break, but good luck trying to get your teeth fixed on a budget. The truth is, even if you have some form of dental insurance, which is unlikely — according to the American Dental Association (ADA), only about half of all Americans do — dental care is nearly impossible for average wage earners to afford. At least, I’ve never been able to afford it. And I’ve looked everywhere.

My own dental horror story began nearly a decade ago when the Marine Corps kicked me off my retired father’s lifelong dental plan. I was fine for about a year, until the day I awoke with a terrible pain in my mouth. I was 19 at the time, taking classes at a community college and working at a café — barely able to pay rent, let alone find the time and money for a visit to the dentist. So I did the next best thing: simply ignored the pain, staving it off with copious amounts of ibuprofen when it got intense. The over-the-counter denial did the trick for almost two years, but I knew I would be forced to eventually bite the bullet, however softly.

And then it happened. My teeth started breaking. Not hurting, at least no more than usual, just breaking off — in huge, gray chunks.

This went on for years. By the time I was 25, four of my teeth had shattered and the rest seemed well on their way to doing the same. I adopted the diet of a five-month-old, unable to chew anything tougher than bananas or scrambled eggs. It was time to act, but I had no idea where to go. As a full-time student, getting by on financial aid, loans, and whatever I could rake in as a part-time waiter, I was nearly destitute. I’d recently transferred to San Francisco State University, but at that time, in order to purchase the student dental plan the school offered, I also had to purchase its medical plan, a combination that would have increased my monthly bills by nearly $200.

It was tempting, particularly in comparison with most employer-related or individual plans I qualified for, which could run into the thousands. But SFSU’s dental plan screened out existing problems, like the trainwreck I had going on, and carried an annual cap of less than $1,000. (Unlike medical insurance plans, which feature deductibles, most dental plans have annual monetary ceilings.) So even with the plan I would still be unable to afford even a fraction of the work I needed to have done. Since my student days, SFSU has implemented a dental-only plan available to undergrads, but often the limits are too low to cover anything other than cleanings and fillings.

Thus I began my search for a pro bono dentist, figuring that with all the uninsured people living in the city there must be someone around. It quickly became clear, however, that scoring free dental is harder than finding a decent vegetarian restaurant in rural Alabama.

QUEST FOR DENTAL


First, I had a glimmer of hope: a medical and dental clinic in Berkeley that had the word free in its name.

The Berkeley Free Clinic (BFC) has been offering free medical and dental care to the hard-up since 1969. It provides free HIV tests, medicine, preventative education, and more. But I needed dental work — and that was another story. As the only clinic in Northern California offering free fillings, extractions, and referrals to discount dentists, BFC is insanely popular. And since it’s run by volunteers and donors, it’s also chronically understaffed. Jessica Hsieh, a clinic coordinator, explained that the facility does as much as it can with limited resources. "We used to take patients on a first-come, first-served basis," she says. "But there were so many people lined up every night that our waiting room and hallway became fire hazards."

To deal with this problems, the clinic has devised a maddening selection system, which includes spotty business hours and a name-in-the-hat-style lottery. It sounded a little sketchy, but I gave it a go.

After making the 45-minute commute from my home, I arrived at the clinic at exactly 5:30 on a Monday evening. I scribbled my name on a small slip of paper, handed it to the receptionist, and took a seat in a waiting room crowded with students, broke workers, and homeless people. A nurse came out and told everyone to sit tight; the dentists were taking our names into a separate room and she’d return soon with their random choices. Ten minutes later, she came out again, read off three names, and then told everyone else to go home.

The room had been quiet as we all waited to see who’d won, but when a young blond girl with designer jeans and a fancy cell phone rose to claim her prize, the atmosphere became tense.

"That’s fucking bullshit," said a man with dirt on his face and ripped boots. "I’ve been coming here for weeks. This is her first fucking time!"

One of the dentists apologized and reminded us that we were welcome to keep trying as many times as we liked. I took his advice and returned three more times, missing a day of study or work for every fruitless visit until I gave up. One of my teeth in the back had started aching like hell, and I couldn’t stomach the wait any longer.

I broadened my search to include dental schools like that at the University of California San Francisco, where the wait times were rumored to be long, but once on the list, getting work done was guaranteed. After talking to students at the UCSF clinic, though, I realized treatment would require several days off from work and school because each step a student made during surgery would have to be approved by a busy professor and analyzed by other students. And the discount wasn’t exactly phenomenal.

The average cost of a single complete root canal procedure (root canal, post, and crown) at UCSF is more than $1,100, almost twice the amount I wound up paying in Mexico and way more than I could afford at the time.

So I scrapped the dental-school idea and dug deeper, figuring that if I couldn’t find free or cheap dental work, I could at least find a place that offered a payment plan. And I did find such a place.

Western Dental is like the McDonald’s of dental clinics. With multiple locations in almost every city in California, it’s effectively cornered the market on affordable dental work. Only it’s not cheap. A complete root canal procedure on one tooth can cost up to $1,590 — a lot less than a regular dentist, but much more than a dental school and about three times as much as Dr. Lopez charged me in Mexico. People flock to Western Dental because it lets you pay off your dental work like you would a car. You plunk down $99 for a yearlong membership, make a 20 to 30 percent down payment, and then pay the rest off monthly over the course of one year. And Western Dental doesn’t take your credit history into account when working out a plan.

Out of desperation, I eventually did get one of my teeth fixed at the Mission and 24th Street location, and wound up paying a $350 deposit and monthly installments of $110 for the next 12 months.

CAVITY CAVEATS


With my most painful tooth taken care of, I could now focus on finding a better deal, which is how I wound up in Mexico. So far it seems to have been a pretty smart decision. My new teeth look great and they’re holding up fine. I was treated extremely well by Dr. Lopez’s staff. But there are many reasons not go to Mexico for cheap dental work. And Brad Hatfield, a Korean War vet and retired city planner from Arizona City who asked that I not use his real name, knows them all.

Hatfield has been making the three-hour trip to Los Algodones for nearly a decade. He’s seen the town evolve from a haven for cheap trinkets and booze into what it is now: a medical resort for Americans with expensive tooth and eye issues. Hatfield started going to Los Algodones when he realized that even with his insurance he’d never be able to afford necessary dental work. But now, many years and thousands of dollars later, he’s learned his lesson.

"The problem with dentistry in Mexico," says Hatfield, "is that there’s no recourse. If something bad happens, you can’t sue anyone. All you can do is ask for your money back." And that’s just what Hatfield did when he returned from Los Algodones recently and discovered that his new teeth were worthless. Indeed, he claims that almost none of the work he’s gotten in Mexico has held up longer than a year or so.

This last time was the worst. "As soon as I got home," says Hatfield, "my gums started hurting really bad and bleeding off and on." When he called his clinic to complain, they denied his request for a refund and invited him back for some discounted work instead. Hatfield went back, got the work done, and thought his problems were over. But a few days later he realized they weren’t. "I was sitting here eating a piece of chocolate, and all of a sudden I realized I was chewing on two of my teeth and the bridge that was connecting them. All the work they had done had just fallen out."

Hatfield has tried repeatedly to get his dentist to refund his money back, but all he gets in response are invitations to return for more work. "Now they want to just rip all my teeth out and give me a full set of implants. It’s going to cost thousands of dollars on top of the $10,000 I’ve already spent there over the past year."

Hatfield is currently trying to get his problems fixed at a dental college in Mesa, Arizona, but he’s facing steeper prices and will probably have to return to Mexico soon. "My dental and medical problems have ruined me as a person," he says. "I can’t get a job because my teeth are so screwed up, and I can’t think through all this pain. I just don’t understand why dental work is so expensive. It’s much worse than medical."

THE BIG YANK


Hatfield brings up a good point. For some reason dental issues aren’t included in national or local debates about health care. Healthy San Francisco, the universal, citywide health care access program operated by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, doesn’t cover access to dental services, which were never even considered for inclusion. When reached by the Guardian for comment on this exclusion, SFDPH spokesperson Eileen Shields stressed the difference between the city’s program and regular insurance plans, saying "[Healthy San Francisco] is a health access plan, providing access to basic medical care. I mean, my health plan doesn’t even include dental — does yours?"

Denti-Cal, the state dental insurance program offered as part of Medi-Cal, is an option for California residents with a low income, a social security number, and at least one child. But it obviously doesn’t help the throngs who fill the waiting rooms of Western Dental. San Francisco General Hospital keeps an oral surgeon on call for extreme emergencies but if you want your janked-out teeth replaced or aren’t doubled over in chronic pain, SF General can’t help you.

It doesn’t look like any of this is changing soon. None of the candidates running for president this year has announced a platform that specifically deals with the high cost of dental care in America. Why? Why are medical and dental issues treated as two separate entities? And why is it so hard to afford dental treatment even with insurance?

Hsieh of the BFC thinks it may have to do with the fact that dental issues aren’t thought to be as life-threatening as medical issues. But if an infected tooth is left untreated, it can lead to death just as surely as unchecked pneumonia. On its Web site, the ADA acknowledges the high cost of dental insurance but privileges prevention over treatment, claiming that most dental problems are preventable. If Americans would just take care of their teeth, use their paltry insurance plans for routine checkups, and quit eating so much candy, they wouldn’t have to get root canals. But I brush after meals, floss regularly, and stay away from sweets — and I’ve been in and out of dental clinics with major problems since I was five.

Another theory has to do with the high costs of dental school and specialized equipment, which makes sense. But the truth of the matter, commonly pointed out in the ongoing health care debate, is that mixing profit with patients is a recipe for disaster. As long as insurance companies are able to make billions by fleecing their customers, and as long as dental clinics and drug companies are allowed to set their own prices, the general population is going to be cavity ridden and kind of ugly.

For now, it seems dental tourism may be the best option for people with normal-to-low incomes and chronic problems. Two months after my visit to Mexico, my teeth feel much better and I’m back on solid food. But this kind of travel isn’t for the fainthearted. The weather and food in Los Algodones are great. But getting your teeth ripped out and reconstructed in a foreign country with no legal recourse is dangerous and scary, especially during the high-traffic winter season when the tendency to rush through patients escalates.

My triple root canal, for example, took a mere two visits. The doctors hacked away for 10 hours straight, let me heal for one day, and then stuck on the crowns and pocketed my check. I stumbled out of Dr. Lopez’s office a few days before New Year’s, in a Novocain-induced daze, with blood on my shirt and pieces of rubber molding stuck to my cheeks. My jaws and head ached as I shuffled through the mile-long border-crossing corridor, sweating and dry-heaving.

As I approached the checkpoint, I wondered if I had made the right choice.

Then I remembered that I hadn’t actually made one. It was this or nothing.

Emma Lierley contributed to this report.


>>View a video interview with a Canadian dental tourist

SF Weekly witnesses make the Guardian’s case

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An expert witness for the SF Weekly put a bunch of charts before the jury Friday, trying to undermine the Guardian’s predatory pricing case – but every one of the charts seemed to prove exactly what we’ve been trying to say.

The Guardian is suing the Weekly and its corporate parent, Village Voice Media, for predatory pricing. The claim is that the 16-paper chain poured millions into propping up the San Francisco paper, which for 12 years has lost money while it sold ads below the cost of producing them. That, we argue, was done to harm the locally owned competitor.

Clifford Kupperberg, the Guardian’s expert witness, put the damages at between $5 million and $11 million.

Everett Harry, an accountant who specializes in analyzing damage claims in litigation, tried to take apart Kupperberg’s analysis. One of his weapons: A series of “scattergrams,” graphic representations of large numbers of sales transactions for clients that have advertised in both the Weekly and the Guardian.

Harry tried to use the charts to argue that the Guardian wasn’t losing business to lower-priced Weekly ads. But the stunning fact was that every single scattergram showed that the Weekly was indeed selling ads below cost.

Our expert, their expert

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Lawyers for the SF Weekly and its corporate parent tried mightily today to discredit the testimony of the Guardian’s expert on the damages caused by the chain’s predatory pricing in San Francisco.

It was a classic legal strategy: The Weekly lawyers tried to find flaws in Clifford Kupperberg’s detailed damage report, then brought in their own expert to argue that our expert was wrong.

But in the end, I didn’t see anything presented that undermined the Guardian’s basic argument: The Weekly’s below-cost sales damaged the local paper, and those damages were in the millions of dollars.

The crux of the attack on Kuppergberg’s data: The projections he showed for lost profits during 2001-2007, the period when the Guardian is charging the Weekly was selling ads below cost, exceeded the level of profits the paper had made in the previous few years.

Projecting damages in a case like this is an inexact science: You have to try to establish what would have happened if the illegal conduct hadn’t happened. Kupperberg used a series of different models to do that, and came up with damages of between $5 million and $11 million.

How, Weekly attorney Rod Kerr asked, could Kupperberg suggest that the Guardian would have made profits of well over 10 percent a year when the most the paper had earned in the previous decade was about 5 percent?

Well, Kupperberg noted, the 1990s were a period of rapid growth for the Guardian and the alternative press in general, and during periods of rapid growth, many companies re-invest profits in expanding their infrastructure. When a market starts to level off and mature, those investments pay off; that’s a period he called the “profit maximization level.”

So it wouldn’t be at all unreasonable to assume that, after spending money to expand in the 1990s, the Guardian might have been able to hold costs down and see real economic gains in the next decade.

The other point, of course, is that the Guardian’s owners, Bruce Brugmann and Jean Dibble, have never looked for high profits – all the money has been re-invested in the paper. So the money that the Guardian lost to SF Weekly’s predatory pricing might not have appeared on a balance sheet as “profit” – it might have appeared as higher expenses associated with improving the paper.

Kupperberg made another important point in his testimony: Ralph Alldredge, the Guardian’s lawyer, asked him directly: “Is there any doubt in your mind that the SF Weekly sold a significant percentage of its ads below cost during this period?”

“No,” said Kupperberg.

Then the Weekly brought in it’s expert, Everett Harry, who did the opposing-expert-witness thing and tried to say that Kupperberg’s figures were all wrong. His basic line was the same thing the Weekly has been retailing all along: The early part of this decade was marked by a recession, 9/11 and the rise of the Internet, all of which hit local newspapers and led to a decline in revenues.

But other weekly newspapers in the region (and weeklies all over the country) came out of the recession fairly quickly and saw revenues (from display ads, which are what this case is about) come back strongly. And between 2001 and 2007, there is no evidence that the Guardian lost any display ads to the Internet.

The San Francisco alternative weekly market was unlike markets anywhere else: One competitor, with $13 million in chain money to back it up, was systematically depressing the price of display ads. And the Guardian suffered damages as a result.

I have more when Harry finished his testimony and is cross-examined tomorrow.

Ryan Brooks plays Musical Chairs

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Yesterday, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced he was appointing Ryan Brooks to the Planning Commission.
That announcement necessarily meant that someone else on the Planning Commission was about to get bumped.

And today, the Planning Commission announced that the Mayor had accepted the resignation of Planning Commission President Dwight Alexander.

The latter move wasn’t entirely unexpected, given the shenanigans that occurred behind the scenes at the Planning Commission earlier this year.
And nor was the former, given that Sups. Sophie Maxwell and Bevan Dufty both expressed support for the idea of appointing Brooks to another commission, when they rejected his reappointment to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission last week.

But with Alexander gone, it remains to be seen who ends up as the new Commission president, and what course the Commission—and the Planning Department’s new director John Rahaim—choose to steer in 2008…Stay tuned.

Bad Day for Strong Women at City Hall

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They met in one of the smallest rooms in City Hall, but within ten minutes, the board that oversees the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission managed to make a huge decision that will cost tax payers $400,000, when they voted to fire SFPUC General Manager Susan Leal, this morning.
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SFPUC General Manager Susan Leal talks to the press about her record at the agency, the lack of stated reasons for her termination and her future aspirations.
Photos by Charles Russo

“It’s a sad day when someone doing a good job gets removed to the tune of $400,000 from rate payers for no stated reason,” Sup. Bevan Dufty told the Guardian, after the vote to fire Leal, his friend and political ally, went down.

Commissioner Dick Sklar told reporters, “We’re not discussing it,” as Commission staff distributed copies of an unsigned PUC resolution that cites Leal’s August 23, 2004 employment agreement. That contract allows the Commission to terminate Leal’s agreement “without cause, and without stating any reasons therefore, and upon at least 30 days written notice.”

Commissioner Anne Moller Caen said that with Leal gone, people could expect, “ a change of policy, a change in direction.”

Meanwhile, Leal, a former supervisor and City Treasurer, expressed few regrets, other than wishing that the agency had done a biofuel program three years ago, instead of during the past year. Oh, and wishing she’d been wearing an old suit, the day she got run over outside City Hall.

“I Iost a good suit,” Leal joked.
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Miserable to be gay: A Q&A with Terence Davies

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If the film director Terence Davies didn’t qualify as a master in his own medium (albeit one who has made only a handful of features), it would be tempting to compare him at length with musicians who have made a career out of either discovering nostalgic melodic magic in every corner and cranny of England’s cities, such as Saint Etienne, or ones who never pass up an opportunity to lament the passing of a country that once was unique, such as Morrissey. Any fan of those iconic soundsters who doesn’t know the work of Davies should dive into his Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) as soon as possible, and then journey from them into The House of Mirth (2000) to see that Davies is also capable of creating classic films set in other countries. On the occasion of his upcoming appearance at Pacific Film Archive, I recently rang him up for a chat that began by the Pacific Ocean and ended in New York society, touching upon Noel Coward, Edith Sitwell, vile bodies, vain gay men, Char Ladies and Hottentots along the way.

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Still from the Terence Davies Trilogy

Terence Davies: Are you looking at some wonderful view of San Francisco?
SFBG: There’s a freeway, and some industrial buildings slightly blocking my view of the Bay.
TD: I was expecting you to say it was a view of the clear blue Pacific and you could see Japan.
SFBG: If I was on that part of the coastline, the side Hitchcock loves, I’d at least be able to see the ocean below me in a manner that would completely terrify me.

Noise Pop: Do’s and the Don’ts

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San Francisco’s Dont’s are JJ Don’t (bass), Ken Don’t (drums), Jonny Don’t (vocals), and Joey Don’t (guitar), but as with the Beatles, a fifth Don’t looms like a specter. In this case it’s the Mountain Don’t, a fearsome triumph of mixology that involves a shot of vodka, one of Robitussin, a touch of absinthe, and a splash of Mountain Dew Code Red. It is the band’s go-to tipple, and given that most of the Dont’s songwriting occurs during bouts of improvisation after too much of it, the drink is easily as influential on their sound as, say, kraut rock.

The influence question is unusually tricky with the quartet, who cut their second self-released LP, Inner El Camino, last year at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studio. While the Dont’s exercise many familiar art rock themes — the pinched vocals and twee urbanity of the Talking Heads in "Measure Up" and the beat-driven guitar warfare, DFA-style, of "Blahblahblah" — their methods for getting to them are so anathema to that scene that the whole connection becomes flimsy. Improv rock — to the degree to which these guys take it (lyrics too are made up midsession) — is supposed to be fumbly jam-band stuff.

Joey Don’t, for one, doesn’t buy that line in rock’s sand. "I don’t subscribe to the aesthetics people place between hippies and avant-gardists," he remarked by e-mail. "I like the Grateful Dead as much as I like Can." The good part is that the Dont’s don’t have to be right: they just have to be willful. The music runs its own show, and a tangible sense of liberation crackles across Inner El Camino. It comes up again in Ken Don’t’s description of recent rehearsals: "We’re experimenting with MIDI guitars, drum triggers … our trademark bullhorn miasma. We don’t know where any of that will lead, and frankly, we don’t care."

THE DONT’S

With the High Violets and the Union Trade

Feb. 29, 5 p.m., free

Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 503-0393

www.theeparkside.com

>>Back to Noise Pop page

Noise Pop: Follow those Dodos

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Meric Long spent a year in chicken heaven or hell, depending on your feelings about charred fowl flesh. For about a year the Dodos vocalist-guitarist-trombonist chopped, baked, and tended as many as 80 signature roasted chickens per night as a line cook at San Francisco foodie institution Zuni Cafe — a day job so intense that plump, juicy birds haunted his dreams. "Whenever I start talking about the chickens, I can’t shut up," he says ruefully now. "It just it ruled my life for a year!"

But honestly, despite those incursions into his REM-scape, Long feels more kinship with his band’s namesake: the Dodo, that incredible, edible, yet now extinct white meat. "They were like chickens," he muses, sprawled sideways on a bench in Mission Creek Cafe on this warm California winter afternoon. The precision roasting of fowl seems far away on this fair day. "They were lonely, though."

"They wanted friends," drummer Logan Kroeber throws in. He’s still shaken and a bit stirred thanks to a too-close-to-personal-extinction-for-comfort encounter between his skateboarding self and a car blasting down a nearby alley.

"And that’s why they got killed off," Long continues. "They weren’t used to visitors, and the English came and were hungry and ate ’em."

Still, it takes a lot of sly chutzpah to adopt the moniker of the highly uncool, not-so-beautiful loser of the animal kingdom. And though they’d never say so explicitly, Long and Kroeber are hoping, humbly, to do the clumsy waddlers proud by adapting and maybe even flourishing. Exhibit one: the Dodos’ compelling second album, Visiter, scheduled to be released March 18 on Frenchkiss. Its 14 songs unfold in three rough parts, beginning with the toy piano invocations of road-weary, lovelorn musicians ("Red and Purple"), then rolling through noise-wracked folk drone ("Joe’s Waltz"), wry, Magnetic Fields–style songcraft ("Winter"), and a ragtag country blues scented with the sun and sand of Led Zeppelin and West African drumming ("Paint the Rust"). A significant evolution from Long’s time as a solo acoustic act and from the Dodos’ self-released debut, Beware of the Maniacs (2006), Visiter is startlingly deep and likely to hold up under repeated plays, catching the listener on the tenterhooks of Long’s insinuating melodies.

So it’s funny, then, to think that Long first dubbed his solo folk act Dodobird because he felt like such a slow goer and has now firmly found his voice with Kroeber and the Dodos. "To be honest, I think back then I used to have a fear that I was kind of unintelligent, like I was really dumb but didn’t know it," Long says bashfully. "I don’t know if I should say it. But I think it had to do with partying too much when I was younger and completely fucking my brain. I also think there’s this plane of understanding that other people seem to be on and I’m still kind of out of the loop on."

As usual, Kroeber jumps into the conversation, to watch his bud’s back, because seriously, dude, in his opinion, Long is nothing like the dazed and confused kids he grew up with down south: "A lot of people can sort of deflect that with ‘You’re thinking too much, man! Keep it simple! Positive vibes!’ You know, that sort of brick-by-brick, build your weed cabin." Kroeber nods sagely. "I grew up in Santa Cruz — it’s a historical place for weed-cabin building."

The Dodos found their endearingly clumsy footing far from the happy yet isoutf8g metaphorical grassy isles of yesteryear. After moving from his hometown of Lafayette, Long had been playing solo around town — occasionally as Mix Tape with vocalist Brigid Dawson of the Ohsees — when Kroeber’s cousin introduced the guitarist to the drummer two years ago. Kroeber started accompanying Long live on a few songs, on a single tom. "Even during those early shows," Kroeber recalls, "that girl Emily from Vervein was still, like, ‘It’s cool — I like what you’re doing, the one drum thing. I’m all about it!’ Even with one drum, people were, like, ‘Keep going!’<0x2009>"

A particularly inspiring Animal Collective show roused Long to offer to pay Kroeber’s way to Portland, Ore., where the singer-songwriter was about to record Beware with engineer John Askew, who owns the Filmguerrero label. Their experience working with Askew was so fruitful that the two returned to Askew’s Type Foundry studio to make Visiter after spending 2006 on perpetual tour, getting tighter, writing songs together, and solidifying their identity as a band. For Visiter, the duo piled on an odd array of instruments — stand-up bass, toy piano, and trombone — while the producer carefully pieced the sounds together in the recording’s aural landscape. "John sits there and closes his eyes and imagines his record as a soundscape and places things geographically," Long says, standing suddenly and patting the air above him here and there. "I think it really helped with this situation, because with two people there’s a lot of sonic space to fill, so where he placed everything really made a huge difference. The drums take up so much sound space on the record."

Loneliness fills the spaces of the songs as well, as Visiter so often seems to revolve around the women who were just passing through Long’s life. "Jodi" and "Ashley" are, naturally, about two such suspects, while "Undeclared" eschews Kanye West collegiate themes to focus on an unrealized crush, and "Red and Purple" captures that "young lady" who fashioned elaborate gifts involving invisible ink that would greet Long at every club on tour. "It was pretty romantic shit," Long says a bit wistfully.

"I was definitely impressed," Kroeber agrees. "I didn’t really know this girl, but later I imagined she was one of those people who sew everything by hand, supermeticulous. It was some next-level spy shit."

As the talk turns to girls who have come and gone, the Dodos grow a mite melancholy, though not enough to throw in the towel and jump in a roasting pan. They recently underwent a minimedia storm in New York City, where they attempted to go uncensored for MTV.com while hungover and sleep deprived after partying with Long’s chef pals the previous night. Fortunately, these days the Dodos are relying on their survival instinct more often than not and seeking out swimming holes rather than new watering holes when on tour.

Not that the drink doesn’t have its uses. "It’s an artificial sort of cryostasis," Kroeber quips. "But as soon as you get done with the tour and go home, it crumbles. The second tour, when I came back, my girlfriend was, like, ‘What the fuck happened to you?’ But it does work! When you’re on the road it’s the one thing that keeps you going."

THE DODOS

With Or, the Whale, Bodies of Water, and Willow Willow

Feb. 28, 9 p.m., $10–$12

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

ww.cafedunord.com

>>Back to Noise Pop page

Perpetual edge

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Over Feb. 14 to 16, Yannis Adoniou and Tomi Paasonen’s oddly named offspring, Kunst-Stoff, celebrated its 10th anniversary. The company had its first performance during the dot-com bubble at what was then San Francisco’s most in venue, Brady Street Theater — where you couldn’t find a parking place but did get some of the edgiest performances in town. You wouldn’t dare miss Kunst-Stoff’s total concept theater, in which multimedia reigned to suggest high-tech, futuristic fantasies. Performers donned bubble wrap or stuffed body stockings with shape-altering balloons. Theirs was a place where design ruled and rules existed to be broken.

But then the bubble burst. That initial infusion of venture capital — which had also financed art exhibits, DJ parties, and high-powered advertising — evaporated. Brady Street was sold. Paasonen lost his visa and returned to Europe. He would contribute a work periodically, but Adoniou was pretty much left by himself to redirect the company. Actually, he wasn’t quite left alone. He still had a group of highly committed dancers who allowed him to continue looking at the intersection of design and movement.

At a dress rehearsal prior to the anniversary program — which contained three world premieres — three dancers who’ve been with the company since the beginning looked better than ever. Nicole Bonadonna, Kara Davis, and Leslie Schickel were gloriously fearless, embracing physical and emotional risks they might have been more hesitant to do a decade ago.

Even without an audience, the company (which also includes Justin Kennedy, Marina Fukushima, John Merke, Erin Kraemer, and Dwayne Worthington) was fierce. It made you realize that while dancers talk a lot about the feedback they get from spectators, they ultimately dance for themselves and one another.

Watching the dancers rehearse phrases on a naked stage in punk street clothes and Haight Street throwaways, it took me a while to realize they were wearing Jeremy Chase Sanders’s costumes for Paasonen’s Out of Hand. When they started the piece the music seemed ridiculously loud, though much of the sound would be swallowed up when the seats were full of bodies at the performance.

Paasonen has said the dark Out of Hand contrasts the debris of American foreign policy, as demonstrated on a mountain-of-rubble Berlin, with choreography based on the movement language of people around Seventh Street and Market in San Francisco. It is a grim piece about negotiating danger and keeping yourself steady. Adoniou’s imaginative solo for himself was created "in dialogue with Alonzo King" and asked some King-type questions about the meaning of the universe and one’s place in it. The choreographer took the phrase "having the rug pulled out from under you" and translated it into a meditation on balance, seeking, and letting go. Finally, the extraordinary Korean musician and performer Dohee Lee (with musician Jethro DeHart) set the ecstatic tone for Adoniou’s Un State, a paean at once to the individuality of Kunst-Stoff’s dancers and to the expressive power of the human body. It seemed an appropriate finale for a 10th-anniversary concert.

As the dancers headed for snacks and dressing rooms and Adoniou finessed a duet onstage, Paasonen, back for these shows only, talked about making dances here and in Berlin. "Berlin is very demanding, very competitive, [and] people are very territorial," he said. "This is a community."

Compañía Nacional de Danza

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PREVIEW When Nacho Duato, crowned with laurels from his years in England and Holland, returned to his native Spain in the 1980s, the country’s national ballet company offered him its directorship. He took one look at the ensemble’s anemic repertoire and decided he could breathe some life into it. Consequently, today Compañía Nacional de Danza is a repository of Duato’s choreography. Spain could have done worse: Duato has put contemporary Spanish ballet on the world map like no one else. Don’t expect even a shadow of bolero or flamenco in the two different programs that constitute his company’s San Francisco debut. You will get the fruits of an exceptionally broad musical imagination and dancing that is full-bodied and energized — still ballet based but moving into a lush contemporary sensibility. One of this tour’s pieces, Castrati (2002), also performed at the University of California at Davis a few years back, recalls the brutal ceremony that insured boy sopranos retained their voices beyond puberty. To the sounds of the most glorious Vivaldi, cassocks fly about the stage in a none-too-gentle representation of those initiation rituals. An older work, 1996’s Por Vos Muero, splendidly evokes the role of dance as a social occasion and is performed to 15th- and 16th-century Spanish music. The newest work, Gnawa (2007), named after Moroccan descendents of slaves, explores connections within Spanish and North African cultures. Also on the program are Gilded Goldbergs (2006), White Darkness (2001), and Rassemblement (1990).

COMPAÑÍA NACIONAL DE DANZA Program A, Wed/20–Thurs/21, 8 p.m.; Program B, Sat/23, 8 p.m., and Sun/24, 2 p.m.; $35–$55. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 392-2545, www.performances.org, www.ybca.org

Gyan Riley

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REVIEW I first heard Gyan Riley on the spectacular, otherworldly The Book of Abbeyozzud (New Albion, 1999), by his father, minimalist maestro Terry Riley. The younger Riley’s playing on "Zamorra," a guitar duet with David Tanenbaum, reached new heights of raging classical guitar intimacy.

In 1999, Gyan Riley was the first guitarist to receive a full scholarship to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Since then, he’s been around: he’s had major commissions from the Carnegie Hall Corp. and the New York Guitar Festival, given performances worldwide, and held an artistic directorship with the San Francisco Classical Guitar Society and a teaching gig at Humboldt State University. So the stakes are high for his new full-length, Melismantra (Agyanamus Music). With an almost preternatural sense of musical presence, it doesn’t disappoint.

The four-part "Progression of the Ancestors" suite showcases the range of Riley’s complex sensitivity as a guitarist and composer. He never rushes the moment unless an overwhelming musical force takes control of the song on its own. Tabla giant Zakir Hussain’s elegant pops and rolls and Scott Amendola’s persuasive drumming add texture to the mix. Tracy Silverman’s electric violin playing — introduced prior to "Progression of the Ancestors" on the epic title track — touches on everything I love about not just violin but sound itself. Throughout the album Silverman leaps and bounds in world-turning harmony with Riley.

Melismantra‘s opening three-song cycle, "Mobettabutta," recalls the fusion jazz and somewhat self-interested tone poems of guitarists Larry Coryell and Pat Martino — especially the latter’s odd 1976 album Starbright (Warner Bros.). This doesn’t quite jibe with the rest of the recording, but in a way "Mobettabutta" opens your mind to the delightful guitar perversions of "Herbie Moonshine’s Last Dance." Riley might make thinking people’s music, but he knows how to party.

GYAN RILEY With Tracy Silverman and Scott Amendola. Thurs/21, 8 p.m., $19.50. Freight and Salvage Coffee House, 1111 Addison, Berk. (510) 548-1761, www.thefreight.org

Glad to be unhappy

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Terence Davies is coming to town. For anyone who loves the cinema, this is news of paramount importance — and MGM-level musical magnitude. Davies is one of the greatest directors of the final quarter of the 20th century. He’s created at least two acknowledged classics, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The House of Mirth (2000), and I count his 1992 rendering of a movie-mad childhood, The Long Day Closes, as one of my all-time favorite films. In a single shot that passes across the floors of a family apartment, Davies captures the magic of nature mingling with artifice (a waterfall of raindrops, reflected from a window, passing over the leaf pattern of a carpet), then conveys the passage of time with a potency that never fails to bring a tear to my unsentimental eye.

Time, free-flowing through mental mazes of negative space that Manny Farber would have to admire, is at the center of Davies’s autobiographical work. He connects music with memory in a manner that yields greater returns each time one returns to his movies. At the Pacific Film Archive, he’ll appear at screenings of The Terence Davies Trilogy (1984), Distant Voices, The Long Day Closes, and The Neon Bible (1995) and lead an audience through a shot-by-shot discussion of Distant Voices. In anticipation of this visit, I recently spoke with him on the phone.

SFBG It’s disheartening to read about the various funding problems you’ve been encountering over the past eight years.

TERENCE DAVIES We don’t have a cinema in this country — we just have an extension of television. You’ve got 25-year-olds who don’t know anything and think cinema started with [Quentin] Tarantino. We’re just little England. We’ve become virtually another state of America. In 20 years’ time, if we don’t watch it, we’ll be just like Hawaii, but without the decent weather.

SFBG Within British cinema, your films don’t fit into the contrasts that place David Lean–like literary adaptations or the documentary base of directors like Lindsay Anderson against more flamboyant directors such as Nicholas Roeg, Ken Russell, and Joseph Losey. You have elements of all of the above: your work is autobiographical and learned, but it has also has a flamboyance I relate to, though it isn’t outrageous.

TD I suppose my influences were very simple: the British comedies from the period when I was growing up and American melodramas and musicals. I remember being taken by my two older sisters to see Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing [1955] or All That Heaven Allows [1955] and going by myself to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers [1954] or The Pajama Game [1957] and any comedy that attracted Margaret Rutherford and Alastair Sim.

My films are an amalgam of those things and of the fact that I was brought up Catholic. I was very devout until I was 22. What a waste that was!

Also, I was influenced by classical music, particularly [Jean] Sibelius and [Dmitry] Shostakovich and my beloved [Anton] Bruckner. And poetry. [My family] got our first television in 1961, and about two years later, over the course of four nights, Alec Guinness read [T.S. Eliot’s] entire Four Quartets from memory.

SFBG Your current documentary project, Of Time and the City, is about your hometown of Liverpool. I came across an interview from the era of Distant Voices, Still Lives in which you talk about its utter transformation and deterioration. That interview dates from almost 20 years ago. Have the changes continued?

TD Yes, inevitably. At the time I left, Liverpool was very down at heel. I left it at its worst. It’s getting better now, but there’s still an awful lot to be done. The evocation of war that Humphrey Jennings did in Listen to Britain [1942] I’m trying to do for Liverpool. I wanted to try and capture what it was like when I was growing up. Even I was shocked at some of the footage of the slums, which were some of the worst in Europe. I grew up in one, and when you grow up in one you don’t realize it, because everyone else is in the same boat. But seeing footage of it now, it’s absolutely appalling. When you think that in 1953 this massive amount of money was spent on the coronation of the present queen, it’s just obscene. They get away with it — it’s quite extraordinary. I’m very much a republican; I’m not a monarchist. When you juxtapose the coronation with the footage that we’ve found, it’s shocking.

SFBG Solitude and rich sensory experience are qualities at the core of your movies. Those qualities take on specific aspects in cinema — your use of darkness in relation to light is connected to, and even a few times directly about, the experience of being in a dark movie theater.

TD You have to see the films in the cinema. It’s lovely to see, say, Letter from an Unknown Woman [1948] on the telly, but if you see it projected, it’s even more ravishing. The only way to see a film is in the cinema — nowhere else.

SFBG I first saw my favorite of your films, The Long Day Closes, at the Castro Theatre here in San Francisco.

TD The Castro is a beautiful theater. But I remember that when I was there, two men were walking down the aisle and one asked, "What did you see last night?" The other said he’d seen the [Terence Davies] Trilogy. The first asked, "What did you think?" And the other said, "Not very good."

SFBG There’s no accounting for taste.

TD Another man said to me, "These films make Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis," which I thought was a wonderful insult — practically a compliment. Isn’t that fabulous?

CLOSELY WATCHED FILMS: TERENCE DAVIES

Feb. 20–27, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Citizens vs. spies

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› news@sfbg.com

A Bay Area man and a San Francisco nonprofit are at the center of an epic, ongoing battle over privacy rights involving all three branches of the United States government. The outcome may determine the lines between national security and personal liberties in the 21st century.

The story begins in December 2005, when the New York Times exposed the George W. Bush administration as having illegally eavesdropped on US residents without required court warrants. The next month a former AT&T technician in San Francisco came forward with information about how that company (and Verizon and MCI, it was later learned) was gathering Internet and phone data from its customers and illegally routing it to servers controlled by the National Security Agency.

Mark Klein saw that a splitter was diverting the normal information traffic of domestic customers to a secret room at the AT&T Folsom Street plant. He knew that NSA people were around the company’s buildings as early as 2002, and it didn’t take him long to figure out what was going on. "It was obviously some big government hush-hush thing," Klein told the Guardian in a phone interview.

Klein realized he was not in a position to do much at the time, so he "made a note and moved on," he said. He also came across company documents spelling out the technical details of the operation, which his "fortuitous knowledge" allowed him to understand and explain. Klein stowed them away and kept them when he retired in May 2004.

Klein contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-rights group, in January 2006 and became a key witness in a class action lawsuit filed by the organization on behalf of AT&T customers. Hepting v. AT&T was the first of nearly 40 cases filed by citizens in Northern California against telecommunications companies and the government. In June 2006 a federal judge denied a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds of state-secrets privileges. The government and AT&T appealed the decision to the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco.

On August 15, 2007, EFF lawyers offered their opening arguments to a three-judge panel, urging it to allow AT&T customers to continue to fight against illegal spying on their Internet and telephone communications. In transcripts from this session, Judge Michael Hawkins surmises the matter: "As I understand, in this case what the plaintiffs are saying is that AT&T has provided telecommunications information about its subscribers to the government without a warrant."

This action runs afoul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which established a special court to issue warrants for government surveillance and which set standards to prevent abuse, although the court has rarely refused to issue warrants, which could even be obtained retroactively for emergency situations.

The Bush administration has sought to revise FISA for the post–Sept. 11 world, and a major component of this overhaul would be immunity for telecommunication companies that have served as dragnet information collectors for years. Government and AT&T lawyers argued before the judges that the data collection was in the interest of national security and that the industry giants were acting in good faith, so they cannot be held liable.

Reiterating this position, company spokesperson Walt Sharp wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian, "AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers’ privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security."

A decision in the case is still pending, and according to Rebecca Jeschke, media relations coordinator for the EFF, "We have no idea when they’ll have a ruling for us. Delays for a year are not uncommon."

Meanwhile, Congress is debating whether to essentially legalize the actions of the Bush administration and the companies and is hashing out two conflicting piece of legislation. The Senate voted Feb. 12 to reject an effort to strip the immunity provisions from the FISA Amendments Act, opting to protect the companies from legal scrutiny.

The House of Representatives has its own surveillance measure, which would loosen up some FISA restrictions but not include the immunity provision. That legislation, House Resolution 3773, was passed in November 2007 by a 227–189 vote. The bills now head to a Senate-House conference committee, which will work out the discrepancies, if that’s possible. As Jeschke explained, "The two bills will become one law or no law."

Bush has repeatedly said he will veto any bill that does not include immunity, while hawks in Congress say national security will be compromised if the government has to gather information without corporate assistance. In a Feb. 15 press release, Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected this assertion: "[The president] knows our intelligence agencies will be able to do all the wiretapping they need to do to protect the nation…. [He] should now work in a cooperative way with Congress to pass a strong FISA modernization bill that protects our nation’s security and the Constitution."

Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill told the Guardian, "Her position is that we have to make sure that this is consistent with the Constitution…. She is not in favor of immunity."

HR 3773 is "far from perfect," according to the EFF Web site, but it "provides far more congressional and judicial oversight of the Executive Branch’s domestic spying than the FAA."

Klein, the former AT&T technician, whistle-blower, and key witness, also became an unpaid lobbyist for EFF when he traveled to Washington DC in November 2006. He described the experience as "very tiring, exhausting," and said that over the four days, "we were much more successful in media coverage, but in terms of Congress, it didn’t do very much."

He concluded our interview with some foreboding words based on his experience. "This is more than about another bill," he said. "This is about fundamental constitutional issues, and many people are unaware."

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

There comes a time in any campaign, a political consultant once told me, when you just have to hang up the phone, stop looking at polling data, walk away from the office, and leave it in the hands of the voters. You do everything you can; you work every angle, make the case every possible way you can … and in the end, someone else is going to decide. You can only hope that if you told the truth, played by the rules, and showed why your side was right, in the end you’ll come out on top.

And sometime around the day this issue hits the stands, the Guardian‘s case against the big national chain that owns the SF Weekly will go to the jury. We have the facts on our side. We have the law on our side. We have the truth on our side. And all we can do now is hope the jury sees it.

If you haven’t been following this on the blogs or in the paper: we’re suing the Weekly and Village Voice Media, which used to be known as New Times, for predatory pricing. Our claim is that the Weekly (and until recently, the East Bay Express, which VVM just sold) has been selling ads below cost for the purpose of hurting a local, independent competitor.

Over the past three weeks I’ve been in the courtroom almost every day, watching the story unfold. I’ve learned a lot: the Weekly, for example, has lost money every single year since New Times bought it in 1995. In the past few years the losses have only escalated (to nearly $2 million per year). The paper is still publishing because the corporate parent in Phoenix has shipped more than $16 million to San Francisco to prop it up.

That’s pretty good evidence of the first part of our claim: if the Weekly keeps losing money, the paper is clearly selling ads below cost.

I’ve also seen evidence that the Weekly prepared special Guardian reports every month to send to Phoenix, that the Weekly‘s publishers devoted a special section of their regular financial reports to competition with the Guardian, and that the senior staff regularly talked about the war they were waging on us. Three witnesses testified to hearing Mike Lacey, one of the principals of VVM, announce that he wanted to drive the Guardian out of business.

I’ve seen memos and heard testimony showing the Weekly paid its sales staff bonuses to take ads away from the Guardian. I’ve seen a study showing that in 91 percent of key accounts, the Weekly sold below cost — and in 66 percent of those cases the Guardian either lost the ad or had to deeply discount rates to keep it.

I’ve heard witnesses from the Weekly‘s side testify that the Guardian was just one of many competitors in the market and that they treated it no differently than any other publication. I’ve heard misdirection and lies so blatant that I’ve wanted to stand up and point my fingers at the witnesses and call them out and demand they be indicted for perjury.

And now a jury will have to sort that out. In the end, I think this is a pretty clear case: we are a small, locally owned independent business under assault by a chain competitor that is vioutf8g state law in an effort to take monopoly control of the market. I think we’ve proved that. We’ll know soon.

The real FISA problem

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EDITORIAL It’s no secret that the nation’s telecommunications companies have been spying on Americans without any sort of legal warrants. The New York Times broke that story in December 2005 — and not long after that a San Francisco man who had worked for AT&T came forward to describe how private calls were routed to a secret building on Folsom Street where the feds could listen in.

The courts are sorting out whether that was a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which contains at least some limited provisions protecting privacy. But in the meantime, the George W. Bush administration wants to update FISA — and include retroactive immunity for the telecom companies. Even if AT&T, Verizon, and others broke the law by allowing federal agents to snoop on their customers, Bush says, they should pay no price.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other public interest groups have been pushing to block immunity; unfortunately, the Senate (with California’s Dianne Feinstein on the wrong side) has gone along with what Bush wants. The House has a better bill, and the two are headed for a conference committee. Activists are demanding Speaker Nancy Pelosi stand firm and refuse to allow passage of any bill that protects the phone companies from past misdeeds.

That’s the right approach, and we agree. But we have to ask: why are the Democrats so willing to support this law in the first place?

FISA was created in response to the Counter Intelligence Program abuses of the 1960s, and it provides some modest protection for citizens. But it created a special secret court that could authorize wiretaps with very little oversight. The government’s warrant requests have almost never been rejected. Sometimes the court has issued them after the fact, retroactively approving wiretaps that have been done with no judicial oversight at all. The current version of FISA is better than what Bush wants — but it could be vastly improved.

We’ve never been fans of secret legal proceedings and special, shadowy courts that operate as an arm of law enforcement. The entire premise of FISA seems awfully shaky: if the FBI or the National Security Agency needs to tap someone’s phone, why can’t it go before a federal judge, using the normal procedures for wiretap and search warrant authorizations, just like everyone else? Is there any evidence that the federal courts are unable to handle that job or that the judiciary is too unwilling to allow the government to use all of the tools it needs to track terrorists?

Is the United States any safer with the authority to spy on Americans almost entirely removed from the oversight process established by the Constitution?

The real threat here is the growing one to privacy and civil liberties — and the best way to address it is to simply refuse to reauthorize FISA, start from scratch, hold hearings, get public testimony, and rewrite the law in a way that protects the public, not just the FBI, the NSA, and telecom companies. That’s what Pelosi ought to be pushing for.

Crime cameras for the defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharing the Panopticon

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No shelter from the budget storm

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› news@sfbg.com

Arriving at the steps of Buster’s Place on a cold night is a familiar, comforting act for many of the city’s chronic homeless people. Or rather, it was until recently, when a sign was posted informing clients the facility will be closing its doors for the first time in almost a year.

Buster’s Place, the only centrally located 24-hour drop-in center in San Francisco, is on the chopping block to meet the demands of one of the city’s most drastic midyear budget cuts in recent history. The $1 million cut (roughly the one-year operating cost of Buster’s) is only a piece of the $9.25 million the city’s Department of Human Services must trim from its annual spending.

Buster’s has logged more than 34,000 visits from an estimated 700 clients in the past year. The center serves all walks of life, from lonely elders to those who cannot manage the complex shelter reservation system to newcomers who don’t know where to turn. While staff and resources are limited, Buster’s provides easy access to essential facilities like showers, bathrooms, and laundry rooms. It’s the stop of last resort, as I learned during my recent undercover investigation (see "Shelter Shuffle," 2/13/07, and "Search for Shelter," on the Guardian‘s SF blog).

"There’s a need for this place," Louis Ramon, who is the only case manager working at Buster’s and has been at the center since it opened, told the Guardian. "This is where the too sick, the too paranoid, the too mentally ill come who cannot be housed. Nobody is working with these clients — the really hardcore ones."

Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director for the Coalition on Homelessness, has been a leading advocate for 24-hour homeless centers and is pressuring city hall to reinstate funds to carry Buster’s through the end of the year.

"It’s frustrating when the mayor makes random and arbitrary decisions without consulting relevant community-based organizations or the homeless themselves," Friedenbach told us. "This is another attempt by the mayor to put a nail in the coffin of overnight shelters."

In a Feb. 14 press conference Mayor Gavin Newsom held with Dariush Kayhan, his newly appointed homeless czar, Newsom discussed plans to redesign the city’s shelter system, as well as the midyear budget cuts. "We’ve got a lot of resources that are being spent, but they could be spent more wisely by coordinating strategies," he said.

"With respect to 24-7 access, we’re going to have that with the [Mobile Assistance Patrol] vans, to ensure that people still have that. People can, in rare instances, come to the shelters directly if they’re in a dire emergency and access a bed if needed," Kayhan said. "And we also want to engage those folks because we don’t think sitting in chairs, around the clock, at night — and especially since a lot of those folks are seniors and disabled — that’s not a proper place to be."

Less than five months after it opened last year, Buster’s was slated to close during the regular fiscal-year budgeting last June. Homeless advocates came to Buster’s rescue and had the Board of Supervisors reinstate most of the funding for the center.

However, many homeless advocates and Department of Public Health officials are less optimistic about this round of budget reductions. For one thing, midyear cuts are generally more reactionary, made with little public deliberation, and made because the deficit is bigger than expected.

"This year is much different because the amount of money we need to cut is much more severe," said David Nakanishi, coordinator for community programs at the DPH and responsible for spearheading the planning of Buster’s Place. "Last year Buster’s was the only cut being made to homeless programs, so the community could rally around that one issue. The fiscal situation is much more dire this year. The supervisors will probably not reinstate the money."

Sup. Chris Daly, whose District 6 includes Buster’s Place, isn’t optimistic. "I will fight, but I won’t be successful," he told us, referring to his reduced power on the board after being removed as chair of the Budget Committee last year. "The cut list resembles very closely the list of board priorities from last year. The board cannot compel the mayor to spend."

Over the past year, Buster’s Place has had an uncertain future. The center was created after the temporary closing of the McMillan Drop-in Center, the city’s previous 24-hour drop-in center, at 39 Fell Street. Homeless-rights advocates campaigned for the creation of a 24-hour facility until Daly lobbied the DPH to keep an all-night drop-in center open. The city then contracted the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics to open Buster’s.

However, since the DPH established the center on a short timetable, it did not follow standard procedures for awarding the contract. The DPH is now going through a request-for-proposals process for a 24-hour drop-in center. Of course, if the midyear cuts are approved, this process will stop.

During a night at Buster’s, visitors can count on a few things: hard plastic chairs, restless sleep (if any), and good conversation with familiar faces. While Buster’s provides 24-hour shelter, it also serves as an important social hub for the homeless community. Elisa Frank, who handles shelter reservations through the city’s CHANGES system at the 150 Otis Street administrative office, sends up to 60 people per night to wait for beds at Buster’s.

"Buster’s is a community for a lot of people. They want supervision so they’re not just on the street doing dirt. Some people even have houses. Some who are in [single-room occupancies] and even some who just live alone come to Buster’s just for company," she told us.

One 31-year-old homeless client at Buster’s told us he has been in and out of shelters and illegal housing for most of his life. He has been staying at Buster’s occasionally over the past year and hopes to get his own apartment.

"When I don’t have a place to stay, I get suicidal," he told the Guardian on a chilly night outside Buster’s. "More people are going to die on the street if this place closes."

Milked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

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

Solo budgeting

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› sarah@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noise Pop: Hot shots

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Mika Miko


Los Angeles’ proudly punky ladies have been busy tearing out new tunes back home. Expect them to show their hand in their constant quest to drive the audience bonkers. Also on board is more of their characteristically dark imagery. "There’s nothing worse than happy-joy-joy," drummer Kate Hall says. "You gotta go through some dark stuff." (Kimberly Chun)

With DJ Amp Live and Tempo No Tempo. Tues/26, 8 p.m., free for badge holders and VIPs. Rickshaw Stop, 55 Fell, SF. (415) 861-2011

Minipop


Indie pop rarely gets sweeter — or more radio-friendly — than in the hands of San Francisco’s preternaturally poised Minipop. The foursome found an avid listenership early in their career, and the recently released A New Hope (Take Root) finds the unit looking fondly back at the dreamy alt-pop of the early ’90s, with graceful nods to 4AD forebears. (Chun)

Feb. 27, 8:30 p.m., $12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

The Mumlers


Perhaps the Mumlers were channeling the spirit of William Mumler, a mid-19th-century man famous for claiming he could photograph ghosts, but once all seven band members touched their fingers to a Ouija board’s planchette, the board, they claim, spelled out their group’s name. Regardless, it’s clear their swaggered ruckus pop channels dead folk musicians galore. Despite the ghostly origins of their handle, the Mumlers’ live appearances tend into turn to lively celebrations, with the outfit dancing about the stage. Their repertoire of instruments rivals any philharmonic’s and includes guitars, drums, upright bass, various keyboards, euphonium, French horn, trumpet, clarinet, tambourine, pedal steel, and recently, eagle whistles from Mexico. While the tunes give old-time music an indie pop sheen, beneath the group’s sprawling arrangements the lyrics and vocal delivery compare to those of Johnny Cash’s later recordings — with a touch of early Bob Dylan. (Alex Felsinger)

With the Entrance Band, honey.mooon.tree, and Golden Animals. Feb. 27, 9 p.m., $14. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

The Morning Benders


This group has no shortage of hooks and crescendos, and with a lighthearted indie pop style familiar enough to capture anyone’s attention and enough creativity to hold it, they stand out from their peers. Listeners have drawn comparisons to Voxtrot, the Shins, and Of Montreal for good reason, but in the end the Morning Benders’ biggest debt is to the Beatles. So far they’ve recorded all of their releases at home but have always managed to mimic that old analog sound, even when using nothing but a laptop and one microphone. With their upcoming debut, Talking Through Tin Cans (+1), they’ve successfully stepped into hi-fi wonder without losing their homespun feel. The Morning Benders don’t break any musical molds, but their solid songwriting and smooth deliver serve pop tradition well. (Felsinger)

With Kelley Stoltz, Grand Archives, and the Weather Underground. Feb. 28, 8 p.m., $14. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

The Blacks


SF’s grungy indie rock band the Blacks sound so much like the Pixies that they ought to be called the Frank Blacks, but they trump the re-formed Pixies in stage presence tenfold. Vocalist JDK Blacker doesn’t sing much at all but rather focuses his energy on livening up the audience: sometimes he’ll help drummer Gavin Black smash cymbals, or perhaps he’ll simply thrash around with his trusty tambourine. Vocalist Luisa Black holds the group together with solid alternating rhythm and lead guitar, while Gavin Black’s drumming shines with stripped-down, solid beats. The Blacks take the simplicity of ’70s punk and garage rock and jump-start the attitude: the concept isn’t new, but then, a combo doesn’t need to be entirely original to rock. (Felsinger)

With Cursive, Darker My Love, and Judgement Day. Feb. 29, 8 p.m., $18. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

Jeffrey Lewis


Crass saved punk. They never fit the part, never ripped off the Rolling Stones, and never tried to become famous, because they genuinely wanted to create a better world and thought they could do so through music. But in the past four years every kid with a leather jacket has picked up an acoustic guitar to sing against the war and capitalism, recorded some songs on their PowerBook, then thrown them up on MySpace. Folk punk has swept the nation’s underground to the point where 924 Gilman Street Project hosts a monthly Acoustic Night. Bringing it full circle, New York City’s Jeffrey Lewis recently released 12 Crass Songs (Rough Trade), composed entirely of acoustic versions of Crass numbers, including some of the group’s best. Lewis came out of his city’s so-called antifolk scene — a Crass cover LP ought to be deemed anti–folk punk, right? — and his vocal patterns have a hushed, somewhat raplike flow. The CD’s best track has to be "Punk Is Dead," which Lewis delivers as a wistful ballad. Hearing a folk singer recite the lyrics 25 years after the first recorded incarnation makes more sense than ever — because the words are certainly truer today. (Felsinger)

With the Mountain Goats, OKAY, and Aim Low Kid. Feb. 29, 8 p.m., $18. Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. www.bimbos365club.com

British Sea Power


Do You Like Rock Music? is the provocative title of British Sea Power’s new Rough Trade LP. Well, sure, but do I like their brand of grand indie? Their engorged drums and highly dramatic overtures just might get them discounted as the Big Country of the ’00s, though their quieter moments and more experimental textures hint at increasing — and welcome — complexity and nuance. (Chun)

With 20 Minute Loop, Colour Music, and Off Campus. March 1, 9 p.m., $14. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

Immigrant


These SF vets of Evening have come a long way from would-be bell-ringing bouts, taking on an epic yet poppy, synth-dappled alt-rock veneer with the self-released Novakinesis. (Chun)

With Panther, Wallpaper, and Distraction Fit. March 1, 9 p.m., $10–$12. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. (415) 861-2011

Port O’Brien


One might note that the flowing harmonies between the four members of Port O’Brien work so well onstage that the audience would be doing a disservice to the band if they joined in. But that would be an unfair request. Port O’Brien’s music emits the instant atmosphere of a warm campfire sing-along. The group’s more intimate acoustic concerts are now only rare gems, and their recorded efforts tend to fall short of capturing the same level of energy, yet their glowing personalities and dedication to the crowd are still evident at their amplified full-band performances. (Felsinger)

With Delta Spirit, What Made Milwaukee Famous, and the Mayfire. March 1, 9 p.m., $10–$12. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

The Virgins


Imagine Julian Casablancas with a freshened-up adenoidal approach and jaded ‘tude intact, backed by sloppy-cool disco-rock rats. Equipped with a taste for that tatty late ’70s intersection where punk and disco met, snarled, and duked it out on the train on the way back to the boroughs, these New York City decadance-kins seem likely to outshamble Babyshambles and their louche ilk. Too bad you can only be a virgin once — wonder what the combo’s next trick will be? (Chun)

With Airborne Toxic Event, the Blakes, and Man/Miracle. March 1, 9 p.m., $12–$15. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

Scatterbrain Jamboree

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PREVIEW How many times have you heard this before? "There’s no good local rock scene in San Francisco! It’s totally a DJ city!" Sigh. Before resigning yourself to a safe and steady diet of well-known touring indie bands — "Why risk $10 on an unknown local band that could suck?" you ask — while bemoaning how much cooler the scene is in other towns (Brooklyn! Montreal! Portland! Oh my!), check out the Scatterbrain Jamboree at Thee Parkside. Sponsored by Stanford radio station KZSU, 90.1 FM, this two-day, all-ages local band–palooza features 19 groups, including some of the freshest new talent this city has to offer.

Highlights include: French Miami, headlining Feb. 23, who manage to combine the anthemic, sweaty-basement-party spirit of Japanther with the speed and prowess of a math rock band (think finger tapping) and the harmonized guitars of the Fucking Champs. Channeling Frank Zappa, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and Devo, the six members of Battlehooch create a fantastic racket that makes you want to scream your way right into a straitjacket. Little Teeth play raspy, effervescent freak folk with hints of Animal Collective’s raw psychedelia and the quirkiness of bands like Neutral Milk Hotel and the Moldy Peaches. Finally, Master/Slave is the ultradanceable electropop brainchild of guitarist Matt Jones and makes for a remarkably tight live show. But perhaps the best thing about the jamboree is that it’s a benefit for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

SCATTERBRAIN JAMBOREE With White Pee, Pidgeon, Mumlers, Schande, Make Me, Holy Kiss, Top Critters, and DJ Nate Nothing. Fri/22, 8 p.m., $10. Also with French Miami, Master/Slave, Death of a Party, New Centuries, Battlehooch, Shitkickers, Settler, Little Teeth, Thunder Thighs, and Bug Pedals. Sat/23, 2 p.m., $10. Parkside, 1600 17th St., SF. (415) 252-1330, www.theeparkside.com

Newsom needs to return the MTA’s money

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19-NewsomMuni_web.jpg
What is Gavin looking for? A way off the train? Or a way to spend MTA money on hiring himself a climate change director?

“Crashes involving MUNI and pedestrians have nearly doubled in the past two years: in 2005, there were 34 crashes involving a MUNI vehicle and a pedestrian; while 2007 saw 62. These numbers include 3 fatalities in 2005 and 7 fatalities in 2007. This is a disturbing statistic.”

Manish Champsee of Walk For San Francisco, a pedestrian advocacy group, included this stat in an email to Mayor Newsom, by way of explaining his group’s concerns with the Mayor using MTA safety money to hire a climate change director.

Champsee’s email (included below) is worth reading for the way he avoids denigrating anyone working in the Mayor’s Office. Yes, those folks are doubtless trying to do great and wonderful things for the planet, but could they please do that with money from the Mayor’s budget, not from overloaded public transportation agencies?

Subject: Restore Funding for a Safety and Training Manager
To: gavin.newsom@sfgov.org
Cc: boardofsupervisors@sfgov.org, Nathaniel Ford

Dear Mayor Newsom:

This letter is to voice our concern regarding reports that staff in your office are being paid for by MTA funds meant for the hiring of a Safety and Training Manager for the SFMTA.

With a downward safety record at the MTA regarding collisions with pedestrians, we advocate that this MTA funding in particular be applied to Safety and Training Management. As advocates for a walkable, more livable city,
we strongly support the role of a Greening Director.

We welcome an opportunity to speak with you regarding the current spike in injuries to pedestrians.

Sincerely,

Manish Champsee
Walk San Francisco President

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