Television

Get Health! The LA noise combo gives up their secrets

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Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout Health – as well as Dan Deacon, who the LA noise combo plays with tonight, Jan. 17, at Great American Music Hall. It’ll be an awesome show. I traded e-mails with the outfit this week, and here’s what they graciously coughed up.

SFBG: How did your name come about?

John: We wanted a name like Television, an everyday word. Went down a list with the interweb. Health was left.

SFBG: What makes you play music?

John: Gets me AMPED, man. Unless you’re a little kid, music is the only way you get someone to rage with you.

Jake: Is that a big question or a small question?

SFBG: What sort of “Health”-y things do you do?

John: Kombucha

Jake: Watch out for excess sodium.

Pop op

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Omigod, I totally love that." A doll-faced, teenage dead ringer for Zooey Deschanel gawks dreamily at a dabbed dwarf cactus drifting off the edge of a cream-colored sheet of paper — jaw a-dangling, china blue eyes a-gobbling. It’s not often you catch a snatch of pure rock ‘n’ roll idol worship amid the pristine white walls of a museum space, yet here it was, flowering quietly in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art room that hosts the shifting collection of Paul Klee prints gathered and loaned by San Francisco’s father of the pill, Carl Djerassi. These days the Klee pieces are sharing space with the whimsy-washed ink, watercolor, and graphite works by San Francisco Art Institute graduate and international psych-folk rock emissary (and Guardian copydesk swear-jar star) Devendra Banhart, who performs at the museum Jan. 17 in celebration of "Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart."

The small show opened quietly, but judging from the cool kids reverently orbiting the pieces, word is slowly leaking out about this charming clutch of images, which displays both opera lover Klee’s most music-inspired, antic pieces — is that the musical fruit of a bean burrito or bassoon emerging from a posterior in Der Fagottist (The bassoonist)? — and Banhart’s sweetly humorous paper pieces depicting a fictitious fan called Smokey, who’s also the center of his recent, somewhat decentered LP, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon (XL). Banhart is clearly a man of many gifts: here, Flowering Corn Maiden Smokey and Banded King Snake and Thunder Maiden show off a playful yet refined eye and an overflowing though focused imagination with a transfigurative bent that conjures Giuseppe "Fruit Face" Arcimboldo.

While the word show is increasingly, happily confused in both its musical and visual art contexts — and the term pop becomes more relevant in the art world than in the shiny plastic disc marketplace — the exhibit arrives as yet another instance of the healthy, ever-bubbling and brewing cross-pollination going on between the two types of media since the turn of the century. That highly consensual crossover fever dream is evident at art openings throughout the Bay every first Thursday, and it’s heartening to know that just as music becomes a harder proposition to tackle commercially and art has become a bigger business, musicians are finding their way toward new audiences and artists are coursing toward pop. And while spaces like 21 Grand and LoBot Gallery weather their share of hassles, newbs like the month-old Fort Gallery are throwing open their doors undeterred. The last, a Mission District space, is currently showing collage and sculpture by Ryan Coffey by appointment only — "Until we quit our day jobs," co-owner Jesi Khadivi says with a laugh — but Khadivi and cohort Vanessa Maida promise a mix of art, barbecue, live music, and special soirees like the Jan. 16 movie night that will juxtapose Ranu Mukherjee’s Sustenance short with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s tripindicular The Holy Mountain (1973).

The blend of high art and lowdown sounds isn’t new, ace genre bender Chris Duncan asserts: music-art hybridization "has always been around on different levels, but I think most people who make art also make music, or are very much influenced by music. As far as different mediums and different ways of doing things, the lines are so blurred at this point. For me, I like to keep busy, and I like getting a lot of people involved in stuff. I can get lost in my studio for a long time, and it gets kinda lonesome."

This may explain why Duncan — whose visual art career has been far from dormant, considering his fall solo show at Gregory Lind Gallery — has been dipping his toes into other creative wellsprings: on Jan. 18 he’ll celebrate the first release of SF twosome Pale Hoarse’s The Gospels on his new label, the Time Between the Beginning and the End. Call it a handmade labor of love: Duncan stitched and silk-screened about 100 multihued covers for the limited-edition record. Each one — available at Aquarius Records and via Duncan’s Hot and Cold Web site — promises to shimmer with different tones beneath the pink fluorescent-ink silk screen.

It’s the first record the Oakland artist has made, though he once designed a cover for a Jade Tree split with Songs: Ohia and My Morning Jacket, as well as for Battleship’s Presents Princess (Ononswitch, 2005). "There’s a total Sub Pop Singles Club influence, for sure. Music has always been part of my whole trip, and record collecting was such a big part of my growing up," says Duncan, whose also recently edited his first book, My First Time: A Collection of First Punk Show Stories (AK Press), a project that mushroomed from a slim zine, and he’s embarking on the next issue of the wonderful art zine he assembles with Griffin McPartland, Hot and Cold. (The next issue sounds like a doozy and will include contributions from Colter Jacobsen, Chris Corales, and Hisham Bharoocha and a CD by Golden Bears, a new project from the Quails’ Julianna Bright and Seth Lorinczi.) "Making a record fulfilled the need to hand-make stuff," Duncan continues. "A lot of projects I do outside painting are about gathering and collecting things, doing records, zine assembling. Now I’m inspired to put out a record every year." *

MOVIE NIGHT

With Sustenance and The Holy Mountain

Wed/16, 8:30 p.m., $5 donation

Fort Gallery

83B Wiese, SF

www.fortgallery.com

DEVENDRA BANHART

Thurs/17, 8 p.m., $15–<\d>$20

Phyllis Wattis Theater, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

www.sfmoma.org

PALE HOARSE

With Raven and Hannah, visuals by Chris Duncan, and shorts

Fri/18, 8 p.m., $6

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

www.atasite.org

For more, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Bye bye beautiful

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

There’s a wonderful moment during the performance of "Bye Bye Blackbird" that opens the 1964 Chet Baker set preserved on a recent Jazz Icons DVD (Chet Baker Live in ’64 and ’79 [Reelin in the Years]). In the midst of the squarish piano player’s solo, the star trumpeter shuffles into the medium close-up frame, shucking a cigarette from his accompanist’s pack. Chiseled even when sporting a stuffy sweater, Baker takes a long drag and glides back to his place on the stage. The pianist plays on, but the camera operator tracks Baker, plainly in the clutch of a lonely lothario.

The cigarette break is more revealing of Baker’s largesse — his ineffable cool and the desire it produced — than any of his softly sustaining trumpet solos for the television program are. It also sheds some light on the side-winding portraiture that marks Bruce Weber’s adoring documentary Let’s Get Lost, filmed during the last months of Baker’s life in 1987 and now playing in a restored print at the Castro Theatre.

The first interview in Let’s Get Lost is with photographer William Claxton, an early admirer of Baker’s who waxes poetic about the revelation of shooting such a naturally photogenic subject. Weber, known for innumerable sleek Calvin Klein and Abercrombie and Fitch spreads, riffles through these striking stills in contact-sheet form, a neat solution to the persistent documentary problem of how to make archival photographs move. Twenty minutes pass before we begin to explore Baker’s music, and there are another 20 minutes after that before we meet his Oklahoma mother, our first whiff of personal history. Backward, it might seem, except for Baker’s being a cipher of his own iconography.

"He was trouble and he was beautiful," an interviewee muses early in Let’s Get Lost, and it might as well be the film’s byline. He was beautiful, possessing a ravaged, introspective glamour attractive to both men and women: writing about Baker’s underfed croon in his excellent liner notes for The Best of Chet Baker Sings (Blue Note, 1953), Will Friedwald notes, "His moony voice twangs like an Oakie [sic]-cum-valley person at times, but more often he achieves geographic — not to mention sexual — ambivalence." Though less remembered today than James Dean or Jack Kerouac, Baker had a comparable rogue appeal, his missing front tooth suggestive of wounded sensitivity, his shoulders bent under the unknowable weight of being himself.

Weber’s velvety black-and-white cinematography has never met a silhouette it didn’t like, and indeed, his documentary is first and foremost a tribute to Baker’s arch stylishness. Insofar as Josef von Sternberg, Leni Riefenstahl, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s idolatrous visions are often said to anticipate modern fashion imagery, Weber must rightly be considered their direct descendent: a fashion photographer turned filmmaker unapologetically devoted to surfaces. He is equally attentive to the silvery bleach of Santa Monica, the inky black swallowing various stage spotlights, and the shadows of heroin abuse running across Baker’s unbearably gaunt 57-year-old face — all shot in an amorous chiaroscuro evocative of the trumpeter’s West Coast cool musical phrasings, his constant drug nod, and the late-night languidness of his smoking and speech.

But, of course, Baker was trouble too, and this is where Let’s Get Lost can feel strained. Though clearly a labor of love, the film shrugs off conclusiveness as casually as one of Baker’s shopworn melodies might. For one thing, Weber isn’t much of an interviewer, asking the musician’s mother, "Did he disappoint you as a son?" and directing one of Baker’s ex-wives to "tell me something romantic." Still, with the recent documentary explosion prizing kinetic revelations at all costs, Weber’s patient accumulation is a virtue in itself. We hear several versions of a story about Baker getting his teeth knocked out, and although none of them paints a convincingly specific picture, we do get the overarching thrust of a sad decline.

Originally released the same year as Gus Van Sant’s similarly loving debut, Mala Noche, Let’s Get Lost gives the lie to the notion that every gaze is created equal. Weber may wrap the disillusionment of Baker’s life in the romanticism of the latter’s demeanor, but the director also gives the spiraling musician space for self-expression (including a couple of lovely, understated full performances) and, in an empathetic final scene, offers to buy him a methadone fix. The film is as recklessly lyrical as Baker was himself, and it’s in this way that — in spite of its shortcomings as biography — Let’s Get Lost has the spiritual heft of an ample epigraph. The ragged icon mumbles about the film’s production being "a dream," and the inevitable fade to black and memorial that follows seem exactly the type of void he’d like to walk into. *

LET’S GET LOST

Opens Fri/18, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

The zoo at City Hall

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› news@sfbg.com

City Hall looked like feeding time at a popular new zoo exhibit on the morning of Jan. 11. Hundreds of people spilled from a cramped fourth-floor hearing room. The aisles bristled with television cameras and microphones. But the only animals on display were officials of the privately managed San Francisco Zoo.

A little more than two weeks after a Siberian tiger escaped her undersized enclosure before killing a young man and badly injuring two of his companions, the Recreation and Park Commission and the Joint Zoo Committee summoned Zoo management to discuss the tragedy. But after hours of staff presentations and public testimony, many in attendance doubted whether the same public officials and private managers who failed to prevent the grisly Christmas Day mauling should be trusted to point the correct way forward.

"To have Rec and Park and the Joint Zoo Committee hold the hearing is inappropriate at best," animal welfare activist Deniz Bolbol told the Guardian after the meeting adjourned. "This is the same committee that has basically rubber-stamped every management arrangement at the Zoo for the last 14, 15 years."

In 1993 the city handed over control of the Zoo to the private San Francisco Zoological Society but retained ownership of the property and the animals housed there. The makeup of the Joint Zoo Committee, which is charged with overseeing the society’s management, reflects this hybridized public-private arrangement. Three members of the city’s Recreation and Park Commission sit on the body, as do three members of the Zoological Society’s board of directors. According to Bolbol and other critics, the committee gives the private Zoo managers too long a leash.

"It’s a joke," Bolbol charged, "because basically, you’re asking them to self-regulate. You go to their meetings and there’s never one dissenting voice. Anytime anyone in the public says anything critical, they just sweep it under the rug."

The main argument for Zoo privatization was a lack of city money for needed improvements. And without a doubt, the Zoological Society has raised lots of cash since it took over. In addition to the $4 million dollars per year it receives from city taxpayers, the society waged a successful ballot campaign in 1997 for nearly $50 million in public bond money and has raised almost that much in private donations. But controversy surrounds how these windfalls have been spent and how the Zoo’s private management has decided to operate the facility.

Past Guardian investigations turned up disturbing cases of animal suffering and lax safety standards (see "The Zoo Blues," 5/19/99, and "The Zoo’s Losers," 5/7/2003) on the society’s watch. Many animals have died of diseases associated with unclean living conditions and cramped quarters. The same Siberian tiger that escaped her outdoor grotto enclosure and killed the young man Christmas Day mangled a keeper’s arm in late 2006. And last week’s cover story, "Tiger Tales," uncovered accounts of past tiger escapes from the same grotto.

Nick Podell, chair of the society’s board of directors, makes no apologies for his organization’s focus on the bottom line. "The primary function of the board is the raising of capital," he told us at the Friday hearing, adding, "We rely heavily on professional management for day-to-day operations."

When we asked Podell whether Zoo manager Manuel Mollinedo, who reportedly makes more than $330,000 per year, conducted a review of the outdoor grotto enclosure in the wake of the 2006 attack, Podell fiercely defended Mollinedo but declined to comment directly, citing "active litigation." Shortly after the Christmas Day incident, Mollinedo acknowledged publicly that the grotto’s walls were more than four feet lower than national standards. Nonetheless, Podell told us he believes the director "is being railroaded and lynched."

But critics of the privatization deal have renewed calls for greater scrutiny. "I’ve always been skeptical of this public-private arrangement," Sup. Tom Ammiano told the Guardian by phone. "[Zoological Society leaders] look at what makes a profit first. In itself, that’s not bad, but what are you sacrificing with that?"

City taxpayers will most likely sacrifice plenty in lawsuit awards and legal bills. Within a week of the Christmas Day debacle, the surviving victims hired celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos. City Attorney Dennis Herrera and his staff have already spent numerous billable hours jousting with Geragos in a high-profile spate over potential evidence. During the public hearing, Herrera and Geragos were down the street in Superior Court arguing over whether the city can search the victims’ car and their cell phones. As Ammiano put it, "This whole thing is probably going to be in lawyer land for a good while to come."

In the end, the privatization of the Zoo — hailed by advocates as the best way to bring needed funds to the facility — could very well cost taxpayers even more than expected. Indemnification clauses in the Zoo contract ostensibly absolve San Francisco of any legal jeopardy, but a separate clause clearly states that the city is liable for any "preexisting conditions." The grotto breached by the tiger on Christmas Day is almost 70 years old.

Officials won’t speak on the record about potential city liability, but they privately say they won’t be surprised if there are legal battles between the society and San Francisco over who has to pay the victims. Further blurring the line between the public and the private sector, the society has retained the services of former city attorney Louise Renne — the very person who negotiated the original lease agreement on behalf of the city. At the hearing, she told us she did not expect any problems between her former boss, the city, and her new client, the Zoo. "But to tell you the truth," she added with a smile, "I haven’t even looked at [the agreement] in years."

Sup. Sean Elsbernd, whose district includes the Zoo, voiced support for keeping the facility in private hands. But he did pledge that "if it comes down to a question of whether the city will pay for anything [the Zoological Society] did negligently, we will not…. They will pay for their negligence if negligence is found." Elsbernd has scheduled a hearing on the Zoo’s woes for Jan. 28 before the Government and Oversight Committee, which he chairs, while Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has called for a hearing by the Budget Committee.

Ammiano told us, "The history of the Zoo has been controversial, especially since [privatization], and we just need to be brutally honest about everything."

The press: Humbled in New Hampshire

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B3 comment:

As I said in my post-election blog, I liked the fact that it was the voters, not the pundits nor the pollsters, who decided the New Hampshire primary and surprised everyone.

I also liked this commentary below by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a national media watchdog group, who asked the Washington Post’s David Broder and NBC’s Tim Russert to explain their embarrassingly wrong predictions, rebuked NBC’s Chris Matthews for horserace coverage, and quoted NBC’s Tom Brokaw offering some good reporting advice, and then giving its own good advice.

FAIR to the campaign reporters: “Reporters should strive for coverage no matter what the results are.”

Brokaw: “Wait for the voters to make their judgment…”

B3 adds: “Reporters should cover the issues and the policy differences between the candidates. And work to keep the war and Bush on the front burner at all times.”

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http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3242

Media Advisory

Humbled in New Hampshire?
Press Needs to Refocus Campaign Coverage

1/11/08

Leading up to the New Hampshire primary, the storyline on the Democratic side was the disastrous state of the Clinton campaign. Her loss was a given; it seemed the only considerations were the margin of defeat and whether or not she would even continue running at all. The day of the primary, the Washington Post reported (1/8/08) that a second loss to Obama “would leave the New York senator’s candidacy gasping for breath,” and declared that Clinton’s vow to stay in the race

may be more wish than reality. By Wednesday, it may be too late. By then, Obama’s campaign may have inflicted enough damage on the woman-who-was-once-inevitable that no amount of readjusting, recalibrating and rearranging will give her the wherewithal to overcome two big losses in the first contests of the 2008 nomination battle.

Clinton, of course, won the primary–surprising the pundits and contradicting the polls that journalists unwisely use to set the tone of so much of their coverage. In the aftermath, the media were left asking what went “wrong” with the numbers. As the front page of USA Today declared (1/10/08), “For pollsters, N.H. ‘unprecedented.'” But this isn’t so; the actual USA Today story included a state pollster who noted that pre-election polls in 2000 vastly underestimated John McCain’s victory over George W. Bush. Right before the primary, the New York Times reported (1/30/00) that “a series of polls showed the two Republican front-runners in a dead heat.” Given that McCain won by 19 points, journalists and pollsters puzzling over Clinton’s showing are ignoring very recent history.

As the media mea culpas start to pile up, it’s worth considering the unspoken implication–that if the vote had gone the way the polls were predicting, then the press would have been doing a fine job of covering an election. But journalists should not be gamblers, betting that they will be vindicated by voters’ choices that are inherently unpredictable. Reporters should strive for coverage that holds up no matter what the results are.

Expectations and reality
Though they often prefer to think of themselves as mere observers of an election, the media clearly set the tone for much of the campaign, laying out expectations for various candidates and making editorial decisions about who the most “viable” contenders will be–usually long before most actual voters have been given the chance to weigh in.

But beating the expectations doesn’t necessarily guarantee good coverage. Democratic contender John Edwards defied press predictions by finishing second in Iowa, ahead of supposed front-runner Hillary Clinton. But much of the media conversation after the votes were tallied focused on the disappointing Edwards showing. By contrast, Republican John McCain had a great night in Iowa, according to many in the press– despite the fact that he finished fourth, behind Fred Thompson. The obvious difference is not how well the candidates did but how well they are liked by the press corps.

Some in the media point out that the Republican race in New Hampshire went as predicted, so it wasn’t all bad news for the press. But the campaign coverage still included its share of bizarrely confident predictions. NBC’s Tim Russert (1/4/08) declared that “only McCain or Romney can come out of New Hampshire to fight for another day in South Carolina, only one. One stays behind. It is make or break for McCain or Romney in New Hampshire.” Given that both candidates are, by all appearances, continuing to campaign, will Russert explain where his prediction came from? Or as the Washington Post’s David Broder wrote before the New Hampshire vote (1/4/08), “A second Romney loss would effectively end the former Massachusetts governor’s candidacy.”

Horse race
There’s a long trend of media hostility towards so-called “second-tier” candidates (Extra!, 9/10/03). As a recent Wall Street Journal news story put it (1/10/08), “In both parties, second-tier candidates continue to press on and siphon off votes.” But Broder and Russert were not just saying that non-frontrunners have a duty to get out of the way–they were asserting that a loss in New Hampshire would mean that Romney would no longer be a front-runner. This illustrates an important point about mainstream election coverage: Not only do journalists and pundits devote far too much attention to covering the horse race aspect of campaigns, but when they cover the horse race they generally do a poor job of it.

Primary elections and caucuses determine how a state party’s delegates are assigned; if a candidate wins enough delegates, they will almost certainly be their party’s nominee. So a reasonably helpful media would focus on this delegate count. But the mathematics of this process are obscured by the media’s obsession with “wins” and “losses” in highly visible contests.

Consider Barack Obama’s apparently monumental victory in the Iowa caucuses. The distribution of delegates, though, was hardly so dramatic: Obama won 16, Clinton 15 and Edwards 14. In a race to secure a little over 2,000 delegates, the results are of little consequence. In New Hampshire, Clinton’s dramatic comeback netted her nine delegates–the same number awarded to Obama. In the total delegate count tallied on CNN’s website–which counts a large number of party insiders awarded as “superdelegates”–Clinton has more than double the number of delegates as Obama, and Edwards is about 25 delegates behind Obama.

On the Republican side, McCain’s victory in New Hampshire gained him seven delegates; to put that in context, Romney’s second-place finish in Iowa was worth 12 delegates. And Romney’s win in the Wyoming primary–which received almost no media coverage at all–secured him eight delegates. His total delegate count still puts him ahead of all or most his competitors (depending on whether you believe CNN or ABC), though the media coverage would lead you to conclude otherwise.

Given that the process of nominating a presidential candidate is a matter of winning delegates, why does the press assign so much significance to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries? The implicit assumption is that these small states have a big role in determining the eventual party nominees, but they actually have a quite mixed record in projecting overall winners in competitive races. (Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas and Pat Buchanan were all New Hampshire winners.) Neither does losing early primaries necessarily doom a candidacy–in 1992, Bill Clinton lost the first five contests. The media’s decision to place such importance on the small number of delegates in the first two states has little to do with any actual reasonable political determination.

What do we cover now?
Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw offered some helpful commentary during the coverage of the New Hampshire primaries, suggesting to MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews that reporters put less emphasis on trying to predict outcomes and spend more time covering actual policy:

BROKAW: You know what I think we’re going to have to do?

MATTHEWS: Yes sir?

BROKAW: Wait for the voters to make their judgment.

MATTHEWS: Well, what do we do then in the days before the ballot? We must stay home, I guess.

BROKAW: No, no we don’t stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they’re saying. We know from how the people voted today, what moved them to vote. You can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that have not been fully explored during all this.

Matthews’ response is illuminating. Does a political junkie who hosts two national television programs really not have any idea about how to cover politics other than talking about strategy, fundraising and polls? Do campaign journalists really have so little interest in the actual policy positions of the candidates?

As it stands now, the races for the major party nominations are remarkably close. The most valuable service journalists could provide now would be to illustrate the differences between the candidates on the major issues of importance to voters. The press corps seems chastened by their misreading of the New Hampshire electorate, and many are vowing to be more cautious in their assumptions. Will they follow through on their own advice? And will voters ever get campaign reporting that helps them make informed choices about the direction of their democracy?

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Peter Hart on 2008 primaries, Kali Akuno on New Orleans public housing (1/11/08-1/17/08)

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SPORTS: Triple Brady = NFL blues

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By A.J. Hayes

New England quarterback Tom Brady grew up idolizing Joe Montana in the 1980s, but in 2008, the San Mateo native is primed to eclipse the former 49ers great in the boyhood dreams department.

Brady already has three Super Bowl rings and is a near lock to equal Joe in the championship jewelry department next month. The dashing Brady is also a favorite of fashion designers and beautiful women, including current squeeze, Victoria’s Secret model Giselle Bunchen.

tombrady.jpg

Then last Saturday night, three television networks did something that hasn’t occurred since Super Bowl I: They simulcast a single game — one of Brady’s.

But before you start believing every thing the San Mateo native touches turns to gold, the simulcast had less to do with Brady’s perfect spirals and dreamy looks and a whole lot more to do with the abysmal failure of the NFL Network.

Great Scott!

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iowa: young and old are caucusing with the stars

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B3: Here is the Christmas Eve report from Carolyn Schmidt, our citizen journalist in Cedar Falls, Iowa. She will be reporting regularly up through and after the Thursday election. The key question remains: Will Iowans pick the president this time around?

By Carolyn Schmidt

Cedar Rapids, Iowa–The papers are so full of good stuff, I’ll give you some choices. It’s way more than you probably want to know.

Candidates are bringing in special guests to campaign with them these last few days. “West Wing” star Richard Schiff has been stumping with Joe Biden since Friday, and Martin Sheen, from the same show, is appearing with Bill Richardson. Hillary had the governor of Ohio with her for a few days.

Although his attack ads against Huckabee and McCain are still running on television, Romney has let up on his criticism of the other GOP candidates in person. Reminiscent of Howard Dean, for years ago, he’s saying, “I’m going to fight in Missouri, and Michigan, and South Carolina, and Florida, and California. I’m going to be all around the country making sure that if I get this nomination I’m not just a one-hit wonder.” Huckabee, on the other hand, is now hitting back at Romney, saying Romney is dishonest in his depiction of Huckabee and his policies. “If you get a job by being dishonest…how can you be trusted once you’re in that job?” Huckabee asks. (His audiences evidently haven’t reminded him that it’s been done before:)

Golden Girls: Ghetto Fabulous!

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13-GoldenGirls.web.jpg
Oh, Mary! The girls spend Christmas in a homeless shelter.

REVIEW There’s something about performing old television shows (i.e. “The Twilight Zone”) on a bare-bones stage two feet from the front row that accentuates what was good about them in the first place–the snappy dialogues, the solid story construction, the tinge of the absurd. Needless to say, the additional bonus of having the parts of four scrappy gran’mas living together in Miami, played by a snazzy quartet of the Bay Area’s finest drag queens puts the icing, as it were, on the Hostess cupcake. Heklina as Dorothy-makes the (ahem) perfect straight-woman. The sarcasm practically drips from her three-inch long eyelashes, without her even having to say a word. Cookie Dough plays her ribald Sicilian mother, Sophia, stage veteran Matthew Martin channels racy southern belle Blanche, and Miss Trannyshack 2007, Pollo del Mar embodies spacey airhead Rose Nyland. In “Sisters of the Bride,” Blanche’s baby brother Clayton (Mike Finn) announces his plans to marry his boyfriend Doug (Laurie Bushman). Consternation and eventual acceptance ensue, along with some great one-liners (Blanche: “What will the neighbors think when they see two men in my bedroom?” Sophia: “They’ll think it’s Tuesday.”) The highly-anticipated Christmas episode, set in a homeless shelter, does lay on the schmaltz a bit thick, but after all, ’tis the season, even in Miami, where–the girls remind us–it is 103 degrees. Santa, how ’bout a plane ticket? Or maybe just a ticket to the next sold-out Golden Girls show… (Nicole Gluckstern)

Fri/28-Sat/29
8 and 10 p.m.
The Finn Theatre
814 Grove, SF
$20 cash donation
waiting list starts at 7:30
www.trannyshack.com
www.cookievision.com

Year in Film: Cinema 2007

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COVER STAR RICHARD WONG’S VIEW OF 2007


I feel like I’ve only seen about 10 films this year, so my list would basically be No Country For Old Men, I’m Not There, and Beowulf (two of those movies were painful, they were so aesthetically pleasing — guess which ones). But I’m going to say Paranoid Park was a huge influence on me this year. The risks it took and its loose narrative and utter disregard for convention were extremely inspiring. I saw it in Toronto at a press screening, among all the jabbering sales agents and distribution reps, and it still managed to drop my jaw — despite the guy next to me answering his phone midway through, telling the guy on the other line how "half baked" the movie was. Afterward I talked to a fellow aspiring filmmaker about the film, and he told me how much he disliked it because he thought it was a "mess." Exactly. It feels like a rough cut, only not — a work in progress, but that’s the point. Perhaps that’s why I identified with it so much. Besides, maybe a little messiness is not such a bad thing to embrace right now.

Richard Wong is the director and producer of Colma: The Musical.

JEM COHEN’S FAVORITE MOVIE MOMENT


James Benning’s Ten Skies at New York’s invaluable Anthology Film Archives: with a description like a parody of avant-garde impenetrability ("Ten shots of the sky — feature length"), it sounds daunting. Instead, it was an experience of mysterious joy that brought me back to why movies are entertaining and why seeing them can be so communal. After a few restless, fidgety minutes, both audience and film hit a groove so sublime that I kept laughing with pleasure. Each sky has its revelations and dramas, each viewer "makes" their own film, but in a shared hallucination that filmmakers and venues rarely allow, much less encourage. Sure, we’ve all seen the sky before, but when’s the last time you fell in so deeply and for so long, undistracted yet free to drift, stunned by both the thing itself and the amazing mirror of moving pictures? And I love that Benning says it’s a political film, "the opposite of war."

Jem Cohen (www.jemcohenfilms.com) is the director of Instrument, Benjamin Smoke, Chain, Building a Broken Mousetrap, and other films.

VAGINAL DAVIS’S FLESH FOR LULU: A LETTER FROM TEUTONIA


So glad I live in Berlin as an expat, far away from icky, tired Los Ang, that sad, pathetic film industry towne. When I worked for the Sundance Film Festival in programming I watched what seemed like a zillion of the same kinds of films. This year I created (with the art kollective Cheap) the Cheap Gossip Studio installation as part of the Berlin Film Festival. It was housed in the atrium of the Kino Arsenal. Film historian Marc Siegel brought Callie Angel out to show some rare, seldom-screened Andy Warhol films, as well as Jerry Tartaglia, who restored Jack Smith’s noted oeuvre. I even got to meet my sexy feminist heroine, Jackie Reynal of the Zanzibar movement, and Phillip Garrel, who brought his delicious young thrombone of a son, the actor Louis Garrel.

During the year, I started a new monthly performative series at Kino Arsenal called "Rising Stars, Falling Stars." It featured experimental silent classics from filmmakers like Louis Delluc, Man Ray, and the grandmama of the avant-garde, Germaine Deluc.

A lot of filmmakers send me rough cuts of their new films hoping I will write something on my blog, which gets a million readers a day. I just saw Bruce La Bruce’s allegorical zombie flick Otto; or Up with Dead People, and it’s beyond brilliant, and I am not saying that just because I have starred in Bruce’s other films Super 8 1/2 and Hustler White or because he directed my latest performance piece, Cheap Blacky. I am harsh on my filmmaker friends. I told Bruce that he shouldn’t act in his own movies anymore, just like Woody Allen and Spike Lee shouldn’t act in theirs. I even scolded Todd Haynes that Far From Heaven was overrated, but I adored Velvet Goldmine and his latest, I’m Not There. (Though I can’t stand Cate Blanchett; after seeing her as Queen Elizabeth yet again all I could say was, "Glenda Jackson, Glenda Jackson.")

I watched Superbad twice with the 14-year-old twins of my Cheap Blacky costar Susanne Sachsee, and I even got off on the ‘roid rage of Gerard Butler in the epic 300. No one does brittle white lady like my Tales of the City costar Laura Linney in The Savages. Tony Leung is so elegant and sensuous in Lust, Caution that everyone will want a Chinese boyfriend as the hot new fashion accessory this year. And if Sweeney Todd doesn’t bring back the musical genre, nothing will.

Vaginal Davis (www.vaginaldavis.com), who now lives in exile in Berlin, will be in the Bay Area on March 29, 2008, for the opening of her installation Present Penicative at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; it will also feature her performances "Bilitis — A Lesbian Separatist Feminist State" and "Colonize Me."

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALPHABETICAL DOCUMENTARY TOP 10

1. Absolute Wilson (Katharina Otto-Bernstein, US/Germany)

2. All in This Tea (Les Blank, US)

3. King Corn (Aaron Wolf, US)

4. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, US)

5. Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, Canada)

6. My Kid Could Paint That (Ami Bar-Lev, US)

7. No End in Sight (Charles Ferguson, US)

8. Protagonist (Jessica Yu, US)

9. Romántico (Mark Becker, US)

10. Zoo (Robinson Devor, US)

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALARMING PORN TITLES, 2007 EDITION


All thanks to the Internet Movie Database, without which we would remain in blessed ignorance.

Brad McGuire’s 20 Hole Weekend

5 Guy Cream Pie 29

Abominable Black Man 8

Ahh Shit! White Mama 4

Anal Chic

Apple Bottom Snow Bunnies

Be Here Now

Blondes have More Squirt!

Bore My Asshole 3

Bring’um Young 23

Campus Pizza

Catch Her in the Eye

Even More Bang for Your Buck

Go Fuck Yourself

I Scored a Soccer Mom 3

Old Geezers, Young Teasers

Seduced by a Cougar 4

Swallow My Children

Thanks for the Mammaries

Trantasm

You’ve Got a Mother Thing Coming

Dennis Harvey is a Guardian contributor.

JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS’S PICKS


1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania). This debut feature possesses a nonjudgmental flow reminiscent of a Dardenne brothers film as it follows two young women who negotiate for an illegal abortion during the final days of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist regime.

2. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US). Uncovering the layers of human identity has been a career-long, disturbing theme of Cronenberg’s. But with his most recent films he’s figured out how to deconstruct our psychotic and schizophrenic patriarchal society in a minimal, confrontational manner.

3. Cassandra’s Dream (Woody Allen, US/UK). This minimasterpiece follows the downward spiral of two nice, middle-class brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell), both of whom loosen their moral codes just to better their lifestyles. Striking camera work (by Vilmos Zsigmond) encloses the characters in an unrelenting nightmare.

4. "Made in America," The Sopranos (David Chase, US). Forever you’ll be able to bust out the statement "What did you think of the end of The Sopranos?" and people will get all lit up.

5. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US). Thanks to audacious writing and powerful acting (especially by Jennifer Jason Leigh), the bittersweet sincerity is pitch-perfect.

6. Californication, season 1 (various directors, US). David Duchovny is alive and hilarious. Creator Tom Kapinos cuts right through our progressive relationship era, devilishly developing each character over 12 episodes. This is heavy-duty stuff mixed with dirty, dirty sex.

7. Year of the Dog (Mike White, US). White brings heartfelt storytelling to his directorial debut.

8. Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, Canada)

9. The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Martin Weisz, US). This Wes Craven–produced Iraq war allegory deserves more attention than Brian De Palma’s patronizing Redacted.

10. Hostel 2 (Eli Roth, US). Baddie Roth again makes social commentary on America’s xenophobic world colonization by torturing the pathetic children of the apathetic parents who make our lovely world go round.

11. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany). Reygadas updates the transcendental religious overtones of Carl Theodor Dreyer by way of a Mennonite community.

12. At Long Last Love (Peter Bogdanovich, US). Never released on VHS or DVD, this throwback to the musicals of Ernst Lubitsch — featuring Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, and Eileen Brennan — was dismissed and despised on its only theatrical release in 1975. All of the Cole Porter musical numbers were filmed live, with the actors using their own voices. Not only are these numbers brilliantly executed (inspiring realistic musicals like Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark), but the film also attains the rapid-fire interaction and casual kookiness of late ’30s screwball comedies. Did critics really overlook the fact that this is clever cheekiness? It’s a true treasure that serves as a ’70s time capsule and should inspire future filmmakers to take their chances all the way. It may have taken 32 years, but your time has come, Mr. Bogdanovich. Thank you.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks teaches film history at the Academy of Art University and curates Midnites for Maniacs (www.midnitesformaniacs.com) at the Castro Theatre.

JAMES T. HONG’S TOP 11, STARTING FROM 0


0. The 70th anniversary memorial of the Nanjing Massacre in Nanjing, China, and especially survivor Xia Shuqin’s reaction to her re-created wartime house, where most of her family was raped and killed by Japanese soldiers.

1. The passing of House Resolution 121 (the "Comfort Women" resolution) on C-Span, July 30.

2. Yasukuni (Li Ying, China/Japan). The power of the shrine isn’t fully captured, but this is the closest an outsider has come to doing so that I’ve seen. All captured on a Japanese mini-DV video camera, in American NTSC.

3. Nanking (Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, US). AOL + Iris Chang = Woody Harrelson and the Nanjing Massacre.

4. A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila (various, US). The alpha and omega of Asian America. For those with the required assets and skills, Playboy and the Internet can make you, regardless of race, a bisexual American celebrity — the end and a new beginning for all the so-called angry Asian Americans.

5. Summer Special Olympics in Shanghai, China. Globalization was transformed into music by Kenny G during the opening ceremony.

6. Pride: The Moment of Destiny, or Puraido: Unmei no Toki (Shunya Ito, Japan). Finally found a good DVD copy of this, in Canada of all places. This could also be called Tojo: The Hero.

7. Inside the Brookhaven Obesity Clinic (various, US). Pride and Prejudice for the heavyset, on the Learning Channel.

8. Major League Eating’s Thanksgiving Chowdown (various, US). The purest American professional sport and the fall of Japan’s greatest hero, Takeru Kobayashi, on Spike TV.

9. Mock Up on Mu, in progress (Craig Baldwin, US)

10. Blockade (Sergey Loznitsa, Russia)

The works of San Francisco filmmaker James T. Hong (www.zukunftsmusik.com) include Behold the Asian: How One Becomes What One Is, The Form of the Good, Taipei 101: A Travelogue of Symptoms, 731: Two Versions of Hell, and This Shall Be a Sign.

JONATHAN L. KNAPP’S TOP 10


1. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands/Germany/Belgium)

2. Brand upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, Canada/US)

3. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

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

5. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, US)

6. In Between Days (So Yong Kim, South Korea/US/Canada)

7. Makeshift 2007 grindhouse double feature: The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Martin Weisz, US) and Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, US)

8. The Wire, season four (various, US)

9. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

10. Zodiac (David Fincher, US)

Jonathan L. Knapp is a Guardian contributor.

MARIA KOMODORE’S 10 WORST


In addition to bringing some very good movies to the screen, 2007 was also a really good year for bad films. But among them all, these are the ones I feel had lack of intelligence, conservatism, and conventionality on a whole different level:

1. Hitman (Xavier Gens, France/US)

2. Good Luck Chuck (Mark Helfrich, US/Canada)

3. License to Wed (Ken Kwapis, US)

4. The Brothers Solomon (Bob Odenkirk, US)

5. Hot Rod (Akiva Schaffer, US)

6. P.S. I Love You (Richard LaGravenese, US)

7. The Final Season (David M. Evans, US)

8. The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Jay Russell, UK/US)

9. The Perfect Holiday (Lance Rivera, US)

10. P2 (Franck Khalfoun, US)

Maria Komodore is a Guardian contributor.

CHRIS METZLER AND JEFF SPRINGER’S TOP 10 DOCS


With a very special mention and heavy props for the fantastic TV doc series Nimrod Nation.

1. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (Jason Kohn, Brazil/US)

2. Lake of Fire (Tony Kaye, US)

3. Summercamp (Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price, US)

4. This Filthy World (Jeff Garlin, US)

5. A Man Named Pearl (Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson, US)

6. King Corn (Aaron Wolf, US)

7. An Audience of One (Mike Jacobs, US)

8. Crazy Love (Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens, US)

9. Big Rig (Doug Pray, US)

10. Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa (Jeremy Stulberg and Randy Stulberg, US)

San Francisco filmmakers Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer codirected the award-winning documentary Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea (www.saltonseadocumentary.com).

SYLVIA MILES’S TALES OF GO GO TALES


Go Go Tales was filmed at Cinecittà, so I had a location like I did in the ’60s. Cinecittà was thrilling. When the film premiered in Cannes, you would have thought I was the lead from the reviews. What’s her name in the New York Times gave it a wonderful review that got picked up by the International Herald Tribune.

Abel [Ferrara] got mad at Burt Young, who played my husband, and cut him out of the film. Be that as it may, we still managed to keep that story together The irony is that the rap that I do [at the end of the movie] was ad-libbed at 10 o’clock on the last night of filming. I give my all and know that something good will happen.

From what I hear, [Bernardo] Bertolucci is the one who chooses the film from Italy that gets into the New York Film Festival. Because they were renovating Alice Tully Hall, Go Go Tales had one of its screenings at the Jazz Center. It was exciting to look out my apartment window and see the lines of people outside [Frederick P.] Rose Hall waiting to see the movie. People even came to the 4 p.m. Sunday screening. At 4 p.m. on a Sunday they should have been out to tea instead of at that film!

Two-time Academy Award nominee Sylvia Miles has starred in Midnight Cowboy, Andy Warhol’s Heat, Evil Under the Sun, She-Devil, and Abel Ferrara’s soon to be released Go Go Tales.

JACQUES NOLOT’S TOP 10


1. The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akim, Germany/Turkey)

2. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)

3. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany)

4. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

5. Le Dernier des Fous (Laurent Achard, France)

6. The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy)

7. Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/US)

8. Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, France)

9. La Graine et le Mulet (Abdel Kechiche, France)

10. Love Songs (Christophe Honoré, France)

Actor-director Jacques Nolot’s latest film, Before I Forget — John Waters’s second-favorite film of 2007 — will be released theatrically in 2008.

DAMON PACKARD’S TOP 10


I have no shortage of rants about the sad state of cinema. Of the 25,000-plus films released each year, it’s impossible to keep track or be aware of anything above the overrated Oscar contenders or mindless mainstream crap that floods the market. Anything slightly worthwhile not on this list would be a smaller independent (foreign or documentary) film, such as Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter or The Life of Reilly.

1. Paris, Je T’Aime (various, France/Liechtenstein)

2. No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US)

3. Notes on a Scandal (Richard Eyre, UK)

4. Sicko (Michael Moore, US)

5. Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, US)

6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, US)

7. Goya’s Ghosts (Milos Forman, US/Spain)

8. Ratatouille (Brad Bird, US)

9. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, US)

10. Death Proof, driving sequences only! (Quentin Tarantino, US)

Damon Packard (www.myspace.com/choogo) is the director of SpaceDisco One, Reflections of Evil, and other films.

JOEL SHEPARD’S TOP 11


1. Bug (William Friedkin, US)

2. The Kingdom trailer (Peter Berg, US; editors Colby Parker Jr. and Kevin Stitt)

3. Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, China)

4. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany)

5. Into the Wild (Sean Penn, US)

6. An Engineer’s Assistant (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Japan)

7. Saw IV (Darren Lynn Bousman, US)

8. "Made in America," The Sopranos (David Chase, US)

9. The Pastor and the Hobo (Phil Chambliss, US)

10. You and I, Horizontal (Anthony McCall, UK)

11. Kara Tai in the Front and the Back (Bangbros.com, US)

Joel Shepard is the film and video curator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

MATT WOLF’S TOP 5


1. Following Sean (Ralph Arlyck, US). Thirty years after making a legendary short film about Sean, the lawless four-year-old son of Haight-Ashbury hippies, filmmaker Arlyck reconnects with his subjects. The result is the most complicated study of baby boomers and their kin ever made.

2. Artist Statement (Daniel Barrow, Canada). Winnipeg artist Barrow uses an old-school overhead projector and layers of transparent drawings to create manual animations with music and live narration. His second US performance brought to life his imaginative, queer, literary, and delicate personal manifesto.

3. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Austria). Apichatpong’s latest radical narrative film focuses on a rural Thai hospital and its inhabitants. Among its meditative episodes is an unresolved love story between a female physician and an orchid farmer.

4. Real Housewives of Orange Country (various directors, US). Bravo’s reality television program about a contrived community of rich middle-aged women living in Coto de Caza is unexpectedly compelling. Because their lives are so boring, there’s nothing left to explore in this show except their complex emotions.

5. Zodiac (David Fincher, US). Crushworthy Jake Gyllenhaal, genius cinematography from legend-to-be Harris Savides, and incredible reconstructions of a beautiful and scary San Francisco in the 1970s.

Matt Wolf (www.mattwolf.info ) is the director of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (premiering at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival) and Smalltown Boys.

Switching sides

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Following the waves of layoffs that have occurred over the past year at several newspapers in the Bay Area, former top editors and reporters are reinventing themselves as media spokespeople, also known as "flacks," after the jackets that deflect incoming rounds of ammunition. At least a half-dozen prominent journalists have succumbed so far.

Their job now is to stamp out unsettling questions from their former colleagues or put a positive spin on bad press, like calling a slight dip in San Francisco’s homicide rate last year a huge success for Mayor Gavin Newsom or characterizing his lurid affair with a subordinate as a chance for him to heal emotionally.

They’re perhaps most famous for the phrase "no comment," but flacks the world over would likely prefer a more honorable description, like the one promoted by the Public Relations Society of America: "Public relations helps our complex, pluralistic society to reach decisions and function more effectively by contributing to mutual understanding among groups and institutions."

Spoken like a true flack.

So who better to work as a media relations executive than a former reporter? Newspaper insiders know more than anyone else how to kill a story or at least blunt its impact by instilling doubt in the mind of the reporter. It’s not uncommon for journos to hear "That’s not a story" from the new flacks.

Another tactic, used by C.J. Cregg, the fictional flack in Aaron Sorkin’s television series The West Wing, is to invite uncooperative reporters out for coffee and off-the-record chatter until they’ve been befriended. District Attorney Kamala Harris’s press office is famous for coffee invites.

Among the newspaper expatriates:

•Chris Lopez, an editor of the Contra Costa Times who was laid off by parent company MediaNews Group last year, took a job as a communications director for the Denver host committee of the Democratic Party’s 2008 convention.

•Paul Feist, formerly the Sacramento bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle, was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger earlier this year to serve as a communications secretary for the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency.

•Tom Honig, who recently departed as the longtime editor of the Santa Cruz Sentinel, accepted a job with Armanasco Public Relations, an affiliate of Hill and Knowlton, which represents such illustrious clients as McDonald’s, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and Starbucks. Hill and Knowlton helped McDonald’s diminish fallout from the 2004 documentary Super Size Me, in which filmmaker Morgan Spurlock attempted to survive exclusively on the fast-food chain’s food for 30 days, with disastrous results (his health condition plummeted).

Honig, however, promised Sentinel staffers Nov. 30 that he wasn’t betraying the values of news reporting and proclaimed himself a martyr hoping to save the Sentinel from further staff cuts enacted by MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton.

"Just because you’re in public relations does not mean you’re a liar," the paper quoted Honig as saying. "What I do now is tell people’s stories. This is just another way to tell people’s stories."

He’ll make a praiseworthy spinner indeed.

Lopez and Honig could not be reached by deadline. Nor could we get hold of a spokesperson for the spokespeople at the Public Relations Society of America. Feist wouldn’t comment when we contacted him.

There are other defectors. A former Chronicle reporter from the paper’s Sacramento bureau, Lynda Gledhill, is now a spokesperson for State Senate leader Don Perata, and a San Jose Mercury News capitol reporter, Kate Folmar, is working for the press office of Secretary of State Debra Bowen. And former Chronicle City Hall reporter Charlie Goodyear is now working for the high-powered SF flack firm Singer Associates.

Newspaper giant MediaNews set the trend this year for pushing career journalists into public relations. The company laid off scores of people after it purchased several newspapers in the Bay Area, including the Sentinel, the CoCo Times, and the Mercury News. But other Bay Area newsrooms, including the Hearst Corp.–owned Chronicle, today have literally half the staff they had just a few short years ago.

Lopez previously worked for Singleton’s flagship paper, the Denver Post, which he helped earn a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Columbine shootings. Columnist Charles Ashby of the Post‘s rival Pueblo Chieftain pointed out Dec. 10 that two more former Post staffers are now working as press secretaries for Colorado governor Bill Ritter and reporters from other large Colorado papers are today handling public relations for the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and the University of Colorado.

Gene Rose of the National Association of Government Communicators insists citizens are better served by bureaucracies that contain former reporters.

"With the shrinking news hole and with less reporters to cover news, agencies and governments are being forced to figure out ways to communicate more directly with people one-on-one," Rose, also a former reporter, said.

The interim dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s journalism school, Neil Henry, documented the phenomenal rise of public relations in this year’s book American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media (University of California Press). In particular, he notes, TV news organizations have grown increasingly reliant on polished video news releases produced by flacks, which sometimes air verbatim, as opposed to expending their own dwindling newsroom resources. The VNRs, as they’re called, give "coverage" of a product or idea the veneer of journalistic credibility, when in fact they’ve been created by professional manipulators.

"For the concerned citizen and certainly for the dedicated American journalist, it is horrifying to see how significantly business and political advertising has compromised the mission of the news industry, at times with the industry’s full participation," Henry writes.

He adds that in 2004, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson lured more than 20 journalists, including some of the state’s best, into his administration with the promise of good pay.

So who else in the Bay Area plans to depart for the dark side? No comment.

Band together for 21 Grand

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Fuck New York. I can stick it out longer. I’ve got a masochistic streak!"

Cue divine, mad laughter. No, this isn’t a disgruntled renter pushed out by another owner move-in or a painter or sculptor resisting the draw of the trad national marketplace — the speaker is Sarah Lockhart, who runs 21 Grand, the jeopardized arts nonprofit and music space around the corner from the Mama Buzz Café, Johansson Projects, and other galleries participating in the insanely popular monthly Art Murmur walk set in what has become the grassroots-art epicenter of Oakland and the East Bay at large.

Going on seven and a half years downtown, Lockhart has been toiling in the trenches of ambitious music and arts programming longer than most. But in the past few weeks she and partner Darren Jenkins have had to close the doors and move shows after a troubling visit by the Alcohol Beverage Action Team, a unit of the Oakland Police Department that also ushered in the closure of underground music venues like the French Fry Factory and Oaklandish. "My thing is to work on this and fight it," the ever-feisty Lockhart continues. "We’re actually going to stay open and maybe provide inspiration for others. I want to have at least 10 years, because Tonic in New York City closed — they lasted nine years — but we’re still here." She chuckles, contemputf8g her tenacity and the vaunted East Coast experimental music club, which closed in April. "I get competitive about weird things! No money, lots of work — let’s see how long it takes before I totally burn out. This is our form of an endurance test."

Consider their current gauntlet the latest in the uncanny, imaginative struggle to provide a place for visual artists, film and video makers, poets, and, notably, musicians — working in every esoteric, noisy, experimental, rockish, improvy, and otherwise unclassifiable stripe — to show, speak, or sound out. Some of the best live music shows I caught in 2007 were at their space: Marnie Stern, the Gowns, the High Places, Lucky Dragons, and Breezy Days Band, which made the programming there the best in Oakland, if not in the running for tops in the Bay. Lockhart and Jenkins have survived nightmare landlords and condo push-outs — first at 21 Grand Avenue, then on 23rd Street — but this new challenge has to be their most frustratingly Kafkaesque.

On Dec. 1, ABAT officials were looking into Shashamane Bar and Grill, whose kitchen door shares the alley entrance with 21 Grand. The latter was closing for the night after a performance. Recycling buckets with empty beer bottles, a tip jar, and a cooler led one of the visitors to give Lockhart a card, saying, she recalls, "We don’t want you to have any problems in the future." Lockhart was alarmed enough to put a halt to most of December’s shows, explaining, "I’m 33 years old. I feel like I’m too old to risk horrible fines from the department and have to call my mother and say, ‘I have a fine for $10,000 — can you lend me money?’ That’s how things began, and then the ball started rolling and things started escautf8g."

It wasn’t enough for Lockhart to simply apply for a cabaret license; she had to navigate a bureaucratic maze of Byzantine proportions while she attempted to get special-event permits from the police in order to continue to put on a few larger shows by artists like Zeena Parkins and Eugene Chadbourne, which led to efforts to get approval from the fire and building departments. "For all they know, we’re a large firetrap that has raves for 4,000 people, so they weren’t signing off on anything," says the exasperated Lockhart, who recently put in 40 to 70 hours of footwork on paperwork and approvals. The nonprofit has been organizing shows for years using grants from the city, but 21 Grand’s hard-to-define, multidisciplinary programming has puzzled bureaucrats.

Still, the onetime Artists’ Television Access programmer is hoping that the few helpful city officials she’s encountered, who are familiar with the closure of spaces like Oakland Metro, can help the nonprofit. Lockhart wants to resume shows next month beginning with a Tom Carter and David Daniell performance Jan. 10, and in the meantime she’s trying to maintain a sense of humor: "the irony is not lost" on her that their recent fundraiser had to be moved to someone’s home and that new legislation allowing the Fox Theatre to be redeveloped as a live-entertainment venue within 300 feet of a school, library, or church might help 21 Grand, which has had its share of developer travails, to get a cabaret permit for their present spot near a Presbyterian church.

Going the private-club route like the 924 Gilman Street Project or heading underground isn’t an option. "Our goal is to have 21 Grand actually have a public presence," Lockhart says. "I want to do something that’s advertised and open to the public so a kid in bumfuck nowhere can see something about it and say, ‘This is cool. I’ll go to this.’ " *

RAPPING DAY

DARONDO


The onetime Bay Area soul-funk-blues cult legend rolls into town — though not in his mythical ivory Rolls. With Nino Moschella and Wallpaper. Wed/19, 8 p.m., $10. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

CHARLIE HUNTER


Welcome back the ex-Bay guitar-picking virtuoso as he plays with keyboarist Erik Deutsch and drummer Scott Amendola, and sit back and marvel alongside an audience of hotshots like Kirk Hammett. Wed/19–Sat/22, 8 and 10 p.m.; Sun/23, 7 and 9 p.m.; $16–$24. Yoshi’s, 510 Embarcadero West, Oakl. www.yoshis.com

MOTHER HIPS


The proudly hippie group reassembles — surf or no surf — for butt-shaking holiday sets. Fri/21–Sat/22, 9 p.m., $20. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

ASCENDED MASTER


Take a hit off the bongos of this local experimento-psych combo. With Top Critters and NVH. Sat/22, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

Feeding the food brainiac

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› paulr@sfbg.com


Amid the agonies and anxieties of last-minute holiday shopping can be found at least one sure stocking stuffer, provided your list includes a food brainiac (with a Christmas stocking). You’ll know one when you meet one; a large clue will be a passionate interest in not merely recipes and restaurants but also the cultural story they help tell.

And what is that sure thing, in a world where many a gift goes astray like a bad JDAM? A book, of course, since the reports of print’s death have been greatly exaggerated and the food brainiac loves books. One of the better food brainiac–friendly books available is Lilia Zaouali’s Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World (University of California Press, $24.95), whose subtitle, A Concise History with 174 Recipes, suggests that we aren’t talking about a volume with a companion Saturday-morning, how-to-cook-it series on public television.

No, Zaouali’s book dwells more on the history than the recipes, which are interesting though possibly too vague to be of much use in the contemporary, anal-retentive kitchen. Even a reasonably competent home cook is likely to be uneasy about such instructions as "put some red meat cut into small pieces in a pot with some water. When it is cooked, strain it and brown it in fat" (from a recipe for rutabiyya, or meat with dates).

But even if your brainiac never boils a dollop of honey in a splash of vinegar (medieval Islamic cooking being rich in sweet-sour effects), pleasurable sustenance can be had from the book’s many fascinating historical nuggets: the migratory route of couscous from North Africa through Sicily into Tuscany, for instance, or the Moorish roots (culinary and linguistic) of the dish the Spanish call escabeche, or the religious importance to Muslims of eating meat (other than pork) with most meals. As Zaouali puts it, "One may wonder whether a vegetarian could be admitted to the community of believers."

Of transcendent interest is not the bequest of medieval Islamic cooks to their modern heirs in both the Middle East and Europe but their own debt to the Romans, many of whose ingredients and flavor patterns they adopted and continued. The Roman gastronome Apicius, who lived at the time of Christ, is especially relevant here. For details, consult your stocking.

Clay Oven

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Two cheers, then, for Google, which recently rerouted its Noe Valley shuttle-bus lines so as to cause less air pollution and other distress in the heart of a neighborhood that has become, in effect, Googleberry RFD, the nesting habitat for those countless Google employees who spend their working days in the suburban wilds of the Peninsula. The child is father to the man, and the city is now the suburb, a dangling appendage to industry but no longer itself industrial. Just recreational.

During the last dot-com boom, in the late 1990s, a rise in both quality and quantity was noted in Bay Area restaurants serving Indian food. Software engineers and other tech types of Indian heritage were drawn here for work, and they expected — and got — an improvement in Indian restaurants, which previously were scarce and abysmal. The renaissance, or naissance, first took hold in the South Bay, whose environs were and are dotted with gigantic tech installations (including Google’s, in Mountain View), but now that everyone has moved to the city, enabled by shuttle buses with wi-fi and probably whirlpools, the city is getting better Indian restaurants too. Two more cheers.

Before the recent opening of Clay Oven, Noe Valley had no Indian restaurants at all, not a one, despite the neighborhood’s profound connection to Silicon Valley. An Indian restaurant in Noe Valley was arguably overdue — and not just because of software engineers and other Googloids either, but also because many of the rest of us marginal-Luddite types happen to like Indian food and its hit parade of spices. Of course, Dosa and Aslam’s Rasoi, each within a few steps of Valencia and 22nd streets, aren’t exactly light-years from Noe Valley, but there is something cozier about Clay Oven’s setting on outer Church, amid a quieter but flourishing restaurant row and Muni’s J trains rumbling past at odd intervals: a real convenience for those lucky enough to catch one.

If you believe addresses are portents, then you might think Clay Oven’s prospects are no better than mixed. The space was occupied most recently by a California-style bistro that never quite caught on, and before that by a Chinese restaurant that never quite caught on, and before that by a Burmese-inflected spot whose owners kept an old sofa and a dead television at the back of the dingy dining room. The Burmese food was pretty good, but eating there was like having dinner in a U-Store warehouse.

All of that dimness and debris has been cleared away. The old TV and sofa are long gone, and the kitchen has been separated from the stylishly low-key dining room by a new wall. Even the building’s faded facade has been remade; it’s now clad in red granite. If you didn’t know what used to be here, you would never guess.

The food is what many of us would probably consider standard-issue in Indian restaurants these days, but it’s carefully prepared and intensely flavorful. (Clay Oven, not coincidentally, has a number of older siblings around the city, including India Clay Oven in the Richmond, as well as a namesake Clay Oven in San Mateo.) The only real disappointments for me were the pappadum ($1), the crinkly lentil wafers, which were cold and therefore a little flat, and the palak pakora ($3.50), fritters of spinach in a batter of chickpea flour — also cold, and apparently fried (well ahead of time) in rancid oil.

Other than that: satisfaction. How about tandoori chicken, which is so cliché that it transcends cliché? You would expect a place called Clay Oven to have a pretty good version, since a tandoor is a clay oven, and Clay Oven’s version ($9.95 for a half bird) is exemplary, very tender and juicy, with the requisite reddish pink color (from the seasoned yogurt marinade), presented on a sizzling iron platter with slivers of onion and quartered lemons.

But we were pleased too to find tandoori chicken meat turning up in a dish called chicken makhai ($10.95): chunks of boneless flesh swimming in a voluptuous, spicy sauce very similar to that of chicken tikka masala. The restaurant offers this latter preparation too ($11.95), the only difference being … well, we couldn’t really detect any difference. If you’re concerned about the heat factor, incidentally, you needn’t worry, since the kitchen will tune the food’s fieriness to your specification.

Vegetarian dishes, as is typical at South Asian restaurants, are more than sufficient if you are a shunner of flesh. Saag paneer ($8.95) struck us as unusually and agreeably creamy, with a heavy allotment of white cheese, while chana masala ($7.95) — chickpeas cooked in a spicy gravy — was rich in said gravy, which helped allay any sense of dryness. (Chickpeas can be chalky.) Rice, of course, is offered to help capture the sauces of all of these dishes, but the breads work just as nicely, from a simple, well-blistered naan ($1.95) to a whole-wheat chapati ($1.50) glistening with oil.

Some of the humblest of dishes were among the most memorable. A cucumber salad ($2.75) turned out not to be a yogurty raita (though raita is available) but instead a heap of peeled coins sprinkled with salt and curry powder. And mulligatawny soup ($3.50), a hearty combination of shredded chicken and rice, was Soup Nazi–worthy, though served in a dainty little bowl. Ordinarily I might have hoped for a slightly bigger serving, but the world is not ordinary in the wake of Thanksgiving. So: two cheers yet again for little bowls of soup, and a dessert menu (of such usual suspects as rice pudding and saffron ice cream) from which one can abstain with a clear conscience. *

CLAY OVEN

Lunch: daily, 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Dinner: daily, 4–10 p.m.

1689 Church, SF

(415) 826-2400

www.indiaclayoven.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Shop like a Scrooge

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› deborah@sfbg.com

As soon as Black Friday came, you reflexively started rocking back and forth, chanting, "No, no, no," in order to drown out the concert of ho, ho, hos blaring from malls and gift shops across town. The shopping frenzy that occurs between Thanksgiving and Christmas brings you down faster than a kid-wet Santa. Until, in a moment of weakness, at the 11th hour, you decide it’s a wonderful life after all and you want to partake in the joy of giving. So how are you going to round up a sack of gifts before it’s too late to avoid the bitter loneliness of being a Scrooge? Don’t worry — lots of places are open on Christmas Eve, and a few on Christmas Day. Follow one of these strategies and you won’t even feel like you’re Christmas shopping, or trying to cram it all in last minute.

Hit the corner store

I’m not suggesting you get your loved ones cancer sticks and a bottle of Night Train for the yuletide, though for some, booze and smokes might be at the top of the list. Still, if you’re in a bind, you can always buy a bottle of top-shelf liquor. Personally, I’m a Jameson’s girl. Less embittered individuals might prefer Yellowtail’s celebrated Shiraz, while sober friends might appreciate a handful of Lotto tickets. Any of these are available at your convenience store just around the corner. But when seeking out the finer things in life, try these gourmet mini-marts:

26TH AND GUERRERO MARKET


Organic fruits, fresh flowers, imported sparkling wines like Prasecco, and fancy chocolates will help you throw together an assortment of decadent gift baskets for all of your peeps.

1400 Guerrero, SF. (415) 282-6247, 26thandguerreromarket.com. Open Christmas Eve, 8 a.m.–9 p.m. Closed Christmas Day.

HEALTHY SPIRITS


Your gift recipient will think you special-ordered the rare Belgian beer from Europe, but all you had to do was grab it on the go at this top-shelf Castro District liquor dispensary.

2299 15th St., SF. (415) 255-0610. Open Christmas Eve until 6 p.m. and Christmas Day, 9 a.m.–6 p.m.

ARLEQUIN WINE MERCHANT


The first step is admitting it: all of your friends are winos. The next step is popping over to this classy Hayes Valley cellar for vintages in all varieties and prices.

384 Hayes, SF. (415) 863-1104, www.arlequinwine.com. Open Christmas Eve, 11 a.m.–7 p.m.

Resort to the Internet

The road to Scroogeland is often paved with the best of intentions: last year you vowed not to fill your shopping cart at the megachain stores. Of course, they’re the only ones that will ship your product overnight if you buy online, but you can PayPal these purchases on Christmas Day and still make it look like you thought of them months ago.

SF BALLET


It doesn’t matter if you give tickets to a ballet fan or someone who has never been. The 2008 season has many exciting things in store, such as a new-works series that will debut pieces by Mark Morris and Paul Taylor.

www.sfballet.org

GLOBAL EXCHANGE FAIR TRADE STORE


Buy a 2008 Peace Calendar from this international human rights organization. No one needs one for another week anyway. Or make a donation in the name of your loved one for any amount. They get the tax deduction, you get the easy way out, and the world gets a little better.
www.globalexchange.org

KQED WINE CLUB


Worsening the pressure of the holiday shopping season is the nonstop guilt trip of public television subscription drives. One way to make up for the nature shows you watched without subscribing is to join our local PBS affiliate’s wine club.

www.kqedwineclub.org

Be a tourist in your hometown

You can kill two birds with one stone by doing your Christmas shopping while showing your relatives around town. Tourist areas always have lots of places open on holidays.

Chinatown is your one-stop shop for everything, especially for those most quintessential of Christmas gifts: robes and slippers. And many shops there will be open until as late as 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, just as they always are. On Pier 39, where Moms and Dads can’t resist going, no matter how much of a trap it is, there are a few shops that sell something more than shot glasses with the Golden Gate Bridge painted on them.

CANTON BAZAAR


You’ll find three full floors of those good-luck cats with raised paws, Buddhas for your spiritually Eastern friends, kimonos and house slippers, and sake sets for your ample heavy-drinking associates at this classic Chinatown store.

616 Grant, SF. (415) 362-5750. Call for hours.

SAN FRANCISCO SOCK MARKET


Give the classic Scrooge gift of socks. The huge selection means you can cover the feet of everyone in your life with something they’ll actually like.

Pier 39, bldg. G, level 1. (415) 392-7625. Open Christmas Eve, 10–6 p.m. Closed Christmas Day.

Lighten up, for Christ’s (oops, I mean Pete’s) sake:

Maybe you just need a few laughs to get into the spirit of things. Head to one of these comic shops, get lost in the escapist pleasures they offer, then grab some gifts for your friends.

AL’S COMICS


Now that Al’s has moved from his cramped Mission spot to roomier digs in the Castro, he’s turned his store into a one-stop gift shop. In addition to comics in all genres, the store sells greeting cards and a few toys.

1803 Market, SF. (415) 861-1220, www.alscomicssf.com. Open Christmas Eve until 5 p.m. Closed Christmas Day.

COMIC OUTPOST


From the huge selection of back issues and superhero figurines at this Sunset District shop, you should be able to find something that will bring a smile to the faces of many in a matter of minutes.

2381–2387 Ocean, SF. (415) 239-2669, www.comicoutpost.net. Open Christmas Eve, noon–5 p.m. Closed Christmas Day.

FCC votes for Big Media

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And now we need l00,000 people to get Congress to reverse the FCC of George W. Bush to reverse the commission’s sellout to the Big Media who supported us going into Iraq and are now helping keep us there

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Scroll down to sign a protest letter to Congress and the New York Times story)

As expected, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and his two Republican colleagues approved new rules that will unleash yet another flood oer media consolidation across the country. As expected, the Big Media is either blacking out or minimalizing the story, with the notable exception of the New York Times which ran an opposing editorial in Monday’s edition and a strong story online today. (See below).

As Robert McChesney, the president of Free Press, a valiant media reform group puts it in an action alert,
“This is about whether we will have access to the information that democracy requires. it is about whether or not we’ll have real news and local voices on radio, trelevision, and in the newspaper in your town. It’s about whether the public airwaves will represent our nation’s diversity.”

Or, let me add, a city’s diversity, such as San Francsico. Remember the Will and Willie show on the Quake on Clear Channel, a highly valuable show that was killed brutally with no explanation because it didn’t have high enough ratings and wasn’t able to go national? That’s but one local example of this dreadful phenomenon. There are some good people on the liberal Quake on Clear Channel (Thom Hartman, Big Ed Schulz, Randi Rhodes, Rachel Matteo, et al), but none of them bring a San Francisco perspective to the show, even though the city is one of the most liberal and civilized cities in tthe world and has the Speaker of the House and two California Senators (Diane Feinstein in the city, Barbara Boxer in Marin).

McChesney rolls the drums and points out that in 2003 the FCC tried to do the same thing, but millions of people demanded that Congress reject the FCC’s rules. And they did, thanks in large part to McChesney’s group. And it’s ttime to do it again. Sign the open letter to Congress, as suggested in the alert below. B3

Read the New York Times article here.

stopmedia.gif

Dear Charles,

It happened. A few minutes ago, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and his two fellow GOP commissioners approved new rules that will unleash a flood of media consolidation across America. The rules will further consolidate local media markets — taking away independent voices in cities already woefully short on local news and investigative journalism.

In 2003, the FCC tried to do the same thing, but millions of people demanded that Congress reject the FCC’s rules. And they did. It’s time to do it again.

We need 100,000 people to get Congress to reverse the FCC’s rules right now.

Sign Our Open Letter to Congress
Then get three of your friends to do the same.

This is about whether we will have access to the information that democracy requires. It is about whether or not we’ll have real news and local voices on radio, television and in the newspaper in your town. It’s about whether the public airwaves will represent our nation’s diversity.

Just yesterday — spurred by your calls and letters — 26 senators from both parties sent a letter to the FCC Chairman promising “to revoke and nullify the proposed rule” if the FCC voted to lift the longstanding ban on “newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership.” But Chairman Martin did it anyway.

Congress has the power to throw out these rules — and if 100,000 people demand it, they’ll have to listen.

Take action now and spread the word.

Some say that nobody listens to letters like this. Well they definitely do, and it’s a way you can truly help the cause with just a few clicks. Sign on now — and get your friends to do the same.

Your actions are making a difference. Let’s keep up the pressure. And stay tuned — this fight is far from over.

Thanks for bringing us this far,

Robert McChesney
President
Free Press
www.freepress.net

P.S. Spread the word: Recruit three new friends to sign on to this letter and send the message to Congress.

P.P.S. Read Senator John Kerry’s blog post on today’s decision on the Free Press Action Network.

——————————————————————————–

View more information about this campaign at: www.action.freepress.net/campaign/sbmopenletter

Tell your friends about this campaign at: www.action.freepress.net/campaign/sbmopenletter/forward

If you received this message from a friend, you can click here to become a Free Press activist.

FOIA reform bill passes!

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After five years of effort, a group of ten media organizations called the Sunshine in Government Initiative has succeeded in getting Congress to pass a much-needed reform bill that addresses some of the worst problems with the Freedom of Information Act. It now goes to the president — but since there are Republican co-sponsors and it passed pretty overwhelmingly, there’s a chance he’ll sign it.

Here’s the official statement:

U.S. House Sends FOIA Reforms to President’s Desk,
Media Groups Praise Changes Helping Public Obtain Documents

The ten media organizations comprising the Sunshine in Government Initiative
(SGI) applaud the House and Senate for passing important bipartisan reforms
to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), House Oversight and
Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA), Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), Rep.
William Lacy Clay (D-MO), Rep. Todd Platts (R-PA) and Rep. Lamar Smith
(R-TX) led the effort to pass this legislation. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) also
played a key role in getting this legislation over the finish line.

The media group members of SGI appreciate the hard work and dedication of
these members and their staffs for their diligent work to improve the way
FOIA works for the American public. Members of the SGI coalition include:
American Society of Newspaper Editors, Associated Press, Association of
Alternative Newsweeklies, Coalition of Journalists for Open Government,
National Association of Broadcasters, National Newspaper Association,
Newspaper Association of America, Radio-Television News Directors
Association, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Society of
Professional Journalists.

Statements from the Sunshine in Government Initiative and SGI Members
Organizations

“After years of growing government secrecy, today’s vote reaffirms the
public’s fundamental right to know,” said Rick Blum, Coordinator of the
Sunshine in Government Initiative. “Fixing FOIA isn’t a secret. This bill
makes commonsense changes to help the public know what government is up to.
We thank the sponsors who championed real changes and worked hard to keep
the government’s doors open.”

“We applaud Congress for resolving the differences that existed in the House
and Senate versions of this important legislation and making its passage a
reality,” said Gilbert Bailon, president of the American Society of
Newspaper Editors and editorial page editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“This action reaffirms the public’s right to know and buttresses a statutory
right vital to our Democracy.”

Long-time open government advocate Pete Weitzel, Coordinator of the
Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, which is a member of SGI,
called the vote “a true holiday gift from Congress.”

Community newspapers particularly sought an independent office to resolve
disputes. “Strengthening the Freedom of Information Act will pay dividends
in public information for a long time to come. This new law has many
virtues. But as community newspaper journalists, we particularly celebrate
the development of an ombudsman office under the Office of Government
Information Services,” said Steve Haynes, President of the National
Newspaper Association and Publisher of the Oberlin (KS) News. “We hope it
will open doors that have too long been locked by delay and inattention to
information requests. National Newspaper Association congratulates Senators
Leahy, Cornyn and Kyl and House Chairman Henry Waxman for their authorship
and contributions to this bill. We hope this will be the first of many
enactments to improve transparency and help citizens better understand how
the government operates.”

Other media leaders praised today’s vote and the bill’s sponsors. ³The
Freedom of Information Act is an indispensable tool for citizens and
businesses to access information about their government, which,
unfortunately, too often includes government waste and wrongdoing,² said
John F. Sturm, President and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America.
³Today¹s bipartisan passage of the OPEN Government Act to strengthen and
reform FOIA is a great day for the public¹s interest in good government. We
applaud the dedication of all the lawmakers who pushed this important
measure forward, particularly Senators Patrick Leahy, John Cornyn, Jon Kyl
and Reps. Henry Waxman and Todd Platts.²

³This is a huge advancement for open government, thanks to the leadership of
Senators Leahy, Cornyn and Kyl and Representatives Waxman and Platt,² said
Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors
Association. ³But this isn¹t just a victory for journalists; it¹s a victory
for every single member of the American public. This legislation will
eliminate some of the lengthy delays and persistent backlogs in the FOIA
process that create obstacles and limit the public¹s ability to make
informed choices in their communities.²

Other SGI members saw this as a strong change in direction. “Passage of the
FOIA bill will allow not only members of the press but all Americans to hold
their government more accountable. In a time when First Amendment rights
are under attack almost daily in this country, this bill is a major step to
ensuring America has a free press and a government that is transparent and
open,” noted Clint Brewer, president of the Society of Professional
Journalists and Executive Editor of the City Paper in Nashville, Tennessee.

We are the eternal paradox

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By Amber Peckham

Although the “gayest videos ever” blog posts were a while back (click here for part 1, here for part 2, and here for part 3), this one still needed to be shared.

It’s a clip from “Legally Blonde: The Musical”, which aired on MTV a few weeks ago, and is probably still being shown if you want to check out the whole show. You know how they roll with the reruns. At least it’s more amusing than most of their programming these days, except of course for Room Raiders, which in my opinion is just good television.

For more mindless fun, visit Gay or Eurotrash?, leading to a pre-metrosexual classic test that requires finely-tuned gaydar. There’s Gay or straight?, which lets you compare people’s photos. And if you’re just looking to pass judgment (bad mommying?), there’s Virgin or not test.

Now go have fun being shallow, courtesy of the Guardian.

Year in Music: Bling

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

There’s no getting around it: for me, 2007 was the year of the vibes, case closed. But before anyone gets the wrong idea and paints me as a hacky sack–thwacking trustafarian slathered in sandalwood oil and picking chunks of crusted hummus from my beard, let me qualify: those ain’t the kind of vibes I’m a-grooving on. Nah, we’re talking vibraphones here. You know, aluminum bars, mallets, the whole bit, just like Lionel Hampton, Milt Jackson, and Cal Tjader used to rock. And while we’re at it, let’s throw in xylophones, glockenspiels, and marimbas too. Basically, if you hit it with a couple of sticks and it chimes out a sunny-day "ping," "bling," "blong," or "pong" in response, you’ve got my undivided attention. I’m a hopeless sucker for percussion with pitch, and this year has heaped a veritable bounty of warm, mellow tones into my headphones.

Oh, the twinkles and sparkles of the ceaselessly charming, thrillingly cheeky Gruff Rhys. The title track of the Super Furry Animals vocalist’s sophomore release, Candylion (Team Love), rolls along like an ice cream van from a subversive children’s television show, thanks to its misleadingly bright, singsong xylophone patterns, trilling away while Rhys plays the part of the medicated host, informing the kiddies, "Dreams can come true. Nightmares can also." Delicious! Then there’s the Brunettes. The Kiwi duo lay down a mighty double assault of lush glock action on their Structure and Cosmetics (Sub Pop) with "Her Hairagami Set" and "Credit Card Mail Order." The former picks up the mallets to plunk down an OMD-inspired round of ’80s romanticism, while the latter evokes images of poodle skirts and beehives with a glock melody beamed down from Buddy Holly.

How about Midnight Movies, whose glorious, Mazzy Star–like "Ribbons" billows and whirls heavenward with its elegiac xylophone line? The Barbarella-isms of Dean and Britta’s Back Numbers (Zoë) just wouldn’t be the same without the orbit-seeking wooziness of those space-jazz vibraphones. And where would I be without Welsh xylophone abusers Los Campesinos!, whose breathless pummeling of the metal bars on "You! Me! Dancing!" approaches levels of rapture? Finally, I bow to my icon as I revel once more in the mesmerizing marimba rumbles of Siouxsie’s captivating solo debut, Mantaray (Universal). Honestly, what could possibly beat a rhythm that’s also hummable? Good vibes are flowing, indeed.

TOP 10 ALBUMS


•<0x0007>The National, Boxer (Beggars Banquet)

•<0x0007>Beirut, The Flying Club Cup (Ba Da Bing)

•<0x0007>Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge)

•<0x0007>Blonde Redhead, 23 (4AD)

•<0x0007>Bettye LaVette, The Scene of the Crime (Anti-)

•<0x0007>Bat for Lashes, Fur and Gold (Echo/Caroline)

•<0x0007>Grinderman, Grinderman (Anti-)

•<0x0007>Celebration, The Modern Tribe (4AD)

•<\!s><0x0007>Jens Lekman, Night Falls on Kortedala (Secretly Canadian)

•<\!s><0x0007>Gruff Rhys, Candylion (Team Love)

Year in Music: Throwback or keeper?

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I was born at the dawn of the 1980s, and as I’ve gradually climbed the aging ladder, the remnants of what I recall from my childhood have slowly faded into a dim star set to expire in some far-too-advanced digital-age contraption. I’ve been pretty hungry of late for an endless helping of nostalgic pop culture, and nothing satisfies an empty stomach more than watching The Making of Thriller or catching a five-second clip of Hulk Hogan leg-dropping Mr. Wonderful. You see, when I was a wee youngster, I channeled many of my fantasies from TV debauchery: I wanted to be the Karate Kid and yearned to live on the set of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. I started watching MTV before kindergarten, and the thought of soaring from a wire above the sea of 10,000 screaming fans in Bon Jovi’s "Livin’ on a Prayer" music video seemed like heaven to me. I longed to spike a volleyball in some drunken beachgoer’s face during the weeklong episodes of MTV’s Spring Break, but the closest I ever came to a beach was the grungy kiddie pool in my backyard. Sadly, I was never able to find another means of capitalizing on my fool’s paradise, but I remain convinced in my adulthood that something will eventually creep up and take me back to the Cosby generation.

YouTube finally answered my prayers in the beginning of 2005. Then I had the entire 1980s at my fingertips, and I’ve been hooked ever since. It’s been nothing but talking cars, pastel-clothed coppers, and cat-eating aliens from the planet Melmac in my tiny universe. I can now explore and eat up all of the catchy theme songs from old faves such as Pinwheel, Hey Dude, and Hickory Hideout, or scratch my head and wonder why I found Punky Brewster so compelling in the first place. I’m able to watch Alanis Morissette getting slimed on You Can’t Do That on Television, and then I can immediately point and click on a poor-quality money shot of Mr. T flexing his muscles in front of a burning helicopter. It’s so damn bad, but it’s addicting. I’ve come to realize that most of these flashes from the past should have stayed in my childhood, simply because they seemed so much cooler back then. Just last week I watched the first two segments of The Decline of Western Civilization, but they didn’t do it for me, because I just didn’t identify with those lifestyles as a toddler.

Much of my compulsion of wanting to relive the ’80s stems from the fact that all of my idols from that period — from Luke Skywalker to the Lost Boys — were larger than life. And I suppose I’m seeking an escape from the perpetual yawn of reality TV. I might not be Marty McFly, but if I ever find myself behind the wheel of a time-traveling DeLorean DMC-12, I will probably set the flux capacitor to the year 1989 and put it in park.

TOP 10


•Britney Spears loses it

•The Spits at the Great American Music Hall, Oct. 15

•No Age, Weirdo Rippers (FatCat)

•Christian Fennesz and Ryuichi Sakamoto, Cendre (Touch)

•Calvin Johnson at the Rickshaw Stop, June 15

•Black Dice, Load Blown (Paw Tracks). Someday they could become a really great pop band.

•Paula Abdul’s drunken interview on the Fox News Channel

•Japanther at the Hemlock Tavern, May 30

•Aa, GAaME (Gigantic)

•Kanye West, Graduation (Roc-A-Fella). My favorite album of 2007. I hear he’s remixing a Michael Jackson song for the 25th-anniversary rerelease of Thriller.

Dirty girl

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I washed the dishes. Put my clothes away. Emptied the compost. I let the fire go out and sat on top of the wood stove in my underwear. The phone rang: how was my weekend?

Let me think about it, I said. I said there was blood on my bed, every single thing smelled like smoke, my eyes burned, I hadn’t shat since Thursday, and my cat was lucky to be alive. Me too, but for a whole different reason. In short, it was my new favorite weekend ever, I said. Yours?

What reason?

Because I care. You said, "How was your weekend?" I say, "Fine, thank you, yours?"

No. I mean why are you lucky to be alive — compared to why the cat is.

Life is good, I said. We have fun, we make a mess, we clean it up, we listen to music. And the mess keeps creeping back in and we keep cleaning it up. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Yes I would, because eventually, I’m told, it wins. It dirties us.

Are you in love, or just weird?

Lost signal. What I was was dirty, so I took a bath. I thought about scrubbing the smoke damage off of my walls with a sponge. I thought about the look that cats get in their litter boxes, the glazed place that they go, at once so far away and yet never more at home.

We can get there too! Weed’s too easy. Try hot sauce. Try three years of almost nothing followed by three days of almost-nothing-but.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. The Mountains hosted and I, the Woods, cooked. Our guests were Cities. Smoked turkey, sausage-and-cornbread-and-biscuit stuffing–stuffed red peppers, mustard greens, apple sauce, cranberry relish, cranberry sauce, and an apple pie.

Everything had meat in it. I had asked 10 times if any of the Cities were vegetarian, and the Mountains had said no (no no no no no no).

There was a vegetarian. For me, the novice cooker and enthusiast-at-large, all will and no clue, this was a dream come true. A last-minute vegetarian at my meatfest, like a drowning kid to a teenage lifeguard, and the boy she’s liked all summer is watching…. Splash!

I looked at Mookie, the Brick, my Chief Number One (and only) Assistant, who I was going to go home with but nobody knew that yet, and I smiled.

He looked neutral. Maybe he was tired of taking orders, chopping this, grating that … everything else was in the oven. And on the grill, chilling in the fridge, or simmering on back burners, waiting for the bell. This was supposed to be Miller Time, not a cross between Baywatch and Iron Chef.

Now the Mountains, as you know, are two of my favorite people ever, even though — or maybe partly because — neither one of them likes to cook. But they both love to eat, so I get to express my devotion, my gratitude, my love, my little sisterhood, my best-friendship, and my unwavering appetite with trays of homemade-noodled lasagna and huge pots of gumbo. If I wasn’t there, they would have had Stove-Top stuffing with their store-cooked turkey.

One of the guests brought Rice-A-Roni. I’m not a snob. While Mookie cored two more peppers, I got that going and scoured their refrigerator for doctorings (carrots, asparagus, a tomato, fake sausage links, and leftover chickpeas). We stuffed the peppers with the San Francisco treat, mixed with all of the above, and put them on the grill with the others. Main course: mushroom burgers. And I had not figured out a way to get bacon into the cranberry things, so he could have that too.

Well, the vegetarian looked about as happy as anyone else at the table. "Hey Mookie! He likes it!" But this was supposed to be a poem, and it had turned into bad television.

For almost all of November I’d been trying to write a song about being a dirty girl on the low road. Which wasn’t working, probably because I’m too fucking angelic. In the bathtub on Monday morning or whatever the hell it was, I gave up on writing the song and just started singing it.

The phone rang. From the tub I could hear the same cellular voice screaming into my answering machine: Who was he?

My new favorite restaurant is El Delfin, mostly for the guacamole. It has some interesting main dishes too, with a recurring natural disaster theme, like "Salmon Tornado" and "Volcan en Molcajete" — which is beef, sausage, cactus, onion, cheese, and red sauce, all a-sizzle. And not as good as it sounds.

Also not particularly cheap, most dishes at or over $10.

But the guac! … *

EL DELFIN

Wed.–Mon., 9 a.m.–9 p.m.

3066 24th St., SF

(415) 643-7955

Take-out available

Comcast’s secret war on file sharing

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION For the past several months, Comcast has been covertly sending commands to your computer that tell it to stop receiving information — especially if that information is coming to you via BitTorrent, Gnutella, or other file-sharing applications. In May disgruntled Comcast users started posting on message boards about how BitTorrent and Gnutella weren’t working for them anymore. So researchers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with an AP investigative journalist, started running tests on the Comcast network, using software tools to examine what exactly Comcast was doing to BitTorrent.

What they found was disturbing. Without telling customers, Comcast had begun a secret program to send automatic reset commands to customers’ computers if they were using BitTorrent, Gnutella, or a few other programs. None of these programs are illegal. Moreover, Comcast had sold its services to customers without informing them that this popular Internet software wouldn’t work on its network. And Comcast is still doing it.

To make matters worse, the method the folks at Comcast are using to shut down file sharing is underhanded. They stop BitTorrent by injecting reset data packets into information streaming between two computers on the Comcast network. Then Comcast makes the reset packets appear to be from one of the computers using BitTorrent — not Comcast. So even if customers know to look for these reset packets, they’ll believe the problem comes from the computer they’re trying to share files with.

When the EFF and angry customers confronted Comcast about its sneaky system, the company claimed that it was merely "slowing down" certain programs. But as the EFF pointed out last week in a research paper on the topic, reset packets are designed only to shut down communication between two computers. If Comcast wanted to slow down BitTorrent, it could have used a common program called a traffic shaper, which can adjust data speeds.

Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas told the Guardian that "Comcast is delaying peer-to-peer applications but not blocking them." He added that there is "no other technical way to delay" these applications than the method the company has chosen.

Without further explanation from Comcast, one is left wondering why the company would engage in such outrageously anticonsumer behavior. One possibility is that it views BitTorrent as a competitor. BitTorrent has made deals with various Hollywood studios to distribute movies online, which is something Comcast cable does for television. So maybe Comcast is playing dirty so its customers will turn to cable TV for movies instead of getting them online via BitTorrent.

For people who don’t care about using BitTorrent, though, Comcast’s behavior is still a gesture of bad faith. The company is demonstrating quite plainly that it won’t hesitate to deny basic Internet services to its customers without warning, and without even acknowledging that it’s doing it. Today those services are for file sharing. But tomorrow they could be for sending e-mail that doesn’t use Comcast’s Web mail system.

I also think Comcast’s actions are a harbinger of what’s to come as Internet service providers get sucked into larger media companies with cable or content-making divisions. No laws guarantee network neutrality online, so Comcast is free to engage in network prejudice. The company can block any service it wants, especially if there’s a financial incentive. Certainly, consumers can choose to go with another Internet service provider, and I hope they do. But in the future, market competition may not be enough.

If Comcast blocks BitTorrent, then another company might welcome BitTorrent traffic but block my favorite game services. Internet service will become like cable TV, where getting the full range of channels is incredibly expensive. Except it will be worse, because the Internet is a far richer and more diverse place than cable TV. Selectively blocking the Internet is like selectively blocking expression itself.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who gets her movies on BitTorrent.

Mission to Caracas

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Chavez snubs IAPA journalists in Venezuela

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Scroll down for the IAPA press release in English and Spanish on its free press mission to Venezuela)

It was an amusing and telling moment in the history of freedom of the press:

I serve on the executive committee of the Inter American Press Association, and arrived in Venezuela on Nov. 17 as part of a mission to check on President Hugo Chávez’s accelerating crackdown on the news media. Chávez had a message waiting for our delegation.

It was a half-page advertisement from the Venezuelan National Assembly, in the big morning Caracas daily paper El Universal, reprinting a copy of a congressional resolution urging the executive branch to declare the IAPA non grata (not welcome) in Venezuela. (Scroll down to see a copy of the ad.)

That set the tone for our mission: The sponsor of the resolution refused to meet with the IAPA’s delegation. In fact, no member of the three branches of the Venezuelan government or the National Electoral Council was willing to meet with the IAPA.

However, Chávez, who was plastered all over the papers and television for his trip to Iran and France, did send us a Chavista group called Journalists for the Truth.

The president of the group told the IAPA mission that there was complete freedom of the press in Venezuela, then promptly went outside the room and told the waiting press that the IAPA had been “duped in good faith by the reports prepared by the ‘opposition’ Venezuela press.”

Gonzalo Marroquín, chairperson of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, immediately retorted to the press that “it would seem that the journalists were at another meeting.”

In fact, the IAPA expressed “deep concern at the instability of press freedom in general and warned of the limited debate and public awareness surrounding planned constitutional reform and called on authorities to create an appropriate framework of guarantees and transparency for the Dec. 2 referendum,” according to its press release on its findings.

Earl Maucker, who led the mission as the IAPA’s president and editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., noted in a press conference that “the government’s unwillingness to talk about issues of press freedom and free speech, so essential to a democratic society, strengthens our belief that there is no real climate of respect, or the tolerance and political will to hold an open and comprehensive dialogue at a time when a major constitutional revision is under way.”

The mission met with members of the Venezuelan Press Bloc, a constitutional attorney, representatives of a human rights group, polling experts, the mayor of Chacao, the head of the National Press Workers Union, and other knowledgeable civilians. The mission and its final press conference were widely covered in the Venezuelan print and broadcast press. Marroquín, director of Diario Prensa Libre in Guatemala and a former television newscaster, was most eloquent in debating the IAPA’s findings on the government radio and television stations.

There were no violent incidents and no attempts to intimidate nor demonstrate against the IAPA mission. However, Chavez has made it difficult, if not impossible, for IAPA to hold its scheduled assembly next March in IAPA. Three different hotels in three different cities offered to host the convention, then mysteriously canceled their invitations.
Suddenly, two hotels said they did not have enough rooms, the third said it had it had rooms but could not provide meeting facilities. Even the J.W. Marriott Hotel that our mission was staying in asked us to hold our meetings and press conference in a nearby hotel.

Interestingly, after I posted a report on my blog, a self-described Venezuelan named Palomudo offered a comment describing the IAPA as a club of rich media owners.

“Look who owns the media in the USA and ask yourself what they did to convince you of their lies,” Palomudo wrote, echoing the Chávez line. “Remember Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction? … The media is your worse [sic] enemy and people like Bruce B. Brugmann are nothing more than media mercenaries pay [sic] to lie!!!”

Quite a statement, considering the Guardian is one of the strongest critics in the nation of media concentration and has consistently written about and criticized the mainstream media’s misreporting on Iraq. As an independent paper with a left-liberal approach, we’d be open to supporting some of Chávez’s economic policies of fighting multinational oil companies and redistributing wealth.

But we also believe that all governments — left, right, center, and otherwise — need a free and vigorous press and unfettered public debate. As long as Chávez refuses to accept those essential conditions, we happily stand with the non grata editors and publishers in the IAPA, and the courageous editors, publishers, media, students, and everyone else fighting Chavez for press freedom in Venezuela. B3

bruce's photo.jpg
IAPA Deputy Director RicardoTrotti and IAPA President Earl Maucker touch up the press release on deadline shortly before the IAPA press conference on Tuesday, Nov. 20th.

Click here for IAPA press release (English version).
Click here for IAPA press release (Spanish version).
Click here to view El National ad.

He hears a new world

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"I was just on the Farne Islands, off the northeast coast of England, near where I live, and at this time of the year they are covered with Atlantic gray seals that have come to birth their pups," environmental sound recorder and musician Chris Watson explains, recounting his latest field trip over a shaky Skype connection. "There are whole communities of female seals that sing and have these beautiful haunting voices. It’s sort of this siren voice. You can imagine sailors being drawn to it from across the waves."

Watson has made a peripatetic and enviable career for himself as a sound technician for radio and television (he earned a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for his work on the BBC’s The Sound of Birds), pursuing and recording the natural world’s siren calls. From the Rolls-Royce-like purr of a lounging cheetah to the deep groans of an Icelandic glacier following its inexorable 10,000-year-old course to the Atlantic or the literally visceral snap of vultures cracking through the rib bones of a zebra carcass, the sounds one hears on Watson’s solo releases (all on the Touch label) are a far cry from the ubiquitous whale song CDs that clog Amoeba Music’s new age bins. Stunning in their clarity, Watson’s recordings are often beautiful and at times frightening. But more often than not, despite their natural provenance, they are simply otherworldly.

"It never fails to astonish me, the connection between the wild sounds of animals and what we hear as music," Watson says, reflecting on our impulse to immediately draw aural associations. "These sounds have the power to connect straight to the imagination in the same way that a piece of music may evoke certain images." Watson’s first experiments with sourcing the "musical" from his surrounding environment were in early industrial groups such as Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA, whose gritty samples and martial rhythms held up an acoustic mirror to the grimness of life in Margaret Thatcher–era Britain.

Although urban Sheffield is worlds away from a cove in the Galápagos Islands or a Kenyan veldt, Watson’s MO has remained consistent even as his locations have become more exotic and the available technology has dramatically improved from the first tape recorder he received from his parents at age 11. "Even in Cabaret Voltaire, I was interested in taking sounds from the world and working with them, or not working with them — just letting them be," the musician says. "Gradually, I became more and more interested in the sounds I was hearing outside than the sounds I was hearing in the studio."

Watson’s latest full-length, last year’s Storm, is also perhaps his most musical — at least compositionally speaking. A carefully edited three-part suite of field recordings, Storm traces a series of particularly aggressive weather systems that hit the northeast of England and Scandinavia in 2000. Watson recorded the storm’s early rumblings — with the lonesome bellow of seals as accompaniment. Meanwhile, longtime collaborator B.J. Nilson — who has released his own subtly processed, environmentally sourced ambient recordings under the name Hazard — caught what Watson calls "its last breaths" as it descended into the Baltic Sea.

"We were really fortunate to have a sort of narrative already there for us to work with," Watson says. "Of course, we couldn’t record the storm as it was crossing over to Europe, so the middle track is a sort of conjecture of what it sounded like, a combination of [Nilson] and my recordings." The two have been experimenting with transutf8g the album into a live piece, a version of which will be presented, sans Nilson, as part of Watson’s performance at Recombinant Media Labs on Nov. 30.

Reflecting on past performances of the piece, Watson remarks that he is continually surprised by how audiences react: "It literally has a powerful, moving effect on people. People have said to me that they put their coats back on because they were cold or found themselves shivering." Certainly, many more of us have heard if not experienced a powerful storm than could identify a recording of or have witnessed firsthand, say, giant sea turtles mating.

I jokingly ask Watson if he has ever visited the Tonga Room, the famed Polynesian-themed bar in the basement of the Fairmont Hotel, in which a tropical storm lets loose at 20-minute intervals over an indoor grotto. He laughs at the idea of the place and says that, regrettably, he hasn’t been. "But wouldn’t that be an amazing venue in which to perform Storm?" he suggests excitedly. The Fairmont’s guests would never know what hit them.

CHRIS WATSON

With Florian Hecker

Fri/30, 8 and 11 p.m., $20 suggested donation (sold out)

Recombinant Media Labs

763 Brannan, SF

recombinantmedia.net

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