› a&eletters@sfbg.com
James Taylor’s early-’70s status as the king of sensitive male vocalists is mere VH1 countdown fodder now. Yet in 2006, more than a few male artists seemed to have recollected being reared in Taylor’s soft rock FM heyday or at least had some of his sunny-voiced sincerity channeled down to them by sonic osmosis. I am no JT disciple — and the Isley Brothers did the best version of “Fire and Rain” (Free Ron!) — but these ears have been grateful for his example this twelvemonth because the “sensitive man” paradigm has yielded the first masterpiece of the digital age: Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere (Downtown).
To be sure, Justin Timberlake worked overtime this season to bring the sexy back, but other pop artists, as varied as the Coup’s Boots Riley, Chris Stills, and Ray LaMontagne, labored to achieve a semblance of organic authenticity in their work — King Solomon Burke went to Nashville, and even Hank III went straight to hell. While their female counterparts — go Natalie Maines, Bitch, Lily Allen, and posthumous Nina Our Lady of Myriad Reissues! — raised hell and exploited bad-girl tropes, many of the men (if not purely saccharine crooners) got raw via their interior landscapes rather than external provocation. From the Southland, see Centro-Matic’s Fort Recovery (Misra), Bobby Bare Jr.’s The Longest Meow (Bloodshot), and Sparklehorse’s Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (Astralwerks) for the wide-screen, psych-twang versions of this impulse. In this, the boys of ’06 heralded the arrival of another sensitive phase in pop music.
No pop star embodied the nu sincerity more than this year’s key Grammy winner, John Legend. Exploiting the goodwill fostered by the 2005 smash hit “Ordinary People,” Legend took to the woodshed with cream collaborators — including Californian producers Craig Street, Raphael Saadiq, and will.i.am — and the result was Once Again (Sony), the autumn’s most significant release. Onstage and in personal appearances, Legend worked his charm as a nice, discreet, well-groomed church boy made good. Meanwhile, the marrow of Once Again’s song cycle dealt with cuckoldry, lust, longing, and the sorrow of life in wartime — all riding on a complex sonic bed recombining classic soul, “easy rock,” AM pop, bossa via Burt Bacharach, and the myth of the era’s leading crooner icon, Jeff Buckley. From the Buckley homage “Show Me” to the yearning cries of “Where Did My Baby Go,” Legend waxed lyrically vulnerable and rendered himself the prime man for all our seasons of discontent.
All in all, it seems no accident that Legend’s hero Marvin Gaye got key DVD reissue treatment this year: Live in Belgium 1981 and The Real Thing: In Performance 1964-1981 (featuring a heartrending live version of “What’s Goin’ On”); is he not the ever-fruitful father of all late-modern, ambitious, sensitive popcraft? And another angsty politicized black man, the Dears’ Murray Lightburn from north of the border, dropped the fine, woeful Gang of Losers (Arts and Crafts). Lightburn appeared to walk a tightrope between Morrissey and metasoul prophet Seal on “Fear Made the World Go ’Round,” “I Fell Deep,” and “Bandwagoneers” — plus the wryly scathing “Whites Only Party.”
The great New Orleans Christian rock crossover quartet Mute Math seem to be after arena glory rather than the somewhat hermetically sealed cloister Lightburn’s music suggests, but these groups share a tacit commitment to revitalizing rock’s lyrical and sonic palette.
Jonny Lang did an effective reverse of Mute Math’s sonic journey, from blues and pop rock categories to inspirational, on the uneven but great Turn Around (A&M). Lang espouses the open, clean, lighthearted benefits of living the Christian life. Mercifully, the sermonizing and sentimental treacle are kept to a minimum. Featuring guests such as new grass master Sam Bush and yacht rock’s last crowned king of soulful sincerity, Michael McDonald, Turn Around kicks Timberlake’s narrow white-negro hips to the Amen Corner and back via blazing guitar licks and true Memphis grit. Lang also goes further than any other nice guy in this gallery by letting his wife play God on “Only a Man.”
Adopting an inevitable singer-songwriter vein, considering his country-rock-confessional-chansonnier heritage, Chris Stills’s album title said it all: When the Pain Dies Down — Live in Paris (V2). Referencing Buckley’s keening as well on “Landslide” and covering Americana’s most revered purveyors of sincere music, the Band, en Français on “Fanny (The Weight),” Stills strums his way simply and soulfully into the hearts of the Studio du Palais audience and any listeners tolerant enough to separate him from his famous parentage.
On the urban front, Robin Thicke transmuted Stills’s blue-eyed soul crooning in a less twangy and more radio-friendly direction. While Beyoncé was declaring a false state of independence this fall and assuming Diana Ross’s mantle with finality, Thicke was telling the fellas you don’t always have to be hard, that thug love has had its day, on The Evolution of Robin Thicke (Interscope). Besides the boilerplate sagas of escape from music biz demigods and monsters and an interesting cod-reggae interlude (“Shooter”), Thicke strove to bring the love back instead of the sexy. And the vulnerability on display in “Would That Make U Love Me” and “Everything I Can’t Have” versus the robotic rump-shaker “Wanna Love U Girl” seems to suggest that’s more disturbing.
Even 1970s and ’80s relic Ray Parker Jr. got in on the singer-songwriter act, dropping I’m Free (Raydio) independently and attempting to bum-rush a perhaps nonexistent market for a horndog sepia Jimmy Buffett. And, up to the moment, “freak folk” pied piper Devendra Banhart and his Hairy Fairy boyz posed in dresses for the New York Times Magazine, the black-and-white images meant to invoke both old-fashioned guileless authority bootlegged from the prewar era and the liberated power of hirsute girly men brave enough to transcend gender boundaries. These New White Savages might be too bohemian to actually cook and change a diaper — yet, as with their ’70s profem forebears, they’re unafraid to let their lady muse wear the mustache in the relationship and concoct weird sonic utopias of her own.
Utopias of any kind eluded the musician refugees dispossessed by Katrina: to wit, beautiful bleeding-heart releases like The New Orleans Social Club: Sing Me Back Home (Burgundy) and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s reprise of Gaye’s antiwar masterpiece What’s Goin’ On (Shout Factory). These discs are suffused with sincere calls for peace, love, understanding, and an end to greed and environmental destruction that no listener in 2006 could refute or afford to ignore.
What’s happening, brother? Gnarls Barkley’s landmark release of St. Elsewhere in the spring encapsulated the 2006 response to Gaye’s eternal query and signaled a subtle yet seismic shift in pop possibility. Sensitive singer-songwriter, soft rock poster boy, Hip-Hop Nation troubadour — Cee-Lo was all of these personae, armed with poetic confessional lyrics and complex, distinctive melodies. Soundwise, courtesy of brilliant Danger Mouse, St. Elsewhere is a very liberated recording, trumping ATLien superstars OutKast and their problematic Idlewild (La Face) in the act of aesthetic and racial revolt. Although enigmatic and evocative lyrics abound (especially moving are the title track, “The Boogie Monster,” “Online,” and of course, “Crazy”), my favorite song is “The Last Time.” What’s more sensitive and sincere than: “Under an endless sky/ Wish I can fly away forever/ And the poetry is so pure when we are on the floor together”? (Even if nothing rivals the Chi-Lites’ twangy begging throughout the classic “Oh Girl,” surely that’s in the wings for next year?)
With all its grating and grillz, hip-hop has reached its end point and become not a revolutionary social force but a genre full of sucka MCs I cannot relate to. Cee-Lo and Boots (via Pick a Bigger Weapon’s humorous sociopolitical commentary) have taken their stands at a very crucial moment. Above all, St. Elsewhere is a vital sign of the times.
That the war and a multitude of social ills have not frozen any of the artists cited above seems miraculous. That they foregrounded introspection and personal transformation in their work rather than simply abdicated as fugitives from the turmoil of these dark days is as close as any damsel in distress is likely to get to emotional rescue in 2006. Yes, with politicians masked and callow and other art forms muted by material glut, these knights in sonic armor are just about the only effective soothsayers for the way we live now. SFBG
KANDIA CRAZY HORSE’S CRAZY TOP 10:
•Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere (Downtown)
•Solomon Burke, Nashville (Shout Factory)
•John Legend, Once Again (Sony)
•Alejandro Escovedo, The Boxing Mirror (Back Porch)
•The Coup, Pick a Bigger Weapon (Epitaph)
•Bobby Bare Jr.’s Young Criminals Starvation League, The Longest Meow (Bloodshot)
•Dears, Gang of Losers (Arts and Crafts)
•Karen Dalton, In My Own Time (Light in the Attic)
•Cassandra Wilson, Thunderbird (Blue Note)
•Centro-Matic, Fort Recovery (Misra)
War
The nu sincerity
Wednesday
Dec. 6
Music
Lost Weekend
Considering the recently rekindled interest in pre–rock ’n’ roll sounds, isn’t it about time for a Western swing revival as well? Bay Area barn burners Lost Weekend carry on the tradition of Bob Wills and Spade Cooley with limb-loosening odes to wide-open skies and small-town girls with sparkles in their eyes. Early arrivals will be treated to a dance lesson. (Todd Lavoie)
7:30 p.m. dance lesson; 8:30 p.m. concert
Ashkenaz
1317 San Pablo, Berk.
$9
(510) 525-5054
www.ashkenaz.com
www.lostweekend.ws
Lecture
Paul Chan
Paul Chan’s take on politics and art might offend SF activists who still recycle 20th-century protest codes. But isn’t it past time to move beyond the recent mania for what he calls war porn and antiwar porn? Anyone capable of citing Hélène Cixous and Richard von Krafft-Ebing in a manner that’s practical and fresh is capable of giving a rare lecture: the kind worth hearing. (Johnny Ray Huston)
7:30 p.m.
San Francisco Art Institute
800 Chestnut, SF
Free
(415) 771-7020
www.sfai.edu
Heeding the call
Call of Duty 3
(Activision; Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii)
Kids! You might be able to convince your parents to buy this game for you based on its historical content. It is virtually impossible to play without learning a bit about World War II. That’s a nice side effect.
The latest incarnation of the popular Call of Duty first-person shooter series takes place in 1944 at the Normandy Breakout. American forces have already landed in France and are about to liberate Paris from the Nazis. The game does a great job of giving a bigger picture of the war than is often presented. Fourteen missions cover 88 days, culminating in the liberation of Paris. You play alongside platoons from Britain, Canada, and Poland. It’s neat to hear a variety of languages while shooting brains out.
The graphics are nothing short of stunning. The smoke, trees, grass, and buildings are simply incredible. To get the full effect, you have to play on a high-definition TV, but even on a stone age set, the game is beautiful.
Although the game play is fairly straightforward, an array of modes and challenges keep things interesting. Fans of the series will have no problem jumping right into the action, and newcomers will be brought up to speed via a training mission at the start. The aiming system takes some getting used to and provides two options. The right trigger allows you to shoot from the hip. It’s not too accurate, but it’s quick. Pulling the left trigger brings the sights up to eye level and enables you to take precise shots. The trade-off is that while you’re aiming, enemies have a clear shot at you. The game takes advantage of all the buttons on the controller, including the analog sticks. Pressing the right analog stick initiates a melee, while pressing the left brings up your binoculars. Those will pop up when you least expect them — as you’re frantically manipuutf8g the stick to make an escape. It’s a flaw in the control scheme. Or maybe it’s a perfect simulation of how messed up combat situations can become.
Speaking of simulations, the game includes a challenge that has players trying to get through a level while being hit by fewer than 30 bullets. Who takes 30 bullets and calls that a success? The game would probably take weeks of nonstop play to complete if you weren’t permitted to absorb a few slugs. Other challenges ask you to complete missions for assorted countries, work as a medic, drive a jeep, drive a tank, and arm explosives. The range of challenges and three difficulty levels make for a long shelf live.
The greatest aspect of Call of Duty 3 is the multiplayer game. A four-player split screen enables buddies to get rowdy at home, but the online universe is where things really get nuts. Xbox Live allows for as many as 24 players, four per Xbox, to play at once as warriors or medics, with the latter deciding whom to help and whom to ignore. Online stats are tracked, and players build their rank. The online play chain of command is determined by rank — pretty cool.
The sounds are as beautiful as the sights. A surround sound system is recommended, because it’s insane hearing bullets whizzing by from behind. Star Trek composer Joel Goldsmith’s orchestral score makes one wish everyday life were accompanied by one.
All in all, Call of Duty 3 is one hell of a game. For the full experience, buy a $4,000 HDTV and get on Xbox Live.
Editor’s Notes
The death of David Ayoob didn’t get a lot of headlines. He wasn’t famous in that way; he never ran for office or made speeches. But everyone on Cortland Avenue knew him, and when he died suddenly of a heart attack at 53, Bernal Heights — and the city — lost a great citizen.
Ayoob ran 4-Star Video, and he was the essence of a good small businessperson. He was active in the community and friendly to everyone and treated his employees well. (When he opened a second shop on Potrero Hill, he made two former employees partners in the business and let them run the new outlet.) His shop felt like the neighborhood — full of a diverse collection of people, with plenty of kids and dogs running around. Everyone was welcome.
As one post on a Bernal listserv put it, “With David it was never just about running a business. Bernal was his family. He was a larger-than-life character. The fabric of the neighborhood is weaker, a bit less comforting, and a lot less colorful without him.” Sup. Tom Ammiano added, “He had such a wonderful heart, so generous.” We’ll all miss him.
The memorial for Ayoob is Dec. 9, 2 p.m., at St. Kevin’s Catholic Church, 704 Cortland, SF.
I’m liking Frank Rich’s most recent analysis in the New York Times, which has President George W. Bush in effect talking to the walls, like Richard Nixon in the final days, and utterly losing touch with reality. It’s not clear that he even remembers why we got into this war in the first place: if he wanted control of Iraqi oil, he’s pretty clearly bungled any hope of that, and nothing in the current course is going to make the situation any better. If it was all about his ego, then that’s a lost cause.
My only problem with the Rich line (other than the fact that you can’t get it on the Times Web site without registering and subscribing, which is pretty damn stupid for the nation’s paper of record) is that it assumes Bush actually had a grip on reality in the first place.
I remember way back in the early days of the presidency of Ronald Reagan reading a piece by Carl Bernstein in the Washington Monthly that said something considered heresy in the nation’s capital: Reagan, he wrote, really wasn’t terribly intelligent and didn’t know what was going on half the time. Agree with his policies or disagree, it was a bit alarming to have someone in the White House who was really a pretty dim bulb (and thus was easily manipulated by the people around him — even before the Alzheimer’s hit).
Even today there’s this sense of respect and decorum in Washington that prevents people from just coming out and saying it: the president really doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Consider the other fascinating Bush item from the past week, his interaction with senator-elect Jim Webb, whose son is a Marine in Iraq. Bush (like an idiot) asked Webb, an outspoken war critic, “How’s your boy?” Webb responded appropriately: “I’d like to get them out of Iraq.” Bush’s lashback: “That’s not what I asked.”
Well, yes, it was what he asked. And the father of a kid who is risking his life for Bush’s insanity answered the same way a lot of fathers would: honestly. Somehow, in Washington, this is a big deal.
Hey: 2,900 US soldiers are dead. Time to get over the protocol.
Pelosi’s solid start
By Steven T. Jones
Now, the Guardian hasn’t always seen eye-to-eye with our congressional rep, incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. In fact, it’s fair to say the relationship has been downright chilly as she’s made compromises to attain her leadership post and we’ve wanted someone to take stronger stands against the unchecked rise of Bush-brand imperialism, corporatism, and theocracy.
But I’m happy to see her take a strong stand against letting the hawkish Jane Harman take over the House Intelligence Committee, making the solid choice of Rep. Silvestrie Reyes instead. And I’ve recently been convinced by Assemblyman Mark Leno that even her apparent gaffe of unsuccessfully backing John Murtha for the number two slot wasn’t the disastrous error in judgment that the mainstream media made it out to be.
Instead, Leno argues that it was a shrewd move that sent a strong message to her troops: if you support me, as Murtha has done on the war and other key issues, then I’ll support you (even in uphill fight where the media is waiting to mock me). Even if there’s only some truth to that view, it at least neutralizes the incident and offers some hope that the Democrats might to up to the challenges they face.
The next big test will be whether she allows John Conyers and other strong Bush critics to push for the release of records related to the Iraq War, which could turn up some truly damning data that would then test Pelosi’s pledge not to pursue impeachment. There’s still lots to do and pitfalls at every turn, but for now, I’m willing to hold my fire and offer my support. Go Nancy!
Questions to Byron Calame, public editor of the New York Times? Why won’t the Times and its Santa Rosa Press Democrat cover Project Censored?
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Carl Jensen, the founder of Project Censored, Peter Phillips, the current director, and I have been waiting anxiously for weeks now to see if the New York Times/Santa Rosa Press Democrat would answer our questions about why they once again censored and mangled the annual story of Project Censored, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year at Sonoma State University? (See previous blogs.) We heard nothing.
So I am posing the following questions to Byron Calame, public editor of the New York Times, who answers questions about Times coverage and policies in his twice monthly column in the Op ed section of the Week in Review in the Sunday Times.
l. Why in 30 years has the New York Times never covered nor written about Project Censored, a nationally recognized media criticism project locating the 25 most important stories that were overlooked, under-covered, or censored?
2. Why in 30 years has the local New York Times/Santa Rosa Press Democrat either censored or mangled Project Censored, a local journalism/media criticism project done at a local university by local professors and local students?
3. Why did the Press Democrat this year, on the 30th anniversary of the Project, continue its censorious policy by sending a reporter to the celebration, not to do a real story on the project, its stories, and its history, but to do what amounted to a hatchet job on the project via one story, Censored Story No. l8, “Physicist challenges official 9/ll story?”
4. Why won’t the Press Democrat/New York Times answer the questions and complaints from Jensen and Phillips (and the Guardian, as the publisher of the project each year) as to why it censors and/or mangles this major story every year? What is going on here?
5. After the problems with the reporting of Jayson Blair and Judith Miller et al, how do you recommend targets of Press Democrat/New York Times news policy complain effectively and get some fair and balanced news coverage of a major local story?
In my accompanying email note to Calame, I wrote, “The Guardian has been doing this story for years, front page, with our local version of censored stories, and sending it out to the alternative press across the country. It is one of our most widely read and highly respected stories of the year and people look forward to it as a major journalistic and academic gem of distinction. I hope you see this as the terribly important and relevant issue it is, since much of the mainstream press helped Bush march us into a war without end at the very time that Project Censored, and its censored stories, were providing an alternative and more realistic point of view.”
Note the supporting material below, this year’s Guardian story on Project Censored, and the archives of some 750 or so issues or stories over a 30 year period of time. B3
San Francisco Bay Guardian : Home Page
… BY AMANDA WITHERELL Rob Strange Project Censored
Bruce B3: The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times “censors” the annual Project Censored story.
Bruce B3: The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times: still no answers on why…
MONDAY
Dec. 4
Music
“A John Waters Christmas”
Celluloid sleaze merchant extraordinaire John Waters, director of such trash-culture gems as Pink Flamingos, will once again smear his delightfully irreverent brand of holiday cheer across the city. Waters also promises an evening of hip-shaking abandon, thanks to special guest Wanda Jackson, the Queen of Rockabilly. Having first toured with Elvis in 1955 and still tearing it up with incendiary country, gospel, and old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll, Jackson will surely keep the winter night warm and toasty. (Todd Lavoie)
8 p.m.
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
$40
www.livenation.com
Film
Beyond the Call
Ed Artis, Jim Laws, and Walt Ratterman had finished their tours in the Army and settled into comfortable careers in banking, medicine, and construction respectively – when duty called again. These middle-aged average joes traveled the world offering food, money, clothing, and medicine to refugee communities and schools in war-torn Afghanistan, Cambodia, Rwanda, and any other nation seeking their self-financed goodwill. Director Adrian Belic (Genghis Blues) treats thesee subjects with a neutrality that seems as ironic as their humanitarianism is saintly, and it’s this complexity that really makes Beyond the Call meaningful. (Sara Schieron)
In Bay Area theaters
SATURDAY
Dec. 2
Music
Norfolk and Western
Having featured paintings of Civil War soldiers and dusty old pianos on their album covers, Portland’s Norfolk and Western play rustic folk that evokes a slower epoch. Favoring a gentler, casual, front porchy orchestration organized around mandolin, banjo, dulcimer, violin, accordion, and similar less decibel-centric instruments, songwriters Adam Selzer and Rachel Blumberg and their troupe of bygone-era nostalgists beguile the listener with intimately recalled tales resembling pages from a scrapbook found in the attic. (Todd Lavoie)
With Corrina Repp and Victor Krummenacher
9 p.m.
Hotel Utah Saloon
500 Fourth St., SF
$8
(415) 546-6300
www.thehotelutahsaloon.com
www.norfolkandwestern.org
Event/Music/Visual Art/Film
“An Evening of Art, Fashion, Film, and Music”
Having trouble figuring out what gift to give the guy or girl who has everything? Look no further! Chillin’ Productions’ “An Evening of Art, Fashion, Film, and Music” will instantly lift you out of the pesky present-buying rut with inspirational ideas from innovative local talent. The incredible lineup boasts 60 fashion designers, 80 painters and photographers, 60 filmmakers, and six DJs to bring the noise, making your gift scouting more eventful. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)
8 p.m.
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
$6
(415) 625-8880
www.mezzanine.com
www.chillinproductions.com
Get Your (Conflict) Rocks Off
By Sarah Phelan
Diamonds, so the saying goes, are a girl’s best friend, especially during the holiday season, which is when 25 percent of the sales of these gems reportedly take place.
But does it make sense to give your sweetie a diamond as a symbol of your love, when so many of these brilliant sparklers have caused death and destruction for so many African souls?
“Conflict diamonds” are sparklers that are mined in war zones and sold to finance African paramilitary groups. But while that practice is said to be lessening, unethical child labor practices and unacceptable environmental degradation continues unabated in Africa, which is where 49 percent of the world’s diamonds originate. These harsh realities became clear to San Francisco resident Beth Gerstein when she was shopping for an engagement ring. The discovery led her to found Brilliant Earth, which specializes in independently mined diamonds of what she calls “ethical origin,” most of them hailing from Canada, which has some of the toughest labor standards in the world.
“Diamonds are supposed to be a symbol of love and commitment, but the industry has fueled a lot of civil wars, and many workers continue to live in abject poverty and work in dangerous and environmentally degrading conditions,” says Gerstein, noting that the movie Blood Diamond, which premiers Dec. 8, “has created a lot of defensive reaction within the diamond industry.”
“People should be proud to wear diamonds. An ethically-mined, conflict-free diamond will carry a “slight premium, but it’s still competitively priced,” says Gerstein, noting that if the whole notion of wearing diamonds turns you off, you can donate your previously worn diamonds to the Diamonds for Africa Fund, which Brilliant Earth cofounded with the Indigenous Land Rights Fund. Proceeds benefit the San Bushmen in Botswana, improve health conditions and education in villages in the Congo, and help children in Sierra Leone, who’ve been affected by conflict diamonds.
Get Your (Conflict) Rocks Off
By Sarah Phelan
Diamonds, so the saying goes, are a girl’s best friend, especially during the holiday season, which is when 25 percent of the sales of these gems reportedly take place.
But does it make sense to give your sweetie a diamond as a symbol of your love, when so many of these brilliant sparklers have caused death and destruction for so many African souls?
“Conflict diamonds” are sparklers that are mined in war zones and sold to finance African paramilitary groups. But while that practice is said to be lessening, unethical child labor practices and unacceptable environmental degradation continues unabated in Africa, which is where 49 percent of the world’s diamonds originate. These harsh realities became clear to San Francisco resident Beth Gerstein when she was shopping for an engagement ring. This discovery led her to found Brilliant Earth, which specializes in independently mined diamonds of what she calls “ethical origin,” most of them from Canada, which has some of the toughest labor standards in the world.
“Diamonds are supposed to be a symbol of love and commitment, but the industry has fueled a lot of civil wars, and many workers continue to live in abject poverty and work in dangerous and environmentally degrading conditions,” says Gerstein, noting that the movie Blood Diamond, which premiers Dec. 8, “has created a lot of defensive reaction within the diamond industry.”
“People should be proud to wear diamonds. An ethically-mined, conflict-free diamond will carry a slight premium, but it’s still competitively priced,” says Gerstein, who notes that if the whole notion of wearing diamonds turns you off, you can also donate your previously worn diamonds or family heirlooms to the Diamonds for Africa Fund, which Brilliant Earth cofounded with the Indigenous Land Rights Fund. Proceeds benefit the San Bushmen in Botswana, improve health conditions and education in villages in the Congo, and help children in Sierra Leone, who’ve been affected by conflict diamonds.
Drilling Mexico
› news@sfbg.com
Macuspana, Tabasco, Mexico — The billboard posted along the scrubby highway running east in the sultry southern state of Tabasco displays lush jungle, a sun-dappled iguana, and a flock of dazzling macaws. “We’re working for a better environment” the giant road sign radiates.
The leafy graphic contrasts starkly with the blighted scenery of this tropical state, where rivers have been contaminated, the fish envenomed, and the corn fields blasted by acid rain that drips from the polluted sky thanks to the efforts of Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), the national oil monopoly and its multiple transnational subcontractors. It is a testament to the fact that Tabasco holds Mexico’s largest land-based petroleum deposits.
But the billboard here in Macuspana — the swampy, oil-rich region settled by the Chontal tribe — was not posted by the Environmental Secretariat to inspire conservationism or even by PEMEX to burnish its tarnished image. No, this pristine scene is signed off by a familiar name for the United States: Halliburton de Mexico. The Houston-based petroleum industry titan’s south-of-the-border subsidiary is PEMEX’s largest subcontractor. Vice President Dick Cheney’s old megacorporation and the largest oil service provider on the planet has been doing business in Mexico for many years.
The privatization of PEMEX, nationalized in 1938 after depression-era president Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated Caribbean coast oil enclaves from Anglo American owners, was right at the heart of Mexico’s still-questioned July 2 presidential election. Right-winger Felipe Calderón, a former energy secretary, is committed to selling off Mexico’s diminishing oil reserves — or at least entering into joint agreements that would guarantee private corporations a substantial quotient of them (the reserves have only 10 more good years, according to the worst-case scenario).
On the other side of the presidential ledger, leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a native of Macuspana who many Mexicans believe actually won the presidency, advocates maintaining the state’s control over PEMEX, an entity that pays for more than 40 percent of the Mexican government’s annual budget, on the grounds that the oil wealth of the nation belongs to the Mexican people and no one else.
Knowing full well which side their bread was buttered on, transnationals like Halliburton rushed to support Calderón — as did Cheney, the corporation’s former CEO (1995–2000), and his running mate, George W. Bush. Both Cheney and Bush have long-standing ties to the Mexican oil industry. Bush’s daddy ran Zapata Offshore, a PEMEX subcontractor, back in the 1960s. His partner Jorge Diaz Serrano, a former PEMEX director, served prison time for an oil tanker kickback scheme. Cheney’s Halliburton somehow finagled its way into lucrative service contracts for the newly opened offshore Cantarell field (said to contain upward of 12 billion barrels) back in the 1990s.
How Halliburton got in on the ground floor smells fishy to National Autonomous University professor John Saxe-Fernandez, who tracks strategic resources. The Cantarell contracts were assigned while Cheney was running the show in Houston. At the same time, the Texas conglomerate was busy across the Atlantic allegedly bribing Nigerian oil officials, according to press reports and a French magistrate.
The truth is the debate about privatizing PEMEX is no longer much of a debate. PEMEX has long since subcontracted virtually its entire exploration and perforation divisions to transnationals such as Halliburton, Fluor-Daniels, and the San Francisco–based Bechtel, leaving PEMEX a virtual shell.
Cheney’s old outfit has grabbed the lion’s share of this billion-dollar prize. Between 2000 and 2005, Halliburton picked up 159 contracts with PEMEX’s Perforation and Exploration division for a total of $2.5 billion, about a quarter of PEMEX’s annual operating budget, according to Saxe-Fernandez. The contracts cover everything from drilling slant and vertical wells to maintaining offshore platforms to logging out a jungle for the drilling of 27 turnkey wells in Tabasco and Chiapas.
With 1,250 employees and thousands of contract workers, Halliburton de Mexico has offices in Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche (the fast-shrinking Cantarell operation); Reynosa Tamaulipas, where Cheney’s boys are helping to exploit the Burgos natural gas fields; and Poza Rica Veracruz, a region in which Standard Oil’s Harry Doherty and Lord Cowry (Weetman Pierson), owner of what eventually became British Petroleum, once ruled with an iron fist and where Halliburton is now combing through what is left of its old Chicontepec field.
Halliburton also maintains offices in Mexico City and Villahermosa Tabasco, from which it oversees its off- and onshore Caribbean domain. Mexico’s Gulf Coast is not Halliburton’s only Caribbean operation. The KBR (Kellogg Brown Root) division of Cheney’s conglom built 207 cells at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002 to house so-called enemy combatants.
Halliburton has had a boot planted in the rebel-ridden state of Chiapas since 1997, three years after the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (known in Mexico as the EZLN) rose up and declared war on the Mexican government after the conglom built a natural gas separation plant in the north of that southernmost state. In 2003, Halliburton won a $20 million contract to expand natural gas infrastructure at Reforma — autonomous Zapatista communities lie south and east of the Halliburton installations.
Both PEMEX’s and Cheney’s associates have their eyes on Chiapas — ample reserves lie under the floor of the Lacandon jungle in areas where the Zapatistas have established their caracoles, or public centers, according to studies by National Autonomous University political geographer Andrés Barreda. Indeed, the first battle between the EZLN and the Mexican military took place near a capped well at Nazaret in the canyons that lead down to the jungle floor near where the Zapatista Road to Hope (La Garrucha, the autonomous municipality of Francisco Gomez) now sits.
According to closely held PEMEX numbers unearthed by Houston oil investigator George Baker, Nazaret was putting out a million cubic feet of natural gas a day when it was capped back in the early 1990s. If Halliburton had been in the picture then, it probably would have picked up the contract, and Dick Cheney, an avid if erratic hunter, would have gotten a chance to exterminate many endangered Lacandon jungle species.
In a religious mood, Cheney once wondered out loud why God did not put the oil under democratic countries, and with that mission in mind, he has set out to democratize foreign oligarchies. His endeavor to bring democracy to Iraq has resulted in more than 50,000 Iraqi dead, civil war, devastation and destruction in every corner of the land, and the systematic sabotage of that nation’s petroleum infrastructure.
Now Cheney and his Halliburton associates say they are democratizing Mexico, having aided and abetted the stealing of the presidential election from López Obrador in favor of Calderón, who would privatize PEMEX. As a member of the Council of Communication, which groups together transnationals doing business in Mexico, Halliburton helped pay for a vicious TV campaign that featured defamatory hit pieces tagging López Obrador a danger to Mexico. Because only political parties can mount such campaigns, Halliburton’s participation was patently illicit, according to Mexico’s highest electoral tribunal.
Planted outside Halliburton de Mexico’s offices in a soaring skyscraper overlooking Paseo de Reforma, where López Obrador’s people would soon be encamped last summer, 80-year-old former oil worker Jacinto Guzman remembered the great strikes (his father was a striker) that had impelled Cárdenas to expropriate the Caribbean complexes where Halliburton now rules — and bemoaned the depredations of Cheney and others of his ilk against what belongs to the Mexican people.
Dressed in a wrinkled suit and hard hat, the old oil worker said he was even more vexed by Halliburton’s participation in the smear campaign to vilify López Obrador.
As he told me, “The gringos think they own our elections too.” SFBG
John Ross is the Guardian’s correspondent in Mexico. His latest book is ZAPATISTAS — Making Another World Possible: Chronicles of Resistance 2000–2006.
Plays of the year
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You may not have noticed, but an unprecedented theatrical experiment was launched nationwide last week. Its San Francisco segment unfolded the night of Nov. 23 before an audience of 80 to 100 people in a modest wood-shingled community center atop Potrero Hill, with the playwright who started it all in attendance.
Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays project — a national yearlong grassroots theatrical festival premiering a unique and audacious play-a-day cycle by one of the country’s foremost dramatic voices — took off at a benefit performance put on by the Z Space Studio as a group of 11 performers, directed by Lisa Steindler and director-actor Marc Bamuthi Joseph, unveiled the first seven playlets in the cycle.
The pieces (each no longer than 10 minutes) percolate with a mixture of mischievous invention, absurdist humor, pointed irony, and somber reflection on a variety of themes. In the first, for example, the aptly titled Start Here, an African American man gets vague encouragement and direction as he prepares, with some trepidation and confusion, to head out on a path as obscure, ambiguous, and mysterious as the history behind him. (The names of the characters, Arjuna and Krishna, invoke the tale of the Bhagavad Gita and overlay it on this seemingly American allegory.) In another piece, a young woman from a long line of “good-for-nothings” fails miserably to make nothing of herself — rejected by a crowd as inadequately worthless, she is forced to reinvent herself as something instead.
In Veuve Clicquot, which deftly reframes a comic situation into one of pathos and acute ambivalence, a seeming gourmand is in the process of ordering a sumptuous meal until his waiter balks at his pretension, and a chorus of women haunts him with the ethereal voice of his departed victim — whose own last meal, as it turned out, was nothing all that special.
Well acted and smartly blocked on and around a nearly bare stage (with some choice choreography added by six female dancers), the evening’s performances coincided with similar premieres around the country involving a wide range of local theater companies (more than 800 and counting) that have each signed on to produce a week’s worth of Parks’s yearlong cycle (which she composed daily for one full year, beginning in November 2002). Locally, the project is spearheaded by the Z Space Studio, Playwrights Foundation, and Cutting Ball Theater (the last of which recently staged a very fine production of Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World). The Bay Area manifestation of the 365 Days/365 Plays festival (which runs daily to Nov. 12, 2007) will ultimately involve more than 40 companies and 300 theater artists. This week’s shows are by the all-female Shakespeare company Women’s Will.
Parks — the Pulitzer Prize–winning creator of Topdog/Underdog, In the Blood, and The America Play, among other works (including screenplays and a novel) — was in a jocular and expansive mood during the Q&A. She explained her commitment to the idea of writing a play a day for one year as the product of an inclination to entertain any idea that comes into her head — “through the window of opportunity,” she laughed, nodding to the suspended prop window stage left that had featured as the thematic and titular center of one of that evening’s seven playlets.
Plays in the cycle beyond these first seven run a varied and quirky gamut of inspirational matter, with themes of war, family, and spiritual life among the leitmotifs. There are pieces that revisit some of the playwright’s favorite themes (Abe Lincoln comes around again), some that pay homage to people who happened to have passed on during the course of the year (Johnny Cash, for instance), others that take off from real-life encounters (one piece incorporates Parks’s meeting with Brad Pitt, for whom she was developing a screenplay). At the same time, the festival aims to do much more than showcase Parks’s enviable talents. Each company is free to stage the plays as it sees fit, giving the festival a panoramic scope that takes in the diversity of the whole theatrical scene. This kind of coordinated national grassroots effort — something Parks described as an extension of a process of “radical inclusion” — has probably not been seen since the days of the Federal Theater Project in the 1930s.
According to Parks, many of her best ideas for the stage have come from entertaining spontaneous ideas others would prudently dismiss after a gratifying chuckle. (Two African American brothers named Lincoln and Booth? Why not?) In her telling, it was her husband, blues musician Paul Oscher, who first responded affirmatively from the couch to her spontaneous idea to write a play a day for a year. “Yeah?” she asked. “You really think it’s a good idea?” That, apparently, was enough. The rest is theater history. SFBG
365 PLAYS/365 DAYS
Through Nov. 12, 2007
This week: Fri/24–Sun/26
Oakland Public Conservatory of Music
1616 Franklin, Oakl.
Pay what you can, $15–$25 suggested
(510) 420-1813
www.zspace.org/365plays.htm
www.365days365plays.com
Guilty of independent journalism
OPINION The pogrom against independent journalists who refuse to conform to corporate media definitions of what a reporter should be continues full throttle. The murder of Indymedia correspondent Brad Will on Oct. 27 on the barricades in Oaxaca by gunmen in the employ of that southern Mexican state’s bloodthirsty governor segues into the denial of the courts to release 24-year-old Josh Wolf from prison during the life of a federal grand jury.
Wolf is charged with refusing to turn over video clips of an anarchist anticapitalist march on Mission Street during which San Francisco’s finest beat the living shit out of protesters (and at which one cop claims to have been maimed).
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is now insisting that it will entertain no further motions in the case, which insures Wolf will earn a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-serving imprisoned reporter in US history.
The callous and cynical response of corporate media (with some notable exceptions) to these outrages has been as grievous as the crackdown by the courts and the death squads on independent journalists. The New York Times and its accomplices — including the New Times version of the Village Voice — insinuate that Will was less than a journalist. Will, the corporados cluck, was a tree sitter and a squatter, a troublemaker rather than a young man who reported on trouble.
Similarly, Josh Wolf is often treated as a postadolescent blogger — as if blogging were not reportage — and an anarcho-symp unworthy of the concern of serious journalists who graduated from famous J-schools.
Compare how the plights of these two brave young journalists are being spun with that of the notorious Judith Miller. Miller, whose 11 mendacious front-page New York Times stories on Saddam Hussein’s fictitious weapons of mass destruction helped justify the Bush invasion that has now taken 650,000 Iraqi lives, was jailed for refusing to give up the name of a friendly neocon who outed a CIA operative the White House did not cotton to. I submit that Miller is as much an activist as Will and Wolf — she’s just on the wrong side of the barricades.
When I was a younger fool just getting started in the word trade, I was sent off to federal prison, much like Wolf. I was the first US citizen to be jailed for refusing induction in the Vietnam War military. I wrote my first articles while imprisoned at Terminal Island Federal Penitentiary in San Pedro and helped formulate a convicts committee against US intervention (everywhere), for which I was regularly tossed in the hole, the prison within a prison. Jail was fertile turf in which to learn how to write.
When, finally, I was kicked out of the joint, the parole officer who had made my life hell for a year walked me out to the big iron gate at TI and snarled, “Ross, you never learned how to be a prisoner.”
Brad Will never learned how to be a prisoner either, and neither will, I trust, Josh Wolf. All of us, both inside this business and out, owe these two valiant reporters a great debt for their sacrifices in defense of freedom of the press.
Live, act — and report back — like them! SFBG
John Ross
John Ross, whose latest volume, ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World Possible — Chronicles of Resistance 2000–2006, has just been published by Nation Books, teaches a seminar on rebel journalism at San Francisco’s New College.
Gimme back my Bone?
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When pressed to define obscenity, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously opined, “I know it when I see it.” For me, a more honest answer would go something like “I know it when I masturbate to it.”
Rock music, like smut, offers an equally simple metric for discerning authenticity: if listening to a band inevitably leads to a stoned argument about the fighting prowess of Bruce Lee, then it is probably real rock. I’ve debated so many Bruce Lee combat hypotheticals while listening to Black Sabbath — Bruce Lee versus genius hammerhead shark, Bruce Lee versus Loma Prieta earthquake, one-armed Bruce Lee versus Willy Wonka — that I never question their place as the supreme suicide-inducing, vengeance-advocating rock band.
The biggest Bay Area radio station that claims to rock is 107.7 the Bone. The Bone consciously sells itself as “classic rock that rocks.” When I moved to San Francisco in 2001, it was the only station that reliably got the Led out. It played a ton of Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath — all the bands that scared me as a small boy because I knew in my heart they possessed evil powers and could, with their music, summon from the soil of the Amazon rainforest an army of cloned Adolf Hitlers. The Bone always comforted me, because it — along with Madalyn Murray O’Hare, pony kegs, bringing M-80s to school, and backward masking — inhabited the same demon-haunted rock-metal world I lived in as a frightened but fascinated child.
FLIRTING WITH DISASTER AND LADY REEBOK
So I’ll never forget where I was the first time I heard the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” on the Bone. It was 2 a.m. earlier this year, and I was driving west on Fell Street at 60 mph, my 1986 convertible LeBaron catching the timed lights one second after they turned green (Fell’s timed lights work at 30, 60, even 120 mph). I wanted rock and prayed for the Bone to twist me up a threefer of Ronnie James Dio. Instead, I found myself thrust into a Lady Reebok ad: vaguely self-infatuated and optimistic about everything but nothing in particular. I defensively smashed my car into a parked Cooper Mini, did a hundred push-ups and sit-ups next to the twisted wreckage, and ran off into the night. As with all time-bifurcating events — 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, being told my seventh-grade “sweats” were actually parachute pants — it’s often hard to remember what life was like before.
Joe Rock, the Bone’s most metal-friendly DJ and assistant program director, told me recently that the station tweaked its format following a 2004 listener-driven “Classic Rock A–Z Weekend” that saw requests for bands like Pearl Jam and Temple of the Dog supplant classic-rock lifers like Derek and the Dominoes and Bad Company. The switch from “metal-oriented classic rock,” the station’s previous Arbitron-monitored format, to “heritage rock,” a mix of old metal, new guitar-based grunge and post-grunge, and both old-school and contemporary Reebok rock, elicited a mild-to-moderate shitstorm from old-school Boneheads.
Why change the formula? I think the economics of commercial radio came into play. Few listeners in the 18-to-34-year-old demographic really care about Deep Purple deep tracks anymore, so the Bone started dropping in Staind and Godsmack amid Jimi Hendrix and Ozzy Osbourne. If you’re an old-school Bonehead, the change means that now you only hear KISS once in a while, unless you count all the time you and Strutter, your albino python, lock yourselves in your room and listen to every single KISS song on tape, vinyl, CD, CD box set, digitally remastered CD, and digitally remastered CD box set. If, however, you believe Stone Temple Pilots and Buckcherry are where Ted Nugent would have ended up if he didn’t OD on elk jerky and NRA propaganda, then you feel much like John Hinckley probably did after his psychologist let him watch Taxi Driver on DVD: deeply appreciative but still wondering what all the fuss is about.
THE SONG NOT THE SAME?
The mythology of classic rock holds that everything used to be one big fantasy sequence from The Song Remains the Same: coked-up druids, trashed Hilton suites, and roadies deep into black magic. The reality is that the vast majority of classic rock is nerdy or nonthreatening. You’re more likely to hear Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, Yes, Journey, and Jethro Tull on an Aflac commercial than see them carved into the arm of a berserker teen. The Bone has always needed to appeal to men and women, hawks and doves, parolees and nonparolees. Until the change in format, ubiquitous classic rock loser ballads like the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” and Pink Floyd’s “Mother” represented the shadow self of the average Aleister Crowley–worshiping Bonehead. After the tweak the Bone forced its aging listeners to ask themselves a fundamental and humbling question: “Am I getting too old for this I-Roc?” Bone listeners older than 40 — who weren’t impressionable suckers when music, fashion, advertising, and public relations merged with movies, television, and politics in the late ’80s — had to swallow a bitter pill: it’s really all the same now, just younger.
The old Bone — despite its marketing and popularity with grown men who paint their faces silver and black and dress up as Norse war gods for their children’s Pop Warner football games — always played an embarrassing amount of lame music. For every “Dirty Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap)” or “Kashmir,” there were two pieces of shit like “Gimme Three Steps” and “China Grove.” The new Bone basically employs the same formula: Rainbow, Metallica, and Alice in Chains but now with acoustic Nickelback and blink-182 thrown in for the women and the younger sensitive guys.
This, objectively, is no wimpier than the old wimpy stuff, just more corporate and more easily marketable. The new Bone plays songs that strippers born after 1984 can lap dance to and still seem credible to their under-30 clientele. A lot of the new Bone stuff — by so-called active rock bands such as Audioslave and Velvet Revolver — easily out-rocks anything by Don Henley — and anything he ever touched.
Sometimes it’s better to just sound good than appear consistent. What rocks for me doesn’t necessarily rock for my next-door neighbor, unless Alice Cooper is now living in a pupuseria on 24th Street and Harrison. As for the ultimate judge, Bruce Lee’s legacy, I say the Bone still facilitates a Bay Area dialogue, even if it’s only seen Enter the Dragon and the first 10 minutes of Game of Death. SFBG
Introducing: the Telling Quote (the TQ):”Ross, you never learned to be a prisoner”
I have always had a weakness for one-liners and telling quotes, which I call the Telling Quote (the QD).
For example, Tim Redmond gave me a good one just a few minutes ago. He said that in the movie on Elliot Ness of fighitng gangsters in Prohibiition Chicago, Ness was asked what he would do once Prohibiton was over.
“I’d have a drink,” Ness said.
I spotted two quotes I liked in the tomorrow’s Guardian. The first is from the cartoonist Tom Tomorrow and his prescient penguin, who is asked to answer the favorite conservative question to the liberal on the disaster of Iraq: “What’s your solulion?” Responds the penguin: “We take the two hundred million dollars a day we’re currently pouring into Iraq and we funnel it all into an intensive top-secret project to deliver the world’s first working machine…and then we go back to 200l and pay some goddamned attention to everyone who opposed this idotic war of choice from the start. THAT’S MY SOLUTION.”
Memo to the New York Times and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York
Times who have been censoring Project Censored: Take note (see other blogs).
John Ross writes in an op ed column about the jailed Josh Wolf and the murdered Brad Will (see link below) as examples of the “pogrom against independent journalists who refuse to conform to corporate media definitions of what a reporter should be.” He says that in the case of Will, murdered on the barricades in Oazaca, Mexico, by gunmen employed by the provincial governor, “the New York Times and its accomplices–including the New Times version of the Village Voice–intimate that Will was less than a journalist…a troublemaker rather than a young man who reported on trouble.” Ross points out he himself was once a trouble-making jailed journalist, for being the first U.S. citizen to be jailed for refusing induction into the Vietnam War military, and that he formed convict committee against U.S. intervention and wrote about it. When he was finally kicked out of jail, the parole officer who made his life hell for a year walked him to the gate and gave him a goodbye snarl:
“Ross, you never learned how to be a prisoner.”
Ross’s point to the New York Times: the Times’ Judith Miller, with “ll mendacious
front-page New York Times stories on Saddam Hussein’s fictitious weapons of mass destruction (that) helped justify the Bush invasion” was just as much an “activist” as Wolf, Will, and Ross himself. B3
Guilty of independent journalism by John Ross
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times: still no answers on why it once again censored and mangled Project Censored and its stories on Bush and Iraq et al
On Sept. 10, 2003, while the New York Times and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and affiliated papers were running Judith Miller’s stories making the case for the Iraq War and then seeking to justify it, the Guardian published the annual Project Censored list of censored stories.
Our front page had a caricature of Bush, standing astride the globe holding a U.S. flag with a dollar sign, and a headline that read, “The neocon plan for global domination–and other nine other big stories the mainstream press refused to cover in 2002.”
The number one story was “The neoconservative plan for global domination.” Our introduction to the timely censored package made the critical point: “If there’s one influence that has shaped world-wide politics over the past year, it’s the extent to which the Bush administration has exploited the events of Sept. ll, 200l, to solidify its military and economic control of the world at the expense of democracy, true justice, and the environment. But President George W. Bush hasn’t simply been responding to world events. The agenda the administration has followed fits perfectly with a clearly defined plan that’s been in place for a decade.”
In many cases, we noted, the neocon story and the other censored stories laying out the dark side of the Bush administration and its drumbeat to war got little or no play–or else were presented piecemeal without any attempt to put the information in context. (The number two story was “Homeland security threatens civil liberties.” Number three: “U.S. illegally removes pages from Iraq U.N. report.” Number four: “Rumsfeld’s plan to provoke terrorists.” Number seven: “Treaty busting by the United States.” Number eight: “U.S. and British forces continue use of depleted uranium weapons despite massive evidence of negative health effects.” Number nine: “In Afghanistan poverty, women’s rights, and civil disruption worse than ever.”)
Project Director Peter Phillips told us at that time, “The stories this year reflect a clear danger to democracy and governmental transparency in the U.S.–and the corporate media’s failure to alert the public to these important issues. The magnitude of total global domination has to be the most important important story we’ve covered in a quarter century.” In our summary of the neocon plan, we wrote that “it called for the United States to diversify its military presence throughout the world, offered a policy of preemption, argued for the expansion of U.S. nuclear programs while discouraging those of other countries, and foresaw the need for the United States to act alone, if need be, to protect its interests and those of its allies.”
And we then asked the critical and timely question. “Sound familiar?”
In that critical year of 2003, only months after the ill-fated Bush invasion of Iraq, the timely and relevant Censored project and stories were not published in the New York Times and the Press Democrat and affiliated papers either censored or mangled the coverage. This year, as Iraq slid into civil war, U.S. war dead rose toward 3,000, and the U.S. public was well ahead of the media in turning against the war, the New York Times should have finally recognized its annual mistake and published the Project Censored story. It didn’t (and it never has). The Santa Rosa Press Democrat should have been all over the story, since it was a local and national story out of nearby Sonoma State University, it was reseached by local professors and students, and it was the project’s 30th anniversary highlighted with a special conference at the school. Instead, the PD did a front page hatchet job on the story and then refused to run a decent number of complaining letters, according to Phillips.
However, The PD did run an op ed piece in this morning’s paper by Phillips (see link below). Which is to the good.
But the paper never answered any of the questions and complaints submitted by Phillips, the project founder Carl Jensen (retired and living in nearby Cotati), or the Guardian (see previous blogs and links). Why? No explanation.
The key point is that the Times and the PD have once again demonstrated in 96 point Tempo Bold the point of Project Censored and the value of alternative voices.
Postscript: More impertinent advice: TheTimes papers that marched us into war, with their flawed front page reporting and backup editorials, ought at minimum to start covering the project and the stories and the voices who had it right before, during, and after Bush committed us to the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. Repeating: the PD ought to invite Jensen, Phillips,and the Project in for a chat and discuss why they have so much trouble handling a local story. B3
Josh Wolf, petition denied, to remain in jail until July
By Sarah Phelan
It looks like Josh Wolf, the jailed freelance videographer and blogger, will be stuck inside Dublin Federal Correctional Institute until July 2007.
That at least is the word from Wolf’s lead attorney Martin Garbus today, following news that the 9th Circuit has denied Wolf’s petition for a rehearing in USA v Josh Wolf.
Wolf’s legal team asked for a rehearing on the basis that the 9th Circuit court, which previously ruled that Wolf does not the right to withhold video outtakes of a July 8, 2005 anarchist protest turned violent, had however granted that privilege in the Jaffee case, when a police officer didn’t want the family of a fatal shooting victim to access notes from a series of counseling sessions that the officer in question underwent following the shooting.
Evidently, the 9th Circuit didn’t agree. Not only did it deny the petition and rule that the motion to reinstate bail is moot, it also wrote that “no further filings shall be accepted in this case.”
Sounds like Wolf will be playing lots of Scrabble and reading lots of books until next summer.
Meanwhile, Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wade have yet to serve any jail time for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury that’s investigating who leaked them secret testimony of Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and others in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative scandal.
What’s ironic about this discrepancy between how the BALCO reporters and Wolf are being treated is that the feds could at least argue a connection to the BALCO case, whereas the protest that Wolf covered and which subsequently sparked their interest took place in San Francisco and should, by all rights, have been investigated locally.
Could it be that these differences are purely a case of the corporate media getting preferential treatment over freelancers? Perhaps. But questions as to whether reporters are shielded from revealing their sources date back to 1972, when US Supreme Court Justice Byron White ruled, in Branzburg v. Hayes, that reporters must answer relevant questions that are asked in a valid grand jury investigation.
Since then, judges largely ignored Branzburg, believing that it’s important to balance the First Amendment rights of journalists against the public right’s to know. But then came Bush, 9/11 and the “war on terror,” at which point First Amendment freedoms began to take a back seat.
Consider that in 2003, a federal appeals court, citing Branzburg, ordered Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune reporters to divulge recordings of interviews of a witness in a terrorism case. The same case was made in the federal investigation as to who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame, and New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail in 2005 for refusing to testify in that case, which resulted perjury and obstruction of justice charges against Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide, Lewis I. “Scooter” Libby. And this year, the US Justice Department has been investigating whether classified information was illegally leaked to the Washington Post about the secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, as well as who told the New York Times about President Bush’s secret plan to eavesdrop on Americans. All of which could be seen as an effort to suppress leaks to journalists.
To add to the confusion, accusations have been made in the BALCO case that it was the federal government which leaked the testimony to the Chronicle reporters. While those accusations have not been proven to date, the truth is that the feds certainly have benefited from the Chron’s revelations, given that Major League Baseball have subsequently adopted stricter steroid rules and the feds have been able to push through harsher penalties for steroid dealers.
What’s striking about the path to Josh Wolf’s incarceration is how he became the target of a federal investigation although his case had no obvious connection to the feds. So far, the feds have trotted out disturbingly vague arguments about how they should be involved because of alleged arson to a squad car that may or may not have been purchased with federal funds. But the truth is that arson was never proven and all the SFPD reports mention is a broken rear taillight, which Wolf’s mother has repeatedly offered to pay for, if that would get her son out of jail.
In fact, court filings show that the police’s real interest is finding out who attacked and seriously hurt an SFPD officer in the course of the protest—a valid concern and one that SF District Attorney Kamala Harris’ office should be handling. Instead, the feds were called in, triggering justifiable fears in Josh Wolf, who the FBI has questioned about his anarchist tendencies, that the real reason that he’s sitting in jail, is that the feds want him to release his video outtakes and identify the anarchists, who lifted up their ski masks and spoke directly into Josh’s camera, before the violence went down. And then there’s the fact that the portion of Wolf’s tape that he posted online at his blog and got picked up by several TV stations does not paint a flattering portrait of the police.
Interestingly, while Wolf has argued that journalists should not be forced into becoming investigative tools of the government, both the SFPD and the US Attorney General’s Office have voiced doubts to the Guardian as to whether Wolf is a “real” journalist, citing his direct involvement with the anarchist cause as well as the fact that he is not employed by a media outlet. These arguments should sound the alarm bells of freelancers nationwide.
Meanwhile, Wolf sits in jail, where he is only allowed 15-minute phone interviews with the media, thereby preventing live visual images and recordings of his voice to be aired across the nation, effectively blacking him out of the consciousness of all those who don’t get their news from the print media. And when the federal grand jury expires in July, there’s a chance that a new grand jury might demand that Wolf release his outtakes and testify or rot in jail for another year.
It’s a sad day for journalists, corporate and freelance, and the First Amendment.
The new media offensive for the Iraq War. Why the Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times ought to stop “censoring” and mangling Project Censored and its annual list of censored stories on Iraq and Bush et al
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Norman Solomon, a syndicated columnist who appears on the Guardian website, wrote a chilling column this week
on how the “American media establishment has launched a major offensive against the option of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.”
He noted that the “heaviest firepower is now coming from the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA–the front page of the New York Times. The present situation is grimly instructive for anyone who might wonder how the Vietnam War could continue for years while opinion polls showed that most Americans were against it. Now, in the wake of midterms elections widely seen as a rebuke to the Iraq war, powerful media institutions are feverishly spinning against a pullout of U.S. troops.”
Solomon cited a Nov. l5 front page piece by Michael Gordon under the headline “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say.” Gordon then appeared hours later on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, “fully morphing into an unabashed pundit as he declared that withdrawal is ‘simply not realistic,'” Solomon said.
“If a New York Times military-affairs reporter went on television to advocate for withdrawal of U.S. troops as unequivocally as Gordon advocated any such withdrawal during his Nov. l5 appearance on CNN, he or she would be quickly reprimanded–and probably would be taken off the beat by the Times hierarchy. But the paper’s news department eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the basic world views of the country’s national security state.”
Solomon’s key point: “That’s how and why the Times front page was so hospitable to the work of Judith Miller during the lead-up to the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. That’s how and why the Times is now so hospitable to the work of Michael Gordon.”
And so it is not surprising that the New York Times and its Santa Rosa daily have been so inhospitable through the years to Project Censored, housed nearby at Sonoma State University. (See my previous blog and the scathing criticism by founder Carl Jensen and current director Peter Phillips of PD/NYT coverage of the 30th anniversary project and conference.)
I asked Jensen about the PD and Times record of covering what ought to be a top annual local and national press story. “At first,” Jensen said, “the PD merely ignored the Project. Then, after Newsweek ran a column about it, the PD was embarrassed into covering it. Which they did, using the annual results as an excuse to criticize me for being a liberal, left-wing agitator. Finally, they just started to run one story a year, or sometimes none, announcing the results. This year they didn’t even bother to announce the results for the 30th anniversary of the project. Instead, they did Paul Payne’s hit piece about Steve Jones. To my knowledge, and a Lexis-Nexis search, the New York Times has never run an article about the project.”
The PD has also not answered my impertinent questions about their censor-or-mangle coverage, which I emailed to the reporter, editors, and publisher.
Let us remember that IF Stone, in his famous IF Stone’s Weekly, exposed in l964 the Gulf of Tonkin scam only days after President Johnson used it as the excuse to expand U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And ever after he led the journalistic charge brilliantly against the war. It took years and tens of thousands of dead American soldiers for the New York Times (and the other big “liberal” papers, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post) to figure out that Stone was right and change their “we can’t get out now” news and editorial policies in support of the war. If Project Censored had been going at that time, Stone and his powerful little four page publication would have had major stories on the Censored list every year.
My impertinent advice to the Post Democrat and the New York Times: if you are are going to run Jayson Blair and Judith Miller and Michael Gordon and Paul Payne, then you sure as hell ought to be giving serious regular coverage to Project Censored at Sonoma State University and its annual roster of major “censored” stories the New York Times, PD, and the mainstream press don’t cover properly. Why not start by running Phillips’ op ed piece and inviting Jensen, Phillips, and their Project Censored crew into the PD for a full editorial conference and a podcast question and answer session? B3
The new Iraq-war media offensive
How powerful institutions like The New York Times are feverishly spinning against a pullout of U.S. troops
BY NORMAN SOLOMON
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times “censors” the annual Project Censored story. Why? Some impertinent questions for the Press Democrat by Bruce B. Brugmann
The Business of Dirty Nukes
By Sarah Phelan
In the war on terror, even cats are suspect. Or at least their kitty litter is.
That’s because of trace amounts of uranium and other suspect stuff that apparently triggers alarms at ports worldwide
But now comes news of better technology–and bigger profits—in the war on terror.
Today, the Bay Area-based Veritainer unveiled equipment at the Port of Oakland which can, according to Veritainer CEO John Alioto, detect “dirty bombs” in shipping containers
Yes, we know that Oakland is a domestic port, and thus less likely to be the site of smuggled nukes, but the Veritainer folks say they are using Oakland as a test case.
No, that doesn’t mean they’ll be bringing in dirty bombs to Oakland so they can test their technology. Instead, they’ll be bringing in small sources of naturally occurring nuclear material, such as americium, which is found in smoke detectors (and was, ironically enough, named for the Americas).
“This is to protect ports around the world from the low probability but high impact of nuclear smuggling,” said Veritainer Chairman and CEO John Alioto, who plans to charge $20 per container to screen for dirty bombs, provided his company gets certified by the Department of Homeland Security in January 2007.
In other words, Veritainer stands to make oodles of bucks, given that Oakland handles 2 million containers a year, L.A. handles 6 million and Rotterdam handles 20 million. Add to that the fact that radiation screening is now required at international ports, thanks to the Safe Port Act which President Bush signed in October, and you get the picture.
Right now, according to John Alioto, the customer is the government, with the National Nuclear Safety Agency setting aside $2.5 billion to cover initial costs.
Alioto also told me that there’ll be no danger to port workers from this technology,
“The equipment is purely passive,” he said. “Unlike dentists’ X-ray equipment, this is passive, purely detective equipment. So, there’ll be no shooting of radiation at the waterfront!” (The International Longshoremen and local residents will be happy to hear that.)
“Unlike radiation portal monitors, which were called kitty litter detectors because they couldn’t differentiate between dangerous and non-dangerous sources, these devices can identify isotopes, and say, yes, it americium. At which point, port officials can check the ship’s manifest and see if it’s certified to carry smoke detectors. And eventually, the machine will be able to do manifest comparison itself, too.”
So, next year, if you’re riding a ferry to Jack London Square, chances are port officials will be monitoring radioactive levels at the port, 24/7. So, leave the kitty litter at home.
WEDNESDAY
Nov. 15
Event/Performance
“The Wicked Stage: Horror Theatre in Jazz Age London”
Join copresenters Thrillpeddlers (voted Best Live Onstage Bloodbath in our Best of the Bay 2006 issue) and the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum for “The Wicked Stage.” Featuring professor Michael Wilson, coauthor of the forthcoming This Troublesome Theatre: London’s Grand Guignol and the Performance of Horror, this multimedia presentation will delve into the history of London’s take on this Parisian theatrical import. As fans of Thrillpeddlers’ annual Shocktoberfest are aware, Grand Guignol combines belly laughs with bloody splats, creating a roller coaster of emotional extremes. For a fitting climax to the evening’s entertainment, Thrillpeddlers will perform a scene from The Old Women, the English version of the Grand Guignol classic A Crime in the Madhouse. (Nicole Gluckstern)
7 p.m.
San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum
War Memorial Veterans Bldg., fourth floor
401 Van Ness, SF
$10
(415) 255-4800
www.sfpalm.org
www.thrillpeddlers.com
Music
Marc-André Hamelin
The San Francisco Symphony continues to tickle our tympana with programs of rare intelligence and far-out aural adventurousness. From Nov. 15 to 18, Montreal’s hugest pianist, Marc-André Hamelin, dazzles in the debut of überhip South African composer Kevin Volans’s oceanic mini-epic, Atlantic Crossing – 14,000 notes in 23 minutes! That’s a lot of plink-plonk for your moola. Also on tap: Russian legend Dmitry Shostakovich’s famous, ecstatic, gloves-off slap to Joseph Stalin’s face, the Symphony No. 5 in D Minor. Soviet smackdown never sounded so good. (Marke B.)
Wed/15 and Fri/17-Sat/18, 8 p.m.
Thu/16, 2 p.m.
Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness, SF
$25-$110
www.sfsymphony.org