War Archives — Page 79 of 117 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

John Jasperse Company

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March 31, 2009

PREVIEW When New York choreographer John Jasperse presented his company in its local debut in 2004, the severe and pared-down choreography of his multimedia piece California looked more New England Puritanism than California hedonism. Good for him, I remember thinking, for not having bought into popular stereotypes. Still the omnipresent leaf blower and the dancers’ self-involvement needled me. No such hint of a cultural disconnect is likely to trouble his Misuse liable to prosecution, which takes its name from the milk crates we use to store and move our belongings. The work includes a live score by Mills College composer Zeena Parkins and a found-objects design for which YBCA has sent out a call for plastic coat hangers. One wonders: when Jasperse, who has been choreographing for more than 20 years, created Misuse in 2007 and set a zero budget for design, did he have an inkling for the rough waters the country was about to enter? In retrospect, the decision has proven visionary. Misuse‘s original impetus came from a desire to hold up a mirror to a society in which Judge Judy makes more money than all nine of the Supreme Court justices combined, or in which the war in Iraq costs more than four times per day than the annual budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. No doubt, if Jasperse made Misuse today, he could come with other horror figures picked straight from the headlines. But ultimately more important than the topical resonance of this work is the integrity and refinement of Jasperse’s choreography — which is his own, yet made for us.

JOHN JASPERSE COMPANY. Thurs/2–Sat/4, 8 p.m., $25–$30. Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 978-2787. www.ybca.org

Ang Lee: Let’s talk about sex?

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March 26, 2009

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By Danica Li

Ang Lee and James Schamus have, in tandem, produced and directed nearly a dozen movies. They count between them a trio of Taiwanese family dramas, a civil war epic, an Austen-derived austerely British comedy of manners, an encounter with the Hulk, and a Chinese-language film about flying warriors and a green sword of destiny that grossed a whopping 200 million bucks worldwide. The duo took the stage at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall recently, in conversation with the Berkeley English Department’s Professor Jeffrey Knapp. The premiere topic of conversation for the first half-hour? Sex.

I diagnose this as program coordinators On the Same Page‘s gesture at edginess and being “with it” — or at least as an effort at warding off the buttoned-up stodginess and rehearsed, by-rote deliveries that have plagued past presentations (see: Stephen Hawking, Garry Wills). For starters, the audience was treated to a presentation clip in which a series of explicit splices from 2007’s Lust, Caution were cross-cut with characters from Lee’s other films expressing distaste and affecting grimaces, a dynamic that ended with a raunchily symbolic big bang (taken from 2003’s Hulk). It was enough to provoke a smattering of laughs from the audience, and was an easy enough segue into the first question: Why do so many of Lee’s films involve sex, as it were?

An unguarded moment from Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution

Appetite: Hookahs on Mission, gnocchi deals, Midi in FiDi, and more

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March 24, 2009

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A delicious-looking dish at Midi. See “Openings” below.

As long-time San Francisco resident and writer, I’m passionate about this city and obsessed with exploring its best food-and-drink spots, deals, events and news, in every neighborhood and cuisine type. I have my own personalized itinerary service and monthly food/drink/travel newsletter, The Perfect Spot, and am thrilled to share up-to-the minute news with you from the endless goings-on in our fair city each week on SFBG. View the last Appetite installment here.

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NEW RESTAURANT AND BAR OPENINGS

Whew! There are a slew of openings this week. Here’s a rundown of four and stay tuned for many more …

Missionites’ new all-day cafe-wine bar-resto combo: The Corner
Weird Fish, the Mission’s quirky, sustainable seafood joint, debuted a sister spot next door last week, The Corner, which should begin all day hours this week. Seeking to be all things to all people, it’s a cafe with wifi and Four Barrel coffee in the am, BLT Paninis at lunch, and at night, DJs, unique wines by the glass and dishes like duck and medjool dates or fennel-crusted pork chops.
2199 Mission, SF.
415-932-6939

Mission take two: Morak Lounge, a new Moroccan hookah bar
Sixteenth and Valencia has no lack of global eating options, all within a couple block radius. What it hasn’t had up till now is a chic, Marrakech-style lounge where you can smoke a double-apple flavored hookah while sampling Middle Eastern bites (the usual: hummus, baba ghanoush, skewers) or Cardamom-infused martinis. Enter Morak Lounge. Behind bronze doors, bright curtains and comfy cushions equal a sultry space to linger and puff away long into the night (open until big city hours of 3am on weekends).
3126 16th St., SF
415-626-5523

Midi: FiDi’s new French Asian restaurant
Joie de Vivre luxury hotels debuted a new restaurant this past weekend, open for lunch and dinner with a downstairs bar open all day for the Financial District set. Midi, with Chef Michelle Mah of Ponzu at the helm, has been in the works for two years but is finally open in the former Perry’s space. The French Asian fare reinvents classics like duck leg confit with a ginger-rhubarb jus, with Euro-Asian offerings from Hawaiian kampachi crudo to pork rillettes with Dijon mustard. It all goes down nicely post-work (or during a lunch break) with a Lavender French 75 cocktail or with one of seven craft beers or 15 wines by the glass.
185 Sutter Street
415-835-6400
www.midisanfrancisco.com

Barlata, tapas bar from B44 chef, debuts Oakland
Chef Daniel Olivella has helmed Belden Lane’s mainstay, B44, for years… and still will. But he’s branching out with an anticipated East Bay locale, Barlata. Experience Spain from the mile-long list of tapas, bite-sized pinchos and paellas to share. Don’t forget Spanish wines, sherries or (non-Spanish) beers as you join friends at the marble bar or communal table to dine on boquerones, garlic soup, grilled sardines or oxtail in red wine sauce.
4901 Telegraph Ave, Oakl.
510-450-0678
www.barlata.com

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EVENTS

March 26: Wine Enthusiast magazine’s Toast of the Town
Another pricey deal, this one’s your chance to pretend that you’re the elite, sipping wine for a local charity at the classy War Memorial Opera House for Wine Enthusiast mag’s Toast of the Town gala. Dress up and splurge for the VIP gig at 5pm or buy slightly more reasonable 7pm tix to sip wines from over 70 producers and taste bites from 30 restaurants like Ana Mandara, Campton Place, Millennium, Rivoli, Shanghai 1930 and Slanted Door, to name a few. A charity auction for SF Food Bank gives some meaning to your decadent imbibement.
7pm
$75 Early Bird Online/$95 at the door
War Memorial Opera House
401 Van Ness Avenue
415-829-7530
www.wineenthusiast.com/toast

March 28: Whiskies of the World is back as part of Artisanal Spirits Fest
How can you not love that San Fran has been the setting for the unique Whiskies of the World celebration for 10 years now? Not only are there classes on Cigar Making or Mixology (using, what else? Whiskies), but the setting is downright idyllic. As the sun sets from aboard the San Francisco Belle, smoke your cigar (BYO or buy there) as you roam the deck while Celtic pipe and drum music plays, and sipping whiskies is the collective activity. Sampling booths cover three floors of the boat, staffed by spirits experts from distillers to blenders, while a dinner buffet shores up the stomach for all that imbibing. On top of whiskies, the Indpendent Spirits Fest portion means there’s also local vendors of other types of spirits like St. George Spirits, Charbay, Anchor Steam, Square One, and Osocalis. It’s pricey, yes, but I can think of fewer more enjoyable ways to go…
Sat/28, 6pm, $115-$120; additional classes: $15-20
San Francisco Belle, Pier 3
610-326-8151
celticmalts.com/events.asp

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DEALS

FREE Monday morning coffee at Four Barrel
I didn’t want to have to mention this and make the waits for a capp at Four Barrel longer than they already are, but as the word is leaking out everywhere this week, I thought I’d mention this generous turn from owner, Jeremy Tooker. Playfully calling it an “F.U. Recession” giveaway, get an 8oz. cup of French Press coffee, brewed just right… don’t say I didn’t warn you about looong waits for it, though!
Mondays through April 20th, 8-10am
375 Valencia, SF.
415-282-0800

Weeknight prix fixe and Gnocchi Tuesdays at Bar Bambino
Every time I go to Bar Bambino, I walk away feeling like I was just in my favorite enoteca in an Italian town, sipping Italian wines, robust coffees from both North and South Italy, eating housemade charcuterie and cheeses Bambino’s been making before everyone in town was. Like many lately, they’re offering special menus like an early evening three-course prix fixe for $30. Primi (first course) could be soup, salad, or pasta. Main course is a meat or eggplant polpette, with gelato or signature Citrus Polenta Cake for dessert. Another fun element (for gnocchi fiends like myself) is their Gnocchi Tuesdays, playfully mirroring the tradition of Roman trattorias serving gnocchi dishes on Thursdays. Chef Christian Hermsdorf makes them from scratch, of course, different each week, with past gnocchi made of red kuri squash with sage cream sauce or a Venetian-inspired pumpkin gnocchi in cinnamon and brown butter. Yum…
Sundays-Thursdays, 5-7pm, $30
2931 16th St., SF
415-701-8466
www.barbambino.com

Jovino’s Saturday night Spaghetti Feed
Spaghetti with Niman Ranch meatballs sound good to you? What if you throw in a glass of house wine all for the price of the wine: $9? Now you have a deal. A low-key Cow Hollow cafe, Jovino is a good place to drop in and unwind — and fill up for less than $10.
Saturdays 6-9pm
2184 Union, SF
415-563-1853

The news from Rock Rapids: Shinny’s funeral

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March 23, 2009

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Shinny during his years as chief of police in Rock Rapids, Iowa, during the l950s. This was the card I had in my billfold when I heard about his death. He was technically “Shene” but he was Shinny to me. Shinny approved of my pronunciation. His last card omitted a key word from his earlier cards: “lover.”

The funeral services for Elmer (Shinny) Sheneberger, the central figure in the famous Halloween caper of 1951, were held Friday March 20 in the Congregational Church in Rock Rapids, Iowa.

I got word from Marj and retired CPA Jim Wells and Shinny’s nieces Audrey and Margo Wallace that Shinny had died on Saturday March 14 in his suburban mobile home in Phoenix, Arizona. He had fallen the day before and was found 20 hours later. He was terminally ill with cancer but hanging on.

Shinny was born and raised and lived his entire life of 92 years in this little northwest Iowa town. He was what every small town needed and cherished: an authentic good-natured character who went on generation after generation. He was somehow always there, when you needed him and sometimes when you didn’t. When a politician came to town, the word would get around that Shinny was briefing him at the Lane Cafe. When the Hermie Casjens gang rolled a loaded boxcar across Main Street, twice, on Halloween eve in 1951, Shinny was on duty as chief of police and had to move the boxcars off the street.

I never told Shinny who was involved in the incident and he never asked. Finally, years later, I gave him the full story. He laughed and said, “Let’s drink to it.” We did and did all through the years. When he would call me at my office in San Francisco, he would say, “I want to speak to Bruce. This is his parole officer in Rock Rapids.” Shinny had a wonderful way of operating on Halloween: he would just come upon the roving Casjens gang, and would just shine his car lights. We would scatter and he would move on, never making an arrest. In fact, I don’t think he ever made many arrests, that night or on any other Halloweens. His was humane law enforcement, Rock Rapids style.

Shinny did roll the boxcars back off of Main Street, but we never knew exactly how he did it. He explained in detail at our 55th class reunion last June in Rock Rapids. We invited Shinny to come after Dave Dietz and I got firm assurances that the statute of limitations had run and we were free to talk about the incident. We surmised that Shinny had gotten everyone out of a nearby dance at the Community Building to move the cars. No, he said, he rousted people out of the nearby movie theater under threat of “arrest” and pressed them into action, twice.

Shinny was quietly generous. He owned a farm near town and he told me that he was would be willing it to Camp Foster, the YMCA camp on nearby West Okiboji Lake where many of us went to summer camp. “I always thought highly of the boys who came out of that camp,” he told me. “And so I thought that would be a good place for my farm.”

Through the years, Shinny would say to me, “Bruce, you and I have got to get along together. We’re going to be together for a long, long time.” I never could figure out what he was talking about until I was out visiting the Brugmann plot at the Riverview Cemetery, the picture postcard cemetery atop a hill overlooking the Rock River. I noticed that the plot next to the Brugmann plot was the Sheneberger plot. As usual, Shinny was right.

Click here to read Halloween 1951: Fast times in Rock Rapids, Iowa, from the Bruce Blog archive.

Here is the email note I sent to my classmates on our email tree for the Dream Class of 1953 (16 boys, 16 girls, now many less):

Shinny’s funeral will be tomorrow (Friday) in the Congregational Church in Rock Rapids.

I ordered a bouquet of red tulips for the service from the Flower Village, with a note “from the Brugmann family and the Class of 1953.” I assume I don’t need to go over the details once again about Shinny’s connection to our class and his involuntary participation in our class activities and the famous Halloween incident of 1951.

Shinny was a longtime member of our church. He always wanted to live as long as Henry Rahlk, also a member of our church, who lived to be 102. Shinny, alas, only made it to 92.

I always enjoy buying my flowers from Flower Village, which once was in the old Brugmann’s Drugstore building. It’s now across the street in the old Bernstein department store building. Each year on Memorial Day, I phone in to Flower Village and buy potted flowers for all the members of the Brugmann plot at Riverside Cemetery. That’s both sets of my grandparents (Ethel and C. C. Brugmann, founder of Brugmann’s Drug in l902; and Allie and A.R. Rice, a Congregational minister in several small Iowa towns); my mother and father (Bonnie and Conrad Brugmann, who was a partner with my grandfather in the drugstore from the Depression onward); and my aunt and uncle (Mary and Clarence Schmidt, a veterinarian from Worthington who was the family representative in World War II.) I hope to end up in the Brugmann plot with my wife Jean.

And the Village people put the flowers on the plot, always well positioned and blooming nicely. Shinny’s family had the next plot and he would always take pictures of my potted flowers and send them to me with a friendly note about “staying in touch and getting together someday.”

And then I would always call the former Janice Olsen to remind her to pick up the flowers and take them to her home in Rock Rapids, once the home of her aunt and uncle, Edna and Harold Jongewaard. Harold was a funeral director in Rock Rapids for many years and buried almost all of our family in our plot. Janice’ s mother was Elsie Olsen, Clarence’s sister, and the Merl Olsens had a family farm out near Edna that I used to visit when I dated her in our junior year.

I didn’t mean to ramble on so long, but Shinny’s death reminds me once again of how it was and still seems to be back there in Rock Rapids, the best little hometown in the country. There are lots of good connections and lots of good memories, but they grow dimmer and dimmer.

So long, Shinny. I’ll be seeing you soon. B3

Waging the online war on war

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March 19, 2009

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By Andrew W. Shaw

Both the media and the anti-war movement are hurting today, on the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, but a growing information clearinghouse that combines both continues its quiet but surprisingly well-resourced fight from its home base in San Francisco’s Sunset District.

Antiwar.com disseminates information about developments in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as stories on the Middle East, Sudan, various other hot spots, and what it calls “the war at home.” The site – with up to 120,000 hits per day and up to 500,000 regular visitors — has a paid staff of 10 people, funded by donations and philanthropic foundations.

“There’s a lack of original sources,” Eric Garris, who started the site in 1995 during the US intervention in Bosnia, told us. “At the beginning there were a lot of reporters in Iraq. Now it’s a lot of ‘official reports’ and unverifiable blogs. We incorporate both.”

Garris edits and publishes the site, drawing from a broad range of regular contributors.He said the site has grown more sophisticated with each military deployment, illustrating Randolph Bourne’s philosophy that “War is the health of the State.”

“Americans are suffering war fatigue and are vulnerable to myths. Most people think Obama is going to end the wars, so they don’t have to worry about it anymore,” Garris said, a sentiment he disagrees with. “Obama seems weak on foreign policy: he keeps [Hilary] Clinton, [Robert] Gates. That’s a slight shift, not really a change.”

Why end of stop-loss doesn’t mean the end of war

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March 19, 2009

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Text by Sarah Phelan

Why doesn’t the end of stop-loss mean the end of war? The short answer is, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

That said, it was good to hear Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announce yesterday that he has approved a plan to eliminate the use of stop-loss for deploying soldiers.

“Our goal is to cut the number of those stop-lossed by 50 percent by June 2010 and to eliminate the regular use of stop-loss across the entire Army by March 2011,” Gates said, noting that the Department of Defense still retains the authority to use stop-loss under extraordinary circumstances.

Asked what he considers extraordinary circumstances, Gates told reporters, “I would say that it would be some kind of an emergency situation where we absolutely had to have somebody’s skills for a specific limited period of time.”

Asked who would make that decision, Gates said it would “probably ultimately be up to the Secretary of the Army.

Reminded that the argument for stop loss has always been, at least in public, unit cohesion, Gates told reporters that cohesion remains very important, but that retention is up, fairly significantly.

“And we are expecting the tempo of operations to be reduced over the next 18 months or so as we do draw down in Iraq,” Gates continued. “We will — as best I understand, we will be drawing down in Iraq, over the next 18 or 19 months, significantly more than we are building up in Afghanistan, in terms of the Army.”

Stop-loss, Gates added, isn’t a violation of the enlistment contract.

“But I believe that when somebody’s end date of service comes up, to hold them against their will, if you will, is just not the right thing to do,” he said.

Asked about suicides in the military, Gates observed that “About a third of the suicides are members of the military who have never deployed.What I am told is that one of the principal causes of suicide, among our men and women in uniform, is broken relationships. And it’s hard not to imagine that repeated deployments don’t have an impact on those relationships.”

To understand war by the numbers, here is a list of some of the more salient statistics:

Reflecting on reflections on war

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March 19, 2009

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By Steven T. Jones

Today is the sixth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, a decision that diminished our democracy, our moral standing, and our empire. There’s much to be said about this legacy, and we plan to post some reflections on the subject today and tomorrow, but first I’d like to link to my lengthy look at its implications from a year ago, a widely reposted story that was recently named as a finalist in the Best Essay category for the Western Publishing Association’s 58th annual Maggie Awards (I find out next month whether I win).
If you missed it last year, please give it a read today because I think it raises issues that are still relevant under our new regime, maybe more than ever.

Kennedy, compounded

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March 18, 2009

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HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING It’s chaos theory’s maxim that the mere brush of a butterfly’s wings might produce a ripple effect sufficient to changes history. But let’s face it: it’s more interesting to muse upon the big what-ifs, like assassination attempts. What if Lincoln or Archduke Ferdinand had survived? What if Reagan hadn’t?

Are such speculations actually useful, or just a glorified party game? Clearly Koji Masutani thinks it’s the former, since he’s gone to the trouble of making Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived. As presented by the director and foreign policy historian James G. Blight, this new documentary makes the case that Kennedy’s nonconfrontational tactics on the world stage during his presidency would surely have carried over to preventing that "quagmire" known here as the Vietnam War (and over there as "the American War"). Had he lived, of course.

Parallels to our moment are hard to resist. Like Obama, JFK’s election was viewed as a landmark and greeted with messianic excitement unequalled by a Democrat until now. He arrived at a time of equally daunting if very different emergencies — the Cold War’s peak boiling point, the civil rights movement heating up at home — and likewise faced hostile Republican lawmakers as well as skeptical press.

Masutani charts six occasions on which JFK dodged armed conflict that might have triggered (or so reasoning went) World War III. The Cuban Missile Crisis is the obvious one. Others, all four-alarm calls for anti-commie action, include resisting engagement in Laos and Vietnam, as well as over the Berlin Wall’s construction. In archival footage Kennedy looks alternately uncomfortable and good-humored defending his policies, as he’s accused of "appeasement toward communism," "utter incompetence," and "mismanaging the news" by rationing his statements to prevent hysteria outbreaks in an already paranoid nation. "This generation of Americans has already seen enough war and hate," he pronounced. Amen.

Alas, that fateful open-car ride in Dallas placed Lyndon B. Johnson in office. Though it evidently tormented him, LBJ saw no alternative to an ever-expanding Vietnam incursion. Some 58,000 U.S. lives and 2 million native ones later, it remains the quagmire by which all our blunders abroad are measured.

These days, not everyone thinks Kennedy was as golden as that Camelot glow suggested. But Virtual JFK does convince us that things would have turned out quite differently, at the very least, had he missed taking a premature powder. May history not repeat itself.

VIRTUAL JFK: VIETNAM IF KENNEDY HAD LIVED

Fri/20-Tues/24, see Rep Clock for times, $6–$9

Red Vic, 1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

Sleeper cells

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March 18, 2009

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Pop monoliths come and go, but these days they mostly seem to be going: tumblin’ down quietly, as with the soon-to-be-shuttered Virgin Megastore on Market Street, or crumbling — and grumbling — noisily, as with the war of words accompanying Radiohead’s reputed snub of Miley Cyrus and Kanye West at this year’s Grammys. So it’s heartening to see that we can all agree on one thing: we want to glimpse an ever-morphing, perkily pageboy-ed pop maestro in the pasty, ghostly flesh.

The last monolith standing, Michael Jackson can continue to claim his King of Pop title with the speedy sell-out of his 50-show London residency, dramatically titled "This Is It!" Neverland does too exist, Mikey: in Londontown, with more than 1 million ticket-buyers gripped by the HIStory-making, get-it-now-or-never pop-consumer frenzy that accompanies reunions and comebacks undertaken by Led Zeppelin, My Bloody Valentine, and a certain half-century-old superstar — and pure brilliant and twisted product of the entertainment biz — who hasn’t tackled a major tour since 1997 or made a studio long-player since 2001. Is this deprivation anxiety, or a sign that pop can once again mean popular for a music industry nervously scanning the tea leaves of ticket sales for a brighter, sparkly-gloved future?

But we can’t all be monsters of pop. Witness that other little combo hitting its chart-topping stride around the same time as Jacko’s Off the Wall (Epic, 1979): the Bee Gees. Down-market lulls are an ace time to revisit past beauties like the group’s stunning two-LP Odessa (Polydor, 1969), later abbreviated to a single disc and leached of its pomped-out, once-toxic red-flocked packaging; and recently reissued, in all its completist glory, with stereo and mono mixes of the entire recording, a disc of previously unreleased demos, sketches, and alternate versions, a poster of lyric notes and reel labels, and a booklet breaking down each track. Sure to be a revelatory sunken treasure for fans of the Decemberists, Okkervil River, and other chamber/indie rock literati, the concept album marked an intense period of creativity for the bros Gibb, and nearly shipwrecked the band. Guitarist Vince Melouney departed for bluesier waters, while Robin bickered with Barry over the choice of a first single and left the group in 1968, only to return two years later (after mending his broken heart, no doubt). We’re left with an opulent, astonishingly deep concept album concerning a lost British ship, Veronica, at the turn of the 20th century. Odessa is marked by lovely flamenco guitar and Mellotron work by Maurice, a miniature symphony, moments of Bands-y rusticism, a forelock tug to Thomas Edison, and those Doppler vibrato vocals — all worth diving into, again and again.

The derring-do with which the Bee Gees once charted the risky seas of baroque pop excess should be a lesson to other music-makers. And strangely, Seattle’s Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band brings to mind an adenoidal indie-rock incarnation of the sibs Gibbs. Could it be the buzz band’s over-the-top AOR and early ’00s new-rock interludes that spurred pals to describe a recent Noise Pop turn as "awful"? The press literature for its self-titled Dead Oceans debut draws a line of descent from Wolf Parade through Modest Mouse and the Pixies, but I sense that MSHVB’s breed of over-the-top, kitchen-sink rock is just the latest wrinkle in an increasingly orchestral Northwest sound, which is skipping from grunge to grrrls to baroque ‘n’ roll.

I’ll bust out my conductor’s tales after listening to Portland, Ore., songwriter Mirah’s delectable (a)spera (K). Björk, Beth Orton, and Julie Doiron would be dang proud of Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn’s successful forays into the wilderness of mutable forms, remixes on Joyride: Remixes (K, 2006), and meditations on the secret lives of insects with Spectratone International on Share This Place: Stories and Observations (K, 2007). Working with certified Mt. Eerie/Microphones genius Phil Elverum, Mirah defies her old lo-fi rep with this full-blown sleeper gem of a CD, gamboling from the string-dappled opening gut-punch of "Generosity" to the shimmering snare and delicate guitar coloration of "Education." (a)spera grabs for classic pop beauty standards and succeeds on its own terms — hurdy gurdy, bongos, kalimba, kora, and all.

And speaking of Malian kora, one mustn’t neglect that country’s Amadou and Mariam — departing for the more futuristic, less folkloric reaches of pop with Welcome to Mali (Because Music/Nonesuch). The only ship the blind couple will be wrecking is that of pop purists expecting another Dimanche a Bamako (Because Music/Nonesuch, 2005). The subtly tweaked Afro-futurist soundscapes — littered with appearances by performers like K’Naan and Toumani Diabate — hew closer to a digitized, disco-ball-glittered, cosmopolitan Paris than a more rustic, impoverished Mali. Amadou and Mariam narrow the divide between the two with the sparkling, Damon Albarn-produced rave-up "Sabali," the wah-wah-wailing kora-laced slo-funk of "Djuru," and the rump-shaking Afro-rock sizzle of "Masiteladi." I’m absolutely besotted with the balafon plonk mashed up with electric guitar twang on the palm-wine-‘n’-spaghetti-Western(-African) "Ce N’Est Pas Bon." Congotronics and ethnotronicans, welcome to A&M’s mothership connection — wake up, shake it up, and get ready for takeoff. Can’t wait to see where it takes us next.

MT. ST. HELENS VIETNAM BAND

with Bishop Allen and Miniature Tigers

Tues/24, 7:30 p.m., $15

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstop.com

MIRAH

with Tender Forever and Leyna Noel

April 7, 8 p.m., $16

Bimbo’s 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

www.bimbos365club.com

“Fridays at the Ballet”

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March 17, 2009

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PREVIEW By now the fact that San Francisco Ballet is one of the hottest ballet companies in the country is no longer news. It’s also common knowledge that ballet is an extremely expensive art form. Ticket prices reflect that unfortunate reality. That’s why SFB’s "Fridays at the Ballet" are such a good deal. For $59 (or even less if you shop around) you get a performance plus drinks afterward in the War Memorial Opera House lobby. The first of this season’s "Fridays" features Helgi Tomasson’s lovely, romantic On a Theme of Paganini (2008) and two glories of the repertoire — Jardin aux Lilas (Lilac Garden) and The Concert. The SFB premiere of Antony Tudor’s 1936 Jardin aux Lilas celebrates Tudor’s 100th birthday with an early work that is perhaps his all-time masterpiece. Its drama, its heat, its agony are underground; nothing is spelled out, everything is implied. Yet this story about love acknowledged and love denied will haunt you. Jerome Robbins’ 1956 hilarious The Concert strikes an altogether different note. Ballet doesn’t take to comedy easily, so Robbins was in for a challenge — but he watched silent movies and studied comedic timing. His mayhem in the concert hall has become a classic, and SFB has the dancers to pull it off. It’s the first of Robbins’ choreographies set to Chopin, a composer he would use very differently in later works, and all you can do is pity the poor pianist who has to contend with the kind of audience Robbins gave him. "Fridays at the Ballet," with a different program, returns April 3.

"FRIDAYS AT THE BALLET," Fri/20, 8 p.m., $59, War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF. www.sfballet.org/fridays

Letters

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March 10, 2009

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THE VICE MAYORS

Thanks so much for the great article on Climate Theater ("Still crazy after all these years," 2/25/09). I’ve lived and worked in SoMa since 1973 and can think of no art venue that has done more to create a vibrant, inspiring community.

If playa types like Suck Up Willie Brown (I’ve seen him at Hollywood parties) and our current mayor, The Talking Haircut, could live in Climate World for six months, they might develop souls.

Joegh Bullock and Marcia Crosby are the co-mayors, or shall I say vice-mayors, of South of Market. Thanks for giving them props.

John LeFan

San Francisco

THE FATE OF THE CHRON

Good riddance to the San Francisco Chronicle and good luck finding a buyer.

I know of one union that has already been cut to the bone — pressmen and prepress workers, Local 4N. As a matter of fact, there will be about 200 press workers out of a job in June when the Canadian Company Transcontinental starts printing the Chronicle at the new printing facility in Fremont. Not one member from the San Francisco Local has been hired.

All production department union jobs are being outsourced. This includes mailers, machinists, and electricians. I wouldn’t count on any of them giving anything up since they are going to be unemployed come June 29th.

Maybe the Hearst Corporation should cancel the 15-year, $1 billion contract it signed with Transcon. I’m sure all the unions that will be out on the street come June would be willing to sign contracts for a lot less.

Bruce Carlton

Local 4N retiree, San Francisco

SF’S SLEEPING GIANT

Paging Matt Gonzalez! If truth is the first casualty of war, what is ceded in total occupation? Calvin Welch’s op-ed ("It’s a recession, let’s get cracking," 2/25/09) reflects the nascent realization that what San Francisco lost in electing Gavin Newsom over Gonzalez, the nation has now lost in validating the pro-corporate centrist DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) wing of the Democratic Party on a grand scale.

The opposition from the right is inarticulate and, as Welch notes, the truly democratic left is hopelessly inarticulate. Sustainability, of our environment, our economies, and our health is the challenge that must be met. It wasn’t that long ago that "a sleeping giant stirred in San Francisco." Can it happen again? Paging Matt Gonzalez!

Poplicola

From sfbg.com

The Guardian welcomes letters commenting on our coverage or other topics of local interest. Letters should be brief (we reserve the right to edit them for length) and signed. Please include a daytime telephone number for verification.

Corrections and clarifications: The Guardian tries to report news fairly and accurately. You are invited to complain to us when you think we have fallen short of that objective. Complaints should be directed to Paula Connelly, the assistant to the publisher. We prefer them in writing, but Connelly can also be reached by phone at (415) 255-3100. If we have published a misstatement, we will endeavor to correct it quickly and in an appropriate place in the newspaper. If you remain dissatisfied, we invite you to contact the Minnesota News Council, an impartial organization that hears and considers complaints against news media. It can be reached at 12 South Sixth St., Suite 1122, Minneapolis MN 55402; (612) 341-9357; fax (612) 341-9358.

Freeing the press

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March 10, 2009

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Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award

ROBERT PORTERFIELD

Bob Porterfield is a shit-disturber, an old-fashioned investigative reporter who has no favorites, no sacred cows, and no fear of offending anyone. Since his first story — a profile of a YMCA social program published in Eugene, Ore.’s The Register-Guard in 1959, when he was 15 — Porterfield has had ink in his veins. He’s shared two Pulitzer Prizes (first for an Anchorage Daily News report on the Teamsters Union in 1975 and then for a series on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority for The Boston Globe), won more than two dozen other prizes and worked on a long list of major investigative projects.

He has become something of an expert in computer-assisted reporting and information systems — but is still a down-to-earth guy who never forgot the value of traditional, hands-on digging. Back in 1986, he was on a team at Newsday looking into the federal Synfuels Corp., a scandal-plagued agency that was shut down in the wake of his stories.

"I remember once we were looking for property records on a Synfuels Corp. project linked to [former CIA Director) Bill Casey," he told me. "I wound up going down to Plymouth, N.C., (population 4,000), and I found this musty old office with two older women sitting there, knitting. There was no index book, nothing computerized. But when I explained what I was looking for, one of the women remembered the parcel of land I was talking about and pulled out the exact documents for me."

Porterfield has devoted a tremendous amount of time to teaching and mentoring, showing young reporters how to use public records to find stories. "I’m glad to see [President Obama’s] new directive on openness, but I hope it trickles down to the independent agencies," he said. "Because there’s been way, way too much secrecy." (Tim Redmond)

Beverly Kees Educator Award

ALAN GIBSON

Alan Gibson is reclaiming the Founding Fathers from conservatives with

his recent book Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions (University Press of Kansas, 2007). It examines the progressive ideals that guided early American political thought.

"The Founding Fathers are often captured by conservatives," Gibson told the Guardian. "But there is no clear line of legacy. It is much more complex than that. Conservative restoration politics are dangerous and not historically accurate."

As an undergraduate, Gibson cultivated an interest in issues of separation of church and state, which led to doctoral studies on James Madison, the namesake of the Society of Professional Journalists’ annual Freedom of Information awards. "Madison was the most progressive of all [the Founding Fathers] when it comes to freedom of the press," Gibson said. "He helped develop the idea that American government should be responsive to public opinion, and the role of newspapers was to make sure that an authentic public opinion was set forth." Gibson, a political science professor at California State University-Chico, lectures at various colleges across the country. Understanding the Founding will be published in paperback later this year. (Laura Peach)

Professional Journalists

MARJIE LUNDSTROM

Journalists often get alarming tips about practices within Child Protective Services (CPS) agencies, but it has always been a nearly impossible task to overcome privacy protections and get even basic information about how CPS handles reports of child abuse or neglect.

"It’s a difficult agency to write about, for some good reasons," Sacramento Bee reporter Marjie Lundstrom, who set out in 2007 to investigate complaints about Sacramento’s CPS, told the Guardian. "They operate in such a vacuum with very little public scrutiny."

She had started to piece together some information from coroner’s records and other public documents when Senate Bill 39 went into effect in January 2008, "and it was just amazing what it opened up."

The bill reveals CPS files in cases where the child has died, allowing Lundstrom to expose the negligence of CPS workers in responding to abuse reports, even those from doctors. "I do feel like what we were able to show, because of the law, where workers made flagrant mistakes that costs kids their lives," she said.

But many CPS records are still secret. Next, after writing several stories about CPS that sparked a grand jury investigation, Lundstrom intends to expose problems within the internal accountability procedures at CPS. (Steven T. Jones)

HILARY COSTA AND JOHN SIMERMAN

When the news broke last September that 15-year-old Jazzmin Davis had been murdered by her aunt after suffering months of abuse and neglect in her Antioch home, Bay Area News Group reporters Hilary Costa and John Simerman submitted a public records request about the girl’s case history with the San Francisco Human Services Agency.

The city denied the request for nearly two months, using a privacy claim. Undeterred, the journalists took the step of testing out Senate Bill 39, a relatively new piece of legislation that mandates public disclosure of findings and information about children who have died of abuse or neglect. A judge eventually ordered that the records be released.

Although highly redacted, the nearly 700-page paper trail told the girl’s story in the form of hand-written notes, report cards, medical records, caseworker visits, and other detailed documents. The records led to a package of stories that exposed a series of failures and violations of state regulations by an HSA social worker, raising questions about agency practices and spurring a review of hundreds of other foster care cases.

"This story’s been so important to me," Costa told the Guardian. "It felt like somebody owed it to Jazzmin to find out what happened to her." (Rebecca Bowe)

Interactive Media

AUTUMN CRUZ AND MITCHELL BROOKS

Sacramento Bee photographer Autumn Cruz had been covering the trial of three-year-old K.C. Balbuena’s murder for several months when she came up with the concept of creating an interactive online courtroom. With the help of Bee graphic journalist Mitchell Brooks, Cruz made public the essential pieces of evidence and information to those outside the courtroom doors.

Viewers can take a virtual tour of the exhibits and documents, along with video and audio statements and interrogations. "As a journalist, you’re fighting every day for your right to information," Cruz told the Guardian.

Although Balbuena’s mother and roommate were found guilty of the murder in early 2008, Cruz laments her inability to bring back the child she grew to know so intimately only after his life was cut short. "I think my bringing his plight to the public will hopefully prevent similar things from happening to other children." (Joe Sciareillo)

Citizen

BERT ROBINSON

Journalist Bert Robinson is a longtime journalist who now serves as assistant managing editor for the San Jose Mercury News. But he’s being honored for his work as a citizen serving on San Jose’s Sunshine Reform Task Force.

"We set out on our sunshine ordinance adventure a few years ago. We found we were faring worse in court, and we couldn’t afford increased court costs," Robinson, a member of the California First Amendment Coalition, told the Guardian.

The project received political endorsements across the spectrum, but the initiative has had problems with the city council’s Rules Committee, controlled by San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, who has supported sunshine in the past.

"We achieved progress with public meeting requirements, but when you get into public records, city staff argue that rules are ‘too cumbersome’ … They say all sorts of things might happen if they become public, [which is] entirely hypothetical," Robinson said.

Task Force work that was slated to last six months has now dragged on for two years. "The city process grinds you down," Robinson said. But he says he’s committed to seeing it through. (Ben Terrall)

Legal Counsel

JAMES EWERT

James Ewert, an attorney with the California Newspaper Publishers Association, has long battled what he calls widespread secrecy in government. So in 2004, he played an instrumental role in providing greater public access to government meetings and records, resulting in the passage that November of Proposition 59, the Sunshine Amendment of California’s constitution.

Most recently Ewert helped Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) with legislation protecting teachers from retribution from administrators when they defend the First Amendment rights of journalism students. Next Ewert hopes to allow greater scrutiny of public/press partnerships and how tax dollars are used in labor negotiations by the public university systems.

Ewert says the public’s right to know is still severely hampered by public safety concerns, including restrictions on journalists’ rights to interview prisoners and obtain information about police officers. But luckily for the public, Ewert is still on the job. (Andrew Shaw)

Student Journalists — High School

REDWOOD BARK

Before April 2008, Drew Ross had never had to defend the existence of the Eureka High School Redwood Bark, where he was the editor. But after arriving on campus one Monday morning to find that former principal Robert Steffen had removed 450 copies of a 20-page color edition of the paper, Ross and his staff fought back.

Steffen claimed that the nude, dream-like drawing by artist Natalie Gonzalez had ushered in a handful of complaints from students and parents. Steffen justified the action by saying he was "stomping out the flames before they became a forest fire."

"We told him we wanted to hold onto the paper but he recycled them," Ross told the Guardian. "We don’t make the paper for it to be thrown away. And we lost a lot of advertising on this."

Ross complained about censorship and got help from the Student Press Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union. By the next day, the censorship story went front page at newspapers and Internet sites all over the country. Eventually Steffen not only sent out a public apology, he paid for the next 20-page color edition.

"We are now armed with knowledge of our rights," Ross said. "And the community knows the Redwood Bark has rights." (Deia de Brito)

SHASTA HIGH SCHOOL’S THE VOLCANO

Shasta High School student Amanda Cope speaks passionately about freedom of speech after her brush with censorship, telling the Guardian, "We are preserving the validity of the Constitution. Free speech is a protection, a safety, that lets us function normally without fear."

Cope was editor-in-chief of the Shasta High School student paper, The Volcano, when a controversy flared over the paper’s end-of-year issue, which featured a front-page image of a student burning an American flag. Shasta High principal Milan Woollard was already considering shutting down The Volcano when the issue came out and publicly stated: "This cements that decision."

But following a maelstrom of objection from Cope and the rest of The Volcano staff in what looked like a form of censorship in schools, the school district reversed its decision. "I think a lot of students feel they are marginalized in society. They’re teenagers. They don’t have many rights and they feel like they’re squished by adults and people in general," Cope said. "The student paper becomes an outlet for those feelings, and a way for students to explore their world." (Juliette Tang)

THE SCOTS EXPRESS

Last November, the principal of Carlmont High School in Belmont shut down the student paper, The Scots Express. School officials claimed that the paper lacked adequate faculty oversight after it published a satirical article about the writer’s sex appeal.

Editor-in-chief Alex Zhang fought back against what he saw as censorship and rejected school officials’ justifications. "I just wanted my paper back," he told the Guardian.

In response to the uproar over what many saw as a muzzling of the press, the Sequoia Union High School District began training Carlmont staff on First Amendment rights and mandated an overhaul of the school’s freedom of speech policy. The district is planning an expansion of its journalism programs in the school curriculum and a partnership with the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.

Zhang is working on relaunching the publication in late March under the faculty oversight of English teacher Raphael Kauffmann. "You can’t have a democracy without freedom of information," Zhang said. "And I’m proud to be one of those young journalists who care about the freedom of information." (Joe Sciarrillo)

Advocacy

KATHI AUSTIN

As the Guardian chronicled in a cover story last year ("Hunting the lord of war," June 23, 2008), San Francisco-based human rights investigator Kathi Austin has spent almost two decades tracking down and exposing those who have made a business out of human rights violations.

Most recently, Austin helped bring the notorious Viktor Bout, a Russian entrepreneur accused of illegally trafficking weapons to brutal regimes from Colombia to the Congo.

"A human rights violation is considered a violation that is carried out by a state actor," Austin told the Guardian. "We were trying to change the whole field of human rights to philosophically say we should be going after these private perpetrators as well."

Thanks largely to Austin’s work, Bout was arrested in Thailand in March 2008 and will likely face criminal charges in the United States. Despite working in treacherous places like Angola and Rwanda, doing meticulous and time-consuming research, Austin said her approach is simple: "What’s wrong and who’s doing it?"

Her patience and persistent pursuit of international justice have led Austin to positions at the U.N., the World Bank, the Center for Human Rights, and the Council on Foreign Relations, to name a few. A Paramount picture featuring Angelina Jolie as Austin is reportedly in production — a fittingly karmic return of celebrity for someone who has worked so long under the public radar. (Breena Kerr)

Electronic access

MAPLIGHT.ORG

Once upon a time, before 2005, the only way to connect the dots between the dollars contributed to politicians and the special access and favorable laws they subsequently granted to contributors was to wade through reams of campaign finance filings. While everyone knew that money talked, few knew just how much campaign cash was dictating public policy.

But now, thanks to MAPlight.org, a Berkeley nonprofit that uses sophisticated analytical tools to produce visually pleasing, easy-to-use charts, there is now a fun, simple way to follow the money.

MAPlight began by putting up data connected to the pro-consumer bill informally known as the Car Buyer’s Bill of Rights. "The data showed that car dealers gave twice as much to Sacramento legislators who voted to kill the bill than to those who voted to pass it," executive director David Newman recalled.

Next, MAPlight pioneered the combination of campaign dollars and politicians’ votes when it launched its U.S. Congress site in May 2007. Most recently its research showed that House members who voted for the $700 billion financial bailout bill received 50 percent more money from the financial services industry than those who voted against it.

Newman plans to expand to all 50 states. "Wherever there is journalism to be done, MAPlight can provide support and help promote openness and transparency in government." (Sarah Phelan)

The Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists hosts its annual James Madison Awards dinner March 18 in the New Delhi Restaurant, 160 Ellis St., SF. The no-host reception begins at 5:50 p.m. followed by dinner and the awards programs at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $50 for SPJ members and $70 for non-members. For reservations or information, contact Freedom of Information Committee chair David Greene at (510) 208-7744 or dgreene@thefirstamendment.org or visit www.spjchapters.org/norcal.

“12”

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March 10, 2009

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REVIEW In Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oscar-winning 1994 film Burnt by the Sun, set in the Stalin-era Soviet Union, a character corrects himself in addressing his companions as gentlemen, saying, "Excuse me, comrades." A reverse correction signals the changed times in 12, where Mikhalkov takes up a more modern, post-Soviet tale, using a familiar framework to tell it. Based on Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men (1957), the film follows the jury proceedings of a Moscow murder trial in which an orphaned teenage Chechen boy is accused of killing his adoptive father, a Russian army officer who rescued him from the war-obliterated village where he’d lost his parents. Throughout a long day and night, the jurors (whose foreman is played by Mikhalkov) deliberate, battle, come unhinged, and reveal, through prejudiced tirades and intelligent argument alike, a flawed legal system and a corrupt society that fail to function in tandem. In a departure from the original, 12 releases the viewer at brief intervals to visit the prisoner in his chilly cell and to witness childhood scenes of poignant and piercing clarity. But at nearly three hours, the film makes us feel the time crawling by and its effect on these men, locked away from their lives in a room they expected to sit in for half an hour before consigning a young man to life in prison. And the fractures and damage we witness in each of them as the hours pass seem to form a mosaic of modern Russian society, fractured and damaged itself by the traumas of its political and cultural history.

12 opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

“transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix”

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March 10, 2009

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REVIEW Spam, napalm, and derivative pop songs weren’t quite the only legacy of U.S. military sojourns through Asia — and specifically Korea and Vietnam — as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ "transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix" exhibit demonstrates. The artists gathered by curators Viet Le and Yong Soon Min are the children of Andy Warhol and Coca-Cola.

Credit goes to the organizers for pointing to the connections between Vietnam and Korea, which are seldom at the foreground stateside: both shared a history of rapid modernization facilitated by U.S. wartime adventures, and Korea benefited economically for their hand in the Vietnam War, as the second largest foreign military and economic presence. Trade in pop culture — film, music, TV, fashion — has evidently continued between the two countries. But despite the presence of a book and zine reading room filled with Korean, Vietnamese, and American transplants’ ballads, bubblegum, rockers, and protest music, this grab bag of an exhibition manifests little of the fizzy wit and energy implied in its title. Instead it assumes a primarily somber, somewhat cryptic tone — more wall text would have helped. This solemn quality is most forthrightly and movingly manifested in Dinh Q. Lê’s video triptych, The Farmers and the Helicopters (2007).

The exceptions make their mélange of pop and politics simultaneously pointed and explicit: examples include Tiffany Chung’s video works, Lam Truong (2007) and the scooter-guys (2007), which juxtapose the frenetic movements of Viet boy bands with bands of working delivery boys; and Min Hwa Choi Chul-Hwan’s 2006 To the Rockers paintings of lost-looking urban youth, paired with Twentieth Century — 1972.6 III (2006), his blown-up deconstruction of AP photographer Nick Ut’s 1972 image of a naked Vietnamese girl burnt by napalm running toward the viewer. Would Warhol have approved? And do any works make as much of a stealth impact as Oh Yongseok’s video montages Drama No. 3 and Drama No. 5 (both 2004-2005)? Cornered by these pieced-together panoramas, which appropriate snippets of Asian films and TV, one is confronted by both the Korean tradition of landscape painting and small, startling moments of violence and disquiet that rupture the stillness at the edges of the frame.

TRANSPOP: KOREA VIETNAM REMIX Through Sun/15. Tues.–Wed., Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.; Thurs., noon–8 p.m. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. $6; $3 seniors, students, and youth; free for members (free first Tues.). (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

Death Sentence: Panda!

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March 10, 2009

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PREVIEW Who can bring together Bay Area noise-improv scene and tween mixtapes? Death Sentence: Panda!, that band of merry, absurdist experimentalists that sprang from the loins of Total Shutdown, NAM, and Crack: We Are Rock. The local underground-music vets are now partying up their second long-player, Insects Awaken (Upset the Rhythm), a blistering drum-flute-clarinet-electronics-xylophone-sax tribute of sorts to the bitty critters that "swarm and have sex and then die a violent death," as flautist-multi-instrumentalist Kim West puts it.

Hardcore, Chinese and Korean folk, and marching band sounds are all pitched into the trio’s dissonant sonic miasma — a blend that weirdly showed up on a mix West’s public school teacher friend recently confiscated from a 14-year-old — and though it’s been four years since the group formed, the noise hasn’t been taken down a single notch.

"We’re influenced by so many different kinds of music, whether it’s more noisy or folky or hardcore-y — is hardcore-y is a word?" asks clarinet-multi-instrumentalist Paul Costuros at the ass end of a band practice before he sets off to DJ "Ska War!" at Casanova Lounge. "Our music has gotten more noisy, and we’re dealing with more effects, atmosphere, and tone."

"I don’t think it’s noisier," responds drummer-multi-instrumentalist Chris Dixon.

"It’s louder sounding," Costuros retorts.

"We were on a bunny hill before," adds Dixon, "and now we’re on Twin Peaks."

"We were elves, and now we’re eating dragons."

Death Sentence: Panda!’s U.K. label — which released its 2005 Puppy, Kitty or Both 10-inch and 2007 Festival of Ghosts album — needed little prodding. "We told them it was done before it was started," Costuros explains. The occasion? "It was for Chinese New Year," jokes West, who also plays in T.I.T.S. But seriously, "we were entering into a different realm of music-making, and we wanted to record that. Songs got longer, and I think it’s a little more dramatic and more dynamic and not as cute and short and still a little tough."

"It redefines the genre of clarinet-flute-drum music," Costuros notes wryly.

DEATH SENTENCE: PANDA! With These Are Powers and Work. Sat/14, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

Stiglitz: How to Fail to Recover

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March 6, 2009

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Here is our monthly installment of Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Unconventional Economic Wisdom column from the Project Syndicate news series. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University, and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, is co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.

How to Fail to Recover

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

NEW YORK – Some people thought that Barack Obama’s election would turn everything around for America. Because it has not, even after the passage of a huge stimulus bill, the presentation of a new program to deal with the underlying housing problem, and several plans to stabilize the financial system, some are even beginning to blame Obama and his team.

Obama, however, inherited an economy in freefall, and could not possibly have turned things around in the short time since his inauguration. President Bush seemed like a deer caught in the headlights – paralyzed, unable to do almost anything – for months before he left office. It is a relief that the US finally has a president who can act, and what he has been doing will make a big difference.

Culture war in Civic Center Plaza

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March 5, 2009

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Steven T. Jones blogs the Prop 8 case

Photos by Steven T. Jones

Thousands of people on both sides of the same sex marriage issue have filled Civic Center Plaza as the California Supreme Court begins to hear oral arguments in the case on the constitutionality of Prop. 8. Ukrainian churches are the largest faction of same sex marriage opponents, along with “God hates perverts” wackos, while gay marriage supporters have rainbow representation. Come on down and watch the arguments on the Jumbotron outside City Hall.

Vanishing points

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March 3, 2009

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

ESSAY/REVIEW There is a wry but hilarious scene near the very end of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 912 pages; $30), in which a French literary critic finds a German writer, Archimboldi, lodging at what the critic calls "a home for vanished writers." After checking into a room at the large estate, the elderly vanished writer wanders the grounds, meeting with the other vanished authors, residents whom Archimboldi finds friendly but increasingly eccentric. Gradually it dawns on Archimboldi that all is not as it seems. Walking back to the entrance gate, he sees, without surprise, a sign announcing that the estate is the "Mercier Clinic and Rest Home — Neurological Center." The home for vanished writers is an insane asylum.

As we enter the Obama era, with all its promise of "change," I’ve found it impossible to read 2666 without being haunted by the memory of those who vanished into the lunatic asylum of the long George W. Bush years — not just the nameless and unlucky left to rot in the Bush administration’s secret torture cells throughout the world, but also those who disappeared right here at home. For instance, a guy I worked with a couple of years ago. One day he was training me on the job, and a week or so later he was in a federal prison, labeled a "terrorist" — which in his case meant that he edited a Web site called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty.

There were other ghosts, those who vanished after refusing to speak to grand juries. They were rumored to have gone over the border, or back to the land, or who knows where, their very names now superstitiously verboten to speak out loud, lest we bring the heat down on ourselves. Now that Obama is here and everybody is eager for "change," who will remember the once-bright hopes and dreams of the generation that beat the World Trade Organization in Seattle at the dawn of this decade — the hopes that would later be chased down and gassed and beaten by riot police under cover of media blackout in the streets of Miami, St. Paul, or countless other cities? Of course, there were the suicides and overdoses, and other kinds of disappearances, different but related, too: the abandoned novels, or the guitars taken to the pawnshop. Three people in my community jumped off bridges. Only one survived. The human toll of the Bush years in my life has been enormous.

Watching the celebrations in the streets of the Mission District on election night in November, I could tell all of this was soon to be trivia. I saw a virtually all-white crowd of completely wasted people take over the intersection at 19th and Valencia, shouting "Obama!" and dancing in the street. In one way, this scene was touching: the spontaneous gathering was a product of the true feelings of human hope that people have for a better world. Yet the moment already had the scripted feel of something self-conscious or mediated, like the Pepsi ad campaign it would soon become. I had a sinking realization: those of us who have spent eight years battling the post-9/11 mantra of Everything Is Different Now were now going to soon be up against a new era of, well, Everything Is Different Now.

The narratives we tell ourselves about our country are important. Just when a Truth and Reconciliation Committee is most needed to write a detailed narrative of the Bush era’s torture, spying, illegal war, and swindling, I could already see the opportunity for that kind of change slipping away into the blackout amnesia aftermaths of the street parties taking place all across the nation. The election of a president of the United States from among the ranks of the nation’s most oppressed minorities has offered the country a new triumphant storyline. We have symbolically redeemed our sins against civilian casualties and third world workers, without too much painful self-examination. I could see that Obama’s brand of change was really so seductive because it offered a chance to change the subject.

Like Ronald Reagan, elected while the U.S. was mired in recession and post-Vietnam soul-searching, Barack Obama developed campaign narratives that made the U.S. feel good about itself again. Obama guessed correctly that national morale is low partially because we don’t want to deal with the nameless guilt we feel from the atrocities Bush and company committed in our names. Accordingly, he stated during his campaign that he would not pursue criminal prosecution of members of the Bush administration. Nor has Obama questioned the preposterous idea that we can win either a War on Terror or the war in Afghanistan. If you think about it, "Yes We Can" — his campaign’s appeal to good old American can-do spirit — isn’t far off in substance from Bush’s faith-based convictions about U.S. power. Both Bush’s crusade to make democracy flower in the desert of Iraq and Obama’s notion that the auto industry could save itself — and the planet! — with electric cars are fantasies that appeal to our sense of pride about being the richest and most powerful.

When a country that is owned by China and is getting its ass kicked simultaneously by ragged guerilla armies in two of the most impoverished and backward parts of the world keeps finding new ways to tell itself that it’s the richest and most powerful country, it is in deep trouble.

When political leaders and journalists seek to generate false narratives for our consumption and comfort, the difficult task of remembering the truth falls to literature.

Roberto Bolaño completed 2666 in 2003, shortly before he died, too poor to receive a liver transplant, at the age of 50. Born in Chile, Bolaño counted himself a member of "the generation who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell," and was himself something of a vanished writer. Briefly jailed during the 1973 coup in which Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the popularly elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, Bolaño wandered in exile from Mexico City to Spain, working variously as a janitor and a dishwasher, entering obscure literary competitions advertised on the backs of magazines, while his generation was consumed by Pinochet’s secret prisons and torture cells.

Fittingly, disappearance is perhaps the main action of characters in Bolaño’s works, from the vanished fascist poet and skywriter in 1996’s Distant Star (published in English by New Directions in 2004) to the entire romantic generation of doomed Mexican poets and radicals followed across the span of decades and continents to its vanishing point in a desert of crushed hopes in 1998’s The Savage Detectives (published in English by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007). In 2666, the terminally ill Bolaño wrote as if in an urgent race against the moment of his own departure, unwilling to leave anything out, as if he wanted to save an entire lost underworld from banishment. Taking on every genre from detective noir to the war novel to romantic comedy in an exhilarating, nearly 1,000-page race to the finish, the book is Bolaño’s epic of the disappeared.

The periphery of 2666 teems with Bolaño’s archetypal lost and doomed, a host of minor characters including a former Black Panther leader turned barbecue cook, various Russian writers purged by Stalin during World War II, a Spanish poet living out his days in an asylum, and an acclaimed British painter who cuts off his own hand. There are the usual obscure literary critics and lost novelists, and we even briefly meet an elderly African American man who calls himself "the last Communist in Brooklyn." This last communist could speak for all of Bolaño’s lost and departed when he explains why he presses on: "Someone has to keep the cell alive."

The book’s action, however, centers upon the unsolved serial killings of hundreds of women in the fictional Mexican border city of Santa Teresa during the late 1990s, events based on real-life unsolved killings in Juarez, Mexico. The majority of the women murdered in Juarez were workers at the new factories along the border with the United States, the unregulated maquiladoras that have sprung up in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In the book’s longest section, "The Part about the Crimes," we learn the names, one by one, of 111 of these murdered women. In terse, police-blotter language, Bolaño describes the crime scenes — the girls’ clothing, their disappearances, and the police investigators’ attempts to construct the last hours of their lives. Their bodies are discovered slashed, stabbed, bound, gagged, and always raped, in ditches, landfills, alleys, or along the side of the highway. Seen from these vantage points, Bolaño’s Santa Teresa is a disjointed place, seemingly patched together from snatches of barely remembered nightmares. Shantytowns and illegal toxic dumps spring up everywhere in "the shadow of the horizon of the maquiladoras." It is a city that is "endless," "growing by the second," a new type of urban zone in a Latin America that has become a laboratory for free trade policy experiments. It is a city made unmappable by globalization.

Bolaño clearly intends the reader to see the disappearances as the inevitable byproduct of the cheapness of life in the maquiladora economy, yet the killings also eerily evoke the disappearances in fascist 1970s Chile and Argentina. These murders are an open secret, virtually ignored by the media. Residents almost superstitiously refer to them only as "the crimes." The Santa Teresa police respond to the killings with a staggering indifference and ineptitude that might suggest complicity. The maquiladoras are ominous, hulking windowless buildings often in the center of town, not unlike the torture cells once hidden in plain sight in Buenos Aires (Bolaño even names one of them EMSA, an obvious play on Argentina’s most notorious concentration camp, ESMA), and many of the women’s bodies are discovered in an illegal garbage dump called El Chile. 2666 suggests that the unrestrained capitalism of the free-trade era is the ideological descendent of the 1970s South America state repression from which Bolaño fled, and that the killings in Santa Teresa are in part a recreation of the Pinochet-era disappearances.

While the scenes Bolaño describes are grisly, his language is clinical, the cold camera eye of the lone detective gathering evidence. The collective impact of story after story starts to accrue into its own profoundly moral force. By giving name and face to hundreds of disappeared women, Bolaño suggests that literature is a political response, a way to make wrongs right by bearing witness. While it would certainly be a mistake to read 2666 strictly as a political tract, Bolaño explicitly ties writing to justice in a rambling digression about the African slave trade. A Mexican investigator of the killings points out that it was not recorded into history if a slave ship’s human cargo perished on the way to Virginia, but that it would be huge news in colonial America if there was even a single killing in white society: "What happened to (the whites) was legible, you could say. It could be written." For Bolaño, the search for justice is partially about who can be seen in print.

At a literary conference in Seville six months before his death, Bolaño joked that his literary stock might rise posthumously. Sure enough, Bolaño the man has, ironically, vanished after his untimely death, lost in the fog of fame in the English-speaking world. Mainstream critics call his work "labyrinthine" — perhaps English-language critics’ stock adjective for Latin American writers — in a rush to "discover" a new Borges. Bolaño was a high-school dropout who bragged of discovering literature by shoplifting books. He claimed to be a former heroin addict who hung out with the FMLN in El Salvador. His genius deserves comparison to the great Borges, but it’s safe to say that, unlike Borges, a literary lapdog of Argentina’s generals, Bolaño would never have addressed the military leaders of the fascist Argentine coup as "gentlemen." Bolaño wrote without a net, over the abyss of atrocity into which his generation vanished. He did so in an effort to make a literature that recorded for all time where the bodies were buried. As a female reporter in 2666 says, "No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them."

The dangers of believing false narratives should be evident by now. In the wake of our current financial collapse, it is now widely understood that the U.S.’s sense of itself as the richest and most powerful nation in the world has been kept artificially afloat in the recent past by the import of cheap goods and credit from China. These cheap goods are manufactured under labor and environmental conditions much like those of Bolaño’s maquiladoras — conditions we tell ourselves we would never allow here at home, yet which are vital to our economic survival. Dealings with China have, instead, spread repressive tactics in reverse back to corporations from the United States, such as when Google memorably agreed to remove all reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from its Google China site.

There is a crucial difference between hope and self-delusion. In its dogged search for uncomfortable truth, 2666 creates a hard-won hope that is different from the way in which that word manifests on the campaign trail. It respects the hope that truth matters, that staring it down can provide the shock of self-awareness that makes real change possible.

In the meantime, there is the hope of literature itself. In 2666, Bolaño devotes a scene to one of his disappeared characters, a Spanish poet who lives out his days in an insane asylum in the countryside. The poet’s doctor — who in a classically deadpan Bolaño twist tells us he is also the poet’s biographer — reflects on the asylum the poet has vanished into. "Someday we will all finally leave (the asylum) and this noble institution will stand abandoned," he says. "But in the meantime, it is my duty to collect information, dates, names. To confirm stories." *

Erick Lyle is the author of On The Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of The City, out now on Soft Skull Press.

“Yan Pei-Ming: YES!”

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March 3, 2009

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REVIEW James Elkin starts off his wonderful book What Painting Is (Routledge, 1998) with the simple statement that "painting is alchemy," an elegant encapsulation of the process by which combining oils and pigments, applying that mixture onto a canvas, and generally getting one’s hands dirty results in something as ethereal as one of Monet’s Water Lilies. Elkin’s words came to mind while looking at Franco-Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming’s massive watercolor and oil paintings. Yan’s paintings are alchemical double exposures: we are asked to view them simultaneously as palimpsest-like records of their material creation and as indexes of their subjects. Their visceral emotional impact comes from the tension between these two ways of seeing, a tension that is present in every brush stroke and paint globule.

Take Yan’s portrait of our new president, painted last year. Obama regards us cautiously. His sober visage and weary gaze — the products of roughly brushed, smeared and daubed blacks, whites and grays — seem to anticipate the disappointment that will invariably accompany the enormous, near-impossible task before him. The spattering mist of paint droplets that streak his face and suit make the canvas look as if it has been left for the birds, so to speak. This is not the face of the Great Progressive Hope enshrined in street art hagiography. This is not a presidential portrait. This is a portrait of a man — a rightfully exhausted and undoubtedly doubt-filled man — who happens to be the president. The aggregated crudeness of Yan’s technique is not in the service of caricature or grotesquerie. Rather — much like Yan’s earlier portraits of Pope John Paul II, Bruce Lee, anonymous prostitutes, and himself — Obama displays the battle scars of a forceful struggle with portraiture itself.

The political resonances of that representational struggle echo resoundingly throughout this solo exhibition, and the struggle is often one of life and death. On the wall adjacent to Obama, there are four equally large black and white oil portraits depicting unnamed U.S. soldiers and veterans. Each is ambiguously titled Life Souvenir, followed by a different date. Do the numbers mark when these people returned home, or the hour of their death, or both? A morbid terminus is suggested, metonymically, by Returning Home (2008) which depicts the flag-draped coffins of the recent war dead; an image that the Bush administration so pointedly tried to remove from the public domain. A similar ambiguity suffuses the more recent "New Born, New Life" series: I couldn’t help but think of the gore porn photos used by anti-abortion extremists when looking at Yan’s watercolors of newborn infants emerging from murky pools of placental red. Even Obama faces a presidential memento mori in the massive watercolors of U.S. currency on the gallery’s upper level, each mottled denomination bearing the portrait (in this context, rendered worthless as legal tender, while being worth quite a lot, since Yan tends to receive blue chip bids at auction) of a "great man" who has come and gone.

YAN PEI-MING: YES! Through May 23. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 749-4563, www.waltermcbean.com

Feds finally relax pot policies

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February 26, 2009

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By Steven T. Jones and Ben Terrall

Might the wasteful U.S. war on marijuana be coming to an end? That possible light at the end of this long dark tunnel was sparked by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday when he said the federal government would no longer raid medical marijuana facilities in the 14 states where voters have legalized weed for medical uses.

That announcement comes just days after California Assembly member Tom Ammiano introduced a bill that would decriminalize and tax marijuana, even pot consumed for strictly recreational reasons by healthy Californians. Advocates are hailing the twin announcements as a refreshing change from the ridiculously intolerant rhetoric that has characterized the national narcotics debate for decades.

Loving the enemy

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February 24, 2009

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REVIEW Nation, ethnicity, family, friends, gender, lover — where do our true loyalties lie? More to the point, when our multiple loyalties slip out of concentric orbit and collide, how much say do we really have in the matter? These questions arise provocatively from two very different plays making their Bay Area premieres.

In the first, Golden Thread’s generally sturdy West Coast premiere of Joyce Van Dyke’s A Girl’s War: An Armenian-Azeri Love Story, an aging Armenian American fashion model, Anna (Ana Bayat), returns to the war-torn village of her youth determined not to be affected by the ongoing ethnic strife that has just taken the life of her brother (Adrian Cervantes Mejia) and racked the Azerbaijani region of Karabakh since the late 1980s — converting her stolid yet hot-tempered mother (Bella Warda) into a machine gun–toting foot soldier for the Armenian cause. Almost flaunting her own aloofness and disapproval, Anna even resists calling herself Armenian and soon falls in love with a returning member of her family’s onetime Azeri neighbors, now antagonists: a passionate young deserter (Zarif Kabeir Sadiqi) who arrives stealthily one day at her mother’s house, which he and his family briefly occupied years before.

Van Dyke’s 2001 play opens on a world seemingly apart, however, as Brit fashion photographer Stephen (Simon Vance) snaps photos of the still-striking Anna, his old flame and muse, glowering at him in some haute-couture idea of battle garb. The contrast is key and works its way into the second setting in Karabakh, when Stephen and his cheerful but recently shaken assistant Tito (Mejia) arrive after escaping anti-U.S. feelings during a harrowing trip to Turkey. Here in her mother’s house, Anna’s two worlds collide even as she insists she needs no land, passport, or language to define her. Her stoic but long-suffering mother, however, shows little patience for her daughter’s flighty Western cosmopolitanism, and we are left with our own sympathies unsettled, fraternizing with all sides.

Along the way, the play neatly works a certain doubling conceit. The same actor playing the Italian American Tito, for instance, also plays Anna’s recently deceased brother, a spectral presence in the form of the far more severe but equally sensitive Seryozha. The implications are subtle rather than crude, suggesting the dramatic shaping done by circumstance across a universal segment of young manhood. And the climax, in yet another doubling, underscores the point resonantly, as another two seemingly very different characters lie side by side, brought together in death — the most democratic of states — and made mirror images of each other. It’s an effect that might have been overplayed, but under artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian’s confident direction it happily comes off with matter-of-fact simplicity. The play as a whole succeeds in similar fashion, overshadowing, if not altogether escaping, its more maudlin and moralizing tendencies with fitting dramatic tension, unexpected twists, and thematic delicacy.

TO HELL AND BACK Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, meanwhile, offers an admirably complex take on love and loyalty in the context of the proverbial war of the sexes, in director Buddy Butler’s graceful Northern California premiere of William A. Parker’s Waitin’ 2 End Hell. An African American couple (a towering Alex Morris and a slyly understated Pjay Phillips) find their relationship hitting the skids after 20 years of marriage, dividing along lines of gender solidarity the four friends who’ve shown up to celebrate their anniversary. If the title — playing on the Terry McMillan novel — isn’t that funny, Parker’s naturalistic dialogue offers consistent laughs and truths, pivoting expertly on the comic and tragic dimensions of male-female rivalry in the context of African American experience. There is one seeming misstep late in the plot — a slightly hard-to-believe change of heart evoked at gunpoint — but this is a surprisingly powerful and well-rounded comedy about love; the entwined politics of race, class, and gender; and the long haul every family faces.

A GIRL’S WAR

Through March 8

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; $15–$25

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF

www.thickhouse.org

WAITIN’ 2 END HELL

Through March 1

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; $24–$36

Lorraine Hansberry Theatre

77 Beale, SF

www.lhtsf.org

Rights way

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February 24, 2009

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Ask any filmmaker: facts and figures may horrify, but images are what leave the most lasting impression. With raw and shocking footage of worldwide atrocities, the movies featured in this year’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival speak multitudes — even when their narrators are silent. Rather than attempt to encapsulate the entirety of the injustices committed, these films focus on the human side of things. And so we get glimpses: a mother weeping over the daughter taken from her, a student cradling her bloody head as she leads a protest.

Two particularly effective films restrict their focus to the women involved in these struggles—as perpetrators and as victims. Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling (2007) avoids such labels and focuses on female Israeli soldiers as individuals. Some might criticize the film for its apolitical tone. While many of the women lament war crimes, they have little to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole. But the story that emerges from these interviews is a unique one, and a valuable addition to the ongoing debates. To See If I’m Smiling doesn’t seek to justify the actions of the Israeli Army, but rather to give its subjects space to reflect — both on their rights and on the rights they served to protect.

The scope of Julie Bridgham’s The Sari Soldiers (2008) is considerably wider. Her female subjects are the civilians of Nepal, the Maoist rebels, the Royal Nepal Army soldiers. Some are loyal to the king, while others march in protest. Bridgham wisely avoids coming down on one side or the other, allowing us to see that these women are united not by ideologies, but by their shared belief in a better Nepal.

One film can’t sum up a human rights quandary — and it surely can’t solve it either. At the very least, though, this festival gives a voice to people in dire need of speaking, whether through pictures or words.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Wed/27–Fri/27, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

March 5–26, $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

www.hrw.org/iff

Beautiful nightmare

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February 24, 2009

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If the U.S. really is entering a new period of transparency and team-playing, that might take a while to swallow for some nations that have known us best as an unreliable fair-weather ally. One of the Vietnam War’s lesser-heralded tragedies was what happened to neighboring Laos. Early in Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal, we see JFK in 1961 saying of Laos, "All we want is peace, not war. A truly neutral government, not a Cold War pawn." Whatever earnestness that statement possessed, it was raped under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, despite all official denials.

The CIA drafted and trained Laotian military personnel as secret guerilla units gunning for North Vietnamese fighters along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. U.S. aircraft began dropping bombs on Laos — 3 million tons’ worth over nine years, more than in both World Wars combined. Vietcong were targeted, but civilians suffered plenty from the bombings as well as from a Yank-supported South Vietnamese invasion.

Nixon’s disgraced resignation drove one last nail in the coffin of this "unpopular" war. The 1975 "fall of Saigon" withdrawal was accompanied by abrupt pullouts of American interests and muscle in Laos. Though not quite as ghastly as what ensued in collaborating Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the fast overthrow of Laos’ "neutral" U.S.-backed monarchial government by Communist forces had similar consequences. Pathet Lao’s oppressive new regime closed itself to the world, arresting, executing, or otherwise persecuting anyone suspected of ties to the prior epoch.

The Betrayal fascinates like other rare, intimate documentaries shot over long periods — Michael Apted’s Seven Up series being the most famous example. This one began a quarter-century ago, when Kuras contacted 19-year-old Thavisouk Phrasavath (credited as co-director and co-writer, and the film’s sole editor) for lessons in speaking Lao for an unrelated project. His personal story — past, present, evolving — took up any time not occupied by Kuras’ cinematography career, which has encompassed features and docs by Spike Lee, Rebecca Miller, Harold Ramis, Jonathan Demme, Mary Harron, Jim Jarmusch, Michel Gondry, and Sam Mendes.

Phrasavath’s father was a Royal Army officer seduced by better pay and the promise that his own country’s best interests were being served — even when he plotted its bombing targets. After long service, the Americans’ abrupt pullout got him arrested, sent to re-education camp, and assumed executed by loved ones. Considered traitorous along with her 10 children, his wife Orady desperately bribed smugglers for their safe expatriation. When that happened, it was so sudden she had to leave two briefly absent daughters behind. She chose the United States as an asylum destination, believing that a government grateful for her husband’s sacrifices would "take care of us when we get to America." The clan got dumped in a decrepit mid-1980s Brooklyn apartment shared with other Southeast Asian refugees, next to a crack house and surrounded by gang violence.

Kuras was there then, and later on when some startling changes occurred in the Phrasavath family saga. But The Betrayal is as soft on narrative detailing as its color palette, which finds rainforest green and Buddhist monk-robe saffron echoed even in the harshest New Yawk/Joisey landscapes. Her visual impressionism is a gift, especially in the abstract illustration of teenage Phrasavath’s solo escape across the Mekong. But such poetical shorthand also frustrates — we’d like to know far more than Kuras and Phrasavath allow about what happened to immediate blood beyond himself and his mom.

But that stuff could be forgivably relegated to DVD extras. A rare new documentary that really belongs on the big screen, The Betrayal‘s flowing lyricism gracefully connects a poignant family history to larger socio-political and extra-large spiritual themes. It’s an almost sinfully beautiful movie about ugly global realities.

THE BETRAYAL opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

Losing the tax argument

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February 24, 2009

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EDITORIAL The lead topic on the local cable TV show City Desk News Hour Feb. 21 was the state budget, and a panel of local reporters were talking about the mix of tax increases and service cuts the Legislature finally passed. After a bit of back and forth, Scott Shafer, host of KQED’s California Report, piped up. "Everyone knows it’s a bad idea to raise taxes in a recession," he said.

Shafer, who was a press secretary to former Mayor Art Agnos, is hardly a conservative commentator. In fact, at the risk of damaging his credentials as an unbiased reporter, we might even call him a liberal. And to judge from the response of most of the panel, nothing he said was particularly controversial. Sure, raising taxes in a recession is bad; so is cancer, and violent crime. Next question.

But that’s not just a limited viewpoint — it’s factually inaccurate. Raising taxes during a recession can be an excellent economic idea, if it’s done right. Because the one thing almost every credible economist outside of the far-right intellectual swampland agrees on these days is that cutting government spending during a recession is a terrible idea — and if the only way to keep the public sector jobs, the social services, and the welfare payments going is to raise taxes, then raising taxes on those who can afford to pay is not only good politics, it’s good policy.

And it’s infuriating that this point seems to have dropped out of the mainstream of debate. That’s a major failure of the Democratic leadership, in California and nationwide.

Historians can argue forever about the direct impact the New Deal had on ending the Great Depression. But it’s pretty clear that what Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman calls the great jobs program of World War II turned the American economy around. And during World War II, tax rates, particularly on the wealthiest individuals and corporations, were exceptionally high. The top marginal income tax rate exceeded 80 percent. Corporations that made more than a modest return paid a high excess-profits tax. The high income tax rates on the richest Americans remained through the postwar boom era, a time when inequality declined and overall wealth grew.

That money went into the public sector, not just for the war but for retooling and rebuilding U.S. industry. High taxes on the rich paid for the interstate highway system, the University of California system, the California Water Project, the birth of the Internet. It took almost half a century for the Republicans and no-taxers to wreck the economic gains of that high-tax era.

And yet, despite all the consistent, clear evidence, we still hear the news media, the commentators, and even liberal Democrats saying that tax cuts are good for the economy and tax hikes are bad.

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

One of the most important goals of the next year or two, under the Obama administration, is to change the national debate over public and private priorities. That won’t be easy. President Obama has started off in the right direction, although the Republicans forced him to include several hundred billion in wasteful tax cuts in his stimulus bill. The tax hikes in the state budget plan are almost entirely regressive (sales taxes and a flat increase in the income tax.)

Here in California, and here in San Francisco, elected officials who claim to represent the Democratic Party’s future need to stop mouthing the old Republican line. None of the Democratic candidates for governor, including Mayor Gavin Newsom, have been our front about the need for more government spending, even if it means higher taxes on the wealthy (say, a business tax that hits harder on the biggest and less so on the small). In fact, Newsom has taken the opposite line, writing in a Feb. 13 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed piece that "we have to reduce spending." The San Francisco supervisors are at least talking about new revenue sources, but polls show that will be a hard sell.

Why do the polls show that? Because people like Newsom — and to some extent, the supervisors — aren’t using their bully pulpits to change the tone of the discussion, to make the case for economic sanity, to challenge the demented wisdom that’s brought us to this nightmare.

That has to change, now, or there will be no way out. *