War

New push to legalize drugs

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pot.jpg
By Steven T. Jones

At a time when the recession is forcing tax increases and deep cuts in government spending — and when California is being ordered by federal judges to substantially reduce its prison population — this would seem to be the ideal moment to end the costly, wasteful war on drugs.
That’s the hope of Assembly member Tom Ammiano, who tells the Guardian that next week he will introduce legislation to decriminalize and tax marijuana, a move that might instantly turn a huge drain on the public treasury (at least $17 billion a year nationally, and closer to $50 billion once related costs are figured in) into what saves the state from financial ruin, given that pot is California’s number one cash crop.
“This is long overdue,” said Ammiano, who will work on the measure with John Vasconcellos, who represented the Silicon Valley in the Legislature for 38 years and was the last legislator to really carry the banner for legalizing marijuana. In fact, Ammiano says he’s basically reintroducing Vasconcellos’s bill from 2004, which went nowhere.
Meanwhile, another former member of the Board of Supervisors, Carol Ruth Silver, this week resigned as director of SF’s Prisoner Legal Services program out of frustration with the large number of nonviolent drug users in the San Francisco jail, joining a new Law Enforcement Against Prohibition campaign for the legalization of all drugs.
As she told the Guardian, “The jail is full of people who should not be there.”

San Francisco Ballet’s “Swan Lake”

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PREVIEW Maybe it was not the best move politically for San Francisco Ballet to schedule a new, no doubt very expensive version of Swan Lake just now. But a lot — besides the pragmatic "you have to spend money to make money" — can be said for Helgi Tomasson revisiting the world’s most popular ballet. In European-derived dance, Swan Lake is the great classical achievement. Theater has Hamlet; the opera has The Marriage of Figaro; and ballet has Swan Lake.

When Tomasson joined SFB in 1985, the company had a 50-year history of presenting contemporary ballets — and had performed Willam Christensen’s Swan Lake in 1940 and Balanchine’s one-act version in 1953. But the emphasis throughout SFB’s history had been on new work, an approach that had taken them a long way. Still, Tomasson knew that the dancers of a great ballet company need the classical idiom. It creates and refines technique and roots the dancers in a living tradition. So in 1988 he choreographed Swan Lake even though he was a relative neophyte as a choreographer.

It was a risk — and a smash popular success, and by now, its sets and costumes have more than amortized. Twenty years later audiences and dancers deserve the rethinking by a much more mature artist who in the interim has created a truly great company. Tomasson is no revolutionary: choreographically this Swan Lake will respect the tradition. However, there will be a first: designer Jonathan Fenson has worked in the West End of London and on Broadway. He has seen little ballet and has never designed one.

SAN FRANCISCO BALLET’S SWAN LAKE Sat/21, Tues/24, Feb. 26–28, 8 p.m.; Sun/22, Feb. 28 and March 1, 2 p.m.; Feb. 25, 7:30 p.m.; $45–$255. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF. (415) 865-2000, www.sfballet.org

Foot Village

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PREVIEW As if it were a sovereign nation of drum-toting, megaphone-wielding musical savages, Foot Village bears its own two-pronged manifesto, stating "Our national language is drumming, our national pass-time is screaming." This declaration aptly sums up the Los Angeles group’s polyrhythmic sonic attack, which is studded with explosions of feral hoots and hollers, and three drum sets’ worth of cataclysmic crashing, hissing, and banging.

The band’s witch-doctor blend of hardcore punk and noise rock is at its best on "Bones": visions of bloodthirsty, amphetamine-fueled jungle warriors out to collect heads come to mind via Grace Lee’s wild yawps over the rest of the Village’s battle cries and death-drum rolls. Foot Village’s forthcoming album of "drum essays," titled Anti-Magic (Upset the Rhythm) and out June 2009, will be the young collective’s blueprint for its war upon the ethereal as its avows to "embrace the physical and the physical alone." Considering the group’s aggressively carnal approach to music, god help anyone who gets in its way. The ensemble will perform with the Drums — a new project with John Dwyer, ex of the Coachwhips and currently of Thee Oh Sees — at Bottom of the Hill, making it a blitzkrieg of eardrum assault with no electric guitars or bass in sight. This isn’t the usual clamor we San Franciscans are fed, but the citizens of Foot Village are clearly ready to shovel their bristling wall of sound down our hungry throats.

FOOT VILLAGE With the Drums, T.I.T.S., and Casy and Brian. Wed/18, 9 p.m., $8. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

Free the prisoners!

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By Steven T. Jones

For all the outrage and political posturing around federal judges ordering California to reduce the state’s prison population, this has been foreseeable for more than a decade and it’s something that our elected leaders should embrace as both humane and a partial solution to our budget woes.

The bottom line is our prisons are shamefully overcrowded, thanks largely to legislators pushing tough-on-crime and no-new-taxes measures for decades. But politicians from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to Attorney General Jerry Brown have vowed to fight the order all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It seems like everyone’s on the same page with this as far as elected officials,” Ronn Owens said on KGO radio this morning, where Lt. Gov. (and gubernatorial candidate) John Garamendi sounded a little more reasonable than other politicians who have been tripping all over themselves to sound tough and indignant, lest someone call them soft on crime.

“We’ve known this is coming. This is not something new,” Garamendi said. “The problem is failed leadership.” He called for more creative incarceration solutions such as more conservation camps (not the best idea) and more aggressive efforts to lower recidivism rates (a better idea). But he shied away from more radical and effective solutions such as ending the war on drugs.

Brown, after taking a courageous stand in favor of judicial independence in December, should be ashamed of himself. Instead of beating his chest, he should be talking about the kinds of obvious solutions that he’s advocated in his previous iterations, such as ending the war on drugs, parole reform, and freeing most nonviolent offenders.

We can no longer afford to have some of the world’s highest incarceration rates and lowest tax rates, it’s just that simple.

Beyond apathy: Todd Snider to deliver ‘Peace Queer’ musings at Great American

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By Michelle Broder Van Dyke

Nashville singer-songwriter Todd Snider has been making folk-rock croons since 1994, but his last three albums have shown an evolving sound that lends itself more towards protest cries than an apathetic hipster generation is used to hearing.

His most recent eight-track EP, Peace Queer (Mega Force, 2008), springs an attack on Dubya (it was released on Oct. 14 before we knew who his predecessor would be), war, and the state of the nation with clever, literate lyrics that Snider says are meant for him (“I share them with you because they rhyme / I did not do this to change your mind about anything / I did this to ease my own mind about everything”). That statement seems as true as this non-commercial album – in title, cover, distribution strategy, spoken word pieces, and length – and reinforces Snider’s sincerity.

Stiglitz: Davos Man’s Depression

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The spirit of Davos was that we had gone from “boom to bust” to “boom and Armageddon”

by Joseph E. Stiglitz

– Joseph E. Stiglitz, 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.

NEW YORK – For 15 years, I have attended the World Economic Forum in Davos. Typically, the leaders gathered there share their optimism about how globalization, technology, and markets are transforming the world for the better. Even during the recession of 2001, those assembled in Davos believed that the downturn would be short-lived.

But this time, as business leaders shared their experiences, one could almost feel the clouds darkening. The spirit was captured by one speaker who suggested that we had gone from “boom and bust” to “boom and Armageddon.” The emerging consensus was that the IMF forecast for 2009, issued as the meeting convened, of global stagnation – the lowest growth in the post-war period – was optimistic. The only upbeat note was struck by someone who remarked that Davos consensus forecasts are almost always wrong, so perhaps this time it would prove excessively pessimistic.

Labor war widens

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By Steven T. Jones

On a day when the labor movement rallied in cities across the country in support of the federal Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for employees to form a union, bitter infighting involving the nation’s largest union, Service Employees International Union, also escalated today.
The California Nurses Association today charged SEIU with launching an illegal, multi-million-dollar campaign to take over their organization using what that they call a phony nurses group called RNs for Change to take over the leadership of CNA and affiliate it with SEIU, which calls the accusations “wild and untrue.”
CNA spokesperson Chuck Idelson called SEIU head Andy Stern corrupt and power hungry, echoing criticisms from Stern-ousted United Healthcare Workers leaders who last week formed the new union National Healthcare Workers Union. NUHW spokesperson John Borsos said the new union has now gathered petitions from about 25,000 workers in 101 facilities who want to leave SEIU and join NUHW.
I’ve been doing interviews and research on these related issues all day, so check back here tomorrow for a more complete report.

Green Chile Kitchen

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› paulr@sfbg.com

You would expect that a restaurant with "green chile" in its name would serve at least one memorable dish with green chiles, and Green Chile Kitchen does. In fact, the restaurant serves a host of memorable dishes (some with green chiles, many others without) and, because it’s in the middle of NoPa rather than at, or just past, the edge of it, Green Chile could be the best restaurant in NoPa. Much would depend on our understanding of NoPa: region with definite borders or state of mind?

This is the sort of question some of us occasionally mull with respect to Mexico. There is, or was, Old Mexico, whose reach extended all the way up the Pacific Coast to the Strait of Juan de Fuca (near Seattle), and there was (and is) New Mexico, one of the Lower 48. The boundaries of Mexico have long been hazy; a legal border has existed since the end of the 1848 war (a good account of how it was drawn can be found in Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848), but, as travelers through the Southwest can attest, the reality is far more zonal and interesting.

Green Chile Kitchen serves a good deal of what the menu describes as "New Mexican" food, and much of this seems Mexican, or Mexicanish, with Indian and desert overtones: salsas and guacamole, tortilla chips made from blue corn, and pinto beans. The restaurant opened about three years ago in a location easily reached by USF students and Haightsters, and it strikingly combines elements of college-town café and stylish restaurant. You order at the counter and carry a numbered plastic doodad to your table so the service staff can find you, and while you wait you admire the soaring ceiling, the burnished wood trim, and the pale sage paint scheme. Full table service would seem to be about a half baby step away, but maybe the current arrangement provides some real savings. Even given the kitchen’s emphasis on organic ingredients, the prices are surprisingly gentle.

There is no better deal to be had on Green Chile Kitchen’s menu than the green chile stew ($4.50/cup, $6.95/bowl). The scale isn’t quite that of a typical pho at a Vietnamese restaurant, but it’s considerable, and the stew itself is an impressive, faintly smoldering collection of green chile strips, chunks of slow-roasted Niman Ranch pork, quartered potatoes, and bits of tomato in a clear, even-tempered broth. The broth (vegetable, I thought) was key; it didn’t add as much flavor as an animal-based stock might have, but, like subtly textured white walls in a museum, it let the main ingredients be heard without completely disappearing itself.

If you pine for the modesty of Fresca or Limon in their earliest incarnations, you will thrill to GCK’s rotisserie chicken (made with Fulton Valley birds). A half-chicken dinner costs $10.95; the bird is rubbed with your choice of herbed citrus or green chile and is served with blue-corn chips, Spanish rice, beans (pinto, black, or refried), and calabacitas, a succotash-like jumble of green and yellow squash cubes, corn kernels, and bits of green chile. The chicken itself was expertly cooked, the dark meat done through while the white meat remained juicy. That is the test of all roast chicken. The party of the second part did register some mild disappointment with the pinto beans, which were thought to be underpowered. A jolt of some blood-red salsa helped bring them back into trim.

I was slightly disappointed in the quesadilla ($3.50), which combined jack and cheddar cheeses to colorful effect but suffered from a dry and brittle tortilla. And the starters offered what little sticker shock there is to be found on the menu. The plato de aperitivos cost $11.95, and while it was full of bright variety — from a pair of tamales to a crock of pristine guacamole to a quartet of salsas and a heap of blue-corn chips to dip in them — the price seemed a little high for what was, after all, mostly starch, indeed mostly corn.

Still, the salsas were excellent: a tour de force of salsa-making. There was the regular tomato kind (seemingly darkened and deepened by roasting), a smooth-tart, pale-green blend of avocado and tomatillo, a pico de gallo, and — the standout — a habañero number the color of lobster bisque, with a hint of citrus fruitiness mixed in to temper some of the high heat. (Habañeros can be quite deadly to the tongue in their pure, untempered form.) When we wearied of using these salsas to coat chips, we started spooning them over the rice and beans and the forlorn quesadilla to pleasing effect.

In the evenings, the people come and go, talking of … well, probably not Michelangelo so much as takeout, which appears to be an appreciable part of the business. (So are breakfast and lunch services.) The clientele tilts toward hip-looking youth, although older people are not unrepresented and we even noticed what seemed to be a family grouping: a set of parents in late middle age and their young-adult children, everyone eating and happy in one another’s company, as if on a sitcom from the 1950s. Not many restaurants are able to cast so wide a net. Green Chile Kitchen, by serving distinctive, carefully made food in an attractive setting at a moderate cost, manages to appeal simultaneously to the price-conscious, setting-conscious, and quality-conscious constituencies. And for those of us who have finger in each of those pies — or stews — the word can only be jackpot.

GREEN CHILE KITCHEN

Sun.–Thurs., 9 a.m.–-9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 9 a.m.–10 p.m.

601 Baker, SF

(415) 614-9411

www.greenchilekitchen.com

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Speed Reading

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THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST HORROR COMICS

Edited by Peter Normanton

Running Press

448 pages

$17.95

It probably comes as no surprise that post–World War II Americans decided Hitler was a lot scarier than the Boogeyman. It’s a little more shocking to see that fear realized in their comic books. The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics contains its fair share of vampires, werewolves, and zombies, but those early years are dominated by ghostly stormtroopers, Nazi clones and — more often than not — the reanimated fuhrer himself. I’m particularly fond of "Terror of the Stolen Legs," which, I assure you, is creepier than the title suggests.

For this collection, editor Peter Normanton has culled prime examples from more than six decades of horror comics. The results are often fascinating: how else to see Nazi anxiety so aptly literalized? And, of course, they’re fun. Don’t forget these are comics, so for all of their time capsule–esque appeal, they retain that guilty pleasure quality. Imagine you’re a kid in the pre-"graphic novel" ’50s while reading the collection— it enhances the thrill.

For the most part, it’s these early offerings that prove the most delightful, if only for the camptastic writing. The best example comes from "The Game Keeper," which begins, "Run Avis Drood! Run as fast as your lovely legs can carry you, for the full moon burgeons beyond Drood Castle and the game is afoot!"

The only real downside to the collection is Normanton’s purple prose. He tends to ham it up in his introductions to each story, promising a life-changing experience on every page. But hey, feel free to skip those parts — they don’t have pictures, anyway.

All mod cons

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› johnny@sfbg.com

How can any of us forget 1835, and the heady discovery of spherical amphibians, blue goats, and petite three-foot zebras frolicking on the moon? In Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders (New Press, 245 pages, $24.95), Paul Maliszewski relates that time, when the New York Sun brought news of lunar life to an increasingly large readership that craved delightful information during an economic drought. Maliszewski doesn’t have to work to make the story funny — he merely has to relate how the paper’s moon-discovery serial likened a typical blue goat to "a young lamb or kitten," and presented scientists pretending to tickle the creature’s beard as seen through a telescope, only to witness it "bound away into oblivion, as if conscious of earthly impertinence."

Within the context of Maliszewski’s sprawling look at fakery, the Sun saga is a light vacation, because of its relative datedness and good-natured imagination. Before and after, Fakers largely avoids such Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds–style nostalgia for more contemporary tales: the stories of Stephen Glass, James Frey, and JT Leroy, for example. It places Glass’s accounts under a microscope that highlights their pandering corniness. It relates the life and times of Leroy — and his feverish endorsement by the likes of Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon (more on him later), as well as his editorship of an installment in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing series — without losing sight of the fact that Leroy’s much-celebrated writing is mawkish.

Such targets and views might suggest that Maliszewski likes to wag his finger and tut-tut, but his viewpoint is much more variable — he isn’t out to condemn various literary liars, for example, so much as critique them. Early in the book, he relates one of his own adventures in the creation of phony identities, a Walter Mitty–scale satire somewhat akin to the letters that Joe Orton used to write to newspapers as "Edna Welthorpe," a make-believe housewife outraged by Orton’s plays. Here, and in other instances, such as a discussion of George W. Bush’s use of the word "confidence" when discussing economics, Fakers suggests that the Bush years have not just eroded but demolished the value of truth.

In a seeming act of first-person tit-for-tat, Maliszewski shares an example of an instance when he fell for a hoax, though the chosen subject — a tall tale that might qualify as an urban legend if it weren’t set in the wilderness — cops out in terms of allowing a truly personal and thus uncomfortable examination of the various aspects of being duped. The most curious of Maliszewski’s practices is the frequent weaving of e-mail interviews — a format that would seem to allow for flights of fancy — into his investigative text. A correspondence with former New York Times journalist Michael Finkel, for example, stays soft-focus when it could have questioned the presumptuous audacity of a middle-aged white man assuming the voice of a West African boy.

In a recent Bookforum review, Hua Hsu describes Fakers as vaguely paranoia-inducing, and indeed, at the very least, this reader — a journalist who has been duped — wonders if any of the facts or stories that the author relates might contain creative twists. In an extended conclusion about a fraudulent Michael Chabon essay, Maliszewski essentially asserts that to lie for the sake of lying is a cynical, selfish act. True. But Fakers is more interesting when it is ambivalent and discomfiting, or when Maliszewski’s examples and anecdotes prompt ideas about various permutations of truth and falsehood in the media landscape. (Take CNN’s Nancy Drew, I mean Nancy Grace, and the way she is currently using a compulsive liar — Caylee Anthony — to co-author cable news television’s version of a radio serial.) Blue goats are cute, but — as Fakers makes clear — white lies have many facets.

Folk-metal growls: SF’s Slough Feg lays it out at the Eagle

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By L.C. Mason

Coupling the two seemingly opposed sonic realms of folk and metal into one paganism-loving, mythology-obsessed subgenre, folk metal is a sphere of music that enjoys a healthy European following. Across the Atlantic in San Francisco, Slough Feg are fiercely holding down the fort.

Taking cues from genre pioneers Skyclad and fantasy metalists Iron Maiden, Slough Feg have been serving up face-melting solos, gut-churning bass lines, and otherworldly lyrics on the same plate since the ’90s. Songs are woven like elaborate sagas, with vocalist Michael Scalzi growling operatically about war, immortality, the cruel hands of fate, and other ancient plagues on the human psyche, while “Don” Angelo Tringali propels them into epic territory with his blistering breakdowns. They lay it down at the Eagle Tavern Thursday with fellow city dwellers Orb of Confusion, but you better watch yourself; this brand of music makes starting a midweek drinking binge seem like a good idea.

SLOUGH FEG
With Orb of Confusion, Modig Wuht, and Cold Cutz
Thurs/5, 9 p.m., call for price
Eagle Tavern
398 12th St., SF
(415) 626-0880

Dudes and don’ts

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All right, I’m not gonna try and pretend The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans and Deadgirl have all that much in common, other than they’re both playing the San Francisco Independent Film Festival. But they do both focus on folks with peculiar obsessions, healthy and otherwise.

Camera in hand, television commercial director Eddie Chung descended upon the 2004 Lebowski Fest — since 2002, an annual gathering of fans of the Coen brothers’ 1998 cult phenom The Big Lebowski — and discovered a bona fide subculture. Who are these people? Why are they addicted to Lebowski? What makes ordinary working stiffs fiendishly create movie-inspired costumes (severed toe, Sioux City Sasparilla bottle, walrus, "camel fucker") as detailed as they are obscure?

At 66 brisk minutes, The Achievers can’t help being fun, although I imagine it would be difficult to enjoy the doc without having seen Lebowski. (If you haven’t seen Lebowski, or you saw it when it came out and — like most audiences and critics at the time — didn’t get it, you’re long overdue for a viewing.) Still, that’s probably not gonna be a problem for IndieFest attendees, considering the fest hosts an annual bowling-infused salute to the Dude. Dilettantes will appreciate The Achievers’ many Lebowski clips, which pop up to contextualize lesser-known references; diehards will thrill to the interviews with bit-part actors like "Saddam," the Hussein look-alike who hands the Dude bowling shoes during his dream sequence. Also featured are the real-life inspirations for the Dude, Walter Sobchak, and Little Larry Sellers (you know, the kid who steals the Dude’s car and leaves his D-grade homework paper behind — incredibly, a true story, more or less.) The Coens are absent, but bemused star Jeff Bridges does make an appearance.

As Chung discovers, the most hardcore of the Lebowski fans found each other over the Internet, becoming acquainted via a message board dedicated to the film and the fest. Many have become real-world friends above and beyond the organized Lebowski gatherings, which now attract thousands of White Russian–drenched revelers. Really, they’re no different than heavy metal fans, or Rocky Horror junkies, or Civil War reenactors, tapping shared interests to build a tribe whose activities (Maude Lebowski tattoo, anyone?) might be viewed by the mainstream as crossing the line into low-level insanity.

Far more wackjobby are the protagonists of IndieFest’s closing-night film, Deadgirl, which is described in the fest program as resembling the early films of David Cronenberg. Body horror? Yes! Disturbing? Indeed! The work of filmmakers (Marcel Sarmiento, Gadi Harel) with innovative, artistically daring careers ahead of them? I’m not yet convinced. Deadgirl starts off promisingly enough, as a pair of ne’er-do-well high schoolers (pretty boys Shiloh Fernandez and Noah Segan) stave off boredom by exploring an abandoned mental hospital. But this ain’t slow-burn creepiness like Session 9 (2001); the film’s most original twist — the boys find a zombielike woman chained in the basement — comes early, and the shocks soon revert to tired torture-porn gross-outs. Naturally, the friends are torn apart by the discovery, even as they both become consumed by it. One’s horny enough to declare the woman/monster do-able, while the other’s a tad more sensitive; it’s not long before an unbelievable mix of emo and necrophilia, and a li’l dab of misogyny, oozes to the surface. Queasy does it.

SAN FRANCISCO INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL

Feb. 5–22, most shows $11

Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St., SF; and Shattuck, 2230 Shattuck, Berk.

www.sfindie.com

Dick Meister: Bolsheviks? In Seattle?

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Dick Meister is a distinguished labor reporter who has spent more than 50 years covering labor and issues of workers on their jobs. There are very few real labor reporters in the mainstream press these days, so I asked Meister to put his regular Guardian column in context. B3

Dick Meister explains his labor coverage:

There’s a vibrant labor movement in this country, a source of important information that is ­ or should be ­ of great interest to most people. Most people, after all, spend at least half their lives working and, in fact, define themselves by their jobs. Yet the labor movement that has so much to do with their working lives, be they union members or not, is largely ignored by the mainstream media.

I’ve spent most of my professional life covering the labor movement as a reporter and commentator, for the Chronicle, KQED-TV and other mainstream outlets as well as a wide variety of non-mainstream outlets, including the Bay Guardian. I’ve recently begun a series of columns for the Guardian that deal with labor issues that have received but slight attention, if any, in the mainstream media.

Among other matters, they covered the extraordinary qualifications of Hilda Solis, President Obama’s nominee for secretary of labor, the extraordinary anti-labor acts of Bush’s secretary, Elaine Chao, and the legendary career of Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary, Frances Perkins.

The columns also concerned labor’s forceful anti-war demonstrations last May Day, labor’s major role in Obama’s election and its eight-year struggle with Bush, the most virulently anti-labor president in history. As another column noted, Bush was particularly harsh on the long-suffering air traffic controllers who Obama promised to help.

Other columns detailed the blatant job discrimination suffered by gay workers in Harvey Milk’s time ­ and now, the significant but ignored 40th anniversary of the faculty strike that was waged at San Francisco State at the same time as the widely celebrated student strike, and the 84-hour workweeks and 30-hour workdays that hospitals impose on young doctors-in-training.

My current column deals with a subject most mainstream outlets probably will also ignore, or at best treat very lightly. The column deals with one of the most important events in U.S. labor history, the Seattle general strike that began 90 years ago this month.

BOLSHEVIKS IN SEATTLE?

A bit of labor history the mainstream media will likely ignore: the general strike in Seattle 90 years ago this month

By Dick Meister

It’s the 90th anniversary this month of the general strike that brought the city of Seattle to a virtual standstill — one of the very few general strikes in U.S. history and certainly one of the most dramatic and disruptive.

Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson described it this way: “Street car gongs ceased their clamor. Newsboys cast their unsold papers into the streets. From the doors of mill and factory, store and workshop, streamed 65,000 working men. School children with fear in their hearts hurried homeward. The life stream of a great city stopped.”

Union showdown

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› steve@sfbg.com

The Oakland-based United Healthcare Workers is bracing for an imminent takeover by its parent, Service Employees International Union, after defying an SEIU ultimatum to support the transfer of 65,000 UHW nursing home and homecare workers to a new local — without a member vote and with leadership appointed by SEIU.

The power struggle between SEIU President Andy Stern and UHW head Sal Rosselli and their respective boards, which has been escautf8g for the last year (see "A less perfect union," 4/9/08), came to a head Jan. 22 when SEIU’s International Executive Board approved findings of fiscal shenanigans and insubordination by UHW leaders and threatened to oust them and institute a trusteeship if six conditions were not met within five days.

To determine its response over the weekend, UHW organized meetings with about 5,000 of its members in San Francisco and four other cities, announcing the response during a raucous press conference at the Oakland headquarters the morning of Jan. 26, a day before the SEIU deadline.

"You ready everybody?" began Rosselli, flanked by a rainbow of 30 members and signs like "Hands off our UHW" and "Don’t Silence our Voices." The energized crowd of about 100 supporters answered with an enthusiastic, "Yeah!"

At that 11 a.m. rally, and in a teleconference an hour later with reporters from across the country, including from the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, Rosselli began by describing the UHW (which began with San Francisco General Hospital workers about 75 years ago) as perhaps the most effective, democratic, politicized, and oldest health care union in the country.

"We have an ideology that there’s no limit to empowering workers," Rosselli told reporters, announcing that UHW has unanimously approved a response letter to Stern that he characterized as "a compromise to avoid a civil war and get to the path of reconciliation."

But SEIU spokesperson Michelle Ringuette, while noting that her union’s leadership had not yet decided how to respond by Guardian press time, said the findings and conditions by special hearing officer Ray Marshall (who was the labor secretary under President Jimmy Carter) "was not a negotiation."

Marshall’s 105-page report concluded that "Leaders of the UHW did engage in financial malpractice and undermined democratic procedures when they transferred UHW funds to a nonprofit organization to be used in contests with the International Union." It set out conditions to avoid trusteeship that included supporting the transfer of long-term care workers, greater fiscal oversight by SEIU, purging the UHW database of names pilfered from SEIU, and publicizing the Marshall report to its members.

"Given that Sal Rosselli and his leadership team were just found guilty by Secretary Marshall of financial wrongdoing and trying to subvert the democratic processes of this union, there’s nothing surprising about this letter," Ringuette told the Guardian.

Yet an insistence on democratic processes was at the heart of the UHW stance against SEIU, which UHW leaders accuse of sacrificing the autonomy of locals in its drive for more national power, appointing leadership based on loyalty to Stern, colluding with large corporate employers, and turning a blind eye to corruption by Stern loyalists that was far more serious than any accusations against UHW.

UHW agreed to some of SEIU’s conditions, but insisted that its members be allowed to vote on the merger and elect their own leaders, and that SEIU work with UHW to craft a union that best represents member interests. In addition, it called for a mediated reconciliation process with SEIU that could culminate in a vote to create a single union representing all health care workers in California.

UHW members are fiercely loyal to that organization. To illustrate UHW’s effectiveness, Rosselli noted that SEIU locals representing nursing home workers recently negotiated contracts with wages $4 per hour less than UHW contracts and without UHW’s strong patient advocacy provisions. He also said that while UHW represents about 20 percent of statewide SEIU workers, the union filled 55 percent of the volunteer shifts in state and local elections.

"We’re a very democratic organization, and that’s what we believe is the key to our success," Rosselli said. "Workers want a strong voice in dealing with their employers, not just another boss in Washington, D.C."

All sides of the conflict express a desire to move forward. As Marshall wrote, "The UHW-SEIU conflict is hurting both organizations at a critical time in the development of the labor movement and progressive policies in the country." But it could be that the two sides have staked out intractable positions.

Rosselli was realistic about whether SEIU will accept the UHW counteroffer, telling reporters, "I don’t think it’s likely, but we hope that they will."

And what if they don’t?

Rosselli was careful to avoid threatening to lead an effort to disaffiliate UHW from SEIU if the trusteeship happens, noting that such advocacy is against SEIU rules and refusing to answer questions from reporters pushing the issue. But he made that possibility clear with statements such as "Our members have instructed us to resist this undemocratic transfer."

As to how UHW leaders will respond if and when SEIU takes over UHW and ousts them, Rosselli read from a prepared statement that said, "We would convene a meeting of our currently elected leaders and decide what to do next."

During the Oakland rally, Rosselli went a little further, reminding UHW members that they always retain the right to form a new union. The crowd applauded for 40 seconds and chanted, "Can we? Yes we can! Will we? Yes we will!"

As the conference concluded and attendees trickled away, homecare worker Tena Robinson grabbed a Guardian reporter and said she had a message to convey: "Andy Stern, we will never surrender!"

As she said it, Rosselli came over to hug her, as if embracing a family member. And then she told Rosselli that if he goes, "I’m going with you!"

Joe Sciarrillo contributed to this report.

The Guardian Inauguration Issue

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Shift happens — now it’s up to us to keep it going … Our Inauguration Issue celebrates and looks ahead

Photos from DC by Paula Connelly and Becca Frank

obamadc09.jpg

>>Live from DC
Blogging the inauguration
By Paula Connelly and Becca Frank

>>Editor’s Notes
On every level we all have to get more engaged, more involved in the community
By Tim Redmond

>>Profiles of Change
President Obama’s call for citizen action is already resonating
By Amanda Witherell

paulabeccainaug209a.jpg

>>Ending War
Will Obama be able to achieve peace?
By Sarah Phelan

>>Ask not what SF can do for you …
How progressives can participate in changing the city and world
By Molly Freedenberg

Fresh jam

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER The perfectly passive postmodern approach to pop nostalgia? Allow the milky waves of 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s retro navel-gazer rehash to simply wash over you — like so many warm, narcotic jets of synthetic baby formula. The opposite tact is the one that San Francisco trio Mi Ami takes: reject the rockist, retread trappings of the old and stale and make new and likely original sounds from a place of authenticity and openness. Breathe. Good. An excellent example might be Mi Ami’s recent spasm of songwriting after the completion of their debut, Watersports, out Feb. 17 on Quarterstick: the jams weren’t quite "up to snuff," as vocalist-guitarist Daniel Martin-McCormick puts it. But the essential flow was restored after drummer Damon Palermo spoke up in favor of letting the songs flow and allowing the changes to happen naturally rather than getting clogged with details.

"We started opening the songs up and started letting the changes happen naturally," explains the clear-eyed Martin-McCormick on this clear-skied, brilliant, balmy winter day in the Mission District. "I feel like when it works, it’s really great because it doesn’t seem like something locked in by something like repetitions of four. But at the same time, when it doesn’t work it can be kind of frustrating because it’s just like trying to have a conversation when you’re just not feeling it. It has to be like a lived experience. You can’t fake it."

You might not know it from glancing at the tall, lanky, check-shirted bandmates stalking down Alabama Street in search of coffee and nutrients at Atlas Cafe, but Martin-McCormick — a former member of Dischord punk outfit Black Eyes along with Mi Ami bassist Jacob Long — and the soft-spoken Palermo are pop philosophers of sorts: amiable, laid-back, yet ready to hold forth politely and passionately on their favorite disco singles and free jazz LPs, the multiple meanings one might glean from the title Watersports, or the role African funk guitar might play in, say, pulsing workouts like "The Man in Your House."

It’s easy to get lost in Martin-McCormick’s high-pitched, keening vocals, equal parts no wave nervousness and androgynous nerve; his bursts of scratched-out guitar skronk; Palermo’s primal-power beats; and Long’s reassuringly melodic bass lines. But Mi Ami never over-thinks its lengthy forays into that anxious and pleasure-strewn interzone between improv and noise, space-is-the-place dub and neverending party jams. Like groups such as !!! and the Rapture and locals à la Tussle and Jonas Reinhardt, which Palermo also drums for, Mi Ami sounds as if it was bred on hardcore’s aggression and reborn on a seething dance floor.

Martin-McCormick and Palermo met two years ago, after relocating from the East Coast and Vancouver respectively, while performing at an Adobe Book Shop art opening. The one thing they were sure of: they didn’t want to be a rock band. "Boring!" blurts Martin-McCormick.

"We are a rock band," says Palermo mildly in Atlas’ noisy back patio. "But you know what we’re talking about. There’s a lot of cool bands that are rock bands but a lot of it is a default setup, the structure of the songs and instrumentation."

"I think we came to be a guitar, bass, and drums trio very much on our terms," Martin-McCormick offers. "I didn’t want to play guitar when I started, but I realized that was what I’m best at and began to find ways to play it that suited what I was looking for." Their resistance to rock habit was helped by the fact that Palermo didn’t own a drum set: at first the duo had only two drums between them. They acquired bits as they progressed, while relying on a janky drum machine prone to crapping out at crucial moments — like their September 2007 opening date for No Age at Bottom of the Hill.

The turning point arrived when the twosome ditched the drum machine and put out a Craigslist ad for a bass player in ’07. "We got a few responses," says Martin-McCormick. "One was super confrontational. I wrote that we’re into disco, gamelan, and no wave — and no old people. We wanted someone who was kind of our age-ish. I just didn’t want an 48-year-old dude who was like, ‘I just need to jam!’ This guy wrote back and said, ‘How do you think gamelan musicians learn? They respect their elders, blah-blah-blah. You should go fuck off and die!’ Whoa!"

The second response: a hip-hop producer working with an "awful singer-songwriter." The third: Long, who happened to be roaming Craigslist during his day job.

"There was no going back after that," says Martin-McCormick. Listening to the forward-facing future-rock of Watersports, I’d say there’s little fear of that scenario. *

MI AMI

Fri/23, 10 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com

ROCK FOR LOVERS

THE ETTES


The primal beat band got theirs — where’s yours? Thurs/22, 8 p.m., $10. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

E-ZEE TIGER


One-man massive energy generator Anthony Petrovic rouses himself from dormancy. With Wooden Shjips and Hank IV. Thurs/22, 9 p.m., $7. Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., SF. www.sfeagle.com

WAVVES


Going big with bristly, lo-fi garage rock. Fri/23, 9 p.m., $16–$18. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

AZTECA


The sprawling fusion combo including Pete Escovedo and Sheila E. rocks for autism awareness. With War, El Chicano, and Los Cenzontles. Sat/24, 7:20 p.m., $45–$75. Warfield, 982 Market, SF. www.goldenvoice.com

THE PHENOMENAUTS


The selfless Oakland space-rockers dish out For All Mankind (Springman). Sat/24, 9 p.m., $13. Slim’s, 33 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

JAY REATARD


He’s watching you watching him. With Nobunny and Bare Wires. Sun/25, 9 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Editor’s Notes

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› Tredmond@sfbg.com

Barack Obama is going to have to be a different kind of president, and I don’t mean just policy or the fact that he’s by far the coolest guy to hold that office in my lifetime. I mean he’s going to have to change the tone of how Americans look at our country. He’s going to have to do something that George Bush (and Bill Clinton before him) never did. He’s going to have to get rid of the selfish baby boomer ethos. He’s going to have to talk about sacrifice.

The economy can’t be fixed with deficit spending alone, and the equally massive environmental issues can’t be fixed with just hybrid cars and wind turbines. All those things are important. Without massive federal spending, probably well beyond what Obama is talking about today, the nation will continue to lose millions of jobs, the recession will become a deep depression, and life around here will really suck. And without new technologies, climate change will continue to get worse and energy will become far more expensive and far less reliable.

But in the end, it’s going to take more.

I was listening to the Democratic response to the governor’s State of the State speech Jan. 15 and the KQED radio host asked Darrell Steinberg, the state Senate president pro tem, the basic question of our time: why do Californians want all these wonderful services — education, parks, roads, trains, etc. — but don’t want to pay for them? Steinberg ducked beautifully, but the question still hangs out there. And it’s not just California.

Let us not forget: the United States is still a very wealthy country, and the Bush years made some of its residents exceptionally rich. I just added up the net worth of the top 20 people on the latest Forbes 400 list, and it came to $433 billion. That’s 20 people. The net profits of the top 10 companies on the Fortune 500 list for 2008 totaled more than $100 billion. That’s 10 companies.

Bush never asked any of those people or corporations to help pay for his war. Instead he told them everything would be easy, and gave them juicy tax cuts.

Obama has to set a different tone. He needs to say, loudly and clearly, that those who have the most (far more than they need) in very tough times should be willing to share.

A one-time, 10 percent wealth tax on the ultra-rich would probably raise half a trillion dollars. A short-term excess profits tax (similar to what the nation enacted during World War II) would provide another huge chunk. And it would send a signal to the rest of the country: this isn’t going to be easy. We all have to help out, starting with those at the top.

It also means that, on every level, we all have to get more engaged, more involved in the community. We have to become a nation of givers, not just takers. Public service has to be more important than private profit.

That’s a tough order for a generation raised on selfishness and greed. But it’s the only way out — and the guy we put in office on a banner of change has to lead the way.

Ending war

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› sarah@sfbg.com

As Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama takes the reins of power, the peace movement is watching to see if he will follow through on foreign policy campaign promises — and preparing to apply pressure if he doesn’t.

CodePink has compiled a list, "President Obama’s Promises to Keep," taken from his campaign statements on which activists intend to hold him accountable. These promises include a pledge to end the war on Iraq, close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, reject the Military Commissions Act (which critics say violates the civil rights of people deemed enemy combatants), adhere to the Geneva Convention, work to eliminate nuclear weapons, support direct diplomacy with Iran without preconditions, and abide by international treaties.

But as CodePink’s Media Benjamin noted in an article that was published in the Huffing ton Post last summer, the peace movement helped Obama beat Sen. Hillary Clinton, who supported the invasion of Iraq, in the primaries — only to see Obama begin talking tough on Afghanistan and pledging to essentially escalate the war there.

"This has come back to hit us in the face during Barack Obama’s Middle East trip, where he called for sending 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan," Benjamin observed, noting the high death tolls of both US soldiers and innocent Afghans almost eight years after the US invasion.

"The Taliban has gained new strength, opium production has soared, and Osama bin Laden has not been found," Benjamin wrote. "And amid it all, Afghan people continue to be among the poorest in the world, its women continue to be oppressed and the US has not succeeded in rebuilding Afghanistan."

But Benjamin acknowledged that it’s not enough to simply say "troops out now."

"We, the peace movement, need to come together and develop a strategy before our troops are sent from the ‘bad war’ in Iraq to the ‘good war’ in Afghanistan," Benjamin warned.

Given Obama’s naming of Clinton as his Secretary of State and his pledge to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Benjamin reiterated her belief that increasing troop levels is not going to help subdue a country that has resisted invasions from the likes of Genghis Khan and the Soviet Union.

"Yes, it’s a complex region, but what has history taught us about it?" Benjamin told the Guardian last week. "That foreigners get defeated. Yes, maybe by increasing troops they’ll get to stay for a few more years, but in the end, they leave with their tail between their legs, having suffered more deaths and without imposing their will."

"Theirs is a very tribal culture, so it’s not easy to get a centralized government," added Benjamin, who first visited Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, at the height of the US-led invasion. "And the oppression of women, unfortunately, preceded the Taliban."

Observing that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has admitted to engaging in low-level talks with the Taliban, which the Saudis helped broker, Benjamin claimed that "plenty of US military reps know that a negotiated settlement is the way forward."

"Our concern is that women will be at the table when that happens and that women’s issues and rights are at the front," Benjamin stressed. "So, we want a negotiated settlement with a more moderate faction of the Taliban. And troops going into Pakistan isn’t the solution, either."

Benjamin, who attended Clinton’s Jan. 13 Secretary of State confirmation hearings, says she got the sense that Obama’s administration wants a policy overhaul.

"So, yes, we are sending 30,000 more troops, but we are not pretending it is a surge, à la Iraq. It’s more of a holding pattern," Benjamin said. "We are hoping this is going to be an administration that disengages. Maybe the focus in the US on the economy will help."

A press release sent out on the eve of Obama’s inauguration by Courage to Resist and Direct Action to Stop the War, a San Francisco–based organization that coordinated nonviolent opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, stated that both groups are urging the new President not to escalate the war in Afghanistan, to stop attacks inside Pakistan, and to cut military aid to governments that violate human rights or international law, "such as Israel, in what Amnesty International calls an ‘unlawful attack’ on Gaza."

The release came just days after Clinton said, during her confirmation hearing, that she and Obama "understand and are deeply sympathetic to Israel’s desire to defend itself under the current conditions, and to be free of shelling by Hamas rockets. However, we have also been reminded of the tragic humanitarian costs of conflict in the Middle East, and pained by the suffering of Palestinian and Israeli civilians."

"This must only increase our determination to seek a just and lasting peace agreement that brings real security to Israel; normal and positive relations with its neighbors; and independence, economic progress, and security to the Palestinians in their own state," Clinton elaborated, adding that Obama is committed to "responsibly ending the war in Iraq and employing a broad strategy in Afghanistan that reduces threats to our safety and enhances the prospect of stability and peace."

In the November 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs, Barnett Rubin, director of Studies at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University and Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy, outlined the steps that they believe are critical for those serious about ending the ongoing chaos in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond.

Stating that sending more troops to Afghanistan "would be insufficient to reverse the collapse of security there," the authors opined that "A major diplomatic initiative involving all the regional stakeholders in problem-solving talks and setting out road maps for local stabilization efforts is more important."

Arguing that such an initiative would reaffirm that the West as a whole is committed to the long-term rehabilitation of Afghanistan and the region, they recommended that the West — with support from if not led by the US — back that commitment with measures to address economic development, job creation, the drug trade, and border disputes.

"The goal of the next US president must be to put aside the past, Washington’s keenness for "victory" as the solution to all problems, and the United States’ reluctance to involve competitors, opponents, or enemies in diplomacy," Rubin and Rashid wrote. "

But the A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition is reemphasizing the importance of building an independent people’s movement and ending imperialist occupations, wherever and whenever they occur. "We are for immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan," San Francisco–based A.N.S.W.E.R. organizer Saul Kanowitz told us. "There are those in the Obama administration who say that Iraq is the wrong war, in the wrong place, but we are against all US imperial conquests abroad."

Noting that he doesn’t believe there is a fundamental difference between Bush’s and Obama’s policies on Afghanistan, Kanowitz says, "It’s just a tactical difference … withdrawing US troops from direct engagement with Iraq, because they don’t believe US can’t win there, and redeploying them to Afghanistan, where they believe they can — it’s the same strategy. It’s about maintaining dominance.

Profiles of change

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› amanda@sfbg.com
Photos by Pat Mazzera

"Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America," President Barack Obama told US citizens on his Inauguration Day. "For everywhere we look, there is work to be done."

He’s not just cheering himself on — he’s asking his constituents to embrace what’s to come and to consider what more we can be as the individual moving parts of this incredibly complex country.

Even as far back as the Democratic National Convention, Obama turned his campaign slogan into a call to action. "All across America something is stirring. What the naysayers don’t understand is this isn’t about me — it’s about you."

That rang in the ears of people profiled below, who changed their lives in response to his call. That inspired other changes, suggesting that the effort to elect Obama is having a spillover effect on organizing at other levels — which may become a part of how US citizens respond to his actions in office.

Expectations are high for the changes he will order and already there’s indications of what’s to come, such as the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the end of the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy on homosexuality, and a commitment to action on climate change.

Many are eager to see more fundamental change in areas such as war, jobs, housing, energy, and transportation — areas we explore in this issue — as well as greater engagement between the White House and the grassroots groups that helped elect Obama.

In the profiles and stories that follow, the Guardian asks questions about what and who will change and how to move past a pithy slogan to trigger the transformation this country desperately needs.

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MARIA GOMES

Maria Gomes was committed to Obama from the beginning. "I signed up right after he announced," said this Menlo Park resident, who joined Silicon Valley for Obama and volunteered on the campaign.

Her first big assignment was in Iowa, where she spent 10 days campaigning before the caucus along with her husband and two teenage children. For Gomes, Obama’s Iowa win was a particularly powerful and pivotal moment. "I just realized the power of the volunteers and how awesome it was," she said. "It was clear to me after Iowa that he was going to win, so I just dove in."

Gomes, a 60-year-old lawyer, took an eight-month unpaid leave from her work as an immigration and dependency attorney for San Mateo County to devote herself fulltime to Obama’s campaign. It was the first time she devoted her life to get a politician elected.

"In fact, I [had] steered away from politics because I don’t really like politics," she said. "This was different. I really strongly felt the people carried this campaign. I canvassed with CEOs, doctors, young people … nobody took a back seat in this campaign. We did not take it lightly."

She and her husband served as precinct captains in California. After the primary, she coordinated volunteers and voter registration efforts for the general election. Gomes traveled to seven states in the months leading up to Nov. 4, spending Election Day working on voter protection in Las Vegas.

"I felt that the only way he was going to get elected was if people got in there. It wasn’t just going to happen," said Gomes, an immigrant from Cabo Verde, off the western coast of Africa.

And it’s not over for Gomes. Her whole family went to Washington DC for the inauguration, where she answered Michelle Obama’s call to volunteer on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Gomes has also signed up to work on Kamala Harris’ run for attorney general and she’s still active with her fellow workers at Silicon Valley for Obama.

"About a week after the election I went to a meeting for our field office. Five hundred people were there. We brainstormed how to stay involved in his campaign," she said. They ranked issues they’d like to see addressed by Obama and organized themselves into teams to work on messaging them to the new administration. "We received a survey from the national team…. The [Silicon Valley] team took the national survey and made it local, community by community. That’s the kind of movement that’s happening now. I’m sure it’s going on everywhere because the campaign wanted every state and every county involved." Her husband is now on the tech team and she’s doing fundraising work for the inauguration.

"It’s not over. Nothing has stopped," she said, adding that she believed this kind of organizing would be very present in the administration. "It’s going to be governed by the people. I plan to be involved for the next four years at whatever level I can. I still write e-mails to whoever I think can change something. I hope it will be transparent enough that we can still communicate to people higher up in the administration — all the way to Barack and Michelle Obama."

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AARON KNAPP

Aaron Knapp graduated from law school in 2002 and spent the subsequent six years working for big corporate law firms. By 2008, he began to feel that all of the major decisions in his life had been made based on money and materialism, an certain emptiness that changed suddenly at summer’s end.

"Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention was a real turning point for me," he recalled. "The change that I needed in my life was to join in this campaign that transcended the individuals."

He said he did what he always wanted to do: "I quit a job I don’t enjoy." Knapp went to work instead on the Obama campaign, spending about four months in Nevada. Putting Obama in office became too important to not give it his all: "I just wanted to make sure on November 4, I could say to myself I did everything I could."

On election night, with the feeling of victory rushing through him, there was also a kind of malaise, a feeling of "now what?"

"Our roles in the campaign were predetermined — there are a finite amount of things you do in a campaign. Make phone calls, gather data, knock on doors…. After the election, after we won…. What do we do now? Those predetermined roles are no longer set up for us," he said.

Knapp said it required some soul searching to find the next important thing to do: "The task is to get real specific."

He’s now writing a book and working to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed by Congress. The act would amend existing labor laws to make it easier for workers to create unions that are recognized by employers. In 2007, it passed in the House and failed in the Senate, but it was part of Obama’s platform during the primary season, and one of the reasons he garnered support from organized labor.

But, said Knapp, "It’s one of those things that’s being put on the back burner as we transition in this administration…. While Obama was championing this cause during the campaign, there’s no sign of it now."

The waning of enthusiasm for it is indicative of how Obama’s administration may start to handle some of those crucial campaign promises that drew so many people into his fold. That piqued Knapp’s interest and reminded him of the goals of his grandfather, an auto worker for Chevrolet during the 1940s, who passed away during Knapp’s first year of law school: "My grandfather always would plead with me to do whatever I could to get the labor laws back in order. So that’s an issue that’s really important to me."

Knapp also said that it’s important to keep the grassroots Obama movement alive by continuing to push crucial legislation that was part of his platform for change.

"It goes right to the controversial pieces of law and policy that he’s addressing," Knapp said. "If he’s able to keep this mobilization together, that will help him significantly in getting policies through."

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PAULI OJEA

Pauli Ojea, who’s about to turn 30 years old, says that she’s spent her entire adult life "voting for the loser" and advocating for change that’s been slow to happen.

A New Jersey native, Ojea came to California to work for the San Francisco Conservation Corps on environmental education programs. That lead to a position with Breast Cancer Action as a community organizer, where she found that hopeful efforts were often frustrated by political pitfalls.

Then, Ojea attended a 2004 event where she heard Van Jones speak about how a new green wave was coming and it needed to lift all boats. When a position opened with Jones’ new organization, Green for All, she applied to be a policy analyst for the Oakland-based green-jobs advocacy group.

In between the two jobs, she spent a week campaigning for Obama with her mother, a Spanish immigrant who groused that if he lost, she’d be spending more time back in Spain.

Ojea now works on federal green-jobs policy and climate change equity, and has already been deeply affected by the Obama election. "For most of my career in advocacy, there’s been this sense that we probably don’t want to work on federal policy because we’re not going to get anywhere," she explained. "I started at Green For All with Barack Obama elected as president and we’re actually putting a lot of resources into federal policy, and there’s this whole feeling like we’re going to get somewhere. That’s shifted for me. I imagine that for a lot of other environmental and social justice advocates, there seems to be a door opening."

She’s even more enthused after meeting with members of the Obama transition team who were tasked with a review of the Department of Energy. About 30 to 40 people, representing organizations including the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council as well as renewable energy business leaders and public officials doing energy work in different states, convened in Washington DC to discuss energy policy.

"I’ve been to a lot of public agency meetings and what usually happens is you have maybe an hour and a half of presentation from the agency and maybe a half hour for all the organizations and people trying to get in their piece," she said. "This was different. It was about a two-hour meeting and the whole time it was dedicated to hearing from the community, from businesses, from people with experience in energy efficiency. The transition team members were fully engaged, actually listening, asking questions, asking for clarifications if they didn’t understand something. They were really humble and they seemed really excited about what kinds of changes were possible. I’d never been part of a process like that."

Ojea sees more potential than ever for the activist community in the Obama administration. "It could provide more opportunity and open more doors for what your activism is about. There’s such a difference between being used to being on the outside of the fence, behind the barricade, screaming because it’s the only way to be heard. Is that going to change? Are we going to be inside the fence?"

She recalled Obama’s campaign observation that "change doesn’t come from Washington, change comes to Washington." She’s hoping the Obama team’s outreach will continue.

"We’re at a really strange and critical time," Ojea said. "As Van says, in America, in terms of the economy, the floor has dropped out from under us. But with the election of Obama, the ceiling has come off. There’s a lot of opportunity, and things could also go downhill. What are we going to do?"

Throw shoe at Bush, send message to Obama

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Text and video by Sarah Phelan

Spirits are high in San Francisco, following the departure of former President G. W. Bush, and the inauguration of the 44th U.S. President, Barack Hussein Obama.

I saw a guy walking down Market Street, chanting “O-Ba-Ma”, like it was a protective mantra. And pretty soon other folks were joining in, like newborns emerging from the darkness of the Bush years.

And then there was the crowd of folks who were gleefully throwing shoes at an appropriately shifty cardboard cut-out of Bush. The cut-out was standing inside at colorful carnival booth that antiwar groups Direct Action to Stop the War and Courage to Resist had set up near the Obama inauguration simulcast at Civic Center Plaza.

At first, it was fairly quiet when I got there shortly after 9 AM, but the crowd quickly grew, once people emerged from the simulcast. Pretty soon, folks were eagerly waiting in line and cheering each other on, clearly delighted to have the chance to vent and throw one last shoe at Bush.

“Throw a shoe for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq!” shouted one of the event organizer, quoting Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi, who stunned and delighted the world when he took aim during Bush’s Dec. 14 joint news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Still in prison in Iraq, al-Zeidi was due to face trial in December on charges of assaulting a foreign leader, which carried a 15-year maximum sentence. But an appellate court is currently considering a motion to reduce his charges to simply insulting Bush. And someone really should award al-Zeidi a medal for managing to pitch a perfect shoe toss under extreme pressure.

Inauguration parties you can believe in

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barackobamasneakera.jpg

>>>All parties take place tonight, January 20

ActivelyOUT.com Obama Ball

ActivelyOUT.com hosts an Obama Ball at Bruno’s Night Club, featuring plasma screens with highlights from Inauguration Day, a dance party with DJ Duarte and a free glass of champagne for the first 150 people. A donation from the evening’s proceeds will go to And Marriage for All, a collaborative partnership of African-American community leaders spearheading dialogue and public education about same-sex couples’ freedom to marry. “Gay fabulous, str8 friendly, no H8-ers!”

6 -10 p.m., $8 cover, $5 for activelyOUT.com members

Bruno’s Night Club

2389 Mission St., S.F.

www.activelyout.com

————

Rock Barack

Glide into a new era with budget-friendly drink specials at the Paradise Lounge. Rock Barack: The Obama Inauguration Party will featuring 99-cent drafts and 99-cent well drinks from 6 to 9 p.m. the event will benefit not just your budget but the Glide Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit working to end poverty.

6-9 p.m., $10 donation

Paradise Lounge

1501 Folsom St., S.F.

www.paradisesf.com/calendar.html

————————–

League of Young Voters
LYV says: “No need for upscale dress attire for our BALL! We’ll have drinks, ginger bread cookies and a good crew celebrating Obama’s Inauguration! We need YOU to get the party really started!”

8pm -11pm; $5-25 sliding scale.

El Rio

3158 Mission, SF

www.theleague.com/sf

———–

Obama mambo

Boogie down to support Amnesty International during its fundraising event, "Dance for Change." Music from hip-hop to house to rock will be spinning all night long, so prepare to shake it for Barack to the wee hours.

9:00 p.m.–2:00 a.m., $10

Le Colonial
20 Cosmo Place, SF

www.amnestyusa.org

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Inaugural Ball

Electric Works gallery is hosting an Inaugural Ball featuring a rebroadcast of the inauguration followed by dancing. Formal dress is suggested but not required (changing rooms and borrowed finery will be available for those coming directly from work). Drinks and light hors d’oeuvres will be provided and proceeds benefit the San Francisco Food Bank.

6–10 p.m., $10 donation requested

130 Eighth St., SF

www.sfelectricworks.com

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Women, Democrats, and democratic women

The San Francisco Democratic Party and local women’s political groups — including Emerge California, Good Ol’ Girls, and the San Francisco Women’s Political Caucus — are throwing an Inauguration Night party in the swanky Green Room of the War Memorial Opera House, featuring hors d’oeuvres, drinks, and entertainment.

5:30–8:30 p.m., $25

301 Van Ness, SF

www.actblue.com/page/inaugurationsf

(415) 626-1161

info@sfdemocrats.org

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Inauguration Skaters’ Ball

The California Outdoor Rollersports Association hosts a political roller disco featuring Sarah Palins and Barack Obamas on wheels. There’s even a chance that a live feed from the party will be broadcast at the Presidential Gala in Washington. Dress up as your favorite politician and resist the urge to knock out your rivals.

7–11 p.m., $10 adults, kids free. $5 for skates

Funkytown SF

1720 19th St., SF

www.cora.org/ObamaParty.htm

Bicyclists sound off

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By Steven T. Jones

San Francisco bicyclists have become increasingly pissed off about the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency’s decision last week to try to remove the bike lane at Market and Octavia. They’ve written angry letters, placed irate phone calls, and will tomorrow be holding a rally at the site during the morning commute.
The MTA’s argument that its needs to remove the bike lane in order to save bicyclists from cars making illegal right turns has been pretty much universally rejected by bicyclists, who say it’s akin to the Vietnam War tactic of burning villages in order to save them.
Meanwhile, city officials have definitely felt the sting, and they’ve repeatedly tried to explain the decision to the Guardian and others, so far without being terribly convincing. Will this protest do anything to thwart city plans to seek court approval for the change in a week? We shall see.

Local Artist of the Week

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169-localartist.jpg

LOCAL ARTIST David Young

TITLE Untitled

BIO A San Francisco resident for just over five years, David Young draws inspiration from postapocalyptic films, punk music, street art, graphic novels, and war photography to present a damaged and hostile vision of SF and its place in America. All of the work in his "Live Forever" series is executed with Micron8 pens on Strathmore Bristol and American Masters paper.

SHOW "David Young: Live Forever," Thurs/15 through Feb. 14 (reception Thurs/15, 6–9 p.m.). Babylon Falling, 1017 Bush, SF. (415) 345-1017, www.babylonfalling.com

WEB www.myspace.com/dyoungv

Mo Biggie

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Wait for it, wait for it: the moment when Jamal Woolard as Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. Big Poppa, utters, with admirable understatement, "Mo money, mo problems." The woman he married three days after he met her, vocalist Faith Evans (a sad-eyed Antonique Smith), is pregnant but estranged; his spunky protégé Lil’ Kim (Naturi Naughton) is hopping mad that her lover-protector-mentor has dropped her and is instead bossing her in the studio; his original baby mama is miffed that his daughter gets zero Big Poppa time, and his ex-BFF Tupac Shakur (Anthony Mackie) thinks Biggie is out to get him, and the East Coast vs. West Coast beef is now fully fired up. ‘Nuff said.

"Mo Money Mo Problems" is the obvious alternate title for Notorious, which has the ring of a men’s cologne by Sean "I Am King" Combs, aka Puff Daddy, aka P. Diddy, aka Diddy, the film’s executive producer. It’s certainly more glammy — and feeds into the mythmaking that Combs has been so adept at when it comes to his Bad Boy artists — than Unbelievable: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Notorious B.I.G. (Three Rivers, 2004), the title of the book by Cheo Hodari Coker that this biopic is based on.

The drive-by shooters who killed the legendary rapper, born Christopher Wallace, at the far-too-young age of 24, remain cloaked in mystery, despite the attention given the MC’s murder in Randall Sullivan’s 2002 book, LAbyrinth (Grove/Atlantic) and Nick Broomfield’s ’02 doc Biggie and Tupac, and his death is still embroiled in knotty intrigue, having triggered multiple wrongful-death claims against the Los Angeles Police Department. But of course, history is written by the winners — and those happen to be Combs and Notorious‘ producers, Biggie’s mother Voletta Wallace and Biggie managers Wayne Barrow and Mark Pitts — and in the end, they prefer to skip the speculation and allegations of conspiracy surrounding the rapper’s unsolved murder and focus on the love.

So much like recent musicmaker biopics à la 2007’s Control, which privileged the perspective of Joy Division frontperson Ian Curtis’ wife over his bandmates’, there’s an element of noticeably selective memory-picking to Notorious — even as it tries to play fair with those outside the equation, such as Shakur and Lil’ Kim. The latter has slammed the movie, according to MTV: she believes it hews to the version of history as written by Biggie’s mother and wife and portrays her inaccurately.

Still, director George Tillman Jr. (Men of Honor, Barbershop) seems to have thrived on the tension between a mother who adored Biggie but disapproved of his criminal activities, and label heads and managers aware that the dope-dealing, dues-paying gangsta grind girding Notorious B.I.G.’s lyrics must be shown to authenticate the first-person experiential honesty the rapper was known for. Thus we get a multidimensional Biggie — the big-kid vulnerability he showed to his moms and his "Faith-Faith," as well as the tough, rock-slinging-to-pregnant-crackheads, money-making front. Plenty of respect is also given to the MC’s art, which this rags-to-riches/gats-to-bitches tale (with much due given to a kind of golden-age of hip-hop label patronage in the form of Puffy [Derek Luke] and Biggie’s friendship) reverently visualizes on the street, in the basement, in the studio, and on the arena stage.

Putting his interest in street-level soul, characters less than well-represented in mainstream Hollywood, and his touch with rappers to work, Tillman subtly injects more cinematic interest into his already-dramatic material than it might have had on the page. Biggie’s childhood is washed with glowy, golden hues, while his time dealing on the street is leached of hues and clad in corroded grays, blacks, whites, and browns, until the MC battles another rapper on the sidewalk and color begins to enter the picture.

And unlike 2008’s Cadillac Records, which bought into the overt displays of bling that talent can bring, Tillman and company give adequate shrift to the musicmaking that built Biggie’s renown: the mic is shot as if it’s a grail, swathed in a silvery aura. The symbols of power — such as the Big Daddy Kane–like throne Biggie mounts — speak louder than his kicks, cribs, or cars. And the scenes in which Woolard actually raps — particularly in a basement scene after he emerges from prison and a bout of lyric writing and soul searching — are believable and compelling: flecks of his spit shimmer in the harsh light. Woolard, who grew up blocks from Biggie’s original hood and had a promising career until a shooting in front of NYC’s Hot 97, is the perfect choice to portray the man.

Notorious‘ melodramatic, overly amped conclusion may ring a bit artificial with its drawn-out return to the opening scenes: as "Hypnotize"’s "Rise" sample ripples through the dancers, Notorious B.I.G. says, in flashback, that he’s finally found peace, he’s become a man, and, well, he’s Ready to Die (Bad Boy, 1994), to crib the title of his classic debut. But I dare anyone to not get choked up by Notorious‘ coda, as Voletta Wallace, portrayed with grand-dame grit by Angela Bassett, looks out on the crowd surrounding her son’s NYC funeral procession, playing his music and flinging their arms, and realizes that, though she never quite trusted the easy money and fast friends surrounding her son, Biggie will always be remembered for his way with words.

NOTORIOUS opens Fri/16 in the Bay Area

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JUST PLAYING

BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT


It’s not a hologram: the roving musicmakers return to the region they once called home. Wed/14, 8 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

LOS YEUX NOIR


They’re dark-eyed and infatuated with gypsy, Yiddish, and Manouche jazz. Wed/14, 8 and 10 p.m., $20–<\d>$25. Yoshi’s SF, 1330 Fillmore, SF. sf.yoshis.com

LENKA


Cutie-pie pop oozes from the Aussie charmer who once studied acting with Cate Blanchett. Thurs/15, 8 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

WILD WEEKEND


We’re lost in an all-girl punk rock wilderness. Sat/17, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE


The popsters go acoustic with tunes from an album-in-progress. Sun/18–Mon/19, 8 p.m., $25. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com.

BARRINGTON LEVY


The acclaimed live performer taps Obama samples for his new single, "No War." Tues/20, 9 p.m., $28. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

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