I went to City Hall, which is usually fun since there's always a wedding or two going on, and people who get married at City Hall tend to be in a good mood and not totally stressed out.
Right behind this wedding group was the Mayor's Office, which I walked into without appointment and where I was given the "are you a criminal or a crazy person" scan by the secretaries/aides who work in the fabulous anteroom. I went to one of the aides and explained the chain-link fence situation with David Best's sculpture and who in city government should I contact about the situation. She gave me an unpronounceable name and number for somebody in Park & Rec. "What do they have to do with any of this?" I asked and she answered, "trust me, they do."
At this moment, the door to the Mayor's office opened, and out walked an Asian delegation of three men along with Mayor Gavin Newsom and the scary Chief of Protocol, Charlotte Mailliard Schultz, who was having a coughing fit. "Are you okay, Charlotte?" somebody asked, and she replied, "I just need a glass of wine."
Then I stopped in at the smaller Supervisor's committee chambers where there was a fascinating meeting going on about LAFCO, the attempt by San Francisco to get rid of PG&E and run a public utility, and how to do it legally and sensibly.
It was being chaired by Ross Mirkarimi, who's not only a good-looking guy who exudes decency, but he also has the greatest baritone speaking voice outside of the San Francisco Opera. Check him out on Channel 26 Government TV some time.
When one of the public commentators at the meeting started boring me with her prepared speech, I wandered down the hall to Chris Daly's office and looked at a map to see which district the pagoda was actually in, and it turned out to be Mirkarimi's District 5.
I started explaining the situation to a young intern and we were finally interrupted by Boris, the brilliant senior aide who seems to run the office. He'd gotten complaints from constituents today so he'd spent the entire day on the phone being sent from one department to another with nobody taking any responsibility until he found the blockage, some bureaucat at the DPW (Department of Public Works) who had an agreement with a private contractor which was doing the work on the rest of the block-long park, and they had decided that the chain-link fence was going to stay until 15 tasks were finished and that would be "sometime in August." I'm not joking. August, which is when the sculpture is slated to come down.
C'mon, burning man dudes and dudettes, get out the bolt-cutters. This is ridiculous.
On a rainy Thursday afternoon, there was an official celebration of the temporary pagoda sculpture on Hayes Street.
There were speeches by various folk, including an endless, self-serving marathon by Jeannene Przyblyski from the San Francisco Arts Commission. About the twentieth time she used the phrase, "And finally..." I was ready to push her off her perch.
She was followed by the founder of Burning Man, Larry Harvey, who gave a great, short speech about the glories of "temporary" art and how it's an incubator for artists and neighborhoods in San Francisco.
"And it doesn't have to cost a lot of money like so much of the public art we have now."
He mentioned that he was also a Hayes Valley neighbor, lived up the hill in Alamo Square, and that the chain-link fence that has just been bolted into place for some reason around the pagoda and the surrouding park was grotesque. He finished his speech with the paraphrase, "Mister Gorbachev, tear down this fence!"
He was followed by the artist, David Best, who confessed to being a born and raised San Franciscan but currently a resident of Petaluma.
His speech was also brief and charming, though he got hung up trying to explain the difference between "working for free" and "being a volunteer." He never did explain the distinction very well so that by the time he finished I was wondering why the "volunteers" weren't being paid.
According to an article by Leslie Fulbright in this morning's "San Francisco Chronicle," the $20,000 cost of the project was mostly for the organized crime groups known as insurance companies along with their cohorts in city government for "permits," which is just plain sickening.
Also sickening is the fact that the bolted chain-link fence is STILL keeping people out of the park today. I thought they had paid off the insurance gangsters and the permit people in City Hall. This is a "temporary" sculpture, folks, and the clock is ticking. Maybe it's time to pay a visit to the Mayor's Office this afternoon and see what's going on.
I really don't get it. Is it:
A) the oil? The oilmen running the world economy at present want to buy, steal and fight over every last gallon of the resource, which in a car economy is not going to be existing all that much longer. The real agenda seems to be making every last frigging pound/euro/dollar on the hydrocarbon molecules, even if it means nobody can breathe and the climate becames unsustainable.
B) the military-industrial complex? There hasn't been this much swag since the Vietnam War. The looting of the American treasury (that's you and me, folks!) continues at a breathless pace, laundered through criminal corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel, and a host of military "contractors." The fact that billions at a time just sort of disappear amongst them in Iraq is amazing and the fact that our representatives aren't making a big fuss out of the fact is even more amazing.
C) the neo-cons? The demented followers of Leo Strauss are grotesquely prominent in American government again (Wolfowitz, Perle, Eliot Abrams, make your own long list). The two directors of AIPAC, the Israeli lobbying group, have just stepped down after the FBI accused the group of passing on classified documents. The Project for a New Century wistfully wished (pre-9/11) for a "Pearl Harbor" type event to galvanize the population at large. The unholy alliance with the loonier branches of the Christian right has been very scary to watch. Plus, the looting of the American treasury to pay for the dream of a Greater Israel as the dominant force in the Middle East, along with the trashing of the U.S. military over the last two years in Iraq as part of this strategy, are just unconscionable.
D) the Bush Administration? Their shortsightedness (global warming, anyone?), "magical" thinking ("Mission Accomplished," for instance), venality (Terry Schiavo or pick your own favorite), and outright corruption keep hitting peaks you didn't think possible until they actually top themselves. We could be in Iraq just because they're stupid and stubborn and taking in too much swag themselves.
E) all of the above? This is my greatest fear, that we're dealing with a confluence, a Perfect Storm of bad agendas, all resulting in an immovable mess.
Though I've been noticing cracks lately. According to the McPaper, USA Today (which has gotten better while the rest of the prestige papers and networks have become immeasurably worse), the majority of the American public is not amused by the Iraq war in any way, shape or form, even though their representatives and the media are telling them how necessary it is for our way of life. It reminds me of the Clinton impeachment all over again.
So pray, talk, write, protest, support -- whatever you're good at -- and let's get our troops home now and out of the poor Iraqis' country.
On holiday on Monday, June 13th in Pismo Beach, I didn't watch any television or get on the internet so when Tony and I sat down for dinner at an overpriced Italian restaurant named Giuseppe's we had no clue what everyone else had known for hours: Michael Jackson acquittted on all counts.
We did notice, however, a crazed group of busboys and waiters were running back and forth across a parking lot to a building behind. We finally asked the busboy dude what was going on and he said it was a Fox News celebration over the end of the Michael Jackson trial. A whole group was driving thirty miles north on Highway 101 even as we spoke, fleeing the carnival in Santa Maria where the trial took place.
There were about thirty people at the "party," and they looked like ghouls for the most part, intelligent and urban, filled with equal parts bravado and neurotic questioning, but working for Satan and They Knew It. Sorry the picture of them is so bad but I really did get the evil eye as I took it.
Today, Wednesday the 15th, in the Los Angeles Times, there was a truly great media critique by somebody named Tim Rutten who I have never heard of before. He starts off his analysis of the media and celebrity trials with a joke: "If you hang around a courthouse long enough, one of things you learn is that people willing to predict a jury's verdict are the sort who take stock tips from their barbers. These days, however, the news organizations most preoccupied with sensational trials are the cable television news outlets, and they are creatures of appetite rather than principle or even brute experience. Their sets may be crammed with more lawyers and shrinks than a Beverly Hills office building, but the constant references to their alleged expertise notwithstanding, they're basically there as shills to lure more suckers into the tent."
Mr. Rutten continues with all the prognostications from the various networks about the eventual verdict (they are almost all completely wrong) and includes this in his roundup: "On Court TV, which routinely uses everything but card stunts to cheer on the prosecution in whatever case it's covering, those onetime prosecutors turned Valkyrie anchors, Nancy Grace and Kimberly Guilfoyle, unhesitatingly predicted conviction." And then he writes this great summary: "So what happened when Jackson was acquitted on all counts? Red faces? Second thoughts? A little soul-searching, perhaps? Maybe one expression of regret for the rush to judgment?"
"Naaawww."
"The reaction, instead was rage liberally laced with contempt and the odd puzzled expressions. Its targets were the jurors."
"No more solemn on-air pieties about jury service as citizenship's highest calling. Oh no, hell hath no fury like a cable anchor held up for scorn."
" 'Not guilty by reason of celebrity," shrieked Court TV's Guilfoyle."
The latter struck me as a great case of cognitive dissonance, rather like Dick Cheney's recent characterization of Howard Dean as somebody only a mother could love. The sentence makes no sense in that Howard Dean is beloved by lots of strangers and Dick Cheney really is a classic case of somebody who "only a mother could love." I felt similarly about the phrase by Miss Kimberly. Here's a national television commentator whose only qualifications are having been married and presumably having sex with Gavin Newsom, having anorexic cheekbones that rival Maria Shriver's, and having been decorative at that grotesque dog-mauling trial. At least Michael Jackson provides interesting music to the world. What has this stupid, ambitious woman done?
But enough. Mister Rutten quotes a long exchange where Nancy DisGrace from CNN bullies and intimidates a Mr. Rodriguez, who was the foreman of the jury. Here's Mr. Rutten's summary which is just plain awesome:
"Getting the last word is the cable bullies' stock in trade, but there is something particularly repellent about watching a conscientious juror, who clearly honored his oath to put personal views aside and decide the case according to evidence and law, abused for the sake of what the show's producers doubtless regarded as "great TV."
"There is something larger here than civility, or even the issue of the damage done when news organizations abandon the standards of ethical journalism wholesale for the sake of their commercial advantage. What's really at issue here is that the way the cable news operations have elected to conduct their business threatens the integrity of the jury system itself."
"Anybody who does not sit through every day of every witnesses' testinomy in a trial really cannot have an opinion worth hearing. Even then, only those who consider that testimony with the ears of a juror mindful of their oath and attentive to the trial judge's instructions can speak with real authority. Everything else is blather --- entertaining blather, perhaps, but dangerous, too."
"We invest the jury's awesome power in 12 ordinary people because it is the ultimate exercise of our democracy's popular sovereignity. In those things that matter most, we only trust each other."
"If jurors who conscientiously fulfill their oath -- as Jackson's did -- then are subjected to contempt and abuse for contradicting the self-interested sentiments of an electronic mob, then who among us is safe?"
This brilliant writing was not in the first news section of the L.A. Times or the op-ed section, but hidden in the Entertainment Section, called "Calendar."
But Rutten is dead on, and if you've ever served on a jury, you'll understand.
