Sorry Elana, but I have nothing to offer in regards to the recent city election. Tho it pains me to admit it, this was a year of pissing on the graves of billions– the poor subjugated people who have never known the sweet freedom of democracy. There was a moment’s hesitation on that fateful Tuesday morning, time afforded and excuses looking small and petty in the sunshine. I considered the candidates who would be spending their day in breathless anticipation for the results, I considered the ballot initiatives which would mold and shape my community for years to come. I considered the fact that I had given the year’s voter guide a perfunctory leafing and had no idea what the fuck was going on and then I considered making lunch and heading off to work.

The self righteous few who had collected the signatures or the money to land their names to the ballot did not speak to me beyond a general or focused revulsion. If Gavin Newsom had been challenged then I may have made a special trip just to mark one check-box, but he was up against local alternaculture luminary Chicken John, homeless cab-driving personality crisis Grasshopper and the slick would-be stuffed shirt Quintin Mecke who ran his campaign office a door over from my own. Having listened to his media savvy on the cell phone countless times I couldn’t even muster any sympathy to take me up the street. Now, had Chicken John or Grasshopper or Mecke had a chance in hell of winning I would have legged it double-time to oppose them but, as I said, this was a sleeper election at best.

I’ve skipped voting for candidates countless times, probably a couple in every election I’ve had the hard-won right and privilege to participate in, but I’m much more adamant about reading up on and forming half-baked, emotional opinions on local initiatives. This year, somehow, my weeks of note-taking and investigation came down to reading the first three in the book laying on the couch, sick, waiting for Amanda to pick up pants before I laid down in bed to prepare for playing a Halloween party. Not the ideal environment for civic duty, I admit, and it yielded a passing knowledge of a MUNI bill and two city hall procedural issues. The latter two made me drowsy but Proposition A stirred the dying embers of my heart momentarily. It looked like another step towards privatization which, broken as the bus system may be, is not the direction I would have things going.

Yet it wasn’t compelling enough of an issue to drag me off to the polls for another round of the ignorant ass awards, not this year. However, in the days leading up to America-day I received an interesting e-mail, followed by an even more interesting one. It’s worth reading the entire quote, people:

Correction! Election day is Tuesday, November 6th. We put the wrong date in our last email. Oh geez, we are so embarrassed, and so sorry for sending you a second email. This is the last you’ll hear from us. We promise.

Hey young San Francisco voter,

We got your email from the San Francisco voter file. See below for the legal mumbo-jumbo. We don’t mean to bug you, but we don’t have the money to send you something in the mail, and we’d rather not waste the trees.

Check out our voter guide to see what we think about the ballot www.theballot.org/2007/sf.

We just want to remind you to vote tomorrow, November 6th. Polls are open from 7am to 8pm. It’s so important that young people make their voices heard in this election.

Don’t know where your polling place is? Go here:

http://gispub02.sfgov.org/website/pollingplace/INDEX.htm

Or you can vote all day in the basement of City Hall.

Did you know that since February, only 154 new voters have registered in San Francisco? Crazy! That freaks us out, so starting Wednesday we’re going to focus on registering young voters. But for Tuesday, the city is expecting a record low turnout for this election, and that’s always bad news, because the Republicans always vote. So we’re going to get out there and vote. You should too.

We’ve been making voter guides for every San Francisco election since 2004, and we’re here to stay. There are three elections next year, and we’ll be making voter guides for young people for every one of them. We also throw parties, art shows, and poetry slams year round. Check us out and sign up to join at www.theleague.com/sf.
You can download a PDF version of it to print and take to the polls.

http://uploadway.com/files/1104/SF07_voter_guide.pdf

So please check out our voter guide to learn about the election and then go vote!

- The SF League

The League of Young Voters PAC (also known as the League of Pissed Off Voters) sent you this email blast. We’re not some vast right wing or left wing conspiracy, so don’t freak out. Don’t blame any of the candidates we endorsed.

We got your email address legally from the San Francisco voter file. You can unsubscribe from our list below. To take your e-mail out of the voter registration database, re-register to vote and write “delete” in the space for your e-mail address. But we hope you don’t. Email is the only way broke groups like us can contact voters, except for robocalls. But those things suck! We wouldn’t do that to you.

Paid for by League of Young Voters Political Action Committee (LYV PAC) 45 Main Street, Suite 628 Brooklyn, NY 11201, William Wimsatt, Treasurer. Not paid for by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Voter Guides posted on this site may not reflect the position of LYV PAC or its affiliated organizations.

If this offends you it’s worth continuing on to their website which is run out of New York, Brooklyn to be specific. Brooklyn, you know? Where the cool white kids live?

A couple of days after my failure to participate, my insult to the oppressed masses of history, I was standing outside work smoking a cigarette and chatting with a fellow wage-slave. A ragged looking, but obviously not homeless, bearded dude came out from the store doing his best Abby Hoffman, carrying some clipboards. “Hey, do you guys wanna hear about some, like, totally boring liberal stuff?” he asked making vague gestures with his hands and rolling his eyes. We both stared at him until he shrugged and started walking off. “No, I want more condescension” I offered but he didn’t turn around.

The next week the hip volunteers for Mecke’s failed bid were clearing out his rented office. I walked through the sad-parade of ratty chairs and tattoos and suppressed my smug laughter. Taking the trash out later that night I opened our blue bin to chuck the recycling and found it had been filled to the brim with campaign propaganda. So had the next bin down the street. Thousands upon thousands of unused, never touched, never read, never cared for and never needed newsheet pamphlets were standing between me and a simple civic task. I had no recourse but to leave a couple of paper bags alongside the trash where they would be kicked over and strewn about before the evening’s end. I wish I had the guts to follow my impulse and upend both industrial-sized containers into the former Quintin Mecke campaign office doorway.

PS– The top graphic wasn’t specific to this year’s democracy hootenanny, it’s the record cover of Funeral Shock’s 7″ that came out last time Gavin was up for office. Local band you’re not gonna like.

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In between heaping handfuls of artificial-butter flavored popcorn film critics will argue the merits of cinema until their faces turn blue and their arteries clog with smegma. Despite the insulting utterances of these arrogant fiends who’ve no business orating anywhere other than from the depths of the dumpsters where they belong there comes from the horde rare observations which blind by virtue of their sheer brilliance. The particulars escape me, possibly severed from my retrievable memory by my own mind, but I once witnessed one such studio crony escape the tired opinions of his rank and question: do films from bygone eras appeal to modern audiences because of their inherent achievements or because of a collective nostalgia?

When I was growing up my summers were often spent falling asleep on the couch watching TV20 before the rape and pillage perpetrated by the WB. Original Star Trek episodes aired at midnight and, if you could stand the excitement, The Untouchables (starring Robert Stack as Elliot Ness, narrated by Walter Winchell) followed. More than anything (certainly not syndicated episodes of Perry Mason which my sister loved to watch) I think that this constant exposure to hard-nosed G-men tommy-gunning rum-runners for God and country eventually relinquished my dependence on color when watching movies. The show, which originally aired from 1959-1963, was shot on film, expertly lit and well crafted. The dialogue and acting was, admittedly, less refined but that’s hardly important when you’re eleven and get really excited when people are riding running boards through the streets of Chicago shooting up speakeasies.

As I’ve never really gotten over the cheap entertainment of pulp I still find a fair share of detective stories and back-lot productions to kill my life an hour at a time. The deeper you dig the worse you find but my tolerance for crap of this kind is far greater than that which is churned out these days. Bad acting, insulting plots, dialogue a deaf-mute could’ve written and cheap sets are just part and parcel of the experience. You forgive the movies because they come from another time and another place and your irritations are washed away by stylish old cars and trench-coats, smokey diners, cheezy swing-bands, wise-cracking cabbies and roustabouts working the pier. And the dames? Ah, the dames!

It could have just been an honest geek-fixation but I started to get pretentious and watching movies with subtitles. At first I just assumed this interest came as a result of my obvious superiority in matters of taste and intelligence but after hearing some snobby poppycock on the television about nostalgia as a spice I started scrutinizing these nickel and rupee three reel deals a little more, trying to look through the exotic for the inexcusable faults which anchor our major productions to the bottom of the bowel. There’s been some success: recently a Russian movie which made the rounds and earned rounds of applause on the indie/arthouse circuit earned nothing but my displeasure because of obvious pandering, shallowness and exploitation. I don’t want a Russian movie made for an American audience, I want Russian movies about fucking Russia for Russian audiences. I want quality, taste, intelligence, emotional resonance! Maybe if I read the back of the boxes before I borrowed these things I could spare myself some wasted evenings but that’s a no-no unless it’s a documentary…

The Turkish film “Journey to the Sun” isn’t great by any measure. The acting comes courtesy of, reportedly, amateurs culled from the streets and there’s little doubt in my mind that this is true. Overall the story is serviceable but elements can cause involuntary cringing (particularly the cheap, pre-fab romantic sub-plot) and not the empathetic embarrassment you get from “Rushmore” but the revulsion of seeing old 1940′s melodramas still seeping into film. Loose ends are tied together a little too cleanly with convenient twists cropping up at just the right time, reaching across the table for the salt and maybe that gravy’s gonna slop and stain the linens. There’s little room for directorial detatchment but even allowing political content there’s ways to make a movie without having your thumb in the frame. It’s not a great movie at all but I would sit and watch it again this very evening.

There’s a little window in my living room, a window into the world. It’s the streets of Istanbul and not the streets they have in tourist pamphlets or posters in travel agencies. It’s peeking in on people struggling to survive, struggling for identity and struggling to be. Through it you see the news, you see history, you see things that make you feel richer for having witnessed and you feel ashamed for not throwing open the sash and screaming. Not to reveal too much but this is a movie about two people who’ve moved from their impoverished provincial towns to the big city, one from the east and one from the west. One knows the score and one’s about to learn the hard-way that life isn’t just unfair but it calculatingly fucked. One’s a Kurd and one’s a Turk but the difference suddenly becomes negligible.

The film’s writer/director, Yesim Ustaoglu become a filmmaker while working as an architect. With some short-films for which she won some awards under her belt she eventually dedicated herself to a feature film, 1994′s The Trace. Turkey became more volatile as Kurdish separatists and government troops became increasingly engaged in what would amount to war and Ustaoglu, being from eastern-Anatolia, decided to focus her lens closer to home. In interviews after the film’s screening in various festivals Ustaoglu talks about how she became increasingly depressed and despondent about the second-class status of Kurds and wanted to understand more about how things had come to be the way they are today. From her research and reading came the script and eventually the movie. Her reasoning is my favorite thing about this movie, but also a reminder that I don’t know shit about shit… (more…)

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Tongue-tied with a sudden sharp ache in my chest as my faltering heart becomes overrun with an adrenal sneak-attack. The prospect, the very idea, of attempting communication– the simple art of opening my mouth and flooding the local atmosphere with my wit and humour– sends shock-waves through by body, one powerful surging tide of anxiety laying waste to vital organs and clumsy limbs alike. Just a little self-contained Nagasaki, babies bursting into flames created by the friction caused when I come into contact with the outside world.

An extreme example: another collision with a mystery wandering around the neighborhood where I find myself employed. For all intents and purposes she remains a fictional character, an empty husk in a demure coat flitting from vague instances of imagination to the busy streets of anonymous obstacles clogging my day like a drowned rat clogs a toilet when you try and flush the little bastard. However, as these non-interactions become more frequent the little monkey living in the back of my brain where the lizard became the man has begun to take a pair of pliers to various nodes and nodules responsible for a variety of impulses best left alone. Yet as the growing desire or compulsion to attempt some form of communication beyond awkward eye contact and reflexive looking away there also grows the more overwhelming physiological impact of a possible exchange.

But as I said this is an extreme example. Typically social interactions are fraught with nausea, faintness, a burning desire to leave and my hands and mouth cross-dressing. It’s a very rare occasion when I find myself at a party and a nearly extinct one where I leave feeling that the evening wasn’t yet another challenge to my right of existence. Against any available wall-space or tucked into some convenient corner a mental checklist is checked more thoroughly than any examination by Santa Claus or the CIA. I don’t know how to behave, how to approach anyone, how to effortlessly and naturally become part of a conversation, how to think, how to dress, how to talk and even if I did what the fuck am I gonna talk about? There’s a million and one rules of engagement in any social gathering and I will violate each and everyone until I’ve shamed the poor sods who invited me into leaving to make sure I get home okay.

Not that I need to go to parties and attempt to fit in, make nice, meet people or enjoy myself. This is an avoidable pitfall and nine times out of ten I’m smart enough or balanced enough to decline any well-intentioned invitation to leave the safety of my little hovel. Unfortunately, while life is full of parties, it’s also full of various obligations which require even more stringent application of communication skills and an ability to stand in the correct line with the correct paperwork and the correct questions and answers. I’ll be taking to the friendly skies soon and my excitement about this impending vacation is tempered by an acute fear of dealing with the airport, getting stressed out and anxious, then boarding a death-trap which will use the force of gravity against my stomach and fill my head with visions of corrupted fuselage breaking apart. I’ve been told there will have to be an exchange with the plastic smiles lurking behind the check-in counter instead of the animosity expressed by the automated tellers. I think the last time I checked-in through the counter one of my bags was x-rayed and my other bag and I were both stopped by security and humiliated publicly.

This would be more of a brick-wall in my life if my job was better paying and I found reason to, I dunno, check out pyramids somewhere. Trouble commences whenever I need to ask someone at a store where something might be– I know that it won’t exist until I ask some over-worked and under-paid future assistant manager for life who will drop everything they’re doing to take me right back to where I was looking and politely point out the neon lights and bells and whistles surrounding the product of choice. Hell, ask the guy down at one of my liquor stores how well I deal with paying the correct amount. Then there are times in your life where you have to enter some strange place with bad carpeting and worse lighting where employees have compulsory attire and perfect, white teeth. A faint memory of intentions long drugged, murdered and dismembered slowly began to haunt me after reading an article detailing the recent protests which briefly interrupted the shareholders’ meeting for Berkshire Hathaway. (more…)

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If you felt alone in the world of exploitative business enterprise it should cause you no small amount of joy to learn that everyone on the industrialized side of the fence is just as nefarious, trouncing about with the rabid mongrels and shoeless children of the third world. The uniforms worn and the flags waved may have changed but the great white North still has the unlisted numbers to the new guard of colonial rule below the equator. The French army will not be found imposing curfew in North Africa, Britain no longer imposes martial law in India and the Dutch have ceased their murderous pacification in the heart of darkness, but rest assured that the situation is under control. The natives aren’t likely to get uppity because the natives will be shot so the steady stream of cheap imports and the bottomless pool of cheap labour will continue to exist for our amusement and profit.

Historically the Germans were not forerunners in the imperial land-grabs of yore, waiting for world events to invest much in properties beyond the borders. In the modern era we have Bert Morsbach, formerly an engineer from Dusseldorf just shy of seventy, who has labored for the past couple of years to introduce his Myanmar Vineyards. A sprawling 40-acre paradise in western Myanmar welcomes guests to tour the property, enjoy a fine meal and, perhaps, even stay for a couple days. Soak up the temperate climate in the shadows of the Blue Mountains just forty miles from the famed Inle Lake. Sample the fine selection of European-styled wines with a hint of magical Southeast Asia.

Then go home. Not even the US government calls it Myanmar– it’s Burma. This is the country where, a hundred and fifty miles due east in Chin State, there’s a brutal effort to Burmanize the ethnically distinct denizens. Refugees are pouring into neighboring India desperate to escape the soldiers. They bring stories of rape, of kidnapping, of enslavement. They bring stories of porterage, a term borrowed from the colonial powers who had previously held sway. The Red Cross has recently been sent packing, journalists are allowed in country only on special junket tours and somehow, despite a collapsed economy and more trade sanctions than any country not on the axis of evil tour, the new capital city Naypyitaw has flowered in central Burma. It was built by slaves and it was paid for by a junta which, paranoid, clings to power by surrounding its population with machine guns. This has been the situation since 1962 when the recently independent republic (released from Britain after WWII) was overrun in a military coup. Drink your wine and then go home. (more…)

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Voting Rights

Standing smoking in front of the anarchist bookstore looking worn and disgruntled– it’s hard to sell ideology and days of slow business can eat away your nerve… Approaching in my old punk rock t-shirt freashly adorned with my red “I VOTED” sticker I prepared myself for any amount of abuse which might be hurtled in my direction… The expected confrontation never occurs and, try as might, passing ellicits not even a trace of a sneer…

The girl at the coffee shop is thrilled by evidence of my participation in democracy… Earlier, she explained, someone told her they weren’t voting because they didn’t believe in it… What does that mean– like you can’t exist? Well, it wasn’t gonna drag her down and damned if she wasn’t gonna plaster that red sticker proudly on her shirt after her shift was over… It’s nice that she’s often the first person I speak to in my day but even so it’s hard to keep up with her sunshine…

Rock the vote parked one of those new VW’s out front of work, manned by a team of numbskulls in matching t-shirts… One looked like Sammy Hagar and played cock-rock licks through the car’s amp while a hapless film crew shot from cutting edge angles… The other must’ve recently escaped from the fraternity and stood much too close to me and explained that people had told them to fuck off as they were spreading the word ealier in the day… Can you believe that? Well, yeah, you make me wish I hadn’t voted– but instead of saying it I just wished them luck and gave up on smoking…

I’m a bad voter– I’m under informed and my comprehension of issues is on par with an Irish lab’s… Generally my grasp of conidates’ history is non-existent, I judge commercials by style and funding and I decide by emotional instinct over critical pragmatism… As guilty as this makes me feel I collect my torn paper cheat sheet and anxiously approach the polls, expecting mocking looks, quiet chuckling and some death by embarassment moment contrived by gravity and my lack of coordination… Aside from being accidentally disenfranchised one year I’ve never suffered any of the expected catastrophes and I can’t help but step lightly as I leave… It happens with the knowledge that my ballot may as well end up floating in the bay for all it’s worth– San Francisco is a predetermined district…

Still, the guilt of my feckless participation pales in comparison to that which I would– have accidentally– be consumed by were I to refuse… In the end I don’t think I vote because I care or because I matter or because I decide a fucking thing ot even because democracy’s such a great idea… In the end I think I vote for every southern black who risked being beaten, jailed or lynched for stepping up to a ballot box for the first time… For the women who marched through the streets suffering taunts, jeers and abuse for their suffrage… For the Central Americans who stood in line under military guard to cast their vote amidst a week of political bombings, assassinations and the closure of independent newspapers… For my highschool English teacher who flew back to Africa to participate in the first election after aparteid fell… I voted because Chinese tanks ran over college students and for Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland– because not voting would be pissing on the graves of people who deserved a right routinely taken for granted by the most powerful population in the world, and the graves still being filled today… Not really a good reason to vote or a responsible act, just a goad I’ll respond to like a pack mule…

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