Slow night at the restaurant so it’s easy to accommodate the out of town party. Two couples, a little girl and her grandfather cluster around the table. Easy to seat, you should say, as they send a bottle of sparkling water back for being flat– you taste it and there’s nothing wrong with it at all. Great, slow night and the biggest party are a bunch of yuppie fucks, but that’s part of the job.

The two couples occupy one another leaving the little girl to be entertained by her grandfather. There’s something off about him, you notice, something inherently creepy in his face or bearing. “He looks like a child molester” you tell a co-worker, and it’s true that he does. The little girl, on the other hand, is pretty and precocious and better behaved than the adults who brought her here.

It’s a little surprising when she suddenly comes up to the counter, boxed in by the creepy grandfather. She holds a plate of bread out and the old man says, “Ask the nice lady for some butter”. The girl, obviously articulate enough to ask for butter on her own repeats as she has been told. “Of course, sweetheart,” you say, and pass a dish of butter over. The grandfather, meanwhile, stands behind the girl rubbing her face and hair; not in an affectionate caress along the cheek as might be expected, but across the face entirely. “Ask the nice lady to spread the butter on the bread” he insists to his grand-daughter. It makes your guts churn, the way he dictates, but worse still is the suffocating pawing. Still, you focus on the girl who deserves the attention, “Of course, sweetheart, I’ll do that for you.” You adorn the bread but all the while you’re distracted by his hands on her face, rubbing. You pass the bread back and the little girl is let down from the counter stool. “That’s a nice lady,” he tells the girl and they return to their table where the couples conversation consumes them.

They don’t stay long. Without any notice being taken by the other adults the grandfather leads the little girl outside. Normal behavior to pacify a fussy child when the food is long in arriving but the little girl’s an angel. Your stomach takes a dive as you see them leave view of the front window. You get shaky, and you can’t swallow. You take the phone and step outside, to make it look like you’re making a call. They aren’t in view anymore, corners equal distance away from the front door. You follow what you hope are their steps, to the corner overlooking a vacant lot, and follow the sidewalk down the dimly-lit street of warehouses and trash and old cars either abandoned or parked and forgotten. Down the block, cast in shadow, you see them. It’s far away and they’re indistinct but it looks as tho the little girl is standing face-first against the wall of a crumbling building, partially obscured by her grandfather and his long coat. It’s too dark and they’re too far away but you’d swear he’s pushing her into the building, pressing her face against the bricks. You’re standing with a phone to your ear straining to see what exactly is happening when the grandfather frees the little girl from the building, and she stands now clear of his body and long coat. He bends down to her height and removes a handkerchief from the recesses of some pocket which he uses to wipe her face. Then he stands upright and propels her further down the street, away from the restaurant. You could swear he’s crossing himself as they walk, forehead, mouth and heart, like when they read the gospel in church.

You go back to work and wait, guts churning, unsure but filled with a horrible sensation and certainty. When the grandfather returns with the little girl she walks in and seats herself at the table, once again consumed by the conversation which has continued unabated. You catch the grandfather’s eye as he walks past and he looks right back at you, then continues on to the bathroom. You tell the waitress that you’re going to the office but to call you when the table’s check is ready. You sit and you don’t know what has happened but you know deep inside exactly what has happened, what is happening, what will happen. You take a drink, you call a trusted friend, you implore them for advice and as you’re talking the office phone rings. The waitress tells you that the table is paying now, and you stand to return. So what do you do?

–
Completely unrelated is this clip of CNN mania from a year or so ago. A story on Richard Cohen, a formerly gay and now converted straight psychotherapist (of sorts) who aids gay men in reclaiming their straightness through unconventional means to say the least. It caps off at almost seven minutes but you should really watch all the way through because the action at the end is really worth it.

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One unfortunate side-effect of my disengagement from network TV is that I’m woefully unaware of what’s going on. Some of this is alleviated by my periodic scanning of world headlines on the Manchester Guardian’s website and some by my loyal viewer-ship of both Russia Today and Deutsch-Welle but this is only good for a general knowledge of events. My finger is not on the pulse of culture or American attitudes. When I do happen to be snagged by something on the big three (we don’t get Fox) I typically sit bemused rather than hypnotized, and I still find myself offended by a good portion of what’s made available for my viewing pleasure.

If I was dedicated enough I might be able to suss out the hearts and minds of America through alternative channels such as youtube but that window into attention-depraved desperation failed me in a recent attempt to secure an IBM commercial recently dragging its lumber-some, neanderthal fists through the cathode spectrum. There’s an older guy and a younger guy. The younger guy is talking about some online reality where avatars represent people and virtual money flows like water. The older guy asks about real money and the younger guy balks. This virtual reality took a lot of innovation to create he says sulkily. The older guy says, “Innovation is for making money”.

The jars on my desk with their segregated coinage populations notwithstanding, I lost my thirst for wealth some years back, now attempting to make my way through life by requiring as little as possible instead of acquiring as much as possible. I’ve not been very successful in my personal endeavors but I try to make do and I do alright. There’s a world of people better at this than me, just as there’s a world of people who don’t just skulk around the corners with their eyes on restaurant dumpsters but with their eyes on an inner vision. The good old DIY ethic may have been subverted and sold back to the internet generation like every other identifiable cultural identity but true-blue individuals continue to thrive, continue to make things happen on their own terms, surviving through willpower and a sense of community that banks and loans and IBM can never understand because it’s not economically quantifiable.

But as I said, every attempt is made to take the concepts of “the underground” and spin them into a product for the cutting edge, left of center liberal who’s registered Green. The most obvious and contemporary example is what’s happening to the organic foods movement as Walmart, Safeway, Costco and their factory farm suppliers have found a profitable niche waiting in the parking lot. They attempt to dilute the legal terms of what qualifies as organic and they skirt the edges of the concept to maximize production with no regard for the grey areas which were never originally an issue when the scale was smaller and more localized. Sustainable? Crop rotation? Transportation? No, they’re busy trying to find a way to have certain pesticides pass the FDA’s rules and fussing over which multi-billion dollar marketing team has the best idea to sell this new rage.

Another marginalized institution of the past has begun to percolate into the popular consciousness as of late– non-profits are booming. However it seems the days of food drives and volunteering at the soup kitchen aren’t sexy in the modern era and now we have tech-driven companies luring the cash for whomever is deigned impoverished and worthy. In particular there has been a movement in the world of finance to incorporate more “socially responsible” investment plans into the capitalist world. I’m on the fence about the purity of this since I a)have this slush fund of death in my name I never did anything with and b)think the only way to invest money in something is to hand it to someone and hope they make a movie instead of buy cocaine.

An old co-worker of mine, after some conversations in the past, told me to check out one of the hot new school feel-good responsibly companies, a local non-profit known as kiva.org. It was exciting and worrisome at the same time, to think of a San Francisco couple founding a charity of sorts contrary to common sense and self-interest. Basically kiva.org began in 2005 after Jessica Flannery traveled to Africa, a place steadily becoming the world-wide destination for wayward, middle-class, college educated 20-somethings set to replace Latin America as soon as Hugo Chavez begins machine-gunning dissidents and broadcasting puppet-shows on his own TV station. Her husband, a programmer at TiVo, listened to her stories of beautiful people struggling to remain their inherent dignity under crushing poverty and together they pooled their pennies and designed a method of allowing other wayward, college-educated 20-somethings to help these beautiful but impoverished people HELP THEMSELVES.

Oprah loves em’, TV loves em’, you probably love em’ too. Kiva, Swahili for “agreement” or “unity” according to their FAQ page (gag, gag), basically works like this. In the third world there are poor people, most of whom could probably get a good solid job at McDonald’s but they’re lazy and would rather watch TV all day and have lots of babies. Despite looking uncool, however, there are people scattered throughout the land who really want to get off the couch and make something of their lives. They try to start their own businesses but, being poor, they have no start-up capital. Some have managed to scrounge and save enough to buy a yak with which they can exploit for milk to sell at inflated prices in the market but most are either unable to take that first step or are unable to get more yaks because the money lending is generally handled by sharks who charge exorbitant interest rates and have the tendency to react poorly to late repayments. What ever shall they do?

Fortunately the third world is dominated by people of a darker-hue and white people, particularly those with good-breeding and a cultured education, love that shit. It’s exotic. You’d love to bring one home for the den but your friends might think it’s tacky. Anyways, the white people want to see these hard-working yak milkers succeed by the sweat of their brow and whatever innovation they can afford from IBM. However, international financing is a little difficult because white people don’t really wanna spend any more time in the third world than is necessary to drink a lot of cheap booze, hook-up with other whites hanging out there and defile ancient cultural artifacts with their banal chatter and snapshot interest. But white people love the internet because it’s really leveling the playing field for the people of the world AND you don’t really have to actually interact with the third world. It’s also a great way to send money!

So kiva has these partners referred to as microfinance institutions. These MFIs exist throughout the third world, tho how they got the money to become anything like an institution is not readily discussed. Perhaps they were really good at milking yaks? Anyways, these MFIs provide small loans to impoverished people so that they can go do what they do to stop being impoverished. The loan officers meet with potential applicants and if their business plan is sound they approve them of the loan. Meanwhile on the malaria-free side of the world kiva receives colorful and exotic snapshots of these applicants and compiles an informal but personable dossier on who they are and what they wanna do. These profiles are put up on the website and shiny happy people can use the power of the internet to make a small donation to the exotic native (officially referred to as “entrepreneurs”) they choose. If that’s not enough the exotic natives even correspond with their “Kiva lenders” and update them on the progress of the yak milking or whatever. Back in poverty the MFI loan officers come knocking once a week to collect a percentage of the loan back. When the loan is paid off the “donor” is free to reinvest their money in another colorful native with a different business plan or withdraw their initial investment. Or, as rarely occurs, they lose their ten bucks.

The loans are repaid with interest which covers the cost of loan officers and, I guess, a portion goes to maintaining kiva itself. While a lot of leg-work is being done by interns or shiny happy people off to the hinterlands to get wasted and fuck Germans, there are still sixteen employees and an office in a very expensive city to consider. It’s no longer that romantic bedroom operation of, uh, a couple years ago. Then again, looking over the titled employees (no indication of what kiva -specific name they have) they might just live off dividends. Former google, Paypal, MIX, Barclays people and not working the mail-room mind you. There’s probably some corporate underwriting and, surprise, Paypal even waives the transaction fees for kiva donations.

In a nutshell… And despite the inherent offensiveness of .com hangover-styled new-wave monied liberals on the loose I think it’s a good company who’s really trying to make a difference in a way they were uniquely capable of doing. I obviously wanted to unearth the dirt, Cayman accounts or tobacco investments or mink stoles at the Wammies, but they just seem like normal people who you might run into at Whole Foods if you were so clueless as to buy that over-priced and mass-produced green-washed dreck. My real problem is vague and uneducated– the emphasis on creating a “My First Capitalism” relationship. Welfare is the nasty word that keeps floating around– it’s not a hand-out! I’m not sure that welfare is such a bad thing in its own right– American poverty is its own beast (to paraphrase PJ O’Rourke it’s the only place you can be poor and own a color TV) so comparisons to central Africa seem a little irresponsible. I mean, places where milking yaks is a good job makes you wonder who the fuck is buying the yak milk, where is the wealth trickling down from? God knows, but there’s probably some machine guns involved, and we don’t wanna know. So there’s yak milk flowing and cute little native things being made to sell to tourists and people can feel good about pulling themselves up by the boot-straps and contributing to their community. Building wells and schools is no longer sexy; earn it people. It’ll be the land of yak milk and honey until desertification strips the pastures, the military junta rapes and pillages and everyone dies of AIDS while drowning in the floods brought upon by global warming.

Kiva.org didn’t invent microfinance; Muhammad Yunus is credited by most as the father of the concept. Back in the 70′s in Bangladesh (not the land of yak milk and honey by any means) he was just a middle-class guy teaching economics in a university when, on a field trip to have his students poke poor villagers with sticks, his heart opened up and he made a small personal loan to someone to better their lives through innovation and hard-work. The habit continued for many years until, in 1983, he founded the Grameen Bank, the first MFI. People thought he was crazy but now MFIs have opened throughout the world and the repayment rate averages at 95% across the board. Not only the initial concept of small, direct loans has trickled down but also the idea of loaning predominantly to women (who tend to stay sober and watch the kids) and often to groups of women (group pressure to keep the money on the straight and narrow) have become industry standard. The interest rates on loans are high to cover the amount of work which goes into the small loans but the size of the repayments are still small enough to keep people from being overwhelmed and the repayment cycles are short, presumably for reasons that make sense but I’m not remembering what those are right now. While I’m sure he’s done alright for himself Yunus does seem to genuinely care about people and the Nobel hippies thought so as well.

One woman is a little less angelic when it comes to microfinance, even tho she traveled on her 1st world credit cards to investigate this Grameen Bank for a couple of months. Tracey Pettengill Turner graduated from Stanford business school where she learned about the small loan practice but was disappointed that only large companies were able to invest globally leaving penny-ante stock market gamblers like herself out in the cold. She wanted a piece of the action and thought that having her own online MFI, one that paid out dividends, was her doorway to emasculating the financial world, or whatever her sick motivations might be. This is all best summed up with this snippet stolen from MicroPlace‘s own history page:

Upon her return, Tracey discovered that the capital markets in the United States were beginning to view microfinance as an attractive investment opportunity. However, only major financial players like institutional and high net worth investors could invest. An everyday investor like Tracey had no way to participate. That insight led to the vision of MicroPlace: a company that enables everyday people to make investments in microfinance.

When eBay executives heard about MicroPlace, they were excited by the synergies between eBay’s mission to provide economic opportunity and MicroPlace’s vision to empower the world’s working poor. They saw MicroPlace as an ideal opportunity to put eBay’s assets to work in a way that could be truly world-changing. Powered by eBay’s expertise in connecting people, creating marketplaces and processing online transactions, MicroPlace could deliver on its vision to significantly impact global poverty.

Yes, you just read “synergies”, but the differences between kiva.org and MicroPlace don’t end there. Kiva may as well be a granola retailer, or maybe a manufacturer of lotions for people allergic the everything except butterfly wings and puppy kisses. MicroPlace looks like every company that has spawned in the internet age that’s predominantly a non-internet concept. Kiva unites the world through pictures and essays while MicroPlace has a bunch of pictures of people probably found using google-images. There are no direct investments– the money is given to a stateside investor which then deals with MFIs of its choosing around the world. You get their assurances that they’re investing soundly in yak milking and love, not oil. What is reassuring about MicroPlace is that there’s little patronizing– this isn’t about making the world a better place as much as it is making an investment you don’t feel guilty about because it’s supposed to be the right thing to do and you don’t even have to watch it happen. Kiva.org has designs on someday being able to offer investment with payouts but, for their sake, I hope they never get SEC clearance to do this– I’ll take my mildly aggravating, clueless, middle-class metrosexuals donating, not profiting, thank-you.

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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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One of these again.

So, I´m in Guatemala, just arrived today. These last two weeks have been a lot about not knowing what I´m doing. I took a bus to Oaxaca City alone and the first night there I met two Mexico City University students who were working on their thesis project: Rafael and I don´t remember the other one’s name, but he had a French accent when he spoke English and never looked at you when he spoke. The university was footing the bill for their expenses and so they took me out to eat for the first two days. They also taught me how to swear, the truth about Mexican men, and got me drunk. I got the flu after that and then drank half a bottle of cough syrup and took a 13 hour bus ride to San Cristobal de las Casas to meet up with Amber.

It was terribly cold there and it spit rain all day. However, we visited a Mayan village just outside of the city that was preparing for Day of the Dead. The village is extremely traditional and although they allow outsiders they are fairly hostile towards tourist snap-shots. I saw a Mayan girl spit at a woman taking a picture of the cemetery. Their traditional dress includes this fabric that cannot be described other than looking like a gorilla costume. The women wear skirts made of this material and the men wear giant sweaters made of it. It looks incredible. The church was amazing. The floors were covered in pine needles and rows of candles, the church walls were lined with glass cases containing porcelain-faced saints; totally spooky, they were draped in fabric and had multiple mirrors hanging around their necks. There was a ceremony taking place in which the individual cases where being opened and then flooded with incense
smoke. There was also an awful lot of ceremonial folding of cloths. My descriptions here are truly unacceptable, even to me. I´m sorry, it was amazing. At the cemetery all of the graves, which by appearances where very shallow, were covered in marigolds.

This, however, was the extent of our Day of the Dead festivities. As it turns out San Cristobal is not so much into the pomp and ceremony. Amber and I found this out a little too late as we emerged in skull-face to find that we were the only, I do mean this, the only people in the city to have painted their faces. We were well received tho, and as a result we made friends with a group of local hippies, one of which whose resemblance to Jack Sparrow seemed a little more than coincidence.

Today we traveled about 12 hours and are now in Antigua. Our plan was to head to Monterrico tomorrow, a beach with black sands, but it´s our running joke to be ill-informed about our surroundings. We arrived the day before election day. We have been advised that its best to not go out at all tomorrow, because as our hostel owner said, there is too much ¨laundry money¨ involved in this election, I´m guessing this means dirty money. We are in dirty money country now.

Okay, this is a P.S, the elections went off without a hitch. Although I guess Colom, the new president, promises to plunge the country into further disarray. I hear he owes too many favors. I am writing you from a beach in the far south of Guatemala, so far south that if I spat I´d hit a Salvadorian. The sands are black, it is true, and the surf is terrifying. At night it’s pitch black and the sand and waves are full of phosphorescent magik. If you kick the sand a spray of glowing blue dust comes out. There is also a folk band from Antigua here that serenades us while we swing in hammocks. We also met a bad bad father and son duo that never wear shirts or shoes, claimed to have moved here so they could drink and drive, run a hotel with a pool full of fiber optics, and tried to get us to do some special k with them. This place is slow and hot and no one does anything.

I don´t know when I´m coming home.

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This is a well-known clip from the motherland. It has everything one wants from black and white memories; Pre-hooliganism innocence; Blighty’s best musical export; and quirky, overstated analysis by the reporter.

This was The Kop a long time before I was born. I went to Anfield in 1994 to watch the penultimate match before The Kop was replaced by an all-seater stand.

Pre-match, I sat down at the back of the terraces. People looked at me funny. I understood why when (at half-time) the rear section of half the stand used the same spot as an open latrine. Liverpool got beat 2-0 by Newcastle and I saw a man bleed out of his head. A recipe for sad associations? Not a chance. It was The Kop. It was top.

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