It’s dead August. Congress is not in session, schools are empty, and your shrink is still on vacation. Without the Olympics, the newspaper would be six pages long, and four of those pages would be filled with wire stories about dead gorilla babies.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel, the Wall Street Journal fills its Page One easy-reading column — a slot where whimsical news offers the ruling class a daily relief from the seemingly endless financial doom-and-gloom — today with a typically silly idea from San Francisco nutball Rob Anderson: Encouraging bicycle commuting leads to more pollution because “Cars always will vastly outnumber bikes, he reasons, so allotting more street space to cyclists could cause more traffic jams, more idling and more pollution.”

I guess by that logic, by driving less I’m actually encouraging drilling in ANWAR because my saving gas is hurting oil comapnies financially, thus making them more desperate for oil profits. Or how about this one: By giving the Olympics to China, the rest of the world is actually encouraging progress in human rights there, because the media attention will make them less likely to oppress people openly. D’oh!

Anderson mentioned previously on sf.metblogs here, here, here, usw.

A couple of weeks back we posted about a court battle that is raging in sf between a tenant and his alleged slumlords. The alleged were brought up on criminal charges and were jailed at the time with an amazingly high bail for their crimes. The judge has decided to lower bail and the fur is still flying as the husband paid bail and the wife sat in jail. And I guess the Chron published a picture of one of the accused today, although I missed that, maybe in the paper today?

Prosecutor Max Peltz urged that bail remain the same, saying Morrow was hardly a vexatious litigant. He also stressed that Morrow was just one of four tenants who allegedly had been victimized by the Macys.
Peltz said that over nine years, Morrow has filed four legal actions: a still-pending lawsuit against the Macys, one against the building’s prior owners in which he won a settlement, and the failed request for restraining orders against both Macys. Labeling Morrow a vexatious litigant was a baseless effort to “malign the victim,” Peltz said.

Bail cut for S.F. landlords in tenant terror case.

At 1:00 tomorrow at the Clay Theater, Kevin Kelly (Senior Maverick of WIRED Magazine) will give the State of Cinema Address at the SF International Film Festival. The address is titled “Beyond Moving Pictures: Possibilities for the Future of Film.” It promises to be very interesting. I got him on the phone yesterday, and he revealed some of the ideas he plans to explore in his talk. The Q&A begins below and continues after the jump.

You’ve said that your book in progress is about “what technology wants.” What might this mean for the future of film?

Well, that’s the subject of this talk on Sunday, which is “Listen to the Technology.” Because what does technology want film to be? One of the metaphors I may use, is that technology wants film to be a new language. It wants to be something similar to writing.

To give you an example of what I mean by that: right now I’m sure, no matter where you’re sitting, if you looked around, you could probably identify 15, 20, maybe hundreds or thousands of examples of text in your environment. It’s actually very hard for us, in our built environment, to escape from text, from words. They’re printed on everything we make, they’re on walls, we carry it around. The technology is ubiquitous, and it has kind of permeated our entire culture. In fact, it’s impossible to imagine our culture without text. It has shaped the very foundation of our culture and our identity.
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Tonight’s late show at the Kabuki is Big Man Japan. Here’s the synposis, by Rod Armstrong:

Things aren’t going so well for Mr. Daisato (cowriter/director Hitoshi Matsumoto), employee at the Department of Baddie Prevention. Speaking to a documentary film crew about his mundane life, he bemoans the estrangement of his wife and daughter, the increasing dementia of his formerly famous grandfather and the low ratings of his televised battles with baddies. See, our (super)hero is a sixth-generation member of the Dainipponjin (“The Great Japanese”), a rarefied breed who defend Japan from various villains scourging the land. Whether it’s saving the land from the stink clouds of Smelly Baddie or the dangerous projectile eyeball of Mean Look Baddie, it’s in Daisato’s job description. As his health starts to suffer from the high voltage exposure he needs to attain fighting stature, however, criticisms of his efforts increase. Locals blame him for destroying property and getting fat and throw rocks through his office window. So when a truly vicious bad guy hits Japan, it’s anyone’s guess whether or not Daisato will be up for the job. Director Matsumoto, a superstar comedian in his native land, showers Big Man Japan with color and verve, satirizing talking head–style documentaries, the omnipresence of sponsor placement and the ephemeral nature of popular culture along the way. Referencing Japanese monster movie classics while reveling in amusingly juvenile humor, and building to an unforgettable climax populated with numerous baddies and heroes, Matsumoto has created an immensely pleasurable, amusingly outrageous future cult classic.

The event is sponsored by Stella Artois, which means one very important thing: they start pouring free beer at 10:30.

The screening starts at 11:00; tickets are $12.50. Tickets are only available at the theater, so get yours early for the best chance at getting in!

Tomorrow at 3:15 PM, the film 1000 Journals will screen at the Kabuki. It’s a light but inspiring documentary about an experiment in collaborative art; it first attracted my attention because the creator of the project (the prime mover, if you will) is a San Francisco native who’s still around, so far as I know. You can read about the project here or get a sense of it from the film’s website. If you have any affinity at all for projects like this, or even if you’re just interested in collaborative art in general, I highly recommend you make time for the show and check it out. My review starts below and continues after the jump.

1000 Journals
Take a hardbound journal — one of those sturdy 6×9″ sketchbooks from an art supply store — and write a little user’s manual on the inside covers: Take this journal and add something to it. When you’re done, give it away to somebody else. When it’s full, please send it home.

Then give the book away, and wish it a wonderful journey.

Back in the year 2000, “some guy” in San Francisco had this idea, and he carried it out. And then he repeated it 999 times over the course of a couple years, sometimes leaving the books in public places, at other times mailing them to people who had heard of the project and wanted to participate. What ultimately happened to the journals he sent out? Whose hands had they passed through? What contributions had they made to the pages?

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Free screening– with donations going to Genocide Intervention Network (GI Net)– of Don Cheadle’s Darfur Now, at Berkeley next Thursday. More info here. Great line-up: Gaopele & Zion-I, and Berkeley college kids getting in an uproar about something that matters… Until we get an East Bay Metblogs, I guess this’ll have to do! Definitely a reason to BART over.

There will be a public hearing this Thursday (2/28) to discuss the results of the EIR for the new Whole Foods expected to go in at the site of the old Cala Foods Market. This location has sat empty for the past couple of years while the community debates what kind of development befits the area. Whole Foods has come forward with a proposal for review. And guess what, the hippies hate it and the yuppies love it.

Download the EIR(PDF).

More pointedly, on the pro-side we have the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association. And on the con-side of the argument we have the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council. It’ll be interesting to see what the substance of the arguments are, as neither of their websites seem to provide any information.

This meeting should be a blast:
2/28/08
1:30 PM
Commission Chambers - Room 400
City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
More details…

I made one of my random pilgrimages to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where I was excited to see that they are displaying the entire series of “The Brown Sisters” photographs by Nicholas Nixon. In this famous work, Nixon — the husband of one of the women — took a portrait of the four sisters once a year from 1975 to 2007. (I suppose he’s still adding to them, but the current exhibit features 33 images.)

The exhibit is part of the museum’s rotating exhibition of its photography collection, Picturing Modernity; the current pictures focus on portraiture, to reflect the travelling Jeff Wall exhibition.
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SFPD is hiring & shuffling: Capt. Ehrlich heads to Tac Squad, Fong brings in new female “Community” Capt. Bennet , plus scroll for details for potential applicants and those that just want to know more about what the hell is it they actually do:

In a continual game that is SFPD’s version of musical chairs meets Stratego, respected local Capt. John Ehrlich, a 27 year vet, moves into the Special Operations’ “Tac Squad” and Northern Station’s former Community Policing Lieutenant, Theresa “Teri” Barrett becomes the Park station’s new captain. An ironic shift perhaps since Chief Heather Fong has been reluctant to give so-called “community policing” much headway. Ehrlich also seemed content like most others in the dept. to hopefully let the “community policing” issue fade away before officers ever were forced to move around outside their bulletproof squad cars like any of us ordinary citizens must do.

This personnel shuffle seems yet another shift in the department that on one hand is derided as being insular, ineffective, and wishy washy and then on the other hand is accused of being insular, insensitive & overly aggressive.

I mean how could one not put their faith in an organization that issues glowing reports on it’s own recruits like
“San Frasncisco Policec Academy to Gradtue 13 Lateral Officers” as seen in a press release link posted proudly on the SFPD website since September 21, 2007.

It’s never helped that the majority of SFPD officers don’t live in town, and for a long time many seemed to take gleeful pride in bullying those that do. Lately the embarrassing and stubborn refusal of the SFPD to get around to enacting basic community policing reforms has really strained community relations.

It’s simply ridiculous what we spend here per capita on policing, and the ultimately shoddy results we get for that $500 dollars a year per person. According to a recent editorial in the Chronicle SF spends $120 more per citizen than Chicago, and $180 more per citizen than Los Angeles does on police services. Yet from 1999 to 2005, unlike in those towns, arrests were down 35 percent, and homicides went up, up, up and not away. Especially troubling is the unsolved homicide rate, with less than 25% solved these days, a dramatic reduction since the 50% solved rate of the latter 1990’s under other leadership.

More ranting after the jump…

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My favorite gift to give & receive this year was a microlending gift certificate from Kiva. So I go on last night to pick out a business entrepreneur from around the world- and to my chagrin, it’s fully funded. I guess they got a lot of press in the last week or so and record amounts of membership, which totally depleted their international business partners. Oprah, Clinton & “the Today Show” all took the non-materialist bent this Christmas to offer up the Kiva gift. Anyways, an inspiring success story- it was founded by ex-PayPal folks, and it’s in the Mission.

Photo: courtesy of Kiva, featuring Anoko Lawson-Savadoi, photo credit Dalia Palchik