|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
October 31, 2007Boo! Trick or Treat, Gavin Newsom!‘fraid it’s a “trick” this time for you, Mr. MayorAND WOULDN’T IT BE A NEAT TRICKif Gavin didn’t get reelected? If all the city’s Halloween zombies loped to the polls and the undead absentees swung the vote?
GAVIN NEWSOM,early in his mayoral stallion days, was named, by myself, Citizen Artist Alexandra Jones, one of the five sexiest straight men in San Francisco, and subsequently stricken from that list, effective now, after proving himself an evasive, unresponsive richer-than-thou spokesmodel for those even richer than he, while he holds hostage the fate of thousands of people—artists, low income workers, families, minorities—who have to consider uprooting their lives and moving elsewhere, having failed in the daunting challenge of bare-bones existence in this money-centric city. HE’S RUNNING AGAIN—did you hear? There was some question, because he was supposed to start his own recall petition if the homicide rate didn’t go down (it didn’t; he didn’t). Newsom, when Pink magazine, asked him about this last year, seemed to blame the remark on thinking out loud: “I think out loud which is good and bad [bad wins!] but I do tend to say the same thing publicly as I do privately. In political life you’ve got to be cautious … but the challenge is also to be yourself and not become a ‘politician’ where you don’t say anything and you equivocate and pontificate and fingerpoint and explain away,” Newsom says. Say what? Uh, huh. Do tell. Well I saw him in a public appearance at a parks event where he remarked on someone’s comments (quoting from memory only), “How political was that? Saying everything and nothing at the same time. I love it.” How far you have come, G. HE DIDN’T KNOWmid-term, if he wanted to run again. “I can say this with sincerity,” (why not just say it?), he continued, “I don’t think there’s a worse job in American politics than being mayor of San Francisco if you don’t feel you can have some impact. It’s relentless; there is no escaping it. If you just do it for the symbolism and show up and do ribbon cuttings … I couldn’t imagine a worse thing in life. But if you feel you can have a little influence and a make a modicum of change, if you feel passionate, it’s truly the greatest job anyone can imagine.” Well, which is it? The worst or the greatest? Is it like thinking out loud, both bad and good? Is it symbolism or passion? Passion’s all well and good—yay passion—but what are you influencing and what are you changing? There’s the rub. My own self, I don’t think he wanted to run again—but he’s caught in the Machine, in the gears, the wheels, the levers, all the apparatus. (Pure speculation on my part.) One of these days Gavin is going to give up all the golden factories, pack his tent and go to live out in the Arizona sand. Perhaps he will become the Bearded Sage of Burning Man (but the hair gel won’t work in a sand storm, guy). You know you’d love it, you! Peace, brother. THAT THING WITH FEATHERSThe worst thing Gavin Newsom can imagine in life is being a figurehead ribbon-cutting mayor. I’m glad to hear that. That is the worst thing Gavin can be. If handed a second term, will he be cutting ribbons or making modicums of change? It would be a sin for him, for anyone, to squander this position of boundless opportunity, to be at the helm of a revolution to make this city the leader of fair and equitable treatment of all citizens. Building housing’s not enough, there has to be hope to go with it, a will to live stemming from decent living conditions, jobs, health care, transportation and amenities, feeling safe and secure, like there are people taking care of you and looking out for you, and having something more than $46 in your wallet after you pay your rent. MAYOR GAVIN “TALK TO THE HAND” NEWSOMis a walking photo op who always looks good enough to eat but contains nothing but empty calories when it comes to serving the will of the people and their needs. Citizens have a right to expect him, as Mayor, to demonstrate a good faith desire and intention to do everything in his power to serve the best interests of all citizens. MAYBE HE’S TOO TALLto see me down here, but I as a Citizen Artist don’t feel served by him. Do Bayview Hunter’s Point residents feel served by Newsom? Do families living crowded together in one or two rooms feel served? They feel avoided, evaded, ignored, like he’s turned his Armani-clad back on them. If he’s not serving the needs of all the citizens, whose needs is he serving? One thing we don’t need is another four years of a (however well) groomed stooge whose voice sounds like money. Has the stallion become a gelding? MY STORY AND I’M STICKING TO ITI am a 52-year-old writer who wants to live, by myself, as a writer; who can no longer work full-time because the relentless schedule aggravates my bipolar disorder to the point of nonfunctioning; and who because of supplemental rental income was able to squeeze sideways into the San Francisco real estate market, where from the bottom rung of the ladder I wedged my way into a renovated six-partner TIC. Condohood is as likely as Kukla doing Fran doing Ollie in my backyard, but it is a very real possibility that I will have to sell my flat and return to renting, because I will lay myself down on the N Judah tracks just down Steiner to get plowed over by the MUNI train as it passes through Duboce Tunnel, assuming the damn thing is running on time, before I sell my freedom to pay my mortgage, or ever involuntarily leave this city. I just wish the city wouldn’t make it so hard for me to stay here. I would instead like Gavin to court me with champagne and roses to stay here. CONTENDER FOR THE THRONE“Chicken” John Rinaldi, champion of Citizen Artists and Innovators, has posited three possible definitions for our government: Kakistocracy, government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens Aristocracy, government by the nobility, a form of government where power is held by a small number of individuals from a social elite or from noble families Kleptocracy, government by thieves - not an existing form, but a negative appreciation of any regime where corruption is excessive–a government that extends the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class at the expense of the population. Wow, tough choice. Is there an All of the Above? How about a government that provides plentiful opportunities for the rich to get richer and the poor to be forced out of town? What is that called? Fuckyoctracy? ACCORDING TO THE ARTICLEon a recent front page of the Chronicle, “A Bay Area couple with two kids can’t make it on $50,000 a year,” said family actually needs $77,069 a year “just for the basics,” and a single adult requires $2,469 a month to live in the Bay Area. Not this single adult! That’s not even my housing cost! In my former job as an office manager for an architectural firm, I earned a salary of $42,000, approx $20.20 an hour including bonuses (some would call this a “decent” job), and my take-home was approx. $2,600/month. Between my mortgage, TIC fees, and SF property taxes, my monthly housing cost alone was $2,554. The extra $46 was for everything else. I supplemented my income by constantly refinancing the Portland house I have since sold so I could quit my job to live as a writer. I am not building equity because I can hardly afford the interest, and can’t access my existing equity because I can’t get a loan on 1/6th of a TIC; I would have to sell my home to make use of that money, when what I need the money for is to stave off having to sell it. That’s some catch, that catch-22. WHYcan’t a single Admin. Asst. making forty-two grand own her own home? However modest, however humble, there’s no place like it. People shouldn’t have to scramble to find adequate housing, shoehorning their way through the crowd for the plum spots everyone wants. Why does acid churn in my stomach as I peruse Craig’s List and see nothing, day after day, that sounds like what I want, where I want, takes two cats, and is a reasonable deal. It’s scary. There should be a dozen artist live/work lofts dotting the city, like Project Artaud, for every thousand market-rate condos existing and being built, and a one-to-one match of affordable rentals and homes. One-to-one, I said, in case your mind wandered. By affordable I mean that which can be paid for with your paycheck without bankrupting whatever other resources you might have. GAVIN’S BUDDIESGetty, Fisher and Wilsey could fund things like that, if they were not so busy building museums as big as their egos, or donating $25,000 (!) a head (!) to oppose Prop E, which changes the City Charter to mandate, as the citizens requested with the passage of Prop I in November ’06, that the Mayor appear once a month in front of the Board of Supervisors, and asserts the public’s right to a regular opportunity to listen in on policy discussions between the executive and legislative branches, when what we have now is mostly “government by press release” and orchestrated town hall “dialogues” restricted to one topic and select questions;or if they were not all so oblivious to what the $25,fucking000 each donated to Newsom, a rich, rich man seeking to protect himself from being accountable to the Board of Supervisors and the people, would mean to any artist, any starving person, any homeless, unemployed, uninsured person in the city. For me, it would save my home. What a grotesque misuse of resources—all that money, just so Hair Boy doesn’t have to face the Board in front of the people—and I predict it will pass, as Prop I passed, even with his war chest friends funding the opposition. God, what a waste! What are those $25K contributions buying and whose needs will Newsom be prioritizing when there are policy decisions to be made? GOOD FOR YOU, GAVINfor recent steps to lessen by a scooch the burden on ordinary folks with the Health Care Access Plan and Downpayment Assistance Program for teachers and police officers, which offers $20,000 (sure you didn’t mean $200,000?) towards purchasing a home—but hey, probably more than half of the city needs that kind of assistance. It was you yourself who said, “When young, middle-class families with children flee for the suburbs, a city is robbed of its heart and soul.” Where do we sign up? As Mayor, Newsom has not prioritized ways for folks to both live and work, survive and thrive, in this berg that is increasingly overriding its artistic and bohemian roots to become an enclave of people with lots of commas in their bank balances, because of the emphasis on the construction of market-rate condos, the overdue crisis-need to place a moratorium on same, and the drive to piece-by-piece privatize the City to be under the control of rich friends and corporations. SKY-HIGHhousing costs and the correlative lack of high-enough-to-live-in-SF-paying mid-level jobs make supporting oneself at all, much less one’s family, much less while practicing one’s craft, a tremendous challenge. Then there is the discouraging chore of searching for reasonable housing in the cut-throat competitive atmosphere of a city where everybody is trying any which way including screwing the prospective landlord to squeeze their way through the clamoring throng into the least disgustingly exorbitant closet advertising itself as housing which the people of San Francisco—if they were not desperate to live somewhere anywhere in the city people flock from all over the world to gawk at with no idea of its hidden filth violence poverty environmental racism and skewed priorities that would make Herb Caen, Allen Ginsberg and Mark Twain turn over in their graves like they were buried in a revolving door—those home seekers would turn on their respective heels and hightail it out of that slightly off-smelling beige Tenderloin studio with the peeling linoleum, looking out at two walls two feet away, for only $1350/mo. plus utilities; and refuse, refuse, REFUSE to pay these insane insulting prices, except that the “market rate” will never come down as long as there are always rich and richer people to snap up what vacancies fly off of Craig’s List just moments after they are posted. If I’m standing amongst a crowd of my competitors at an Open House, what landlord is going to pick an unemployed writer with money on the way, but no income and dwindling savings? Good luck to me. I’M NOT YOUR TYPICAL CITIZEN ARTIST, PERHAPS.I acquired my Lower Haight flat after 30 years in the workforce and 14 years of shrewd and strategic real estate investments. I acknowledge, my standard of living is high (I am paying for what I get, and getting what I’m paying for), but it took me from 1989, when I first bought a house in Portland, Oregon, to get here, and I’d like to think, after age 50, that I would not be forced to sell a home that has been evolving over 30 years’ time since my first apartment in Philly, because I need some fast cash—and can’t take it out of my only asset, the equity on my TIC. If I sell my flat, I’ll be fine. But I’d just as soon not lose my home, my building, my street, my neighborhood, the life I’ve built here over the past four years—just as soon not, babe, you know what I’m saying. It would be nice to have a choice. In fact, the whole thing makes me sick. The whole panic-inducing quest for housing, jobs, second jobs, roommates, all the hoops you have to jump through to stay here. Yes, I love San Francisco. So did a lot of people who left it. BETTER TAKE ANOTHER DIPin the back-room Teflon vat, Gav, before you fall through the trap door in your office down into your waiting Lincoln Towne Car because wherever you go, re-elected or not, the Citizen Artists and regular working folk who tearfully or angrily or spitefully left San Francisco because it’s being sold to the highest bidder will be following you like the zombies that descended on the Main Library as you left the League of Women Voters debate through the back door, and who may well still flock to the Castro on Halloween despite your cancellation of this classic San Francisco trick ‘n’ treat because you couldn’t figure out a way to make it work. Why didn’t you call in Artist/Innovator “Chicken” John? YES, IT’S HALLOWEENUh oh. UH oh. (That was part of the laugh track of “I Love Lucy” when trouble was on the way.) It’s true, the Castro party is too big for its britches now and there are public safety issues. The city did try to stage an alternate event, which fell through, so there wasn’t time to get it right. Lots of folks are happy about it. But if you’re going to cancel events because there might be violence, you’ll have to cancel walking down the street in the Western Addition, and “then the terrorists win.” You can’t live your life or operate a city in fear of what might happen. Ya gots to keep on L – I – V – I – N’, ‘til you D – I – E. You’ve got to walk down the street like you own it, and you’ve got to throw a party like it’s not a rumble. Strengthen security and checkpoint inspection, do what you can, but realize that not every contingency can be met, and enter at your own risk. Even the Burning Man ticket flat out tells you up front you’re risking injury and death by attending—deal with it or don’t go. It’s called life. Live it or die. NO. NOT. NO. NO. NO. NO.A flyer was handed out at transit stops warning people there’s no party to be had in the Castro. And though the caution may be merited, the death of Halloween kills off one more piece of the soul of San FranSASSY!, drains a little more blood, and not the theatrical kind. CITIZENS OF SAN FRANCISCO!Mine is just one story in the Naked City. Whatever your situation is, if you have a story of struggle to stay in San Francisco, I urge you to write it up and send it ASAP to: Mayor Gavin Newsom City Hall, Room 200 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place San Francisco, CA Phone: (415) 554-6141 Fax: (415) 554-6160 Email: gavin.newsom@sfgov.org Or write to me at goofcitygoof@yahoo.com. I’ll read them if he doesn’t. I’ll make an Election Day bouquet out of them and send them to the fabulous exotic bird of paradise in Room 200, an attractive and fetching arrangement of the frustration and despair of his constituents to be delivered on November 6, 2007. COME ON GAVINIf you retain your office, use this opportunity to strike out on your own. Make some headway like you did with Gay Marriage. Go make nice with the Bored of Soups at Q Time. You must be a decent guy underneath it all. I used to like you. Secretly, I still do. I just don’t tell my friends. You know in NERT training, they tell you the priority in triage is to do the most good for the most people. A good way to start your new term, should you be granted one by the people. Remember it when you’re making decisions that impact us all. Ho-K? HOLY FLURKING SCHNIT!as Bart Simpson once said, Election Day is one week away, Tuesday, November 6th. You have three chances to vote for someone other than Gavin Newsom. If like me you are struggling to stay in this city, let’s get him out of city government. Shyeah, right! Just like Newsom is going to personally subsidize everyone who can’t make it in his City of the ever-richer Rich, a dream which, for many of us, is ever more a nightmare.
Maybe if he holds them the other way, he’ll appear three dimensional to us.- Anthony Faber ------------------------------------------------------------ Sweet dreams
What have I got to do to be heard? copyright Alexandra Jones 2007 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
