Watching City Hall #362 (4-14-05)
“I don’t know what you said, but I understand it.”
(from old anti-war poster)
“Rachel is a radical lesbian feminist separatist with a weakness for men.”
(email from Rachel)
“My name is ‘Bouncy’ and I’m going to dance for you.”
(Aries party dancer at Leeona’s)
“It’s Officer KRUPKE, not ‘KUPKE!’”
(fan of West Side Story)
“It’s Luke THOMAS, not ‘OWENS!’
(nit-picker on New Sentinel co/owner’s name)
The cop car ran the red light, trying to kill me!
Yeah. Honest. Kind of an average event around this neighborhood. It was 7:20am (4-14-05), corner of McAllister and 7th or Leavenworth (at the ‘Y’ in the road where 7th turns to Leavenworth) I was coming back from picking up my morning newspapers and coffee and stopped at the light on the corner across from my SRO room at the Civic Center Residence Club at 44 McAllister. The walk sign came on and I started across the intersection. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a movement. I turned and saw the danger.
The cops in the car were halfway down the block at about the middle of the Hibernia Bank. When the light turned red for them and the walk signal turned in my favor, the driver of the cop car stomped on his gas pedal and accelerated sharply toward the crosswalk. An old black man on a walker watched from the front of the hotel. There were around 50’ distance between myself and the cop car. I started backing up immediately and wondered if he’d swerve to hit me.
He didn’t. He was laughing! Just a little test in the morning. … As an afterthought, (after he’d passed me and headed into the turn on Leavenworth) he turned on his flashing lights but blended into the traffic without hitting his siren. That gave him an excuse for running the red light and endangering my life. After the fact.
Oh, he wasn’t trying to hit me. He just wanted me to know that he had a gun and a badge and a couple of tons of car and the support of a thousand members of the Police Officers Association who would lie til they died if he did choose to murder me there in the street in front of my residence. The assholes would do a lot better to just leave me the fuck alone.
In other news
Mabel Teng tendered her resignation from the post of Assessor. This is like the Cookie Monster quitting a job as taster at the cookie factory. Julie Lee finally gives up her spot at the hog trough of public housing. Who was the Chinese Port Commissioner who bitched to Peskin that a Latino Planning Commissioner took a 20 grand bribe from him, then didn’t come through? I forget. Remember Willie’s reaction? “He just doesn’t know how the system works.” Uh huh, he said that. Meanwhile, Walter Wong is fronting for the commie Chinese government in a project destroying South American rain forests. Rose Pak takes a trip to China and comes back to denounce the Falun Gong and block their plea to the hypocritical SF Board (which once again, last week, by an 11-0 votes without discussion, approved a resolution condemning Turkey for the Armenian ‘genocide’ – where’s the companion resolution condemning the Germans for the Holocaust?) … Police Commissioner Doug Chan deserts the progressives who handed him his seat and joins a xenophobic Arlene Ackerman in condemning Chinese-American School Board President, Eric Mar. You know, I gotta disagree with Willie on this one. I mean, shit man, what do you want? I’d say our local Chinese-American politicos are playing the game very well. Even if you discount the international intrigue, they’re lying and thieving and back-stabbing and bribing on a level that would do any top Irish or black politician proud.
Other dumb things
Firing a veteran firefighter (30 years, I believe) for being an alcoholic is another very bad idea. Hey, it’s a disease. Dock the guy a month’s pay and make him agree to regular testing regimen after he completes an appropriate detox program. With a politically connected chauffeur as chief, the department needs every experienced command level white helmet they have.
New Assessor?
Same advice I gave when Newsom picked the new Treasurer (which he didn’t take) … he should call a meeting of the entire department and take their recommendations. Go for competence for a change. Shock us. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a situation like you have with your present Treasurer appointee . You know, trying to build up his public persona by taking him everywhere with you. I swear to God, Newsom drags this guy around like a dead cat on a rope.
Ackerman, a superfluous bully
People, the real head of the SFUSD right now is Warren Hellman. He runs the day to day cash flow through a guy named David Golden. SFGTV couch potatoes finally got to see Mr. Golden in person (Hellman pays his salary) last week during a hearing before the Budget Committee. “I’m NOT going away!!” said the SFSOS hire even though no one asked him about travel plans. Expect Ackerman and Board hacks Dan Kelly and Jill Wynns to jump up and down screaming and yelling about the new progressive majority to distract the public from the actions of the equally new Hellman juggernaut as it passes contracts to Bibee Construction and other favored contractors just as he and Donald Fisher have done in L.A. for the last couple of years. Word is that Hellman, (whom the SF Weekly’s zany and troubled, Matt Smith says tried to bribe him) .. rumor is that Hellman has even been naming school principals.
The Alioto girl
“So, you want me to set up a lunch meeting with you and me and Warren Hellman?” Angela seemed intrigued. She has 15 Zebra finches now and if you want to adopt a couple of these cheerful little beauties, just let me know. “Look over here. There are 4 babies in this nest and 12 eggs in this nest over here. They grow so fassst!” The woman with the heart. The birds have a cage that’s bigger than my SRO room and a a 10 million dollar view that centers on Angel Island and includes most of the entire Bay area. Joe’s girl and I had gotten together to talk about the passing of the pope and Care Not Cash and our grandkids. As usual, a 10 minute coffee break (she don’t drink – never has) 10 minutes turned into 3 hours . I opened a bottle of great chardonnay from her fridge and drank half of it as we did a tour of the most comfortable mansion in town. We’d met on the Polk Street stairs.
I was early to the Hall
I’m a flake. Just as likely to arrive to a meeting an hour, day or week early or late. I knew I was supposed to meet the Sicilian volcano somewhere between 3 and 3:30, somewhere between Alioto Plaza and the North Light Well. I arrived before 3 and started yelling at the passing notables.
“It’s the poet laureate!”
I yelled that one at Joe O’Donaghue who was exiting City Hall with Joe Cassidy and a small gaggle of strapping Irish builders. He looked across, laughed, waved and kept going. I continued to shout.
“I can tell you’re up to no good!!”
I was cupping my hands and using my clipboard to make a megaphone. “Ya know how I can tell you’re up to no good!?” I yelled that on over. Joe cupped his own hand at his ear for the final dart. …
“Cause you’re breathinggg!”
Joe is a favorite of most reporters. He’s over-the-top funny and honest and combative all at the same time. He could, however, use a little work on the feminist perspective. Seldom in history has a man not wearing a sheet over his head pushed more ignorant drivel than Joe and his posse’ spilled last week before the very DBI Commission that he and Randy Shaw created some 10 years ago. … Fret not, O’Donoghue will survive, as will the builders; as will Amy Lee who will become DBI head next week. … Big winner in this one was Randy Shaw who decided to lay off the RBA Kool-Aid at this party.
Speaking of THC
Mayor Newsom gave us some hint as to where he’d be making up the quarter million bucks he and Aaron Peskin gave to the rich Republican bike race entrepreneur last week. (Is getting your picture taken with Lance Armstrong and Robin Williams really worth it?)
Heeding the calls of the big anti rent-control landlords who helped fill his political coffers, Newsom struck some $90k from Shaw’s Tenderloin Housing Authority’s legal aid allocation. That’s 3 lawyers.
Let’s see you hire 3 good lawyers for 90 grand. Nope. Ain’t gonna be able to do it unless they believe so much in what they do that they are willing to work for less than the wages of a janitor or dishwasher. That’s what makes them so dangerous. Look for Newsom to back down on this one. Shaw’s just a better card player.
I should make note of Randy’s ‘beyondchron.com’ which has the best overall local political commentary in town on a daily basis. Shaw’s honest look at the damage the recently departed pope did to liberal (nay, ‘revolutionary’) SF theologians was what got me to talking to Gavin’s ‘Homeless Czar’ on this particular day.
“I told Gavin I’d pull that flag down myself!”
Thus spake Angela to the Gav when the pope passed. She wudda too. … I’m starting to think that maybe having a flag pole on the damned building is not such a good idea.
Or, maybe we could hang a huge wind sock all sewn and painted up to look like a classic phallus and when the wind blows … huh? … huh? … OK, OK, not such a good idea.
So, here I am arguing the radical feminist position in front of City Hall and Sophie Maxwell comes over and starts assuring Alioto that she would have come to the mass for the pope but that she got the notice just the day before the ceremony and had other plans. There was a lot of that. … People coming up to Angela to comment on her opinion piece that had appeared in the morning Chronicle. My friends are so powerful. Especially, the women. The former Board President assigned me a chapter in her book (‘Straight to the Heart Political Cansos’) to reread (I opened the book today and found I’d dog-eared and high-lighted the thing for much of the 250 or so pages – I stuck a business card from Michael J. Antonini into the chapter on the Agnos/Jordan/Davis battle in the 1991 race for mayor. I really do love stuff like this) … I told her to read Daly’s blog from a couple of day’s ago in which he notes the new ‘Care Not’ shift by Trent Rohrer in which the department is tossing people who are not chronically homeless from the rolls and transferring the money to the supportive housing program. I note that my friend was told that she could be barred from reapplying for the PAES program again for up to 6 months. She listens carefully and asks what I’ve done. I tell her that I left a message for ‘Dar’ but that he hadn’t replied and that I assume the entire thing will be battled out in the coming Daly hearing where requests for the location of the beef will be flying. I preach the same mantra I preached to Rohrer … put a 150 million dollar stand-alone supportive housing bond measure on this off-year ballot as ‘Care Not Cash II’ or whatever.
Now, lots of people have given me the bird as they say. But, Angela, she’s the only one I know who offers you two of em as you leave (“Not brother and sister.”) plus a cage to keep em in.
It was fun. Always is. I told her again that I wanted to partner with her and open a press bar with a pot club and brothel. She smiled and laughed and we talked about when she was in her 20’s and owned the old ‘Tiddly Bar’ which was ‘The Black Cat’ before and how a friend of mine hung out there with Melvin Belli while Melvin taught politics to the likes of Willie Brown and Diane Feinstein. Later, I related the conversation to Rachel.
“You told this good little Catholic girl
that you wanted her to help you
open a drug den/whorehouse bar
for the press?
What’s the matter,
did you forget about the car wash!?!”
Rachel does get right to the point on things. I started carefully quizzing my new muse delicately. Where, indeed, had she come from? I noted a few of her replies.
Rachel: “I was born in Cleveland and got on the road dancing when I was still in my teens. I was so successful that I never bothered to finish school. … I used to live with some logger types in the great Northwest and they called me ‘Honey Bunch’. Later I realized they were referring to the R. Crumb cartoon character.”
h.: (shaking head in admiration) “Baby, face it. You’ve got a set of legs there that deserve immortality.”
Rachel: “Yeah, here I am, this 21 year old dancer, waltzing (no, I ‘marched’ in those days, now I ‘waltz’) … waltzing into the la boheme in San Francisco where Crumb was sketching and the world’s most talented and slightly deviant cartoonist creamed in his jeans, and transferred what he saw to paper & ink.”
h.: “Damn! You WERE the model!! I used to hang there years later and he was still sketching in there.”
Rachel: (still waiting for her wardrobe) “Give la boheme a plug. This is their 30th anniversary. Glenna has worked there most of that time.”
h.: (shaking head) “Sure. My best friend’s ex-wife worked there. Rebecca Robinson. Susan Johnson worked there. Jimmy Wallace’s girl worked there. And, the dance studio is still upstairs.”
Rachel: “I know.”
