“Dirty Deeds,” Feature, 3/29 and 4/5
This just in!
So, are you all one month ahead of the Chron, or are they one month behind you?
Yet another reminder of the need for strong, local independent media, the sort which sees news coming and can get underneath a story, showed up on the Chron Web site today. About a month ago, I was thoroughly impressed by your superb two-part feature “Dirty Deeds.” So today it made me chuckle, and then sigh, to find a “breaking news” story posted on SFGate.com reporting an alarming spike in the number of home mortgage foreclosures. Of course, the story offered nothing by way of explanation or investigation into what might be responsible for the sad trend. I trust there will be similar meaningful coverage to look forward to on the local news tonight.
Thought I’d pass along congratulations on another job done better. Keep it up.
Andy Bouvier-Brown, Berkeley
“I Am Infuriating,” On Food, 4/5
I am earnest
I am a server at Cafe Gratitude and I am writing to you today for two reasons: First, I’d like to thank you for an article that was (while titled otherwise) actually overwhelmingly positive. I’m really glad that you have enjoyed the food at our restaurant. We work hard to provide a beautiful place where delicious organic vegan fare is available, and your article is an expression of gratitude to everyone who took part in putting the food on your plate — from the farmers and laborers to the delivery drivers to Cafe Gratitude’s 24-hour main kitchen staff to (yes!) the staff at our new restaurant in Berkeley. In turn, we thank you for being our customer, and we hope you come back again and again.
Secondly, while I admit to our mistakes, I ask that next time you come into our restaurant, you open yourself up to what we are REALLY doing — creating a new paradigm within the realm of conscious business. We are committed to bringing organic raw vegan food to as many people as we can. We are committed to transforming our customers’ experience into one of being abundance. And while it may seem trite or “cloying” to you, to most people it feels pretty good when your server sets down your coffee and a fabulous piece of vegan lemon meringue pie and says, “You are courageous and amazing” — and really means it. And while your article was hurtful, I’ll just remember the time that I looked an 87-year-old man in the eye and said, “You are beautiful and perfect in every way,” and he looked back at me with tears in his eyes and said, “Do you have any idea how many years it’s been since someone has said those things to me?”
And still, we practice every day being better at what we do so that every customer feels honored and cared for in the best possible way.
Amanda Sayre Caskey, Berkeley
“Good Sausage, But Don’t Ask What’s in It,” City of Warts, 4/12
What’s your price?
So what are you getting for your shameless and uncritical pandering to mayoral wannabe Ignacio De La Fuente? Chris Thompson takes every opportunity to pour on the PR on how he’s Oakland’s only hope. Compared to the Express, the Oakland hills real-estate rag the Montclarion looks absolutely fair and impartial. So what does the Express get out of the deal: real-estate advertising, maybe a “development grant” from Phil Tagami? Will Chris Thompson be Mayor De La Fuente’s new “spin and win” communications expert?
In the interest of women, youth, minorities, and working people who might go to your publication for actual information, let’s point out some of the glaring logical inconsistencies in De La Fuente’s campaign and Chris’ critical thinking. Ignacio has wallpapered his office and his campaign literature with pictures of Cesar Chavez. Ignacio started his career as a union representative, like Chavez. Yet if you read his Web site he refers to starting his career in “labor relations.” FYI: “labor relations” is the boss, the other side of the negotiating table, the enemy! Chavez was a union organizer and labor leader, not a “labor relations specialist.”
Ignacio says that working hand in hand with greedy developers he can make Oakland better for immigrants. Improving rent control, not home ownership, helps immigrants. You have a huge population of people who can’t get drivers’ licenses, and you expect them to be able to buy homes in the East Bay real-estate market? At the point that Ignacio designates fifty units in the new Oak Street to Ninth development to undocumented immigrants and the chronically mentally ill, then I’ll endorse him myself. As it stands, though, Ignacio De La Fuente is the man who will do the most for Montclair, and the Express is the rag that’s doing the most to help him.
Chris Thompson, you slut!
Ann Nomura, Oakland
“We’re Outta Here!,” Feature, 4/12
Going, going, gone
Is Robert Gammon on steroids as he hits another long home run way out of the park with “We’re Outta Here,” backing up the long homer he hit with “Welcome to Pombo Country”?
“We’re Outta Here” hit the news stand before Senator Perata announced his $30-billion-plus “pork barrel” bond issue to allow legislators to take care of their favorite friends if the voters approve the bond issue. Gammon’s article sure changed my attitude toward the proposed infrastructure repair bond issue. Had the legislators not raided gas tax money, which was supposed to be used exclusively for road repair, we wouldn’t need an “infrastructure bond issue” to backfill money legislators spent on other things. So why do we want to bail the legislature out of their misspending?
Brian Murphy, Walnut Creek
Ed DeSilva, consider your legacy
Robert Gammon’s “We’re Outta Here!” makes a point that environmental activists might want to express more often. The real tragedy in these situations is not the relatively small number of birds and animals that are directly affected, but the very large number of people who are indirectly affected. Even those of us who never hike these majestic hills gain something from simply knowing they are out there — from appreciating the fact that wild eagles and elk roam free. But, apparently, not much longer.
Mr. DeSilva, if you happen to be reading: Might you consider donating the land to the park service, or perhaps making it a privately run park? You would make yourself a hero to thousands (perhaps, eventually, millions) of Bay Area residents. A privately run DeSilva Park could generate respectable income as well; I would make it a point to visit multiple times a year, and to bring as many friends as I could. Creating such a park, or merging it with Sunol, would be an action worthy of great admiration and respect.
David Goldweber, Oakland
Stop the quarry
Excellent piece. Excellent as in totally outrageous! I had NO idea! I am shocked! Thank you for bringing this to light. Keep us informed of further developments in the story. It will be quite a shame if this mining operation is allowed to proceed. We the people must do everything in our power to fight this aggression toward a million-year-old ecosystem for a century’s worth of rock. It’s just sickening.
Tom McGuire, Kensington
Let’s buy it
I’ve just read your excellent article. I am outraged by the thought, much less the deed, of allowing DeSilva to buy the Apperson property to quarry rock. It seems no one can prevent him except the environmentalists.
Why doesn’t Jeff Miller ask the Nature Conservancy to buy the parcel and donate it to the Sunol Wilderness? The conservancy buys land all over the world to preserve habitat and species. Surely they can outbid Mr. DeSilva for a four-mile-square tract of land.
Marina Fenner, Berkeley
The Cocaine Importing Agency, Letters, 4/5
Corporate media hatchet job
Your editorial comment posthumously smearing the great work of Gary Webb in his San Jose Mercury News series is outrageous.
In April 1990, Nina Wax and I did a lengthy expose of the Oliver North drug network for Z magazine. We focused on the macro picture, while Webb six years later brought home the micro situation. Readers should check out his great book, Dark Alliance, which proves his thesis and discredits the hatchet job done by the corporate media whores, including New Times via SF Weekly.
No one could prove it was intentionally aimed at the black community but it DID cause considerable damage there and elsewhere. This is way too late in the day for any believable whitewashing of the CIA or the US government in general.
Michael Hardesty, Oakland
Stephen Buel responds
Your letter displays no more regard for the truth than did Dark Alliance. First of all, the only reference to that series that ever seems to have appeared in the pages of the SF Weekly was one neutral paragraph in a 1997 calendar item. Not only that, but current SF Weekly editor Tom Walsh actually gave Gary Webb his last job in journalism, back at the Sacramento News & Review, where he worked at the time of his death.
Finally, the “corporate media whores” of New Times had nothing to do with “the hatchet job” on Webb’s spurious assertion that the CIA intentionally spread crack cocaine across black America via Los Angeles. To the contrary, New Times reprinted the entirety of Webb’s series in New Times Los Angeles and thus helped it gain its infamy. So, yeah, New Times screwed up in this case, but not by “whitewashing” the actions of the CIA or the US government.
“Brown’s Backroom Barbecue,” Bottom Feeder, 4/12
Super-Q is super
Bottom Feeder uses a quote from the Zagat review of Everett & Jones Super-Q at 2nd & Broadway, depicting it as “‘seedy … takeout windows’ with ‘cheeky’ service.” If anything might put me off my feed, it’s a Zagat reviewer who doesn’t know beans about one of the great restaurants in the entire Bay Area.
First, there’s the meticulously restored Puccini building — the Puccini family was the original pioneer of Jack London Square back in the ’40s, and the building itself, an Oakland landmark, dates to 1910 or so. Then there’s the fabulous interior, with its decor and motif more fun than any other restaurant in town: Grande Funque, if anything, filled to overflowing with antiques and wonderfully recycled treasures from all around Oakland, including old ’30s refrigerators, Western Pacific waiting-room benches, etc. Seedy to some, I guess, but for rib eaters and the rest of us who — unlike some parachuted-in nose-in-the-air reviewers — happen to know where our main zag is at, Super-Q is it.
Steve Lowe, Oakland
Editor’s note
As we previously noted on this page, Zagat’s comments were actually in response to a different Everett & Jones location.
We have a winner
Congratulations to Keith Lohkamp of Oakland, the Best of the East Bay voter who won a $50 gift certificate to Fellini O restaurant in Newark.
Correction
Our May 10 cover story (“Selling Ignacio:) mistakenly said that flowery “Ignacio De La Fuente for Mayor” signs were produced by the De La Fuente campaign. In fact, they were evidently made and paid for by Same Day Signs, a De La Fuente supporter.
