When my all-time favorite Samoan barbecue restaurant — Mo’s Hut, in East Oakland — and one of Alameda’s better Hawaiian plate lunch shops (Kau Kau Korner) both closed at the end of 2015, I wondered: Did every good Polynesian eatery in the East Bay go out of business overnight?
Later, I realized that I’d been a bit too nearsighted and Oakland-centric in my search for a decent scoop of crab mac salad. What I needed to do was head down to Hayward, a city that’s home to one of the largest populations of Pacific Islanders in the country. Specifically, I needed to eat at Katalina’s Island Grill and Grocery, the only bona fide Tongan restaurant in the entire East Bay.
Katalina Pahulu prepares taro leaves for making Tongan lu pulu.
Credits: Bert Johnson
Turkey tail (left), lu pulu, and pork hocks.
Credits: Bert Johnson
Even in Hayward, where plate-lunch aficionados can choose between a half-dozen L&L-type Hawaiian fast food restaurants, the year-old Katalina’s is something of an anomaly — a family-run spot that serves home-style island dishes instead of your typical mix-and-match teriyaki grilled meats. Katalina Pahulu, the restaurant’s eponymous owner, said that on warm-weather Saturdays she’ll make a big batch of macaroni salad and set up a grill outside. But the main focus is on slow-cooked comfort dishes — the sort of food you’d find if you traveled to Tonga, Fiji, or Samoa. In the words of several enthusiastic online reviewers, this is “the real deal.”
Here in the Bay Area, our popular image of Tongan culture owes too much to the outsize presence of kitschy, culturally appropriative tiki bars. Katalina’s is more or less the exact opposite of that. If anything, the restaurant resembles a general store or an old-fashioned pancake house — the charmingly no-frills kind of place you’d stumble upon out in the Sierra Nevada. A small grocery section is stocked with canned mackerel, giant jars of mayonnaise, and other pantry items.
The closest thing to something you might find at a tiki bar is the handful of gorgeous black-and-white photographs of Polynesian dancers that line the walls, but these are hardly kitsch: The featured dancer is Pahulu herself. The photos date back to when she and her husband worked at Disney World’s Polynesian Village Resort during the Seventies — as a dancer and musician, respectively.
Katalina’s is Pahulu’s first restaurant, and the place is, among other things, a testament to its proprietor’s work ethic. Pahulu is there at 8 a.m. to cook the day’s first batch of food, and she stays through the early afternoon, when she turns the kitchen over to one of her three adult children — Annabelle, Helen, or Alani — and heads off to her other full-time job at Delta Airlines. The next morning, rinse and repeat. If you’re like me, this is the kind of scrappy, family-run small business you root for — assuming, of course, that the food is up to snuff.
What, then, is Tongan cuisine? At Katalina’s, all of the food is served from a steam table and consists of a lot of slow-cooked meats, all prepared in small batches over the course of the day. You can order dishes a la carte, but every customer I saw went with one of the combo plates, which come with a choice of starch: big, starchy hunks of taro, sweet potato, or unripe banana. A three-entrée plate will only run you $15 and, unless you’re a much heartier eater than I am, leftovers are inevitable.
If you aren’t too fat-averse, you’ll want to start with the restaurant’s most unusual and hardest-to-find item — turkey tails, a dish that’s beloved in both Samoa and Tonga, which import several thousand pounds of the fatty delicacy each year from the United States, where most customers consider it to be an undesirable waste product. (Southern cooks, who sometimes use these tails in place of salt pork when preparing collard greens, know better.) At Katalina’s, the tails are brushed with teriyaki sauce and roasted slowly until the meat is impossibly soft. Any home cook who knows that the choicest morsel on a roast chicken is the butt will love this (though perhaps only in moderation): Turkey tails are even fattier, with an even greater surface area of crisp, caramelized skin — and are about ten times as big, to boot.
The menu at Katalina’s is dotted with dishes that speak to the global influence on Pacific Islander cuisine. For instance, one of the most popular items is the corned beef and cabbage — a testament to the islands’ relative proximity to New Zealand. As Pahulu put it, “You don’t have to be Irish” to love this pub staple. Again, the corned beef had been poached gently for hours until it was lush and tender, and the cabbage offered a welcome bit of sweet, vegetal freshness.
Tongans’ love of corned beef also manifests itself in other forms. One of my favorite items was Pahulu’s version of creamed spinach, which was spiked with a ton of cream and coconut milk and a small amount of canned corned beef — the softest, fattiest bits cooked down until they’d yielded all of their salty, meaty flavor. Lemon pepper gave the dish a distinctive, addictive tang.
Another highlight was a dish I haven’t seen elsewhere in the East Bay — what Tongans call lu pulu, Samoans call palusami, and Hawaiians call lau lau. Each island cuisine has its own take on the dish, but the gist of it is that taro leaves are wrapped in foil — along with coconut milk and, often, meat — and then baked until the greens achieve a texture similar to the aforementioned creamed spinach, but with a musky flavor that reminded me of my favorite versions of Indian saag. Katalina’s serves one version with corned beef and another with lamb; both are the kind of unique dishes you’ll be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.
Even after you’ve eaten all of the above dishes, you will have barely scratched the surface at the Katalina’s steam table, which, as a sign promises, is “the only island table with twelve or more items daily” — the exact number depends on when you arrive, and how quickly Pahulu and her children are able to restock the supply. There’s a fish and coconut milk dish that wasn’t available during any of my visits. Other rotating menu items include ota (a poke-like raw fish preparation); a very simple but tasty chicken curry; a gingery version of chop suey; and pork hocks braised until the meat and gelatinous skin practically fall apart.
If I have any criticism, it’s that there was a sameness to a lot of the dishes, especially in terms of how rich and heavy they are. Order accordingly. (Turkey tails, pork hocks, and corned beef might not be an ideal trio if they’re all part of the same meal.)
A note to mainlanders and East Asians who, like me, might find the starchy default sides a bit difficult to get used to: You can always opt for white rice. It helps, too, if you order a mango otai — a refreshing drink made with fresh mango and coconut pulp, served in Big Gulp-size foam cups. For dessert, if Pahulu’s pineapple pie, topped with a big dollop of cool whipped cream, is available, don’t hesitate to get it.
In the back of Katalina’s, there’s a stage area with a full drum kit and a tricked-out sound system. Sometimes there’s live music on the weekend, and eventually Pahulu says she’d like to do Polynesian shows each Friday and Saturday night — something like the family-friendly performances that she and her husband used to put on back in their Disney resort days. During my last visit, there was a humbler performance: a little Tongan or Samoan girl, maybe seven or eight years old, singing a charmingly off-key rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” into a live mic. Somehow, it was the perfect soundtrack for my meal.
“I see myself performing in arenas and baseball stadiums and soccer stadiums. I wanna make, like, big — big, big, big — anthem songs,” enthused IAMSU in a recent interview. “Like U2-type — Coldplay, Beyoncé, Jay Z, Prince. I wanna be a rock star.” While his assertion might sound hyperbolic to some, considering how far the 26-year-old rapper has come already, his ambitious proclamation didn’t come off as too farfetched.
Since gaining notoriety in 2011 for his standout feature on LoveRance’s chart-topping single “Up,” the Pinole artist has climbed the ranks of the Bay Area’s music scene and is in large part responsible for galvanizing the current wave of melodic yet hyphy-inflected rap currently coming out of the region.
With his new album and new label, IAMSU is preparing to level up.
Credits: Bert Johnson
HBK Gang, the music collective he founded shortly after graduating high school in 2007, has become so large and so widespread that IAMSU and its other members — such as P-Lo, Kehlani, Kool John, Sage the Gemini, and Jay Ant — currently make up a large percentage of the most promising young, local artists.
As a producer, rapper, and singer, IAMSU’s influence on the other HBK members’ output is palpable. And in turn, he and his collaborators have had a noticeable ripple effect on other West Coast scenes — which is impressive considering the crew’s sound has caught on organically, largely without major label support.
At this point, IAMSU has had major singles with big-name locals like E-40 and Too $hort as well as mainstream rappers such as 2 Chainz, Dej Loaf, and Tyga. His recent single, “Famous,” is currently on 106 KMEL. Last week, he left town on a national tour in preparation for his upcoming album, Kilt3 (which, he just announced on Twitter, should be out this week). He also recently released an Android app (an iOS version is in development); is preparing to launch a new merch collection; and said he has several finished music videos sitting on his hard drive. In short, IAMSU is preparing to level up.
While IAMSU experimented with more emotional and introspective lyrics on his 2014 album, Sincerely Yours, Kilt3 turns its focus to big, upbeat clappers that overlay bouncy, bombastic bass and flutters of glistening synth lines with a metallic sheen. He has a gift for coining hooks, but his recent singles, such as “Game Time” and “Up All Night,” also see him solidifying a distinct flow that effortlessly bridges rapping, singing, and carefully inserted backing vocals. Earworms are where IAMSU truly shines, and his best work conveys a sense of instant gratification — a strength he sought to hone on the new album.
“I didn’t want there to be any moments where you feel like you need to look at your phone or you feel like you want to start talking to somebody,” he said. “I wanted every moment to feel like, ‘Oh, he’s about to say this,’ or ‘This part is about to come on’ — all Snapchat moments.”
While newfound success is lyrical fodder for many rappers, IAMSU’s pursuit of stardom has influenced his writing process in less typical ways. He found unexpected inspiration for Kilt3 while watching movies on tour bus rides and flights. While writing and producing Kilt3‘s tracks, he became especially infatuated with the 1983 version of Scarface, and its cinematography and electrifying, synth-driven soundtrack became sources of inspiration for the album’s sonic palette. Giorgio Moroder — a pioneer of synthesizer-based pop production who worked with the likes of Donna Summer and Debbie Harry in the Seventies and Eighties — wrote and produced the Scarface soundtrack, and the influence of his pulsing, glossy synth playing is subtly apparent in Kilt3‘s production.
“When I was on tour last year, on a bus, I would literally just plug my BeatBox in and play [the Scarface soundtrack] on the road trip, and look out the window and envision how I could add those sounds to my sound,” he said. He explained that he often thinks of sound in terms of color, and that the tropical, kitschy scenery of Scarface, which takes place in Miami, helped him conceptualize beats with effects that evoke the movie’s decadent look.
“It sounds like Art Deco buildings — white walls, neon lights, palm trees, you know what I mean? All those colors — I wanted to add it to the production of the music. Not like, killing people and selling drugs or Scarface stuff, but figuring out the most intriguing way to tell my story. Like, the most crazy-sounding soundtrack to what my life story is.”
While IAMSU said that Kilt3 has been finished since August 2015, he has repeatedly delayed its release date since announcing the album title last fall — much to the befuddlement of his anxious fans. He admitted that last year’s announcement was somewhat premature because he had not finalized various financial aspects of the project.
“Before, when I was making music, I’d record it, Chief mixed it, and I’d put it out,” he said, namedropping one of HBK Gang’s other producers. “But it’s so much of a business process. If there’s other people involved, you gotta get sign-offs, and there’s percentages, and attention to detail.”
Instead of vying for a record deal, he and his mom, Maxine Harris, who is also his manager, started their own label, Eyes on Me, which they recently registered as an LLC. He explained that while, previously, Atlantic was courting him for a contract, he ultimately wanted more control over his sound and image than the label was willing to give. Considering that the Bay Area has a long history of self-starting rapper-entrepreneurs, such as E-40, The Jacka, and Mac Dre, he has decided to circumvent the traditional pathways to success and chart his own.
“I tried to get in the system and play that game, but I hate that game.”
Singer and composer Pamela Z resembles a magician when she performs. Often dressed in all black and standing before her laptop, the sixty-year-old artist uses sweeping gestures to activate different effects without touching a single button or knob. She loops her operatic singing in real time, weaving an abstract collage of voices that include live monologue and pre-recorded samples of other people’s speech.
The secret behind this auditory alchemy is a custom-designed MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) controller that uses ultrasound to trigger an array of samples and effects on her laptop. The innovative instrument, which she designed with the help of fellow composer Donald Swearingen, enables her to use the position of her hands in relation to sensors to manipulate sound. In previous works, Z has used this technique to process her voice while singing on stage, altering its volume or adding delays and layers of harmonies with a flick of the wrist.
Pamela Z creates awe-inspiring vocal arrangments using a gesture-activated MIDI controller.
Credits: Thomas Steenland
In Memory Trace (which she will perform in full at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on April 28), Z investigates the musical qualities of human speech. Using samples culled from interviews that she recorded with various subjects about time, memory, dreams, and perception, she takes snippets of words and phrases and processes them until they become unrecognizable and abstract, allowing discernible quotations to surface only occasionally.
“What I like about language is its sound, and I listen to it purely for its sound,” she said when we met at the studio where she lives and works in San Francisco’s Mission district. “But I have the awareness that if the language being spoken is understandable to the listeners, you can’t divorce the meaning from [the sound], so that adds another layer.”
Dressed in a long-sleeved black T-shirt; black, high-water cargo pants; Chelsea boots with angular, geometric platforms; and a pair of electric blue, thick-framed glasses, she bustled about the studio, whose clutter evinced nearly thirty years of creative practice. Electronic instruments were scattered about her work space; MIDI controllers spilled out of a suitcase, ready for her upcoming national tour; underneath her cramped loft, a doorway led to an isolation chamber where she records many of her interviews and other samples.
A classically trained vocalist with a music degree from the University of Colorado, Z became interested in making experimental music shortly after graduating in 1978. At that time, she earned her living busking and performing in clubs as a folk-rock singer-songwriter. She also hosted Tuesday Afternoon Sound Alternative, a public access radio show on KGNU in Boulder. On air, she played a wide range of music with experimental and countercultural leanings — from contemporary classical music to punk. As her interest in avant-garde sounds grew, she realized that folk-rock no longer reflected her own tastes.
“I was sort of educating myself about the experimental music world through the stacks at the station. I became aware that my interests lie much more with experimental music than the kind of music that I was performing,” she recalled.
Z moved to San Francisco in the Eighties and has since found considerable success in its experimental music scene. She’s performed at such prestigious institutions as the YBCA and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she will play her next concert, the aptly titled Full: Voice, on March 23.
Z’s voice is the most commanding element in her work — even in pieces where string and brass instruments accompany her singing. She can dip into low, throaty, soulful timbres and blast off into high notes with intense vibrato. And through looping and processing particular phrases, she creates awe-inspiring, tapestry-like arrangements that sound as if they’re coming from a choir rather than a soloist.
Many of Z’s works also contain video components. As she sings, she uses the ultrasound-based MIDI controller to activate images on large screens behind her. In Memory Trace, videos of her interview subjects drift in and out of focus. She juxtaposes them with footage that nods to the passage of time: the hands of an antique clock, rain falling, a livestream of her hands moving as she performs.
As we got acquainted, I mentioned that my family moved to the Bay Area from Russia when I was a kid. “I can hear the slightest trace of your accent,” she observed — usually something that goes undetected in my day-to-day interactions. Working with interview subjects has given Z a linguist’s ear. For a piece she did with the Kronos Quartet, she interviewed a variety of subjects with different regional accents, ethnic backgrounds, and English language proficiencies. Having studied French, Italian, and Japanese herself, she is attuned to the subtle qualities of diction and bases her compositions on sounds that wouldn’t normally be considered music to the untrained listener.
“I really like finding the melodic material in spoken text and composing music made entirely out of speech,” she said.
Projects such as Memory Trace have also cast Z in the role of a sociologist. One of the most interesting things her interviews have illuminated, she continued, are the subtle similarities between people from different walks of life.
“When you interview a bunch of people and ask all of them the same questions, you ultimately find that on one or two of the questions, they all say the same things,” she observed. “And then it’s beautiful, because you have this whole chorus of people who were never in the room together all in unison saying something. It all becomes this really interesting musical thing, and I love playing with that.”
I’m a 27-year-old, feminist, conventionally attractive, straightish, GGG woman. Over time, my tastes have changed, and now I find myself more of a kinkster. A few years ago, my desire for kinkier sex and my willingness to take a chance came together in a mutually beneficial, exciting D/s relationship. I’ll be honest: I wasn’t as smart as I could have been. I met this guy on Tinder, and after verifying his identity, I told some friends where I’d be and I met up with him. He was great for a while, but a big move took me away from the area and I grew tired of his conventional gender ideals. I assumed I would find another partner in the future as functionally great as him but maybe a better conversationalist. Fast-forward to today. I’ve dabbled with pain and submission play with a few boyfriends with no great success. (A subsequent partner who didn’t respect my safe word, in fact, assaulted me.) I’m now greatly discouraged in my search. The cycle always goes like this: I get horny and want kink, I go looking for it online, and I am then buried in a landslide of creepiness, typos, and aggression. There are just so many men out there who hate women. These men are more interested in condescending to me and bossing me around than they are in power exchange. It was recommended to me to join the local center for sex positivity in Seattle, but that costs money. I want to engage in kink to relieve stress, not to cut into my already tight budget. Are my only options perseverance or an extra grand lying around?
Perseverance Or Withdrawal, Eternal Regrets
I definitely think you should keep hacking your way through the creeps, typos, and aggros, POWER, and, more importantly, your pussy thinks so too — excuse me, that’s crude. Perhaps I should say: Your erotic imagination and your libido think so too. But you may find the search for kinky play partners a little less frustrating if you devote a few hours a week to it — set a regular schedule: two hours a night, twice a week — instead of waiting until horniness and desperation drive you back online. If you search for kinky guys only when you just gotta have it, POWER, your inability to find it immediately is gonna be that much more frustrating.
And you might wanna get out there and find a kinky guy now, POWER, while you still can.
“Uh-oh, kinksters: Sex cops could be coming for you next,” Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes at Reason.com. “According to a new federal court decision, Americans have no constitutional right to engage in consensual BDSM because ‘sexual activity that involves binding and gagging or the use of physical force such as spanking or choking poses certain inherent risks to personal safety.’ Thus, officials could constitutionally ban or regulate such activity in the interest of ‘the protection of vulnerable persons,’ the court held.”
In 2003, the US Supreme Court ruled that Americans have a constitutional right to get their asses fucked, and one day soon we could be asking the Supreme Court whether Americans have a constitutional right to get their asses spanked.
Finally, POWER, I’m a huge fan of Seattle’s Center for Sex Positive Culture (TheCSPC.org). And I’m an even bigger fan of people getting out there, meeting up IRL, and making face-to-face connections with like-minded kinksters. I’m such a big fan that I’m going to pick up the expense of your first year’s membership at the Center for Sex Positive Culture. While there are additional charges for most events at the center, POWER, there are also tons of volunteer opportunities — and there’s no better way to get to know the local kinksters than to pitch in and help out. I’ll email you directly about your shiny new membership.
And speaking of safe words…
You messed up in your response to THINK, the man whose wife wanted to engage in consensual role-play rape scenes despite having been sexually assaulted by a previous partner who didn’t stop “when she said ‘no.'” THINK said he worried “the same thing could happen” to him. Due to some ambiguous wording, you thought he doubted his wife’s account and was worried the “same thing” he was worried about was “being falsely accused of rape.” I think he was actually worried about accidentally making his wife relive that trauma in a non-sexy way. Although it was poorly worded, I don’t think his intentions were motivated by the fear of being falsely accused. His worries were based in the ambiguity of when does consensual rape-play cross the line in this very delicate scenario. The other thing you forgot, the most important thing you forgot, the thing that should never be forgotten when talking about rough-sex role-play, consensual rape scenes, power exchange, bondage, or SM: a SAFE WORD!
Simple And Frequently Effective Word Omitted Recently, Dan!
THINK’s wife told him she was raped by an ex who refused to stop when she said no, SAFEWORD, and here’s how THINK described his concerns: “I’m over here wondering if her previous trauma was a result of her encouraging forceful sex and regretting it later, and I worry the same thing could happen to me.” [Emphasis added.] Awkwardly worded, yes, but THINK’s meaning seems clear: He didn’t want to go for it, like that other guy may have, and be accused of raping his wife if she came to regret it later. That doesn’t seem ambiguous to me.
But you’re right to ding me for failing to advise Mr. and Mrs. THINK to agree on a safe word. And I didn’t just leave “get a safe word” out of my response, SAFEWORD. It was worse than that: I deleted “get a safe word” from my response. There were two very similar paragraphs in the original draft of my response to THINK, both on the mechanics of making it happen, and I had to delete one paragraph for space. In an unbelievably stupid move, I deleted the one with “get a safe word” in it. I should’ve caught that, I didn’t, and I’m grateful to SAFEWORD and everyone else who did.
And remember, kids: We have a new universal kink/BDSM/power-exchange safe word: scalia.
I am the only liberal in my family. I love them, but there is no talking to them on the issues. I have come up with the idea of a Planned Parenthood jar. It is like a swear jar, but I will put money in it when I am too chickenshit or conflict-avoidant to have a hard conversation. Every time one of my family members puts up a stupid, ill-informed article on Facebook and I don’t say anything, I will put money in the jar. Any time they tell me why Hillary Clinton is the devil, I will put money in the jar. It will assuage my guilt and make those moments easier because I can smugly think: “Keep talking, the only one you are helping is Planned Parenthood.” Is this a cop-out or a narrowly tailored, appropriate penance?
Fearful And Milquetoast, I’m Leaning Yellow
Can’t something be a cop-out and a creative, appropriate penance? But whether it’s one or the other or both, FAMILY, I’m strongly in favor of anything that benefits Planned Parenthood. For those who don’t want to go through the motions of filling a jar with money before making a donation, just go to PlannedParenthood.org and click Donate.
They say that sisters who distill single malt whiskey together stay together — or something like that, anyway. At least that’s the case for Samantha and Alexandra Blatteis, a pair of Oakland-born twin sisters who will launch their new craft spirits company in the coming months.
Housed in a Jack London district warehouse, Home Base Spirits joins an emerging community of craft distillers in Oakland, which, until recently, hasn’t had a single active distillery since the onset of Prohibition. Then, last fall, Wright & Brown Distilling, a small-batch whiskey distillery in West Oakland, opened, followed a couple of months later by the Oakland Spirits Company, a gin- and brandy-focused distillery in Uptown.
Samantha (left) and Alexandra Blatteis.
Credits: Home Base Spirits
Part of the reason that the craft distilling trend has taken longer to take root in Oakland than other comparable movements — in, say, the worlds of beer or wine — has to do with the burdensome legal restrictions that govern the production and sale of spirits, particularly in the State of California, where you need to go through a lengthy process and obtain a prohibitively expensive permit to even begin to practice distilling whiskey. (There’s no spirits equivalent to brewing small batches of beer in your garage — not legally, that is.)
To be clear, this is why Home Base Spirits won’t technically be distilling its own whiskey, at least not at the outset, though co-owner Samantha Blatteis said opening their own distillery is very much the sisters’ long-term goal. For now, Home Base’s spirits will be distilled at Sutherland Distilling (a Livermore-based rum and vodka distillery) using the Blatteis sisters’ recipes and under their close supervision. Their first product, a 350-gallon batch of bourbon, has been aging in charred oak barrels for the past eight months. Once a batch of booze is ready, the Blatteises will bring it back to their Jack London district facility, where, in some cases, they’ll flavor the spirits with additional herbs or other botanicals, bottle them, and then sell them to bars, restaurants, and liquor stores under the Home Base Spirits brand.
The decision to apply for what’s known in the trade as a “rectifier’s” license instead of a distiller’s license was “completely a matter of budget,” Blatteis explained. Apart from the permitting issue, the Blatteis sisters wanted to specialize in whiskey and bourbon, which are notorious for how long they take to properly age — often upwards of three years, or even ten or twenty years for the really high-end stuff. Blatteis said she knows many folks in the craft distilling industry who have opened new distilleries only to have to wait years and years before they have anything to sell. Why not start their business now and put the money they make toward building a distillery later on?
The Blatteises are both relative newcomers to the distilling industry and are mostly self-taught, though Alexandra took a workshop at MB Roland, a bona fide Kentucky whiskey distillery. Samantha, on the other hand, has spent much of her career working with farmers — including several years working for the New York-based Greenmarket network of farmers’ markets. So it makes sense that Home Base Spirits would tout its use of California botanicals and sustainably grown corn, barley, and rye.
Home Base’s first batch of bourbon is probably still a few months away from being ready, but Blatteis expects that it will pick up some nice caramel-y notes from the oak barrels, and some honey and chocolate flavors from the malted barley. The idea is for the bourbon to be of high enough quality to drink neat, but also priced low enough that local bars and restaurants won’t find it too expensive to use in cocktails. Other products in the works include a single malt American whiskey and an amaro — a bitter Italian liqueur flavored with various herbs.
It should be said, too, that there’s a perception that the distilling industry is a male-dominated field, even if that hasn’t been strictly accurate for quite some time now. Blatteis said she’s aware of that perception, but hasn’t found it to be much of a hindrance so far.
“Before we decided to start this business, we had been enjoying whiskey for a long time,” Blatteis said, explaining that she and her sister are longstanding members of a women’s whiskey tasting club. “It’s just a fun community of ladies that we enjoy drinking with.”
On Black Friday, 2014, a group of Black Lives Matter activists known as the “Black Friday Fourteen” linked hands and created a pair of human chains that tethered two BART trains to the West Oakland station with actual locks at both ends. The action was in response to the non-indictment verdict in the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, announced four days prior. Together, the activists clogged one of the Bay Area’s most crucial transit arteries.
For the past six months, Christian L. Frock, a Bay Area writer, curator, and educator focused on political and public art, has been curating a show calledTake This Hammer: Art + Media Activism from the Bay Area for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The exhibition is titled after the 1963 KQED documentary in which James Baldwin investigates the state of Black communities in San Francisco, as well as playwright Bertolt Brecht’s idea that art is a hammer with which to shape culture. Appropriately, it aims to highlight local artists of all stripes who are doing work that’s politically disruptive. “I knew immediately that I wanted Black Lives Matter to be a part of the show,” Frock said as we walked through the gallery last Thursday, a day before the packed opening reception. But according to Frock, when she initially asked Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza if there were any artists among their ranks of activists, Garza said no. Frock urged Garza to extend the call to her network anyway, sure that there would be some intersection. Cat Brooks answered.
A photo from “Gmuni: Free Luxury Free Market Free for All.”
Credits: Courtesy Leslie Dreyer
Oree Originol’s site-specific installation of his ongoing “Justice For Our Lives” series in Take This Hammer.
Credits: John Cartwright
Brooks, who was one of the Black Friday Fourteen, has been a member of the Black Lives Matter Bay Area chapter since its inception, and is the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, appears in the show on an LCD screen. Her contribution is video documentation of her performance of “Tasha,” a monologue she wrote about Natasha McKenna, a Black Virginia woman who suffered from schizophrenia and died last year after being Tased four times by police. Brooks’ multi-faceted approach to activism (or maybe holistic is a better way to put it) represents a spectrum of political engagement that underlies Take This Hammer as a whole, ranging from direct intervention to creative response.
The exhibit prompts a complex question: In a contemporary art world where anyone can be an artist and social-practice art has normalized the idea of actions as artworks, what is the distinction between an activist and an artist? The works in Take This Hammer ring out loudly in a collective refusal to acknowledge that any such distinction might exist. “The show is really about complicating narratives about activism, about art, around who belongs in an exhibition space, what work belongs to the visual art realm,” said Frock. “I wanted to bring as many wild cards into that as possible.”
Take This Hammer occupies the majority of YBCA’s main gallery. The show includes works that span from traditional to experimental, but all engage deeply and directly with contemporary social issues. One of the most impressive contributions is Oakland artist, activist, and CultureStrike co-founder Favianna Rodriguez’ massive, wood-cut installation, which depicts four technicolor figures standing side by side, as if announcing their solidarity in swirling, vibrant waves of color.
Another wall is covered entirely with iconic portraits by Oree Originol — the relatively anonymous artist behind the freely distributed illustrations that have become protest staples across the country — creating a rainbow of faces belonging to deceased victims of police violence. Across from it is “The Liberator Cycle.” For that piece, designer Jeremy Mende took the code for The Liberator, an open-source 3-D printable hand gun, and replaced specific variables with gun violence statistics from cities around the world. With these changes, Mende created a series of distorted versions of the weapon based on its potential impact. The resulting 2-D images feature red, black, and gray streaks of color that together look remarkably similar to a sidewalk after a deadly encounter.
On a platform across the gallery, spandex jester costumes, stenciled yoga balls, and video documentation are gathered together in Leslie Dreyer’s “Gmuni: Free Luxury Free Market Free for All.” The installation recalls the highly publicized April 1, 2014, intervention that Dreyer organized with local anti-gentrification groups to stop a Google bus by building a human pyramid in its path. A smaller room features several data visualizations created by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, an initiative led by self-taught coder and activist Erin McElroy. The elaborate, interactive maps track Bay Area occurrences of Ellis Act evictions, no-fault evictions, loss of public space, and killings by San Francisco and Oakland police.
A poster by Dignidad Rebelde (Oakland’s Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes) in Take This Hammer.
Credits: Courtesy Dignidad Rebelde
Although many of the works in Take This Hammer wouldn’t traditionally be found in an art museum, they don’t feel out of place. In fact, it was likely more difficult for some of the activists and researchers in the show to consider their practice artistic than it will be for viewers.
In tandem with the show, YBCA released a free brochure that includes essays from Frock and acclaimed local authors Jeff Chang and Rebecca Solnit. In her essay, “You Must Be Present To Win,” Solnit opens with the statement, “Radical politics is bodies in places.” She goes on to stress the importance of collective physical presence to create social change. For people who share that belief, it could feel dissonant to see activist work in the quiet, tame atmosphere of an exhibition space.
But, without downplaying the importance of physical protest, Take This Hammer emphasizes the critical role that images play in building awareness around injustice, as well as the complicated way in which resistance has taken place online (especially in the past few years) — through hashtags, viral cell phone videos, and creative digital interventions. Rather than a sterilized presentation of radical politics, the show feels like a vital call to action, intended to spark new gatherings of bodies in places, not replace them. And there’s no doubt that was Frock’s intention. Her essay reads: “Each of us possesses the potential to exert this kind of impact on the world we want to live in. Start with whatever you care most about in the fierce urgency of now. Start here. Take this hammer.”
Correction: The original version of this article erroneously referred to Cat Brooks as a co-founder of Black Lives Matter.
Last spring, Shoshana Walter of the Emeryville-based Center for Investigative Reporting filed a routine public records request with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department for a story on a rogue firearms instructor. The request was unceremoniously denied, so Walter did exactly what reporters do in that situation: She pushed back. Moments later she received an email that she was never meant to see.
“Okay, now what? She is being a pain,” wrote the public servant handling the request. “Do we ask Peter what to do with her?”
Credits: Courtesy of EFF/Hugh D’Andrade
Credits: Courtesy of EFF/Hugh D’Andrade
Credits: Dave Maass
The official immediately tried to recall the message. And then within an hour, the sheriff’s department had a sudden change of heart and agreed to release the information. Meanwhile, all Walter could do was commiserate with other transparency advocates on the #FOIAFriday thread on Twitter.
Scroll through #FOIAFriday tweets, and you’ll find that Walter’s story is far from uncommon. In fact, the only thing unique is that, for once, Walter caught a glimpse of the cavalier attitude that many government agencies take toward transparency.
March 13–19 is Sunshine Week, the time each year in which open government activists around the country make as much noise as possible about the need to reform laws on access to information, whether that’s the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or state-level laws, such as California’s Public Records Act (CPRA) and New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).
Journalists, government watchdogs, and regular citizens around the country encounter weak excuses, flagrant stonewalling, and retaliation from government officials on a daily basis. That’s why, to celebrate Sunshine Week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) created “The Foilies” — our name-and-shame awards for agencies and officials who stand in the way of transparency and accountability.
Join us on this journey as we examine some of the most ridiculous experiences that members of the public have faced while pursuing James Madison’s 1822 advice: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
The Self-Server Award Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
The homebrewed email server that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used during her time in office was lighter on complying with the spirit of FOIA than that watered-down lager brewed in your cousin’s closet. And just as your cousin decides which buddies get to share in the homemade suds, Clinton herself decided which of her emails to share with the public and then deleted 30,000 of them.
Transparency advocates and journalists are right to criticize Clinton for using an insecure private email server, but it is important to remember that her story is merely the highest profile example of a public official misusing technology to stifle public oversight. For years, officials at the local, state, and federal levels have been using private communications to shield their work from public scrutiny: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has communicated exclusively with Blackberry PIN messaging to avoid creating any public records, and high-level White House officials have used their private email to conduct government business. There are, sadly, dozens of other instances of governors, city councilmembers, and county supervisors doing the same thing.
When officials use private communications for work, they are not just potentially violating open records laws, but they are also stymieing the public’s ability to understand the operation of their elected government and to hold officials accountable for their actions. Clinton deserves this award, but so does every official who seeks to hide his or her actions from the public by using private communications systems.
The “Old School” Award Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis
Kim Davis, the Rowan County Clerk in Kentucky, ignited a national controversy last year when she was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. MuckRock News’ Shawn Musgrave filed two requests for emails from that period, including emails covering the time when Davis had supposedly scheduled a meeting with Pope Francis.
It turned out that marriage wasn’t the only issue in which Davis took a “traditional position.” Rather than providing the 6,000 or so communications to MuckRock in a digital format, Davis insisted she was “old school on this email stuff,” and instead asked Musgrave to pay $1,200 for the cost of print-outs — despite the fact that the Kentucky Open Records Act requires electronic records to be available in an electronic format. After a lengthy back-and-forth, Davis finally complied with the law and began forwarding the records.
Worst Definition of Terrorism State of Georgia
Transparency advocate Carl Malamud’s Public.Resource.Org has been on a quest to make sure that people have access to the laws that govern them. A righteous and benign endeavor, right? Well, not according to the State of Georgia, which is suing Malamud’s organization for publishing a searchable and downloadable scan of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated. Georgia claims to hold the copyright to the laws, and alleges that by publishing them, Public.Resource.Org is not only engaged in piracy, but employing “a strategy of terrorism.”
Just to be clear: reading a state’s annotated statutes might bore some people to death, but publishing the laws of the land has never killed anyone.
Full disclosure: EFF represents Malamud and Public.Resource.Org in similar lawsuits around the country, but not the Georgia case.
Most Expensive FOIA Fee Estimate Department of Defense
Last year we issued this award to the US Drug Enforcement Administration for asking for $1.46 million in fees to process a FOIA request related to the capture of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman (and that’s even before he escaped, was interviewed by Sean Penn, and then recaptured).
This year, the Pentagon makes the DEA’s assessment look like pocket change. When MuckRock user Martin Peck asked for the number of “HotPlug” devices (a tool used to preserve data on seized computers), the agency came back with a whopping $660 million fee estimate to “perform the necessary redactions of proprietary data.”
The Defense Department claimed it has no way to do a text search of its document system, so it would take 15 million labor hours to do the search and redact the documents.
By MuckRock’s calculations: “15 million labor hours breaks down into 625,000 days, or a little over 1,712 years. So, assuming one DOD employee started working on this nonstop tomorrow, they’d finish somewhere in the summer of 3728.”
Special Prize for Drunk Dialing for Public Records New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez
New Mexico media outlets have been battling against Governor Susana Martinez and her stalling tactics on records requests basically since she was elected to office in 2010. Yet when it comes to her own requests for public information, Martinez is a little impatient.
Last year, Martinez was partying in a room at a downtown Santa Fe hotel when police responded to complaints of noise and bottles being tossed off the balcony. While still at the hotel, a furious Martinez called 911 and demanded to know the name of the person who filed the complaint. As the 911-dispatch recording revealed, Martinez demanded: “It’s a public record. Give it to me!”
We’re a little sympathetic: The world would be a better place if we could all get public records on demand with a simple phone call. Unfortunately, that’s not the case yet, apparently not even for governors.
Martinez claimed she’d only had one cocktail, but witnesses told police that she was visibly “inebriated.” She later claimed that “nothing that I said or did was as a result of any alcohol.” That’s almost worse, isn’t it?
Ministry of Silly Talks Award UK Independent Commission on Freedom of Information
The United Kingdom also has a Freedom of Information Act, and last year a new body was formed to review the state of play (i.e., investigate whether transparency is too expensive and invasive). But at its first meeting in 2015, the Independent Commission on Freedom of Information announced a ludicrously ironic set of ground rules for reporters. As The Guardian reported, the meeting would be “off-the-record” and journalists could not quote anyone. Transcripts weren’t published either.
Head Trip Award US Army Surgeon General
The US Army wasn’t happy with New York Times reporter Dave Philipps’ investigation into concussions at West Point. As documents show, Army officials came up with a plan to undercut his story by stalling the release of FOIA documents until they could publish their own report. What’s worse, this wasn’t the first time they’d pulled this trick. As Army surgeon general Lieutenant General Patricia D. Horoho said, according to a meeting summary, “Timing is everything with this stuff. We were able to do something similar … when the Colorado Springs Gazette attacked them with treatment of wounded warriors last year — killed any scrutiny from the media and killed their story.”
Copywrong Award City of Inglewood
Local governments hate gadflies, those tenacious citizens who troll public meetings at every opportunity. The City of Inglewood, California thought it would use copyright law as a swatter, suing local resident Joseph Teixeira. Teixeira had been posting video clips from city council meetings (which are public records) to YouTube with his own DVD-Bonus-Feature-style commentary, accusing officials of lying and betraying their constituents. Teixeira won the case in federal court in August, proving that trying to use copyright law to silence critics is a waste of tax dollars and everyone’s time.
Gitmo, Get Less Award Department of Defense
Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg has been covering Guantanamo Bay for more than a decade, and that’s how long its taken the Department of Defense to release information on the costs of running the offshore detention facility for enemy combatants in the “War on Terror.” In 2004, a DOD official started compiling answers to her questions, but later informed her that he was under orders not to release the information. So, Rosenberg filed a formal FOIA request in February 2005, received a rejection, and then appealed. In 2015, almost 4,000 days later, she received an apology for the delay and was notified of a decision that the secrecy was unwarranted. She received three pages of information that showed the tens of millions of dollars spent to maintain the controversial facility in its first years.
Correction Fluid Award Willacy County Sheriff, Texas
The Houston Chronicle was researching a reported spike in crime along the Mexican border by filing Open Records Act requests for crime data with sheriffs across South Texas. None of the sheriffs asked the Chronicle to pay records fees, except for one: the Willacy County Sheriff provided reporter Brian M. Rosenthal with an itemized invoice for $339.60 that included — wait for it — $98.40 worth of Wite-Out. Based on Staples pricing, that’s a full 55 bottles worth of redaction or one bottle of Wite-Out per 18 pages of responsive documents.
Beasts of Privacy Award Oregon State Legislature
This year, we received three separate nominations in which FOIA officials were absurdly mindful of the privacy of animals. Reporter Elizabeth Dinan found on at least two occasions that the Portsmouth Police Department in New Hampshire were redacting the names of lost and loose dogs from its blotters. Meanwhile, MuckRock contributor Carly Sitrin found that the State of New Jersey initially refused to release the necropsy results for a dolphin that died in the South River, citing the dolphin’s “medical privacy.” New Jersey later reversed course.
The prize, though, goes to the Oregon State Legislature, which renewed a law exempting the names of people who sell laboratory animals to Oregon Health and Sciences University, ostensibly to protect vendors from overzealous animal rights activists. InvestigateWest reporter Lee Van Der Voo obtained records (released seemingly by accident by the Oregon Department of Agriculture) that illustrated the pitfalls of shielding an industry from scrutiny. As it turns out, one of the primary primate dealers to the university had previously served time for illegally smuggling orangutans as part of the infamous “Bangkok Six” case.
Sue the Messenger Award Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson
The Sacramento News & Review filed a public records request with the City of Sacramento for communications from Mayor Kevin Johnson’s office regarding how the former basketball star and his staff allegedly engineered the collapse of the National Conference of Black Mayors. The Sacramento City Attorney’s Office agreed that the emails were public, but then Johnson’s legal team threatened to file a lawsuit against SNR unless it abandoned its quest for transparency. SNR refused, Johnson sued, and now the story has been stalled as the case plays out through a protracted legal process. It remains to be seen whether the case will wrap up before Johnson leaves office next year.
The Culture of Secrecy Award Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services
Back in 2010 and 2011, the Courier-Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader filed Open Records Act requests with the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services for information related to child fatalities. The agency balked at providing many of the records, forcing the newspapers to sue.
A lower level court ruled in the newspapers’ favor and ordered the agency to pay $1 million in penalties and fees. Rather than let it go at that, the cabinet appealed, only to dig itself deeper into the hole. After oral arguments in October 2015, the appeals court sided with the media and issued this juicy condemnation:
“The Cabinet’s conduct in this case was indeed egregious. The face of the record reveals the ‘culture of secrecy’ of which the trial court spoke; and it evinces an obvious and misguided belief that the Open Records Act is merely an ideal — a suggestion to be taken when it is convenient and flagrantly disregarded when it is not.”
The Most “Helpful” Redactions Award Office of the Director of National
Intelligence
Redactions are a way of life in FOIA, but a response that the American Civil Liberties Union received from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in September takes this year’s award for the most ridiculous misuse of the black marks.
For years, the ACLU has been demanding access to records documenting the government’s “targeted killing” program. In ODNI’s response to the ACLU, it claimed to be releasing an eight-page letter that ODNI Director James Clapper sent to ranking senators on the US Intelligence Committee. That statement was belied by the fact that ODNI withheld nearly every word of the letter, save for the page numbers, names, and addresses of the senators it was sent to, and a concluding paragraph from Clapper. The redactions were so all-encompassing, there was no way to know what the subject of the letter was and whether it actually discussed the targeted killing program.
The kicker? The unredacted paragraph at the end of the letter began, “We hope this information has been helpful.”
Yeah, real helpful. Keep up the FOIA trolling, ODNI.
Exhibit Inhibition Award US Department of Justice
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) believes that exhibits it used in open court when prosecuting a physician convicted of illegally distributing prescription drugs are not, in fact, public records. The DOJ staked out this curious position in a long-running FOIA dispute with Rhode Island-based reporter Phil Eil after he filed a request for copies of the exhibits that prosecutors used during the 2011 trial of Dr. Paul Volkman. After stalling for several years and requiring Eil to sue for the records, the DOJ proposed to release the records in heavily redacted form.
Of course, anyone who attended the trial would have been able to see the records without the DOJ’s redactions, which the DOJ claims were in part necessary to protect law enforcement concerns — despite the fact that it had aired those records in open court.
The Still-Interested Pat Down Award Transportation Security
Administration
Like the airport security line on a busy travel day, the TSA’s backlog of FOIA responses just seems to keep growing. That’s according to a compliance review by the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), one in a series of reports on various agency-components of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). OGIS found a nearly 70-percent, year-over-year rise in the backlog of unfilled requests — up to 924 in 2014 — despite a small drop in the number of incoming requests.
How does TSA get through those old requests? Unfortunately, it turned to the dreaded “still-interested letter,” checking to see if requesters still care enough to want an answer. TSA sends those out after a case has gone unclosed for four years — and, contrary to DOJ guidance, allows only ten days for requesters to respond.
A bright spot in this sad story: Since OGIS compiled its report, TSA has updated its procedures on still-interested letters to bring them into line with the DOJ and the rest of DHS.
The Timey-Wimey Award City of Wilmington, Delaware
In October, Wilmington Mayor Dennis Williams had to clarify that he had not endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for president after Clinton’s campaign had listed his name on her website. The next day, America Rising, a conservative opposition research organization, filed a records request that asked for all communications to and from the mayor’s public relations team for that single, tumultuous day.
Here’s where the timeline gets bizarre: America Rising filed the request on October 21, asking for communications that were exchanged on October 20. Instead, the city said that America Rising had demanded the request be fulfilled by October 20, one day before the request was actually filed. The city denied the request, essentially claiming it lacked the time travel capabilities to respond.
Since then, America Rising has clarified its request twice, and it’s still pending.
Earlier this week, Dallas Seavey, the winning musher of Iditarod 2016, entered Nome, a town on Alaska’s remote Seward Peninsula. Pulled by teams of delightful sled dogs, Seavey and his fellow finishers covered 1,000 miles of harsh, dangerous, and unforgiving terrain. Iditarod mushers are an outspoken group of hardy northern souls — men and women, native and white. Some race to win and secure the prestige and endorsement deals that come with victory. For others, the goal is to experience the wilderness and finish with happy and healthy dogs.
But the race is changing for the mushers and their teams because of the impacts of climate change. Many teams have had to wade through bone chillingly cold streams that are normally frozen this time of year. Some mushers have found that their teams have had trouble exerting themselves because of the warm weather. And organizers had to bring in seven train cars of snow to the ceremonial start in Anchorage. An old saying in Alaska is that spring does not come until after the Iditarod. Now, it seems, spring comes first.
Protestors display a sign decrying oil companies’ role in climate change at this year’s Iditarod.
Credits: Jay Youngdahl
Historically, the Iditarod trail follows the “serum run,” a route over which diphtheria serum was carried to Nome after an outbreak there in 1925. Flying the desperately needed serum into Nome in the dead of winter was not possible, so it was carried village to village, with each village along the trail offering their best musher and dogsled team.
Nature writer John McPhee marveled at the “effete” terms — like “fragile” and “delicate” — that are often used to describe the Alaskan environment through which the race is held. Yet even as McPhee told stories of hearty bush Alaskans living off their trapping and hunting skills in his superb Coming into the Country, he acknowledged the fragility of the place with its vulnerable terrain. That terrain and its people are now under siege from climate change.
Alaska, McPhee wrote, has constantly seen cycles, such as caribou and salmon changing movement patterns. The native peoples followed those natural cycles and engaged in their own survival cycles as the gasoline engines of Evinrude, snow machines, and bush planes entered their lands. But now it feels like something is very different.
During my recent visit for the start of the Iditarod, the effects of climate change were on full display. Local news outlets and meteorologists called the weather “weird,” “wacky,” and “broken.” David Hulen, editor for the Alaska Dispatch News in Anchorage, who has spent nearly thirty years in the state, worries that the freeze-thaw cycle is out of whack, “changing the nature of the place.” In the past, the state would freeze in the fall and unfreeze in the spring. But this decade, in many locations, multiple freezes and thaws have occurred. This winter also has been the driest in centuries in some areas, ensuring a bad wildfire this summer season.
Fifteen percent of Alaska’s residents are Native Americans and many face the prospect of becoming climate refugees in the very near future. Many are also active in important issues of the day. Esau Sinnok, an eighteen-year-old resident of Shishmaref, a Inupiaq community located on a barrier island north of the Bering Strait, told me that he worries that climate change will be costly in human terms, “breaking up the community and killing the dialect of the people.” Sinnok has been a youth leader in the struggle to make sure that the voices of those affected most directly by climate change are heard, especially native peoples. He attended the climate talks in Paris earlier this year and will be on hand for discussions about renewable energy this week at the Arctic Science Summit in Fairbanks.
During Sinnok’s lifetime, Shishmaref has lost one hundred feet of land to the sea, and it is likely that within two decades, the land upon which his community is based will be washed away. Traditional means of survival are also in peril as the lack of ice has made normal hunting and fishing much harder. Plans have been made to move the community, but with the melting permafrost from warmer temperatures and the further erosion of ice, the cost of such a relocation would be high for the Inupiaq.
It is not just native people who are feeling the pain. Alaska is facing a fragility in economic and social life. Crashing oil prices are taking a serious toll on the state. Like the oil dependent countries of Venezuela and Nigeria, Alaska is finding that reliance on this single commodity has serious drawbacks especially when facing the double whammy of the concerted movement to limit carbon use and the oversupply of natural gas from fracking. Jobs are draining from the state. Shell and Apache Corporation are ending their efforts to find oil, ConocoPhillips is downsizing, and many remaining projects are being mothballed. Even oil rigs in Prudhoe Bay are shuttering, putting the efficacy of the Trans-Alaska pipeline at risk.
“Alaska’s situation today is a fundamental loss of the way we earn our way in the world,” economist Gregg Erickson told the Alaska Dispatch News. “I don’t think there is any doubt that we are headed for the deepest recession in Alaska’s history as a state.”
The state budget is deeply dependent on oil revenue, and its deficit is now nearly $4 billion. Rating agencies have downgraded the state’s finances, and the legislature is engaged in an orgy of cutting social services. A reinstatement of a state income tax and a reduction of payments from the Permanent Fund are likely. This fund, financed by oil revenues, has been doling out nearly $2,000 a year to all Alaskan citizens. With shocking Alaskan frankness of opinion, a legislator from Sarah Palin’s home town of Wasilla suggested that to reduce state government expenditures, seniors should consider leaving the state, because “Alaska is a tough state for older folks to live in, slipping, falling, icy, so on and so forth.”
To the visitor, Alaska feels very American, with fun and friendly people, but residents share a strong sense of the “don’t tread on me” attitude. They hold a contempt for big government, and Alaskan politicians harangue federal officials for sport. Yet, except for oil and some fishing and mining, the state basically runs on government payouts. These two poles, the hatred of government and the dependence upon it, engenders a slightly schizophrenic mindset that, with the cold and darkness of the far north, imparts a somewhat eerie sensation for visitors.
And in good times or bad, Alaskans are uniquely sensitive about people outside their communities telling them what to do. A proposal involving the protection of Alaska wilderness by Congressmember Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, whose district runs from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, was met by derision from many Alaskans. Huffman’s coastal Plain Arctic Wilderness Act would designate the 1.5 million-acre Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness, codifying into law permanent protections from damaging activities like oil drilling. To be fair to Alaskans, this is the same Congressmember Huffman who waffled on one of the more important environmental issues in his district — the closing of the commercial oyster farm that stood in the way of the completion of the second marine wilderness area in the national park system. Ironically, the first was in Alaska’s Glacier Bay.
As for the Iditarod, it is an extraordinarily friendly event. Visitors typically watch the race either at the start, in south central Alaska, or at the finish, along the Alaskan slope. The event has a romantic frontier feeling, and spectators can approach and speak with the resourceful and cheerful mushers, while encountering a kaleidoscope of arctic fun. Like many of us, the mushers love their dogs. One of my favorite mushers, Hugh Neff, introduced me to his lively sled dog, Stevie Ray, named in honor of Neff’s attendance at Stevie Ray Vaughan’s last concert.
And given the financial morass that the state and its citizens find themselves in, tourist dollars are much appreciated. Maybe the current crisis will help the state move toward the renewable energy projects for which Esau Sinnok is advocating. If Alaska’s oil stayed in the ground, the planet would certainly be better for it.
Upon taking office in January 2015, Mayor Libby Schaaf was slow to react to Oakland’s deepening affordability crisis. At the time, dealing with out-of-control rents and the displacement of longtime Oaklanders were not among the new mayor’s top priorities. But over the past half year, Schaaf has made Oakland’s affordability crisis her primary concern, and she and other top city leaders have assembled an ambitious plan to address it. In fact, the city council and the city administration should move as quickly as possible to implement the mayor’s plan. Oakland can’t afford to wait.
As we noted earlier this month, the multifaceted proposal being put forward by Schaaf and her housing cabinet, which included councilmembers Dan Kalb, Lynette Gibson McElhaney, Annie Campbell Washington, and Abel Guillen, calls for protecting 17,000 existing affordable homes in Oakland and building at least 17,000 new housing units in the next eight years, including up to 5,600 affordable units.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.
The mayor’s plan calls for putting two large bond measures on the November ballot. One would be a countywide $500 million affordable housing bond, of which Oakland would receive about $105 million to build affordable units. The other would be a citywide $250 million infrastructure bond. The city would use $50 million from this bond to establish an Oakland Buyers’ Collective that would purchase currently affordable apartment buildings, fix them up, and convert the homes to “permanent affordability.”
Schaaf’s plan also seeks to tighten tenant protections under the city’s Rent Adjustment Program. The proposal, for example, would expand rent control to smaller buildings and would make it tougher for landlords to take units off the rental market and turn them into condos. Schaaf also is calling on the California Legislature to overhaul the Costa-Hawkins Act, a state law that restricts rent control in Oakland to apartment buildings constructed before 1983.
The mayor’s plan also calls for creating special financing districts that would raise millions in tax revenues to pay for more affordable housing — much like the city’s redevelopment agency used to do before Governor Jerry Brown killed redevelopment in 2011. And Schaaf wants to tap into millions in state cap-and-trade funds to build more housing near major transit hubs in Oakland.
As we said, it’s a bold plan — and one that Oakland needs to immediately embrace.
But as good as the plan is, it could go further. For example, it calls for the council to enact a housing impact fee on new housing projects in order to pay for affordable units — but proposes to slowly roll out the plan, and thus the city would potentially miss out on millions of dollars for affordable housing. Under an administration proposal that is scheduled to be heard by a council committee next week, the impact fee would not go into effect until December and would start at only $5,000 per unit, before increasing to $10,000 a year later, and then to $20,000 in December 2018.
Schaaf has argued that imposing the fee all at once could scare off housing construction in the city. But the impact fee should come as no surprise to developers. In fact, they’ve known for at least two years that the council was going to establish a fee. Plus, the nearby cities of Emeryville and Berkeley already have impact fees of at least $20,000 per unit. As such, the Oakland council should implement one this summer — at $20,000 — in order to capture as much money for affordable housing as possible.
The mayor and council also would be smart to back aspects of a proposed November ballot measure being pushed by tenants’ rights groups in the city. Known as the Renters Upgrade, the measure would, among other things, extend Oakland’s just cause eviction ordinance to buildings constructed after 1983. That’s a smart fix to a loophole in current Oakland law that allows landlords in newer buildings to evict tenants without just cause.
And, finally, if the mayor and council were truly serious about building more housing in Oakland — and making development more equitable — then they would launch a rezoning of wealthy areas in order to allow for denser developments in upscale neighborhoods.
For years, developers in Oakland have maintained that only a few sections of the city have high enough rents to make dense market-rate housing financially viable. However, because of neighborhood NIMBYism, Oakland has walled off many high-income areas from dense development. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to build large housing projects in highly desirable areas, like Rockridge and parts of Temescal in North Oakland, even though those neighborhoods are among the few in Oakland that have high enough rents to support this type of development.
Moreover, these NIMBY zoning rules are making Oakland’s affordability crisis worse. The city could be building lots of new housing right now, but it has effectively banned itself from doing so in many of the neighborhoods that people want to live in.
The coal industry — responsible for much of the CO2 pollution driving climate change — is dying, and State Senator Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, wants to help bury it. Hancock, whose district encompasses much of the East Bay, from Rodeo to San Leandro, has spent the last half year drafting legislation designed to prevent millions of tons of coal from being transported by train through the East Bay and exported from a marine terminal that is to be built in Oakland near the foot of the Bay Bridge. Hancock also wants to block any future coal export schemes in the state.
It’s not a fight she expected to have to take up in 2016, her final year in the state Capitol. “I think it’s front and center in my responsibilities as a senator,” said Hancock in an interview last week. “One of the reasons I ran for the state legislature in the first place was my concern about catastrophic climate change, and what it means for future generations.”
State Senator Loni Hancock opposes using public funds to subsidize the coal industry.
Credits: Bert Johnson
Hancock was elected to the California Senate in 2008, and has championed various environmental and social justice issues throughout her long career in local and state office. Before becoming a senator, she served three terms in the Assembly. She was also the mayor of Berkeley from 1986 to 1994. She has five adult children and seven grandchildren, three of whom are growing up in the East Bay. And in her last year of public office, she has made coal her top priority. If successful, it will become part of her considerable legacy.
Last month, Hancock introduced four bills in the Senate designed to stop coal. One would declare that the transportation of coal through Oakland presents a danger to the health and safety of Oakland residents and workers. If it becomes law, it would bolster an existing clause in the contract between the City of Oakland and developer Phil Tagami’s company, CCIG-Oakland Global, which controls the land where the coal export hub would be built. The contract clause states that the Oakland City Council can block any proposed activity by the developer that could have harmful health and safety impacts. Although Hancock admits that this legislation can’t outright ban coal shipments through Oakland, she says it would empower the city council to reject coal as part of the massive redevelopment project at the old Oakland Army Base on the city’s waterfront.
Another of Hancock’s bills would require new environmental studies for the proposed shipment of coal through Oakland. Many contend that coal transportation was never studied in the original environmental analyses for the Army Base redevelopment project, and that if it had been, the results would have shown unambiguously that it would have significant negative impacts on air quality. (Attorneys representing the developers have contended that coal was included among many other “bulk commodities” when the original analyses were completed; therefore, no new studies are necessary.)
The two other bills in Hancock’s legislative package would prohibit the use of public funds to build or operate port facilities in California that export coal and would require new private port facilities that ship coal to fully mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions that result from burning the fuel. Hancock said her mitigation requirement would bring any new coal facilities under California’s cap-and-trade regime, ensuring that coal transportation companies would have to purchase carbon offsets that neutralize the CO2 emissions that would result from the combustion of fuel they bring to the market. “We cannot allow this to happen,” said Hancock about the prospect of California becoming a major depot for the global coal industry.
In laying down this legislative gauntlet, Hancock isn’t just battling Tagami and former Port of Oakland Executive Director Jerry Bridges, whose company, Terminal Logistics Solutions, has the rights to build and operate the coal terminal, the senator is also fighting Utah lawmakers and the Kentucky-based coal company Bowie Resource Partners. For several years now, Bowie has been quietly trying to secure Oakland as its Pacific gateway to ship millions of tons of Utah coal to Asian markets (see “Banking On Coal,” 8/19/15).
In 2014, Bowie tried to convince the Port of Oakland to approve a coal export terminal near Jack London Square. The port’s board of commissioners rejected the plan because it would result in coal dust blowing into nearby neighborhoods from trains, silos, and ships. Then last year, it was revealed that four Utah counties had secured a $53 million interest free loan from a Utah state agency called the Community Impact Fund Board (CIB) to help finance construction of a new marine terminal in Oakland — on land that is owned by the city. The Oakland terminal would export coal produced from three mines owned by Bowie Resource Partners located inside the four Utah counties.
That plan, however, ran into legal troubles. Utah and California environmental groups and elected officials raised questions about whether CIB funds could be used to subsidize a private fossil fuel project — one that is outside of Utah. CIB funds are supposed to only be spent on public infrastructure and services in Utah — for things like fire stations and sewers — according to the CIB’s enabling legislation.
Two weeks ago, Utah State Senator Stuart Adams introduced a complicated bill in the Utah Senate that is designed to overcome this legal problem. Adams’ bill would essentially launder the $53 million in CIB funds through the Utah Department of Transportation so that the money can be used to help pay for construction of the coal export terminal in Oakland.
As the Express reported last Thursday online, Adams and thirty other key Utah lawmakers received $15,000 in campaign contributions from Bowie Resource Partners in 2014. Bowie also donated $14,000 to Utah Governor Gary Herbert in 2014 and 2015.
Hancock made a last ditch effort to convince Utah’s lawmakers that subsidizing an Oakland coal terminal is unwanted and risky. “I strongly oppose your bill to invest $53 million in Utah taxpayers’ money to build a coal-export terminal in California,” Hancock wrote in a March 2 letter to Utah Senator Adams. “Environmental groups from Oakland and the Bay Area strongly oppose the transport of coal and are working together to stop the project.”
Hancock also informed Adams of her four anti-coal bills that will be considered by the California Senate in April. “I would think that Utah residents would also question whether their hard-earned tax dollars should be going to build a railroad and port terminal in another state instead of promoting sustainable economic development in Utah,” she wrote.
Some Utah lawmakers raised Hancock’s criticisms during debates in the Senate and House of Representatives last week, but Adams’ $53 million coal subsidy was approved by both houses and will likely be signed by Governor Herbert.
Hancock said the use of public money is a bad investment in a “dying industry” and can only result in environmental damage and economic losses. She said it appears that the coal industry is attempting to use public money to stay afloat, because private investors have all but abandoned coal.
“Institutional investors are pulling out of coal,” said Tom Sanzillo of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank that promotes renewable energy development. “The industry isn’t collapsing, it has collapsed.”
Even Bowie Resource Partners is in financial trouble, according to recent reports. Bowie was in talks to purchase three coal mines from Peabody Energy, the largest US coal company, but Bowie has been unable to find a bank or other investor willing to finance the deal. Peabody meanwhile is careening toward bankruptcy, and in the past year, four of the other biggest US coal companies have all declared bankruptcy as global demand for coal plummets.
“But here we have connected insiders giving away public money,” said Hancock. “That seems to be what’s going on in Utah, and when you look at the players in the terminal deal, it’s a former port director, it’s major developers, and it’s a series of asks for public money from the Alameda County Transportation Commission and the California Transportation Commission.”
Both the Alameda County Transportation Commission and the California Transportation Commission have put hundreds of millions of California public funds into infrastructure upgrades at the old Army Base. And the planned coal terminal is only viable because of those taxpayer-financed upgrades.
On March 7, Hancock sent a letter to California Transportation Commission Chairman Bob Alvarado, asking that the CTC consider postponing any further funding for the Army Base redevelopment project until the commission determines whether a coal export terminal undermines the intent of Proposition 1B, the ballot initiative that raised billions in gas taxes and vehicle fees specifically to pay for transportation infrastructure that would improve air quality. Susan Branson of the CTC told me last week that they are reviewing Hancock’s request and formulating a response.
“Public money should be invested in the 21st century sustainable energy economy,” said Hancock. “And it does not include coal.”
When my all-time favorite Samoan barbecue restaurant — Mo's Hut, in East Oakland — and one of Alameda's better Hawaiian plate lunch shops (Kau Kau Korner) both closed at the end of 2015, I wondered: Did every good Polynesian eatery in the East Bay go out of business overnight?
Later, I realized that I'd been a bit too nearsighted and...
"I see myself performing in arenas and baseball stadiums and soccer stadiums. I wanna make, like, big — big, big, big — anthem songs," enthused IAMSU in a recent interview. "Like U2-type — Coldplay, Beyoncé, Jay Z, Prince. I wanna be a rock star." While his assertion might sound hyperbolic to some, considering how far the 26-year-old rapper has come...
Singer and composer Pamela Z resembles a magician when she performs. Often dressed in all black and standing before her laptop, the sixty-year-old artist uses sweeping gestures to activate different effects without touching a single button or knob. She loops her operatic singing in real time, weaving an abstract collage of voices that include live monologue and pre-recorded samples...
I'm a 27-year-old, feminist, conventionally attractive, straightish, GGG woman. Over time, my tastes have changed, and now I find myself more of a kinkster. A few years ago, my desire for kinkier sex and my willingness to take a chance came together in a mutually beneficial, exciting D/s relationship. I'll be honest: I wasn't as smart as I could...
They say that sisters who distill single malt whiskey together stay together — or something like that, anyway. At least that's the case for Samantha and Alexandra Blatteis, a pair of Oakland-born twin sisters who will launch their new craft spirits company in the coming months.
Housed in a Jack London district warehouse, Home Base Spirits joins an emerging community...
On Black Friday, 2014, a group of Black Lives Matter activists known as the "Black Friday Fourteen" linked hands and created a pair of human chains that tethered two BART trains to the West Oakland station with actual locks at both ends. The action was in response to the non-indictment verdict in the police...
Last spring, Shoshana Walter of the Emeryville-based Center for Investigative Reporting filed a routine public records request with the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department for a story on a rogue firearms instructor. The request was unceremoniously denied, so Walter did exactly what reporters do in that situation: She pushed back. Moments later she received an email that she was never...
Earlier this week, Dallas Seavey, the winning musher of Iditarod 2016, entered Nome, a town on Alaska's remote Seward Peninsula. Pulled by teams of delightful sled dogs, Seavey and his fellow finishers covered 1,000 miles of harsh, dangerous, and unforgiving terrain. Iditarod mushers are an outspoken group of hardy northern souls — men and women, native and white. Some...
Upon taking office in January 2015, Mayor Libby Schaaf was slow to react to Oakland's deepening affordability crisis. At the time, dealing with out-of-control rents and the displacement of longtime Oaklanders were not among the new mayor's top priorities. But over the past half year, Schaaf has made Oakland's affordability crisis her primary concern, and she and other top...
The coal industry — responsible for much of the CO2 pollution driving climate change — is dying, and State Senator Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, wants to help bury it. Hancock, whose district encompasses much of the East Bay, from Rodeo to San Leandro, has spent the last half year drafting legislation designed to prevent millions of tons of coal from...
