Local Journalist Defends Payola?

I just spent the last two days at the Independent Press Association's conference, and the best speaker by far was Laura Flanders of Air America, who spoke about the number of pundits who have been exposed as taking government money to promote government programs and propaganda. In her talk, she mentioned our local KRON TV, not necessarily as a station that is above all this, but as an independent station (since it lost its NBC affiliation).
But only this morning, the same KRON ran a story about payola, and the morning anchors, Marty Gonzalez, Ysabel Duron and Henry Tenenbaum, started to riff on the subject. Tenenbaum called the whole thing a "red herring" and what we should really be worried about is the fact that politicians take moeny from special interest. And, all agreed it was OK for journ...pundits to take money as long as they disclosed it. What??? Well, at least Tenenbaum is mostly their arts reporter (oh, and garden), but it makes me wonder if the arts stories he runs are paid for.

Well, Back to Theatre

This week marked Chloe Veltman's second as the SF Weekly's new theatre critic, and I have to say I'm enjoying the new perspective. Not that I didn't enjoy Michael Scott Moore's reviews, I just disagreed wildly most of the time.
I also noticed that after a bit of a break that Cheshire Dave is back with his previews at SFist. Don't worry CD, next time I need a poster, I'll hire you to design it.
Last night we had dinner with Art Street Theater's Mark Jackson, who's been in Berlin on a fellowship, as he passed through town on business. We're happy to hear that his breakthrough Death of Meyerhold received a second run at the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC. (The Web site includes a review of the world premiere at Shotgun Players in December 2003 by same Michael Scott Moore, who I agreed with this time.) Extremely jet-lagged, Mark passed up the pints at Foley's for cranberry juice and told stories of German theatre, where, apparently, the actors say "Gesundheit" when someone in the audience sneezes.

A Sign?

Just up the street from the Independent Press Association conference is a store, The Endangered Species Store, with a For Lease sign on it.

We Drive Here

Every work day, I drive down Eddy Street. A few months ago another incarnation of those ubiquitous banners popped up on the street: Slow Down, We Live Here.
Hey, I'm down with that. People drive too fast. They drive so fast that how could they not hit the myriad jaywalkers--many of which are clearly lucid? I've never seen so many people defiantly cross clearly against the lights and then flip you off when you honk. I hope that whoever put those banners up are also working with the residents to inform of basic traffic laws. I drive the speed limit, you follow the lights.
Tenderloin pigeons, many of which are clearly less lucid than some of the denizens, also have a death wish. Today I stopped for half a minute in front of a garage so they could walk by.
My good friend Prince Gomolvilas, an excellent playwright who just revived his blog, is looking for a teen punk band name, or was last time he visited SF. Hey Prince, what about Skanky Pigeons?

Tickets?

I'm a shameless U2 fan. So shameless that I actually joined the U2 fan club ($40), which entitles me to benefits such as a U2.com e-mail address (no, I don't use it), discounts on merchandise, access to message boards. It also entitles me to presale tickets for the Vertigo Tour, which went on sale this morning. But what it actually entitled me to was a Ticketmaster disaster. You would think that Ticketmaster would have so much money from the $17/ticket fees that they would be able to put together a site that wouldn't crash for almost two hours. It was such a mess that Ticketmaster was issuing apologies to the U2.com site.
If I were U2 management, I would be pretty bent about having a bunch of upset members. Of course, U2's message boards were down for "regular maintenance" during the whole fiasco.

This Is Still San Francisco, Yes?

So, I stop in at a coffee shop, one I haven't been to before, near my office in the Union Square district.
Me: What brand of coffee do you brew?
Counterperson with lost look in her eye: Uhhh...black...and....
Me, looking around for some sort of clue, like "Illy" on one of their cups: No, I mean what brand?
(Lost Counterperson points to the chalkboard coffee menu.)

What Finally Did It

I had been thinking about starting a blog for a while, and Martha Olney of El Cerrito, CA finally pushed me over the edge with her letter to the SF Chronicle's Datebook today. It's distressing enough to know that, even though the Bay Area and particularly San Francisco should be known for its arts scene, the highest volume of Datebook letters have to do with comics and puzzles. But Ms. Olney outdoes all with her indipensable advice to the Datebook editors:
"Craigslist has trumped the Chron classifieds. So ditch the classifieds, put the horoscope and puzzles back where they belong, move Dear Abby back where she belongs...and if you're short on space in Datebook, shrink the unnecessarily large photos on the front page of the section."
If the Datebook is short on space, how about, I don't know, call this revolutionary, expanding arts coverage?