SF Dept. of Over-Regulation

The agenda was about some rule changes relating to permits for one-time events and minor strengthening of the notoriously weak, though club-friendly, Entertainment Commission.  This was not what the audience came for.   They came for a football toss between the pro-club and anti-club teams.  The meeting started benignly enough with Chairman Dufty providing some background, a statement that enhancing public safety was the goal of the committee, and then a few functionaries who weighed in with fairly benign comments.  Then came time for audience comments, the whistle blew and the gamesmanship began.

Neighborhood activists weighed in on the evils of clubs: noisy drunks, urine-soaked doorways and violence, violence, and more violence.  They showed a five-minute video purporting to be about the violence associated with clubs.  It started off with a fairly decent fight — a few roundhouse punches, but no weapons, no blood, nothing broken and the combatants were soon pulled apart.  The next cut showed a rather sorry fight, a shoving match really, then came four and a half minutes of people milling around outside a few venues.  Oh yes, and a pack of loud motorcycles roared by.

The pro-club forces weighed in with the economic benefits of nightlife, cultural and artistic diversity, and their fear of having San Francisco turn into its suburbs.  One speaker concluded her praise of SF’s nightlife saying, “That’s why I live here!”  This drew another round of applause from the pro-club side which seemed to out-number the anti-club side by about 4-1.

The three Supervisors listened politely and held their judgments in reserve as is their wont during factious meetings.  They’d seen the pro-club versus anti-club football tossed around enough to know that what the people needed to say would have little to do with the meeting’s specific agenda.

“What if club life really isn’t so violent after all?”

The bigger question is whether the public safety issue that is motivating the committee’s agenda is misguided.  What if club life really isn’t so violent after all?  Of course violence sometimes breaks out at a club, but it is actually quite rare, usually confined to two individuals and bloodless.  The over-all risk to violence upon one’s own person is quite modest when compared to the risk of violence at, say, schools, sporting events, public housing or MUNI.

The neighbors’ video reinforces this point. It was prepared to highlight club violence, but the best they could come up with was one quick-ending fist fight, one push-and-shove, and four and a half minutes of people milling around outside clubs behaving perfectly peacefully.  And what about those thuggish looking brutes pounding by on their motorcycles in the wee hours?  As creepy and annoying as they are, they had absolutely nothing to do with the clubs they were driving past.

The Supervisors and the club debate itself seem to have been hijacked by a handful of neighbors who do not want noisy drunks waking them up or urinating in their doorways.  These are fair and honest concerns.  But the neighbors also know that the forces of law and order aren’t going to react to that, so they’ve taken relatively infrequent and minor incidents of club violence and stoked them into an epic myth.

The pro-club forces need to change their tactics and deflate the hot-air balloon around club violence.  The Supervisors need to change their focus from legislation driven by public safety to real concerns, such as how to keep clubs and the arts they support thriving.  As for the few bad apples, the City Attorney already has the power to shut them down just as he’s done this week to the Pink Diamonds.

“The last thing San Francisco’s clubs need is more pointless bureaucratic initiatives emanating from City Hall.”

Clubs are regulated beyond what most types of business must endure.  The Entertainment Commission and the Supervisors need to make cutting the red tape around club management their priority, and there’s no better place to start than to send a strong message to the State Alcoholic Beverage Control.  ABC regulates things like the menus at clubs serving food, it mandates what tables need candles, and it regulates the type of dancing that can be done.  The last thing  San Francisco’s clubs need is more pointless bureaucratic initiatives such as these emanating from City Hall.

In 2005, Yoshi’s was lured into the mid-Fillmore area by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency which was making a pitch to re-establish the San Francisco jazz district; a “district” that never really was.  Sure, there were a couple of jazz places on Fillmore after WW2, but in the ’50s Turk Murphy and, of course, the Beatniks, ruled the city’s jazz roost from North Beach (where, incidentally, patron-starved Pearl’s jazz club recently closed.)

The Redevelopment Agency put up a $5.7M loan to help Yoshi’s build a palatial restaurant and music facility.  Yoshi’s, along with Rasellas, a jazz-favored Ethiopian restaurant that had been at Divisadero and California, and the new Sheeba Lounge all opened shop to bring jazz to the redeveloped blocks of Fillmore between Geary and Turk… and nobody cared.  Then came the recession.

A March 17th Chronicle item picks up the story.  “Today, the agency will ask the Board of Supervisors to approve a proposal to give $1.5 million to Yoshi’s to help with construction debt, $90,000 to Sheba Lounge for tenant improvements and $251,000 to Rasselas for tenant improvements.”  The article also notes that Yoshi’s has never made a payment on the original $5.7M loan.  The additional $1.5M has been approved since the Chron story was written.

The City is cutting services and running a deficit yet it continues to use tax dollars to fund a never was, never going to be, project like Yoshi’s-SF to the tune of $7.2 million.  $251,000 to Rassalas and $90,000 to Sheeba Lounge, on top of who knows how much else, is hardly chump change either.  Meanwhile, Pearl’s in the heart of SF real jazz district (such as it is), the Pound SF which was SF’s premier punk venue, and 12 Galaxies which was the largest club in the Mission, never received a penny from SF when they opened, or closed.

SF’s clubs and bars are taking an economic beating these days.  They’re cutting hours, some are closing on Mondays and Tuesdays, and some are closing forever, yet Yoshi’s-SF and the clubs around it hang on thanks to multi-million-dollar taxpayer-supported bailouts.  $7.2 million to Yoshi’s-SF smells even worse when compared to the $3.5 million that constitutes the entire 2008 music budget for San Francisco Grants for the Arts, which HWS News took to task in the last issue.   (See “City of SF’s Narrow View of Music as Art”)

Responsibility for this injustice is due to SF City Hall’s dilettante-inspired bias toward classical music and jazz, and the pampered Redevelopment Agency, which has been irresponsible, negligent and flat-out incompetent for decades, yet never once been called to account.

SFGFTA granted $3.5 million to 50 music organizations in 2008-’09.  Of those 50, the opera and the symphony devoured 51% of the budget, so for practical purposes SFGFTA gave $1.7 million to 48 organizations, averaging $35,000 per grant.

Considering the quantity of music-related endeavors in SF, SFGFTA is putting great sums on tax dollars into a narrow group of organizations that artlessly repeat the same-old, same-old year-after-year.  Imagine dividing $1.7 million among 500 songwriters, composers, mixmasters, small stages and nonprofits.  $3400 in each of those 500 hands would make San Francisco the creative music capital of the world, but that’s not the way SFGFTA thinks.

Their list of grant recipients reads like a who’s who of classical music snobbery with chamber orchestras aplenty, mid-summer Mozart (like the world really needs another one of those), and choral groups up the proverbial wazoo.  90% of the grantees are classicists and the rest are ever-so-PC ethnic and G/L/B/T groups of which the majority of them are both PC and classicist.  A grant hopeful who walked into SFGFTA with a Telecaster, twin turntables or a banjo could expect little more than a lash or two from Michael Tilson Thomas’ baton.

A Citizen’s Advisory Committee (CAC) is responsible for grant decision making, but they are merely acting on the will of those who appointed them.  The key to this unfortunate situation lies in the control of the San Francisco Arts Commission, which is over-populated with social and political hobnobbers.  It is their members’ tastes that ultimately determine what deserves a music grant and what does not.  Hoi polloi pack SF’s Art Commission, place their proxies in the CAC, and group-think their social agendas into art.  Thus it becomes more important to spend $1,800,000 to assure opening night galas at the opera and symphony than to put $3500 into the hands of someone who might create something more than a musical retread.

Charlie Nesson

Boston.com summarizes some of the excitement over Nesson’s entry into the music downloading war: “’RIAA Litigation May Be Unconstitutional,’ headlined Slashdot, a self-described ’news for nerds’ website.  ’Harvard’s Charlie Nesson Raises Constitutional Questions in RIAA Litigation,’ trumpeted ZDNet Government.  ‘Insane Harvard Law Professor Promises MP3 Justice,’ proclaimed Gawker.”

The case involves Joel Tenenbaum a Boston University grad student who the RIAA has accused of downloading seven MP3 files.  The RIAA’s basic shakedown is for $3000-$5000 and a promise to stop downloading.  Most families cave in since they can’t afford to fight the RIAA over three to five grand, particularly since the digital copyright laws have been bought and paid for through the RIAA’s grease monkeys in Congress.  A song on iTunes costs $.99; the minimum fine for downloading from a P2P is $750 per song.

Nesson plans to try the RIAA in the court of public opinion first and in a court of law second.  Nesson is attacking the Digital Theft Deterrence Act of 1999 as overly punitive and unconstitutional because its cases can’t really be tried in courts.  The way the law is written, cases can only be rubber stamped in favor of the RIAA.  Techdirt has the full story and some hard-hitting quotes from Nesson’s brief.