Category / San Francisco

by Edward Champion

Chuck Nevius: The Cancer of the San Francisco Chronicle

Forget the horrors of The Family Circus. Do you really think your biggest concern when reading the daily paper is yawning over a comics section that takes no chances?

Frankly, if you’re a newspaper devoting column inches to a far from magnificent man in his flying machine, a far greater danger is that you, your child, or your pets will somehow believe in the xenophobic and thoughtless doggerel that the op-ed columnist in question considers a well-informed take by a responsible citizen for responsible citizens. Step off the paths into ruminative territory, and you’ll have less knee-jerk views on a highly complex situation that won’t go away anytime soon.

I’m not suggesting that the homeless situation shouldn’t be looked at through a critical prism, with criticisms extending to the homeless and municipal failings alike.

But, on a recent Sunday afternoon, I examined the newspaper in my former hometown and found — without trying too hard — a heartless and complacent yuppie writing very much in the thoughtless and vacant manner I used to find in that reactionary cad of a columnist, Ken Garcia. I saw the smiling visage of a man cast lovingly in a blue-toned circle — a smug and self-satisfied man who probably wouldn’t last twenty seconds in a bar brawl, and who certainly wouldn’t attempt to understand those people who were “beneath” him, who were possibly “more common,” and who didn’t sign their columns or their checks with pretentious initials like “C.W.” (If Chuck Nevius thinks he’s some kind of bullshit aristocrat with this preposterous handle, then I’m a small rhesus with a commodious shard of banana up his sphincter.)

Here was a man who was entirely uninterested in coming to terms with the homeless in Golden Gate Park for his piece. (Note how Nevius, like a well-trained corporate bitch, weighs the quotes of city officials and residents over the people who camp in the park.) I saw a man who witnessed needles and ran away and didn’t stop to think that maybe one of the guys he talked to, Christopher Ash, was troubled and didn’t have another place to go. I saw a “journalist” who didn’t have the balls to ask hard questions about where the homeless in San Francisco will sleep or how they will be fed or how they will be cared for. These were questions I asked myself when I lived on the edge of the Park and when I tried to pass along food and a few bucks and when I went out of my way to talk with people and understand a horrible problem. In this wicked web, these were uncertain questions with no immediate answers that sometimes brought tears to my eyes. San Francisco was, in many ways, very cruel in the manner that they threw the homeless to the wolves — now, the coyotes apparently — and in the manner in which they denied organizations like Food Not Bombs the means to disseminate food or help those in need.

With this column, I saw a “journalist” who was more concerned with banging out a piece instead of examining these harder issues, who described “the jewel of a public park” but didn’t consider that the people who slept there simply had no other spot and were just as human as the upper middle-class people who this journalist likewise spoke to.

Inevitably when we write a story like this, there are complaints that we are unsympathetic to the homeless. But this isn’t a homeless issue.

Is Nevius really this fucking daft? Here is a story that involves people camping out in the park and shooting up. If that isn’t a homeless issue, then tell me what is. An unexpected conflagration taking out the many expensive homes above Lake Street and causing San Francisco’s precious aristocrats to check into a hotel? (“Oh dear! I’ve become homeless! Thank goodness I have my driver and valet!”)

In the Nevius world, bravery is attached not to the everyday people who are trying to find a new place to sleep every night and live with their drug addictions, but to those volunteers who work to clean up the neighborhood and who pay $8,500 a year in property taxes. And if Nevius is gullible enough to think that Central Park is devoid of the homeless, he might want to consider this Wall Street Journal item from last month that reported how New York City was undercounting the homeless. Just because Gavin Newsom didn’t see them doesn’t mean that they aren’t there.

Consider Nevius’s nonsense when compared against the Chron‘s detailed series of articles in February that examined the homeless problem in depth, hitting it from numerous angles. In writing this sham of a column, Chuck Nevius has demonstrated that he is a hack who defames journalism and who defames what is, for the most part, a pretty good paper.

I may have had my quibbles with William T. Vollmann’s Poor People, but if you want real journalism, you’ll find more honesty on this subject in one highly reflective chapter that begins with the line “I am sometimes afraid of poor people,” and that proceeds to explore the problem of maintaining a neighborhood while contending with the equally necessary quality of human compassion.

by Edward Champion

Gray Lady Slams San Franciscans with Base Generalization

New York Times: “Most plastic grocery bags are made from polyethylene, which is derived from oil, which is considered by many San Franciscans to be the root of most of the world’s problems, from $4 gallons of gasoline to the war in Iraq.”

Actually, not this San Franciscan. I believe that most of this world’s problems stem from peanut butter that you can’t lick from the roof of your mouth, poorly performed cunnilingus, clip-on ties, bad toupees, and, of course, money.

by Edward Champion

Teo Kridech, My Hero

San Francisco Chronicle: “The posts ‘nearly killed my business,’ said Kridech, a native of France who has worked in the food industry for 25 years and spent $150,000 revamping the Senses space. ‘Everyone has become a food critic. They think they’re real big shots. They probably can’t even make scrambled eggs.'”

I am one of the few cultivated San Franciscans who can, in fact, make scrambled eggs. So I take no offense to Teo Kridech’s charges. In fact, I agree whole-heartedly with them. It’s about time that someone identified those vermin now sitting in restaurants because they are incapable of cooking a basic breakfast. It’s about time that rebels like Mr. Kridech raked these bastard diners across the coals. I believe in a society in which those who cannot make scrambled eggs are massacred by unscrupulous men in Nazi uniforms and epaulettes. I will begin shooting these so-called “food bloggers” in the head, should Mr. Kridech request my services. These uncultured vultures think that can simply place something in a microwave and call it dinner. They think that they can go to a restaurant and describe its problems to people on the Web! Well, what good are these interlopers with good men like Teo Kirdech determining our cultural norms?

So I salute Teo Kirdech’s unapologetic and somewhat strange embrace of Manichean vales. Since I can make scrambled eggs, perhaps I might be styled a “big shot” and even, quite possibly, a “food critic.” (Many years ago, I was asked to write restaurant reviews. Whether these scribblings count as “food criticism” proper, I cannot say. I was a younger man then and I often described how I was feeling in these reviews, which was probably my career as a “food critic” was a brief one. Nevertheless, I shall send copies of these on to Mr. Kirdech, where he can then offer me his opinion about whether these scribblings constitute criticism. Or perhaps I can simply cook scrambled eggs in front of Mr. Kirdech and earn his trust.)

To settle this matter once and for all, I plan to check out Mr. Kridech’s restaurant at some random point during the next three weeks, investigating these claims of “cheap porcelain plates” and the “little butter dish from Ikea.” If this plateware is causing an inordinate amount of stress among San Francisco eaters, and if Mr. Kridech is indeed stiffing his customers, it will be duly reported here. And I will have to abandon the clear homicidal plan implied by Mr. Kridech.

The ball, as they say, is in Mr. Kridech’s court. And he should be a little frightened. For while other food bloggers have been hard on Mr. Kridech, who I hope will be my friend no matter what I think of his restaurant, I am a harder man to be reckoned with. I can make scrambled eggs.