Trigger Reactions

• The photo by Mike Kalantarian of a blue newt with an orange belly and that bumpy texture… Could it have been a rare newt? Who knows their amphibians?
  
• Warren Hinckle was living in New York when he launched War News, phoning and faxing copy and instructions to an ad hoc staff in San Francisco. It was a full-folio-sized newspaper. The first issues were laid out in a vacant restaurant/bar on Montgomery Street at Broadway that the Mitchell Brothers had recently bought. Jim Mitchell and Warren were planning to launch a San Francisco newspaper, but Warren felt impelled to respond immediately when Bush launched Operation Desert Storm. I was working at UCSF at the time. Warren asked me to write something for War News, and one evening after work —on February 26, to be precise— I delivered a piece to the Montgomery Street HQ, along with some copy Bruce Anderson had faxed to my office.

It might have been the very first issue. Someone with no experience was trying to set type using a Macintosh and was being taught over the phone, by someone in New York, how to paste up columns with rubber cement. I told Jim Mitchell there was a program called Pagemaker that might be more efficient. He asked me to take over the whole production side of the operation then and there. I said I couldn’t. He said let’s go get some dinner and talk about it. I said I was running late to pick up my kids in Sonoma and boasted that Doug was a great soccer player. Mitchell said he had a soccer-playing kid, too, let’s take them all out someday soon. I said sounds good. But that night he drove to Corte Madera and shot his brother Artie dead. People had theories about Jim’s motive and think the shooting would have happened anyway, but I think it was the utter chaos of the ‘newsroom’ and the stream of faxed scrawls from Warren in New York that put Jim Mitchell over the edge.

In 1988 I had interviewed his brother the Artie for a piece about San Francisco that ran in a glossy travel magazine called ‘Departures’ (published by American Express for its Platinum-card holders.) My description of The Tenderloin District ended with a reference to the Center for the Resettlement of East Asian Refugees. (In 1991 it looked like the refugees were breathing new life into the ‘hood.)

Next door to the Resettlement Center, placed there by a Higher Power with a sense of humor, is the O’Farrell Theater, headquarters of the Mitchell Brothers film group. On the ground floor is the Ultra Room, with a peep show, a live sex show (girls sit on customers’ laps). Also, a movie theater that plays the brothers’ greatest hits, including Autobiography of a Flea, Behind the Green Door, the Graffenburg Girls, Sodom and Gommorah, and Missy Manners’ Guide to Safe Sex.

Upstairs, overlooking the resurgent Tenderloin, is the brothers’ office. They are trying to raise money to make their first ‘‘R-rated’ (for Restricted) movie, a dramatization of Robert Crumb’s ‘Whiteman-meets-Bigfoot’ story. It will be scripted by Crumb and might even star Crumb. ‘I said I would never make any movie that wasn’t X-rated,’ Artie Mitchell explains. ‘I have my morals, you know. But when the great Robert Crumb came to me, I had to say yes. The great Robert Crumb,’ he repeats, picking up the phone. He wants to invite Crumb and his wife Aline to an Aerosmith concert, followed by a party. The band has been in town to play the Cow Palace and the Oakland Coliseum. Lead singer Steve Tyler and the boys showed up at the O’Farrell earlier in the week. ‘Do you know you’re in the center of the universe?’ Artie asked Tyler, who looked around and said, yes, he understood.

The key to making a porn flick that has sexual intensity, according to Artie, is casting. ‘I’ve always preferred using people that were in love, or mates if you can get it. But at least make sure they like each other. You can’t lie to the camera.’

Art and brother Jim have been busted nine times in the 19 years they’ve been making and purveying porno films in San Francisco. It has now been three years since The O’Farrell was raided and Marilyn Chambers arrested for taking tips from members of her live-show audience. (It required the entire SFPD vice squad to make that raid.) Three years, says Artie, is the longest period in which relations between the brothers and the city have been ‘relatively mellow.’

Sirens blare on Polk Street and we go to the window. A tour bus pulls up outside and 39 Japanese businessman skip eagerly towards the Ultra Room. The US trade deficit is about to be reduced by at least $1,000.

• Another great photo: Charlie Chaplin squaring off with Primo Carnera! John Fleer wrote a song about Primo C.

Born and raised in Tuscany A stonecutter’s son

Met a French man in the street He said ‘You might be the one, you might be the one’

He taught me to keep up my guard To protect my plate glass jaw

In the ring I flailed about I’d push and I’d paw

CHORUS

They said ‘Primo! Primo C!’

He’s so big So ugly

Doesn’t bother me

I’m Primo Primo C!

.

They’d say ‘Primo! Primo C!’

The Mob took all the money

I’d do it again for free

I’m Primo Primo C!

.

They thought I was too dumb to know My boxing was a joke

I played along with each fake win I knew, knew we’d go for broke

The title belt for a while Lots of women, lots of drink

You ask me if I have regrets Amico, what you think?

.

CHORUS

John Fleer was the lawyer sent by Dr. Tod Mikuriya’s malpractice insurance carrier to represent him in 1999 when the Medical Board of California tried to pull his license. Mikuriya was the leading proponent of marijuana as medicine. All the complaints against him were made by law enforcement officers upset that they could no longer bust pot people with impunity. As lawyers Mikuriya hired the woman who’d handled his latest divorce, and Bill Simpich, a pot proponent. Neither of them had experience defending a doctor in front of an Administrative Law Judge. Fleer was a pro and if the fix hadn’t been in, would have won an acquittal. About 20 years ago he recorded one CD. He now lives in Sebastopol and is still defending doctors against the med board.

• Whenever ‘our’ Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was in the news, I used to wonder what happened to Wynken and Nod?
  
• Haiku inspired by the red baseball cap:

Greenland’s a clean land,

Denmark did not ruin it.

Servers need the cold.

• Like millions of US Americans, I don’t share the Democrats’ outrage over the leak of ‘our’ plan to blast the Houthis to Hell. What the opposition party should be decrying is not the leak but the plan itself. They should be reminding everyone that the Houthis would stop their desperate attempts to hit a ship in the Red Sea if Israel would stop the genocide in Gaza. The beautiful architecture of Yemen has been blasted enough!

‘Pick on somebody your own size’ was one of the rules enforced by the older kids on the playground in Brooklyn. That was Before Gentrification, and long before computers kept the kids indoors. The jungle gym was made of steel, not plastic, and there were four big wooden see-saws (which were never called ‘teeter-totters’ in Brooklyn B.G.) See-saws are now being banned as a health hazard

I think the astonishing email link to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic –the voice of the establishment, a most prominent critic of the Trump Administration– was a big misdirection play. The so-called leak to Goldberg occurred on Monday, March 24. Next day, while the media were pre-occupied with the Administration’s so-called blunder, the Associated Press reported ‘President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a sweeping executive action to overhaul U.S. elections, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and demanding that all ballots be received by Election Day. The order calls on states to work with federal agencies to share voter lists and prosecute election crimes. It threatens to pull federal funding from states where election officials don’t comply.’

This is obviously a much bigger story than the mysterious link to Jeffrey Goldberg (of all people). The AP story went on, ‘The Republican National Committee launched a massive effort to probe voter registration lists nationwide.’

• Another great photo – the man emerging from the Blossom Restaurant on the Bowery (and the obscured woman) – reminds me…When Jerome Snyder and Milton Glazer originally planned their ‘Underground Gourmet’ column for New York Magazine in the early ‘60s, their idea was to review restaurants that were at least three steps down. The city was full of such eateries. Then they expanded the definition of ‘Underground’ to mean any restaurant serving lunch for 2.85 or less. The column was a huge success, and spawned a book, and the publisher spun off Underground Gourmet guides to other cities.