Chris Smith’s blog

This month’s San Francisco magazine runs my piece on a legal challenge that could bring California’s death penalty law crashing down. The decision is expected this fall, but no matter which way the judge goes we can expect appeals stretching to the horizon. Ultimately, though, it’s hard not to see this challenge as yet another step on the road to abolition.

One way or the other, members of the defense community are cautiously optimistic that the death penalty’s days are numbered. “It’s like pushing a boulder uphill,” Zimring says. “But things are changing.”

Yesterday, the Huffington Post ran my initial take on the Occupy SF movement–and Occupy Wall Street in general.

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The encampment, huddled on the sidewalk in front of the Federal Reserve on Market Street, was a veritable Noah’s Ark of lefty protest. There were dreads in camo pants, Boomers in recycled-rubber sandals, crust punks with Guy Fawkes masks — red meat for Fox news, in other words.

But then a DPW street cleaning truck trundled by on Market Street. The guy in the passenger seat was leaning halfway out the window, high-fiving sign-waving protesters on the sidewalk. And every time the F-line passed the driver leaned on his horn, prompting a cheer from the protesters.

Clearly, this wasn’t just another San Francisco protest.

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This is a fast-moving story, though. After my piece went up yesterday, word got out that the police were planning another raid on the camp Wednesday night. The call went out, and maybe a thousand came out to protect the encampment, and stayed deep into the night. A few impressions from last night’s gathering:

SF’s Brass Liberation Orchestra played its highly danceable version of protest music. The guy with the tuba was my favorite.

A woman danced while wearing a gas mask.

A new chant (at least to my ears) was born: “Hella, Hella Occupy!”

Rumors flew that some 2,000 Oakland occupiers were marching across the Bay Bridge to reinforce the SF encampment. Alas, they were just rumors.

Word was that hundreds of riot cops were massing in Potrero and headed to Justin Herman. Somewhat puzzlingly, they had piled into Muni buses for the ride up to the encampment. The jokes, of course, told themselves: “Riot police are on their way, but they may be a little late–they’re taking Muni.”

Bart shut down Oakland’s 12th Street station to prevent the Oakland occupiers from coming to San Francisco. Then they closed Embaradero station–due to a “civil disturbance,” as the agency put it. If only Bart could monetize the commuter anger it’s been generating lately, there’d be enough money to fund 24-7 service across the bay.

There was a lot of cigarette smoke. Activism requires lots of standing around and waiting. Hence the cigarettes.

Organizers taught the crowds to link arms and form defensive lines encircling the camp. People scrawled the number for the National Lawyers Guild (415.285.1011) on their arms, and donned vinegar-soaked bandanas in case of tear gas.

And then nothing happened. The cops never showed. Possibly because there were so many people there and the City Family didn’t want to risk an Oakland-style melee. It couldn’t have hurt that a good chunk of the city’s elected officials–including mayoral candidates Avalos, Yee, Adachi, and Chiu–turned up in the plaza last night. (Yes, Occupy SF has become an issue in the mayor’s race.) Today, the police said their maneuvers were just late-night training exercises. Advisory letters sent to businesses near the encampment suggest otherwise.

In any case, the camp’s still there. At least until tonight.

That’s the subject of my new piece for San Francisco magazine. If you believe the polling, it doesn’t look good for Lee’s opponents. But ranked choice voting is a cruel mistress, and the scandals surrounding Lee’s campaign backers are beginning to pile up. If Lee stumbles down the stretch, here’s a (half-serious) look at how his opponents might prevail.

Historical note: I might be the first journalist in San Francisco to name-check Jello Biafra, Barry Zito, and that terrible ’90s band, Train, all in one piece.

This month’s San Francisco magazine (see p.38) runs my piece on broken political promises, from the “no new taxes” pledge that helped make George H.W. Bush a one-term president to Barack Obama’s liberal bait and switch to SF mayors Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, and, most recently, Ed Lee. How pissed should voters be? Sometimes, mendacity is in the eye of the beholder.

When interim Mayor Ed Lee announced his intention to run for a full term this fall, erstwhile allies like Board of Supervisors president and mayoral candidate David Chiu let him have it, and rightfully so. After all, the supes had given Lee the interim post precisely because he said he wouldn’t run. Voters, though, greeted the charges with a shrug: Politics as usual, no? Still, a look at some broken promises by prominent pols, past and present, reveals some interesting middle ground between “unforgivable” and “no big deal” that may help you decide just how charitable to be toward this latest bait and switch.

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Today, on Huffington Post San Francisco, I’ve got a piece on the Bay Area’s underground metal scene. Besides being a good excuse to name-check a few of my favorite local bands (Acephalix, for instance), the piece is a paean to underground concerts of all sorts, from punk to metal to bluegrass to hip hop.

I have no idea how the guy managed to sleep through Acephalix, because it was really loud. The San Francisco death metal band emitted a growling, galloping roar, the stuff of bad dreams, and it enveloped the room. The pit, meanwhile, was going off, a hostile ballet of bodies pinging off one another in front of the stage.

But this dude? He was dead to the world, mouth hanging open, slumped against the back wall. Next to him sat an equally incongruous giant stuffed donkey.

It was a Sunday night in early summer, and we were at the Victory warehouse in the Oakland ghostlands, a few blocks from Uptown but worlds away from its hipster sheen.

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There’s something special about an underground show. I grew up outside Detroit in the late 1980s, as the city went into freefall. Paradoxically, Detroit’s collapse was great for the scene: there was no shortage of empty places to play, and the police were too busy to care about permitting or zoning. At college in North Carolina a few years later, I went to the occasional backyard bluegrass show. At a house in the woods about 20 miles from town, Teva-ed types sipped moonshine as guys with banjos and mandolins played Ralph Stanley tunes. While working in South Africa a few years ago, I found myself at a hip hop show in a weedy lot in Soweto, the country’s largest black township. While a succession of aspiring MCs jumped around on a makeshift stage, people drank beer and smoked weed, flirting with one another. Guys showed off their tricked-out cars, a parade of spinning rims and superfluous DVD screens mounted to the seats.

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A couple of months ago, I acquired an odd new follower on Twitter. The handle was FakeLelandYee, the State Senator and SF mayoral candidate’s tweeting doppelganger. I think that was the name, anyway–Twitter soon took it down.

Not to worry, though, because an account named NotLelandYee quickly replaced the old one. The accounts–run by somebody who really, really hates Yee–have lots of fun with Yee’s weird brushes with the law and alleged ethical lapses, as well as his uncanny ability to play both sides of virtually any issue. As a political writer I’m a connoisseur of “ratfucking,” so I wrote up a squib for San Francisco magazine (see p. 34):

State Senator Leland Yee is one of the frontrunners in this fall’s mayoral race, but not everyone’s a fan. The social-media equivalent of an old-school attack ad, this fake Yee Twitter account quoted here–run by person(s) unknown–hammers on Yee’s penchant for playing both sides of an issue, such as his opposition to both sharkfinning and the ban against it. When Twitter shut down the account, another impostor popped up. It may not be as effective as a TV ad or mailer, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.

You can’t throw a rock in Silicon Valley without hitting some dude in business casual claiming his start-up is revolutionary. Sometimes, though, it’s actually true. Such is the case with AnchorFree, which makes software enabling activists to block their governments’ Internet-blockers, without being traced by the authorities. Indeed, without software like this, people in less-than-free countries might not be able to get on Facebook or Twitter to plan protests. It’s been used to good effect in Egypt, Libya, and is in heavy rotation in China and Saudi Arabia, too. The new issue of San Francisco magazine runs a short piece of mine on these guys, who just set out to make money and ended up aiding the Arab uprisings. How’s that for “Don’t be Evil”?

The Bay Area has always been a metal hotbed, spawning the likes of Metallica, with its knifepoint riffs and galloping tempos, and Sleep, masters of the sludgy, bong-fueled stomp. (I caught one of Sleep’s reunion shows last week, by the way. Whoa.) These days, we might be better known for our avant-garde metal bands, united less by any particular sound than by a willingness to experiment. San Francisco magazine’s “Best of” issue this month runs a piece of mine on this burgeoning scene. I could have mentioned a ton of bands but chose to go with Ludicra, Grayceon, and Giant Squid. Check it out–and check the bands out when they play.

This month’s San Francisco magazine runs a number of my pieces, most of them as part of its annual “Best of the Bay” package. Here’s one on this fall’s mayoral race, focusing on Ranked Choice Voting, the city’s new-ish voting system. RCV isn’t like your typical, “first past the post, winner-take-all” system. Instead, it has a tendency to kneecap frontrunners (just ask Oakland’s Don Perata), and encourages second-tier candidates to be nice to each other.

You might think that this fall’s mayoral race–the most wide-open in ages, with nine credible candidates and no true front-runner–promises even more of the ritual bloodletting than usual. Instead, look for a race more anodyne than aggro, as hopefuls kiss up to their opponents’ supporters and try not to alienate anyone, ever.

The new issue of San Francisco magazine is out, and with it my short piece on political correctness in SF (see p.40).

This spring, PETA, the animal-rights group that specializes in pointless PR stunts, petitioned San Francisco to rename the Tenderloin. The name is just far too beefy-sounding for PETA’s taste–”an outdated moniker that evokes the horrors of the meat trade,” according to a letter the group sent Mayor Ed Lee. PETA’s suggestion? The Tempeh District. This won’t happen, of course, but what if we did succumb to our darkest, most politically correct impulses? Herein, a rundown of what some of our neighborhoods might be called if we resolved never to offend anyone, anywhere, ever again.