Recent Posts
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It IS Happening Here
February 16, 2024
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General Ludd to General Intellect
January 11, 2024
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Temporal and Geographic Edges
December 26, 2023
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The Root of All Evil
October 13, 2023
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Post-Pandemic Melancholia . . . Same As It Ever Was?
September 3, 2023
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Chronicle of Deaths Foretold
June 24, 2023
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Reparations is the Least We Should Do
May 11, 2023
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We Are Not Alone
April 9, 2023
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War and Anti-War
February 22, 2023
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For Full Enjoyment, Not Full Employment!
January 7, 2023
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Continuing to find serendipitous connections between unplanned coincidental reads… The two titles for this one are Barbara Ehrenreich’s new Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (Henry Holt & Co.: NY, 2005) and Magnus Mills’ novel The Scheme for Full Employment (Picador USA: NY, 2002). Mills’ novel is a very easy read, kind of like an extended short story. It’s really a one-joke story, but at the leisurely pace it’s told in, the rhythm is part of its pleasure. It tells the story of the “The Scheme for Full Employment, the envy of the world, the greatest undertaking ever conceived by men and women.” Under the “Scheme” UniVans are driven from depot to depot, full of parts for… UniVans. The UniVans are loaded and unloaded, disassembled and rebuilt, repaired and cleaned, by the employees working 8-hour shifts, everyone living in “glorious days.”
Of course it is such a perfect system that it ultimately destroys itself. A factional dispute breaks out between those who are “flat-day” workers (strict adherents to the 8-hour day) and those who are fond of the “early swerve” (getting signed off before 8 hours). As announced at the outset of the novel, they brought down the system themselves, and could not blame a bad leader or corrupt government.
Taken as an obvious allegory on the pointlessness of most work in this society, it drily sends up the work ethic and all the attendant neuroses that get people to keep each other in check, and to accept the ‘necessity’ of patently unnecessary behaviors. This accidentally fits together with Ehrenreich’s latest salvo surprisingly well.
Continue reading The Scheme(s)
It was a spectacular evening in San Francisco. At least 2,000 cyclists showed up for the 13th anniversary ride of Critical Mass here. I had a lot of great conversations during the ride. My bells were broken so, uncharacteristically, I spent the time talking instead of playing bells. I didn’t do much to document any of it either, even though beforehand I had thought about videotaping and interviewing people for their thoughts on the 13th anniversary. I took a few blurry pictures coming up Polk from Fisherman’s Wharf (that after a circuitous route through the Financial District and North Beach, to the tumultuous enthusiasm of most bystanders), and another batch of blurry shots alongside Union Square (after we’d poured eastward through the Broadway Tunnel and then south through the Stockton Tunnel–I guess we have to do the double-tunnel trip when it’s a significant anniversary…). Anyway, here’s the photo I like best, next to Union Square:
The ride went on for a long time, getting broken up into a half dozen clusters, causing much mayhem with angry motorists along Market and at a few other points along the way. The utter lack of internal self-management really showed last night, and is the inevitable result of years of just having Critical Mass happen, with little or no communication among participants before or during the ride. This unconscious approach came under some interesting, and deserved, criticism during an after-party at Station 40, where a benefit screening of “Still We Ride” was held.
Continue reading Critical Mass is Thirteen!
I’ve taken to big bike rides up the steepest hills around. Lately, I’ve been heading to the top of Twin Peaks a couple of times a week, up and down Potrero Hill, McLaren Park, Bernal Heights, Nob Hill and even Hawk Hill. Here’s a photo I took standing at the top of Hawk Hill in the Marin Headlands, after a great ride over Pacific Heights, up and over the Presidio, and then the bridge.
It’s a great workout, not just for my ever thickening body, but my head too. Riding through the city for a few hours, taking weird routes up steep hills, I always find new pleasures, odd views, strange happenings. I even went to the Cable Car museum the other day, which I’d never done.
Heading up to Twin Peaks is my most common ride. It’s a big surprise: once you get up all the steep blocks (like 25th between Hoffman and Grand View, then Clipper to the top–that’s serious!) and then find your way to Twin Peaks Blvd., you are suddenly out of the city. It’s quiet, the aliens close in (eucalyptus, french broom, german ivy and a bunch more) and the hum of local insects rises with the sun’s heat, or on some days, with the swirling fog. It’s magical. The city is far away, glimpses of it surround you, but you’re above it, floating away in an altogether “natural” space. And yet, on a clear day, I’m checking in with the whole town, first the haze over the bay beyond Mission Bay and downtown, then the southern reaches of the city with San Bruno Mountain looming in the distance, the west side with its boxy landscape stretching to the sea, Sutro Tower standing like a 19th century apparition out of H.G. Wells, views to the north reveal that red bridge poking out of rolling hills, citified until the bulging green Presidio, brown and dry across the gate… At the top at last, sweaty and refreshed, Market Street’s diagonal draws our attention back to the heart of the city.
Continue reading Twin Peaks and a Phat Farm
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