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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My pal Jon Christensen over at The Uneasy Chair has picked up on a new blog campaign to promote awareness and networked creativity in the face of the impending Avian Flu epidemic. So here’s a couple of links to get yourself up to speed if this hasn’t entered your awareness yet. I really don’t like catastrophist prognostications, but the more I’ve read about this the harder it is to resist the sense that yes, a calm and reasonable appraisal would indicate that it’s quite likely that the earth is due for a major flu episode. Mike Davis, who has a new book out on the topic (which seems to have delayed his new book Planet of Slums that I’m REALLY looking forward to), has an excellent column on this too.
I sure don’t know what the best response to all this should be, but I do like the basic idea of taking advantage of our growing ability to think “networkly”… maybe one of you will have a brilliant idea… And let’s refuse the silly “gaia’s wrath” or other religious explanations and try to confront our woeful public health capabilities…
UPDATE, Sunday, August 21: Here’s another blog I just discovered that purports to keep us abreast of developments. Fittingly it’s called Avian Flu! I was also sharing some skeptical thoughts with a pal on the street yesterday. He asked me, having read this post, what I thought he or I as individuals could actually do? And I don’t know. We both agreed that calling for a more robust governmental response was weirdly contradictory to our politics and in any case, VERY unlikely to lead to anything good. As is too often the case, the problem far outstrips our capacity to deal, since an “adequate” response would probably involve a major reconfiguration (and reconceptualization) of our sense of the public sphere, public goods, and human rights to public health care… still, maybe all the blogging and worrying will generate the kind of grassroots pressure that might start such a reconfiguration. We can at least try…
It’s August in San Francisco and the fog has been unrelenting. If you live in the westernmost neighborhoods I doubt if you’ve seen sunshine for weeks. Here in the banana belt (the Mission) we have been socked in most of the past two weeks too, though late afternoons often give us a few hours of sweet sunshine before the howling, bitter cold fog wind comes roaring back over the hills, eventually swallowing even our bucolic urban tropicalia… It’s the best thing about San Francisco, and maybe the worst thing too… Fog, beautiful cool fog, the best built-in air conditioner one could hope for… but the same frigid grayness also makes the city’s streets weirdly desolate and cold most evenings during the summer.
A lot of us have to get away each summer, to soak up some real heat, to remember how to sweat in the humidity, and to feel like it was really summer! We went off to Montreal and the New England in late June, so that was enough for me to come home and feel deeply gratified by the fog. And it’s been intensely beautiful to watch it spill over Twin Peaks every afternoon and slowly meander towards us as the sun sets–every so often actually peaking through the layers of fog to illuminate a bright orange or purple streak of sunset above and behind it all (I suppose the East Bay hill dwellers are enjoying the beautiful sunsets over the cotton-covered San Francisco).
Fog envelopes us and it cools and calms. It also blocks the warmth and sunshine. I’ve been pondering for a while the role of air conditioning in destroying street life, the kind of daily existence where you had to go on to your front stairs to get respite from the stifling heat… but here in SF where it’s cool most of the time, it’s usually too cold to have anything like a real street life anyway. But I’ll be working that up into a more thoughtful essay one of these days.
Meanwhile, a less natural form of envelopment is all around us, and a whole new augmentation of it might be forthcoming soon. I speak of the tangled web of electronic waves engulfing our shared urban spaces. Yesterday’s interesting announcement came from the Mayor’s office, a plan being floated to provide free, citywide WiFi connectivity with free internet access.
Continue reading Natural and Unnatural Envelopment
Misleading title? Probably… Spent another fun San Francisco weekend taking full advantage of local treats. Friday night happened upon a listing in the SF Bay Guardian for an interesting program called “Invisible Cities” and much to my surprise, it was at CounterPULSE! So we took it in, Tim Barsky and an amazing beat-boxer named Each and the third character, a lithe and charming female tap dancer whose name escapes me. A work-in-progress, part of Joe Landini’s Summer Performance Festival that’s going to be running at CounterPULSE every weekend in August. I’d say, check it out!
Earlier Friday afternoon I sat with my pal Jon Winston in the relatively obscure Franklin Square Park at Bryant and 16th, across from the former site of Seals Stadium, and he interviewed me for his Bikescape podcast. First one of those I’ve done… yet another radical democratization of broadcast technology. Now anyone can be a radio producer, and apparently millions are jumping on it… not too different than writing a column on a blog, and in the same way, how will anyone find you?
The bicycling fun continued on Saturday when Rai S. convened a perimeter ride around San Francisco, leaving from Tire Beach, a.k.a. Warm Water Cove. We spent intensive exploration time along the southern waterfront, seeing up close Heron Head Park, India Basin, Yosemite Creek and Candlestick State Rec Area, all with spectacular vistas of the bay and back towards the fog looming at the top of the hills. Here are some photos for you:
Continue reading Seeing through technology
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