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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First let me just urge you to enjoy yourself by going to Tom Flocco and reading his lovely press release.
But I wanted to post a quickie… I had a couple of great moments in modernity over the weekend that I forgot to mention in the last post. First I was bicycling down Folsom and looked at a blonde woman in her car going the other way at a stoplight. She was kissing her cellphone, I mean REALLY kissing it! I suppose she was sending some lucky someone her big fat lips, but really!… Is that romantic? Ouch!
Then I was at that nightmarish warehouse we know as Costco and standing in line with my two bottles of gin and suddenly everything stopped. The system crashed and all the checkout lines stopped. If you’ve ever been at any big box store, esp. on a weekend afternoon, imagine the curiously quiet and empty feeling as everyone stops. The line isn’t moving. The clerks are calling out to managers. They can’t sell the goods unless the scanners and cash registers are working and they’re all dependent on some master computer (ha ha). Managers are frantically phoning. No one is buying! (Can those of us who’ve been waiting in line just please take our things and go home? We’ve already paid with our time, after all!) I turned to the middle class white guy behind me (most of the San Francisco shoppers are Asian and Latinos, and mostly not first-language English speakers, so that was already anomalous) and mentioned how easy it is for the whole civilization to just suddenly grind to a halt, to which he merely grimaced. It felt cinematic. I was thrilled, grinning like an idiot. Two minutes later, sigh, it all started up again.
Tonight there was a community meeting to discuss how to calm and humanize Cesar Chavez Street. I was thrilled to find out that the other attendees were ready to get a lot more seriously radical than I would have imagined. In about 10 minutes of brainstorming, people of all ages called for taking back the streets, digging up the pavement and putting in green spaces, daylighting the creek, planting grapes to honor Cesar Chavez, and generally to completely alter our sense of San Francisco’s landscape… now that’s taking the machinery by the throat!
Been a busy beaver lately, lots of socializing and being in the ol’ midsummer groove. This past weekend was a typically crowded and satisfying time: Friday night was our local Critical Mass. It was a very spirited ride, wrapping around the waterfront to Fisherman’s Wharf, back up Columbus to eventually two-time the Broadway Tunnel (where good pal Ben Monopod got creamed by a ‘fellow’ cyclist, ending up in the hospital with surgery on his separated shoulder… he’s out now, with pins!)… then back downtown again and over and out Market, down Van Ness, circling at Mission for a change, turning eastward down Division to Potrero where we all enjoyed the newly striped Potrero Avenue. I lived on Potrero for 11 years and always dreamed of the day when it would no longer be a six-lane pseudofreeway monstrosity. Now it’s four lanes, with left turn bulbs, bike lanes on both sides, and is a teensy step towards human habitability. A fun tour of 24th Street full of odd interactions with drunk teenagers who weren’t used to such an overwhelming posse storming their turf, but eventually the ride broke up in mid-Mission into a half dozen smaller groups and everyone found their bar or park to hang out in.
Saturday I gave my latest Labor History Bike Tour. Only about 4 of the 15 reservations showed up, but another 15 folks did too, so it was a perfect size, about 20, and though the experience probably suffers from chronic TMI, everyone seemed to enjoy my polemical style and historical contextualizing… I also got to start us off with 15 minutes of labor history highlights from Shaping SF in the CounterPULSE theater, and then a good 1.5 mile loop through SOMA and NE Mission to start. I really like doing bike tours, even though they are truly exhausting. So, the CounterPULSE lunch forums are kaput, but instead I’ll be doing semi-regular bike tours on historical and cultural themes. Peter Brastow of Nature In The City and I are collaborating on advancing a public engagement with the politics of San Francisco’s nature, and will be conducting periodic Nature in the City bike rides, starting on the last Sunday in September (mark your calendars!).
Continue reading Peace and War
I’ve been grappling with ideas about “Precarity” and class for a while now. There’s not a whole helluva lot of thinking or writing going on around this in the U.S. that I can really identify with, but yesterday I got two things in my email box. One is a link to a pamphlet distributed at the Gleneagles Scotland G8 meeting called “Event Horizon” by a collaboration of folks in Leeds, Chicago and Scotland. I highly recommend it.
The other thing I got was a rather rough translation of a piece called a “Precarious Lexicon” from a Spanish group Precarias a la Deriva. The Lexicon is a solid bit of theoretical work, and the two pieces go hand-in-hand beautifully. The Spanish text (if you want the English translation I got, email me and I’ll send it to you) connects the discussion to the eruption of the May Day carnivals in first Italy and then now across 16 European capitals this past year.
In 1998, 1999 and to a lesser extent in 2000 a bunch of us got together around here and pulled off these “Reclaim May Day” parades and fairs that were really exciting and hopeful at the time. David Solnit and Alli Starr and the Art & Revolution folks were instrumental in making it happen, so when they threw themselves into Seattle organizing in 1999 it sapped the energy for the 2000 Mayday, and then the event petered out after that. But reading the two pieces above reminded me that I’d been feeling the urge to re-reclaim May Day in 06 with a radical parade/carnival… any takers?
I’m feeling the continuity of our local scene more strongly right now, after Punx Against War held a really great punk show at CounterPULSE on Friday night. It was an impromptu affair, since we hadn’t really been thinking we could or would be hosting punk shows there (now I think we’ll definitely want to make it happen at least a few times a year). But they got evicted from their squat across the street at the former Guitar Center a couple of days before their big inaugural concert there, and lo and behold, we had a sweet, artistic, inspiring evening. I had that delicious taste of past venues, old friends, echoes of my own youthful love of c. 1979 punk rock (esp. the Onion-Flavored Rings–yowza!). Some old Komotionistas showed up, and tons of new kids too, some of whom are organizing free events, concerts, discussions on Peak Oil, the Really Really Free Market in Dolores Park last Sats. of the month, and so on.
San Francisco ain’t dead yet! And I gotta say, I put a shitload of energy into helping CounterPULSE get open and wouldn’t have done it if it couldn’t at least resemble in a limited way the openness and serendipity and synchronicity of a Social Center in the European style… Friday night’s punk show was the best confirmation yet that we’re going to be able to pull it off.
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