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We had another really lovely Critical Mass here on Friday night. I think we may have reached 2,000 riders, but at least 1,500. It was huge! We went south for a change, along the waterfront, wrapped around the ballpark and across the venerable 3rd Street bridge into the eerily emerging city-state of Mission Bay and its fortress-like biotech UC campus. Not much going on there on Friday night though, but the balmy weather and beautiful early evening light underscored how nice the new public park waterfront and campus panhandle will be in a few years.
The worst incident of the night erupted towards the end of our meandering towards 3rd Street when a few blue-collar guys were stopped by an idiot on a bicycle who appointed himself Czar of Stopping Oncoming Traffic. I rode past as one of the workers was yelling, “Hey I’m tired and I just want to go home!” while one of his pals gave a firm shove to a bicyclist, hurling him to the ground. I heard later it turned into a full-fledged melee of fisticuffs… glad I wasn’t around for it!
But that’s the deal with Critical Mass. It’s what you make it. If you don’t like stuff going on, you have to intervene and make it different. I’ve done that plenty of times, but I–like many of my friends who have been part of this for years–am pretty tired of newbies (the next generation, for better AND worse!) who don’t quite ‘get’ the culture (or maybe they’re just the logical descendents of the always lurking Testosterone Brigade) and repeatedly ride into oncoming traffic when there’s absolutely no need to do it.
Continue reading Critical Mass April 05
I’m not going to write a long entry here. Just had that odd internet moment when two apparently unrelated but actually closely intertwined links appeared to me in a matter of minutes. Firstly, on a small private email list, a friend brought up Andrea Dworkin’s recent death, and made some positive comments about her. I was peripherally on the sex-positive scene in the mid-eighties when my ex- (Caitlin Manning) was making Stripped Bare, a documentary on five local strippers here in San Francisco. One of the friends we made during that time was Susie Bright, and as my email pal surmised, she has a very interesting take on Dworkin’s passing. I always thought of Dworkin as this dark, sex-hating, depressed unhappy woman. I never met her or heard her or even read her, but she was the caricature of all that weird penis-hating, man-hating feminism that seemed to take over intelligent discussions of real social relations in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
Flash forward to 2005. On today’s SF Gate website, there’s a nice piece by the always interesting Gregory Dicum on a new sensation that started in Norway and is now in Berlin. A 20-something couple launched an eco-porn website called fuckforforest.com, and they’ve already raised nearly $100K for their strange combo of hardcore porn and eco-proselytizing about the state of the forests and the planet. I went there but wasn’t motivated enough to plunk down my $15 for a month of porn… at least not yet! But maybe you are, dear reader!
Riverbend posted this link to an apparently Italian indy-media-ish website called Bellaciao, where you can see the enormous demonstration in Baghdad yesterday that was completely blacked out in international media. The photos of Firdow Square, where the Saddam statue was pulled down, two years ago and now, tell the story.
I get The Economist instead of a daily newspaper (which I peruse in 5 minutes on-line… in any case there is very little local news in our horrible ‘local’ newspaper, the S.F. Chronicle). Of course The Economist is a right-wing rag, but it does give actual news from various places in the world every week. It’s terribly aggravating to read their stuff on Bush and the U.S. though. I can only glance at it. This week there’s an absurd piece about how well Condi Rice and Bush are doing at winning back the Europeans to the U.S. project of democratizing the world! What a pathetic joke. Quite a contrast to the biweekly columns from Immanuel Wallerstein which I subscribe to. He’s good on following developments that point in a radically different direction than the U.S.-centric fantasies of the right-wing media. Either in his column, or on some other blog or news site, I’ve recently seen a lot about how various countries are proceeding independently to set up trade and diplomatic connections that simply go around the dying U.S. elephant, too stupid to see the mess it’s making. (Examples include the regular meetings between France, Germany and Russia, something that the U.S. strived to avoid for all the post-WWII era; China and Russia engaged in joint military exercises; China signing deals with Venezuela, Iran, Brazil for oil and other raw materials; etc.)
Continue reading Iraq and Mexico
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