Candlestick Park is gone, but we’re still here!
Took a good long break from the blog… partly I was writing other things, including the piece on “When Punk Mattered” I just posted before this. Partly I just wasn’t in the mood, and partly I’ve been quite preoccupied with our housing situation and also I began teaching a graduate seminar at USF this fall, so that took some effort to prepare for as well…
Come out and join us this Saturday for a sidewalk party!
The good news: we are eviction-proof after a long summer of twists and turns that culminated in the successful closing of escrow on September 10. The Pigeon Palace is ours! For the next few years we’ll be renting from the San Francisco Community Land Trust, but in a few years we’ll go through a conversion process and come out the other end as a fully formed low-income housing cooperative and have a high degree of self-control and self-management over the building and our fates. Meanwhile, all around us San Francisco continues to undergo a staggering wave of displacement and disruption… the prognosis in just a few years is that we’ll be a weird pocket on Folsom Street in a thoroughly gentrified neighborhood. Imagine a co-op in Greenwich Village—that’s more or less where we’re headed now, irrespective of this small victory. That said, we’re mighty glad to have a safe and stable home from which we can continue to do all the work we’ve been doing all these years, whether radical history, anti-police violence organizing, queer dance and performance, AIDS activism, culinary interventions, or coming soon, support for other tenants to do what we’ve managed to do here.
I also spend a weird amount of time walking these days. My time is my major asset, and I use it well. My path crisscrosses the city’s hills and far-flung stairways and neighborhoods. Also just got back from a nice weekend in Lake Tahoe, a place I only barely passed by in the past, but this time enjoyed for a couple of days, hiking up to Lake Marlette above Tahoe, and circumnavigating much of the Lake during my visit. Between my urban treks and that Tahoe jaunt, I took a ton of photos. Here are a few more to finish off this brief howdy-doo to any readers who may still be waiting for me to get it together… Not sure about near-term regular posting, but I’ll keep this going one way or another. If you’re interested in anything in particular that you look forward to from me, drop me a line and let me know!
Off the end of the fishing pier at Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, the only urban park in the California State Park system.
Everyone went crazy for the Blood Moon the other night… seen here above 25th Street around the corner from home.
The rest of the images are from Lake Tahoe this past weekend… here seen from the trail to Lake Marlette.
I caught the moon over the western hills along the beach at South Lake Tahoe, rather sad in its depleted state after 3 years of drought.
Same view from a balcony at our hotel, at sunset that night.
Wild clouds full of water, full of hope! It did rain one night while we were up in the mountains, but apparently not a drop in our bone-dry area.
Mahalo nui loa for prompting wonderful memories.
California was very good to me.
I just could not handle the chill in the summer.
Now I live on the slopes of a volcano in old-fart Valhalla.
Aloha nui,
John