Recent Posts
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Whither Modern Life?
June 27, 2025
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What the Hell
June 18, 2025
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As Darkness Engulfs Us
April 6, 2025
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AI, Risk, and Work
January 17, 2025
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“Things Are in the Saddle, and Ride Mankind”
December 29, 2024
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Forgotten Futures in Seattle
December 12, 2024
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Autocracy Defeats Neoliberalism
November 14, 2024
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History… We’re Soaking in It!
October 2, 2024
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A Numbing Spectacle
September 22, 2024
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War Is the Air We Breathe
July 15, 2024
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I’m back in something approaching a ‘normal’ groove, happily reconnected to lover, friends, and family. The expensive housing prices here cover the cost of this amazing free air conditioning in San Francisco, which runs all summer long. Here’s the daily flow of cooling pouring over Twin Peaks a week ago (it’s been with us every day lately):

All you folks sweltering in some true summerish hell with temperatures and humidity over 90, eat your hearts out!
Most of us locals get pretty sick of being chilled all summer and have to go somewhere for real summer heat at least for a few days or weeks, but since I had a good dose in Turkey, Hungary and Germany already, I’m very happy to be back in the perfect temperatures of San Francisco!
Summer brings a weird combination of too much to do and some version of entertainment doldrums too. At CounterPULSE we’re having trouble booking our theater this summer, which is also true of many other small-ish venues in town. This weekend we showed Peter Watkins’ remarkable 6-hour film “La Commune/Paris 1871” over two nights to celebrate Bastille Day (We also served about 50 fresh crêpes and several folks brought good French champagne, so it was a fun party). Our pals at AK Press have this amazing DVD box set, which includes also a great documentary on the making of the film, at a reasonable price.
The always bombastic and worth-avoiding July 4 in San Francisco also features the opening day of the annual SF Mime Troupe show, called “Making A Killing.” I’m going to stick to the old adage, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything. (I hated it!)… but I think it’s a telling contrast to compare this show, which is basically a predictable and cliché-ridden musical that replays the characters, jokes, and sensibilities that the Mime Troupe has staged for 5 or 6 straight years now, to a weirdly whimsical and surprising new movie, also a musical, called “Colma: The Musical.” I heard a lot of people buzzing about this movie and some good friends really raved about it so I went to see it, not knowing what I was in for… It’s a story of three 18-year-olds just out of high school in Colma, which is the cemetery-filled suburb near San Francisco where all the dead bodies are buried, literally (1.5 million dead, about 1,200 actual residents). The funny take on life, the hilarious send-up of getting a job at the nearby Target, the interaction between the gay Filipino, the fag-hag(ish) gal, and the stiff and straight-ish assimilating “latino” guy are spot-on. The songs are hilarious, occasionally poignant, but the real success of this film is its ability to capture the feeling of life right now in 2007, something very real about what it’s like to come of age in this political and social void… in a way it’s far more politically on the mark than the vapid leftism of the Mime Troupe…
Getting further afield from the formal performances of stage and cinema I attended the annual Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo yesterday. It’s a very San Franciscan treat, semi-punk, semi-mechanic, semi-Burning Man, all zany and ‘at your own risk’, in a junkyard just off Bayshore… They had their usual motley assortment of pedal-powered carny rides, a bevy of punk bands and periodic live runnings of the life-size MouseTrap, with human mice and hardhatted crew all scurrying about amidst the ornately beautiful rendition of the classic plastic board game. Here’s some shots for your enjoyment:







Not atypical of San Francisco, to get to the Cyclecide event, we walked over Bernal Heights and took the pedestrian bridge down to Bayshore. On our way to the pedal-powered insanity, we encountered this, which I believe passes for “normal” in this country:

Overlooking this normalized lunacy is an advertising billboard pitching alcohol, the most common coping mechanism for people who spend too much time in such situations. On the billboard though, the confusion thickened, as the name of the liquor corresponds to the normal activities of pedestrians, but as you can see, the art indicates that it is somehow emerging from gears, much like a bicycle chain! Talk about mixed metaphors!

And back in San Francisco during the summer means lots of cycling around. By now I have quite a library of images of favorite spots, including this one, the Tennessee Hollow restoration in the Presidio. Here the Park Service removed a dump that had filled in the creek as early as the 1880s, and after some vigorous volunteer labor planting native species, the Hollow is coming back to life. Here are two shots, Oct. 05 and July 07…


Lastly, I’m frantically trying to plot out the entire Fall/Winter Talks at CounterPULSE right now, so the calendar can be printed in about 2 weeks. One event we’ve decided on for the Nature in the City side of the programming will be about Birds in San Francisco, so I’ll leave you with some shots I love. First, a hawk devouring a pigeon on Thanksgiving Day (talk about your Thanksgiving bird!) at Dolores and 19th in 2003 (photo by Tristan Savatier); then a big ol’ owl I’ve seen a lot at the top of the Esmeralda Steps on the Bernal Heights ring road, this photo taken about a week ago; and last another shot of a hawk perched on an electrical tower near Billygoat hill at the end of Castro on 30th Street.



Back home in San Francisco, my head still floating in Istanbul or somewhere in Central Europe, my body most definitely in San Francisco. Jet lag is still a bitch, even after nearly a week at home. Happy to land in the arms of my sweetie, but sad to leave my sweet daughter’s company… that was a 50th birthday present for all time: five weeks with my daughter (part of it with my parents too), visiting the UK, Berlin, Budapest, Sofia, and Istanbul… the memories swirl…
I really hate air travel now. The absurd Theater of Security in which you have to take off your shoes (only in the U.S.) and have your belongings examined is all about learning to live passively in a police state. As I overheard a friend say the other day, “when I’m in an airport I’m like an obedient dog.” It has NOTHING to do with security, that’s for sure. On this trip I had my tube of posters stopped by some rent-a-cop in London, so I had to check it, only to have the airlines mangle and destroy the tube and a number of the irreplaceable posters inside… fuckers!
I never much liked the weird sensation of getting on plane on one side of the globe and popping out a half day later on the other side. I’d much rather take longer to get there and make the physical and mental transition it ought to take in something closer to real time… my favorite idea that percolated up during this trip (including 3 days spent on the practically moribund Orient Express) is to resuscitate travel by airship, i.e. blimp! Think of it, a journey by air, not so far from the ground so you can watch the meandering countryside or ocean as it passes beneath you, moving at liesurely 100-200 mph, putting down in inclement weather or for an occasional refueling/rest stop… And of course for all those carbon footprint worriers, the blimp could be powered by wind and solar… the future of air travel? let’s hope so!
As for ground travel, I was glad to return to SF just in time for the June Critical Mass, a rather huge ride of 3000-4000, happy and energetic as it has been for months now. Here’s a couple of shots at the corner of Turk and Scott during the ride. This is when about 75% of the ride has already gone by…


Critical Mass keeps rolling, as do the insane twists and turns of global geopolitics. The mundane and simple act of riding home together once a month can seem unimportant when juxtaposed to the war and mayhem that continues to frame the “great game” to control world oil supplies. Still my favorite analyst of how this process is unfolding is on Asia Times, MK Bhadrakumar, who has yet another illuminating piece recently. Interesting to compare this to today’s Democracy Now, in which Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation is interviewed about the Putin visit to the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. It’s all about Cold War redux (or not) and Bush Senior’s legacy and the factions within the US… not a mention of the insights that Bhadrakumar offers about Putin’s maneuevers in global oil and gas and the abject defeat of US interests they represent.
Continue reading Blimps, bikes, pipelines, uninsurance
We spent a fair amount of our visit hanging out on stairways or in cafes or hookah bars or restaurants, talking politics among ourselves or with our friends and contacts in Istanbul.


This great hangout place was one of the few where you can safely drink in public… but it wasn’t the Cartier-Bresson photo location we tried to find…
This was the view from the stairs, right at dusk as we sat enjoying some Turkish red wine:

The “moderate Islamic” party that has governed Turkey for the past few years has dissolved the parliament is a new election is scheduled for early July. Local lefties are banding together outside of party structures (to enhance their chances of gaining seats, due to some arcane election rules) and there’s some hope that they might win as many as 25 seats in the coming election, out of a parliament of 550, which will be dominated either by the AKP (current Islamic party) or the pro-secular, pro-military right wing party coalition. Lurking behind all political activity in Turkey is the military, which still absorbs a large portion of the national budget (it is the 2nd largest military in NATO after the U.S.), was threatening to invade northern Iraq while we were in town, and always holds out the threat of another coup d’etat if Islamic politics “goes too far.” In fact, its previous interventions have been to ensure the implementation of IMF structural adjustment policies and to ensure the conditions for capitalist accumulation. The foot-dragging and apparent refusal of the EU to give Turkey a path to full membership is fueling nationalist paranoia, even though most on the left are at best skeptical of EU membership, if not openly opposed.
Our time in Istanbul was mostly spent among these lovely cafes and in appealing neighborhoods that it was easy to imagine living in. Here are a couple of shots of this neighborhood BeyoÄŸlu.


On Saturday it was over 100 degrees so we didn’t get moving until around 3 pm. Francesca and I headed over to see a church/museum called Kariye or St. Savior in Chora, which has amazing mosaic murals dating to the 1300s. Luckily it was at the far end of the “western neighborhoods” which gave us our first direct experience of older, poorer, more popular Istanbul, and we felt very lucky for the chance to walk through it. First we took the Metro out to the old wall, climbing up amidst the crumbling, partially repaired ramparts for the view. Funny how completely open it is to walk up and on these historic walls, and it’s definitely at your own risk!


Here’s a shot of one of the mosaics:

and here are some of the street scenes we caught on our walk:



There are lots of these old wooden buildings around Istanbul, often with bay windows and vaguely like San Francisco victorians… but not!
Our walk took us back over Ataturk Bridge, across the Golden Horn, to Galanta Tower, an impressive tower built by the Byzantines originally and reinforced in the middle 1300s by a Genovese merchant, just below the Beyoglu neighborhood, north of the old city. It has fantastic views over the Golden Horn, especially at sunset. Here’s the tower, and then the sunset:


There was a smattering of anarchist graffiti in certain parts of town, especially around Cihangir and BeyoÄ¡lu, where there are also incredible outdoor café and restaurant scenes. We presume there is a lot of political discussion going on there too”¦ Here are some images of graffiti, stencils and a poster we found on the walls, but it would be a stretch to say this is in anyway meaningfully representative”¦




We weren’t quite sure how Malcolm X came to Istanbul, and it only became more confusing after the next one…

A punk-Islamic fusion gang?


The Turkish part of this says something “go back home” or “go back where you came from” and it turns out it was a marketing ploy by someone starting a new magazine!


Transit in Istanbul
I think I saw about 4 bicycles in 7 days, the most memorable being an old guy in a white robe, white beard, on a mountain bike with the red Turkish flag flapping from the back of his rack”¦ Otherwise, this is a town based on taxis, indecipherable private and public bus routes (some people figure it out, but there were no maps or reliable explanatory systems to be found for us non-Turkish speakers) and some modern Metro and Tram systems. The city is so sprawling, 16 million in about 150 square kilometers on both sides of the Bosphorus, so we can hardly claim to have experienced a significant portion of the whole metro area.

We did have fun riding on the ubiquitous and vital ferries (I suppose the SF bay once had this kind of ferry traffic), as well as the taxis and buses. On the way out to the airport this morning we rode 50 km on a small bus on an 8-lane ultra-modern tollroad, crossing the bridge we watched turn colors every night. The charm of the city’s streets was lost in the hideous, sprawl of 8-20 story apartments that went for mile after mile as we sped along the freeway. This is a glimpse of the scene that was unbroken for 45 minutes:

Here I am before going to the concert on our last night in Istanbul, standing on the balcony at our place:

Well if you’ve made it this far, you might enjoy some images of our social lives this past week:

Francesca and Ali playing “exquisite corpse” at the hookah bar.
Dessert after a fantastic fish dinner on the Asian side of the Bosphorus:

One of our post-3 a.m. drinking nights with a gang of Ali’s friends:

Dinner and dessert with E.A. Tonak, Ali’s dad, a chance to talk Marxist politics…

of course you can’t come to Istanbul and not visit the Grand Bazaar…


and even better, the spice market!

As we walked past this display, the guy hawked it our way as the sign reads, but a man standing near him asked sub rosa, “only five times?”

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Hidden San Francisco 2nd EDITION!

NEW 2nd EDITION NOW AVAILABLE! Buy one here (Pluto Press, Spring 2025)
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