Nowtopian

The Passing of Giants

I’m listening to a “world music” radio program on KPFA just now, Thursday morning 10:45 in San Francisco. It’s dedicated to Ali Farka Toure, and it’s making me feel that impossible combination of deep soulful connected humanity and profound sadness. He’s been the soundtrack to my last six years, more than any other musician, along with the other awesome musicians from Mali that he helped get noticed, and finally on to my playlist (esp. Amadou and Mariam, and the amazing Boubacar Troare who I saw not long ago at Yoshi’s in one of the best live shows I can remember). Tuning in to the historic synergy between west African music and American soul music is like opening a multidimensional, multilayered Chinese box full of prisms and rainbows and gyrating pelvises and a steady massage of one’s deepest backbone… that unmatchable complex sonic food has nourished my 21st century, and shaped my lost relationship in mysterious and beautiful ways… sigh… Ali Farka Toure has died, and I feel the loss.

Octavia Butler has died too. She is probably one of the top three best science fiction writers, maybe the best (depending on your preferences). No writer has used the form so unpredictably. The best science fiction is always a commentary on our own lives here and now, but it’s very easy to forget that in the house of technological mirrors erected by so many sci-fi writers. Butler never lets you stop long enough to get lost in the mirrors because she pulls you right through the first impressions and twists us into many more layers of insight and compassion and profound confusion about what it is to be human, to live on a planet of chemicals and biological webs, an unmeasurable universe of microcosmic and macrocosmic life that we have barely begun to apprehend. I highly recommend the always brilliant Annalee Newitz’s column on Butler for a great overview of her work.

San Francisco–live if you want it

I’ve been carrying on like most normal folks around here: if you’re at one event, you’re missing 5 others. No matter what, there’s always too much going on. Today I went to the rally on City Hall steps to stop the Redevelopment Commission from gobbling up another huge chunk of Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood. Everyone seemed to realize that they were going to lose today’s ‘vote’ by the Redev. Commission, but it was a spirited gathering, reminding me of our days in the exact same spot 5 years ago when we were fighting the Seligman family over the Grant Building.

This is much bigger though, because as speaker after speaker noted, this is the last stand for San Francisco’s black population, already down from its 1970 peak of almost 100,000 to under 60,000. The machinery of displacement is being lined up and tuned up, and if it can be stopped, it will take a concerted movement of solidarity from people all over the city.

Here’s SF Bayview publisher Willie Ratcliff speaking (and do check out the paper and website, one of the best outlets of local journalism, covering New Orleans and Haiti like no other too):

And 84-year-old Edith Smith, not intending to speak as she arrived, decided to take the mic and make a passionate speech for her community:

It was a Tuesday at 3 p.m. so most people could not make a rally at City Hall at that time; consequently it was not a big crowd. There is also some real concern with this whole effort to resist redevelopment that a lot of people are so defeated already that there won’t be a sufficient mobilization. Another reason for an insufficient engagement is part of what I’ve vaguely been writing about lately: a general demise of familiar forms of doing politics. Some ANSWERistas came out to support the rally, but of course their typical signs and barking-style of rhetoric added nothing but their characteristic lustre of self-delusion and the despair that results from being berated by people of questionable mental health.

On April 12 at 8 p.m., we are hosting at CounterPULSE a Spring Talk on “Black Exodus/Black Eviction” with Willie Ratcliff, Alicia Schwartz of POWER, and filmmaker Kevin Epps.

But wait! There’s more!

Continue reading San Francisco–live if you want it

Critical Mass Feb 06–Why We Ride and Do’s and Don’ts!

Critical Mass rode again this past Friday… a much larger than usual ride, maybe 1,500 or more… got very spread out, at one point stretching from Stockton and Broadway all the way to the Cannery in Fisherman’s Wharf. I and Joel found ourselves in cell contact from front to back and managed to halt the ride for about 5 minutes, allowing most to catch up… wasn’t long though before we all split into multiple parts… I ended up in a group-let of about 75 that wound up to Cathedral Hill and went through the Whole Foods Parking lot, while another much larger group apparently made their way through the Moscone Center in South of Market… a lovely evening, great weather, great spirits… here’s the flyer I handed out, a rare re-emergence of Xerocracy, which I hope to see more of from others in the future!

Why We Ride

This is the 162nd consecutive month that San Francisco bicyclists have gathered to ride in Critical Mass. The world has certainly changed in thirteen and a half years, but the compelling reasons that draw us together every month are still very similar. In the earliest days of Critical Mass, riding together provided a euphoric alternative to the isolated danger most daily bicyclists face. These days San Francisco bicyclists are seldom alone on the road in the large north-eastern part of the city, from Bernal Heights and Twin Peaks to the bayshore. But we still live in an atomizing culture that seeks to reduce life to a series of cash transactions. Critical Mass exemplifies a rare and exuberant repudiation of that pecuniary logic, as it re-creates every month an authentic, open-ended, passionate, temporary community.

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