Recent Posts
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And Yet, We Go On
April 22, 2024
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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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Another hiatus from blogging… this time because I was busy getting our Shaping San Francisco celebration ready to roll last weekend, and as usual this time of year, the weather has been unbelievably beautiful, hence more long bike rides.
Last week I went out Mission Street from 24th all the way to the “top of the hill Daly City” (long time residents will know I’m referring to a ceaseless ad campaign that once dominated our airwaves, c. 1970s-80s). Going out Mission, over the hill at Highland and Richland and down across the Mission Overpass (crossing over the river once upon a time, now over I-280 freeway), then the long slog gradually uphill to Geneva and then further up to Daly City, it’s a different city. It’s a commonplace that the further reaches of San Francisco are very unlike the heart of the city, but this time I saw it differently. I don’t think I ever rode straight out Mission, being a traffic-choked four-lane commercial street for most of its length. But the architecture along those miles is actually surprisingly interesting. You can see layer after layer of old urban America, from abandoned Woolworth’s to strange 1930s buildings that are now used as photography studios or fast food joints, or what have you. Of course mortuaries still dot the boulevard, as they do Valencia at its southern end, since back in the day, the streetcar lines that would carry the coffins and funeral attendees to the cemeteries in Colma ran along those streets.
Continue reading A Bicycling City
Continuing to find serendipitous connections between unplanned coincidental reads… The two titles for this one are Barbara Ehrenreich’s new Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (Henry Holt & Co.: NY, 2005) and Magnus Mills’ novel The Scheme for Full Employment (Picador USA: NY, 2002). Mills’ novel is a very easy read, kind of like an extended short story. It’s really a one-joke story, but at the leisurely pace it’s told in, the rhythm is part of its pleasure. It tells the story of the “The Scheme for Full Employment, the envy of the world, the greatest undertaking ever conceived by men and women.” Under the “Scheme” UniVans are driven from depot to depot, full of parts for… UniVans. The UniVans are loaded and unloaded, disassembled and rebuilt, repaired and cleaned, by the employees working 8-hour shifts, everyone living in “glorious days.”
Of course it is such a perfect system that it ultimately destroys itself. A factional dispute breaks out between those who are “flat-day” workers (strict adherents to the 8-hour day) and those who are fond of the “early swerve” (getting signed off before 8 hours). As announced at the outset of the novel, they brought down the system themselves, and could not blame a bad leader or corrupt government.
Taken as an obvious allegory on the pointlessness of most work in this society, it drily sends up the work ethic and all the attendant neuroses that get people to keep each other in check, and to accept the ‘necessity’ of patently unnecessary behaviors. This accidentally fits together with Ehrenreich’s latest salvo surprisingly well.
Continue reading The Scheme(s)
It was a spectacular evening in San Francisco. At least 2,000 cyclists showed up for the 13th anniversary ride of Critical Mass here. I had a lot of great conversations during the ride. My bells were broken so, uncharacteristically, I spent the time talking instead of playing bells. I didn’t do much to document any of it either, even though beforehand I had thought about videotaping and interviewing people for their thoughts on the 13th anniversary. I took a few blurry pictures coming up Polk from Fisherman’s Wharf (that after a circuitous route through the Financial District and North Beach, to the tumultuous enthusiasm of most bystanders), and another batch of blurry shots alongside Union Square (after we’d poured eastward through the Broadway Tunnel and then south through the Stockton Tunnel–I guess we have to do the double-tunnel trip when it’s a significant anniversary…). Anyway, here’s the photo I like best, next to Union Square:
The ride went on for a long time, getting broken up into a half dozen clusters, causing much mayhem with angry motorists along Market and at a few other points along the way. The utter lack of internal self-management really showed last night, and is the inevitable result of years of just having Critical Mass happen, with little or no communication among participants before or during the ride. This unconscious approach came under some interesting, and deserved, criticism during an after-party at Station 40, where a benefit screening of “Still We Ride” was held.
Continue reading Critical Mass is Thirteen!
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