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The Root of All Evil
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Post-Pandemic Melancholia . . . Same As It Ever Was?
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Chronicle of Deaths Foretold
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Reparations is the Least We Should Do
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War and Anti-War
February 22, 2023
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Misleading title? Probably… Spent another fun San Francisco weekend taking full advantage of local treats. Friday night happened upon a listing in the SF Bay Guardian for an interesting program called “Invisible Cities” and much to my surprise, it was at CounterPULSE! So we took it in, Tim Barsky and an amazing beat-boxer named Each and the third character, a lithe and charming female tap dancer whose name escapes me. A work-in-progress, part of Joe Landini’s Summer Performance Festival that’s going to be running at CounterPULSE every weekend in August. I’d say, check it out!
Earlier Friday afternoon I sat with my pal Jon Winston in the relatively obscure Franklin Square Park at Bryant and 16th, across from the former site of Seals Stadium, and he interviewed me for his Bikescape podcast. First one of those I’ve done… yet another radical democratization of broadcast technology. Now anyone can be a radio producer, and apparently millions are jumping on it… not too different than writing a column on a blog, and in the same way, how will anyone find you?
The bicycling fun continued on Saturday when Rai S. convened a perimeter ride around San Francisco, leaving from Tire Beach, a.k.a. Warm Water Cove. We spent intensive exploration time along the southern waterfront, seeing up close Heron Head Park, India Basin, Yosemite Creek and Candlestick State Rec Area, all with spectacular vistas of the bay and back towards the fog looming at the top of the hills. Here are some photos for you:
Continue reading Seeing through technology
First let me just urge you to enjoy yourself by going to Tom Flocco and reading his lovely press release.
But I wanted to post a quickie… I had a couple of great moments in modernity over the weekend that I forgot to mention in the last post. First I was bicycling down Folsom and looked at a blonde woman in her car going the other way at a stoplight. She was kissing her cellphone, I mean REALLY kissing it! I suppose she was sending some lucky someone her big fat lips, but really!… Is that romantic? Ouch!
Then I was at that nightmarish warehouse we know as Costco and standing in line with my two bottles of gin and suddenly everything stopped. The system crashed and all the checkout lines stopped. If you’ve ever been at any big box store, esp. on a weekend afternoon, imagine the curiously quiet and empty feeling as everyone stops. The line isn’t moving. The clerks are calling out to managers. They can’t sell the goods unless the scanners and cash registers are working and they’re all dependent on some master computer (ha ha). Managers are frantically phoning. No one is buying! (Can those of us who’ve been waiting in line just please take our things and go home? We’ve already paid with our time, after all!) I turned to the middle class white guy behind me (most of the San Francisco shoppers are Asian and Latinos, and mostly not first-language English speakers, so that was already anomalous) and mentioned how easy it is for the whole civilization to just suddenly grind to a halt, to which he merely grimaced. It felt cinematic. I was thrilled, grinning like an idiot. Two minutes later, sigh, it all started up again.
Tonight there was a community meeting to discuss how to calm and humanize Cesar Chavez Street. I was thrilled to find out that the other attendees were ready to get a lot more seriously radical than I would have imagined. In about 10 minutes of brainstorming, people of all ages called for taking back the streets, digging up the pavement and putting in green spaces, daylighting the creek, planting grapes to honor Cesar Chavez, and generally to completely alter our sense of San Francisco’s landscape… now that’s taking the machinery by the throat!
Been a busy beaver lately, lots of socializing and being in the ol’ midsummer groove. This past weekend was a typically crowded and satisfying time: Friday night was our local Critical Mass. It was a very spirited ride, wrapping around the waterfront to Fisherman’s Wharf, back up Columbus to eventually two-time the Broadway Tunnel (where good pal Ben Monopod got creamed by a ‘fellow’ cyclist, ending up in the hospital with surgery on his separated shoulder… he’s out now, with pins!)… then back downtown again and over and out Market, down Van Ness, circling at Mission for a change, turning eastward down Division to Potrero where we all enjoyed the newly striped Potrero Avenue. I lived on Potrero for 11 years and always dreamed of the day when it would no longer be a six-lane pseudofreeway monstrosity. Now it’s four lanes, with left turn bulbs, bike lanes on both sides, and is a teensy step towards human habitability. A fun tour of 24th Street full of odd interactions with drunk teenagers who weren’t used to such an overwhelming posse storming their turf, but eventually the ride broke up in mid-Mission into a half dozen smaller groups and everyone found their bar or park to hang out in.
Saturday I gave my latest Labor History Bike Tour. Only about 4 of the 15 reservations showed up, but another 15 folks did too, so it was a perfect size, about 20, and though the experience probably suffers from chronic TMI, everyone seemed to enjoy my polemical style and historical contextualizing… I also got to start us off with 15 minutes of labor history highlights from Shaping SF in the CounterPULSE theater, and then a good 1.5 mile loop through SOMA and NE Mission to start. I really like doing bike tours, even though they are truly exhausting. So, the CounterPULSE lunch forums are kaput, but instead I’ll be doing semi-regular bike tours on historical and cultural themes. Peter Brastow of Nature In The City and I are collaborating on advancing a public engagement with the politics of San Francisco’s nature, and will be conducting periodic Nature in the City bike rides, starting on the last Sunday in September (mark your calendars!).
Continue reading Peace and War
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