Nowtopian

Critical Mass is Thirteen!

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!

Twin Peaks and a Phat Farm

I’ve taken to big bike rides up the steepest hills around. Lately, I’ve been heading to the top of Twin Peaks a couple of times a week, up and down Potrero Hill, McLaren Park, Bernal Heights, Nob Hill and even Hawk Hill. Here’s a photo I took standing at the top of Hawk Hill in the Marin Headlands, after a great ride over Pacific Heights, up and over the Presidio, and then the bridge.

It’s a great workout, not just for my ever thickening body, but my head too. Riding through the city for a few hours, taking weird routes up steep hills, I always find new pleasures, odd views, strange happenings. I even went to the Cable Car museum the other day, which I’d never done.

Heading up to Twin Peaks is my most common ride. It’s a big surprise: once you get up all the steep blocks (like 25th between Hoffman and Grand View, then Clipper to the top–that’s serious!) and then find your way to Twin Peaks Blvd., you are suddenly out of the city. It’s quiet, the aliens close in (eucalyptus, french broom, german ivy and a bunch more) and the hum of local insects rises with the sun’s heat, or on some days, with the swirling fog. It’s magical. The city is far away, glimpses of it surround you, but you’re above it, floating away in an altogether “natural” space. And yet, on a clear day, I’m checking in with the whole town, first the haze over the bay beyond Mission Bay and downtown, then the southern reaches of the city with San Bruno Mountain looming in the distance, the west side with its boxy landscape stretching to the sea, Sutro Tower standing like a 19th century apparition out of H.G. Wells, views to the north reveal that red bridge poking out of rolling hills, citified until the bulging green Presidio, brown and dry across the gate… At the top at last, sweaty and refreshed, Market Street’s diagonal draws our attention back to the heart of the city.

Continue reading Twin Peaks and a Phat Farm

Leftism in the Streets and a Memoir

Yes, it’s the “big anti-war demo” day today. And it totally lacks anything remotely approaching excitement or curiosity. It is utterly predictable. I won’t bother describing the event beforehand, even though it would be ridiculously easy to do so. Suffice to say that I’ll go out and drum with my pals in the sun of a late San Francisco September Saturday. The die-hard leftists who organize these things give themselves enormous credit for doing so. Most people I know either won’t go, or find it absurd to give the answeristas any credit. They make the reservation but the rest of us go and have a dinner party and never notice them again (their control over the speakers matters not a whit since we don’t listen or hang around for the speeches anyway). But what does make these things worthwhile, on a fairly grassroots level, is that it’s a space for networking, catching up with old friends, and sometimes those connections lead to something worthy down the road.

In fact, “mass” demonstrations like this, if I don’t have my own agenda of drumming and seeing friends, make me feel quite stupid and impotent. I hate being a body count, instrumentalized by someone else’s agenda.

Which leads me to today’s short book review, of Margot Pepper’s memoir of being in Cuba during the “Special Period” after the Soviet Union fell and their economy was thrown into a deep decline (Through the Wall: A Year in Havana, or get it at Modern Times or City Lights or any decent independent bookstore) Margot is an excellent, poetic writer (her earlier volume of poetry, At This Very Moment, is really excellent; she also wrote a few things we published in Processed World over the years.)

Through the Wall was kind of hard for me to read. Not because it’s not well written, but because it is an honest portrayal of a relatively bad (in a common sort of way) relationship, a relationship whose emotional foundation runs parallel to her own ambiguous commitment to “socialism,” Cuba, leftism, her father (an exiled Hollywood 10 director) and her own feelings about revolution.

Continue reading Leftism in the Streets and a Memoir