Recent Posts
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Silicon Valley: A Living History
May 6, 2024
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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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The Pacific Edge, a 1990 novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, is an Orange County utopia set in the 2060s. The elder radical, who is brought out of his mountain retreat to help his grandson and his allies combat a local development plan, turns out to be born March 22, 1984, about a month before my own daughter! That tickled me.
I really enjoy Robinson’s writings. His later work is more mature and really awesome in its detail and command of psychology, politics, ecology, and more (esp. the Mars trilogy, and Years of Rice and Salt). But having recently completed my own utopian novel, I was excited to rediscover, unread, on my shelf, this last volume of his Southern California trilogy. It’s an odd utopia, based as far as I can tell, on a gradualist, legal tranformation of U.S. society in which the corporations and multinationals were systematically dismembered, their wealth and resources distributed downward into dense networks of locally owned businesses. Income and property ownership are capped by law.
Continue reading The Pacific Edge
I would like to blog more often, but last week I was really booked solid. In addition to several meetings for our upcoming opening at CounterPULSE, I drummed with the Committee for Full Enjoyment at the otherwise impotent and boring anti-war march last Saturday the 19th.
That night I shared a podium with Josh MacPhee of Stencil Pirates and Erick Lyle with a charming and funny slideshow of cement etchings in SF. My role, after the intermission, was to present some clips from the Greenpepper “Precarity” DVD, and to start a discussion on the theme of precariousness, the “Precariat” and the “Cognitariat”, all by way of setting the stage for a future launch of “HeadFirst!” (my planned next foray into magazine publishing, to appear in late 05 or early 06).
Continue reading A Public Week
That would be me, I guess. This past Tuesday, my sweetheart, Mona Caron, put one over on me, with the help of 25 of our close friends. It was my 48th birthday last Friday, March 11, so she was going to take me out to dinner Tuesday night, just the two of us. We started out, and I failed to register that she was uncharacteristically dragging her feet. We crossed 24th Street at Folsom and surprisingly ran into Med-o, Allyson and Ruby in front of the just-evicted La Luna restaurant. Chatted for a bit, and invited them to join us. A few steps later, there’s Steven Bodzin across the street with his bike and a friend, so we hail him and he comes over to say hello. On the corner of Shotwell, Anna and Suzahna are standing and talking, so we stop to say hello. We’re only a short block from home and already we’ve run into 6 friends. Weird!
Continue reading The Most Gullible Boy in the World!
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