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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Funny to get a news feed indicating that “nowtopia” had popped up in an essay over on Counterpunch, written by a Torontoan… it’s a lovely essay, and flattering to see nowtopia becoming a useful noun already!
In May 2008 Nowtopia was published. It’s been a year and a quarter and I’ve had the great fortune to travel to many places and present the book, meeting incredible people, reconnecting with old friends, and it looks like I’m not finished yet! There is a good chance I’ll be making a trip to Buffalo this fall, and to Scandinavia for a mini-tour prior to the Copenhagen Climate Conference. The questions that I try to prepare myself for are the inevitable queries a couple of years from now: Was the analysis in Nowtopia wrong? Is this argument about a transition to a new way of knowing life really happening? What’s the evidence? And what about the notion that this is a process driven by a working class recomposing itself in terms of useful work?
I don’t actually think I’ll be able to answer those questions in two or three years. Part of my analysis gets me off the hook, because it doesn’t have to show up in a given amount of time to be “true.” On the other hand, if there is nothing happening that corresponds to my analysis, that might serve to debunk it, of course.
 A bit of Potrero Hill on Kansas, hidden from through traffic. Continue reading Ruminating on Nowtopia
 Paris Commune, 1871: citizens wait for shooting to stop. I live in San Francisco’s Mission District, going back to 1987. It’s a neighborhood undergoing intense gentrification, even with the current economic and housing crises. Sometimes I think with all the cafes and bars and trendy new galleries and boutiques that we’re sliding towards becoming a Greenwich Village.
There are different populations living here, among each other and side by side, but for the most part we don’t overlap or intersect that much. I’m basically invisibile when I walk past young Latino drug dealers on a nearby corner. They don’t see me (I’m not a customer) and I don’t see them (eye contact can lead to dangerous encounters, I learned growing up in Chicago and Oakland as a kid). Similarly, chronic alcoholic homeless men roll past my building all day, sometimes cajoling a buck out of me, but mostly not seeing me as I don’t see them. A few blocks away a modern-day “shape-up” goes on all day every day, where hundreds of mostly undocumented immigrant men stand on Cesar Chavez Blvd. hoping to be selected for some short-term day labor.
My partner Adriana has recently been going out to interview some of these day laborers, and also started a similar process with some of the “homeys” on the corner. Suddenly the boundaries of invisibility start to crumble. The individual lives, the specific voices, thoughts, and motivations of what were generic humans come into focus, no longer easy to ignore. The stories are unique, compelling, sometimes hard to believe. As Adriana is writing about this herself, I cannot divulge much, but yesterday she met some of the kids on the corner (they’re probably 18 or 19 at least) and they described themselves as “norteños,” those from Northern California, and they defend the campesinos, they are “Cesar Chavez’s bodyguards,” and as soldiers, when they’re doing time, their elders command them to learn their histories. Who knew? Fascinating that the local corner’s drug dealing crew see themselves in a politicized lineage that is almost overtly left-wing.
Continue reading Parallel Universes
posted originally at sf.streetsblog.org…
I was glad to see “We Are the World” on the ridiculously inadequate Climate Change bill that finally emerged from the corrupt U.S. Congress. Sadly, the bill could only emerge with the support of a number of mainstream environmental lobbyists in DC, who clearly have sold out to get something, anything, in the direction of addressing the climate catastrophe. Here in San Francisco there’s an inordinate amount of enthusiasm for the Bike Plan getting okayed by part of the city government, even though it’s still under an injunction, and even when that finally gets lifted, it’ll take three years to finish this Plan, one which will have relatively little effect on this car-dominated city. In some strange way the Climate Bill and the Bike Plan are eerily similar: sources of great pride to those who believe in incremental change, “the best we can do in the current political climate” to political realists, but falling way short, sorely disproportionate to the actual needs they ostensibly address. (An article in the UK Guardian Weekly June 5-11 edition “Climate Change Creates New “˜Global Battlefield'” quotes a new report from Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum that there are already 300,000 deaths a year due to the warming climate, and 300 million people have already been affected!)
 New Bike Plan! Let's Get Naked and Celebrate! Critical Mass San Francisco, June 2009. I’m not saying anything that most people can’t readily see if we pause from our daily frenzy long enough to think about the bigger picture. I’ll go out on a limb (barely) and say here and now that the Climate Catastrophe conference scheduled for Copenhagen, Denmark in December will fail to do anything meaningful. It’s not hard to predict, since even with a 60-vote Democratic (comedian-reinforced) Majority in the U.S. Senate, there’s no chance of a treaty being ratified that addresses the structure of the U.S. economy or the geographic arrangement of our dwellings, our transit infrastructure, or our energy use. And yet, this is simply what is necessary to have ANY CHANCE AT ALL of averting catastrophic ecological and economic collapse”¦ funny to think that things are that stark, and hard to see if we don’t stop and look, but there it is.
 Bike and Irreligious Pride! Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence indulging in the June 09 Critical Mass... I get a lot of readings coming my way. Here’s a few to help you source what I’m arguing, in case you’re not sure” “this all seems rather hysterical,” “the sky isn’t really falling is it?”, and so on”¦ In the June 29 New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert profiles James Hansen, the NASA director who was shut up by Bush Administration decree, but wouldn’t go quietly. He’s still at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and in the article, Kolbert traces his emergence as one of the world’s most eloquent and urgent climate catastrophe bell-ringers. Continue reading Things Are Heating Up!
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