Nowtopian

Work Worth Doing

Plum tree bursting with fruit at Mullen and Franconia on the north side of Bernal Heights, June 2009.

I’m deep into researching a new book project these days, covering San Francisco history from the late sixties to the late seventies. It’s incredibly fun to be in discussion with a couple dozen great writers and historians, learning as I go how much more complicated and nuanced all these stories are than my first (rather glib) overview. It goes hand in hand with the ongoing push on the wiki FoundSF.org, which is getting almost 5,000 visitors a month already. We redesigned it a couple of weeks ago, so if you only saw it once a few months ago, have another look. And we’re going to have a much simpler system for submitting material by the end of summer. Part of the fun of that project, and part of what makes it so damn infinite, is getting turned on to new resources. Case in point: via my friends at the Bernal History Project I learned about this amazing photo collection by Charles W. Cushman at Indiana University.

A couple of great books on local history have further enriched my work. Just out is “Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo” edited by Annice Jacoby (full disclosure: I have a short piece in it about Mona Caron’s Market Street Railway Mural, but in fact it only bears a passing resemblance to what I actually wrote, which was not a big deal anyway.) Jaime Cortez has a great article in this book, as do another half dozen contributors, but the best thing is having a fancy coffee table book with such fantastic reproductions that really captures the breadth and depth of the street art scene in San Francisco going back to the 1970s. The other book that transported me to a time before mine is “Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era” by Elizabeth Pepin and Lewis Watts.Â Between the amazing photos, reminiscences, and narrative text, it’s an incredible history all in one volume. Drives home the sense of loss regarding the black community in San Francisco, which of course is a story still unfolding, though the geographic focus has shifted to Bayview-Hunter’s Point from the once vibrant Fillmore.

That photo I started with highlights another theme I’m increasingly interested in, urban agriculture. In San Francisco there are a couple of efforts underway, one called SF Glean, and the other Produce to the People. They are discussing a closer working relationship on one of the lists I’ve been lurking on, but in any case, they’re each doing great work connecting hungry people, willing workers, and untended fruit trees in the city, of which there are many. I came upon that plum tree above yesterday, with a rich bounty ready to eat, and a couple of weeks ago I found this loquat tree on the south side of Bernal:

Loquats ready to harvest on Bernal, early June 2009.

Continue reading Work Worth Doing

Commons and its Enemies

IBM’s latest slogan is “We can make a smarter world” or something idiotic like that”¦ here, again, in a dumb marketing campaign we immediately confront the basic problem. The world is an incredible intelligence already. We humans really don’t understand it well at all”¦ It might make sense for a corporation like IBM to invite us to become smarter by learning more about natural systems, how we can redesign our existence on a paradigm of sensible insertion into those natural systems, but to hubristically claim that corporations could” or worse, should” go about “making” a “smarter world,” is just breathtakingly dumb.

Not that I expect anything different from corporations. They are always filling our mental and social spaces with their insipid messages. Once in a while they have a bad moment, like yesterday when Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company decided to settle out of court for about $15 million rather than face the shitstorm of bad publicity that a trial was going to put them through. The case was brought by the relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian activist of the Ogoni people who was murdered by the Nigerian government in an unsuccessful effort to quell the ongoing resistance in the Nigerian Delta to the incredible mayhem, death and pollution wrought by multinational oil companies like Shell and Chevron.

Image drawn by Jim Swanson in 1996, dramatizing the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa by the Nigerian military and its multinational sponsors.

It was a small but important step towards ending the impunity with which multinational corporations are able to wreak havoc across the planet. Another exciting development just happened yesterday when the Peruvian congress voted to suspend two laws that had been shoved through by the neoliberal Alan Garcia regime, using the Free Trade agreement with the U.S. as a pretext, which were designed to remove the traditional land-tenure rules that preserved indigenous cultures against global energy giants. Mass protest in the Amazonian part of Peru led to a horrible massacre of 500 people by the Peruvian military last week, and now the national parliament has entered the fray to try to defuse the situation. Kudos to the intense organizing and protest of the Peuvian indigenous who have, temporarily at least, halted the oil and timber companies.

Continue reading Commons and its Enemies

At the Edge of Commercialization: The Maker Faire

Following the siren song of the Fossil Fool, or expecting to anyway (he was very late!), I joined a surprisingly large contingent of San Francisco cyclists to ride the 20-odd miles to the Maker Faire at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds. Gray foggy skies kept us cool as we headed out, and right away the etiquette of a Critical Mass broke down, as we separated into ever smaller groups of cyclists, broken up by the red lights.

San Francisco cyclists leave on Valencia May 30 for the Maker Faire 20 miles south in San Mateo.

We headed for a bayshore route, and took Bayshore Blvd southward, zigzagging across the freeway before finally getting into the relative open of the toxic landfill that was once San Francisco’s garbage dump in Brisbane lagoon. It’s a nice place to ride now, presumably relatively safe for passersby, but known to harbor some of the hottest of toxic hot spots that rim the bay. We slipped under the freeway again to regroup under San Bruno Mountain’s last spring greenery (we were in a sprawling Marriott parking lot), but a lot of the musical accompaniment was so far behind us that we never saw them until hours later at the Faire.