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July 31, 2007
Home and Away
Critical Mass was as fun as usual this past Friday. As I was imbibing my usual pre-ride gin and tonic someone reminded me it was the 10th anniversary of the mini-police riot that Willie Brown unleashed in 1997. Quite a contrast these days, with the police a very small presence, and sometimes actually helpful with corking and cooling down irate motorists. We somehow went up and down Lombard, the dumbest way up (from Van Ness straight up) but going down the other side was blissful as always...
Here's everyone walking up:
Here's a guy who wanted me to see how happy he was, a bit before we came to Lombard, still on Van Ness here:
Unlike New York, or Portland, where the police have been really petty and brutal and have reduced participation through aggressive punitive tactics, we're still enjoying something of a golden era of Critical Mass openness here in SF. Check out this cool video of the 3rd birthday of Brooklyn NY's (my birthplace!).
I'm happy to report that my book, Nowtopia, will be published by AK Press in April 2008. I put a lot of hours in to writing the second draft this past month, so I'm naturally delighted that the AK folks like it. My other big push of the past few weeks was assembling the "Towering Ideas" Fall/Winter Talks series at CounterPULSE. There's a version, not quite final, online at that link, but we'll have another beautiful Hugh D'Andrade poster in print soon. So a somewhat frenetic July has led to some good work that will bear fruit for months to come--always satisfying!
While absorbed with rewriting the book, I had a pang or two induced by critical comments from friends, regarding my incessant criticism of work and wage-labor, particularly my focus on the inherent alienation of selling time for money. Some people argued that actually it's quite satisfying to be paid to do work they care about... ok, fine. I cannot rebut someone's lived experience, and it's not my intention to instruct people how to feel about work. Still, I was glad to come across a review article in the August 16 New York Review of Books called "They're Micromanaging Your Every Move" by Simon Head. (Sorry they charge $3 to get it)... Head reviews several books, including Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch (that I also utilize as evidence in my book) that detail the rise of Enterprise Software and its role in radically intensifying work, productivity, and profits (and insecurity, emptiness, and anomie). I won't go into detail, but my new book has a long-ish synopsis of class history in the U.S. that also leads to a discussion of the "revolt against professionalism" that this review does a nice job of giving the groundwork for...
In the news recently was the sad, horrifying story of the man whose 11-month old son died in his car, forgotten by the father as he went to work. How could such a thing happen? The bereaved father, who was not charged with negligence, apparently had just started a new work schedule at the medical equipment company where he works. He drove straight to work with his son strapped in the child seat in back, forgot to go by the childcare center, and when his wife called at 3 in the afternoon, he ran out to find his son dead in the back of the closed, boiling hot car. So sad. Can this be a fatality we can attribute to the stupidity of modern work? I'd say it's a reasonable explanation.
On a much lighter note, I've also been enjoying exploring some familiar and less familiar sites here in the Bay Area, thanks to my sweetie still living in Palo Alto. Here are some photos from a fantastically clear day at the top of Coit Tower (and some of the always wonderful murals there too).
and then a shot from the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge, aka the wetlands at the southern edge of the SF Bay, looking across the mouth of Stevens Creek northward towards the fog over the northern peninsula:
Adriana and I had a great bicycling day on Sunday down there in the wetlands, and then after taking in the Simpsons movie (laughed a lot, it's just like the tv show!), we rode up to the Stanford preserve known as the Dish. Got these photos from that 75 minute walk through gorgeous foothills I'd never visited before:
This is Stanford's Hoover Tower with the Dumbarton Bridge behind it and Mt. Diablo on the horizon.
and this quirky straw sculpture, one of three at the beginning of the walk:
I really love summer hereabouts... one of the things I love the most is my weekly trips to the Heart of the City Farmers' Market where I go crazy buying fruit for my morning cereal. Everyone who knows me well knows how obsessed I am with this beginning for every morning:
Posted by ccarlsson at 08:45 PM | Comments (1)
July 16, 2007
Summering
I'm back in something approaching a 'normal' groove, happily reconnected to lover, friends, and family. The expensive housing prices here cover the cost of this amazing free air conditioning in San Francisco, which runs all summer long. Here's the daily flow of cooling pouring over Twin Peaks a week ago (it's been with us every day lately):
All you folks sweltering in some true summerish hell with temperatures and humidity over 90, eat your hearts out!
Most of us locals get pretty sick of being chilled all summer and have to go somewhere for real summer heat at least for a few days or weeks, but since I had a good dose in Turkey, Hungary and Germany already, I'm very happy to be back in the perfect temperatures of San Francisco!
Summer brings a weird combination of too much to do and some version of entertainment doldrums too. At CounterPULSE we're having trouble booking our theater this summer, which is also true of many other small-ish venues in town. This weekend we showed Peter Watkins' remarkable 6-hour film "La Commune/Paris 1871" over two nights to celebrate Bastille Day (We also served about 50 fresh crêpes and several folks brought good French champagne, so it was a fun party). Our pals at AK Press have this amazing DVD box set, which includes also a great documentary on the making of the film, at a reasonable price.
The always bombastic and worth-avoiding July 4 in San Francisco also features the opening day of the annual SF Mime Troupe show, called "Making A Killing." I'm going to stick to the old adage, if you can't say something nice, don't say anything. (I hated it!)... but I think it's a telling contrast to compare this show, which is basically a predictable and cliché-ridden musical that replays the characters, jokes, and sensibilities that the Mime Troupe has staged for 5 or 6 straight years now, to a weirdly whimsical and surprising new movie, also a musical, called "Colma: The Musical." I heard a lot of people buzzing about this movie and some good friends really raved about it so I went to see it, not knowing what I was in for... It's a story of three 18-year-olds just out of high school in Colma, which is the cemetery-filled suburb near San Francisco where all the dead bodies are buried, literally (1.5 million dead, about 1,200 actual residents). The funny take on life, the hilarious send-up of getting a job at the nearby Target, the interaction between the gay Filipino, the fag-hag(ish) gal, and the stiff and straight-ish assimilating "latino" guy are spot-on. The songs are hilarious, occasionally poignant, but the real success of this film is its ability to capture the feeling of life right now in 2007, something very real about what it's like to come of age in this political and social void... in a way it's far more politically on the mark than the vapid leftism of the Mime Troupe...
Getting further afield from the formal performances of stage and cinema I attended the annual Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo yesterday. It's a very San Franciscan treat, semi-punk, semi-mechanic, semi-Burning Man, all zany and 'at your own risk', in a junkyard just off Bayshore... They had their usual motley assortment of pedal-powered carny rides, a bevy of punk bands and periodic live runnings of the life-size MouseTrap, with human mice and hardhatted crew all scurrying about amidst the ornately beautiful rendition of the classic plastic board game. Here's some shots for your enjoyment:
Not atypical of San Francisco, to get to the Cyclecide event, we walked over Bernal Heights and took the pedestrian bridge down to Bayshore. On our way to the pedal-powered insanity, we encountered this, which I believe passes for "normal" in this country:
Overlooking this normalized lunacy is an advertising billboard pitching alcohol, the most common coping mechanism for people who spend too much time in such situations. On the billboard though, the confusion thickened, as the name of the liquor corresponds to the normal activities of pedestrians, but as you can see, the art indicates that it is somehow emerging from gears, much like a bicycle chain! Talk about mixed metaphors!
And back in San Francisco during the summer means lots of cycling around. By now I have quite a library of images of favorite spots, including this one, the Tennessee Hollow restoration in the Presidio. Here the Park Service removed a dump that had filled in the creek as early as the 1880s, and after some vigorous volunteer labor planting native species, the Hollow is coming back to life. Here are two shots, Oct. 05 and July 07...
Lastly, I'm frantically trying to plot out the entire Fall/Winter Talks at CounterPULSE right now, so the calendar can be printed in about 2 weeks. One event we've decided on for the Nature in the City side of the programming will be about Birds in San Francisco, so I'll leave you with some shots I love. First, a hawk devouring a pigeon on Thanksgiving Day (talk about your Thanksgiving bird!) at Dolores and 19th in 2003 (photo by Tristan Savatier); then a big ol' owl I've seen a lot at the top of the Esmeralda Steps on the Bernal Heights ring road, this photo taken about a week ago; and last another shot of a hawk perched on an electrical tower near Billygoat hill at the end of Castro on 30th Street.
Posted by ccarlsson at 05:40 PM | Comments (0)
July 03, 2007
Blimps, bikes, pipelines, uninsurance
Back home in San Francisco, my head still floating in Istanbul or somewhere in Central Europe, my body most definitely in San Francisco. Jet lag is still a bitch, even after nearly a week at home. Happy to land in the arms of my sweetie, but sad to leave my sweet daughter's company... that was a 50th birthday present for all time: five weeks with my daughter (part of it with my parents too), visiting the UK, Berlin, Budapest, Sofia, and Istanbul... the memories swirl...
I really hate air travel now. The absurd Theater of Security in which you have to take off your shoes (only in the U.S.) and have your belongings examined is all about learning to live passively in a police state. As I overheard a friend say the other day, "when I'm in an airport I'm like an obedient dog." It has NOTHING to do with security, that's for sure. On this trip I had my tube of posters stopped by some rent-a-cop in London, so I had to check it, only to have the airlines mangle and destroy the tube and a number of the irreplaceable posters inside... fuckers!
I never much liked the weird sensation of getting on plane on one side of the globe and popping out a half day later on the other side. I'd much rather take longer to get there and make the physical and mental transition it ought to take in something closer to real time... my favorite idea that percolated up during this trip (including 3 days spent on the practically moribund Orient Express) is to resuscitate travel by airship, i.e. blimp! Think of it, a journey by air, not so far from the ground so you can watch the meandering countryside or ocean as it passes beneath you, moving at liesurely 100-200 mph, putting down in inclement weather or for an occasional refueling/rest stop... And of course for all those carbon footprint worriers, the blimp could be powered by wind and solar... the future of air travel? let's hope so!
As for ground travel, I was glad to return to SF just in time for the June Critical Mass, a rather huge ride of 3000-4000, happy and energetic as it has been for months now. Here's a couple of shots at the corner of Turk and Scott during the ride. This is when about 75% of the ride has already gone by...
Critical Mass keeps rolling, as do the insane twists and turns of global geopolitics. The mundane and simple act of riding home together once a month can seem unimportant when juxtaposed to the war and mayhem that continues to frame the "great game" to control world oil supplies. Still my favorite analyst of how this process is unfolding is on Asia Times, MK Bhadrakumar, who has yet another illuminating piece recently. Interesting to compare this to today's Democracy Now, in which Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation is interviewed about the Putin visit to the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. It's all about Cold War redux (or not) and Bush Senior's legacy and the factions within the US... not a mention of the insights that Bhadrakumar offers about Putin's maneuevers in global oil and gas and the abject defeat of US interests they represent.
If you're a regular reader of my blog you already saw versions of this, but if you're interested in the final, edited and tidied up version of my look at the recent anti-G8 protest in Rostock, Germany, the article has been published on Mute's website here. I could be a lot bleaker about it than I was in the article, but that doesn't serve anyone. I was glad to get a nice note from John Holloway who said he liked it. He gave a great speech after Chumbawamba at the Rostock rock concert on the 2nd night, which I hope Mute will also post on their website. If not, maybe I'll drop it in here later.
I went out to see Michael Moore's latest, Sicko, the other day. Much as I share the general antipathy to Moore himself, and can't miss the irony of an enormously obese man making a movie about a dysfunctional health care system, I like Sicko for several reasons. For one thing it shows myopic Americans that other countries have a much better system than we have here in the supposedly "best country in the world" with the supposedly "best health care in the world." It also focuses, intelligently, on the Big Lie of insurance coverage rather than the obvious problem of 50 million people with no safety net. Most people with insurance expect to have their medical needs met when they arise and are shocked to learn that they've been paying for a bureaucracy whose main job is to deny their benefits when they come due. Sicko shows this with great clarity. One can object to Moore's rosy portrayal of state-run health care in Canada, UK, France and Cuba, which can surely be as blundering and incompetent as any US hospital. But the interviews with doctors in which they declare their pleasure in being able to actually do their jobs without the constraint of what insurance will pay for is refreshing. It's a great example of how markets, profits and money constrain us from doing work that needs doing, and it's a lesson that could be applied far beyond the health care system. I appreciate Sicko's success at juxtaposing a medical system dedicated to making profits and therefore denying benefits to a system that is dedicated to taking care of people and therefore no one is denied what they need (at least not by policy design like in the U.S.).
I was dismayed at dinner later the same night when we tried to explain the movie's main arguments and two different people immediately spouted rightwing talking points as though they were obviously true: "I wouldn't want the guvmint running the health care system!" said one person. "We need a system that promotes economic growth, that allows us as consumers to spend our money as we see fit!" said another... That's when coming home to the U.S. feels like I'm really in the wrong place. So many people so easily bamboozled by propaganda... America must be the dumbest place on the planet!
Anyway, I'm glad the conversation is being stimulated by the movie. Maybe something good can come of it, something that unites the people who do the work with the people who depend on it, cutting out the bureaucracies and insurance companies who parasitically occupy the vast middle of the system.
It was great to come home and meet Maizie Jade Lazzara Lee, who is here with her happy mom, Marina, and yours truly, glad to welcome a new creative spirit into the world... Welcome Maizie!
Posted by ccarlsson at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)