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February 16, 2008
In Search of a Public Life
Now that I can get up and down and out and about, pushing and prodding the limits of my prepositional life, I'm SOOO glad it's our semi-usual February summer. I actually made the walk to the top of Bernal Heights with Adriana a couple of days ago, and have been bicycling around town a lot, though quite slowly as befits an old (recently incapacitated) man... The plum and cherry trees are in spectacular bloom. Here's the plum tree outside my window, followed by a cherry tree we found on Bernal...
Taking advantage of our city's beauty, walking around my neighborhood and the nearby hill (more photos of this recent walk at the bottom), but it's all in a much larger context of a decaying society and its current political life. I've been thinking a lot lately about how ardently people are embracing the Obama campaign, what it means. I'm obviously unmoved by it, and find myself scratching my head in my quadrennial puzzlement at the urgency of people's beliefs, their willingness to swallow all this vague rhetoric spooned up by a guy who is bought and paid for by the likes of Goldman Sachs and the Illinois coal industry. A guy who won't rule out nuclear power! and yet is treated as the embodiment of major change... and to be sure, he is a highly symbolic form of change on the surface at least. If everyone's secret wishes come true, he'll actually be a pwogwessive once in office, sweeping aside the neocons in favor of a New Green Deal... it'll still be capitalism, still dominated by corporations, but maybe, just maybe, a bit more humane, a partially restored social fabric and safety net, a creative approach to intractible problems like climate change, carmeggedon, drug wars, imperialism...
Oh, sorry! I got carried away. I think Goldman Sachs and Zbigniew Brzenzski and the many other major backers and advisers from the ruling class who are rallying around Obama may be the wing of capital who see the need for some real reform, after two terms of brazen looting and a foreign policy that has sent the U.S. plummeting over the cliff. The financial system is unravelling, the world market is in for a period of retrenchment, renewed nationalistic protectionism, and probably some kind of global rules on investment and capital flows... or at least, one might presume that's what Obama promises the monied interests behind his blandly passionate and vaguely populist words...
I can't help but notice that his success is working in a way that's quite similar to the upswell of enthusiasm Matt Gonzalez got in San Francisco in 2003 for Mayor. Then and now there are a lot of cultural signifiers and winking going on, never being too explicit about any actual programs or commitments, but by establishing a tone that embodies cultural yearning and expectations, people get motivated and enthusiastic. It's a telling lesson in contemporary Spectacular Society. Being specific and detailed and programmatic is boring. Being inspirational, remaining opaque enough to be everything to everyone, and promising to fulfill everyone's inchoate desire for MUCH more, a BIG change in the pitifully limited lives we're forced to live in modern capitalism...well, that works in this image-centric political era. Like Reagan (who Obama spoke about as an important reference point for his own politics, whether or not he actually endorsed the policies that were carried out in Reagan's term), Obama invokes a moral stance, one that unites Americanism and prosperity, comfort and safety. For anyone on the left with any kind of critique of U.S. imperialism and domestic domination by unaccountable corporations (not to mention the basic institution of wage-labor that underpins it all), this sweeping patriotic rhetoric is pretty hard to stomach... but if you think of yourself as political AT ALL in the U.S., the presidential election is for most people the MOST important arena for public participation. And the circus of the campaign (taking on all the trappings of an exciting pennant race these days) can be quite fulfilling compared to the dull, meaningless isolation in which most people function day-to-day. For another view of the Obama phenomenon, check out Barbara Ehrenreich's Unstoppable Obama that was on Common Dreams a couple of days ago.
The dearth of public life and public space is an important frame to understand the four-year suspension of disbelief that drives presidential politics as a popular form. An article about the recent Northern Illinois University killer speaks to the empty banality of American daily life. It came to me via my pal Eddie, written by Mark Ames who wrote a book called "Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond," and it does a good job of revealing the disgust percolating just beneath the surface of an insignificant Midwestern college. Ames' argument that the killer was reacting to the emptiness of the life he was succeeding at is repudiated by most of the comments attached to the piece, but I think he's spot-on. There are so few avenues for expression, for public participation in a life with meaning (the presidential election is a compelling arena for those that fall into it, but for more people, it's another of a long line of empty rituals that underscore our basic powerlessness). It's obviously insane to go out and murder a bunch of people and then suicide as a "statement" but it's hard to argue with the finality of its punctuation. Did the shooter have a critique of his empty life? Who knows? But the increasing frequency of such flip-outs (sci-fi writer John Brunner called such people "muckers" after running amok, in his early 1970s novel Stand on Zanzibar, a book that was amazingly prescient about this) cannot be only seen in terms of personal psychology and individual failure. The social context we're living in is producing this response because, in part, there are so few other apparent ways to act meaningfully. In a life drained of purpose and enjoyment, why not go out in a blaze of mayhem? It makes a twisted kind of sense.
San Franciscans are not so despairing in general. Maybe our social fabric is a bit more coherent than places like Dekalb Illinois? Or perhaps it's a coherence that is more tolerant and realistic and not requiring of its participants to pretend to be happy with a life that is plainly unsatisfactory?... hard to say. But here's a couple of exmaples, both quite minor to be sure, of ways locals are currently making public statements and engaging with public life. First, I saw this flyer for an anti-war vigil in the Haight a few days ago. Note its insistence on a single-purpose demonstration (reflecting a frustration that I've heard often enough about how many people bring multidimensional concerns to every public demo... seems fine to me, but if you're in the world of seeking 10 seconds on the news, you want to "stay on message" I guess)...There are also special offers at the bottom to entice participation...
A permanent monument in Golden Gate Park is the AIDS grove, which I'd never visited before... it's a lovely small forest with many dedications covering benches and plaques, but the nicest was the centerpiece, this circular list of people that have died of AIDS and were memorialized by their friends here...
This beautifully establishes a public space for personal and public grief and mourning. It is very moving to sit in the grove and think about friends who have passed...
A rather different use of public space, moving in its own way, is this small patch along the Bernal Heights ring road. The local gardener has done some serious work to make this lovely jade garden, but has had to post the sign to ask for public respect...
A short distance further east is a small community garden, another of my favorite public features of San Francisco life (there are over 100 such community gardens scattered around the city)... Here I am, on my happy return to walking uphill, visiting the garden:
In a city covered with advertising and private property, there are not so many places for public expression... the sidewalks, though, are always available. Here someone had a fit of philosophical generosity and left it etched into cement,
and then perhaps another person decided to extend it with this chalked addition...
Before we made our way up the hill, we paused in Precita Park, brilliantly green in the February sun. Here's a lovely addition to the park, this bench on a pretty mosaic foundation... Adriana is smiling from the bench.
We had a nice visit to some friends for Valentines Day, another example of the silly effort by commercial society to manufacture public life out of shopping rituals. But with that in mind, we had to laugh at the site of this mouse trying to get her chocolate right in the middle of the BART tracks as we waited for a train home.
The next day we were walking on 25th Street and saw this juxtaposition, which can only be titled "I missed your call!"
And with all the plastic junk, the bags, the wrappings, that we all have to dispense with no matter how hard we might try to avoid gathering it all, it's worth remembering that it all goes somewhere. And it's increasingly obvious that that somewhere is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I've written about waste semi-regularly, and I always like coming back to it, since it's not going away! Check out this recent piece in the UK Independent on the Giant Garbage Dump in Pacific Ocean...
Posted by ccarlsson at 10:51 PM | Comments (1)
February 12, 2008
Hill Help for Bikes!
Having resumed bicycling my mood is much improved. The weather has been simply amazing too, plum and cherry trees are bursting into bloom all over the place, including in my back yard. I used to ride to the top of Twin Peaks every couple of weeks, sometimes more often, but now, with my hobbled sciatic nerve, I have to ride really slow, and the more I have to push against gravity, the more it hurts. So I'm not doing any sprints or climbs. By way of the SF Bike Coalition's regular email, I was pointed to this lovely video of a very simple cable bike lift in Trondheim, Norway... I had imagined a system of tow ropes and translucent bridges in my novel. But this is a beautiful fix for folks who want to cycle, but cannot deal with climbing steep hills. Check it out!
Posted by ccarlsson at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2008
My neighborhood
Finally emerging from my month and a half hibernation with sciatica. I actually rode my bike to the Farmer's Market today and then up to see Adriana's new apartment in the Haight. Couldn't ride the whole way, had to walk about 6 blocks at one point, just too much pressure on the sciatic nerve. But I didn't do any damage and I made it back home after a few hours of convalescing in her really cool room with a big curving bay window looking west-northwest at Golden Gate Park and the Panhandle from Shrader and Page, top floor of the SE corner. About 5 days ago I had my first tentative walk around the neighborhood, making it about 16 blocks altogether. It still hurts but nothing like before, so I think I just have to work through it now... Anyway, it coincided with the first sunny day in weeks after relentless storms and rain. I took a bunch of photos. Here's a nice shot of Mission Street with a very green Bernal Hts. in the background, and then a typical--but so lovely--produce market, which are abundant around here...
I felt so great just strolling around the area. I made my way to drop off a DVD, which took me past the abandoned gas station on Valencia and 23rd.
What is up with all the abandoned gas stations? One after another has been closing, getting replaced with condominiums, which I suppose is the fate for this large lot too. Obviously I don't mind losing gas stations, but it seems strange that in a city that is gaining more population, generally affluent and car-owning, the gas stations are slowly closing. I was imagining (at least 20 years ago when I first noticed this trend) that it had something to do with the oil companies restricting availability to drive up the price... but all they needed for that was GW Bush and an invasion of Iraq (it went from $20/barrel in 2000 to $90+ now)... Not that I really care. I ride a bike or walk so the hell with the gas stations! But couldn't we do better than an endless series of 4 and 5 story luxury condos going up on Valencia?
In the next block I passed the new City College campus on Valencia, a pretty impressive structure:
I guess it might be interesting to eventually teach local history there... we'll see. Still don't have that college degree that makes it possible to get hired and no plans to get one either!
Right beyond the CCSF campus is this old drugstore on the corner, recently revealed by the brunch-serving proprietor of Boogaloo's that occupies it now. But note the condo to its right on 22nd...
Directly across the street the residents of the 22nd Street Co-op, which has been there for decades, hung this banner facing the supposedly "green" condo, built by "Lorax Development"...
The hip-wah-zee rapidly filling the neighborhood really love Ritual Cafe next to the video store. Ritual has good coffee, but there is something unmistakably cult-ish about the place. And it's the epicenter of the growing phenomenon of Zombie Cafes (full of zombies staring into laptops)...
By contrast, around the corner at 22nd and Bartlett is our beloved Revolution Cafe, which has all the great qualities we love in a cafe... open air, outside seating, good wine and snacks, a thriving social scene of regulars and passersby... and if City College ever mellows out, the back entry to their new campus diagonally across the street might become a major hang-out, a scene of public oratory, political organizing, who knows?
The whole neighborhood endlessly changes. Mission Street itself has seen many businesses and populations come and go. Here's a shot of the old Grand Theater, now used by a cheap Chinese import store:
I'm totally fine with the influx of Chinese into the city and the Mission. It's a growing trend for sure. But I do wish there was some way to hold on to old theaters as community spaces, performance venues, even movie houses! Alas, that would seem to require a philanthropist or twenty...
Almost back home, I entered the 24th Street BART Plaza where there is this historic fresco, showing BART being built on the backs of the workers. As you can see, the colors are fading and it's kind of chipping away...
One long block away, at the corner of 24th and South Van Ness, sits House of Brakes, and on the Victorian that makes up the southern wall behind it is one of the iconic murals of the Mission, severely deteriorating:
In response to these, and many other historic murals that have been painted over or allowed to deterioriate during the past quarter century, a new mural was painted in the parking lot behind McDonald's (the lot occupies the old San Jose railroad right of way, as does the triangular lot diagonally across Capp and 24th. This mural was completed just a few months ago, after some controversy regarding its portrayal of Palestinians breaking through Israel's apartheid wall. But one theme of the mural is about breaking barriers, and another important theme is the need to save the Mission's mural heritage. Here's a detail making the point:
The styles in different parts of the mural change, as do the specific iconic components, making it a kind of oddly eclectic piece in its full length. We have some familiar lefty imagery, harkening back to a 1970s aesthetic, but with an updated irony:
I'll just put up another shot of the far left end of it where a kid in a MUNI bus seems to be graffiti'ing the window (that goddam acid window etching shit is driving me crazy) but instead he's producing a beautiful rainbow... and it leads into the credit panel for HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth) which I'll put up to show the many people who are still engaged in making history, making art, making my neighborhood such an awesome place to live and walk around...
Just across the street in the triangular lot are some more murals, broadening the cultural references considerably. Joel Bergner has painted a half dozen really detailed, beautiful pieces around the neighborhood (quite a tour de force on the side of CELLspace), and this one reflects his experience with Brazilian culture:
On another wall in the same lot is a whole Mayan piece recently added:
From there it's only a block to Folsom and a half block to my apartment... Philz Coffee is on my corner and has become quite the hipster hangout too, but not so zombie-fied as the places on Valencia... but it's coming! Several cafes have opened further down the street, a skateboard shop, a couple of new art galleries...I'm afraid even 24th Street is finally starting to succumb to the overwhelming pressure to gentrify... who knows? Maybe the credit crisis will save the Inner Mission and make it possible for long-time residents to stay, whether owners or renters. It's such a fine place now and it would be a shame to see it turn in to some kind of west Greenwich Village upscale emporium... There's a long way to go before that, and the public art and activism here is crucial to preventing any inevitable victory for money...
Posted by ccarlsson at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2008
Nowtopia Rising?
I have about three blog entries piled up so I'll just plunge in. First off, I read an article in the Jan./Feb. issue of Orion called "Send in the Clowns"... it's a beautifully written piece and was eerily similar in certain respects to my forthcoming Nowtopia... in fact, I'm finding more and more writing out there that resonates with my book (another example is Jeffrey Shantz's article "Anarchist Futures in the Present" in the new Resistance Studies Magazine), which just reinforces my sense of a rising movement that still lacks its own voice. Anyway, here's a nice snip from the "Clowns" article:
They are people who have turned their backs upon petroleum culture, who, by doing so in a world that has been made safe for consumption, for a besetting tyranny of convenience, have instead profoundly inconvenienced themselves and are trying, in John Updike’s phrase, to be “model citizens of Thoreau’s utopia of doing without.” They are grassroots, agitprop do-it-yourselfers, tinkerers, roboticists, jugglers, musicians, radical gardening disciples, fluffy anarchist trash worshipers, and practitioners of slow food and slow time. They are thrift store habitués, living comfortably and happily off the salvage stream. In dumpsters, on city sidewalks, and on the shoulders of American highways, radical bicycle activists lay claim to the materials of construction to build their huts and their yurts and their geodesic domes in the woods. In a world where one hardly knows where to start the work of redemption, salvage has, for them at least, rediscovered its link to salvation.
The article is well worth reading all the way through, when the author finds himself falling out with his hero, an anarchist bicyclist who turns out to be a rigid moralist that can't brook the author's ongoing "normality" after being exposed to the "superior" lifestyle he's been shown. In this curious way the article actually serves as a repudiation by a 'regular guy' of the subculture his article mostly celebrates. And I get it! The self-righteousness that one encounters all too often among the marginal activists and innovators might be a crucial way for them to keep themselves going, but it's incredibly off-putting if you're not already "with" them...
Not long ago I was talking with Rose Aguilar of Your Call radio after a CounterPULSE event about how flaky the "left" can be compared to how tightly organized and well presented mainstream folks can be (we were lamenting a rather poor panel discussion we'd just been part of)... she spontaneously came up with the example of "a bicyclist who comes late to the radio studio, all sweaty and breathing heavily"... her KALW studios are at top of a steep hill adjacent to McLaren Park in southern SF, and I've ridden there. Not easy! So the implication of her offhand comment was that an organized "together" person would arrive by car, and only the disorganized and (implicitly) pathetic would arrive by bike... sad that she has that association, but it's telling. And it dovetails in an interesting way with the portrayal of Dave Santos in the Orion piece.
Today is election day, Sooper Dooper Toosday, and the usual frenzy is well underway, but limited to the random friend who unpredictably and mysteriously gets suddenly very animated about Obama or Hilary or Kucinich or... fill in the blank. In years past it was Jesse Jackson or even Walter Mondale (that was 1984 and if Reagan was re-elected, the world might not survive!)... I grapple with my own sense of utter disconnection from these momentous decisions. The person who occupies the presidency matters on symbolic levels for sure, but among the people still running there are hardly any differences. They all are representatives of a fairly tightly organized ruling class politics. Obama is pro-coal and pro-nuclear? getting his foreign policy advice from Brzezinski? Sure, the fantasy is that he'll break with all the received wisdom (oops, I mean madness) and it might be that the ruling class itself (at least a good-sized faction of it) sees the need for radical reform in the face of collapsing economy and failing empire. But the most likely scenario, like when Clinton and Gore were running the show, is that Obama will give cover to really heinous policies serving American capital... his noise on trade and labor and environment means he'll be perfectly positioned to advance the aggressive penetration of other countries and cultures by US business. Might he be the president that kickstarts the radical capitalist exploitation (biofuels, genetic materials, cheap manufacturing) of Africa?... that seems overdue.. anyway, it's all speculation now, and it's impossible for me to imagine that Obama or Clinton will be anything but a nightmare once in office.
Meanwhile, I'm up and moving a lot more. In my next blog post, perhaps later today, I'll show some photos of my neighborhood that I can finally walk around in again. In a small 2-block zone there is a great window on the neighborhood murals here, old and new... but for the moment here is the meal I finally got to sit at the table and eat, brusselsprouts and scallops and champagne, celebrating my emerging recovery:
back again later, or tomorrow....
Posted by ccarlsson at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)