« February 2008 | Main | April 2008 »
March 28, 2008
Still Bicycling!
There's something odd afoot and I'm not sure what to make of it...a mini-PR offensive was launched last week that had some contradictory components. Following the shocking death of two racing cyclists in the South Bay hills, run over by a cop or sheriff who fell asleep at the wheel, also badly injuring a third cyclist, most bicyclists felt that maybe, just maybe, the local authorities might start paying attention to how unsafe it is to cycle around here. The Comicle rushed in to the save the day. They published this hilarious article which puts the blame for 2/3 of all bike-car accidents squarely on the shoulders of the bicyclists. The source? Why it's that always objective and reliable California Highway Patrol and local police records. What a joke!
Anyone who has bicycled regularly for any length of time around here has had the experience of seeing a fellow or sister cyclist get doored or driven into or worse, or come upon a cyclist sprawled on the ground, and seen how the police routinely take statements from anyone at the scene EXCEPT other bicyclists! The presumption at all points of contact between cyclists and motorists is that the cyclist is at fault. It's quite difficult to even insert into the record a contrary point of view.
This coming Monday night I'm going to be on a radio show with the Bike Coalition's Leah Shahum, the MTA's Bridget Smith, and anti-bicycling crank Rob Anderson:
On Monday 3/31/08, 7:00pm to 8:00pm, the topic for City Visions Radio (91.7.FM) will be: "Planning for San Francisco's Growing Biking Population" Call in during the show at 415/841-4134 or e-mail us.
I hope you cyclists will call in and demand a thorough and radical alteration of our city streets in favor of safe cycling, traffic calming, and reduced car access wherever possible. It might get weird and even ugly with Anderson on there, since he's the guy who filed the lawsuit that stopped the current bike plan in its tracks, ostensibly because inadequate environmental review was done before it was implemented.
And that's the other part of the inexplicable PR offensive under way. On Thursday night the city bureaucrats working on the Bike Plan held an "open house" at 101 Grove to push their plans... but in the course of an extremely uninformative and tedious presentation of everything we knew already, they admitted, in sparkling bureaucratese, that the question of when the Superior Court would lift the injunction that is stopping the bike plan's 34 miles of lanes and sharrows and other minor improvements from being worked on is "outside of their knowledge base."
Typical of San Francisco's turgid democracy, the commissions and departments and agencies that hold public hearings to provide the public with "input opportunities" are expert at numbing minds and squelching any passion or enthusiasm anyone might have. These public consultations are a formal charade, an exercise in fake openness. I've been attending hearings on the Bike Plan off and on since 1994 (another one here). The sheer tedium of the process is what is most noteworthy about it. The fact that the grand successes of the Bike Plan are still only painted bike lanes, when places such as Copenhagen or Berlin have extensive networks of healthy and safe sidepaths that make cycling in those cities incredibly easier, speaks to how tepid our efforts have been locally.
Anyway, we'll be arguing about all this on the radio on Monday night. Someone is pushing this moment though, and I don't really see why or who. Is it all because of the headline-grabbing deaths of those racing cyclists a few weeks ago? Or is something else going on?
In any case, I'm still cycling. In fact, I'm going up Twin Peaks semi-regularly again. Here's my favorite spot on Twin Peaks Blvd. because it's where you suddenly feel as if you've left the city, going above it. These are mostly invasive species so I know it's not a properly "natural" spot, but in the midst of the French broom and blackberries and odd flowers, I always hear a lot of birds and bugs, and the sounds of cars and the sense of the city just drifts away... after about 25 minutes of heavy pedaling it's a sweet moment every time, whether in fog or sun, midday or at dusk...
And after you go through this spot, you wind your way up hill and come up this view:
Any botanist friends want to identify those flowers? Goldfields? or something like that... anyway, this is the best time of year for a spectacular show of wildflowers sprouting on all of SF's hilltops. Here's lupine I think, with a bit of a view behind:
Of course when you're up on Twin Peaks on a crystal clear day, the reward is like having an ice cream sundae! Here's a zoomed up view of Mt. Diablo looming over the east bay hills, with Potrero Hill looking rather diminutive in the foreground:
And just to prove I took these photos myself, here I am in my favorite spot on the top of the south peak:
Critical Mass rolls in another couple of hours... if you see this right way, maybe I'll catch up with you during the ride... Happy Trails!
Posted by ccarlsson at 03:28 PM | Comments (1)
March 18, 2008
Springing Forward
Nowtopia is back from the printer! You can now order copies here, and you can visit the website I put together for it here. I have an ambitious calendar of appearances scheduled already too, so I hope to see everyone out there somewhere! Big opening party at CounterPULSE April 9, 7:30 p.m.
Obviously I'm behind on blogging these days. My birthday passed last week, and I had the pleasure of discovering that I share a birthday with John Ross. John threw a septugenarian poetry slam at Cafe La Boheme at 24th and Mission a week ago. Here he is early in the proceedings:
He writes semi-regularly for the SF Bay Guardian and Counterpunch, and has a manuscript looking for a publisher about Iraq, where he went at the start of the current war to act as a human shield in Mosul. He just sent out a short piece about that, so if you want to get on his email list write him. I interviewed John a year ago about his late 1960s/early 1970s experience with the Mission Tenants Union and the Mission Coalition Organization, incredibly important episodes in San Francisco history that are largely forgotten... hope to get the clips up on the Shaping SF archive collection soon.
History jumps out at me from my rides and walks around the city. Here's a piece of public art gracing the MUNI "barn" at Presidio and Post, a nice 30s aesthetic:
Up on Potrero Hill where I was strolling last weekend, spring has sprung, but I was also surprised to find this memorial stencil on 19th near Vermont Street, a most unlikely place for such a thing:
Some folks I know put a lot of hope into Bhutto's return to the fray in Pakistani democracy, but as usual, I didn't think it was such a big deal. Her martyrdom is sad--she was apparently an interesting person who had once had quite a joie de vivre, but she must have known her odds of surviving were pretty darn low. Tariq Ali, who was both her friend and a fierce critic, wrote several good pieces about her, here's one.
Here's a couple of spring flower shots for all you far-away friends and family yearning for San Francisco at its best:
The ceanothus go crazy at the beginning of spring. Here's one on the slope below McKinley Square on Potrero Hill with such an intense blue-purple color, I don't think the photo can quite capture it.
Continuing a bit with photos of beautiful San Francisco, here's a shot from Liberty Hill, 21st and Sanchez, looking north/northeast...
Some friends got together for a typically odd San Franciscan Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, staging a "Librarian Rampage"... 'naughty librarians' invaded a succession of bars before placing strangely notated index cards in books by Freud and staging an erotic reading at the Gay and Lesbian room in the Main Library... here's a couple of shots of them in the Tenderloin before they made it to their destination:
Of course the Obama story continues, as it will for months and maybe years more. I think I said in an earlier post that I'd prefer him over the rest of the field, mostly just because he represents a stylistic and oratorical leap from what we've been stuck with for all these years. There's been some good work done on the phenomenon, firstly by Matt Gonzalez who took the time to carefully analyze Obama's voting record and political behavior over the past few years. Darryl Pinckney in the NY Review of Books had a really interesting piece looking back at Obama's political life, situating him in his historic period very intelligently. It is detailed look at Obama's various writings, episodes in his life that were politically formative, something of an argument with Shelby Steele's "thin and unhappy meditation" on how Obama can't win, and finally sees Obama as an American successor to Nelson Mandela insofar as he is pitching his candidacy to the deep yearning for sincerity, truth, justice, and real progress on overcoming a racist society.
Many people I know are caught up to varying degrees in this yearning, and it's understandable, but sadly familiar. Every four years some version of this untethered fantasy arises, perhaps not "just like" the ones people are having now about Obama, but similar in that a politician brings forth submerged desires for engagement, for meaning, for finally moving forward to address real issues facing our lives.
I'm always mystified as to why this works. Why do people still imagine that a bought-and-paid-for politician who can ONLY be where he or she is thanks to the largesse and backing of the real ruling class beneficiaries of this deeply unjust society, will on election turn out to be a socialist, or even just an honest person who tries to meet other needs than that of the accumulators of capital? I can allow myself a glimmer of optimism that someone like Obama may take advantage of a collapsing global economic order to instigate a series of reforms that begin to throttle untrammeled, savage capitalism. But he'll be in no position to do anything of the sort without a general failure of the existing ruling class consensus (we can hope that this is well underway!), and a real fear of general uprisings against their power. All in all, kind of far-fetched, eh?
A local artist took the time to satirize the GIANT brand with this Obama poster... but considering the apolitical nature of the original GIANT, perhaps it's an actual comment on the emptiness of the Obama juggernaut?... I'd like to think so!
Well, outside of the U.S. a different kind of politics, a wholly different order of philosophical depth and political awareness, manages to carry on... I'm going to Italy at the end of May again, and am excited to be presenting my book to several forums in Milan and Rome, including the folks promoting the Euromayday festivities in Aachen when French president Sarkozy and German chancellor Merkel get together to give each other an empty award...
I'd go, but I'll be in DC on May 1, and travelling around the U.S. east coast until May 21 when I fly over...
Posted by ccarlsson at 03:38 PM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2008
Wiki World
OK, sorry to have been gone so long... a whole month has passed! Sheesh!... up to my eyeballs in a variety of things, especially booking a lot of upcoming appearances. (next Friday March 21 I'll be reading from After The Deluge at Inside Story Time) More later.
There's been a flurry of interesting articles about Wikipedia lately. This is particularly interesting to me since one of the things that's absorbing me these days is the painfully slow creation of a wiki version of Shaping San Francisco (if you want to help, please contact me)... I've been thinking and working for a long time on the notion of an open, living archive of San Francisco history. I'm glad I don't have to answer to the problems besetting Wikipedia, but as we ramp up to our own mini-wiki on local history, we'll probably face some similar issues.
On one hand there's the exciting thought that lots of people will contribute their own recollections, memories, and opinions to our shared history. One idea I'm particularly enthusiastic about is having multiple accounts of events that have happened in our own lifetimes. The best example we'll have of this right away (when we "go public") is about 5 different versions of the White Night Riot (that links to my account, but there are several others in the current Shaping SF, and more to come). But you can imagine that the sky's the limit when it comes to parallel stories, often contradicting each other, just as real history is experienced by multiple people with different points of view.
Then there is the likely scenario that as the shapingsf-wiki opens to the public, ideologues of various stripes will plunge in to add their skewed views of local history. Of course this is to be welcomed, but not if the "wacky" versions of various events are the ONLY ones, or if they go out of their way to rewrite or destroy existing or contrary views, etc.
Wikipedia has apparently begun to founder on the rocks of a curious dualism, pitting "inclusionists" vs. "deletionists". Nicholson Baker has a fun description of this in his NY Review of Books piece "The Charms of Wikipedia." In it, he talks about how marvelous and weird Wikipedia is, what a curious range of topics appears there, and how addictive it is once you realize you can have an impact on what is retained or what is deleted. Because in the past year or so, a dedicated minority of wikipedians known as "deletionists" have taken it up themselves collectively to massively purge Wikipedia of things they deem not notable. When you delve into what makes something notable vs. not notable, you soon realize that the criteria are as flimsy as many claims for historical factuality can be. The behind-the-scenes wars to include or exclude content from Wikipedia lead to some serious losses of important information, and it's difficult for me to fathom why anyone would think it worthwhile to be an avid deletionist.
Fortunately in Shaping SF's version, at least at the outset, we'll be wildly inclusionist. We want all the stuff people want to put in, as long as it can reasonably claim to be historical, based on real life experiences, and relevant to the city of San Francisco. The Economist also chimed in in their March 8th edition "The battle for Wikipedia's soul" laying out the odd comparison of Wikipedia's ample coverage of Pokemon biographies vs. it's skimpy and poorly written coverage of the men who made the Solidarity Union in Poland... fascinating stuff. Our local rag the SF Weekly got into the fray back in early February too, with an account of a particularly obnoxious and self-important Wikipedian known as Griot. That's probably my greatest concern, is to have our wiki get bogged down by unpleasant, self-righteous and unbearably persistent creeps... it could take an enormous amount of energy to fend them off, or if we just say 'fuck it' and let them do what they want, then the content gets overly shaped by people that we don't particularly agree with or like... kind of the deletionist problem writ large... But that's what comes with the territory of a wiki I suppose...
During our fascinating Talk last Wednesday at CounterPULSE on Arab SF, Maher Sabry, an out gay Egyptian filmmaker, spoke about how the Wikipedia entries on Islam and homosexuality have been repeatedly edited to remove references to the well-known tolerance of homosexuality that has existed in much of the Islamic world for a long time (you can hear a podcast of the whole Talk here). He told several other stories of weird and politically charged deletions at Wikipedia, furthering my sense that the content of that sprawling encyclopedia is undergoing something of an ongoing conservative assault.
Of course in the past month I've taken a lot of purty photos, so here's a few to conclude this post, admittedly unrelated to wiki world per se...
Here's Hugh D'Andrade and Diamond Dave Whittaker standing outside the new digs of our local PirateCat Radio 87.9 FM and on the internet too!
It was my 51st birthday a few days ago and I had a lovely ride across the Golden Gate Bridge with Adriana before having a fancy dinner with my parents, so here's some shots of all that, including an incredible magnolia tree that was going crazy in Golden Gate Park at Page and Stanyan...
It's hard to believe with the collapse of the dollar and soaring oil and gold that there's still a steady stream of junk pouring into the U.S. but while we were on the Golden Gate Bridge at least three ships steamed under laden with more containers of who knows what?...
And as it's March we get a lot of great sunsets. I rode up to Twin Peaks for the first time in months and caught this amazing sunset... here's the bizarre Sutro Tower as foreground...
many more photos and urban ruminations in the next post...
Posted by ccarlsson at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)