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June 29th, 2019
08:53 am - Looking for cheese?
All my cheese entries are now over at my website: Gordonzola Dot Net. If you're an LJer there is a feed set up you can subscribe to here: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) gordon_edgar. See you there! If you are more into facebook, you can follow my cheese entries here.
Thanks!
(This is dated 2019 so it stays on top of my journal.)
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November 12th, 2009
10:13 am - Available for pre-order, finally
Ok, People keep asking when the book is coming out so here it is. Not available until March, but it’s never too early to pre-order. And check out the new low cover price since we’ve done away with the pretentious hard cover edition. ;)
(Photo by awesome local photographer Myleen Hollero)
You can order direct from Chelsea Green.
Or from the bookstore of your choice (like your neighborhood worker-cooperative perhaps)
For some reason, Amazon is the only place that is posting the blurbs (though I have a few more now) and they are pretty good.
OK, self-promotion time is over (for the day).
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October 19th, 2009
06:29 pm - Anyone post this yet?
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) smallstages and I got off MUNI at Church st. right before the closed the whole system down from flooding. Crazy!
p.s. the rain also killed my phone which was in my pocket. Don't bother calling for a couple of days until I can get a new one.
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October 14th, 2009
06:30 am - Last day in Wisconsin
Our Wisconsin trip ended with a min-coop tour since our flight didn’t take off until about 4 hours after all the South Bay folks. Luckily, we were in Madison so we got a tour of Madison in a Union Cab!
Union Cab is a worker-owned cab company that started during a taxi strike in Madison during the ‘70s. John is currently president of Union Cab, a member of the Board of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (I met him because I hosted him in my apartment during an annual BOD meeting held in SF) and does a great co-op blog here: rochdale
Look, Union Cabs even has an ad in the Madison airport baggage claim! (security questioned me nicely after I took this picture)
First we went to Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative where we stocked up on books for the plane. John tried to sell his buddy who worked there on my (not yet printed) book and we discussed the contrast in the new interest in food books between the buy-your-way-out-of-the-system folks and the true politicos. Still, I don’t think he was impressed with the idea of a cheesemonger memoir. Oh well.
Then we drove past the Willy St. Co-op and to union Cab where we saw the state-of-the-art computer tracking system and a lot of yellow automobiles.
I wish I had more time to spend in Madison. Every visit I have had there has been quick and rushed. It seems like a really awesome little college town. Oh yeah, we went to Fromagination earlier in the trip. It’s a pretty awesome little cheese shop. I happily spent $20 (full retail!) on cheese ( Blue Mont Dairy’s bandage-wrapped Cheddar) and the folks working there definitely know what they are talking about. I have never seen a store give out smaller samples, but they were happy to give as many as you want.
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October 11th, 2009
October 6th, 2009
05:35 pm - What I've been up to
What an awesome cultural leftist weekend I had with smallstages!
Thursday: “Capitalism a Love Story”
We went to a special showing that was a benefit for the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives and The Network of Bay Area Cooperatives. How was it? It was a Michael Moore movie. Incredibly awesome to see someone address class issues in a movie with mass distribution, also frustrating to watch the cartoony history and missed analysis.
Still, it was his best movie in years and I learned a few things (I didn’t know about corporations cashing in on early employee death through mass life insurance policies, for example), saw a couple of decent politicians, and got to see our co-op buddies at Alvarado St. Bakery and Isthmus Engineering.
Sunday: Sins Invalid: an unshamed claim to beauty in the face of invisibility
Disabled POC-organized collection of pieces on disability, sexuality, and collective liberation. Sometimes intense, sometimes funny, the whole performance was amazing, but Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha* deserves special mention. I’ve seen Leah perform a bunch of times, but this piece broke new ground for her as a writer and artist. Amazing. One of the best group productions that I had seen in years.
Monday: Billy Bragg
Awwww, a night for us older lefties. A sit down show at the Great American. I don’t know what it says that we chose to pay to see BB at a nice venue instead of fight the crowds at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, but there ya go. Except for his anti-NFL rants, I enjoyed everything about his performance (though I would have loved to hear “Price of Oil” which is my favorite song of his.) Diggers, unionists, and lovers: together at last.
Sometimes it’s great to be in a big lefty bubble.
* Leah obviously did not renew her website. Unintentionally funny!
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September 30th, 2009
05:55 am - Capitalism: A Love Story
Bay Area folks!
Special early screening to benefit the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives and the Network of Bay Area Cooperatives. This Thursday, 7:30 PM at the Embarcadero.
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September 25th, 2009
06:06 am - Two things I love besides cheese
I know that just last week I was talking about my fascination with hotel carpet, but I’ve had two longer-running fascinations:
1. Signs in bathrooms, especially in the “don’t pee on the floor” and “wash your hands” genres
( clicky clicky, cuz it looks better large )
2. International symbol death/injury-warnings
(This is evidently a warning that stairs are ahead and one must lift their feet.)
Who wouldn’t want a coffee table book of both those?
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September 19th, 2009
10:00 am - Last images of Austin (non-cheese)
I will leave you with some non-cheese images that summed up Austin.
Flower wilting in the heat:
My agent may not like this, but I think my next book may be about hotel carpets. They fascinate me
People... how come no one told me the largest colony of bats in North America? In Austin? Under a downtown bridge? And they come out at the same time every day like the Disneyland Electrical Parade or something?
AWESOME
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09:50 am - Wisconsin here I come
Hey folks,
I will be on a whirlwind Wisconsin (cow milk) cheese tour so don’t expect any posts from me this week. Hopefully I’ll have good pictures and stories when I get back.
I will be back in town in time for the California Artisan Cheese Guild Benefit (held at the San Francisco Cheese School) on Friday night. If you want an evening of cheese eating, cheesemaker schmoozing, and/or something to do before the clubs open, this is well worth the $35. Reserve your spot through the Cheese School (and check out their other classes while your there!).
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September 12th, 2009
09:49 am - Saturday morning
I am not quick to embrace new technology. When I first got itunes I didn’t really know anything about downloading music so I just borrowed friends CDs and burned them. At first I was very active, then I had enough music to shuffle so I stopped for awhile. When I realized – a few months later – that I could burn all my CDs and then sell them and still have the music, I started doing that in earnest.
But I made a playlist of the music I had listened to all the time in my early days of computerized music (and, for that matter my early days on LJ). I forgot all about it, but I’ve been listening to it on shuffle for the last few days. It is the perfect music for sitting in my “office” with the rain hitting the roof and my windows shaking from the thunder.
It’s impossible to convey to others how music can feel but it was incredibly comforting to hear all these songs I hadn’t heard for awhile – one after another songs I know all the words to and wanted to hear. Cozy apartment. Being warm when it’s stormy out. Listening to old music.
I wish I didn’t have to go to work later.
* The last five songs: Mekons – “The Flame that Killed John Wayne”, Feelings on a Grid – “Trevallian Zed”, Stiff Little Fingers – “State of Emrgency”, Leonard Cohen –“Suzanne”, Anti-Pasti – “no Government”
Current Music: Iggy pop -- "Fall in Love with me"
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August 17th, 2009
08:49 am - Healthcare
Here's Bee Lavender's piece on the current rationing of US healthcare and her comparison of dealing with the US system and the UK's NHS. Definitely worth a read
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August 3rd, 2009
07:58 am - Austin
The say you are not really Texas, but you are still 100 degrees on the weather forecast. Sigh.
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July 28th, 2009
11:43 am - I haven't done a poll in awhile.
Poll #1436353 Do you still read LJ?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 137How often do you read LJ these days? Who's out there right now?
Current Music: Nina Gordon -- "Straight Outta Compton"
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July 14th, 2009
09:20 am - Co-op developement
I start a course in co-op development today: “From Workers to Owners: Steps to Start Worker Cooperatives”. It’s part the economy and part the recent press our store has gotten, but we are getting calls or emails multiple times a week from people wanting to start co-ops. In addition to the cheese buying, one of my jobs is to field those calls. It’s an online course – and not a free one -- and I heard that 83 people are signed up.
I don’t want to out anyone before they are ready so I won’t name any places or details, but I talked to two incredibly different groups last week. One group of African Americans from an urban area in another state who want to do something – anything – that will help provide jobs and better health in their community. They were information gathering in general, without a specific plan of the type of model they wanted.
The other was an API ethnic group with a very specific idea of taking an existing, successful franchise model and converting it into a worker-owned version of the same thing. I don’t know that business model well, but they seemed pretty sure they could make it work.
It’s almost unfair to have people come for a tour and answer questions about our modes of operation since our blueprint for success is uncopyable. They see the result of nearly 35 years of work, starting in a totally different economy and era, with the good luck to be starting in an industry that – at that time – wasn’t an industry. I think there could be a blueprint. (The Cheeseboard/Arizmendi model is certainly a very good one) We just haven’t figured it out yet.
Historically-speaking I also speak to about 25 groups for every one that actually starts a co-op. I hope that this course – and two other Rainbow workers are taking it as well -- helps provide some groundwork to increase that ratio.
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July 7th, 2009
08:56 pm - Roseanne Riot Grrrl
Ha! The Roseanne episode where they pick up the riot grrrl hitchhiker (Jenna Elfmann) and listen to Bikini Kill. (thanks to kristy_chan
Awesome
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June 29th, 2009
12:00 pm - Maggots and Men
I saw “Maggots and Men” last week at Frameline. It was amazing. Like seriously amazing.
When I go to see art produced by people I know, and starring people I know, my expectations are low. I don’t mean that my friends aren’t talented. I mean that I’m already on their side and pre-disposed to be positive. I’ll laugh at the in-jokes. I’ll forgive hammy behavior. I’ll wince with them at hard moments, not be thinking “someone else might have done this better”.
“Maggots…” however, exceeded every expectation I had.
When I moved out of my apartment on Valencia St. 15 years ago, Cary (the Director) moved in. We had known each other through Epicenter and the punk scene. Indeed, the house I was moving out of, and that he was moving into back then in 1994, was a hub of the queer punk scene. My housemates had helped found Q-TIP (Queers Together in Punkness) and also produced shows under the name “House of Failure” (our phone number was 552-FAIL… what a happy coincidence for the “beautiful loser” generation). I’m not aware of any touring queer punk bands of that era didn’t drop by at some point, even if just to change outfits or use the bathroom before the show since we were only a half block from Epicenter.
When I saw that his movie was finally finished I knew that it was the one thing I couldn’t miss in this year’s film festival, even if it was just to see what an old friend had done over the last 5 years. “Maggots…” is the re-telling of the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921. The last hope of the real Russian Revolution, sailors at the Kronstadt naval base made 15 demands to the revolutionary Bolshevik government, which might have altered history and prevent the Soviet Union from becoming the tyrannical, farce of a revolution that it became. After a few minor victories, the sailors -- many of whom had fired on the Winter Palace during the 1917 revolution -- were killed, jailed, or forced to flee over ice to Finland. (Kronstadt, like the Spanish Revolution of 1936, has always been an anarchist talking point.)
“Maggots…” certainly owes a debt to Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”. While I don’t know if anyone has every been a better visual filmmaker than Eisenstein, “Maggots..” is a beautiful, beautiful film. And brilliantly scored.
Cary also made the incredibly smart decision to make the film narrated by a rebel sailor in Russian, with English subtitles.* In this way, the film could be made with its mostly transgender/gender queer cast of friends and not have the varying levels of acting ability affect the final product. ** I was overjoyed to see lots of people I knew on the big screen of the Castro, (including House of Failure housemates) but this film rose above the art-of-friends category and is seriously a film I would recommend to anyone. It’s gripping, assumption-challenging, and, in the end, tearfully sad. Of course, the place to see it is at a film festival because it’s only a 50 minute movie and it deserves to be seen on the big screen. Watch for it! Request it from your local festivals!
While the movie does not have much humor, the funniest part of the screening was when asked a question about the maggots filmed in the movie, Cary told how they had to grow them for the film a number of times. He said that his relationship to them really changed after all that. After all, they’re really only “going through their own transition”.
The film doesn’t over-polemicize. With its mostly trans cast, it draws out questions between revolutionary moments in history and a time when gender can be revolutionary transformed, but doesn’t try and make them direct parallels. It’s a beautiful look at the potential of revolutionary moments to be beautiful, perhaps even challenging folks to appreciate that beauty before stronger social forces can organize to take back control. It's also a love letter to rebels who have the courage to take up these fights.
*There is an agitprop retelling of the history of Kronstadt by a theater troupe in English as well
**An example of this is the Bratt Brothers’ early film “Follow Me Home”. It’s a masterpiece in some ways, painful to watch in others. The Rainbow Grocery joke was hilarious though.
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June 25th, 2009
06:45 am - Big cheese announcement!
Hey folks, as of now I am posting all my cheese content over to my personal website Gordonzola dot net. I am posting cheese stuff there more or less regularly. If you are an LJer, and you really want to keep reading me on LJ, someone has already made a feed: gordon_edgar.
Sorry for the change of venue. See you there!
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June 20th, 2009
07:47 pm - Report from work
They're filming a movie on 13th St. outside the store. They seem to be blocking our parking lot. It is very slow here.
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June 18th, 2009
10:33 am - Rainbow in the news again
Now Channel 5 thinks our coupons are newsworthy!
Best part is our Rainbow person plugging my book while talking about the cheese department.
Otherwise there are some factual inaccuracies (we started the coupons originally because we were trying to make the weekends less crowded, not because we were having hard times), and it would have been nice to hear the word "cooperative". But you can't get mad at free publicity.
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11 (8.0%)