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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 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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June 11th, 2009
09:51 am - Neko Case sets the tone
We had a big cheese contingent at the Neko Case show last night. Neko was amazing. I actually left liking her music more than I did when I went in, and I liked it plenty upon arrival. It’s poignant, sad, hopeful, nostalgic, and filled with the detail of every day life, sometimes all in the same song.
When we all got to the BART/MUNI stop after the show I was struck by something. Maybe it was a reflective mood inspired by an hour and a half of Neko Case. While we once all lived in walking distance from Rainbow, now I was the only one left in San Francisco. This entry/article/rant has been said many times before, to be sure. But I felt the sadness for a moment. Our communities that once existed and the way they could have grown – and we could have grown old – together.
It didn’t help when the first song that came on this morning as I sat down to the computer was J Church’s “The Satanists Convene” which is a song about everything this city has lost. And of course we’ve lost Lance too. His songs occasionally made me cry when he was alive. While his songs were also part sappy/part serious, some certainly have become more poignant since his death.
Perhaps returning to the Warfield also contributed. I hadn’t been these since (I think) a 1992 Cramps Halloween show. Just to prove how old we are, I attended that show with friends whose youngest daughter was one-ish. These are wonderful people that I’ve been friends with since the ‘80s who fled the Bay Area for more affordable living in rural Pennsylvania, but returned last year. Earlier this week that daughter won a $10,000 scholarship for her singing from Beach Blanket Babylon. You can’t predict these things. And some of these things are good.
I suppose poignancy was the theme of the last 24 hours. I didn’t choose that theme. It just happened.
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January 5th, 2008
10:21 am - San Francisco storms
My apartment is very San Franciscan. Drafty windows that vibrate in the wind like speakers playing Motorhead. No central heating, just drafty hallways that are colder than any upstate NY apartment when you get up in the middle of the night. A window in the bathroom that always needs to be cracked open at the top because there's no ventilation and it's the only way to prevent Sistine Chapel-worthy mold designs on the ceiling. I know it's Edwardian, not Victorian, only because that's the kind of thing you pick up living in SF for a couple of decades.
I love the banging of the windows, the smack of the rain on the glass, the sound of hail, even if it isn't hail, on the roof. This last storm reminded all of us who were here of the storm in 1995 that smashed up the Conservatory of Flowers.* I had separate conversations about it with both anarqueso and jactitation probably because we spent that storm in my room watching storm damage on TV. At least when we had power.
I love storms, but for the last few years I couldn't. My workplace is in the lowlands of San Francisco, in a formerly industrial area that never had an income base to demand drainage repairs or sewer modernization.** During heavy storms and hide tides, this city floods. Our little section of the city, really our two block area, has flooded the last few years whenever we get a heavy fog.*** Our store's backstock, a foot or so below street level filled with rain water and overflowed drains so often that we started expecting to close during every storm. I spent a few hours of one storm, when my arm was injured and I couldn't mop, outside our front door, rain blowing in my face, trying to explain that we were flooded to customers coming from areas just blocks away which didn't have our problems.
So Friday morning, when I got to work at 6:45, I expected to grab a floor squeegee, not a handtruck, and spend the morning pushing water and bleaching. I think all of us there did.
We've spent years, and a lot of money, trying to fix this problem. I mean there's nothing you can do in a storm like a few years ago when cars were floating down Trainor Alley and water poured in through the bottom of the closed receiving door on Folsom St., But Friday was a giddy day. All the worker-owners were happy. This was a big storm**** But except for two very small floods in one backstock area, we stayed dry and open.
So, hopefully, now I can go back to feeling the wind, worrying that the house will blow down, watching the umbrella carnage pile up on the streets and trying to figure out which trees will fall and which will survive. I really missed enjoying bad weather without worrying about being called in for emergency flood duties. Whoo-hoo stroms!
Edited to add: Hold on! Here comes storm #3. I can't here my stereo over the sound of the rain hitting the roof on my home office.
*This isn't the best article about the storm but what a simile! "the monster windstorm that shook Golden Gate Park like a naughty child" . Issue alert!!
**it's truly a city-wide problem, but some things flow downhill
***Yes, that's an exagerration. But not much of one.
****Certainly the tide/rainfall combo wasn't the worst possible, and that's the single worse factor in San Francisco flooding, but last year we would have been shut down for hours in with this kind of rain.
Current Music: Nick Cave - "Tupelo"
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December 4th, 2007
08:36 am - Market St. poetry reading
Nearly 30 years after Reagan's war on poor people* and defunding of mental health facilities began it's hard to write about homeless people without being full of cliché, a cynical bastard, or sounding like a prep school photography student looking for gritty urban realism. So bear with me.
I was walking down the street and heard what I thought was an argument. Then I realized it was only one angry, raised voice. If I had to describe the accent, I'd say hungover, bitchy queen after a couple of decades of cigarettes. Piercing and mocking. Tired and witty. But definitely loud.
I didn't hear the intro so at first I thought crazy street preacher when I heard:
"SOME say the world will end in fire!
Some say in ice!"
Somewhere in my memory I knew I had heard that before. I realized it was a poem when I heard
"From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with THOSE WHO FAVOR FIRE !"
I didn't know that I knew it, maybe it's because he was my Mom's favorite poet, but immediately I thought, "That's Robert Frost."
"That's Robert Frost people!" he said to the folks within hearing distance who were trying to ignore him. "And I'M SORRY, I can't remember the rest,** I'm really sorry. But it's really GOOD. Go look it up! It's a good fucking poem and you don't even care. ROBERT FUCKING FROST. Read a book, IT'S IMPORTANT"
I applauded but I was the only one and either I was too far away or he was too addled to notice and he started walking in the other direction. It was right across the street from the last homeless performance artist I wrote about. I'm sure that somehow there is an artist lifeforce there, emanating from beneath the concrete. Or maybe a performance artist ghost muse of encouragement. The recycling center is obviously just a coincidence.
*A continuation and reaffirmation of the war on poor people that has been passed down from generation to generation but was slightly disrupted during the '60s and '70s.
** I looked it up. Here's the rest:
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
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November 12th, 2007
01:14 pm
So, obviously I haven't been on LJ much for a couple weeks. I agreed to do the zine for Lance Hahn's memorial. That, combined with my thanksgiving cheese buying responsibilities, left me really no time for anything else.
The zine included about 20 submissions of art or writing, childhood pictures sent by his sister, some writing of Lance's that his partner found while cleaning up his desk, a couple of things from the surviving Epicenter logbooks, and a million pictures and J Church/Cringer graphics scanned from our personal collections.
I mentioned this in the intro I wrote, but it was really hard to put this together. I thought it would be easier for me because, while we were friends, I was not as close to him as some other people were. After spending this week receiving nothing but Lance memorial news, submissions and stories in my e-mail box, I'm glad that I could help spare Lance's closest friends this task.
It was overwhelming. I wasn't able to get Lance's voice out of my head but I also couldn't stop listening to his music. Obviously I also had to keep reading the submissions and e-mail questions. I started and ended many of these days crying. The outpouring of love for Lance is remarkable and speaks to what a special person he was.
Two old Epicenter friends came over on Friday and we spent 8PM – 3 AM eating food, drinking beer and putting the 40 page zine together. We did it old school, cut and paste, gluestick, 8.5 x 14-folded in half-style. I spent most of the next day printing 250 copies.
The memorial was last night and really a special, if often too-crowded, event. Lance's sister brought home movies. There were videos of J Church. The room was covered with pictures, graphics, album covers, and flyers. I don't know how many people were there over the course of the night but it was a lot, especially when you consider that Lance hadn't lived here for 7 years. It was part memorial, part Epicenter reunion, and part punk show (without bands). Punks aren't great about showing their emotions, but people did their best. Old grudges were even overlooked for the night, maybe even forever, who knows?
It was really good to see a lot of the people there. It made me miss Lance, miss a lot of those people and even miss the old days a little even if I don't want to go back. The '90s Mission punk scene was a special time even if it sucked a lot too. I think many of us were mourning that loss and the loss of our own youth as well as mourning Lance.
I may have extra copies of the zine after I mail out the ones that were requested by out of town submitters. Let me know if you are interested.
*My original Lance Hahn obit is here in case you missed it the first time.
Current Music: 1/20/87 MRR radio downloaded by Lance
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