San Francisco

Coit Tower Mural, c. 1936

The last time I was in San Francisco, only a year or so ago, to see Asleep At The Wheel at the Herbst, I thought that it would be the last time, for sure. I hadn't been there in quite a while, there being no earthly reason to go any more than I typically go to downtown Sacramento unless on duty. But I'm in San Francisco today and will be spending the night because it turns out that Ray Davies of the Kinks is playing the Fillmore, and well... there's a story.

There's a whole novel, if you want to get into it.

Yes, I was at the Fillmore for the Kinks/Taj Mahal, Sha-na-na concert on one of those dates November 27-30, 1969; it was quite something, and I can almost remember it. Well, you know how the old saying goes, "If you can remember the '60's, you weren't really there." I wonder if I would remember as much as I do (in bits and pieces to be sure) if it weren't for the movies and television programs that from time to time provide documentation of the era.

I came across a box the other day as I was packing stuff up for the move to New Mexico. It was full of surprising stuff: letters I'd written, a hotel brochure from San Francisco, some projects I'd done in college, etc; all from the 1960's, some of it as early as 1966 or possibly even before that. I barely recognized my own handwriting (it was much neater then!), I had no idea exactly when I'd picked up the hotel brochure and stationery but I found a San Francisco travel brochure dated 1973, and a letter written on hotel stationery dated "Saturday" -- referring to the Kinks at Winterland. I sort of remember that concert as well; it was where I was introduced to Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. Oh. Of course. Who could forget.

There's a story about them, too; not quite a novel though, say a novella.

At any rate.

So off we go to visit Baghdad by the Bay at least one more time.

Like many others, I have mixed feelings about San Francisco. From a tourist perspective, there's practically no city better, but I'd rather not live there. It's foggy and cold and damp and windy. All. The. Time. The hills are monstrous if you're on foot; they can be more than a challenge if you're driving, too. Traffic is often horrendous. I remember a time when it took me over five hours just to get on the Bay Bridge to leave town one Friday evening after I'd conducted a training at the Civic Center. There wasn't a wreck. It was just extremely heavy traffic. This was during the dot.com bubble, and Bay Area traffic in general was nearly impossible practically  everywhere nearly all the time. One reason I was leaving town rather than spending the night was that it was almost impossible to get a hotel room anywhere in the Bay Area as well. (Grouse, grouse, complain, complain. But the Money!) There are earthquakes, too, you know! Sometimes bad ones.

Ah but! The galleries, the museums, the parks -- Golden Gate Park remains my all-time favorite urban park -- the beaches (brrrr!), the views from practically anywhere; gasp inducing. The Marina, the Palace of Fine Arts, the Presidio, the Bridges; Marin. The flowers... there used to be a lot more flowers. There were flower stands everywhere, flowers seemed to be blooming everywhere too. Now there are not so many, nor are they "everywhere."

The City (we always capitalize it) used to be very dirty; trash in the streets and on the sidewalks was almost as common as flowers. It was like no one ever cleaned up, and those who tried found themselves defeated in short order. I found some pictures of San Francisco street scenes taken in the 1850's, and it was like that then, too. So I figured all the trash in the streets was a historic/cultural thing, but then there was a big campaign to clean up when Willie Brown was mayor, and by and bye, it worked. I wouldn't say San Francisco is as clean as Seattle (Seattle is really too clean for an American city), but it is much, much cleaner than, for example, when I lived there in the mid-70's.

I don't care for Muni, and I still won't ride the 38 Geary bus, but the cable cars are fun and they can get you where you need to go. A variety of old fashioned street cars now run on Market Street, and that's a good thing. I'm old enough to remember when they still had streetcars in downtown Los Angeles, and while I can only remember riding them once or maybe twice, I was very fond of streetcars when I was little. So it's nice to see the old ones on Market Street in San Francisco rattling and careening along.

We had a one bedroom apartment on Geary St. between Leavenworth and Hyde. Neighbors called it "Lower Nob Hill," we called it "The Tenderloin." It was an urban neighborhood, not that rough, but certainly not deluxe and very convenient to my work and practically everything we needed. We paid $225 a month rent, which we thought was outrageous, and we had to park the car at a garage over on O'Farrell St. for an additional $45 or $50 a month. Well. I saw a listing last year for a one bedroom apartment in the building where we lived in the mid-'70's. It actually looked just like our apartment -- it was in the back of the building with a view of a beautiful garden where we could sit on nice days somewhat protected from the wind. The kitchen and bath had been upgraded, so there was that. The rent was $2450, if I recall correctly. Parking at the garage on O'Farrell is running about $300 a month these days.

We didn't like paying as much as we did to live in San Francisco back in the day, but we could afford it.  I wasn't making a lot of money by any means, but it was enough to get by -- on one salary.

It would take two "median American" salaries to approximate our living standards in San Francisco in the 1970's -- standards we could maintain on what was then considered one relatively low single salary. This gives an idea of how far workers' compensation has fallen since then and how much costs have increased.

As the number of employed Americans went up from the 1970's onward -- thanks in part to the pressure of a lot of liberation movements -- the value of their labor, strangely -- or maybe not so strangely -- went down. Workers today, if they can stay employed at all, are earning about half on average what they should be making based on productivity and comparable living standards. Of course there are tens of millions of unemployed -- forcing down wages and benefits for those who remain employed. Millions more Americans are forced into poverty every year which further erodes the living standards of everyone else -- except the 1%.

For their part, they've been happy to help themselves to all the profits of the last few decades. How much longer they'll be able to ride on the backs of everyone else is a question, though, isn't it?

Meanwhile... there's some geezer performing at the Fillmore...

Mark Morford Explains It All For You

Mark Morford has been tweaking, tantalizing and teasing readers of the San Francisco Chronicle for long years now. Not as long as Herb Caen, to be sure, but still...

His columns were among the very few 'mainstream' media effusions that showed any real insight into what was really going on back in the early days of my involvement in the internet, despite the author's, shall we say, unique vision of Things As They Are.

Many of those who found him back in those days were delighted, and then they weren't so delighted any more because Morford does have a schtick, and unless you're up for it, it can be a bit much after a while, and then you crave it, can't get enough of it, and you want to go to San Francisco and take Yoga from him, and then you don't, and then you're all confused and you run around screaming while he twists himself into yet another impossible yoga position and laughs a celestial laugh that makes you stop and wonder... is this all really a joke?

All of it?

No!

So it goes on like that.

And then he comes up with something like "The Rapture Is For Cowards (or is it Ninnies?)" and you know he is dead on, spot on tuned into the Universe in ways you can only imagine being if you could ever get through your current karmic debt, which you won't, so just get used to it, ease up, and learn to laugh or cry or anything besides whatever it is you're doing now.

Verily, from the Mayans to the Greeks, the pagans to the nutball evangelicals, New Age hippies to the witches of Burning Man, every tribe has their ache for transformation, for a final, orgasmic release into the Great Void. Right now it's freshly coupled to a feeling that 2012 is particularly pregnant and tangy, more potentially explosive than any other year to date. Indeed, the 2012 cataclysm is an idea that's been hovering around the collective consciousness for so long, there just might be something to it. You think?

Do you want signs? There are signs. Global warming has accelerated, unprecedented methane plumes are blasting out of the Arctic seabed to scare the horses, nature is in increasingly furious uproar, we are running out of maple syrup, frankincense, whooping cranes, Adderall and those exquisite nautilus seashells, which is just all kinds of depressing. Extinctions are happening faster than we can count, and we can count pretty fast.

Yes, well. It couldn't be truer. But so what?

It gets worse. Or maybe better. Did you know every animal species on earth is (at least partially) gay? That nearly every species we know enjoys homosexual sex for all sorts of reasons, many of which we don't even understand and most of which would make any evangelical shake with muddled rage? True. Don't tell the Tea Party. Or rather, do, and watch their faces explode.

Then there's dark matter, the stuff that, along with dark energy, makes up 96 percent of the entire universe. It's completely unknown. Inexplicable. Baffling. For all we know it's made of chocolate lubricant, tequila blanco and invisible alien spermatozoa and it's pouring down right now to impregnate all girls named Tiffany and Dakota and Caitlin. Apocalypse!

Oh my God, India and China! They're running out of water, for one thing. And when both dry up completely they will hop in their strange little cars and drive toward each other at breakneck speed, daring the other other to chicken out first so the other can race in and steal all their incense and/or iPods and sell them for Evian. I read that somewhere.

And?

Here's the wonderful thing: Peel back the uppermost layer of any apocalypse fantasy, 2012 prophecy or doomsday scenario, remove the lunk-headed shards related to zombies, aliens, gold bars, Ebola outbreaks and locust invasions, strip away the tremulous Christian pathos and evangelical illiteracy, and you're left with one stunning, increasingly intense desire for ecstatic awakening, writ large.

Put it this way: The real reason 2012 is so frontloaded? Because we've loaded it. Because there really has been mind-boggling technological advancement, environmental breakdown, change in the karmic weather. The tang in the air is a real tang. We are not the same planet, the same species, the same spiritual lugs we once were. At least, not all of us.

It is very possible and very true that the window of opportunity for some sort of great spiritual leapfrog is finally opening wider than a tiny sliver of a crack. The real question is: What are you going to do about it? Or the bigger question still: Are you even ready?

See, this is this catch. This is the one thing all tribes agree on when it comes to rapturous spiritual transformations and awakenings, be it Jesus coming to hoover up your quivering soul or (more elegantly) a simple stepping into the sheer bliss of consciousness itself and swimming there for the rest of forever.

It's this: You gotta be ready. You gotta be aligned to it, attuned, have done a bit of the work. Simply put, you need to be awake.

And when Morford gets into a state like this, he might be on to something, for he is often content to spin yarn and smirk and leave it at that. Not this time.

2012 is here.

Now.

And:

it's all just seven billion angels dancing on the head of a pin of Shiva.

Well sure. But you knew that...

Read the whole thing. Ponder.

The BART Protests

BART Protests Shut Down Several Stations: "A protest has shut down three BART stations in Downtown San Francisco on Monday. Protesters are upset over a recent decision to shut down cell service to thwart a previous demonstration. Joe Vazquez reports."



Protest at the Civic Center BART station July 11, 2011

BART stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit; it's the subway system that serves San Francisco and the surrounding area, and it's recently been in the news for a number of unpleasant incidents in which the transit police have seen fit to fire their side-arms into the bodies of... well... Negroes [and others]

[Note: One loses track of all the shootings. Kenneth Harding was shot and left to bleed out by SFPD officers on July 16, 2011 at the Hunters Point-Bayview Muni Station, allegedly after failing to pay his fare. I initially confused him with Charles Hill, who was shot and killed by a BART policeman at the Civic Center BART station on July 3, 2011. Oscar Grant was shot and killed by a BART policeman at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland on January 1, 2009. His killer, Johannes Mehserle, resigned from the BART police force, was tried for second degree murder and was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to two years, and was released in June of 2011.]

This has caused more than a little consternation among certain BART riders who have taken to protest, on a fairly regular basis, especially after the shooting of Charles Hill on July 3 of this year at the Hunter's Point Civic Center Station, ostensibly for not paying his fare. (Exactly how that would be done, I'm not too sure because you can't get to the trains without a ticket unless you jump over the turnstiles like they do in New York.)

A protest planned for last week, August 8, was apparently thwarted when BART officials ordered cell phone service to the Civic Center station turned off, in what is apparently the first such effort to interfere with cell service by a public agency on record.

A protest of that action, as well as the police shootings of Charles Hill and Arthur Oscar Grant was scheduled for Monday evening, August 15, at 5pm at the Civic Center Station, but rather than shut off phone service, the BART authorities decided to close the station instead. They also closed the rest of the Downtown San Francisco BART Stations and suspended MUNI (bus) service in Downtown.

In addition, as they have done at other BART protests, the Authorities deployed their heavily armored, black-clad riot squads in close formation and threatened the protesters with swift and sure dispersal and/or arrest.

Meanwhile, the notorious international hacker squad called Anonymous retaliated for August 8th's cell phone shut down by gaining access to and publishing online the personal information of some 2000 BART riders and calling on participants in the August 15 protest to wear red and Guy Fawkes masks. If you click on the link at the very top of this installment, you'll go to a video of live coverage of the August 15 protest, and you will hear commentary to the effect that few were wearing red and that the mask is supposed to represent some British 17th Century revolutionary.

A fairly comprehensive news story appears in this morning's Chron -- though it was actually more comprehensive last night when posted shortly after the Downtown stations were reopened.

It appears that the majority of BART riders in Downtown San Francisco were seriously discommoded during rush hour by the disruption of service brought on by the protest and the police reaction to it. But at least cell phones weren't interfered with. So there is that. From the comments I've read and heard about last evenings action, the riders were not amused.

I've long said that discommoding the powerful is essential for protest demonstrations to have an effect rather than being dismissed out of hand. That may mean, for example, actions that result in shutting down subway stations, streets, bridges, shutting off or disrupting communications, or what have you.

In the "cat-and-mouse" of yesterday's protest (as the Chron puts it) discommoding tactics were employed both by citizens and by the authorities, with the upshot being a standoff. According to reports and videos I've seen, the protesters marched above ground from the Ferry Building to the Civic Center Plaza (those familiar with San Francisco know these locations well) on Market Street, shutting the thoroughfare down; once they found they could not enter any of the BART stations along the route, they remained assembled at Civic Center Plaza (surrounded by Robo-cops) while a splinter group marched back to the Ferry Building chanting slogans and carrying signs.

For all the rage that is being expressed right now over the inconvenience to commuters, let alone the privacy invasion by Anonymous, in fact, the tactics being employed by the demonstrators are the kind of non-violent civil disobedience measures that are necessary for a protest to have an effect, and further, they are persisting in protest despite being thwarted in reaching their initial objectives.

This is how it is done, and no, one doesn't "like" it. These kinds of protests are disruptive and inconvenient, they disturb one's routine, and they interfere with one's comfort and convenience. That's what has to be done. The argument against this sort of non-violent disruptive protest is that it "punishes the innocent." Well, one might want to take that issue up with the corpses of Oscar Grant and Charles Hill.

BART cops have become notorious for their excessive use of force and for their very itchy trigger fingers. They have long been known for thuggishness toward a certain class of rider, ie: Black men, but they have become murderous, much as the Oakland police department did during the hey day of the Miami Vice-ified drug war. They'll shoot your ass to this day. Ordinary people seem to intellectually understand this is "wrong," but they don't want to be unduly inconvenienced, so they also declare these protests "wrong" because the protesters are getting in the way of their comings and goings. Yet getting in the way -- of ordinary people and the powerful -- is one of the few ways that Americans have left to them that can actually cause the Authorities to change their deplorable behavior.

"But the protesters are behaving deplorably!" Nonsense. Complete nonsense. They are bringing attention to issues and people that are important to them, and they are demanding positive changes in the behavior of Authority. One of the chants they use is: "We are all -- Charles Hill! We are all -- Oscar Grant!" I don't know if you have to live in the Bay Area under oppression to understand the deep emotion such a chant can touch, but it is very effective. What happened to Charles Hill, what happened to Oscar Grant can most certainly happen to anyone the BART cops target -- you, in your narcissistic bubble are not immune.

The protesters themselves are behaving effectively. Which is, of course, a threat to The Powers That Be, which is why such an overwhelming and uncalled for police reaction force is deployed to intimidate the protesters and -- theoretically -- to reassure ordinary BART riders that the Authorities have got their backs. No, that isn't what this deployment of overwhelming and unnecessary force communicates at all. WTF, they've got automatic weapons. No one in the crowd -- so far as we know -- is armed, and there is no hint of a threat of physical violence of any kind by the protesters -- unless of course you consider "protesting while Black" such a threat, which is just stupid.

This overreaction by Authority is one of the characteristics of The Powers That Be when they know they are being shamed and they refuse to take the shame and correct their evil ways. BART is a public agency and they are accountable to the People. They have done everything in their power to avoid accountability -- or shall we say to divert accountability -- in the ongoing struggle against police brutality and overall high-handedness and contempt of the public by the Agency.

I'm sure the BART (and area-wide civic) authorities are well aware that murderous brutality and high-handed contempt of the public by representatives of Authority are sure-fire triggers of civil unrest and disorder, not simply peaceful protest. (We saw this in Britain recently, eh?) BART seems intent on pushing the envelope just as far as they can, pushing the public's rage and reaction buttons to such an extent that there are riots (which there have already been -- on a small scale -- over Oscar Grant's killing and the blank-stare reaction of the BART honchos in their defense of the transit police.)

There are many lessons to be learned in the ongoing struggle against the Police State being imposed on Americans from above. BART is only a tiny corner of the whole, but unless there is significant, persistent, and effective protest, nothing will stand in the way of its expansion.

Those Robo-cops are a threat to everyone.

In the immortal words of MDC (Born to Die):

No War
No KKK
No fascist USA