The eerie, unforgettable sound of Laughing Sal, fixture at Playland for decades, now at the Musee Mecanique.
Topics: Laughing Sal, doll, Playland
Dramatized rendition of speech by Denis Kearny in 1877, denouncing Chinese workers and capitalists in equal parts. Recorded by Haight Ashbury Community Radio Project, 1980.
Topics: Denis Kearny, Workingmen's Party, 1877, riots, racism
Patricia Rodriguez reading an excerpt from her article "Mujeres Muralistas" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78", edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation, 2011.
Topics: Murals, public art, latino, women, Mujeres Muralistas, Mission
Art & Politics: Seth Eisen "OUT of Site" Seth Eisen and James Metzger and collaborators Colin Creveling, Rayan Hayes, Mary Vice, and Diego Gomez bring to life research and performance excerpts from Eye Zen Presents's newest project (a collaboration with Shaping SF)—a series of queer history performance-driven walking tours through the streets of San Francisco. This performative talk explores the ways that queer people have historically created community, how our...
Topics: queer, gay, homosexual, history, historiography, assimiliationism, essentialism, Cockettes, Charles...
From AM radio (the first mass media) before WWII and how it shaped San Francisco, Auto Row AM-radio to the 1960s underground FM radio to the present era of podcasting, we will trace the paths of media, technology, audience and producers. Joe Lerer (KFRC and KSAN), Monkey (PirateCat Radio), George Epileptic (KUSF) and Chris Carlsson (Shaping San Francisco. Recorded January 14, 2009 at CounterPULSE, part of the Shaping San Francisco Talks series).
Topics: radio, AM, FM, web, broadcast, community, media, underground
The (in)famous satirical news coverage by Wes "Scoop" Nisker on KSAN-FM radio in the mid-1970s was issued on an LP in 1977 and this is Side B... B1 I'm A Turkey, Not A Ford B2 Tantric Boogie B3 Kissinger My Brezhnev B4 Natural Calamities and Unnatural Acts B5 The Double-Breasted Sutra B6 The Apocalyptic Bicentennial Conspiracy Show B6 Kundalini Cowboy Lead Vocals – Phil Marsh (2)
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Topics: Gerald Ford, 1970s, Henry Kissinger, Cold War, comedy, satire, Scoop Nisker, Last News Show, oil...
This is an excerpt from a 2 hour interview, part of the Shaping San Francisco "Ecology Emerges" oral history collection, with long-time San Francisco environmental writer Harold Gilliam. In this short clip he tells how he was lured to Washington DC to work for the Stewart Udall Interior Dept. under LBJ, where he was able to help derail plans to run a northern Bay Bridge from apx. Telegraph Hill to Angel Island to a new freeway up the Tiburon Peninsula.
Topics: Freeways, bridges, San Francisco, US Dept. of Interior, Stewart Udall, Angel Island
Elizabeth Creely describes the semi-magical spot known as Kite Hill, with its amazing views, its surprising surroundings, and its role in San Francisco.
Topics: Kite Hill, hills, San Francisco
Excerpted from Jay Kinney's essay "The Rise and Fall of the Underground Comix Movement in San Francisco and Beyond" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: Comix, Mission District, politics, art
A four-part radio series based on the Public Talk at CounterPULSE in April 2006, featuring Kevin Epps, Alicia Schwartz of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), and Espanola Jackson of Bayview-Hunters Point.
Topic: gentrification, African-American, San Francisco, redevelopment, Bayview-Hunter's Point,
Sarolta Jane C. gives an audio memory of Woodward's Gardens, one of San Francisco most storied amusement parks in the 19th century. Situated between Guerrero and Valencia, 14th and 15th, it featured a small zoo, beer garden, and much more. Originally on "Long Ago and Right Now" an Audiozine about San Francisco, produced by Sara Jaffe and Melissa Klein in Spring 2004.
Topics: Woodward's Gardens, 19th century San Francisco, amusement parks, zoo, beer gardens
Bending Over Backwards Audio Walking Tour Stop 3: The Vats, breweries, Hostess Bakery and more...
Topics: The Vats, punk, beer, breweries, Hostess Twinkies
A discussion of our changing relationship with medical care from medieval times to today. Including long-term care at Laguna Honda, a pop-up clinic based on DIY herbalism, nutrition and self-care for Tenderloin seniors, and a small Mission District clinic serving the undocumented. with Ivy McClelland , author of God’s Hotel Dr. Victoria Sweet , Dr. Rupa Marya , and Marina Lazzara .
Topics: Medicine, herbs, herbalism, medieval, Hildegaard, tradition, slow medicine, fast medicine,...
Excerpted from Matthew Roth's essay "Coming Together: The Communal Option" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: communes, Kaliflower, coops, underground press
Mirjana Blanksneship reads from her article "The Farm by the Freeway" in the book 'Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78" edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: ecology, The Farm, urban agriculture, art
Excerpted from "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78", Jesse Drew describes the blue-collar industrial life in the Norheast Mission District, when beer was brewed, bread baked, and trains rolled through in the dark of night.
Topics: labor, work, factories, blue-collar, beer, bread, Twinkies, mayonnaise, trains, Mission District,...
Martha Senger, a Goodman Building stalwart, describes briefly the history of small artist residential hotels in San Francisco.
Topics: Goodman Group, Goodman Building, Hotaling, residential hotels
Kat Case, a short clip from the album " Long Ago And Right Now: An Audiozine About San Francisco" on the Epicenter Zone on Valencia near 16th...
Topics: punk, store, epicenter zone, 1990s
Bending Over Backwards Audio Tour: Stop 6, The Gartland Pit
Topics: arson, fire, gentrification, 1970s, Misson, Valencia, Gartland Pit
Excerpted from Mary Jean Robertson's essay "Reflections from Occupied Ohlone Territory" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: Ohlone, American Indian Center, Alcatraz, Indian rights
Recording of notes scribbled in margins of Haskell's notebooks in 1880s.
Topics: Haskell, real estate, Hall of Records, radicals
excerpt from Malvina Reynolds song, composed about the houses lining the slopes of San Bruno Mountain near Daly City and San Francisco.
Topics: Little boxes, suburbs, housing
Phoned-in first-hand account broadcast on KPFA during the May 5, 1971 Mayday riot in downtown San Francisco. Digitized from reel-to-reel tape recorded by H.K. Yuen.
Topics: riot, police, violence, 1971, May Day, radio, KPFA, Vietnam
Excerpted from Harvey Dong's essay "Jung Sai Garment Workers Strike of 1974: 'An Earth-Shattering and Heaven-Startling Event'" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: Labor, strike, Chinatown, sweatshops, garment workers, ILGWU
Excerpted from Jason Ferreira's essay "'With the Soul of a Human Rainbow' : Los Siete, Black Panthers, and Third Worldism in San Francisco" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: Los Siete, Mission politics, San Francisco police, racism, repression, Third Worldism
Bending Over Backwards Audio Tour Stop 4: Komotion International, an underground music and performance space at 2779 16th Street, c. 1986-97.
Topics: punk, performance, Mission District, San Francisco, 1980s, 1990s, Robin Ballinger, Sasha Lilly
Dramatized account of land theft by newly arriving Americans, as told by a female member of the De Haro clan, originally recorded by Haight Ashbury Community Radio project, 1980.
Topics: land grabs, Spanish Land Grants, Mexican period, ranchos
Gretchen Hildebrand reminisces about her experiences in and around South Park during the dotcom bubble and beyond.
Topics: South Park, SOMA, San Francisco, 1990s, dotcom
Mary Jean Robertson ("Voice of the Native Nations" KPOO-FM radio, 34d, 4th and 5th Wednesdays from 6-8 pm) and Tony Gonzalez (AIM-West, International Indian Treaty Council) speak about the importance of the Alcatraz occupation in 1969-70, and the many initiatives galvanized by the audacity of that event. The first part of the audio is the soundtrack from a movie "Alcatraz Is Not an Island" by Jim Fortier.
Topics: Alcatraz, 1969, 1970, Native Americans, Indians, Indigenous, AIM, American Indian Movement,...
Hidden San Francisco : Book Release and Birthday! Join Shaping San Francisco’s Chris Carlsson on his 63rd birthday as he presents his new book, Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories . After a quarter century of curating the digital archive at foundsf.org , and conducting bike and walking tours, this book captures the unique and serendipitous connections that course through Shaping San Francisco’s ongoing work.
Topics: San Francisco history, Shaping San Francisco, grassroots, nonlinear, hyperlinks, narrative,...
Haight Ashbury Community Radio dramatizes the women's suffrage movement in this short clip.
Topics: Suffrage, Women's Vote, temperance
Alejandro Murguia reads more from his essay "Poetry and Solidarity in the Mission" from the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78", edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: Mission, poetry, cafes, 1970s
Bending Over Backwards Audio Tour: Stop 1: Gordon's sugar works, surrounding wetlands, butchertown and more.
Topics: sugarworks, George Gordon, butchertown, sand dunes, steam paddy, wetlands
A different look at the Lyon Steps.
Topics: Steps, skateboards, bikers, punks
Harry Hay was a co-founder of the Mattachine Society, participant in the San Francisco General Strike of 1934, organizer of the first Radical Faerie Gathering. Harry Hay was at the heart of arts, activism, spirituality and sexual identities in the 20th century. Learn about this amazing man and discuss his legacies today. With Will Roscoe, editor of "Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of its Founder--Harry Hay" (Beacon Press: 1996), and Joey Cain, curator of the new exhibit on...
Topics: homosexual, gay, gay rights, queer, gender, theater, Maritime strike 1934, Communist Party
Willy Lizárraga gives an incredible one-man performance of the history of San Francisco's Carnaval. Fast-changing hats and voices, accompanied by a slide show of historic images from Lou Dematteis and others of those early days.
Topics: Carnaval, Mission Distrct, 1979, festival, public space
Haight Ashbury Community Radio dramatization of water lot speculation in early San Francisco.
Topics: real estate, water lots, speculation
Patricia Rodriguez reading an excerpt from her article "Mujeres Muralistas" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78", edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation, 2011.
Topics: Murals, public art, latino, women, Mujeres Muralistas, Mission
Bending Over Backwards Audio Tour: Stop 5: The Redstone Building, former Labor Temple.
Topics: labor, Labor Temple, Redstone Building, Painters Union, Dow Wilson, CAMP, murals
Bending Over Backwards Audio Tour: Stop 2: Leathermen in SOMA
Topics: gay, homosexual, leather, leathermen, Stud, leather bars
Tim Drescher reads more from his essay "Lost Murals of the 1970s" from the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78", edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: murals, public art, San Francisco, 1970s
buchla box sound
Topics: electronic music, buchla box, buchla
Excerpted from Tomas Sandoval's essay "All Those Who Care About the Mission, Stand Up With Me!" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation. This excerpt is read by Adriana Camarena.
Topics: Mission, MCO, Mission Coalition Organization, latino, latinidad, Hispanic
audio of street noise during 1991 State Building mini-riot in San Francisco.
Topics: riot, police, violence, 1991, gay, State Building
Chris Carlsson reads an excerpt from his essay "Ecology Emerges" in the City Lights Foundation book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78".
Topics: ecology, open space, environmentalism, property taxes
Claude Everhart of Friends of Candlestick, Alan Hopkins, Golden Gate Audubon Society, Patrick Rump, Literacy for Environmental Justice talk about the unusual history and present of the Candlestick Point State Recreation Area. It's an open bayshore park built on landfill and trash, a product of a deliberate community-driven process that chose open space and natural qualities over the usual city-style parks and recreation facilities. It's now home to many returning species of birds and wildlife....
Topics: Candlestick Point, State Park, urban park, bayshore, redevelopment, endemic species, birds,...
North Beach hair stylist Joe Jachetta, interviewed by Audrey Tomaselli of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers oral history project, talks about how folks in his building kept things cold before refrigerators.
Topics: cooling, North Beach, Italians, before refrigerators
Shaping SF co-director Chris Carlsson gives a multi-layered tour through the FoundSF.org collection, focusing on the theme of dissent. Labor history in the 19th century, antebellum anti-slavery efforts, women's suffrage, the 1934 Big Strike, the rise of gay liberation, anti-nuclear and anti-war politics in the 1970s and 80s, the 1991 Gulf War, and 2003 anti-war efforts to prevent the invasion of Iraq... and much more!
Topics: dissent, antiwar, anti-nuclear, occupy
From the book "Ten Years that Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78" author Alejandro Murguia reads an excerpt describing the weekly occupations of the Nicaraguan consulate in the Flood Building in the late 1970s.
Topics: Nicaragua, Sandinistas, consulate, Flood Building
(This Talk's recording started about 5 minutes in, after the introduction. The first voice is Sin Sirocco.) A panel of ex-cons discussing the myriad ways resistance continues and perseveres behind bars, and how such herstories are, or are not, recorded and celebrated. Featuring: Ida McCray, former black conscious feminist prisoner. Supporter of love and life for all: present educator; lifetime involvement to make a better world gang; Rita Bo Brown has been a prison abolitionist for 40 years. An...
Topics: jail, prisons, Prison-Industrial Complex, women, feminism, Black Panthers, Hunters Point Riot,...
How Can Making Products Locally From Recyclables Solve Local Economic Challenges? "We need to make products locally from local recyclables." said Peter Berg. "Remanufacturing provides meaningful work, closes the energy loop, and stimulates creativity. It is a practical response to the economic slump that builds on our physical and human resources." Featuring: Neil Seldman, President of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute For Local Self-Reliance, Peter Berg, Planet Drum...
Topics: Recycling, waste, remanufacturing, materials, sustainability, green jobs, work
Efforts to integrate history and ecological restoration can be found tucked away in most San Francisco neighborhoods. Neighborhood greenways and corridors are most often the result of initial community-based activism to beautify an urban space, and end up becoming much more complex projects. Sophie Constantinou shares stories of creating the Buchanan Street Mall project and a newly accessible open space along the Bernal Cut, and how the different neighborhoods shaped these similar projects....
Topics: Corridors, greenways, sidewalks, gardens, Buchanan Mall, Bernal Cut, Visitacion Valley Greenway,...
Excerpted from Alejandro Murguia's essay "Poetry and Solidarity in the Mission" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: poetry, Third World Communications, literary underground
satirical advertisement for the May 12, 1984 End of the World's Fair held in San Francisco.
Topics: satire, Reagan, subversive culture, humor
A talk on the coloniality of power and knowledge, transmodernity, border knowledge, indigenous socialism and the socialization of power, solidarity economies, and other contemporary practices, theories and radical political alternatives emerging from the Global South. The panelists will discuss autonomous self-activity in Venezuela, Amazonian social forums, poly-culturality, global indigenous movements, the conditions and politics of knowledge production during the early colonization of the...
Topics: Indigenous movements, theory, exteriority, mestizo, anti-colonialism, socialism, modernism
Osento Bathhouse. Amelia’s. Artemis Cafe. Old Wives Tales. Modern Times Bookstore. Names and functions of these venues have changed, but they are part of the living memory of Valencia Street. Long before it descended into the white tablecloth, boutique-filled, gentrified peculiarity of today, the Valencia Street corridor was a hotbed of radical feminism and lesbian culture. LisaRuth Elliott moderates a conversation with some of the women who helped create the important sites and undergirded...
Topics: Valencia Street, Mission District, 1970s, 1980s, bars, cafes, weight training, bookstores, gyms,...
Janet Delaney has been documenting the changing South of Market since its days as a recently deindustrialized district in the early 1970s to its present boom in luxury residential towers. Our Art & Politics series invites solo artists to talk about their work and share a bit about their process and the relationship of art to politics and vice versa in their work.
Topics: SOMA, redevelopment, Moscone Center, Project One, warehouses, gay leather, SRO, residential hotels,...
Ilana Crispi is a Mission District ceramicist with a curiosity of what makes up a place. In her recent projects MISSION DIRT and TENDERLOIN DIRT she literally digs in to the earth to extract the soil and transform it, inviting residents to take a look at an invisible past and consider its future. Dirt taken from an excavated Boeddeker Park in 2013 became furniture and vessels to eat out of and created to give Tenderloin residents a direct connection to the soil under their feet. MISSION DIRT...
Topics: Tenderloin, Mission, dirt, clay, sand, ceramics, pottery, pinch pots, Barcelona, glaze, art,...
Roger Wilson of the Bristol Radical History group gives a wide-ranging Talk covering 17th and 18th century history around Bristol, England, including a debunking of the common narrative of the anti-slavery movement, putting the working people of England back into the saga. He also gives a fresh look of the mass riots of 1831, and brings the interventions of the Bristol Radical History Group in our era into the unfolding of "history from below." If you want to find out what unites a...
Topics: History from below, riots, England, Britain, anti-slavery
Excerpted from Peter Wiley and Stephen Rees's essay "Up Against the Bulkhead" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: Antiwar, Vietnam, GI organizing, Up Against the Bulkhead, underground press
Vivian Chang narrates how the Asian Pacific Environmental Network was founded after activists attended the first Environmental Justice conference in the early 1990s.
Topics: APEN, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, environmental justice
A Shaping San Francisco talk held on January 13, 2010: Comparing the alcohol Prohibition of the 1920s-30s to the contemporary prohibition on marijuana. With Dick Boyd, author of "Broadway, North Beach, The Golden Years: A Saloon Keeper's Tales" and former owner of Pierre's, a bar in North Beach from 1960-65, Sean Lavon Nash, and Michael Whitson, a marijuana prohibition expert.
Topics: prohibition, alcohol, temperance, drugs, marijuana, pot, medical marijuana, medicalization,...
Excerpted from Alejandro Murguia's essay "Poetry and Solidarity in the Mission" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: Sandinistas, newspapers, Gaceta Sandinista, Mission
An excerpt from "Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A View from the Street in Bernal Heights" read by author Peter Booth Wiley in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: Bernal Heights, 1970s, housing, segregation, hippies, communes
Excerpted from Deborah Gerson's essay "Making Sexism Visible: Private Troubles Made Public" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: Women, Women's Liberation, 1970s, Valencia
Glenn Lym presents an architectural and political history of the 27-year project of building the original City Hall, a building that fell down in the 1906 earthquake, revealing deeply inadequate and corrupt building practices. Meanwhile, when contruction began in the 1870s, the white working class was raging against capitalism and the Chinese in equal parts, providing the impetus for the 1882 federal Chinese Exclusion Act. Chris Carlsson joins the conversation to connect the social and physical...
Topics: Old City Hall, San Francisco, architecture, earthquake, 1906, Workingmen's Party of California,...
Education Crisis/Radical Responses Shaping San Franciscio Talk series, Sept. 29, 2010. From the crisis in the California universities to the steady destruction of public schools, weâre in the epicenter of a storm that spans the globe as neoliberalist politicians and the interests they serve seem determined to make education a precious commodity that is no longer a bedrock of democratic society. Come and discuss radical responses to this crisis, leading to the big October 7 Day of Action, with...
Topics: education, university, debt, college, occupation, strike, classrooms, teaching, students, crisis
Haight Ashbury Community Radio Project dramatizes the sensibilities of the turn of the 19th-to-20th century Employers' Association, an organization bent on destroying labor unions.
Topics: Employers Association, class war, 19th century
Weâll take a look back at military resistance to the Vietnam War, including the mutiny of sailors on the Coral Sea, the anti-nuclear and anti-Central American War movements of the 1980s and hear from Iraq vets about the state of anti-war activities in the current conflict. David Solnit, Paul Cox and Sarah Lazare.
Topics: Anti-war, Vietnam, Iraq, veterans, organizing, El Salvador, Nicaragua, resistance, GIs
Musician and author Mat Callahan presents the James Connolly-Songs of Freedom project. "Songs of Freedom" is a collection of lyrics edited by Irish revolutionary, James Connolly, and published in New York in 1907. Its rediscovery and revival is a project undertaken by Callahan and a group of Irish, American and Swiss musicians. Tonight's event will include an account of how this project began as well as a performance of some of the songs. Callahan will discuss Connolly's contribution...
Topics: Ireland, James Connolly, 1916, Easter Rising, music, revolution, politics, Irish nationalism,...
Dramatization of Irish couple arguing over the anti-Chinese agitation in San Francisco in 1877. Original recording by Haight Ashbury Community Radio project, 1980.
Topics: Irish, Chinese, labor, capitalists, racism
The “Language of Water” is a vision to retrofit strategic locations of the Islais Creek Watershed to reduce flood risk and invest in real resiliency from sea level rise, drought, flooding and demonstrating the state of the art practices available to the agency or the cities. This proposal includes plans to create multi-purpose, distributed infrastructure for water supply, wastewater and stormwater treatment and the incorporation of creek daylighting and floodable spaces that make room for...
Topics: sea level rise, coast, flood, planning, urban design, landscape design, resilience, Islais Creek,...
A Shaping San Francisco Talk held at CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission at 9th in San Francisco on Wed. Oct. 21, 7:30pm 17 years of Critical Mass and 10,000 members of the Bike Coalition? what's right, what's not with the way bicycling and bicycling politics is developing at the end of the first decade of the 21st century? A broad discussion of bicycle etiquette, transportation and urban design, equipment and safety (good engineering vs. "good shopping"), Stop-Roll, Bike Plan 04 vs....
Topics: bicycling, bicycles, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, bike boulevards, Critical Mass, red lights,...
2011 marks the 100th anniversary of women winning the right to vote in California, making it the sixth state, or the Sixth Star, to recognize women as political actors. Learn more about these women, their collective organizing strategies, the nexus between movements, voting, and class issues, the connection to Spiritualism in the United States, and their previous attempt in 1896 to convince voting men to amend the State Constitution. LisaRuth Elliott and Sue Englander.
Topics: Women, suffrage, voting, vote, spiritualism, temperance, San Francisco, Sixth Star
Pam Peirce, author of "A Personal History of the People's Food System" in 'Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78' reads an excerpt from her essay.
Topics: People's Food System, food, 1970s
Tony Nguyen's "Enforcing the Silence" documentary tells the story of the 1981 assassination of Lam Duong, founder of the Vietnamese Youth Development Center in San Francisco's Tenderloin. Within days of Lamâs murder, news spread that a shadowy, anti-communist group had claimed responsibility, sending a chilling message to Vietnamese refugees everywhere: stay in line with your political views or risk death. Between 1982 and 1990, five more Vietnamese Americans â four of them...
Topics: Vietnam, Vietnam war, refugees, Tenderloin, San Francisco, assassination
From the weird madness of the Reber Plan to dam both ends of the Bay into freshwater lakes in the 1950s to the Save the Bay movement of the early 1960s that helped create the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, we’ve come a long way in a half century. Today’s open shorelines, closed trash dumps, and returning wetlands honor and preserve our greatest public resource. Historian Chuck Wollenberg and Steve Goldbeck from BCDC.
Topics: Reber Plan, Bay, Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area, fresh water, dams, locks, earthen dams, Bay...
On November 30, 1999 the World Trade Organization was prevented from meeting in Seattle by unprecedented phalanxes of self-organized protesters who filled the streets, tied up key intersections, blockaded the convention center, and used video and the internet in ways they’d never been used before. Bay Area activists were in the middle of it all, and veterans of that experience will revisit that moment to help us rethink this moment. With Anuradha Mittal, David Solnit, Eddie Yuen, Steve...
Topics: globalization, alter-globalization, global justice, social movements, Seattle, WTO, 1999, WTO...
A critique of the idea of a global commons, the history and context of the commons under feudalism, demonstrating the boundary between 'commons' and 'commodity'. Also how Via Campesina is using the commons in "food sovereignty" politics âhow seed politics offers a model for international decommodification. Iain Boal and Raj Patel, part of the Shaping San Francisco Talks series at CounterPULSE, recorded April 22, 2009.
Topics: commons, global, food security, food sovereignty, globalization, anti-globalization
with Starhawk, Megan Prelinger, and Chris Carlsson. Megan Prelinger's book "Another Science Fiction" takes a whimsical look at how the Space Race was promoted during its heyday 1957-62, offering a pointed look into a twisted type of corporate "utopian" thinking that informed a whole generation. Meanwhile, Starhawk's "The Fifth Sacred Thing" and Chris Carlsson's "After The Deluge" both present alternative utopian futures for San Francisco a century or more...
Topics: Utopia, urbanism, ecology, revolution, future, dystopia, space, NASA, Mars, San Francisco
A rumination on the last space for punks in San Francisco.
Topics: punks, epicenter, Mission, San Francisco
Few events in the past century equal the importance of the Russian Revolution. And yet we only know it through the fog of propaganda and fear, and the actual events of 1917 are long forgotten in the mists of time. Find out what actually happened in that fabled year, and how it fit together with the world events of that epoch. Longtime Russian scholar Anthony D’Agostino (SF State) joins Anarchist scholar from socialist Yugoslavia Andrej Grubacic (CIIS) to unpack some of those tangled...
Topics: Russian Revolution, Soviet Union, USSR, 1917, WWI, WWII, pacifist putsch, anarchism,...
Excerpted from Deborah Gerson's essay "Making Sexism Visible: Private Troubles Made Public" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: Women, Women's Liberation, 1970s, Health Care, Women's Health Care
Prisoners and Politics: from the San Quentin Six to Pelican Bay California holds more prisoners than any other state while the U.S. incarcerates far more people than anywhere else on earth. During the 1960s and 1970s a political movement erupted among the imprisoned— Dan Berger ’s new book Captive Nation takes us through that political history. We welcome Luis “Bato” Talamantez and David Johnson — both original members of the San Quentin Six, and Caitlin Kelly Henry —...
Topics: prisons, prisoners, California Department of Corrections, injustice, San Quentin, San Quentin Six,...
Join queer organizers from Pride at Work/HAVOQ and other community organizations to discuss gentrification, how the economy affects queer workers, and redefining the gay agenda. This recording was primarily of the Queer Agenda discussion, but also has the report-backs from the other groups at theend of the night. Reexamine what is seen as a queer issue in San Francisco, as we dig into our ongoing struggles for justice around issues that daily affect our lives and those in our communities. In a...
Topics: Queer, agenda, workers' rights, gentrification, class, rich and poor, unions, labor, human rights,...
If we're to believe the mainstream media, the Occupy movement came out of nowhere and represents a new kind of politics. But we should be skeptical of such claims. Social movements scholar Barbara Epstein was a participant in the nonviolent direct action movements of the 1970s and '80s. She describes how they incorporated consensus-based decision-making, radical egalitarianism, and prefigurative politics. And she examines how their strengths and weaknesses have been passed down to Occupy....
Topics: anti-nuclear, anti-war, Livermore Action Group, Abalone Alliance, Occupy, Direct Action, blockade,...
Learn about the âColony Collapse Disorderâ afflicting commercial beekeepers and the threat to agribusiness, in juxtaposition to the dozens of native bees flourishing in Californiaâs urban environments, which reinforce local biodiversity and provide another important link to growing our own food in cities. K. Ruby and Philip Gerrie
Topics: bees, urban agriculture, biodiversity, agribusiness, Colony Collapse Disorder
Yolanda Lopez, Judy Drummond and Donna Amador cover the dynamic history of Los Siete de la Raza and Mission District politics of the 1970s. Yolanda dissects the popular iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the context of racially exploitative advertising over the past few decades, to reveal her own creative processes that have produced beautiful "Virgin"-inspired representations of working Chicana women and more.
Topics: Los Siete, Mission District, 1960s, Third World, San Francisco State, Basta Ya!, Centro de Salud,...
Excerpted from a longer essay in "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78" this tells about a Gay Liberation Front protest in front of the Examiner building in 1969.
Topics: Gay, gay liberation, Gay Liberation Front, Society for Individual Rights, San Francisco Examiner,...
40+ minutes of live sound recorded in the Gartland Pit, 16th and Valencia, San Francisco's Mission District, Sept. 1987. Tom Jennings and Shred of Dignity are featured, and many anonymous commenters over the punk show in the background.
Topics: Gartland pit, landlord arson, Mission District, 16th and Valencia, police, punks, music, 1987
Moments of hysteria in history have shaped our feelings toward immigration—either on a local or global scale—from anti-Chinese sentiments leading to decades of the Exclusion Act to events like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, to witnessing thousands of unaccompanied children arriving from Central America, we discuss the increase in security and scapegoating within our borders toward immigrant groups who become associated with these events. Lara Kiswani ( Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC)...
Topics: Immigration, scapegoating, organizing, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Arab, Punjabi, Sikh, Muslim,...
small clip of Kerouac describing San Francisco.
Topics: Kerouac, beats, San Francisco
In 1913, students, farmers, and roaming revolutionaries working to free India from British colonial rule came together to form the Ghadar Party, to organize mutiny in India and work towards a secular world of economic and social justice. The party, headquartered in San Francisco collaborated with a variety of Bay Area based freethinkers, labor activists, anarchists, and expats of colonized nations. Though formally dissolved in 1948, the work of Ghadar offers potent lessons for political...
Topics: India, British empire, Ghadar, colonialism, networked movements, Irish liberation, IWW, Punjabi, UC...
A conversation about network forms of work and their relationship to capitalism, business, and alternative ways of producing our world. Panel Moderator is Michael Whitson Panel: Shereef Bishay of Better Means, Chris Carlsson of Nowtopia, Gordon Edgar (Life on the Wedge), member of Rainbow Grocery Workers' Cooperative.
Topics: Work, networks, open source, internet, Nowtopia, coops, collectives, markets, money, incentives,...
We bring together story shapers, story sharers, and story collectors for this evening taking a close look at oral histories and memory keeping. Susan Schwartzenberg hosts a discussion series at the Bay Observatory at the Exploratorium intertwining personal stories and scientific study to understand climate change, Brandi Howell and Mary Franklin Harvin of Tales from North Beach are currently producing a podcast series to document the aging, forgotten, and hidden people and places of North...
Topics: storytelling, stories, oral history, digital archiving, archives, digital history, truth, memory,...
Claude Everhart, a founder of Friends of Candlestick, describes the public process that led to the Candlestick Point State Recreation Area as a natural park on the bayshore, built on landfill, created by community input and control.
Topics: Candlestick Point, San Francisco, state parks, public participation, community input
A discussion about the future of Market Street is taking place in many forums in the City, preparing the way for a new boulevard in 2015. The history of Market Street is peppered with architectural and social solutions that have not worked out as planned. We'll take a look at the long history of Market Street as a public arena in San Francisco, some of the redesigns that have happened over the decades, question the assumptions about urban design that underly the current municipal discussions,...
Topics: Planning, Urbanism, Market Street, Livable City, BART, MUNI, San Francisco, plazas
Excerpt from an 1850s song popular in San Francisco, having to do with the freeing of Archy Lee from jail. He had been seized by fugitive slave bounty hunters but a mob set him free. This rendition by Blackberry, recorded in 1980 for the Haight Ashbury Community Radio project.
Topics: slavery, song, 1850s, San Francisco
A vivid account of how San Franciscans moved around this peninsula through time: walking through the sand, horse-drawn stagecoaches, Clipper Ships and Shanghaiing, cable cars, ghosts of train routes and former freeways, plus the role of mass bicycle rides in both the 19th and 20th centuries. Presented by Chris Carlsson
Topics: transit, transportation, wind power, horsecars, cable cars, streetcars, Key System, trains,...
Pamela Chang discusses Laotian community and APEN organizing.
Topics: APEN, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, environmental justice, Laotian community, Richmond
