The boundary-pushing, "wickedly funny" comedian and formidable foe Nato Green gives a stand-up performance, preceded by opener Irene Tu. A free show, followed by conversation... Get your brain stimulated while laughing your head off...
Topics: comedy, stand-up, Irene Tu, Nato Green, sexuality, raunchy, gender, gay
Foraging is a fantastic way to learn about the urban natural habitat and cultivate our local food sources. It is also becoming a fashionable urban treasure hunt. Artist and Guerrilla Grafter Margaretha Haughwout shares some simple gestures that can generate as well as preserve the urban commons, urban agriculturalist Antonio Roman-Alcalá takes a critical look at privatization of the urban wild and the groundwork laid by grassroots activists.
Topics: foraging, forage, urban wild, urban food, urban agriculture, nature, boundaries, non-nature, wild...
Ina Coolbrith, California’s first Poet Laureate (1915), was a contemporary of many male writers we count on for our understanding of what is meant by the American West. She was also a frequent contributor to The Overland Monthly which acted as a vehicle for showcasing poets and authors exploring and constructing ideas of liberal selfhood as the United States moved westward. Biographer Aleta George and author Stephen Mexal provide a look at the literary landscape of the West and its...
Topics: liberalism, poetry, Overland Monthly, selfhood, public space, restaurants, gardens, parks,...
The Mission District's incomparable Guillermo Gomez-Peña performs his latest screed, “Notes from Technotopia: On the Cruelty of Indifference” along with a brief retrospective of his work, followed by an open conversation with the audience traversing the complicated borders in which his work resides.
Topics: Gender, Borders, frontiers, gentrification, art, politics, spanglish, Mission District, San...
Enrique Reynoso of Mexico City’s Organización Popular Francisco Villa de Izquierda Independiente (OPFVII), also known as “los Panchos,” reports how tens of thousands of people occupy land and build thriving, autonomous communities in the heart of one of the world’s grittiest cities. Outside of political parties they promote urban self-government, community safety, and autonomous education, culture, and health. Bárbara Suárez Galeano joins him. Co-presented by The Mexico...
Topics: Housing, Mexico City, left politics, autonomy, cooperatives, squatting, land occupations, occupy,...
The Presidio - a military outpost, and South of Market - the industrial and maritime center of early San Francisco, represented worlds of single men, soldiers, sailors, and miners, right? Archaeological research into the 19th-century neighborhood, the 18th-century El Presidio de San Francisco, and recent work around the Transbay Terminal area, gives us a picture of family life and maritime wives, where women and children participated in the hard work of everyday life in these settlements....
Topics: archaeology, early San Francisco, Presidio, Folsom and Main, family life, 19th century, class,...
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,...
Vandana Makker Interview Part II
Topics: Yoni Ki Baat, Vagina Monologues, South Asian, Queer, Omsri Bharat
Conversation with Vandana Makker
Topics: Yoni Ki Baat Performance, South Asian, Queer, Culture
Governor Jerry Brown is determined to build the Delta Tunnels through the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta. The once-and-future Peripheral Canal is the latest plumbing scheme to follow the damming and diking of rivers and swamps which began with intensive Chinese manual labor in the 19th century. California has already radically altered its plumbing, but we’ll also look to future efforts at riparian restoration, dam deconstruction, and maintaining or altering our massive hydrological...
Topics: rivers, water, plumbing, maps, dams, delta, tunnels, agriculture, arable soil, rainfall, sewage
In a world where every inch has been impacted—directly or indirectly—by industrial society, what does it mean to “preserve nature”? How does the idea of adaptation shape our responses to extinction, climate chaos, and nature? How does our sense of “history” shape our ideas about nature, evolution, and conservation? How should we understand and value natural processes, wildness, and human technologies? With Peter S. Alagona, Annalee Newitz , and Noah Greenwald . Co-hosted by Wild...
Topics: anthropocene, habitat, endangered species, adaptation, technology, future, civilization, grizzly...
Bureaucratic labor unions, long besieged, seem incapable of defending, let alone advancing, workers’ interests. In Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, workers are rejecting leaders and forming authentic class-struggle unions rooted in sabotage, direct action, and striking to achieve concrete gains. Manny Ness , editor of New Forms Of Worker Organization , and Steve Early , contributor to Continental Crucible: Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America...
Topics: unions, labor, syndicalism, trade unionism, AFT, CWA, Labor Notes, South Africa, Argentina,...
Bricks give literal structure to a history of place. Bricks produced around the Bay were a fire proof building material in early years of a city often engulfed by fire. Archeology work at the Presidio reveals plant time capsules embedded in recovered bricks that help us understand pre-settler ecology. And bricks increasingly confront our current landscape of evictions and displacement. Featuring Ruth Askevold, Lew Stringer, and LisaRuth Elliott . Co-hosted by Wild Equity Institute.
Topics: bricks, seeds, Presidio, bayshore, mud, rubble, earthquakes, ballast
Money! Crime! Vice! Politics! Moral Panic! Gender bending! The history of the Tenderloin, one of the least heralded and worst understood neighborhoods in town, has it all. Peter Field , who gives astounding walking tours there, will cover the early days to WWI while Chris Carlsson will take it from the 1910s to the beginning of the 21st century.
Topics: Tenderloin, St. Ann's Valley, Central City, SROs, Historic buildings, prostitution, parlor houses,...
Vietnam War, Dissent, and the U.S. Military A half-century after the Vietnam War officially began, we’ll look back at military mutinies, the rise of the volunteer army in response to the “Vietnam Syndrome,” and situate the Vietnam War in the long history of U.S. military aggression, even pre-dating the founding of the United States. Paul Cox, Deni Leonard, Michael Blecker
Topics: Presidio stockade, Presidio mutiny, anti-war GI newspapers, anti-war coffeehouses, FTA, FTA tour,...
Sirron Norris has been splashing his satirical cartoon characters around the Mission and San Francisco for years. From biting social commentary to whimsical commercial art, his work spans a range that challenges the boundaries of art and politics.
Topics: cartoons, art, commercial art, Art and Politics, murals, Mission District, tagging, graffiti, day...
Sirron Norris has been splashing his satirical cartoon characters around the Mission and San Francisco for years. From biting social commentary to whimsical commercial art, his work spans a range that challenges the boundaries of art and politics.
Topics: art, murals, cartoons, cartoon literalism, tagging, graffiti, Mission District, commercial art,...
On the 100th anniversary of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), Gray Brechin and Chris Carlsson discuss the PPIE and the relationship of world’s fairs to the idea of progress over time. How did the presentations at PPIE in their early 20th century context boost now long-held assumptions about progress and development through technological innovation and economic growth?
Topics: World's Fairs, Chicago World's Fair 1893, St. Louis World's Fair 1904, Midwinter Fair 1894, Panama...
Rene Yañez has been at the epicenter of the Mission’s multiple art movements going back to the 1970s. Our Art & Politics series puts him in the spotlight for a retrospective of his life’s work, a free-ranging discussion of the politics that informed his work, and how his work has shaped the neighborhood and the City to which he has contributed so much.
Topics: Day of the Dead, Frieda Kahlo, Galeria de la Raza, Neighborhood Art Centers, La Raza Park, Great...
In 1849 San Francisco was surrounded by wild animals and a flourishing sea and bay, from which most early food was taken. But what is our “wild menu” now? How do foraging, fishing, hunting, and gathering fit into modern life? What role does conservation and ecology play in a contemporary and future wild menu? With Mark Heath, Kirk Lombard , and Chris Carlsson . Co-hosted by Wild Equity Institute and Nature in the City .
Topics: Seafood, fish, herring, sea bass, salmon, sturgeon, perch, hunting, wild boar, deer, geese, ducks,...
What actually happened to Darling Clementine? Historian Joel Pomerantz explores the California floods of 1862. Learn how this historic storm, which killed thousands and caused a number of San Francisco houses to collapse, can be an example for what a really extreme weather event could be like in our future.
Topics: storms, weather, rain, 1861, 1862, Sacramento, Sacramento River, delta, San Francisco floods,...
“Grange Future” celebrates the history and contemporary expression of ‘the grange idea.’ From the 19th century populist movement that backed the early campaign for an “information commons” in the form of Rural Free Mail delivery, to public banking and Farmers co-op banks, this vital movement is re-emerging to confront information and agricultural monopolists of our own era. Severine Fleming of Greenhorns leads a panel discussion with the Internet Archive 's Brewster...
Topics: Commons, internet, property, intellectual property, farming, grange, populism, Omni Commons,...
