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
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...
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
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
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...
Haight Ashbury Community Radio dramatization of water lot speculation in early San Francisco.
Topics: real estate, water lots, speculation
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
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
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
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,
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
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
audio of street noise during 1991 State Building mini-riot in San Francisco.
Topics: riot, police, violence, 1991, gay, State Building
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 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,...
Bending Over Backwards Audio Tour: Stop 6, The Gartland Pit
Topics: arson, fire, gentrification, 1970s, Misson, Valencia, Gartland Pit
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
small clip of Kerouac describing San Francisco.
Topics: Kerouac, beats, San Francisco
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
Haight Ashbury Community Radio dramatizes the women's suffrage movement in this short clip.
Topics: Suffrage, Women's Vote, temperance
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
Mission District legend Roberto Vargas reads his epic poem "My World Incomplete/To Complete My World" which traces the Sandinista movement in the Mission in the 1970s. It is from the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78" edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation, 2011.
Topics: Mission, Sandinistas, FSLN, Nicaragua, Roberto Vargas
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,...
Part of the "Imagining Post-Capitalism" festival, cohosted by Shaping San Francisco and the ProArts Gallery in downtown Oakland. Are There Marxist Robots?!? Kal Spelletich , robot-maker and long-time artist, professor, actor, and all around raconteur of machinic chaos and dissent combines with Chris Carlsson , a persistent critic of the Planetary Work Society, to confront our collective anxiety. As Nick Dyer-Witheford ably puts it: "Digital capital [is] making a planetary working...
Topics: robots, androids, robot industry, automobiles, artistic production, cultural dissent
Co-editor J. Smith of the three-volume documentary history of the emblematic urban guerrillas will be in town to discuss his work, the life, times and enduring relevance of the RAF. "A fascinating history of the German revolutionary left in the 1970s and 1980s. It powerfully situates the RAF within a broader orbit of revolutionary politics and world events. It gives us the inside story of how militants did and might engage with police, prisons, informants, media and one another in the...
Topics: RAF, Red Army Faction, Revolutionary Cells, Carlos, PFLP, terrorism, 1970s, Germany, 1980s, Red...
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,...
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 Walking Tour Stop 3: The Vats, breweries, Hostess Bakery and more...
Topics: The Vats, punk, beer, breweries, Hostess Twinkies
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
buchla box sound
Topics: electronic music, buchla box, buchla
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
Chuck Wollenberg presents his new book Rebel Lawyer about Wayne Collins and his defense of Japanese-American rights during and after WWII. Novelist and essayist Karen Tei Yamashita shares her introduction to John Okada’s No-No Boy , the only 1950s novel to reflect on the post-Internment experience among Japanese-American families.
Topics: Internment, Wayne Collins, Fred Korematsu, renunciants, Tule Lake, concentration camps,...
Inaugurating a new âthird Wednesdaysâ series at CounterPULSE, Mona Caron will present a slide show of her famous murals and many other works, talking about the politics of her art, and her ideas about the relationship of art and politics.
Topics: murals, art, politics, painting, Switzerland, Intragna, Mona Caron
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,...
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
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
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,...
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
Bending Over Backwards Audio Tour: Stop 2: Leathermen in SOMA
Topics: gay, homosexual, leather, leathermen, Stud, leather bars
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
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
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,...
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
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,...
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
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
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
In this majestic tour de force, celebrated historian Peter Linebaugh takes aim at the thieves of land, polluters of the seas, ravagers of the forests, despoilers of rivers, and removers of mountaintops. Scarcely a society has existed on the face of the earth that has not had commoning at its heart. "Neither the state nor the market," say the planetary commoners. Linebaugh kindles the embers of memory like few other historians of our time to ignite our future commons. Linebaugh...
Topics: commons, enclosures, England, 1790s, Ned Ludd, Queen Mab, industrialization, wage-slavery,...
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
Felicia Elizondo Flames recounts her experiences in the Tenderloin when trans women erupted on a late August night in 1966 and rebuked police harassment with an epic mini-riot at Compton’s Cafeteria at Turk and Taylor. The audience joins the conversation to help illuminate the long path over the decades to today’s high profile trans activism, still beset by obstacles and conflict within the gay community as well as the larger surrounding culture.
Topics: Trans, gay, LGBTQI, Trans women, hair fairy, jota, queer, lesbian, Tenderloin, 1960s
Recording of notes scribbled in margins of Haskell's notebooks in 1880s.
Topics: Haskell, real estate, Hall of Records, radicals
In Adriana Camarena's new work the most precarious residents of the Mission are the central storytellers. In this, the latest presentation of her ongoing work-in-progress, she tells the story of El Cabe, accompanied by Los Alegres del Bajio. Her project covers a range of historic tales of Californian daily life: Indigenous migrants on their day off from construction or cooking on the line, watch movies inside their shared group apartments. Parents, raising children in the Mission, fend off...
Topics: migration, border, desert crossing, Guadalajara, Los Angeles, Mexico, Cesar Chavez, trust,...
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
With translator Donald Nicholson-Smith. There is a grain of truth in the stereotypical view that Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, as two leading lights of the Situationist International, stood for two opposite poles of the movement: the objective Debord versus the subjective Vaneigem: Marxism versus anarchism: icy cerebrality versus sensualism: and, of course, The Society of the Spectacle versus The Revolution of Everyday Life --the two major programmatic books of the Situationist International,...
Topics: Situationists, Raoul Vaneigem, Donald Nicholson-Smith, France, radicalism, Debord, Society of the...
Satirical radio advertisement for "Le Tank Solaire", the solar-powered defense strategy for the 1970s and 1980s, prepared by members of the Union of Concerned Commies.
Topics: tank, solar, Chrys-is-ler Corp., satire
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
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...
While squatting a South Park Gulch apartment in the 1990s and experimenting with urban guerrilla art, at some point Argentinian-born artist Mauro Ffortissimo began collecting pianos. He took them apart, pushed them off rooftops, and set one ablaze on the bluffs of Half Moon Bay after a series of sunset performances. Together, Mauro and Dean Mermell now bring pianos to the streets and gardens of San Francisco. Including an excerpt of Twelve Pianos .
Topics: piano, public space, public pianos, Sunset Piano, Flower Piano, San Mateo coast, free pianos
With the twang of a steel guitar, the whine of a fiddle and the plunk of a banjo comes an instant association; the pick-up truck, the cowboy boots, the rolling hills, dusty fields, lonesome highways and the flag. For many, it has also come to signify conservatism, “traditional values,” American chauvinism, and even racism, bigotry and the confederate flag. Although one wouldn’t realize it from listening to today’s pop Country radio stations, Country music has been anything but a...
Topics: Country, folk, coal miners, hobos, transients, Big Rock Candy Mountain, Irish, Scottish, English,...
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
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,...
Mark Twain once quipped, "I never let school get in the way of my education!" This panel of educators will share how they live that idea working in school systems. All three educators have successfully co-created programs with their communities that are progressive, develop student leadership, and empower communities to address social justice issues. Their work ranges from recreating schools as centers for social research and action in Berkeley and New Mexico to shifting the dialog...
Topics: education, charter schools, Africa, poverty, community, adult education, student led curriculum
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
Foxconn, the world's biggest contract manufacturer, employs more than one million people in China alone, working for Apple and many other brands. Foxconn's workers, the iSlaves, face horrendous working conditions while producing iPhones and iPads. In 2010 a series of worker suicides at Chinese Foxconn factories drew world-wide attention. The situation has not changed much since: instead of improving conditions, Foxconn accelerated the relocation of factories to the Chinese hinterland, and still...
Topics: China, Foxconn, Apple, iPhone, iPad, iSlave, iPod, working class, class struggle, strikes, riots,...
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
Jon Christensen hosts a conversation with Richard Walker, Rebecca Solnit, and Antonio Roman-Alcalá, growing out of the oral history project "Ecology Emerges" by Shaping San Francisco's Chris Carlsson and LisaRuth Elliott. The discussion was held at SPUR, May 17, 2010, and includes a lively discussion with the audience.
Topics: Natural capitalism, externalities, prices, markets, ecology
Imagine a time when the land that we know as the Franciscan Peninsula extended out to the Farallones and mastodons and tigers roamed freely. Imagine small seasonal villages along waterways engaged in trading across the bay, and tule canoes making the journey. Park Historian Breck Parkman will share his extensive research into the prehistory of the Bay Area, and Malcolm Margolin (Heyday Books, The Ohlone Way ) joins in with his years of exploring the indigenous history of the region. ...
Topics: indigenous, ohlone, Bay Area, pre-urban, pre-Spanish, prehistory
Last year we embarked on a grand collaborative journey through the under-recognized LGBTQ+ history of North Beach with Seth Eisen’s OUT of Site performative walking tours. Seth returns with a look at his new SOMA tours coming in June and September, bringing forgotten queer histories and sites to life and exploring the intersections of labor history, the leather scene, bars, nightlife, and the immigrant experience. This is part of a series of solo artists giving a behind-the-scenes and...
Topics: Queer history, homophile, SOMA, Happy Valley, Waterfront, City Front, YMCA, The Stud, Boot Camp,...
The fight against the Reagan administration’s war build-up, emergency response against Central American wars, birth of the Peace Navy, stopping the USS Missouri, creating sanctuary cities, AIDS and Anti-Nuclear activism. We bring it up to climate justice & no nukes today. With activists and archivists Marcy Darnovsky , Steve Stallone , Lincoln Cushing, and Roberto Lovato. .
Topics: anti-nuclear, anti-war, Reagan, Thatcher, neoliberalism, New Deal, safety net, nuclear war, nuclear...
Missing Pieces: Remembering Elements of a Gone City Geographer Dick Walker looks at the formative politics of the region in his new book, Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area , and takes us through the overheated bubbles and spectacular crashes, inequality, and delusion of the current moment. Arthur O’Donnell has methodically documented parts of the City slated for demolition or redevelopment from 2010–2018 in his Bound to...
Topics: Bay Area, destruction, rebuilding, gentrification, construction, new buildings, The Suppository,...
Today’s San Francisco and our village-like neighborhoods, charming architecture, and quality of life is indebted to the Freeway Revolt that shocked the nation between 1956 and 1965. Most histories have focused on the politicians and city leaders who argued and voted in those years, overlooking the vital role of the emergent middle-class women who spearheaded the Revolt, and kept it going against overwhelming odds. Decades later, a second Freeway Revolt helped reclaim the Embarcadero and Hayes...
Topics: Freeways, Freeway Revolt, Glen Park, Bay Bridge, Southern Crossing, bridges, highways, Panhandle,...
âCorporate Personhoodâ is being widely discussed after a couple of decades of slowly growing awareness of the creeping expansion of corporate legal rights since the late 19th century. After the Civil War in the 1860s corporations took on new forms, new legal rights, and new power. David Cobb, Phillip Pierce, Jed Holtzman, and Chris Carlsson will talk about the origins and and describe the evolution over time.
Topics: Corporate Personhood, charters, states, sovereignty, rights, duties, Move to Amend
The Enola Gay Faggot Affinity Group emerged in 1983 during direct action protests against nuclear weapons at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. About a year later they were the very first group to publicly engage in nonviolent direct action to dramatize the AIDS crisis. The "Money for AIDS, Not for War" ritual/protest was held on September 23, 1984, by Enola Gay, a self proclaimed faggot affinity group, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 50 miles east of San...
Topics: HIV/AIDS, Direct Action, affinity groups, Lawrence Livermore Lab, anti-nuclear, nuclear weapons,...
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
Considering urbanization as a global crisis/an opportunity. Understanding the restorative, regenerative, and imaginative possibilities of a new integration of urban and rural through local agriculture, human-powered transport (e.g. walking, biking), etc. Wednesday, April 28, 7:30 with Peter Berg (Planet Drum Foundation), Miya Yoshitani (Asian Pacific Environmental Network), Jason Mark (Earth Island Journal, Alemany Farm) at CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission St (at 9th), SF part of the Shaping San...
Topics: Nature, Cities, urban, rural, native species, habitat, restoration, balance
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
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...
Jenny Odell brings us an update on her ongoing project, the Bureau of Suspended Objects , which seeks an archaeological approach to the present by researching and archiving everyday discarded (or about-to-be-discarded) objects. First displayed at the dump, the objects are seen as true artifacts: crystallizations of a whole set of desires, economic contingencies, material availabilities, and abstract valuations that are more specific to their time than we could possibly realize now. As a result,...
Topics: Trash, garbage, found objects, objectification, research, factories, supply chain, reuse, Recology,...
What role do nontraditional archives play in the preservation and interpretation of peoples' history? This open discussion will explore some of the opportunities and challenges of radical repositories. Some of the issues that will be addressed include: What defines a radical archive? What can be productive relations between community-based or independent archives and more established (and establishment) institutions? What tools and processes are making it easier to document, catalog, and share...
Topics: archives, history, historiography, silence, digital media, paper, books, newspapers, formats,...
From editor Sasha Lilley's essay: "By its very nature, capitalism is catastrophic. There should be no doubt that the multiple social, and especially ecological, crises of our time are genuine and cataclysmic. We are suggesting, however, that politics embedded within the logic of catastrophe â that the catastrophe will deliver a new world, or that it will create the conditions under which people automatically take action â do not serve the left and environmental movement. An awareness of...
Topics: Catastrophism, catastrophe, apocalypse, end times, doom and gloom, fear, politics, right-wing,...
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,...
An evening of stories and discussion about the impact of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (which wasn’t rescinded until 1943!) on the Chinese American community in San Francisco. This infamous legacy was both subtly woven into community cultural life, and overtly demarcated social and geographical boundaries. Chinese Whispers , a research and storytelling project about the Chinese who helped build the American West, will present excerpted stories from the Bay Area which reveal the deep impact...
Topics: Chinese, Chinatown, Exclusion Act, racism, community, borders, identity, language
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
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...
250 years ago, life along the edges of what we now know as San Francisco Bay changed forever when the Portola Expedition came upon this hidden magnificent body of water. The Spaniards couldn’t quite understand it when they saw this marvelous sight for the first time on November 2, 1769, but this confluence of many rivers was a thriving home to thousands of people, not to mention an abundance of species of water, land, and sky. Join us to talk with Gregg Castro , t’rowt’raahl...
Topics: shellmounds, per-European Bay Area, Ohlone, Portola, grizzly bears, wetlands, swamplands
The largest living Ohlone tribe began a migration from San Francisco's Mission Dolores in 1834 and now lives in Pomona, CA. From June 2012 to November 2013 the Ohlone Profiles Project is bringing this peninsula's original inhabitants back to this land where they will be holding community meetings, healing ceremonies, and other gatherings to begin a Truth and Reconciliation process between the City and the Tribe. Fresh from a Big Time Gathering on Indigenous Peoples' Day (October 6) at the...
Topics: Ohlone, indigenous, indian, San Francisco, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Federal recognition, Pomona,...
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...
"Money: A Comedy with Music" is a satiric portrayal of an economically troubled society in which an American banker tries to explain how money works. The new play written in 2010 in San Francisco moves from Brazil to New York, from scenes of wealth to scenes of bankruptcy, accompanied by cabaret songs, chicanery and financial chaos. Developed this year, but indebted to the Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project from the 1930s, "Money" incorporates puppetry, film...
Topics: 1937, money, economics, comedy, musical, Federal Theater Project, WPA, Depression, derivatives
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
Progress to Poverty: Land and Rents On the 140th anniversary of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, his land tax and radical reform of land use are worth a critical re-examination. Geographers F.T.C. Manning and Richard Walker , along with Ted Gwartney of the California chapter of Common Ground USA, untangle what George proposed, what happened as a result of his ideas, and what the future holds. In conjunction with the San Francisco Public Library exhibit Who Owns the Earth? Henry George’s...
Topics: Single Tax, Land Tax, taxes, wealth, monopoly, Henry George, Georgist, Workingmen's Party of...
Everyone is invited to come to an open discussion about the Occupy movement that started in September in the U.S. and has spread across the country, with dramatic events in Oakland, San Francisco, and other locales. What are the politics of this moment? How shall we understand our own activity, how does it fit into a longer historical perspective? Is this really so new? If so, what next? Come and participate in a civil and lively discussion.
Topics: Occupy, Occupy Wall Street, politics, history, direct action, banks, foreclosures, taxes
Selma James speaks on her new book "Sex, Race and Class--The Perspective of Winning; A Selection of Writings 1952-2011." James discusses the class divide in feminism, the anti-capitalism of the social wage, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Haiti: Black Jacobins then and now and much more! With her was George Katsiaficas, author of the just-released "Asia's Unknown Uprisings: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century," and he gave an account of the...
Topics: Feminism, unwaged, wages for housework, prostitutes union, England, South Korea, Gwangju, Tibet,...
In the 1960s the Black Panther Party for Self Defense joined with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the poor White Young Patriots Organization in the Original Rainbow Coalition (pre-Jessie Jackson). The model of "organize your own but fight together" was an attempt to build broad unity in dispossessed communities while dealing with the realities of racialized capitalism head-on. Come join a discussion of this history and what its going to take to keep the 99% together for the...
Topics: Rainbow Coalition, Black Panther Party, Young Lords, Young Patriots, I Wor Kuen, Los Siete de la...
Mexicans are experiencing unprecedented levels of violence but are responding with unprecedented levels of mobilization at the base of society. From the No Más Sangre movement to the #yosoy132, Mexican people are contesting established powers and âprehistoricâ institutions. How do we reconcile the return of the PRI with an insurgent population determined to rewrite their own history?
Topics: #yosoy132, Mexico, corruption, elections, presidential elections, Narcotraficantes, Drug trade,...
Shaping San Francisco's Chris Carlsson provides an historic tour of the eastern shoreline from its days as tidal mudflats and open sewers crisscrossed by piers and wharves to its new incarnation as a site of ecological restoration and recreation. Anthony Khalil of Literacy for Environmental Justice (LEJ ) offers a special look at creating a revitalized Candlestick shoreline including habitat restoration and community engagement, while interpreting the wonders of the Franciscan...
Topics: shoreline, landfill, hills, mudflats, wetlands, swamps, San Francisco, Telegraph Hill, Mission Bay,...
The San Francisco Poster Syndicate has been creating inspiring silkscreen posters at protests, demonstrations, street fairs, art events, and parties for the past decade or more. A steady stream of new participants has kept it fresh, and tonight we’ll hear from veterans and newbies alike. Art Hazelwood, Jos Sances, Lucia Ippolito, Christopher Statton, Joanna Ruckman, and more!
Topics: posters, politics, wallposters, free, gratis, public space, decommodified art, free posters,...
