Category: Thoughts

Over the years, I’ve worn many hats. I know people who wear more, but I sometimes have doubts about how to deal with the random lids I’m wearing at the time. Last year, I wore the “performer” and “activist” hat, as well as the “photographer” and “writer” ones. I also got to wear the “production” hat and the “artist” hat a few times as well. As you can easily see, sometimes I have a hard time juggling all those hats around.
Continue reading “My Favorite Hat”

I love the fact that you can soak up free and cheap culture in San Francisco. My music tastes can always be satiated with $5 to $10 events, in great underground spots, that benefit hard-working organizations and people. I rarely go to bars and clubs to catch larger shows anymore and instead pay what I can to support amazing causes. There might even be free food, drinks, and smoke at some of these events (read ahead for details).

See you in the Mission at one of these fun events. PS: DJ Pod in the house at the Feb. 3 ArtSF event.

• 2/1/07: BLO’S 5TH BIRTHDAY PARTY AND BENEFIT FOR MISSION ANTI-DISPLACEMENT COALITION!
• 2/2/07: CELEBRATION AND SOLIDARITY FOR OAXACA AND ATENCO’S POLITICAL PRISONERS
• 2/3/07: KAFANA BALKAN – a benefit for the Bread and Cheese Circus

Continue reading “Benefits to Cheaply Fill Your Weekend with Joy”

I learned a simple lesson last week at Macworld. Hypercapitalism equals hooked on gadgets. When my two nieces got an iPod stereo/alarm clock on this past Christmas, I didn’t notice. They also separately got a cellphone and a camera from Santa Claus. Mr. Claus would probably give junk to a junky if that’s what was the hot seller that holiday season. I still didn’t bother to pick up the addicted message.

But with the new Apple iPhone, I got hooked right along with the school of consumer fish. As Wednesday’s audience oh’d and ah’d at Macworld’s iPhone presentation, I drooled as well. My friend Antonio texted me while I was there, “bow down and prey(sic) to ur new god.” He had taken photos of people oogling at the encased iPhone, but afterwards still ran over to the Apple Store and bought his girlfriend an iPod.
Continue reading “Hooked”

My, what a long period of nothingness from these yon HappyFt pages. No pics, no words, no strange deeds of Middle American yonders. What a fast and furious month I’ve stumbled through. Driving across the heartland one last time, lunching in Cleveland right before the November elections, and reading a great political cartoon about how to hack your voting machine.

Before Cleveland, I hot-tubbed on the 25th floor of my friend’s rental building inside Chicago’s Loop. Kimilee was in town working on the Broadway preview of the Pirate Queen as a swing for four of the fem parts. Saw the show, it needs work, but wished her well as I continued the drive east.

Nights in hotels blurred by clear across the Rust Belt, TV visions of election madness, pundit punditry, and the usual gang of idiots. I’d hop online and try to stay in touch with my peeps in NYC and SF. The trip to RI fell through, as did my grand dream of traveling over most of Canada. Iowa got too cold, and an SF friend called me mad for thinking of visiting our neighbors to the north in Nov.
Continue reading “Painting the Walls with Butter”

After the cops shut us down about 4 years ago, I had to take on the task of answering info@cellspace e-mail. At least once a week, people from around the world would contact CELLspace and ask how they could start their own arts center. I tried to answer their questions. This desire to make community space showed me how amazing of a concept CELLspace had become. Now, the term “multiuse arts facility” is used to describe spaces like CELL all over San Francisco and the world.

Here, unpublished since 2003, are a few of the answers I gave for the groups that e-mailed us asking about starting their own multiuse arts space. I tried to be as honest as possible, because I didn’t want them to make the mistakes that we made, and I saved these answers in info@cellspace’s account. Sadly, all of those old e-mails were deleted by the company that hosted our mail account. Of all the neat things I saved during that rocky time, these FAQs are the only bits that survived.

HAPPY 10TH CELLSPACE!!!

:~:~:~:

(From a personal file dated June, 2003. All opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinions of CELL the collective and/or CELLspace the nonprofit.)

If things seem slow–i.e., few people around, summer’s here, let’s go drink, etc., do we just keep sticking it out?  Have there been ‘bad times’ at CELLspace, and how did you weather them?

Continue reading “CELLspace 2003 Multiuse Arts Facility FAQ”

Join CELLspace in celebrating its 10 year anniversary!
When: Saturday, October 14th, 2006 7pm-10pm
Where: 2050 Bryant Street (btwn 18th & 19th Streets)
Price: $20 (in advance) $25 (@ door)

Join us for a night of live entertainment, awards ceremony, silent auction, craft making, youth performances, special quest speakers, hors d’oeuvre, full bar, community and more.

Our longtime history and commitment to promoting the arts now embraces creative culturally relevant programs to address violence prevention, leadership development, and academic enrichment for young people in the Mission District.

ABOUT THIS HAPPYFEET IMAGE

Leon has a Posse, a photo and sticky note that stayed in the CELL office for years.

In 1999, Leon Rosen lived down the street in a Project Artaud studio, played amazing piano and accordion, but didn’t do to well at collective meetings. He and the Sound Coop crew, the original Sound Labbers, couldn’t keep up with their rent. Leon added flavor to CELLspace when I started volunteering there, cracking me up and entertaining me while randomly playing on the half-broken instruments that lived in the space.

A Shepard Fairey spoof photo/gag hung on the CELLspace office wall for a long time. The sticky note says something like “Lea Bo has a posse/5’6″/130 lbs” and stood the test of time in the office. I asked his permission to put it on my older version of Happy Feet Travels, and he didn’t care, so for a few years, Leon was one of the HappyFt characters that dressed the home page.

MY EARLY DAYS AT the CELL

My first experience with CELLspace, then called CELL, took place in 1997 during a digital media conference. I’d just moved to San Francisco, and saw that Mondo Media (or was it Wired?) had an art show at 2050 Bryant Street, right around the corner from the new BAVC building. My traveling companion Arno and I walked into CELL thinking it was a random warehouse that had underground art. We weren’t too far off. Caretaker and Co-Founder Tom Cocke produced the show that night: tables of gadgets that made strange sounds and noises. Mondo had cover art on the walls of the Crucible Steel Gallery, along with fancy furniture and magazines to flip through. At the time, the “Black Box” stood where the new bathrooms are now, there wasn’t a crafts loft, and the studios were freshly built.

I went to concessions (no kitchen there either) and ordered a smart drink smoothy for about $3. It is still one of the nastiest things I’ve ever put in my mouth, and the first money I wasted inside the CELL. Arno and I left to get free food at BAVC after we tired of the dissonant noise.

In early 1998, two neighbors who lived in my building asked me if I’d like to volunteer for a funky, underground art space. Luther and Romaine took me to my first-ever volunteer meeting, and Caretaker and Co-Founder Jonathan Youtt sat in on the meeting and discussed how to get involved in CELL. While sitting in the gallery, I remembered that this was the underground space with the really bad music and nasty smart drinks. Amazing how you find things, or how they find you. Jonathan’s version of the volunteer program sounded well-codified, but I soon found out that nothing was too organized at this non-hierarchically run space.

All volunteers had to work in the office before they could work elsewhere in the organization. I started off doing about two shifts a month and would answer phones and try my best to tell people on the other end what was going on. I must say answering the phones and talking to people who walked in, while not having any idea who ran CELL or how things got done, proved to be a frustrating experience.

One particular shift, a man walked by my desk, waved hello, and walked into the strangely-shaped door that I kept seeing people (Caretakers I found out later) go in and out of. Minutes later he walked by again in a hurry, followed quickly by a blonde-haired woman.

“Who are you?” she asked.
“Um, I’m Russell, the office volunteer.”
“Hi, I’m Julie. I live upstairs. [she was a Caretaker and Co-founder]”
“OK?”
“That guy that you just let go upstairs into our private apartment was going to rob us!”
“Oh!”
“Don’t let anybody in that door for the rest of the night!”

She stormed out, leaving me shaken and confused. Soon, Dave X, another Caretaker, walked into the office and headed for the door. He then yelled at me for trying to NOT let him go to his room!

AND THEN…

Frank “12 Galaxies” Chu was a constant presence on the Financial District sidewalks as well as bars and activist gatherings. He ended up on the early design of HappyFeet Travels.

As my years at CELLspace rolled along, I always told people that the best way to get involved was to start cleaning the place. Regulars always noticed new people cleaning and sweeping and mopping, so you’d always have a good talk with one of us. If you wanted to know what was going on at CELLspace, while calling would get you a clueless volunteer and our online calendar was always out-of-date, the best way was to come by and ask or pick up flyers.

I started out not knowing anyone or anything, and ended up making my dreams come true. I played music, puppeteered, acted, read poetry, curated shows, produced concerts, worked raves, met celebrities, built walls and laid floors. I learned a new way of communicating via facilitation, and became a facilitator and mediator. I dabbled in many artforms, met artists that were amazing in their own medium, and made friends for life.

Puppet Crafting Mayhem at the 2000 Funky Puppet Circus Supper (one of the first big shows I co-produced)
I also found a community that shared the same values as I did, felt like changing the world like I did, and taught me to embrace the whole DIY attitude.

I’ve heard over the years that there should be a book about CELLspace. I’ve never seen a space quite like CELL, so a book about it might help future groups learn from our strengths and weaknesses. But, in true CELLspace fashion, it won’t get done until someone figures out how to make it happen. I’ve never warmed up to doing that book, and wonder if some of the older folks would contribute. But I’d sure like to meet someone who’d like to take that idea and make it happen.

Coming soon, I plan on posting a few old e-mail responses that I wrote while I was checking Cell’s official email inbox. We’d just been shut down, and were short on volunteers, so I checked the em from my day job computer. Guess I had time to write long answers, and hope that the information is still useful. Who knows, maybe it’ll inspire someone to start that book!

HAPPY 10TH, CELLSPACE!!!