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Hunting for Groucho on the Edge of Gas Town

Found Groucho’s book up in Vancouver. I first went to a used bookstore with books piled to the ceiling. “Now, I don’t put Groucho in the humour section,” the old worker said. “I put him in the Hollywood section.” Wasn’t sure if he was trying to be funny, until he walked me over to the piles of books about movie stars.

They had no copy of the particular book I wanted in either section. This put the number of book stores with no copy to about 6 total (SF and Vancouver combined). I leave the piles, and the aggressive hobo guy with an unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

Just up the street was another bookstore. Walking in, I heard two employees discussing something under the rattle of a jack hammer. Just behind the till, on the other side of the shelved wall, a jack hammer vibrated the whole store. It was like having a loud drunk as a third party to the conversation.

Male Employee: “Oh, boy. My neighbors at home are doing construction. Starts early in the morning. I’m getting here and there!”
Female Emp: “This is fucking driving me crazy! We start a bathroom remodel next week so I’m going to get it here and there too!”
They pause. Then she says, “they’ve been pounding the same part of the wall for weeks now. What the hell are they doing over there?”

… all the while, classical music sheepishly peeps through their stereo.

I find the book, the 1993 edition, and pay way too much for it. I don’t mind, since I’m feeding the local economy and not getting the book mailed to me. Cash feels good in the hand, and in the till. A book on a flight home will feel even better.
“I would browse some more, but I think I’ll buy this and flee,” I remark under the metal and concrete racket.
“Wish I could flee,” the guy states. We pause so that the hammer can add emphasis to his point.

I accidentally give the guy an Australian coin that’s mixed in with my Canadian change.
When I pull out the bill, the guy says, “Hope you don’t plan on paying in pesos.”
“No,” I remark, popping the bill out in front of him. “I don’t think Mexico has the Queen on their tender.”

I hastily exit the store, unlock my bike, and take a glance at the building above them. Jack hammers are going in other parts of the building. It will probably be another condo after the remodel. For now it is the din and debris of “progress” above a musty smelling, but neatly organized, (and LOUD) book store. Continue reading “Hunting for Groucho on the Edge of Gas Town”

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A Day on MUNI

Devin talked about his plan since early 2012. He initially planned to ride MUNI buses, trains, and cable cars for 24 hours on Friday, March 16. After I told him that that was St. Patrick’s Day weekend, he realized that the drunk and stupid quotient would be up. He postponed the ride to June 8.

I told him I’d love to ride along a bit, so Devin decided to eat lunch, a sandwich he made that morning, in my hood. I sometimes leave my phone off all morning so missed his texts (he had his phone off for most of the ride). He buzzed at the front door, took a quick WC break, and I joined him. We walked down to Divis and spent his break at Cafe Abir. We hopped the 24 and rode it to the end of the line on Fillmore. Caught the 10 and meandered through Pac Heights, Chinatown, North Beach, and then down into the Financial District. I hopped off at Market and caught a Fulton 5 back home to do some work.

He mentions the woman we met on the 10. He does no mention the joke she told us:

Three Italian sons move to the USA to succeed in life. The first one makes money and buys their mother a house in Italy. She replies, “Thanks for the house.” The second son makes his money and buys their mom a car and a driver. “You do too much. I let the driver go,” their mom said. The third son succeeded and wanted to buy their mother the most exotic bird he could find. So he bought her a parrot and shipped it to Italy for her. His mother sent him a note, which read:

“What a lovely gift. The chicken tasted terrific.”

Anyway, I snapped a pic of Devin during his travels. And he’s begun to post stories from the 20+ pages of notes he jotted down.
Glad I got to enjoy about two hours of his 24 total.

devin-on-muni Continue reading “A Day on MUNI”

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Month of Blog: Learning Points

Here we are, four weeks later and the Month of Blog is complete. What do I have to show for a month of focusing on retro content, even without the daily link to the current networking site(s) of choice?

  • Well, I can optimistically say that my brain thinks less in the framework of “I should post that on Face Book.” Good to know that the billboards of my mind have been cut down by the chainsaws of indy-driven content.
  • I had some moments at the beginning where I was ahead of the daily postings and I had some moments here and there where I missed a day and had to back date a post (this just happened today).
  • I enjoyed taking what interested me and putting it in the context of daily posts rather than Face Book or Flickr’ing the content. There’s liberation in not posting to a feed-driven site, where one can get lost in the chatter. There’s freedom from looking at one’s personal content that is not in the framework of a clean, yet bloated, framework.
  • My brain and social network didn’t implode because of less activity on the corporate social sites.
  • I did have a few instances of not having much to say, but enjoyed posting random content that filled the gaps.
  • I realized that my webstats site is not that user friendly for a moderate blogger. Urchin 6 needs to give me graphs and more dumbed down stats!
  • Photos, thoughts, dreams, lines, stencils, politics, remembrances, music, creations … I hope you enjoyed rattling around my brain for a month straight without distractions from all the other tickers of brain rattlings.

And what about the future?

As I continue to feel ODd on FaceBook, I will continue to go retro and blog. But I doubt I’ll keep up the daily postings. This has been a refreshing exercise in mind and thought liberation.

Thank you for your participation!

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Critical Mass:20 … Welcome to San Francisco!

When I moved to SF in August of 1997, I didn’t know anybody or anything. Looking back, I see myself back then as a soft-skinned rube (which I was) who had landed into an alien land of an edgy, left-leaning city full of kooks, freaks, radicals, burners, and all manner of people from all corners of the globe and economic scale. Boom times were happening back then, and not just for the dot coms and investment banks. Burning Man had just had a wild week in the desert and gained national attention exactly a year before my arrival. Back East, it was a blip on the CNN feeds. (here’s a little video taste of the Cacophony Society’s Burning Man 1996). And only a month prior to my landing in SF, an entity called Critical Mass had been harassed and roughed up by Mayor Willie Brown and the SFPD. (see a video of this event here).

I only knew about Critical Mass from picking up the latest copy of the SF Bay Guardian my first ever Wednesday in the City. They had an intense photo of cyclists getting arrest, their bikes impounded, for no real reason than being in a huge bike ride that defied any type of control. Being a cyclist in the Southeast, which meant that I rarely rode on paved roads for fear of being killed by car drivers who felt that they owned ALL of the pavement, I was instantly inspired by Critical Mass.

So, on the last Friday of August 1997, I hopped a MUNI bus down to Justin Herman Plaza to see what the hell this monthly activity was all about. I didn’t have my bike. I didn’t know anyone who would loan me one, and I couldn’t afford to rent one. So I showed up to find thousands of cyclists, piles of riot cops, media and cop helicopters, and a general sense of fun an celebration. I walked through the mass of riders, waiting to wander off into the city to cause mayhem with the Friday car commute home, with amazement. I’d never seen so many bikers in my life. Continue reading “Critical Mass:20 … Welcome to San Francisco!”

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The Other 4/20: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

While plums of purple haze drift over the City from Golden Gate Park’s Hippie Hill, let us not ever forget the unfortunate disaster that is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The human deaths on this day in 2009 were a tragedy, the aftermath is yet another sad example of our capacity to shit where we eat.

Earthjustice Blog posted a great page with news about the spill.

Dead dolphins keep washing up on shore in unprecedented numbers. Oil-coated coral reefs are dying in the deepwater. Eyeless shrimp and crabs with holes in their shells are showing up in relatively empty fishing nets while killifish, a minnow-like fish at the base of the food chain, show signs of chemical poisoning.

And critics say offshore drilling safety and oversight remains woefully lacking.

Meanwhile, coalitions continue to form and grow against fracking, the Alberta Oil Sands (and the Keystone XL pipeline), arctic drilling. In the past two years, fracking has caused earth quakes, the Keystone pipeline as not approved, yet arctic drilling is about to begin. I cannot imagine an oil spill in the rugged Arctic Ocean.

That would be an even worse disaster than in the Gulf, if that can even be calculated in terms of destruction upon the Earth.

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You are already a member…

Ah… Rev. Ian Stang and his cadre always make me smile.
So blessed to have seen “Bob” here and there in the early 1990s and then found out what it all “meant”.
Doubly blessed to live in SF, where abnormal means normal, and the normals are, well… from Walnut Creek!
Triply blessed to know that all post-web high weirdness and mocking mayhem stems from the  Discordian and Illuminatus! roots of the CoSG and Bishop Joey’s First Church of the Last Laugh. These idiots found inspiration from mid-20th Century nuts, including the Merry Prankster/Situationist/DaDa/Fluxus realms.

BEHOLD…. something to seriously not be serious about, unless you feel the deep need to be serious about something that is possibly not seriously worth being serious about.

…………….

ARE YOU ABNORMAL?

Then you are probably BETTER than most people!

IF you suspect that things are much worse than you ever suspected…
IF the only thing you’ve been able to laugh at for the last 5 years is the fact that NOTHING is funny anymore…
IF you sometimes want to collar people on the street and scream that you’re more different than they could possibly imagine…
IF you can possibly help us with a donation…
IF you see the whole universe as one vast morbid sense of sick humor…
IF the current “Age of Progress” seems more like the Dark Ages to you…
IF you are looking for an inherently contradictory religion that will condone megadegeneracy and yet tell you that you are “above” everyone else…

Then…

THE CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS could save your sanity!

Using SubGenius secrets of BULLDADA and MOREALISM you can now MIRACULOUSLY ELIMINATE COMPULSIVE URGES such as smoking, eating, sleeping, working; end baldness, constipation, sex-money problems, assouliness, and painful shortage of SLACK!

Become a Doktor of the Forbidden Sciences… Make religion a kick-ass adventure! Indulge in Self-Help through Raising Hell!

The SubGenius:

Patriot or Alien?
Personal Savior or False Prophet?
Nurd or Hero?
Inspired Madman or Complete Jackass?

Thought you’d tried everything? YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET! Learn to THINK BIG! Develop the tricks of Length Extension! Bring your weirdest dreams to rampaging LIFE!

Stand erect for you own abnormality. WISE UP! They are out to get you.

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The Facebook IP License

Find all the terms here.

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

This appears to be a straightforward clause that allows FB to show your IP content on their site. They clearly state, prior to this clause, that “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook.” However, the main sentence of this clause is “you specifically give us [Facebook]…. license to use any IP content that you post on… Facebook.”

The obvious reason for posting IP content on FB is to have people share it, tag it, and like it. And the only way out of this license agreement is to delete your IP content. If it has been shared around the FB networks, then those copies need to be deleted too! That seems almost impossible to do if you have years of IP content and get a reasonable amount of shares on it.

FB appears to not include any simple way to notify those who have shared your IP content to please delete it so that this license can be terminated.

Sneaky twists, those FB billionaires.

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Copyright Yer Sh!t ??

Woe be the artist who doesn’t dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Who would expect to have that song become a YouTube sensation, or that illustration to end on on the cover of a magazine? FaceBook and Google+, etc. may weasel in on your rights too, if you post things on there. After the success, what do you have if you haven’t covered your ass?

And did you co-create a work? Do you have a collaboration agreement with everyone else? If you have a project that becomes successful, © and ownership issues may become messy.

Then again, there is also Creative Commons, which Flickr.com allows for content sharing. I protect my content under ©©. This allows creative re-use, but not to make money from re-use. You can scroll to the bottom of this page and read all about it. Try to make money off of my content, and >:)

A funny video on © your music:

This is not legal advice btw. Need that? Ask a lawyer!

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Meal, Rain, Curse, Renewal

I stare at the radar screen, showing colors of a storm across the Bay Area. Yellows are the worst of it, poring down out my window in the darkness of my back courtyard area. The flood light went out after they flipped the fourth and final one bedroom back there. I emailed the landlord to tell her three weeks ago and she said it would be fixed. It is still broken and I guess all the new folks living back there do not mind walking through the dark up the stairs to their places.

I have been thinking about silence today. I know someone that talks constantly. Almost nonstop. I won’t go into details because this person could actually wander over to this site and figure out who I am talking about. But all the talk makes me think of not talking. I hear enough talking in my mind. Nonstop monkey brain. Planing planning planning. Getting caught up on inner criticisms and the hustle for work and living.

But I do not feel like I have to open up my mind’s words into actual verbal words. I do not feel that strong of a need to connect with someone just to connect. I do like connecting, but I like to use my words with care. They can easily hurt or be too aggressive. They can easily be taken the wrong way and misinterpreted. One thing I have learned in my Paralegal classes is that words matter. In law, like life, what you say can and will be held against you.

But I get caught up and attached to the frustration and anger that arises when I hear nonstop talking. I don’t want to be around it! Some of it offends me. Some of makes me want to argue a counterpoint. Simply put, there can be unskillful means within the confines of the chatter.

On the flip side of this, I have had an exquisite conversation with a familiar stranger these past three weeks. I do not know her but I do know her. I have not spoken with her but we have spoken. I savor the words that she uses and I try to give thoughtful replies. I fret over my word choices and feel like I may say too much. I have edited myself and tried to keep a more refined persona. We are email pen pals with a few snail mail cards thrown in.

While I still go over to FaceBook, appreciating the silence and the pointed choice of words to a pen pal has added another layer of my disdain for social media. I look upon the feed(s) with a clouded confusion. Some of it is self-promotion which I do not mind. Most of it seems like chatter. And I get frustrated at the uselessness. While I translate Italian subject lines and watch shared videos, the FaceBook stream looks like this (and this is the current stream of useless chatter):

OK. I just looked at FB and I cannot bring myself to judge. I do not want to judge. I do not want to feel like I’m sucking sugar water in a rat maze as the feed ticks on. Maybe it is useful chatter for others. Maybe it is teaching me a lesson in my practice. Notice it and let it go. Do not let the mind get caught in the FB stream!

The rain continues outside my window. Not as loud as it was 15 minutes ago. I feel the laptop on my lap. Hear the ticking of the space heater. See the words appearing on the screen. This is now. Just notice this, now.

Right now, it’s like this.

Translate Curse to Italian. Maldire.

Translate Renewal to Italian. Rinnovo.

Rain renews. Washes away the day.

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Sticky Mouth

Yes, today is one of those days where you just go with the flow and take it for what it is. It began with the end of a seder for Passover. Done Project Artaud/Mission/Reb Le stylie. Biked home from that around 3am this morning, with mystical discussions and mad laughter ringing in my ears. Got home and continued to read Catching Fire, Book II of the Hunger Games trilogy. Slept in and had a futzy morning and finished the book, made final plans for the tour this afternoon, ate some food. Just chilled on a Shabbas morning. Gave the tour for a party of 9, a surprise birthday party for a man’s wife. She announced to her friends that she was pregnant. Weather was great. They loved the walk. Off to CC and Addie’s place for pre MAPP cocktails of egg-white pisco sours. Dangerous concoctions! Visits with friends and making new friends. Then out and about the Mission for tacos, galleries, and spaces packed to folks enjoying music. Discussions of murals, meetings with new and old friends, hugs all around and then back home to end the night with Mockingjay Book III beginnings, pb and honey sandwiches, the daily blog post, and a sticky mouth. Continue reading “Sticky Mouth”

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CELL at 7 (and 16)

Back in 2003, a major shift had happened at CELLspace. Events had been shut down and a large group of volunteers had pretty much left 2050 Bryant to start the Mission Market back on Florida Street. Tensions were high, people were burned out, and CELL needed to pay rent. CELL had had one of its few retreats to try to reform the regroup after many caretakers left in a huge pile of animosity. Then the war in Iraq started. We had all been protesting to not start this war and most of us saw the meta-narrative of CELL’s plight as that of the world’s.

I was personally down about the war and CELL. I’d backed off a bit to take a break, but I was answering the info email address (because no one else was). Since 1996, CELLspace has inspired many people to start their own space. There’s the Crucible, the Box Shop, and many others. From time to time, people would stop by to study CELL. And we would get emails asking about how to start a space. At the time I was answering info@cellspace, I got an email from Bucketworks in Milwaukee, WI (now in its 9th year!!). They were starting up a space and had great questions about how to do it. They caught me at a time where I must’ve been ready to talk raw and candidly about what was going on at CELL.

CELL had just turned 7 when the email arrived. I had just finished co-producing the Funky Puppet Supper, which was an amazing show that touched on CELL’s plight and the plight of war with Iraq. I pulled the original emails off of the Oblio hard drive last week, and decided, for CELL’s 16th Birthday (this Spring Equinox), to post it on here in its entirety. It is emotional, raw, unedited (well, I did take out a few bits that were too personal). It is a great snapshot of how I saw CELL back in 2003.

I had no help in answering the questions. I did not answer this based upon any horizontal process. So do not expect this to be the definitive angle on what was happening at the time. Remember, I was going to CELL meetings with about 3 other people while about 12 people were meeting and running the Mission Market. And a group of workers had left the space. These were hard times.

Being a lover of history, I cannot pass up adding the following Q&A about CELL to my Month of Blog. Happy 16th birthday CELLspace! So many amazing and intense memories.

……………… Continue reading “CELL at 7 (and 16)”

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Month of Blog

Because you crave it!

In the past few weeks, I have become tired of seeing my mind work like a FaceBook post. I actually started noticing this on the 2009 Stencil Nation tour in Europe. As Pod and I wandered around Vienna, Austria, we realized that every city we toured, the word “FaceBook” kept showing up in random places. And we both realized that we were beginning to think as posts to FaceBook. “Woah, that’s funny. I should share that on FaceBook.” I didn’t have a phone in the EU and Pod’s phone was a cheap “dumb” phone, so we couldn’t go from thought to FB in a matter of seconds.

Beyond the concept of having a huge corporation enter my brain as a way to express myself, I have begun to worry about the content that I post on FB. Google just changed the way they gather user information. I’m sure you saw the ads all over the place telling you about Google’s plan to consolidate their user experience, and thus their user’s thoughts. Buddhist ads have begun to appear on FB. I don’t want to buy any buddha t-shirts, but FB thinks I do. As the FTC mulls a “do not track” rule, and Google and other companies get busted for accessing too much user data, I’m beginning to wonder if my already slim profile on FB (and Google+, which I rarely post to), is a bit too much. And as FB changes their format (and user agreements) every 3 months, I am growing tired of the overflow of information. I hear this FB burnout from other people as well, and I think that the FB OD is one reason Google+ just isn’t happening. Most people appear to be thinking “You mean I have to go to yet another website to post my life?!” Continue reading “Month of Blog”