Saving Halloween in the Castro

A community group, Citizens for Halloween, is attempting to save the Castro Halloween party both from Mayor Gavin Newsom and from a potential riot. For further info, check the above website, or come to the C4H meeting this Saturday, September 22, at 1 pm, in the Eureka Valley Recreation Center, 100 Collingwood St.

City living

I couldn’t have said this better myself. You can find the original commentary here in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

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CITY LIVING

By Steven Jones

City living isn’t for everyone. It gets messy, crowded, stinky, loud, scary, and downright weird. Sometimes people block your car even when you have a green light and pound their fists on your hood if you honk. They wear outrageous costumes, play silly games, and follow ridiculous trends. They yell and laugh too loud right outside your window when you’re trying to sleep. Occasionally they pee in your doorway, graffiti your wall, grab your ass, or barf on your shoes.

But that’s city living, and I love it.

If you want clean and orderly, there are plenty of small towns and suburbs to choose from. You can probably even get front and back yards and a roomy house big enough for 2.5 children and assorted pets for what you’re paying for your apartment here. Tempting? Then you should do it. Really. We’ll all be very supportive of your decision to leave if it comes to that, no hard feelings. I might even help you pack and find a new occupant for your place.

But if you want to shut down our party or expect us to dance around your delicate sensibilities, we’re gonna have to fight. And guess what? We’ll win. There are more of us in this crazy town than there are of you … and we aren’t afraid. We dodge SUVs on bicycles, brush past ranting lunatics, stand tall against cops in riot gear, pierce painful parts, bring strange people home to do unspeakable things, cavort with revolutionaries, and take way too many drugs. So there’s no way we’re caving in to the NIMBYs, the conservatives, or the complainers who want to banish our beloved chaos.

The Guardian has long embraced true city living, from the Summer of Love and its hordes of hippies to the summer of 2007, when our glorious urban messiness is being threatened by the forces of gentrification, corporatization, homogenization, normalization, and stagnation. Once-radical neighborhoods like the Castro and the Haight are increasingly filled with aging homeowners, some of whom have grown frustrated with aspects of city living they once embraced.

Increasingly, however, these tragic naysayers are being confronted by groups such as the San Francisco Party Party, which was created to oppose the forces that are suburbanizing our great city. Last Halloween I donned a beard and stovepipe hat and joined the Party Party’s Abe Lincoln brigades as they cruised the Castro. Why Abe? Why not? Two dozen Abes strolled past the phalanxes of cops on overtime whose presence the nervous Nellies had urged (and who couldn’t stop violence from breaking out anyway), whooping it up until the party was shut down at the ridiculously early hour of 10:30 p.m. and city water trucks chased the partyers away, a sight that almost made us weep – and provoked the crowd into a state of restless frustration.

City living is about keeping the party going, not ending it. It’s a massive pillow fight in Justin Herman Plaza. It’s placing your body and bike in front of the angry guy in the Hummer who wants to cut through Critical Mass. It’s the drunken decision to get another tattoo or the hungry impulse to try an unfamiliar taquería. It’s wearing a chicken suit to confront a cowardly mayor. It’s watching Willy Wonka or the World Cup on massive screens in Dolores Park that somebody set up just because they thought it would be cool. It’s a bonfire on Ocean Beach, a blog argument over the latest city hall scandal, a giant purple head suddenly appearing in Golden Gate Park, street dancing at the late, lamented How Weird Street Faire, a bunch of wasted Santas bar crawling through North Beach, a sunny afternoon at Zeitgeist, a shopping trip to the Haight for a good pair of Burning Man goggles.

Or maybe for you it’s something else, something I’ve never thought or heard of, just some eccentric thing you and your freaky friends like to do. San Francisco has thousands of dynamic social pockets, big and small, each with its own passions, routines, and language. And not all civically spirited events are exotic, either. I’ve felt the abstract joy of the Bay descend during the most pedestrian of tasks, like when this great old guy in the Mission fixed the loose soles on my combat boots (bought used on Haight for $20 a few months ago and walked down many wild paths since) and made me a new key for my dog walker, a woman whose control over a large and combustible crew of canines borders on the miraculous.

Whatever our ideas of city living may be, there’s a reason we’re all living in the city, making San Francisco what it is. Some of the corporate-owned publications in town seem to enjoy mocking the free-living, forward-thinking sensibilities we embrace, dismissively deploying their “only in San Francisco” eye roll or casting progressives as somehow floating outside the country’s political spectrum.

Don’t let them put a ding in your wa, as my DJ friend Syd Gris likes to say. We know that it’s the rest of the country that’s the problem, not us. Luckily, there are a million things to do in this beautiful and bountiful city while we wait for the rest of the world to catch up

Old Blue Eyes is gone

photo: © kay taneyhill

I had to put down Archy, my cat, yesterday. For the past two weeks I’ve been dealing with his steadily deteriorating health, all the while contemplating having to end his life. I’ve been extremely sad, and a little depressed, because of this. Needless to say, I haven’t been in the mood to blog.

I had Archy for thirteen years. He was a rescue cat, abandoned in a dumpster, probably because he wasn’t pure Siamese. As the above photo reveals, he had the bluest eyes, yet wasn’t deaf as are most blue-eyed cats. I named him after the cockroach archy in Don Marquis’s archy and mehitabel.

Archy was a grouchy cat to almost everyone except me. I knew him as affectionate, playful, and downright cuddly. He was a complete lap cat, though he didn’t like to have his belly touched. My wife got to know him over the past five years and was able to see his sweet side.

He was fascinated with my wife’s cat — now an eighteen-year-old female long-haired orange tabby named Daisy — when we moved in together. Archy was always trying to make friends and play with Daisy, but she would have none of it. No doubt, it was one his great disappointments in life.

Archy got to be over twenty pounds, and became diabetic about four years ago. The diabetes contributed to neuropathy in his hind legs, which only got worse over the years. In addition, he had a deteriorated disc in his spine that also made it difficult for him to walk. And, he had severe constipation. He was on a half dozen medications toward the end of his life, none of which seemed to do much to improve his condition. His diabetes, in particular, was never fully regulated. He had a couple of sugar crises as one type of insulin after another became ineffective in treating his diabetes.

About nine months ago, Archy found it harder and harder to have a bowel movement in the litter box. He just didn’t have the strength in his back legs to support himself, and so had to lie down on his side on the carpet to take a shit. I bought a large cage for him, outfitting it with a litter box, a place for food and water complete with carpet samples, and a bed on a perch. I put him in the cage at night, and when we were away and couldn’t watch him. For a while, the cage forced him to use the litter box, but only for a while. Soon, he was shitting on the rug samples. Then he started urinating more and more outside the litter box, finding it harder and harder to stand to take a pee. He used the bottom of his cage, and for the last two weeks the carpet samples, and often Archy himself, would be covered in excrement.

That cats are such incredibly fastidious animals only made it worse. His quality of life was approaching nil, so the decision to end his life, while difficult, was inevitable. I didn’t want him to kick it all terrified in a veterinary clinic, so I had the Vet on Wheels euthanize him at home. With my wife and I holding him. As I said, that was yesterday, and I dismantled his cage that evening.

I’m sad and grieving and a bit relieved at the same time. Unlike humans, animals are unconditional in their love for their people, yet care giving for a sick animal is very stressful. I will miss my little companion deeply. At the same time, Archy no longer has to suffer the pain and indignities of his various illnesses.

Goodbye, my sweet boy.

Coyote ugly

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. Personal issues got the better of my time, but now I’m back with a followup to the shooting of two coyotes in Golden Gate Park. All the stories come from the San Francisco Chronicle.

First, there’s this about the fact that city dwellers often must share their urban space with a lot of wildlife, not just coyotes but raccoons, skunks, squirrels, bats, opossums, foxes, etc. Frequently, there are clashes between this vestigial wildlife that’s just trying to survive, and the humans who presume to have dominion over everything. Needless to say, the wildlife loses out most of the time.

Then, there’s this story that coyotes get underfoot in many urban settings, from southern California to Chicago, and not just San Francisco. An interesting side story is that the supposedly wild geese around Oakland’s Lake Merritt have become such a nuisance, or to be exact, their shit has become such a health hazard, that city officials are looking for ways to control the birds, to include importing coyotes as predators.

SF Animal Control officials speculate that the Golden Gate Park coyotes that supposedly attacked two leashed dogs were being regularly fed raw meat by humans, in violation of park regulations. The regular feedings made them more aggressive, it is claimed. Finally, a female coyote pup was found dead, apparently run over by a car, near where the two other coyotes were shot and killed. This seems to support the claim by pro-coyote folks that the two coyotes that were shot were simply protecting their young.

Surprises from the government

So, I went to the PO Box today, and had a rather large envelope from the Department of the Army. Seems that a parcel of high desert land near Victorville that my parents purchased in the 1960s, and which I inherited after they died, “may be located on the former Victorville PBR no. 3 Target Area and Buffer Zone.” They want my permission to enter the property and search for unexploded munitions.

Cute.

Of course, I intend to give them my permission. If I had the energy and outrage however, I’d surely like to find out how the fuck my parents purchased land in a military weapons testing range. Incredible.

PS — Here’s a link to a Sacramento Bee database of California’s former defense sites.

New Deal in the East Bay

I’m often stunned by the turn to the right that politics in this country has taken in the last twenty-five years. And I lived through Nixon’s presidency. It’s been said that Richard Nixon was our last great liberal president, in that he still had a fundamental commitment to the policies and principles of the New Deal. The turn to the right I’m talking about is the one that began with Ronald Reagan, a turn away from the New Deal and all it represented in government planning and intervention, towards the fool’s paradise of free markets. The social infrastructure of the country has been deliberately underfunded and allowed to crumble, providing the justification for increased privatization of social services and government functions. So successful has this conservative counterrevolution been, there are proposals to replace Franklin Roosevelt’s portrait on the dime with that of Ronald Reagan.

Which brings me to this story in the Berkeley Daily Planet, about the not-so-hidden New Deal legacy to be found in the East Bay.

A recent wedding party at the Berkeley Rose Garden, one of the many local New Deal projects. Photograph by Gray Brechin.

State of retail music

Here’s an article on the state of the retail music industry, from Tower to HMV. The sub-theme is about how very small retail stores can survive by exploiting a niche market or remaining on the avant garde of a particular musical genre. It’s from The Guardian (7-6-07).

To quote: “These days, a small independent store dabbling in anything remotely mainstream would be commercial suicide…”

San Francisco Mime Troupe, LaborFest announcements

The San Francisco Mime Troupe always begins its new season on July 4. The schedule for the current play, “Making a Killing,” can be found here.

The LaborFest film series begins today. An annual labor cultural, film and arts festival, the schedule can be found here.

Fillmore Jazz Festival

We walked around the Fillmore Jazz Festival for several hours today. It’s still a lively, two day, twelve-block long party with at least three large, live stages, a half dozen corner venues like Marcus Books, lots of artist/merchant booths, plenty of unhealthy food, and beer and wine aflowing. The stores, restaurants, and bars along the street are brimming with customers, there’s a staggering amount of unsanctioned booze around in brown paper bags, and the friendly crowd is something rare for San Francisco — racially mixed.

I wonder what hoops the Festival organizers are jumping through to keep this tradition alive?

What are they thinking?

It has taken thousands of lives, and ruined many thousands more. It has cost billions of dollars and squandered the country’s resources. It has been a failure, with no end in sight.

No, I’m not talking about the Iraq War. What I’m referring to is the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs has been an unmitigated disaster that has lasted for decades. No, generations. Given such a dismal track record, what do the Feds propose to do? Why, make even more substances illegal.

Fucking idiots!

The SF Chronicle reported yesterday that a legal hallucinogen, Salvia divinorum is under scrutiny by the Federal government, with a strong possibility that it will be made illegal. Given the government’s success with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, et al, it can be expected that salvia’s popularity and availability will skyrocket once it’s made illegal, and that a lucrative black market will spring up, leading to greater crime, misery and corruption, not to mention a bigger, more invasive government.

The stupidity here is just breathtaking.

On the road

Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and Offissa Pup by George Herriman

I’m going to LA Monday through Wednesday. I don’t blog from the road, don’t even take my laptop, and I may not have time to post tomorrow. If not, I’ll post when I get back.

I moderate all comments to the blog, so if you don’t see yours, it’s because I’m away.

Punk Planet, RIP

Punk Planet has printed its last issue. #80. A sad day, indeed.

As a writer for PP’s chief rival, Maximum Rocknroll, I always sneered that PP was “punk lite.” Tim Yohannan’s assertion that MRR was the bible of punk rock, and his heavy-handed attempts at defining what was and wasn’t punk, in part motivated Dan Sinker to start PP, and later for Jeff Bale to start Hit List. To Sinker’s everlasting credit, PP was never merely a reaction to MRR. It had its own style, focus, and audience, not to mention its own understanding of what punk was all about.

PP’s demise comes on the heels of Clamor publishing its last issue. It’s never good news when a small independent magazine goes under. Punk Planet will be missed.

Oaktown revisited

People talk shit about Oakland: poverty-stricken, crime-ridden, gang-plagued, drug-infested, with a brutal police department and a corrupt city government. I moved to Oakland when I came up to the Bay Area in 1991, and I thoroughly enjoyed the eleven years I lived in the city. I spent many a “dark night of the soul” walking about downtown or around Lake Merritt, grieving after my parents died. Not once was I mugged or robbed or even harassed. I liked Oaktown’s racial diversity and pleasant weather and radical history and the fact that I was only a BART ride away from Berkeley or San Francisco.

I didn’t like Mayor Jerry Brown much. I considered him a faux progressive and a crass opportunist. I have a soft spot for Ron Dellums ever since the Vietnam War years, but he seems to be struggling to find his stride as the new mayor. He is criticized for being an absentee mayor, a charge that he denies. His website features a report of his accomplishments in his first six months in office. Maybe I’m a sucker, but I’m willing to give Mayor Dellums a little more time to prove himself.

The problem with progressives #1

Why is it that progressives think that the best person to rally the troops and lead them to victory is the guy who lost the last time around?

Beyondchron.com in the Bay Area is a mind-numbing example of this problem, with hopeful stories about momentum building for Al Gore to enter the presidential race and the potential for Matt Gonzalez to reunify the SF Left by running for mayor against Gavin Newsom.

Excuse me, but isn’t winning the point? And didn’t these guys demonstrate an inability to do so? In Europe, when the leader of a political party presides over the defeat of his party, frequently the leader steps down and lets someone else have a go at it. Something to consider.

What was, what will be

The above map is of the San Francisco peninsula in the 19th century, showing the creeks and original shoreline, before all the development and landfill.

Below are a couple of maps of the San Francisco Bay Area’s future, if sea levels continue to rise as predicted.

(Sources: 19th Century Map, Sea-level maps)

Comfortable communalism

Berkeley Peoples Architecture presented a community plan, in the late 1960s/early 1970s, to transform the city of Berkeley into a groovy communal place to live. The plan involved making most of the streets car-free, people tearing down the fences between their properties to create block-long common spaces, incorporating private property into inalienable publicly-regulated land trusts, and so on.

A well-to-do Berkeley neighborhood has managed to take down the fences separating their backyards to create just such a communal residential space for themselves. A comfortable middle-class commons. It’s a far cry from the city-wide communalism proposed by Berkeley Peoples Architecture, yet an interesting read nevertheless. (here)

All the news that fits

What? No front page story on Paris Hilton’s latest travail?

Well, it is the Guardian Weekly after all. I just wanted to highlight a few items in this week’s edition (June 8-14 2007, Vol. 176 No 25).

– Jean-Jacques Bozonnet has a fascinating story on the Italian state. (“Torrent of criticism has Italian politicians fearing implosion”) Apparently, the Italian political apparatus is ten times the size of its neighboring European countries. A local business leader is quoted as saying: “The cost of political representation is equal to that of France, Germany, the UK and Spain together. The party system alone costs taxpayers 200m euro a year, compared with 73m euro in France.”

– A day in the life of an anonymous private security contractor in Iraq entitled “It’s the wild west: we’re a taxi service with guns.”

– A reprint from the Washington Post by Steven Pearlstein entitled “US middle class doing just fine.” I think I’ll run down a copy of the study in question as it flies in the face of most things I’ve experienced about the American economy.

– “Danger: upheaval down under,” an opinion piece by Will Hutton of the Observer, details striking parallels between the political climate in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, with an emphasis on the state of the social-democratic Left. Here’s two salient quotes: “One answer is being provide by a nascent Australian progressive think-tank, Per Capita. The left has to invest in people, design markets so that companies deliver public-interest outcomes, extend the polluter-pays principle to every form of economic activity where private companies do not pay for the damage they generate and start to develop a story about promoting individual wellbeing. It is a fine wish-list, and the ambition can hardly be faulted. The question remains: how?” And there’s Hutton’s concluding paragraph: “It is not that the right has a better or even good answer to the questions of our times. It is that the modern left, unless it is prepared to say something concrete about how it wants the economy to look in the future and takes steps to shape it, has little to say either. And if it’s the incumbent government, the consequences is staring it in the face.”

– A whole secti0n on the “G8 and the world.” It asks the rhetorical question: “Developed nations’ leaders have promised to give poorer states a better deal. Are they delivering?” The answer is, no.

– A cyberpunk flavored story about how RFID tags are being used to help make sense out of the baffling confusion that is Tokyo. (“Tagging Tokyo’s streets” by Michael Fitzpatrick) “The city with no street names.”

– A well-deserved savaging of Don DeLillo’s latest novel which I think applies to most of the man’s pretentious oeuvre. (“An inevitable DeLillo, an unoriginal DeLillo” by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post)

It’s still probably on the newsstands, in case you’re interested.

Let’s do the time warp, again

The whole GMT time zone default was bugging me, so I adjusted the options to give me the correct time and date for my time zone. I’ll probably have to change it when we go from Daylight Savings Time to Pacific Standard Time, but at least I won’t be posting something on a Sunday night, only to have it publish with a Monday date.

The parrots! The parrots!

We moved from South of Market to upper Eureka Valley ten months ago. We’re two thirds of the way up Twin Peaks, in dense trees and occasional fog. This morning, Sunday morning, the parrots flew by.

(I forget that this blog is set, by default, to GMT. It’s still Sunday evening, nine-thirty-ish, as I write this.)

The “Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill,” made famous in book and film, paid us a visit. Three flew screeching into the towering buckeye chestnut in the neighbor’s yard, then promptly flew away with much squawking, and then two returned to the buckeye and a nearby pine tree, again with much noise, and color. They were green and red, comical and playful.

Made my day.

Oh joy!

Both my Guardian Weekly and Monthly arrived on Friday of last week. I’m in heaven. There’s nothing more civilized than spending a leisurely Sunday morning reading newspapers over breakfast.

I’ll get to the Weekly later. The Monthly has two articles of particular interest. In “Slogan’s Run,” Catherine Rapley talks with Ji Lee, a disgruntled New York ad man who does these great detournements of billboard and online advertising with cleverly phrased and placed word bubbles. His stuff can be seen here.

Then there’s Ed Vulliamy’s retrospective on the 1967 Summer of Love (“Peace, Love and Understanding”), done through interviews with survivors like Country Joe, Bob Weir, Paul Kantner, and Barry Melton. Generally a worthwhile piece, although I have a few criticisms.

The writing is done in a staccato style that is a bit jumpy, and makes the interviewees all sound the same. He clearly states that the Summer of Love was seen “to reach what was for some the revolution’s climax, for others its nadir.” Yet no one who soured on the hippie ideal is interviewed. What we are left with is at best a flashback, and at worst nostalgia.

Which brings me to my final criticism. For the most part, I’m positive about the hippie counterculture in particular, and about the 1960s in general. However, I just don’t buy the cliched reasons for the collapse of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury that started even before 1967, which Vulliamy repeats ad nauseam. It was the hordes of young people that flooded the Haight which the community wasn’t prepared to handle; it was hard drugs like speed and heroin that started to replace soft drugs like marijuana and LSD; it was the commercialization and exploitation of the hippie experience. To my mind, even all three of these reasons combined don’t entirely explain why the hippie counterculture went bad. Perhaps having a few disgruntled and dissenting voices could have helped shed new light on the subject.

The then-and-now photos of some of those interviewed are fun.

There’s also a horrific article about a ruthless Nigerian militia, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, and a nicely eclectic music section, among many other interesting features. I’m glad I subscribed.

Of Volvos and tanks

I drive a 1990 Volvo 740 GL. I’ve owned the car for five years. It’s a tank. I’ve driven Volvos like it for the past fifteen years, ever since my tiny 1987 Honda Civic was totaled by a 4×4 with those monster truck tires as it ran over my car’s front end in running a red light. I was in LA at the time, playing the tourist, and I had to tow the car up to my parents’ house in Ventura to store it while I arranged to dispose of it.

I bought my first Volvo station wagon after that incident on the basis of a story I’d heard. The Loma-Prieta earthquake in 1989 caused the collapse of the multi-level Cypress Freeway in Oakland. A couple managed to survive, buried under tons of freeway rubble, because their Volvo station wagon held under the weight until rescuers managed to dig them out. Rumor has it that Volvo bought the car from the couple, and it’s now on display in a museum in Stockholm. After having a near-death experience in my flimsy Honda, I told myself, now that’s the car for me.

I’ve been pretty happy driving Volvos ever since. Sure, they have problems. Their heater/air conditioning fans invariably break down. And they cost more, in both parts and labor, to work on if you go to mechanics that specialize in Volvos. But it’s been worth it in peace of mind alone. I’ve had three fender benders, all three involving cars that have run into me from the rear. In two of those incidents, while the car owners wailed over crunched front ends, I casually noted a scratch or two on my rear bumper. When a massive old Chevy Impala rear ended me at a stoplight and drove my car into the vehicle in front of me, I found only a bent license plate on my front bumper. The driver of the Chevy had a dent in his chrome bumper. The car I hit, again some tiny Japanese import, had a torn-off bumper and a dangling wheel well panel.

What brought this up was a little accident I had recently. I was driving my wife’s 2006 Lexus IS 250 last Wednesday when I was sideswiped by a woman driving a Ford Focus. Her side mirror smashed up the side mirror on the Lexus, and left a long black streak down the driver’s side of the car. I won’t go into how the other driver fled the scene and how I chased her down. Nor will I describe the shit she gave me just for wanting her insurance information or the fact that her car suffered almost no damage. The whole process of dealing with insurance companies is such an incredible hassle.

I’m pretty confident that, had I been driving my Volvo at the time, the damage ratio would have been reversed; virtually no damage to my car, and a fair amount to hers. Just the look of my car – fifteen years old and clearly a junker – usually keeps other drivers steering clear of me on the road. Indeed, when I drive my wife’s Lexus around, folks driving vehicular equivalents of my Volvo blithely pull out or change lanes right in front of me, assuming that I don’t want my new car to tangle with their junker. They’re right on that score.

Well, my Volvo has issues. It needs a new muffler, and a complete brake job. I’m looking to get another car, and while I’m not interested in something brand new, I’m tired of owning a vehicle that’s a decade or more old. Unfortunately, Ford Motor Company purchased Volvo in 1999. Call me an American hater, but I’m not at all confident that the newer Volvos are any good. I certainly don’t think they measure up to the pre-Ford Volvos. And I’m not willing to put my life in the seat of one of those tiny plastic Japanese numbers again. So, unless I can find a make of car that’s as sturdy and durable as a pre-1999 Volvo, I may get stuck owning another ten year old car just to feel secure.

Urban wildlife (no, not wild life)

We have a family of racoons living in the extremely narrow, covered over space between our house and the neighbor’s garage. Or so our neighbor tells us. We haven’t actually seen the critters yet, though we do hear occasional scratching and scrabbling noises from that wall.

I’ve seen squirrels sauntering about our backyard as if they owned the place, and another neighbor said he found a very irritated ‘possum on his doorstep one night. Now, the SF Chronicle reports coyote sightings in the city, specifically in Golden Gate Park and Bernal Heights. (here) I lived in San Diego for way too long, and spent a few years in the suburbs, which are built on the outlying mesas. There were always stories about pet dogs and cats disappearing, the victims of marauding coyotes. Besides hunting in packs, coyotes can jump a fence and climb a tree as good as any cat.

There’s an organization in San Francisco, Nature in the City, devoted to “ecological conservation, restoration and stewardship of the Franciscan bioregion.” I guess our racoon neighbors are members, by default.

Broke-ass update

Broke-ass Stuart did manage to finish up a revised edition of his Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco. It will be out in the fall, and will be in book format, though he says it will still have a zine-ish look to it. I think Lonely Planet is publishing it. Broke-ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply in New York is also part of the book deal, and part of Stuart’s plan for world domination.

Rick Steve, better watch your ass!

Deja vu all over again

After a June 2 “Progressive Convention” in San Francisco failed to chose a candidate to run against Mayor Gavin Newsom from the left, speculation has been rife about who might step up. Ross Mirkarimi has declined, leading to speculation that Chris Daly may announce today. No dice with Daly, which puts Matt Gonzalez in the spotlight once again. Even if Matt runs, this won’t exactly be a repeat of the last mayoral election as Newsom has a better than 65% approval rating, a teflon coating with respect to recent scandals, and a ton of money already donated to his campaign. To keep up on the speculation and news, check out Beyond Chron.

Broke-ass Stuart

One of the things that made San Francisco a more enjoyable place to live was Broke-ass Stuart and his Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco. No more. After a number of months traveling around South America, Stuart is off to New York for a six month stint in which he hopes to write the Guide to Living Cheaply in New York.

I bought volume 2 of Stuart’s guide when he was still hanging around the city. Whether or not it’s still available, or whether Stuart managed to pull together an updated version before he moved to New York, I don’t know. Check here for Broke-ass Stuart’s website, and here for Last Gasp’s page. Note that Last Gasp lists it as out of stock.

Broke-ass Stuart did say that the one thing in the Guide worth the cover price was the following link. Among other things, FecalFace lists various art and photography openings around San Francisco. Openings equal free wine and snacks. A person desiring to live cheaply in the city could certainly get a buzz, and perhaps a meal, out of hopping from one opening to another.

I do visit New York City on occasion, so I look forward to Stuart’s guide to living cheaply in the Big Apple.

Here we go again!

According to a story on yesterday’s SF Chronicle website, Mayor Gavin Newsom is once again intent on banning the infamous Castro Halloween party. (here) Now, personally, I’m not a big partyer. I wasn’t one when I was young, and I’m even less of one now that I’m over 50. And frankly, my claustrophobia kicks in when I think of the wall-to-wall crowd that takes over the Castro every Halloween.

Yet Newsom’s ongoing efforts to “Giulianize” San Francisco really piss me off. The Mayor’s focus on “quality of life” issues is an attempt to suburbanize the city, as the folks at San Francisco Party Party point out. He needs to be opposed. What follows is a brief list of organizations trying to make the city into a fun and livable place. Each website has further links and resources.

San Francisco Party Party (HELP!!! SF Mayor Gavin Newsom is suburbanizing our great City… he must be stopped!)

Livable City (Livable City works to create a San Francisco of great streets and complete neighborhoods, where walking, bicycling, and transit are the best choices for most trips, where public spaces are beautiful, well-designed, and well-maintained, and where housing is more plentiful and more affordable.)

Boom! (the sound of eviction)

Fun/Cheap San Francisco (cool and affordable things to do in the san francisco bay area)

Friends of the Urban Forest (creating a greener San Francisco tree by tree)

SF Gro (San Francisco garden resource organization)

I’ll have more to say on this subject in the future.

San Francisco Tourist Advisory

If you’re planning to visit our fair city anytime soon, please, don’t ask this police officer for directions.

This is a public service announcement.

Officer Jesse Serna reported using force 57 times and injuring 31 citizens during the 1996-2004 time period. Chronicle photo, 2004, by Paul Chinn.

Izzy’s update

Israel Rind informs me that they’ve opened a second Izzy’s at 783 E. El Camino Real in Sunnyvale. (408-523-1333). Why does South Bay have all the luck!?!

Uncle Luigi’s Kosher Pizza. PIZZA and KOSHER used to inhabit two different worlds. Izzy brought them together.

Hippie to yuppie

I subscribe to the Guardian Weekly. Occasionally, I get the latest issue on Friday, but more often it arrives on Saturday. That’s “on time” as far as I’m concerned, and I can still enjoy reading it over the weekend. Once in a while it doesn’t get to me until Monday, which meant Tuesday this week since Monday was Memorial Day.

Ah well.

John Harris quotes British rock writer Charles Shaar Murray in his opinion piece “Tune in, turn on, drop out, cash up” in the 25.05.07 issue. I thought I’d pass it along:

“The line from hippy to yuppie is not nearly as convoluted as some people like to believe,” Murry said. “A lot of old hippy rhetoric could well be co-opted now by the pseudo-libertarian right, which has in fact happened. Get the government off our backs, let individuals do what they want — that translates very smoothly into laissez-faire yuppie-ism, and that’s the legacy of the era.”

Izzy’s is gone!

I walked around my old South of Market neighborhood yesterday. A lot has changed since I moved away 9 months ago, most of it not for the better. The residential building boom of apartments, condos and “live/work” lofts continues at an alarming rate, altering the light industrial character of the area with relentless gentrification. Upscale businesses are proliferating, yet there’s no commensurate expansion of public parking for the customers those businesses hope to draw. The Academy of Art University has spread like a cancer, occupying more and more real estate. Perhaps most disheartening of all, Izzy’s Brooklyn Bagels at 151 Townsend is no more.

I regularly walked down to the waterfront for exercise when I lived in the neighborhood, passing Izzy’s on the way. I always bought a bagel to nosh on for the remainder of my walk, and occasionally picked up a few more for home. I ate them plain, savoring the smell and taste of Izzy’s authentic, kosher bagels. Their bialys were to die for. Izzy’s bagels never failed to transport me in my memories to the times I spent in Brooklyn and Manhattan visiting friends.

Izzy sold the San Francisco store, and it’s now the non-kosher Bagel Bakery. There’s another Izzy’s down the peninsula in Palo Alto (477 S. California Ave.), but that’s a long way to go for genuine Brooklyn bagels. I’m saddened more by Izzy’s departure then I am about SOMA’s inexorable transformation into yuppieland. (Izzy’s website)

Hey, Ho, Let’s Go!

I spent the last three days creating and perfecting the website, “What’s Left?,” for the mostly monthly political columns I write for Maximum Rocknroll under the name “Lefty” Hooligan. (check here) I learned quite a bit in the process, so constructing “Playing for Keeps” for my personal blogsite was a snap. I’m still not completely happy with this theme, but it will do.

“What’s Left?” piggybacks on the blog format, allowing me to post my columns on the web as I write them. It will also be a place for limited archiving of my past columns. The idea here is to get some web exposure for the columns in a way that allows comments and feedback. I’ve written “What’s Left?” for MRR now for 15 years. It’s pretty much taken for granted, and raises little commentary or controversy.

“Playing for Keeps” is intended as a true blog. It’s also intended to inspire me to write more frequently, on a wider range of subjects. I’m new to blogging, so we’ll see how it goes.