Superfund sites in San Francisco? Come find out whether people and nature are being treated appropriately and fairly in these two well known but very different communities and environments. Is the Presidio Trust fulfilling its commitment to protect and restore the natural resources of this great urban National Park? Are the Navy and the City of San Francisco taking the best care of the residents and their environment at Hunter's Point Shipyard? San Francisco is blessed with significant...
Topics: Toxic waste, superfund, Bayview Hunter's Point, Presidio, Tennessee Hollow, Candlestick Point State...
Bending Over Backwards Audio Tour: Stop 2: Leathermen in SOMA
Topics: gay, homosexual, leather, leathermen, Stud, leather bars
Bending Over Backwards Audio Walking Tour Stop 3: The Vats, breweries, Hostess Bakery and more...
Topics: The Vats, punk, beer, breweries, Hostess Twinkies
Favianna Rodriguez has been making art to make change for years. She will present remarkable posters, illustrations, stickers and more, and talk about art and politics, in the concluding event of our solo artist shows this season.
Topics: art, activism, Latina, illustrations, posters, social movements
Melanie Cervantes is an artist trained by library books, family, peers and experimentation. She produces her work in various mediums including pen and ink, acrylic, screenprinting, embroidery, fiber arts, and spraypainted stencils. Melanie infuses her indigenous internationalist worldview, spirituality and politic into all her art. Following the tradition of such artists as Juana Alicia, Malaquias Montoya, Judy Baca, Emory Douglas, La Mujeres Muralistas and Diego Rivera- Melanie has made a...
Topics: art, politics, zapatismo, community, third world, indigenismo, chicanismo
Established in 1992 by a volunteer collective of North Mission residents, the Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) was directly inspired by the mural cluster in Balmy Alley focused on Central American social struggles. Over the past two decades artists of all ages and levels of experience representing every social and ethnic group have created over 350 pieces on this one block street. Fresh from celebrating 20 years at the Clarion Alley Block Party on October 20th, CAMP collective members will...
Topics: alleys, murals, art, politics, volunteerism, gentrification, cooptation
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
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
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,...
Peter Cole ’s new book Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area uniquely compares and contrasts the radical activism of dockworkers on opposite sides of the planet. The San Francisco-based ILWU took direct action to block apartheid-era cargoes, while their counterparts in Durban, South Africa were on the front lines confronting the racist South African government. ILWU Local 10 (ret.) Jack Heyman introduces the evening. Co-hosted by Freedom Archives
Topics: ports, containers, automation, solidarity, hiring hall, steady men, ILWU, Durban, cultural...
Our food system is being refashioned by new urban farmers, farmers markets and community-supported agriculture, and importantly, by savvy shoppers who demand local, organic and safe food. Still, food security is tenuous for too many of our neighbors. Amy Franceschini (Victory Gardens, past and present), Willow Rosenthal (City Slicker Farms), Jason Mark (Alemany Farm, and editor of Earth Island Journal). Recorded as part of the Shaping San Francisco Talks series on Novermber 28, 2007 at...
Topics: localize, urban agriculture, food security, organic, fresh, local, gleaning, backyard, victory...
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
Education Crisis/Radical Responses Shaping San Franciscio Talk series, Sept. 29, 2010. From the crisis in the California universities to the steady destruction of public schools, weâre in the epicenter of a storm that spans the globe as neoliberalist politicians and the interests they serve seem determined to make education a precious commodity that is no longer a bedrock of democratic society. Come and discuss radical responses to this crisis, leading to the big October 7 Day of Action, with...
Topics: education, university, debt, college, occupation, strike, classrooms, teaching, students, crisis
Bricks give literal structure to a history of place. Bricks produced around the Bay were a fire proof building material in early years of a city often engulfed by fire. Archeology work at the Presidio reveals plant time capsules embedded in recovered bricks that help us understand pre-settler ecology. And bricks increasingly confront our current landscape of evictions and displacement. Featuring Ruth Askevold, Lew Stringer, and LisaRuth Elliott . Co-hosted by Wild Equity Institute.
Topics: bricks, seeds, Presidio, bayshore, mud, rubble, earthquakes, ballast
continuing the conversation about the category of "natural disaster" and how many things taken for granted as normal or natural are actually artifacts of human culture. This episode features Chris Carlsson and Peter Davidson.
Topics: public health, heroin overdose, natural disaster
Vivian Chang narrates how the Asian Pacific Environmental Network was founded after activists attended the first Environmental Justice conference in the early 1990s.
Topics: APEN, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, environmental justice
One of the two major bookstore chains in the US is on the verge of collapse, even as authors are being abandoned by publishers to go "indie" via Kindle and iPad. The ebook (r)evolution is here, but its course is not yet chartedâwill the dinosaurs of New York's publishing industry go extinct, and what new species of publication and publisher will emerge? And will writers be able to make a living...not that most of them are doing that even now! Join science fiction writers Terry...
Topics: E-book, pdf, Kindle, Amazon, publishing, books, self-publishing, New York publishing, agents
The largest coastal lagoon between Point Reyes and Pescadero, Lake Merced is an incomparable natural resource for San Francisco. A controversial preserve has been proposed for East Lake and some intact habitats, to protect wildlife and threatened species. Dan Murphy GG Audubon Society, David Behar, SF Public Utilities Commission. A Nature in the City co-production (www.natureinthecity.org)
Topics: Lake Merced, aquifer, golf courses, habitat, species, wildlife, birds, Audubon, southwest San...
Decades after the Alaska oil pipeline began, we’ve gone through repeated booms and busts in oil production and prices. Antonia Juhasz has studied the history of the oil business and is one of the world’s best-informed critics of the industry. She is joined by Leila Salazar-Lopez of Amazon Watch, a group confronting oil giants in the Amazon, and by Joshua Kahn-Russell , author of A Line in the Tar Sands . All three explain the current balance of forces, and the prospects for keeping the...
Topics: Oil, petroleum, fossil fuels, climate change, climate chaos, burnout, Amazon, Ecuador, Peru,...
Christopher Richard, aquatic biologist at the Oakland Museum of California, has deciphered the earliest accounts of the water features of the San Francisco peninsula... working with maps, original Spanish diary entries, and a clear understanding of Mission settlement patterns, Richard builds his argument that the century-old myth of a freshwater lake in the Mission is unsustainable.
Topics: water, lakes, ecology, Mission period, Spanish colonization, San Francisco, Mission Dolores,...
Who are we, and what is our place in the world of the living? The Modern Synthesis of Biology, much of it conceived and incubated in the San Francisco Bay Area, has become a conceptual steel trap dictating much of what we do not only with our ecosystems, but also with our economy, our politics and our very selves. Liberation Biology proposes a critical approach to the deep roots of our understanding of the living. Based on both an exhumation of forgotten knowledge and on radically...
Topics: Biology, physics, central dogma, dna, code, gene, debunking
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,...
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
One of the emerging zeitgeists of our era is the rediscovery of the water beneath our cities, and redefining the places we are in through awareness of our watersheds. Derek Hitchcock of the South Yuba River Citizens League (SYRCL), Joel Pomerantz, a San Francisco water historian, and Sarah Kelly and Arthur Richards, co-directors of Adapting to Scarcity, will share their knowledge and find the common streams uniting their work around indigenous communities reliant on waterways, and the...
Topics: watersheds, creeks, rivers, dams, pollution, silt, contamination, sedimentation, salmon, sea,...
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
Excerpted from Peter Wiley and Stephen Rees's essay "Up Against the Bulkhead" in the book "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78," edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation.
Topics: Antiwar, Vietnam, GI organizing, Up Against the Bulkhead, underground press
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
Continuing the discussion on the crisis in health care with Q&A among the panel and the audience. Chris Carlsson, Bill Mosca, Adrienne Pine, and Jason Blantz
Topic: San Francisco, health, sickness, therapy, medical care, single-payer, CNA, insurance
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,...
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,...
Dancer, Choreographer, and Director, Jess Curtis is interviewed by celebrated Bay Area choreographer Joanna Haigood. Together they will explore Jess' nearly three decades of body-based experiments through peformance and teaching. Like Jess' dancing this will be a night investigating the 'embodied intellect'. Short video clips will be interspersed with smart conversation about the theory and practice of Curtis' Body of Work. As always, there will be a lengthy Q & A so all will have a chance...
Topics: Dance, body, embodiment, communication, politics, art, performance, circus, gesture
Doug Minkler was one of the first political artists to embrace the Mac and heâs been making scathing collages and edgy, often hilarious posters for several decades. See his solo show and find out how heâs kept himself going all these years!
Topics: Art, politics, labor, movements, left wing, social services, social movements, expressionism,...
After more than 150 years, finally historians—and perhaps Californians—are facing up to the horrifying truth that the Indians of California were subjected to a vicious and genocidal campaign of extermination from the beginning of U.S. control in 1846 until after the Civil War. New scholarship shows that Indian slavery was the key source of labor that helped create the early "economy" of California and enrich its first settlers. Explore complicated stories of cultural, religious,...
Topics: Indians, indigenous, slavery, missions, Spanish, Mexican, colonialism, Amah Mutsun, Ohlone,...
A Shaping San Francisco talk held on January 13, 2010: Comparing the alcohol Prohibition of the 1920s-30s to the contemporary prohibition on marijuana. With Dick Boyd, author of "Broadway, North Beach, The Golden Years: A Saloon Keeper's Tales" and former owner of Pierre's, a bar in North Beach from 1960-65, Sean Lavon Nash, and Michael Whitson, a marijuana prohibition expert.
Topics: prohibition, alcohol, temperance, drugs, marijuana, pot, medical marijuana, medicalization,...
What actually happened to Darling Clementine? Historian Joel Pomerantz explores the California floods of 1862. Learn how this historic storm, which killed thousands and caused a number of San Francisco houses to collapse, can be an example for what a really extreme weather event could be like in our future.
Topics: storms, weather, rain, 1861, 1862, Sacramento, Sacramento River, delta, San Francisco floods,...
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
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
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,...
Janet Delaney has been documenting the changing South of Market since its days as a recently deindustrialized district in the early 1970s to its present boom in luxury residential towers. Our Art & Politics series invites solo artists to talk about their work and share a bit about their process and the relationship of art to politics and vice versa in their work.
Topics: SOMA, redevelopment, Moscone Center, Project One, warehouses, gay leather, SRO, residential hotels,...
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...
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,...
Roger Wilson of the Bristol Radical History group gives a wide-ranging Talk covering 17th and 18th century history around Bristol, England, including a debunking of the common narrative of the anti-slavery movement, putting the working people of England back into the saga. He also gives a fresh look of the mass riots of 1831, and brings the interventions of the Bristol Radical History Group in our era into the unfolding of "history from below." If you want to find out what unites a...
Topics: History from below, riots, England, Britain, anti-slavery
with Glenn Lym. It is a common assumption that street grids were imposed easily on San Franciscoâs original landscape, resulting in the cityâs photogenic hillside streets that poke up from otherwise large flat planes. We assume that the imposition of these grids was benign. But it was not benign. Digging under the streets of early San Francisco, we will find that much of San Franciscoâs flatland was created from land forms that were quite different from what we know today.
Topics: ecology, landscapes, sand dunes, wetlands, landfill, hills, CAD, terrain
Continuing the discussion of public health and the health care crisis, starting with Bill Mosca, director of the California State Oriental Medical Association, and followed by Jason Blantz, a mental health worker serving the disabled, indigent and poor on Medi-cal.
Topic: San Francisco, health, sickness, therapy, medical care, single-payer, CNA, insurance
From the "Nature in the City" series of Shaping San Francisco Talks at CounterPULSE, this one features speakers on cleaning up after the military, restoring the former military bases around the San Francisco Bay. In part 2 we hear from Arthur Feinstein chair of the SF Bay Joint Venture; Doug Biggs, community resources director of the Alameda Point Collaborative, Kat Steele, founder of the Urban Permaculture Guild.
Topic: San Francisco, Alameda Naval Air Station, homeless, housing, permaculture, bird refuge
From the "Nature in the City" series of Shaping San Francisco Talks at CounterPULSE, this one features speakers on cleaning up after the military, restoring the former military bases around the San Francisco Bay. Chris Carlsson, host, Peter Brastow of Nature in the City, and Ruth Gravanis, coordinator of the Treasure Island wetlands project, Arthur Feinstein chair of the SF Bay Joint Venture.
Topic: San Francisco, Treasure Island, Alameda Wildlife Preserve, birds, wetlands
Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, epidemic flu, chronic disease, etc. What are the elements of a community response based on mutual aid, cooperation, and a renewed commitment to a public health infrastructure? Chris Carlsson, the host, and Tom Athanasiou of Eco-Equity, speak in the first of four half hour shows from the Shaping San Francisco "Nature in the City" Talks at CounterPULSE.
Topic: San Francisco, Nature in the City, ecology, global warming, climate change, carbon reduction, sky...
Universal Basic Income, Is It time? Touted by the tech industry as a way to preserve livelihoods in a time of automation replacing workers, Universal Basic Income (UBI) is not a new concept. As a poverty alleviation idea, it has resonance in the EPIC program of 1930s California, and similar ideas were floated by leaders of social movements of the 1960s, including MLK, Jr. and the Black Panthers in their Ten Point Program. Through a discussion of UBI we take a look at the nature of work and...
Topics: Universal Basic Income, Negative Income Tax, redistribution, taxes, income, free money, welfare,...
Cris Benton has used kite photography to document the surprisingly beautiful “saltscapes” of the South Bay, while Matthew Booker ’s Down By the Bay is one of the best recent histories of the long, complicated, and contradictory relationship of urbanizing humans and the amazing inland estuary we enjoy as the Bay.
Topics: Bay, San Francisco Bay, Bay Area, shorelines, salt ponds, reclamation, marshes, wetlands, salt...
Christina Gerhardt , author of The Atlas of (Remote) Islands and Sea Level Rise , explores the effects and responses to climate-warming on low-lying Pacific Ocean islands. Urbanist Laura Tam addresses sea level rise on vulnerable shorelines around the Bay Area. Learn about indigenous inhabitants’ adaptive solutions in the South Seas and local grassroots efforts to prepare our bay shore.
Topics: Sea Level Rise, Climate Change, ocean heat, thermal expansion, coastal erosion, drowning islands,...
In 1849 San Francisco was surrounded by wild animals and a flourishing sea and bay, from which most early food was taken. But what is our “wild menu” now? How do foraging, fishing, hunting, and gathering fit into modern life? What role does conservation and ecology play in a contemporary and future wild menu? With Mark Heath, Kirk Lombard , and Chris Carlsson . Co-hosted by Wild Equity Institute and Nature in the City .
Topics: Seafood, fish, herring, sea bass, salmon, sturgeon, perch, hunting, wild boar, deer, geese, ducks,...
Clif Ross and Marcy Rein , editors of Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements present a broad overview of the social movements that have pressured one regime after another in Latin America, changing the political calculations for everyone from right to left, from Venezuela to Argentina, Mexico to Chile and more.
Topics: Mexico, Zapatistas, MST, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Ecuador, Peru,...
Why has the Bay Area been such a cauldron for the melding of art and politics? And what did a period of heightened gentrification do to San Francisco's radical culture? Komotion International, the legendary artist collective and performance, music, and art space -- which nurtured musicians like Michael Franti, Consolidated, and Primus -- epitomized the spirt of rebellion and creativity, leaving a deep mark. Collective co-founders Robin Ballinger and Mat Callahan discuss Komotion's glory years...
Topics: Music, punk, underground, San Francisco, 1980s, 1990s, Komotion, world music
Friends and neighbors from the Mission District, including Mission Archives and Conscious Youth Media Crew folks, came together at CounterPULSE as part of the Shaping San Francisco Talks series on April 11, 2007, to screen raw footage of low-riders on Mission and other lost footage of the 1970s and 1980s. Ray Balbaran, Vero Majana, Roberto Hernandez, and dozens of others... Back in the late 1970s and early â80s Mission St. was home to a wild scene of lowriders every weekend. Bouncing,...
Topics: Mission District, Latino, Low riders, La Raza, The Lot, El Tecolote, Mission Archives, Conscious...
Songs of Freedom is the name of the songbook edited by James Connolly and published in 1907. Connolly's introduction is better known than the collection for which it was written, containing his oft-quoted maxim: “Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement, it is the dogma of a few and not the faith of the multitude.” Though most of the songs were of Irish derivation, the...
Topics: Ireland, Scotland, England, New York, revolutionary songs, Irish socialism, Scottish socialism,...
Lou Dematteis is an extraordinary social documentarian, photographer and filmmaker. He has been taking photographs of the Mission District since the 1970s, capturing the low-rider scene of that era, and being at the first Carnavals and leaving us a stunning visual record. He has also covered the Nicaraguan Revolution into the mid-1980s, the depradations of the multinational oil industry in the Amazon, and more recently has been making movies, with his “The Other Barrio” capturing the...
Topics: Art and Politics, Low riders, Sandinistas, Nicaragua, Italy, Italians, photographer, documentary...
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
Public Knowledge artists-in-residence Bik Van der Pol have pulled a New Deal scale model of the City—based on 1938 aerial photographs—out of storage crates and into the light. Inspired by the Halprins’ 1970s collective creativity and community planning efforts, their project, “Take Part” will explore local histories with City neighborhood residents as library branches display relevant sections of the model beginning in early 2019. Creators of a 2017 cultural map of southeast San...
Topics: Maps, cartography, Southeast San Francisco, Public Library, WPA, 1938 map, wooden map, San...
A deeply informed, irreverent tour through San Francisco before the automobile took over half the City’s physical terrain. Historic photos illustrate many stories, including how Haight Street was named, the City was dominated by steam-powered rail, and San Franciscans lived before parking was an issue! with Angus Macfarlane, Emiliano Echeverria , and David Gallagher .
Topics: Haight Street, Western Addition, 1851 Dexter map, streetcars, steam trains, cable cars,...
The Jazz of Modern Basketball: Racism and Virtuosity at the Roots of the Golden State Warriors Shaping San Francisco’s Chris Carlsson digs into the long history of basketball as another season begins. The first African-American players entered the NBA in 1950, while black college stars led the USF Dons to consecutive national championships in 1955 and 1956, inventing a new style of aggressive defensive basketball. Today’s outspoken Warriors embody the decades-long Heritage in which...
Topics: Golden State Warriors, USF Dons, Adolph Rupp, racism, basketball, NBA, NCAA, WNBA, protest, Jim...
Economic meltdown? Recession? Depression? What are we to do? With the bailout benefiting Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, many are expect the new Obama administration to champion a New New Deal. But how will working people fare? Will the catalyst for change come from above or below? What lessons can we learn from the past and what are âurban homesteadersâ already doing to localize the economy at the neighborhood level? Featuring working class historian Gifford Hartman, who will...
Topics: Economic crisis, Depression, urban homesteaders, self-reliance, localization, 1930s anti-eviction,...
A 3-part radio program based on a Public Talk at CounterPULSE on March 8, 2006, under the Shaping San Francisco Spring Talks series. A historical look at how San Franciscans have fought for a human-centered city. From saving Telegraph Hill, stopping freeways, and resisting redevelopment, the corporate agenda has been thwarted again and again. Today new movements are again contesting the direction of the city. We'll have a look at the historic Burnham Plan and other ideas for reshaping the city....
Topics: anti-highrise, freeway revolt, citizens movements, saving Telegraph Hill, redevelopment
What does âclassâ or âcommunityâ mean? How does the newbie Midwesterner serving burgers at a Castro street diner relate to the landlord and shop owner âGay Communityâ spokesmen? How do the schisms between different classes of women, whether lesbian or bi or undefined, show up in daily life and local politics (or not)? How does fear of gender bending impact trans and intersexed people when it comes to paying the rent? Solidad de Costa, Keith Hennessy, and Michelle Tea.
Topics: class, community, gender, transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual, worker, labor, economy, housing
Does voting matter? Do you urge everyone around you to vote? What kinds of power do we gain or lose by participating in elections? What else can we do? Weâll hear from folks who believe in representative democracy, those who propose reforms, and those who reject it outright. Michael Med-o Whitson, Natasha Marsh (Calif League of Young Voters), James Rucker (colorofchange.org). Recorded Oct. 10, 2007 at CounterPULSE, part of the Shaping SF Talks series.
Topics: voting, elections, representative democracy, direct democracy, reforms
a 1988/89 performance by Keith Hennessy. Twenty years ago Keith Hennessy created Saliva, an interdisciplinary dance-performance-ritual under a freeway in downtown San Francisco. Deep within the rage and grief of the AIDS crisis, Hennessy performed a ritualistic reclamation of the body, the queer male body, as holy. Video excerpts, live performance, historical context, and audience discussion combine to recreate this AIDS-era work of queer performance. Kirk Read and Philip Huang join the...
Topics: performance, AIDS, 1980s, Keith Hennessy, interdisciplinary, dance, ritual, San Francisco, gay,...
Kent Minault tells of the explosive first six months of the San Francisco Diggers. Featuring stories of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Tim Leary, Huey Newton, Emmett Grogan, Lenore Kandel, Richard Brautigan, and Gary Snyder. His chronicle charts the first Digger free food in the park, tense encounters with the police, the opening of the Digger Free Store, and the Invisible Circus at Glide Memorial Church. Accompanied by photos by Chuck Gould, and music by Peter Coyote. The evening chronicles...
Topics: Diggers, Summer of Love, Free, Free store, Free love, Free food, Glide Memorial Church, Invisible...
“Grange Future” celebrates the history and contemporary expression of ‘the grange idea.’ From the 19th century populist movement that backed the early campaign for an “information commons” in the form of Rural Free Mail delivery, to public banking and Farmers co-op banks, this vital movement is re-emerging to confront information and agricultural monopolists of our own era. Severine Fleming of Greenhorns leads a panel discussion with the Internet Archive 's Brewster...
Topics: Commons, internet, property, intellectual property, farming, grange, populism, Omni Commons,...
APEN organizer Vivian Chang describes political organizing among the Laotian communities in Richmond and Oakland.
Topics: APEN, organizing, Laotian, Oakland, Richmond, environmental justice
50 years ago this fall, on November 20, a group of people that came to be known as Indians of All Tribes began a 18-month occupation of Alcatraz Island. This act of self-determination emerged from conditions faced on reservations and in urban centers, from the activism of the Third World Strike at San Francisco State, and resulted in major changes taking place across the continent. From a new consciousness of sovereignty to at least ten major policy and law shifts, Mary Jean Robertson , host of...
Topics: Alcatraz, Self-determination, termination, United Nations, treaties, genocide, settler colonialism,...
The seven young men who became iconic heroes of San Francisco's left and Latino political ferment in the 1970s were eventually acquitted of murder. While the campaign to defend them led to an explosion of social organizing, we know little about how these men's lives developed in the years that followed, losing track of real people in the mists of political legitimacy and hero-worship. Vero Majano takes a look at what happened to Los Siete in the decades since the famous trial, and gives us a...
Topics: Los Siete, La Raza, Latino, San Francisco, Mission, 1970s, New Left, brown power, daily life,...
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...
The 2nd volume of George Katsiaficas's monumental study of Asian Revolutions, this provides a unique perspective on uprisings in nine places in East Asia over the past five decades. While the 2011 Arab Spring is well known, the wave of uprisings that swept East Asia in the 1980s became hardly visible. Katsiaficas relates Asian uprisings to predecessors in 1968 and shows their subsequent influence on the wave of uprisings that swept Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s. By empirically...
Topics: People Power, Uprisings, Asia, Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Tienamen Square, Taiwan,...
Part of the ongoing Shaping San Francisco Talks series at CounterPULSE. San Francisco California State Park at Candlestick, an urban shoreline park used by bird watchers, picnickers, and fishermen, is being ecologically transformed for the benefit of the Bayview community and local critters. Alan Hopkins, Golden Gate Audubon Society, Patrick Rump, Literacy for Environmental Justice, Claude Everhart, Friends of Candlestick. Oct. 29, 2008
Topics: nature in the city, ecology, urban parks, shoreline, wetlands, birds, state parks, fishermen,...
A Shaping San Francisco Talk held on Wed. Oct. 14, 2009 at CounterPULSE in San Francisco. Co-Sponsored by Global Commons Foundation Michelle Dizon, Filipino-American artist from LA, screens her installation video comparing the 2005 riots in France and the 1992 riots in LA, illuminating political issues of marginal citizenships, migration and exile, media and the erasure of memories of historical violence. The discussion will be centered around a criticism of the current predominance of video...
Topics: video, realism, representation, memory, history, post-colonialism, migration, citizenship, 1992 Los...
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