Category: Thoughts

Melbourne speeding ticket. Camera caught while fleeing concrete and spray paint. Started the day, but it got better fast. Hope it did for you too. Was glad to back in my town San Francisco. To ground. To connect. To vote. Fun time voting with The Twin. Had to deal with a rotten window too, but that wasn’t so bad. Took care of things. Rode my bike! Ran into people, Mission style. Get massage. Tight neck and shoulders relaxing hour. Eat collards. Then go meditate vipassana style over at a church on 15th St. Good to have sanga while in the City. About 10 minutes left in the sit, and a house of Obama supporters flood the streets outside the church. Hard to concentrate. Teacher ends with no dharma talk. Pulls out tiny TV. Puts mic to it. McCain giving concession speech! Put on shoes. Run/walk back to Flora Bora where normal-sized TV awaits. Watch McCain a bit from passing bar TVs. SMILES on faces. Cheering in the streets. Screaming. Hugging. Laughing. Honking cars zip by. Make it to home and TV awaits. McCain has finished and all await Obama. Time to pop corn as station plays commercials. “Are they selling commercials like they do for the Super Bowl,” asks D’Louie. HA. HLZ and A. Girl show up just in time to hear Obama’s speech. HMM :: he quoted Lincoln. Illinois, state of Lincoln. Wow, he just said that ideas and deeds outdo money and military. He’ll listen to people he doesn’t agree with. Amid 2 inch thick bullet proof glass, Biden/Obama and family greet the throngs of people. Many crying. Flags waving. Screaming in the streets of the Mission. D’Louie and Then Twin are jacked on the energy. Me too. We cruise with no destination other than hitting the street to see the celebration. I suggest Castro St. and we all agree. People headed that way. All happy eyes. Hit Castro St. and walk into  the No On 8 street party. 8 is winning. That’s bad, so we all celebrate Obama. I walk up to a just-lit effigy of George Bush. Chanting “O-Ba-Ma” begins. I change it to “No More Bush!”. D’Louie turns into party sniffing hound and we stand close to the stage. In front of The Castro Theater. Large TV screen on stage. Man stripping up on fire escape. Takes shirt off. Climbs higher. Dances to DJ music. Climbs to the top of the building. SFPD begin to climb fire escape on first floor. Guy up top begins to take his belt off. Tosses it over the SFPD below. They’re just below. Oh, now a fancy dressed couple begin making out right in front of me. A woman tries to climb a potted tree and puts her ass all in D’Louie’s face. She’s not sure if she’s digging that. Texting friends all over the City. Party in the streets on Divis. In the streets on Valencia. Castro is on TV. Cheese! On the move again and head up to Market cutting over on 17th. Run into Moe at Church! Get to chat. Good times. Look for the roving Extra Action street party but don’t see it. All blow up the stairs to great conversation, warm beds, and sweet dreams. Wake up this morning wondering if it was all a dream. It wasn’t after various nibbles and pinches. Flora Bora feels good. All seem happy. The clucking of “Ba-Rock” fills the house. Back on Bike! Consuming for America. Jonathan calls so head over to MFP and reconnect with the Facilitator of Fun for the Roadshow. Good hang time, eating Thai leftovers and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming……. Off to Market St. for some dessert. Apple pie of course, but with a “change”. Rice pudding ice cream instead of vanilla. We aren’t doin’ vanilla…. LNE visits so good to see again. 8pm where’s Al? Meeting up with Al. Ah, there’s the call. Go outside to be polite at the table and watch about 400 angry queers screaming “Out of the bars, and into the streets!” Protesting Prop 8’s victory. Three men run out of the cafe and join the mass. Jonathan and LNE go to join. Farewell. Hello Al. Zip to Lower Haight (on bikes!), past Sean’s work in progress on Lower Haters. Beer at Toronado. Zip over to D-Structure to Look and HLZ’s stain glass window. Rocks! Bike down Market and hang at Al’s. Knock over toys. Break a few things. Fixed. Good. Bike more. So tired. But must write. At least attempt to show the flow of the “new era”. And how I saw it go down in San Francisco. Left of East. Over the Rockies and at the edge of the world. Where islands burn in the Bay. Prophecy town, pushing corners of the box. Trying our best. And happy to be alive.

I can’t help but think of the great coliseums of Rome after going to an NCAA college football game. In Clemson, SC, take out the marble and replace with bricks, take off the togas and replace them with orange clothing. After a maybe 25 year gap in time, I returned to the autumn days of my youth when I drove my mother and niece to see the Tigers take on the Georgia Tech Jackets this past Saturday.

For the tens of thousands of fans trudging through traffic to arrive and tailgate before the game, this version of Rome floats in a sea of an orange utopia. This is IT for many of them, the ultimate place to be year in and year out. When these dedicated fans find their reserved parking space, they pull out the food and drinks, the satellite dish and wide screen HDTV, and get into some serious football pride. And they haven’t even gone in to see the live action yet!
Continue reading “Signals Get Crossed”

Is there such thing as Web 2.0 OD? I’m not talking about the spectative side of the Interweb, but rather, the participatory side. I’d like to consider myself a moderate user of Web 2.0 interfaces. I don’t have a YouTube account. I don’t dive into Google apps and Yahoo personalization offers. I do get out into the sunshine, ride my bike places, and interact with human beings outside of my apartment.

The other day, while making food in the kitchen, a room mate suggested that I make a web site for an idea I had just thought up (can’t remember what it was). I rolled my eyes. “Oh, no! Not another web site!” I got a laugh, but then tried to count off all the web sites I do have or administrate. Here’s the list: Happy Feet, Stencil Archive, Stencil Nation, Stencil Nation MySpace, Flickr, CELLspace.org,  Sage in the Cage (which is down at the moment), and then online promo for CELLspace (about 12 events list sites, including Facebook and Tribe). This list doesn’t include a few other sites that I log into from time to time for other reasons. During the conversation with the room mate, I couldn’t remember all the sites I logged into to post content to. After counting about five sites, my brain shut down and the conversation moved on to other topics.

Continue reading “Web 2.0 OD”

The United States has a huge monster in its closet. Before you even see the beast, it tips over an oil tanker, creates a huge explosion, tears the head off of the Statue of Liberty, and maliciously throws the head into Midtown Manhattan. Hmm, oil, destruction, and liberty; a monster who sadistically destroys the symbol of a great American Dream: to own a building that reaches up to the heavens. Closer to God at the end times?

The movie Cloverfield is basically a tale of a heroic, or stupid, group of friends that jump into a fantasy land to rescue a woman in distress. That fantasy land includes a lot of walking, lights that are always miraculously on where ever they walk/run in Manhattan, and other athletic, death defying feats (with screaming and jokes thrown in).

Continue reading “Shaken, Not Stirred at Cloverfield”

What: Community Meeting to Keep the CELL Alive and Well
When: Monday, November 19th @ 7pm
Where: CELLspace
(2050 Bryant Street btwn 18th & 19th, Mission District SF)
the CELLspace community: anyone who has passed through our doors (or has been wanting to!) to attend an event, receive services, create some art, participate in community building, or for refuge.
Why: CELLspace’s future is in jeopardy.   The collective and Board  members are struggling to pay monthly operating costs. We need to refocus community support and revitalize our fundraising efforts and collective energies!

The Evening will provide an update of the current status, a gathering of creative thoughts and ideas, and an opportunity to get involved in our metamorphosis.
Continue reading “Ever Been to CELLpace?”

The tabs on my Firefox browser have been up now for over a week. I haven’t shut down the app or the machine in a while, and after those random bug crashes (that happen often on the newer versions of Firefox), I bring the tabs back up. The past weekend led to some great online research/time wasting (you pick which term because I sometimes cannot tell the difference) thanks to folks like Larry, Pod, and my new hobby with researching the P2P torrent world. I’m ready to close some of these tabs; don’t worry, they’re bookmarked, so thought I should pass some of the leads along to whomever hits the HappyFeet universe:

• GraffitiGen: Fun site that lets you type in words and turn them into graffiti-style art. Change the colors, link to the type you made, and have a good time doing legal digi-graff.
• Visual Complexity: Pod turned me on to this great site a few days ago. This site shows you how things connect using advanced design techniques. Some major thought goes into these images, and the results can look otherworldly at times. Pod and I both wonder if this is the future of corporate data manipulation. Imagine Google using their information on all of us to make these complex charts that will further the bottom line.
• The Oil of the 21st Century: Speaking of information, this convention just happened in Berlin. From their site: “Under the banner of the ‘Information Society’, a cartel of corporate knowledge distributors struggle to maintain their exclusive right to the exploitation and commodification of the informational resources of the world.”
• tvRSS: I just learned what a tracker site is. And I’ve also just learned that sharing a torrent file does not mean that you are sharing info with “exclusive rights”. This site is worse than having cable TV because every show is one click away. Want to spend a day wasting time in front of the tube? Hit up tvRSS before Interpol gets them.
• Also found out that The Pirate Bay is legally hosting a torrent tracker in their home country of Sweden. Sort of. The exciting story coming from that country is that there’s a movement to start a Pirate Party that will seek seats in government. Will the WTO be the final ring for this battle?
• Had the honor of meeting Aaron and his Tactical Ice Cream Unit after the Peace March Saturday. I document educational vehicles and his Ice Cream truck fits the method. I hope to post photos and write more about the TICU soon, and will say briefly that he’s got a good deal going on with that project.
• February 29 might seem far off, but a group of organizers have decided to make Leap Day a day of creative chaos. A call has been sent out to get the ball rolling across the planet for a day of direct action that focuses “on living life in a positive, creative, loving, cooperative, sustainable fashion without domination of others or the earth.” The object is to be so off the wall that the actions will confuse cops and business owners. Sound like fun to me!
• Finally, I read an alt-history book about girls who had to give up their children for adoption in the 1950s and 1960s. The Girls Who Went Away gives first hand accounts of many tragic stories based upon societal, familial, and religious ignorance and misunderstandings. I had to read this book slowly because each story a mother gave filled me with sadness, anger, and compassion for their heartbreaking stories.

Wondering where I’ve been? Have you given up on checking my RSS feed? Has this blog fallen off the face of the earth? What the hell happened to Russell in July?

Not much. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been writing. Well, not exactly “not much,” but mostly things I didn’t want to write about. I’ve backed off of reading the news, reading books (though Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” rocks!), going out, consuming anything beyond a movie here or there. So I haven’t been thinking about politics, taking many photographs, doing any carny or puppet gigs, or thinking in audial mode. I haven’t really left the house that much.

Why? Well, I spent half of July at a vipassana retreat in North Fork, CA (near Yosemite NP). The course lasted 10 days, Goenka the teacher called it “prison,” “deep surgery,” “a monastery,” and I had an intense time. I couldn’t talk, write, gesture, interact with anyone else beyond the assistant teachers and the manager. The less distractions the better. My brain more than made up for the lack of technology, consumptive items, and interaction with others. I wrote amazing blog entries about the course, made many revisions, and then realized that I shouldn’t say much about the workshop. Once we all broke Noble Silence, we all realized that we had different experiences.

Continue reading “July Flew By, No Posts From Me…..”

From the grapevine:

Hello,

I am Roisin’s father. July 4th, Roisin and friends were in Dolores Park watching fireworks. Some stupid piece of shit threw an M60 at them. It landed on Roisin’s right hand and blew it apart. She will undego surgery later this morning but it doesn’t look good. Most likely she will lose her index finger; second and third fingers will also be permanently impaired and disfigured. Needless to say, her musical career is over.

I want this fucker. Media attention will help flush him out. People know who did it and I’m offering $20,000 for a name. Please do whatever is necessary to get the story out. Do so and I will reward you as well.

Thank you,
Chris Isner
chrisisner@hotmail.com

What I Saw:

Chris,

So sorry to hear about Roisin’s tragic injury. I have no name but saw it happen. I live in the ‘hood and had never been to Dolores Park on the Fourth. I hear huge explosions all the time from my apartment and realized Tuesday night where they where coming from.

If any of this helps, here is my account:

I got off the 33 bus at the J church stop and walked up the hill by the tracks. Huge explosions where going off all over the park. I realized quickly that anyone below me was in potential grave danger. There was a no-man’s land above the bathrooms, with people randomly tossing and setting off huge fireworks. I saw a few go off from about 30 yards away and wouldn’t get any closer.

I saw a guy, average looking, white maybe brown skinned, with short dark hair, light something and hold it for a really long time. With a fuse that long, I speculated that it was one of the round fireworks you put in a tube to shoot high up. Why the hell was he holding it? He finally tossed it into the no man’s land (he was standing on the 19th st. side of the bathroom, past it up the hill) and tossed too hard. Guess he was excited. I saw the bomb bounce through the empty space and into the crowd down there (they where too close). It went off and screams started. A guy, I guess a friend or boyfriend of Roisin, raged and ran into the empty space ready to kill the guy. I didn’t see where the tosser went to.

The firetruck and ambulance soon showed up. Huge explosions like that one randomly continued all over the park. Then, when people started running out of fireworks, the SFPD showed up and drove around the park.

I do think that it was an accident. The fuse was too long and the firework was thrown too hard. I bounced several times before going into the crowd. There where also a lot of drunk people there and no rules. One couple where setting off huge fireworks in a small 20 foot circle elsewhere. Hundreds of people where around them. Chaos, alcohol (I was stone sober), ordnance, and  “patriotism” equals a lethal cocktail.

I don’t think I could identify the tosser. I was too far away and it was dark. I saw no discerning features in the soft light. I could tell you where he was standing, maybe the exact same spot. What caught my eye was the long burning fuse. It burned for about 5 seconds before he threw it.

Again my sincerest sympathy and regards towards your daughter, a victim of an unfortunate, tragic accident. I hope she recovers soon and continues to follow her musical passions.

Sincerely,
Russell H.
San Francisco

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

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

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

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

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