guerrilla curatorship

via...

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:09:00 -0700

via http://intlxpatr.wordpress.com/2008/07/17/why-women-should-vote/

“So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this year because–why,
exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote
doesn’t matter? It’s raining?”

"Treating transit like an afterthought is nothing new for the state (just last year, for example, the..."

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:52:02 -0700

“Treating transit like an afterthought is nothing new for the state (just last year, for example, the Governor robbed $1.25 billion from public transit coffers). But as a bipartisan consensus begins to gel around addressing climate change through land use decisions, it seems remarkable that perhaps the most essential component of making smart growth work—dependable, affordable and convenient public transit—is getting the short shrift.”

- Without Transit Funding, State’s Smart Growth Efforts Not Enough

Last Call, Bohemia

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:28:00 -0700

Last Call, Bohemia:

syntheticpubes:

“It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships.”

I read this article a few months ago, to my delight. This is basically Jane Jacobs talking through a more flamboyant, lyrical old dude. Which is obviously real cool.

damage new!

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:12:22 -0700

damage new!

As some of you may know, this is my jam. In other news,...

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:46:26 -0700

As some of you may know, this is my jam.

In other news, I’ve been really missing the Mint lately.

This weekend I was thisclose to the New Pornographers singing...

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:47:00 -0700

This weekend I was thisclose to the New Pornographers singing this, one of my favorite songs. I don’t really have superlative adjectives to adequately explain how I feel about it.

"I grew up not knowing what the big deal was about gay people, not being scared of black people or..."

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:21:17 -0700

“I grew up not knowing what the big deal was about gay people, not being scared of black people or street food and it doesn’t matter what city I go to, I can always figure out the bus and the train”

- MD - on the need to nurture

There was a lot about this post I identified strongly with (because I am also a 26 year old mess of hormones) but this was the most resonant. I grew up knowing the difference between Cambodian and Laotian people, eating Senegalese food, having to explain to other kids why my mom lived with a woman and not my dad (and consequently, learning to avoid most people my own age), clambering up the steps of Muni buses or down Bart escalators, eating quesadillas from La Cumbre, and knowing the key to always knowing where you are is paying attention to the way the addresses are running. In my forays outside the densely built environment I’ve always felt alienated (either socially, by the narrowed worldview low density seems to breed, or directionally, because how do you develop reference points when streets run every which way and numbering is arbitrary!?)

I guess part of why I’ve always felt the urge to nurture (if you will) this friendship I have with MD is related to the commonality derived from being citizens of the “urban archipelago” (see below). Despite cultural and geographical differences in our backgrounds (New York vs. San Francisco), there is an ease of relatability and innate acceptance that comes from being fundamentally urban creatures, both by nature and nurture. The gulf that normally exists between me and peers of more privileged, managed upbringing is absent, and I am so grateful for that feeling.

MD, if you do ever breed, I will be there to pick up your kid from charter school, buy it a pupusa and escort it home on the 14-Mission.

tumbledore: This is an argument for confederation. Centralized...

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:29:38 -0700

tumbledore:

This is an argument for confederation. Centralized government leads to mass governmental looting and redistribution of wealth from urban centers to the hillbillies of America. Liberals, step your game up and join those who love freedom against the tyranny of the idiocracy. Conservatives, the Republican Party is just the Democratic Party with a penchant for war and torture combined with deep-rooted antithapy towards gays and foreigners.

(via raptoravatar):(via ferrrn)

A little more of a libertarian flavor to the above than I would normally get behind, but I dig it.

I am so ready to be done with these fucking crutches.

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:52:48 -0700

I am so ready to be done with these fucking crutches.

"The Drug Enforcement Administration discovered something unexpected in the Mall of the Americas. DEA..."

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:56:56 -0700

“The Drug Enforcement Administration discovered something unexpected in the Mall of the Americas. DEA agents found a hydroponics lab with more than 200 marijuana plants, standing 3 to 6 feet tall in the air and worth millions of dollars, in a storage area on the second floor of the mall. Authorities said the electricity that powered the lab was diverted from the mall’s main power supply.”

- Marijuana Grow House Found In Mall Of The Americas - Central Florida News 13

Ha ha ha.

lookmom: Where the Urban Dream Life Is Going Cheap i am not...

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:28:00 -0700

lookmom:

Where the Urban Dream Life Is Going Cheap

i am not moving to buffalo

no way no how

This is interesting for me, both as a perpetrator of that “couldn’t cut it” attitude toward suburban flight (which is admittedly less hardcore over here on the left coast but nonetheless, a snobbery that exists alive and well in San Francisco too) and someone who has gazed longingly at upstate New York with drooly bohemian antiquarian eyes. Such a stock of historic buildings! Such vacancy rates! So undervalued! It’s not the personal space I crave but the smorgasbord of antique elements. Still, the likelihood of actual relocation is - how you say? - non. Le sigh.

Also, I am totally crushed out on lookmom.

I KNEW IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:36:12 -0700

I KNEW IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!: Sex and the Olympic city - Times Online

mollylambert: benhasten: “According to her studio, Theda Bara...

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:01:50 -0700

mollylambert:

benhasten:

“According to her studio, Theda Bara was born around 1892, in the shadow of the Pyramids, the daughter of an Italian artist and a French actress. Film history books state that Bara was actually born in 1890, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Yet this also turns out to be a myth: a little research reveals that Theodosia Goodman was really born in Avondale (a wealthy, largely Jewish, suburb of Cincinnati) on July 29, 1885.”

I don’t have any context for reblogging this it’s just the kind of shit I love.

Chronicle copyediting by Philip Oliver Hole, photo assistant Hugh Jasscock.

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:34:00 -0700

Chronicle copyediting by Philip Oliver Hole, photo assistant Hugh Jasscock.: I’m sure they’ve since edited it because it was reposted so many times around the snickering, bratty kids interwebs, but the Chron originally published the photo with the caption “Oliver Clothezoff, visiting from New York…” which was fucking great.

"Will it draw hot chicks?"

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:07:35 -0700

“Will it draw hot chicks?”

- For new rapid bus lines, much is riding on image

Yes, “hot chicks” are the focus of this article about Bus Rapid Transit (one of the less sexy but more vogue public transit modes. Maybe this is why it didn’t work out on the 38-Geary.)

This is the Face Your Manga thing I made for myself and OH SHUT...

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:26:08 -0700

This is the Face Your Manga thing I made for myself and OH SHUT UP don’t act like you’re so above this particular thing like you didn’t make yourself a Simpsons character or some shit. I didn’t do that, for the record. Anyway I was informed it looks like Emily the Strange. I guess that’s not far off how I see myself, actually.

emptyage: Gold Medalist Shawn Johnson’s peace earrings are, I...

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:28:41 -0700

emptyage:

Gold Medalist Shawn Johnson’s peace earrings are, I think, a sure sign of the
changing times. There would have been all kinds of noise about this in
2004.

I really want to believe this is a sign of significance, of advancement, of sea-change. I do. Because despite the fact that my inner child looks mostly like a walk-of-shaming, gravelly-voiced drunken Jezebel blogger, there is a part of her that still looks all sweet and wholesome like this little Iowan smiley midget here. (Seriously though, how can you not be in love with Shawn Johnson? She is A-motherfucking-DORABLE and she’s teeny tiny and like, the best gymnast in the world and even though everyone is trying to make her say mean things about the Chinese gymnasts she will NOT because she is from the Midwest which I imagine to be the land of eternal niceties and raising people right and euchre and ANYWAY, I hope that even if American forgets about her entirely in three weeks (Shannon Miller anyone!??) and she realizes she has accomplished more at sixteen than anyone else she’ll ever meet and nobody will ever be really relatable to that, that she still finds something to do with her life that’s more fulfilling and awesome than coaching gymnastics. Which I’m sure is fun, but I mean like, I hope she goes to college and discovers lesbianism and/or the joys of the nonprofit sector. I don’t really want her to be a lesbian, that was just for example’s sake. She’s clearly hella straight. It would be fun if she did College Playboy though.)

Anyway, the point of this reblog was that I hope that her peace earrings and her peace sign flashes really indicate some kind of sea-change on the part of the American public; that it’s a signal that even in the Breadbasket and the Bible Belt the “regular” people are sick enough of the hypocrisy of conservatism, the abuses of justice, et. al, that they’re tolerating this overt televised statement-making. But I dunno. I guess I’m not convinced it’s that frought with meaning. I mean, remember when “hippie culture” came back in 1994 in the form of peace signs all over those horrendous ill-fitting “baby tees”? I don’t think that many kids were really contemplating the legacy of the struggle of counterculture or anything. I mean, sure there were the girls in ripped jeans smoking pot and writing in their journals incessantly who professed to be anti-establishment, but most teenagers who were at the mawl buying those earrings at Claire’s (sorry Shawn, maybe yours are real silver or something) were just buying cheap trendy crap. The peace sign just carried a kind of superficial, anachronistic, cutesy appeal. Like, “I’m too young to be washed out and scarred for life by the consequences of hard drug use and group sex, so I represent the innocent new face of peace and love, man!” Maybe I’m overanalyzing this and maybe because I’ve lived in the Haight Ashbury most of my adult life I have a knee-jerk “you don’t know what you’re talking about” reaction to anyone attempting to fly the hippie flag, but I’m inclined to see this whole peace sign thing as superficial. Or if a statement, a partly unwitting one.

I tried to reblog MD’s post about hedgehogs with a...

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:05:55 -0700

I tried to reblog MD’s post about hedgehogs with a different photo, but you can’t do that I guess. So anyway, here is the actual hedgehog who was the topic of said dinner conversation. His name is Sneezer (because he has allergies OMFG CUTE OVERLOAD) and he belongs to my cousin and lives in Boston. Apparently, it is not legal in California to have them as pets which is why I have never heard of anyone doing so. So when my cousin was talking about getting one, I was like, “!??” but now I am like, “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Survivors of 1918 Flu Pandemic Immune 90 Years Later - washingtonpost.com

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:11:01 -0700

Survivors of 1918 Flu Pandemic Immune 90 Years Later - washingtonpost.com: Coolness!

More than just cheesy hotel art (because everything with me has...

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:00:00 -0700

More than just cheesy hotel art (because everything with me has to be imbued with some kind of pseudo-significance!), this is a repro of some 1936 propaganda of the vintage wherein California land speculators were nurturing an image of California as a fair-weathered Shangri-La of open space, cheap land, health and wealth. And knowing what I do of California in its adolescence (armchair historian that I am), I’m sure it was a lovely, pastoral place full of promise. And, you know, rampant white supremacy, overspeculation and oppression of the underclass. Just like anywhere else I guess.

But anyway, what’s interesting to me is the legacy of this boosterism. It promoted a culture of personal space, ubiquitous single-family detached homeownership, and sun worship that seems to persist in various forms even today. I guess it’s why I’ve always regarded California as eh, just a’ight. None of those things are particularly well-suited to my personality (I consider myself a San Franciscan first, Californian only secondarily and peripherally) and I never really identified with why anyone would want to leave the dense, Industrial Revolution-era East for somewhere without a proper train system, but people certainly seem to. My mother, some of my best friends, probably half the people I know are all transplants arriving here on some kind of fresh-foods/knowledge economy/mild weather pilgrimage. It’s not that the appeal is lost on me, but more interesting that such pilgrimages west are still happening, a century or so after they were first popularized.