October 23, 2004
He ... is ... nuts!
Three fixed-gear riders completed this year's Furnace Creek 508 race.
Density calculator
And there are 22 candidates running for Supervisor in District 5 alone. Now that's density. No pun intended.
In which we do not ask for his life story
For more than a decade, I have had a curious poem by John Updike hanging in my apartment (through three Chicago apartments, one in Pittsburgh, and two in San Francisco): "Sunday in Boston". Here, then, is "Sunday in San Francisco":
The dykes on bikes
-- the lemon-lime fixed-gear, a real track bike --
and the upperclass with their derailleurs and yoga mats
The aspiring hippies with patchouli drenched on their clothes
and the vapours of medicinal magic all aroundThe fags and their gay dogs
purposely walking down to the Parkand I smile a beery hello
from the stoop, the real catbird seat
October 22, 2004
An indictment of the people and the President
Bumped into Adam yesterday, who loaned me a copy of Sleepwalking Through History. I read with some alarm the first two chapters, on Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and titled "The Loser" and "The Winner" respectively. As Carter spent a sleepless final week in office, negotiating the terms of release for the Iranian hostages, Reagan showed little inclination to do other than sleep and party his way to Inauguration.
I blame the subway:
Appearing on ABC's "This Week With David Brinkley" after the [arms procurement] scandal began, Arkansas Senator David Pryor described it this way: "A few yards from here is Connecticut Avenue, and we all see the beautiful hotels and office buildings and grand shops, but underneath there's a subway system that is running day and night where people are getting on and they're getting off.... Some of the poeple that are getting off that subway ... have either been with the Department of Defense or with a private consulting firm. They go to a contractor. They're in the Pentagon private consulting firms or their own contractors, and they're all sloshing around in the subway system with all of this money and we're in trouble because of it."
October 21, 2004
Dancing in the street(car)s!
Kim Epifano's Epiphany Dance company are using MUNI F-Market cars as the setting for their new presentation, Trolley Dances:
All aboard for two electrifying days of modern dance in the streets of San Francisco! Travel along Muni's historic F-line trolley route to see four original dance performances in unexpected places.Guided performance 'journeys' leave from the San Francisco Public Library every 45 minutes starting at 12:15 p.m. and take 2 hours to complete. Performances are free with a valid Fast Pass or one-time fare of $1.25.
The flyer (pictured on the website) has a stunning photograph of dancers at a Market St. platform.
A few years ago, while riding the F line from 2nd Ave/LES to York St, some enterprising actors took advantage of line construction (and the weekend closure of East Broadway, in addition to Delancy Street) to perform two short plays in the subway.
October 20, 2004
October 19, 2004
She loved to argue.
Margaret Sloan-Hunter died last week. I met her on the 71 Haight bus, when she boarded at the Fillmore St. stop and began chatting with me.
October 18, 2004
The LA literary conspirarcy
As I was being bodily removed from Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore, I picked up a copy of David Fine's Imagining Los Angeles, a literary tour of L.A.. I'm only a couple of chapters into it, but the writing suffers from being overly derivative, especially of Mike Davis' excellent surveys of post-modern representation of the city, and suffers from poor editing.
I also received a sizeable volume of literary L.A., Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which holds a lot of promise. It's in the same series as the volume on Baseball edited by Nicholas Dawidoff.
October 17, 2004
An argument carried out by other means
Saw Walter Salles' romantic adaptation of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's early diary (the Motorcycle Diaries). Che and a friend rode a dilapidated beast of a Norton around South America, tramping, working, and learning about leprosy. The 1952 journey was one which Guevara undertook expecting it to change his outlook on life, and it did: it opened his eyes to the plight of the proletariat, and he decided that the mass of them live lives of quiet desperation. Of futility.
The adaptation doesn't hide much, but certainly glosses incidents (Che doesn't eat empanadas in his memoir, although in the film two pretty Chilean girls treat him and his hungry traveling companion to a dozen of the savouries. They also give him the nick-name "Che", an apparently common term in Chile for Argentinians; et cetera).
The film shows South America harshly: a continent of hard-working people beaten down by Spanish imperialism and subsequent brutal colonialism. Rather than dwelling on past injustice, the diary and the movie focus on vignettes: an old waitress dying of asthma; day-labourers looking for work in the mines; a festive evening party in Chile. The cinematography is beautiful, and Che's bosom-friend Alberto Granada dances beautifully.
