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CounterPULSE and City Lights Foundation present SHAPING San Francisco's An antidote to historical amnesia • Changing the climate of critical discussion in San Francisco • A place to meet and talk unmediated by corporations, official spokespeople, religion, political parties, or dogma All events
are free and on Wednesday evenings at 7:30 p.m. Fall-Winter-Spring Talks 2010-11 here. |
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Art & Politics: Brian Barneclo San Francisco artist and muralist Brian Barneclo is all about making connections. In his Systems and Foodchain murals, bold images in motion - almost like stills from a film - link natural and creative processes to show complex processes of interconnectivity. From Nopa to Shotwell to Mission Bay to iPad cases, Brian's quick and direct strokes amplify the cityscape with one of his own creation. Come have a conversation with Brian as he shows and talks about his work with us.
Corporate Personhood?!? “Corporate Personhood” is being widely discussed after a couple of decades of slowly growing awareness of the creeping expansion of corporate legal rights expanded since the late 19th century. The first precedents were set on behalf of Southern Pacific railroad in the late 19th century. Chris Carlsson will talk about the origins and and describe the evolution over time, with help from other experts TBA.
Policing San Francisco: 1930s-1960s Hank Chapot will present his work on the 1937 Atherton Report: "In 1935 San Franciscans were shocked, shocked, to hear reports of ordinary police officers with extraordinary wealth. Mayor Angelo Rossi and the Board of Supervisors put up $75,000 dollars to fund an independent investigation of the SFPD and it's crooked cops, hiring the private investigation firm Atherton & Dunn. The investigation and grand jury testimony pointed directly at bail bondsman Pete McDonough, San Francisco's greatest boss. The Atherton Report, released in March 1937, rocked the city and the police establishment and initiated the inexorable fall of the House of McDonough." Chris Agee will present his work on the 1960s: "During the 1960s San Franciscans grappled over the appropriate role of the police in an urban democracy. By examining the Police-Community Relations Unit, the Police Officers' Association, and the administrations of Mayors George Christopher and Joseph Alioto, this talk will explore how rank-and-file police officers maintained their street-level discretion during the period in which San Francisco's city hall embraced an increasingly inclusive political arrangement."
1932 Armored Police Car, San Francisco
Dolly Fine, well-known Madame in 1930s San Francisco. Rick Prelinger Lost Landscapes Greatest Hits! San Francisco has fallen in love with Rick Prelinger’s incredible collection of home movies and forgotten films showing a San Francisco that tickles our memories and reminds us of what once was... come for the participatory screening, where you get to help identify lost scenes and see a San Francisco you can usually barely imagine.
Triumph of Light statue on Mt. Olympus, c. 1940s.
Unusual Alliances: The Original Rainbow Coalitions In the 1960s the Black Panther Party for Self Defense joined with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the poor White Young Patriots Organization in the Original Rainbow Coalition (pre-Jessie Jackson). The model of "organize your own but fight together" was an attempt to build broad unity in dispossessed communities while dealing with the realities of racialized capitalism head-on. Come join a discussion of this history and what its going to take to keep the 99% together for the long-haul. Panel discussion will include a slideshow of the art of the Rainbow Coalitions. On the panel: Pam Tau Lee (member of I Wor Kuen), Emory Douglas (Former Minister of Culture, Black Panther Party for Self Defense) Amy Sonnie and James Tracy (co-authors of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times)
Art and Politics / Jess Curtis: Body of Work 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 to directly engage with Jess about his artistic practice and interests. Photos by Sven Hagolani, or hagolani.com
Sex, Race and Class—The Perspective of Winning Selma James will speak on her new book Sex, Race and Class—The Perspective of Winning; A Selection of Writings 1952-2011. With her will be Andaiye, co-founder of Red Thread in Guyana. James and Andaiye will discuss the class divide in feminism, the anti-capitalism of the social wage, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Haiti: Black Jacobins then and now and much more! Co-hosted by PM Press
West of Eden: Utopia and Communes in Northern California In the shadow of the Vietnam War, a significant part of an entire generation
Conscious Youth Media Crew: "Reel Hood Heroes" We present another night of Conscious Youth Media Crew's latest collection of films by youth, "Reel Hood Heroes", chronicles the lives of everyday heroes who work to create a brighter future for the young people in our San Francisco and Bay Area communities. Conscious Youth Media Crew encourages youth to become life-long learners and positive, productive community members. Through our unique San Francisco-based digital multimedia training program, youth participants learn multimedia arts and filmmaking, develop creative voice through storytelling, gain marketable technology skills, and become involved in the community as media producers and young leaders.
Radically Gay: Harry Hay, LGBT pioneer Harry Hay was a co-founder of the Mattachine Society, participant in the San Francisco General Strike of 1934, organizer of the first Radical Faerie Gathering. Harry Hay was at the heart of arts, activism, spirituality and sexual identities in the 20th century. Learn about this amazing man and discuss his legacies today. With Will Roscoe, editor of "Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of its Founder--Harry Hay" (Beacon Press: 1996), and Joey Cain, curator of the new exhibit on Harry Hay at the Main SF Public Library, opening April 26.
Photo by Mark Thompson
Rock, Posters, and Politics! Mat Callahan and Lincoln Cushing present an incredible slide show of dozens of rock and political posters from the 1960s and1970s, discussing the role of music and art in the politics of the era, and the way the commercial culture worked to co-opt and reintegrate that burst of creativity into the demands of consumer capitalism.
Art & Politics: Amy Franceschini Amy Franceschini is a pollinator who creates formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural and environmental systems that surround her. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. Her projects reveal the ways that local politics are affected by globalization. In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists. In 2004, Amy co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space.
What Are Our Streets For? Emerging visions for public thoroughfares challenge the 20th century paradigm of automobile-centric streets. Pedestrians, bicyclists, and wild critters are all demanding their own ways to cross the city. San Francisco's "Green Connections" project seeks to integrate these new visions into San Francisco's urban grid. Join Andy Thornley (SF Bike Coalition), Peter Brastow (Nature in the City), Elizabeth Stampe (Walk SF), and the SF Planning Dept.'s Kearstin Dischinger to critically evalute these competing and complementary visions of a reconfigured San Francisco.
FoundSF: Dissent in San Francisco Trace the vital history of political dissent in San Francisco with Chris Carlsson, using our FoundSF collection to connect past movements with today’s, with a focus on the anti-nuclear and anti-war movements of the 1970s and 1980s through the today’s Occupy movement. This will be the final Shaping San Francisco Talk at CounterPULSE, ending our 7th season.
Image depicts Feb. 2003 march against Iraq war from mural by Mona Caron
Talks that have happened already this season, with audio links Endangered Species Campaigning Endangered Species is an artwork that wrapped four San Francisco Muni buses in images of locally endangered species. Reintroducing these animals into the urban scene that displaced them, the project dramatizes the priorities and conflicts which shape habitat for both humans and animals. Endangered Species emerges from a vision of engaged and interdependent beings. With Endangerbuses' Todd Gilens, Wild Equity Institute's Brent Plater, and Tuolomne River Trust's Jessie Raeder.
online: Meeting Room Meeting Room shines a powerful searchlight on a controversial moment in recent Dublin history. It tells the contested story of the Concerned Parents Against Drugs movement from its emergence in Hardwicke St and St Teresa’s Gardens in the early 1980s to its decline with the imprisonment of some of its leaders at the end of that decade. CPAD began in response to the explosion of drug addiction in Dublin in 1982. A lack of action from the authorities meant that residents of the flats complexes where heroin was available were on their own. A mass movement was born in response and dealers were confronted with meetings, patrols, checkpoints and late night evictions. These tactics saw the movement spread throughout the city. But CPAD’s direct action strained its relationship with the authorities and the media. Charges of vigilantism and republican infiltration dogged the movement and undermined it. Hostility in the press, prosecution in the courts and a violent response from criminals was all balanced against successfully tackling the dealers as the movement rose and fell during the 1980's in Dublin. A documentary by Jim Davis.
Mystery of Laguna Dolores Join Christopher Richard, curator of Aquatic Biology at Oakland Museum, for a presentation on The Mystery of Laguna Dolores. Richard reexamines the legend of a “now vanished” fresh water lake believed to have been located in the heart of the Mission District. The lake is part of the founding story of San Francisco — it’s written about in history books, mentioned in encyclopedias, but after studying at least 100 maps of the San Francisco peninsula drawn before 1912 Richard has come up with a new theory.
online: Reimagining Market Street A discussion about the future of Market Street is taking place in many forums in the City, preparing the way for a new boulevard in 2015. The history of Market Street is peppered with architectural and social solutions that have not worked out as planned. We'll take a look at the long history of Market Street and San Francisco, the various momentous and controversial redesigns that have happened over the decades, question the assumptions about urban design that underly the current municipal discussions, and set the stage for a discussion of what's coming. Thanks to Rick Prelinger, we'll also show videos of life on Market Street from the early 20th century to more recent decades. Chris Carlsson and Tom Radulovich
4th and Market 1969 during BART construction.
5th and Market 1971 during BART construction. online:
“Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Trial of Lucullus’ SFSU's Department of Theatre Arts will present an open rehearsal of Bertolt Brecht's "The Trial of Lucullus" co-directed by Barbara Damashek and Joel Schechter. The play places an ancient Roman general (Lucullus) on trial for his leadership of a military invasion in Asia. Originally written for radio, subsequently staged as an opera, the play in this production will include songs and dialogue.
Urban Homesteading K. Ruby, Esperanza Pallana, Melinda Stone, three experts on Urban Homesteading, will bring their wit and intelligence to a wide-ranging presentation on the growing phenomenon. Ruby is co-author of "Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living." Esperanza Pallana is behind the website pluckandfeather.com, and partof the farmfoodconnect site too, and will help focus on how food sovereignty and the right to grow and raise our own food in the city is becoming one of the biggest legal battles of the decade. Melinda Stone is the moving force behind the "11 in 11" workshops, taking homesteading skills to the 11 electoral districts over 11 months in 2011. She is also the videographer responsible for the enormously informational "How to Homestead" videos here. Find out how to start your own urban homestead from these experts, ask them tough questions, revel in the growing movement...
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Above and Below San Francisco Streets— with Glenn Lym. It is a common assumption that street grids were imposed easily on San Francisco’s original landscape, resulting in the city’s 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 Francisco’s flatland was created from land forms that were quite different from what we know today.
View northeast as if hovering over Noe Valley online:
The Good, The Bad, and the Alternatives to Mass Education Mark Twain once quipped, "I never let school get in the way of my education!" This panel of educators will share how they live that idea working in school systems. All three educators have successfully co-created programs with their communities that are progressive, develop student leadership, and empower communities to address social justice issues. Their work ranges from recreating schools as centers for social research and action in Berkeley and New Mexico to shifting the dialog about education in Africa. We all know the problems -- lets talk about solutions that are working. Victor Diaz, Will Grant, Lynn Murphy, Sean Burns and (moderator).
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The History of the Future with Starhawk, Megan Prelinger, and Chris Carlsson. Megan Prelinger’s book “Another Science Fiction” takes a whimsical look at how the Space Race was promoted during its heyday 1957-62, offering a pointed look into a twisted type of corporate “utopian” thinking that informed a whole generation. Meanwhile, Starhawk’s “The Fifth Sacred Thing” and Chris Carlsson’s “After The Deluge” both present alternative utopian futures for San Francisco a century or more in the future. Join the conversation with these three authors as they ponder utopias and dystopias, imagination and revolution, and the power of social movements and propaganda to shape different futures. Starhawk, committed global justice activist and organizer, is the author or coauthor of twelve books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, and The Earth Path. Her latest is The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups, forthcoming in November 2011. She is a veteran of progressive movements, from anti-war to anti-nukes, is a highly influential voice in the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion, and has brought many innovative techniques of spirituality and magic to her political work. Her web site is www.starhawk.org.
Chris Carlsson, co-director of the multimedia history project Shaping San Francisco ( foundsf.org), is a writer, publisher, editor, and community organizer. He has written two books (After the Deluge, Nowtopia) edited five books, (Reclaiming San Francisco; The Political Edge; Bad Attitude; Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration; and Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco, 1968-78). He has hosted these public Talks since January 2006 and gives award-winning bicycle history tours. His website is www.chriscarlsson.com.
Megan Prelinger...
online: (Unfortunately the recording failed between the introduction and near the beginning of the 2nd speaker, Chris Carlsson, so Megan Prelinger's presentation is not in this recording, though she does appear during the Q&A with the audience on several occasions. Our deepest apologies for this technical failure and resultant ommission.) Centennial Anniversary! Women Get the Vote! 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of women winning the right to vote in California, making it the sixth state, or the Sixth Star, to recognize women as political actors. Learn more about these women, their collective organizing strategies, the nexus between movements, voting, and class issues, the connection to Spiritualism in the United States, and their previous attempt in 1896 to convince voting men to amend the State Constitution. LisaRuth Elliott and Sue Englander.
Women cast their first ballots in 1912. online:
Enforcing The Silence Enforcing the Silence, Tony Nguyen’s film about Vietnamese community in US. explores silence and loss in the tragic story of a young community worker who may have been murdered for expressing his political beliefs. Lam Duong founded the Vietnamese Youth Development Center in San Francisco and published a liberal newspaper that reprinted stories from communist Vietnam following the Vietnam War. On July 21, 1981, the 27-year-old was shot dead outside his apartment in broad daylight. Within days of Lam’s murder, news spread that a shadowy, anti-communist group had claimed responsibility, sending a chilling message to Vietnamese refugees everywhere: stay in line with your political views or risk death. Between 1982 and 1990, five more Vietnamese Americans – four of them journalists – were violently killed, many believe for political reasons. Thirty years later, new filmmaker Tony Nguyen unlocks the mystery of Lam Duong’s life and death, and uncovers truths that Vietnamese Americans have never publicly explored. Mixing personal interviews with startling historical and present-day footage, ENFORCING THE SILENCE offers fresh insight into the long-term costs of war.
online: Occupy Everything! Open Discussion Everyone is invited to come to an open discussion about the Occupy movement that started in September in the U.S. and has spread across the country, with dramatic events in Oakland, San Francisco, and other locales. What are the politics of this moment? How shall we understand our own activity, how does it fit into a longer historical perspective? Is this really so new? If so, what next? Come and participate in a civil and lively discussion.
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