Meta tags:

Headings (most frequently used words):

the, nowtopian, monumental, instability, or, war, of, memorials, yes, there, is, future, real, crimes, and, coming, violence, recent, posts, categories, hidden, san, francisco, 2nd, edition, links, books,

Text of the page (most frequently used words):
the (204), and (116), that (36), are (23), for (22), this (22), with (15), their (15), but (15), from (14), now (13), what (13), was (13), san (12), will (12), #francisco (11), they (11), history (10), public (10), 2025 (10), people (10), power (10), there (10), have (10), his (10), new (9), been (9), not (9), over (9), who (9), books (8), out (8), has (8), our (8), all (7), world (7), mass (7), years (7), one (7), protest (7), its (7), even (7), when (7), work (7), year (7), show (7), 2026 (6), how (6), violence (6), turn (6), time (6), down (6), being (6), more (6), about (6), which (6), past (6), monuments (6), 2nd (5), did (5), continue (5), media (5), her (5), december (5), technology (5), across (5), while (5), war (5), white (5), full (5), black (5), edition (4), politics (4), critical (4), art (4), like (4), comments (4), travel (4), book (4), reading (4), real (4), crimes (4), coming (4), long (4), back (4), along (4), most (4), own (4), course (4), still (4), death (4), trump (4), had (4), know (4), something (4), yet (4), two (4), again (4), three (4), general (4), future (4), can (4), millions (4), several (4), into (4), blog (4), through (4), everyone (4), monument (4), march (4), space (4), statues (4), nowtopian (3), available (3), celebration (3), political (3), after (3), nowtopia (3), category (3), report (3), reviews (3), switzerland (3), since (3), news (3), around (3), best (3), social (3), put (3), them (3), end (3), national (3), question (3), right (3), don (3), where (3), any (3), rule (3), ever (3), could (3), every (3), day (3), free (3), take (3), away (3), large (3), against (3), horror (3), keep (3), doing (3), beginning (3), small (3), old (3), trip (3), musings (3), yes (3), working (3), leads (3), polycrisis (3), rise (3), recent (3), essay (3), lost (3), much (3), may (3), later (3), supremacist (3), 2020 (3), police (3), face (3), etc (3), june (3), monumental (3), instability (3), memorials (3), confederacy (3), rendition (3), walker (3), brick (3), confederate (3), carolina (3), contemporary (3), various (3), class (3), also (3), museum (3), 2024 (3), 2011 (2), culture (2), 2004 (2), city (2), buy (2), here (2), shaping (2), facebook (2), foundsf (2), org (2), hell (2), hidden (2), september (2), lithuania (2), italy (2), crime (2), felt (2), hard (2), muster (2), simply (2), corporate (2), buildings (2), become (2), painfully (2), some (2), drive (2), wealth (2), making (2), were (2), 20th (2), century (2), seattle (2), protests (2), fascism (2), ice (2), military (2), kind (2), good (2), camps (2), run (2), sign (2), you (2), want (2), fascist (2), these (2), illegal (2), start (2), opposition (2), madness (2), words (2), wish (2), events (2), justice (2), law (2), looting (2), country (2), mention (2), streets (2), get (2), seen (2), darkness (2), gaza (2), such (2), majority (2), stands (2), demands (2), killing (2), obviously (2), million (2), powers (2), never (2), precisely (2), europe (2), days (2), another (2), apart (2), other (2), adriana (2), family (2), sure (2), towards (2), economy (2), multiple (2), states (2), ourselves (2), exhaustion (2), heroic (2), cause (2), system (2), gramsci (2), interregnum (2), great (2), variety (2), paralysis (2), then (2), merely (2), economic (2), neoliberal (2), authoritarian (2), term (2), short (2), continues (2), increasingly (2), than (2), times (2), cruelty (2), use (2), true (2), only (2), attempt (2), within (2), few (2), rest (2), moving (2), bizarre (2), together (2), turning (2), warehouse (2), workers (2), dozens (2), filled (2), racist (2), americans (2), find (2), wall (2), street (2), readers (2), society (2), novel (2), things (2), might (2), done (2), decades (2), built (2), soft (2), pedestals (2), lot (2), both (2), announce (2), read (2), original (2), writer (2), howard (2), serra (2), way (2), write (2), part (2), writing (2), joined (2), literally (2), else (2), jon (2), henry (2), series (2), stranger (2), fruit (2), jefferson (2), davis (2), graffitied (2), moca (2), robert (2), bronze (2), ferguson (2), missouri (2), japantown (2), massive (2), virginia (2), murder (2), geffen (2), portraits (2), whole (2), nation (2), review (2), kara (2), 2022 (2), life (2), toppled (2), los (2), angeles (2), unmanned (2), drone (2), coast (2), east (2), hollywood (2), supremacy (2), posts (2), present (2), copyright, rights, reserved, powered, atahualpa, wordpress, chriscarlsson, com, stuff, vanished, waters, mission, bay, bad, attitude, processed, anthology, 1990, reclaiming, 1998, bicycling, defiant, 2002, edge, deluge, 2008, ten, shook, 1968, shift, happens, 2012, spuyten, duyvil, october, 2023, talks, ecology, page, chris, carlsson, bicycle, walking, tours, explain, turned, links, pluto, press, spring, older, entries, 6th, tags, strikes, riots, punishment, impotent, enthusiasm, least, bush, cheney, crowd, probably, reagan, strategy, ignore, pretend, doesn, exist, generally, gone, reinforcing, authorities, determine, isn, marching, yelling, empty, ritual, amplified, reproducing, bubble, occasional, breakthroughs, why, hopes, wider, impact, sales, worldwide, dent, elon, musk, aura, twenty, five, ago, stop, many, horrible, trade, deals, table, wto, tesla, takedown, well, road, open, bald, faced, troops, recruited, deployed, backed, active, guardsman, seem, germans, made, nazi, saw, asked, order, disobey, hangs, sword, damocles, everyday, soldiers, used, theatrical, props, actual, murderers, pawns, unwilling, protagonists, neo, takeover, refuse, play, further, commanders, haven, spine, stand, orders, grow, difficult, savagely, beating, standing, quietly, chanting, fill, expanding, privately, owned, jails, cameras, body, snatchers, thoughts, irrelevant, add, drop, water, sea, affect, lived, fairness, meant, always, proclaimed, consistently, violated, favor, money, trumpists, dropped, pretense, engaged, fastest, sordid, plunder, rapacious, exploitation, ramping, organized, thuggish, combined, rising, number, disappearances, squads, believe, worse, does, remains, elections, enough, too, without, genocide, entering, mind, clearly, immediate, cessation, israel, slaughtering, starving, destroying, palestinians, expand, extermination, campaign, west, bank, european, propaganda, organs, masquerading, independent, supporting, insulting, phrase, those, shouted, loudest, longest, ones, carrying, allowed, sunrise, intragna, just, enjoyed, almost, weeks, spent, mona, place, southern, hadn, town, italian, alps, friend, giovanni, ending, fun, thermal, baths, spa, pellegrino, drifted, far, enjoy, each, argue, hours, journey, ended, yesterday, sister, wedding, baby, odd, alpine, glacier, flew, milan, 26th, looking, emergency, martyrdom, sees, cares, nothing, individual, lives, deaths, happened, results, determined, reach, crisis, consists, fact, dying, cannot, born, morbid, symptoms, appear, sometimes, mistranslated, monsters, 271, 272, daily, drumbeat, others, frenzied, efforts, plug, holes, dike, sarah, jaffe, labor, writers, generation, writes, ashes, grief, revolution, fire, temporary, convergence, disparate, shocks, structural, expression, simultaneous, ecological, unusual, consequences, amid, post, terrain, alternatives, forged, raj, patel, illuminates, breviary, meanwhile, planet, cook, leading, catastrophic, floods, fires, hurricanes, droughts, turns, sending, onto, desperate, journeys, seeking, refuge, asylum, billionaires, kleptocratic, wannabes, allies, impunity, infrastructure, decay, lose, homes, rents, prices, soar, jobs, precarious, underpaid, medical, verge, collapse, shitty, private, insurance, due, wing, destruction, obamacare, subsidies, schools, falling, broke, closing, education, gutted, spending, passed, trillion, defense, bureaucracies, lining, pockets, venal, profiteers, unreliable, software, controls, snap, decisions, gets, bombed, chatbots, shield, responsible, accountability, avarice, ineptitude, capturing, better, confusing, chaos, ahead, worlds, explode, smaller, minds, hold, lash, imaginary, enemies, inevitability, requires, solidarity, effective, collective, response, going, forward, ultimately, pass, strangle, wind, solar, chinese, car, industry, borders, abdication, american, empire, america, firsters, unexpectedly, welcome, entertaining, aspect, misrule, centrists, able, humpty, dumpty, whether, 2027, 2029, begs, forces, emerge, magasters, themselves, eating, inchoate, left, shaking, off, municipal, socialists, mamdani, less, visible, baristas, uber, truck, drivers, nurses, teachers, disaffected, tech, activists, campaigns, confronting, patriarchal, dinosaurs, slumbering, rebels, connected, move, vast, wait, anti, militarized, posturing, overstepping, soon, itself, trial, countless, petty, profound, posters, restored, democracy, valencia, unfolded, wrote, compliment, prescience, credit, describing, pretty, pike, point, fictional, rendering, hummers, picking, suspects, putting, detention, brittle, furthermore, utterly, incapable, managing, governing, complex, length, quasi, martial, passes, seems, recede, widespread, revulsion, untold, forgetting, finish, tasks, late, taking, initiatives, fix, easily, repaired, very, dumb, sycophants, thrust, everything, posture, macho, toughs, destroy, carefully, institutional, colonialist, already, finding, lofty, preen, eroding, pillars, sand, soldier, schweiks, regular, vanishingly, digesting, interpreting, plow, prefer, anything, online, magazines, gave, presentation, early, delighted, house, morning, busy, compelling, programs, pitted, sharp, questions, flattering, frankly, funny, pal, joe, berry, commanded, floor, greatest, living, bibliographers, should, appreciate, yeah, record, learning, hopefully, process, useful, summaries, offering, fresh, connections, insights, research, reporting, possibilities, confront, zinn, bookfair, statue, stored, toppling, title, self, exhortation, though, suppose, months, last, posted, during, ongoing, participation, arts, commission, legacy, project, resisting, sake, given, firehose, bullshit, pouring, channel, mainstream, mostly, deferential, overt, engulfing, hyper, abundance, opinions, analyses, floating, substack, medium, tiktok, podcasts, talking, opining, answer, silence, certainly, feel, need, repackage, repeat, saying, fall, junipero, happy, 22nd, leave, comment, former, president, deposed, detail, kahlil, irving, stunning, alone, next, come, dozen, removed, richmond, orleans, homeless, artifacts, demolition, wake, described, miranda, nine, parishioners, mother, emanuel, church, charlestown, south, 2015, violent, unite, rally, nationalists, descended, charlottesville, preserve, lee, slated, removal, resulting, counterprotester, george, floyd, minneapolis, officer, sparked, globally, often, vandalized, juxtaposed, responses, artists, ranging, bronzed, site, michael, brown, subsequent, uprising, 2014, photographer, women, adult, sons, arms, form, classic, facing, room, daughters, version, disembodied, arm, upright, finger, taken, aka, miss, tucked, corner, video, camera, filming, appears, distorted, projections, spots, exhibit, hall, jarring, photos, kkk, members, garb, videos, filling, rooms, including, subversive, remix, somber, josephus, daniels, newspaper, publisher, fomented, massacre, coup, elected, government, wilmington, north, 1898, roger, taney, supreme, court, chief, penned, decision, sit, impassively, southerners, dred, scott, birth, vindicatrix, pietá, york, extraordinary, artist, amazing, running, moma, rivera, mural, sat, separate, gallery, offered, dismantled, giant, stonewall, jackson, render, she, wild, twisted, dismembering, membering, man, horse, limbs, weapons, erected, extend, indefinite, defigurative, apparition, condemned, stumble, lurch, defeated, unrecognizable, permanent, purgatory, civil, remembrance, loudly, revolt, context, configuration, case, anchor, fortuna, immortality, garden, machine, battle, wars, openly, fought, everywhere, closes, called, locations, adjacent, went, lisaruth, field, check, shows, stumbled, tavares, strachan, tomorrow, began, county, exceptional, contribution, complicated, monumentality, representation, audience, meaning, focus, idiotic, ballroom, seizing, kennedy, center, insistence, rewriting, whitening, historical, narratives, smithsonian, assumes, attention, span, ignorant, obsession, telling, promoting, himself, bringing, uprisings, wants, create, park, summer, 250th, birthday, grade, understanding, deems, underscore, barbaric, cruel, attack, iran, clearest, indication, pax, americana, once, slow, surprisingly, rapid, decline, capital, creepy, multi, storied, banners, scowling, staring, obvious, dementia, capriciously, tossing, united, wwii, defend, care, demise, except, cheerleader, february, nature, writings, appearances, guest, categories, november, autocracy, defeats, neoliberalism, forgotten, futures, saddle, ride, mankind, january, risk, april, engulfs, whither, modern, sitemap, privacy, policy, contact, archives, home,

Text of the page (random words):
ho has had an amazing show fortuna and the immortality garden machine running in the free part of the sf moma for the past year where the rivera mural sat in the separate gallery along howard street was offered the dismantled giant monument of confederate general stonewall jackson to render into something else and did she ever her unmanned drone 2022 is a wild twisted dismembering and re membering of the man his horse and the various limbs and weapons that had been erected to extend his life and that of the lost cause into an indefinite future but are now a defigurative apparition condemned to stumble and lurch defeated and unrecognizable through a permanent purgatory of civil war remembrance but also to announce loudly the revolt that toppled the original the context of its re de configuration and in this case to anchor the monuments show at moca in los angeles walker s stunning work stands alone at the brick and the rest of the show is next to japantown there you come face to face with a dozen massive confederate monuments removed from richmond virginia and new orleans homeless artifacts after their demolition in the wake of three events described by carolina a miranda in her review in the new york review of books march 12 2026 the mass murder of nine black parishioners by a white supremacist at the mother emanuel church in charlestown south carolina in 2015 the violent unite the right rally two years later when white nationalists descended on charlottesville virginia to preserve a monument to robert e lee that was slated for removal resulting in the death of a counterprotester and the killing of george floyd by a minneapolis police officer which sparked protests globally at the geffen the large often vandalized statues are juxtaposed to contemporary responses by a variety of artists ranging from a bronzed rendition of ferguson missouri site of michael brown s murder by police and subsequent uprising in 2014 to a series of portraits stranger fruit by ny photographer jon henry of black women with their adult black sons in their arms in the form of the classic pietá facing across the room a massive daughters of the confederacy rendition of their version of it in the show are graffitied pedestals the disembodied arm and upright finger taken from the jefferson davis monument the vindicatrix aka miss confederacy which is tucked in an out of the way corner with a video camera filming it so it appears as distorted projections in various spots around the exhibit hall to jarring photos of kkk members in full garb to several moving videos filling up whole rooms including a subversive remix of birth of a nation somber bronze statues of josephus daniels a newspaper publisher who fomented the white supremacist massacre and coup against the elected black city government in wilmington north carolina in 1898 and roger b taney the supreme court chief justice who penned the dred scott decision sit impassively along a wall across from dozens of portraits of working class southerners both black and white at the turn of the 20th century a small detail from kahlil robert irving s bronze rendition of ferguson missouri jefferson davis former president of the confederacy deposed and graffitied at the moca in la from jon henry s stranger fruit series continue reading monumental instability or war of the memorials march 22nd 2026 category general musings history public space technology travel report leave a comment yes there is a future happy end of 2025 and beginning of 2026 it s a new year the title is not merely a self exhortation though i suppose it could be read that way it s been three months since i last posted something to my blog i did write an essay about the rise and fall of the junipero serra monument during this time but it s over on foundsf org the essay is part of our ongoing participation in the sf arts commission s shaping legacy project i ve been resisting writing for the sake of writing even if i ve done that a lot over the past 21 years on this blog i like to write that s no crime yet but given the firehose of bullshit pouring out of every channel of mainstream media mostly deferential towards the overt fascism engulfing our society not to mention the bizarre hyper abundance of opinions and analyses free floating on substack facebook medium tiktok etc joined by several million podcasts literally full of even more talking and opining the best answer might be silence i certainly don t feel a need to repackage and repeat what everyone else is saying the serra statue stored in a warehouse after its toppling on june 19 2020 regular readers of this blog who are vanishingly few by now will know that for the past several years a lot of what i ve been doing is digesting and interpreting all the books i continue to plow through i do prefer reading books to anything i can find online or in magazines i gave a presentation on the 2nd edition of hidden san francisco at the howard zinn bookfair in early december and was delighted to have a full house of about 30 people at 10 30 in the morning on a busy day full of multiple compelling programs all pitted against one another there were sharp questions and comments but the one that was both flattering and frankly funny was from my old pal joe berry who commanded the floor to announce that i was one of the greatest living bibliographers and that was something everyone there should appreciate so yeah i read and then use this blog to record what i m learning hopefully in the process making useful summaries and offering fresh connections and insights that s what i do much more than original research or reporting or any of the other possibilities that confront a writer as this past year unfolded several readers of my recent novel wrote me to compliment what they felt was my prescience i take no credit for describing what was pretty obviously coming down the pike but the point of my fictional rendering of ice hummers picking up suspects and putting them in detention camps was to show how brittle authoritarian rule is and furthermore how utterly incapable such people are of managing or governing a complex society for any length of time the quasi martial law passes within a year in my novel and so it seems it may recede in the face of widespread public revulsion untold millions of good soldier schweiks working to rule forgetting to finish tasks being late not taking initiatives to fix things that might be easily repaired etc etc the very dumb sycophants thrust into power have done everything they can to posture as macho toughs only to destroy decades of carefully built up institutional economic and colonialist soft power they are already finding the lofty pedestals on which they preen turning into eroding pillars of sand posters restored to democracy wall on valencia street there is more horror and cruelty ahead to be sure as their small worlds explode their smaller minds will use the powers they hold to lash out at real and imaginary enemies that inevitability requires as much solidarity and effective collective response as we can muster that s been true all year and will only be more true going forward but ultimately this will pass the attempt to strangle wind power and solar and the chinese car industry may work within the borders of the u s for a few years but the rest of the world is moving on the bizarre abdication of american empire by the america firsters is an unexpectedly welcome and entertaining aspect of their misrule the neoliberal centrists will not be able to put humpty dumpty back together again whether in 2027 or 2029 or later so that begs the question of the new political forces beginning to emerge now if the magasters are turning on themselves and eating their own the inchoate left is shaking off its paralysis from municipal socialists like mamdani to the less visible millions of baristas uber and truck drivers warehouse workers nurses teachers and even disaffected tech workers activists across dozens of campaigns are confronting the patriarchal white supremacist dinosaurs at every turn the slumbering rebels that filled the streets in 2020 to protest racist police violence are still connected and know how to move together when they want to the vast majority of americans are wait for it anti fascist the racist cruelty and militarized posturing overstepping across the country could soon find itself on trial for countless crimes petty and profound meanwhile the planet continues to cook leading to catastrophic floods fires hurricanes and droughts which in turns is sending millions onto desperate journeys seeking refuge and asylum billionaires and kleptocratic wannabes like trump and his family and political allies are looting public wealth with impunity public infrastructure continues to decay people continue to lose their homes while rents and prices soar jobs are increasingly precarious and underpaid the medical system is on the verge of collapse as millions have lost their shitty private insurance due to the right wing destruction of obamacare subsidies schools are falling apart broke and closing while public education is being gutted military spending has passed 1 trillion a year 2 3 of which is lost in the defense and corporate bureaucracies lining the pockets of venal war profiteers unreliable software increasingly controls snap decisions over who gets bombed and when while chatbots shield responsible people from accountability for their avarice and ineptitude the term polycrisis has been on the rise capturing better than most the confusing chaos of our times raj patel illuminates the term in his recent short essay polycrisis a breviary the polycrisis then is not merely a temporary convergence of disparate shocks it is the structural expression of this simultaneous exhaustion economic social and ecological this leads to an interregnum of unusual consequences amid the rise of post neoliberal authoritarian politics it is on this terrain that alternatives are being forged for some people the daily drumbeat of horror leads to paralysis for others it leads to frenzied efforts to plug the holes in the dike but as sarah jaffe one of the best labor writers of our generation writes in her new book from the ashes grief and revolution in a world on fire we can looking at the multiple states of emergency all around us drive ourselves to exhaustion to a kind of martyrdom that sees working ourselves to death as heroic as long as it is for the cause but a system that cares nothing for our individual lives will not be put down by our heroic deaths we know what happened in gramsci s italy and across europe and the world but the results of our own time have yet to be determined we reach back over and over again for gramsci s words the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear sometimes this is mistranslated as now is the time of monsters p 271 272 continue reading yes there is a future december 26th 2025 category book reviews general musings nowtopia san francisco news technology work and the economy 4 comments real crimes and the coming violence an alpine glacier as i flew towards milan i just enjoyed a get away to europe for almost two weeks i spent three days with mona at her place in southern switzerland where i hadn t been for 20 years and another three days in a small town in the italian alps with my old friend giovanni ending with a fun trip to the thermal baths and spa at san pellegrino our politics have drifted far apart but we still enjoy each other even when we argue for hours the journey ended yesterday with adriana and family in lithuania for a celebration of her sister s wedding and new baby it was an odd trip to be sure sunrise over intragna switzerland i don t go too long without the darkness of the gaza genocide entering my mind how is it that such a large majority of the world stands clearly against this horror and demands its immediate cessation and yet the u s and israel keep killing keep doing what they are obviously doing slaughtering starving and destroying the two million palestinians in gaza and now beginning to expand that extermination campaign to the west bank how do most european powers and the propaganda organs masquerading as independent media keep supporting this never again is an insulting phrase now when those who have shouted this the loudest and longest are now the ones carrying out precisely the again that was never to be allowed by the world my words and thoughts on this are irrelevant i know i add my drop of water to the sea of opposition i wish i had the power to affect the course of events i wish i lived in a world where justice and fairness meant something of course in the u s it has always been proclaimed and consistently violated in favor of power and money the trumpists have dropped any pretense about the rule of law and are engaged in the fastest ever looting of the country in its long sordid history of plunder and rapacious exploitation not to mention their ramping up of organized thuggish violence in the streets combined with a rising number of disappearances are death squads about to start in the u s hard to believe it could get worse but every day it does it remains to be seen if there will still be elections and if they will be free enough to take power away from these people we are well down the road to open bald faced fascism the ice troops being recruited and deployed backed up by active military and national guardsman seem to be the kind of good germans that made the nazi death camps run one protest sign i saw go by on social media asked simply what trump order will you disobey that s the question that hangs over us now as a sword of damocles if the everyday soldiers being used as theatrical props right now don t want to become actual murderers and pawns or even unwilling protagonists of this neo fascist takeover they ll have to refuse to play along and further turn on their commanders who haven t had the spine to stand up to these illegal orders mass protest will grow more difficult if and when they start savagely beating people for standing quietly with a sign or chanting their opposition to this madness or when they fill the expanding privately owned jails with people who turn their cameras on the illegal body snatchers and so on and mass protest has felt so impotent for so long that it s hard to muster the enthusiasm to turn out at least since the bush cheney crowd and probably back to reagan s people the strategy has been to simply ignore protest and pretend it doesn t exist the corporate media has generally gone along with this reinforcing the power of the authorities to determine what is news and what isn t so marching around yelling at buildings has become a painfully empty ritual most of the time at best amplified on social media reproducing its own bubble there are occasional breakthroughs of course and that s why some ...