Over de Auteur
Chris Carlsson is a San Francisco historian, tour guide, photographer, writer and occasional college professor. He conducts award-winning bicycle and walking tours of San Francisco's history every year, and he is co-founder and co-director of Shaping San Francisco.
Fotografie: self-portrait on Hawk Hill over Golden Gate, 2005.
Werken van Chris Carlsson
Tagged
Algemene kennis
- Geboortedatum
- 1957
- Geslacht
- male
- Nationaliteit
- USA
- Woonplaatsen
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Opleiding
- Sonoma State University (dropout)
San Francisco State University (dropout) - Beroepen
- typesetter
book designer
historian - Organisaties
- Critical Mass (co-founder)
- Prijzen en onderscheidingen
- http://www.processedworld.com/carlsso...
- Korte biografie
- Chris Carlsson, executive director of the multimedia history project Shaping San Francisco (now a wiki at foundsf.org), is a writer, publisher, editor, and community organizer. For the last twenty-five years his activities have focused on the underlying themes of horizontal communications, organic communities and public space. He was one of the founders, editors and frequent contributors to the ground-breaking San Francisco magazine Processed World. He also helped launch the monthly bike-ins known as Critical Mass that have spread to five continents and over 300 cities. He has edited four books, "Bad Attitude: The Processed World Anthology" (Verso: 1990), "Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture" (City Lights: 1998, co-edited with James Brook and Nancy J. Peters), "Critical Mass: Bicycling's Defiant Celebration" (AK Press: 2002), “The Political Edge” (City Lights Foundation: 2004). He published his first novel, “After The Deluge,” in 2004, a story of post-economic San Francisco in the year 2157. His latest work, “Nowtopia” was published in May 2008. Carlsson makes his living as a book designer, editor, and typesetter. He is a member of Media Workers Union Local 100 in San Francisco. He is a founder of CounterPULSE, a San Francisco-based arts organization, where he has been producing a series of public Talks since January 2006, and conducting award-winning bicycle history tours for over a decade.
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Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-1978 door Chris Carlsson
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned a tremendous amount about San Francisco in that period of time. I found myself incredibly inspired by much of what I read, and was able to fill some important gaps in my own political understanding of San Francisco. Each of topics in this collection of essays was of great interest to me, but I found the quality to vary a great deal. Some were wonderfully written and a few really needed some editorial assistance. I also would have appreciated a more overarching introduction or conclusion that providing analytical glue between the contributions and that referenced what was going on in those geographic and cultural/social areas of San Francisco not covered by the contributed pieces.… (meer)
Written by my friend Chris Carlsson. I'm only into the first chapter, but so far it's as interesting as I would expect.
I liked some of the essays but most just got on my nerves. I don't care about infighting between random bike factions in San Francisco that took place in the late 1990s. Also, a lot of these essays struck me as being written by 1337 bike bros who were totally at the first ever critical mass and are obviously totally awesome. (And that's how their essays came across, smug and annoying.) I mostly skimmed this. Still, I'm excited to go to a CM one of these days.
Book Review: "Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today"
by Chris Carlsson
Review by James Generic
"Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today!" explores the subcultures of subtle and active resistance to the dominate US consumer culture. Author Chris Carlsson argues that today, the American working class is fragmented and not able to organize through traditional union politics, since people work in jobs where they are moved around a lot or are more individualized in smaller units, like retail jobs or smaller shops or service jobs, with many different locations, as opposed to the factory setting of the 20th century. He says that active resistance focuses on creating a "nowtopia" approach rather than a far off future utopia. He touches on a variety of people in the US engaged in building this new world today, instead of confronting the old existing capitalist world order. Examples he gives include the DIY ethic, urban gardeners, bicyclist, hackers and internet freaks, the Burning Man, left-wing scientists, and free fuel activists.
Urban gardeners reclaim otherwise decaying urban cities, where drugs and crime plague neighborhoods, and try to get food from the land. The gardens take back private property, long abandoned by slum lords, and turn it into public land or a commons for the neighbors and by the neighbors, growing and sharing food. More often than not, women lead in rebuilding a sense of community by everyone with an interest in the gardens putting caring for them. Green Philadelphia, a network promoting urban gardens in Philadelphia areas taken over by drugs, empowered residents to be in charge of their neighborhoods. In the 1990s, MayorGiuliani saw t he NYC vacant lot gardeners as a threat to private enterprise, even calling them communists, and basically declared war on the gardeners, forcing them to engage in active fights to preserve gardens and to prevent the land on which they sat from being sold to development schemes.
Carlsson also explores bike culture, like the Critical Mass protests that occur in cities throughout the world typically taking place the last Friday of the month. Bicyclists show that there is a viable, healthy, environmentally friendly and affordable alternative to car culture. Particularly in cities walking, biking or taking public transit provide valuable alternates to cars, lessening air, noise soil and water pollution. He interviews people who've opened up bike repair spaces to anyone who wants learn. In San Francisco, he focuses on programs that teach bike repair to children in low income neighborhoods. He also interviews people who rebel against mainstream bike culture, with its glossy magazines and spandex. The bike messenger culture, a highly individualistic, very punk subculture, has organized into messenger unions, but one in San Francisco fizzled out because the sponsoring union eventually pulled out and suffered backlash from the courier companies.
Carlsson looks into other revolts against mainstream consumer culture, like the veggie-fuel movement, telling the story of one group of people, who drove across the country, procuring used oil at fast food restaurants along the way in order to fuel their journey.They gave talks on their trip, telling others about biodiesel and about how to convert a car to run on veggie-oil. This group reduced their reliance on the oil economy and met their fuel needs by re-using oil that was otherwise destined for the dump. Their project was based on DIY ethics, on environmentally friendly motives, and on a reuse ethic, which in the current days where gas prices are through the roof might seem like a good alternative and a cheap way of fueling vehicles. (Though I worry about Carlsson promoting biodiesel in this day and age, since it will probably end up like ethanol and drive up corn prices, if it became widely popular.) Biodiesel is not sustainable on a mass scale. So consumers need to consider reducing their use of fuels though that's not always possible in places that are built around the automobile.
He looks at using open source software against corporate giants like microsoft. And he discusses the Burning Man festival. Although described by its organizers as an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and self-reliance, and promoting an idea of attenders who are all participants with its "no spectators" concept, not allowing monetary exchange so that attendees allegedly learn to think outside of the capitalist structure and re-evaluate "value" by bartering skills and things, Carlsson acknowledges that the festival has become another for-profit enterprise.
Throughout the book, Carlsson asks various people what they think their class background is. They usually respond that they aren't sure but thought they were some kind of middle class. He takes that to mean that the US working class is not something around which to organize. I think he might be forgetting that the US education system does not explicitly teach people about class. Even in the UK, where people often say they are working class even when they are not, interestingly similar to and yet different from the US where everyone thinks they're middle class from sanitation workers to US Senators. He berates unions over and over because they look at class from an outdated point of view. I agree: unions don't organize people anymore (I think that is the fault of US unions not of unionism). Though unions and the labor movement have been slow to adapt to the changing economy, I don't think that throws out a worker-driven movement.
A part I did like about this book is that it explained the concept of "Multitudes", developed and used by people like Negri, in language that was more on my level, so I finally figured out what it means (there are multiple classes of people instead of one working class).
All in all, the book is an interesting read, though it is a bit choppy and maybe the author jumps to conclusions too quickly. Still, it's cool to see what other people are doing to organize and agitate or self-organize as far as interests outside of my own. I've never been someone who's thought that you can only do one thing ("either, or"), and all else is damned. For any movement to thrive, there has to be a whole lot of stuff doing all kinds to resist and reject to the dominant cultures, as well as organizing within it and for a better future beyond it.… (meer)
by Chris Carlsson
Review by James Generic
"Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today!" explores the subcultures of subtle and active resistance to the dominate US consumer culture. Author Chris Carlsson argues that today, the American working class is fragmented and not able to organize through traditional union politics, since people work in jobs where they are moved around a lot or are more individualized in smaller units, like retail jobs or smaller shops or service jobs, with many different locations, as opposed to the factory setting of the 20th century. He says that active resistance focuses on creating a "nowtopia" approach rather than a far off future utopia. He touches on a variety of people in the US engaged in building this new world today, instead of confronting the old existing capitalist world order. Examples he gives include the DIY ethic, urban gardeners, bicyclist, hackers and internet freaks, the Burning Man, left-wing scientists, and free fuel activists.
Urban gardeners reclaim otherwise decaying urban cities, where drugs and crime plague neighborhoods, and try to get food from the land. The gardens take back private property, long abandoned by slum lords, and turn it into public land or a commons for the neighbors and by the neighbors, growing and sharing food. More often than not, women lead in rebuilding a sense of community by everyone with an interest in the gardens putting caring for them. Green Philadelphia, a network promoting urban gardens in Philadelphia areas taken over by drugs, empowered residents to be in charge of their neighborhoods. In the 1990s, MayorGiuliani saw t he NYC vacant lot gardeners as a threat to private enterprise, even calling them communists, and basically declared war on the gardeners, forcing them to engage in active fights to preserve gardens and to prevent the land on which they sat from being sold to development schemes.
Carlsson also explores bike culture, like the Critical Mass protests that occur in cities throughout the world typically taking place the last Friday of the month. Bicyclists show that there is a viable, healthy, environmentally friendly and affordable alternative to car culture. Particularly in cities walking, biking or taking public transit provide valuable alternates to cars, lessening air, noise soil and water pollution. He interviews people who've opened up bike repair spaces to anyone who wants learn. In San Francisco, he focuses on programs that teach bike repair to children in low income neighborhoods. He also interviews people who rebel against mainstream bike culture, with its glossy magazines and spandex. The bike messenger culture, a highly individualistic, very punk subculture, has organized into messenger unions, but one in San Francisco fizzled out because the sponsoring union eventually pulled out and suffered backlash from the courier companies.
Carlsson looks into other revolts against mainstream consumer culture, like the veggie-fuel movement, telling the story of one group of people, who drove across the country, procuring used oil at fast food restaurants along the way in order to fuel their journey.They gave talks on their trip, telling others about biodiesel and about how to convert a car to run on veggie-oil. This group reduced their reliance on the oil economy and met their fuel needs by re-using oil that was otherwise destined for the dump. Their project was based on DIY ethics, on environmentally friendly motives, and on a reuse ethic, which in the current days where gas prices are through the roof might seem like a good alternative and a cheap way of fueling vehicles. (Though I worry about Carlsson promoting biodiesel in this day and age, since it will probably end up like ethanol and drive up corn prices, if it became widely popular.) Biodiesel is not sustainable on a mass scale. So consumers need to consider reducing their use of fuels though that's not always possible in places that are built around the automobile.
He looks at using open source software against corporate giants like microsoft. And he discusses the Burning Man festival. Although described by its organizers as an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and self-reliance, and promoting an idea of attenders who are all participants with its "no spectators" concept, not allowing monetary exchange so that attendees allegedly learn to think outside of the capitalist structure and re-evaluate "value" by bartering skills and things, Carlsson acknowledges that the festival has become another for-profit enterprise.
Throughout the book, Carlsson asks various people what they think their class background is. They usually respond that they aren't sure but thought they were some kind of middle class. He takes that to mean that the US working class is not something around which to organize. I think he might be forgetting that the US education system does not explicitly teach people about class. Even in the UK, where people often say they are working class even when they are not, interestingly similar to and yet different from the US where everyone thinks they're middle class from sanitation workers to US Senators. He berates unions over and over because they look at class from an outdated point of view. I agree: unions don't organize people anymore (I think that is the fault of US unions not of unionism). Though unions and the labor movement have been slow to adapt to the changing economy, I don't think that throws out a worker-driven movement.
A part I did like about this book is that it explained the concept of "Multitudes", developed and used by people like Negri, in language that was more on my level, so I finally figured out what it means (there are multiple classes of people instead of one working class).
All in all, the book is an interesting read, though it is a bit choppy and maybe the author jumps to conclusions too quickly. Still, it's cool to see what other people are doing to organize and agitate or self-organize as far as interests outside of my own. I've never been someone who's thought that you can only do one thing ("either, or"), and all else is damned. For any movement to thrive, there has to be a whole lot of stuff doing all kinds to resist and reject to the dominant cultures, as well as organizing within it and for a better future beyond it.… (meer)
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jgeneric | 1 andere bespreking | Jul 10, 2008 |
jgeneric | 1 andere bespreking | Jul 10, 2008 | Lijsten
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