Frank Bidart

Been reading a collection of poems by Frank Bidart titled Stardust. As I read last night, my eyes fighting sleep, I realized that I rarely read poems because I am lazy. And poems are like puzzles, and you need to concentrate to do puzzles. Here are a few lines from one in the collection I particularly enjoyed deciphering called Advice to the Players:

"But being is making: not only large things, a family, a book, a business: but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal."

I like this because it serves as a reminder that we don't have to create epic works of genius to be an acceptable human being. It sometimes can be enough to just breathe into the day, to make art from the moment, to walk in beauty on a dirty sidewalk.

Not really a poem, more like a collection of repetitions, a collection of thoughts about what it is to be a "maker."

Direct Action Against Iraq War on March 19th

March 19 Actions

DIRECT ACTIONS ON THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE IRAQ WAR: DOWNTOWN SAN FRANCISCO

7:30 am Multiple actions at multiple locations.
Market and Sansome
War machine tours of shame leaving from Market and Sansome throughout the day.

March & Rally to End the War Now!
5 pm
Gather at Civic Center
Polk and Grove Sts., SF
Initiated by the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition - San Francisco - (read their call to action)

Rosa Luxemburg

Revolutionary

Born March 5 1871
Died January 15 1919

"The modern proletarian class does not carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight... That's exactly what is laudable about it, that's exactly why this colossal piece of culture, within the modern workers' movement, is epoch-defining: that the great masses of the working people first forge from their own consciousness, from their own belief, and even from their own understanding the weapons of their own liberation."[4]

Leslie and the LY's

Big girls rule! Leslie's playing at the Rickshaw Stop in SF on March 8th. I'm a steal that gold lame jumpsuit if it kills me.

New College of California

The New College of California, where I am currently working on finishing my MFA, has just lost it's accreditation. A sign of the times and the perfect death to the "Age of Aquarius." I will post a link to the article I wrote about New College's history of bad behavior for the North Bay Bohemian as soon as it comes out.

Freeconomics

I stumbled across this article today by Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired: Free: Why $0.00 is the Future of Business
and while I'm still digesting it, here are my inital thoughts.

Now, in all honesty, I'd rather not think about money, advertising, web business and all those things that involve what I perceive to be slimy handed people doing back-alley exchanges that almost always seem to involve the exploitation of people in countries far away. On the other hand, I love the idea of things being free. Free! It makes my heart happy just thinking about things being given away with no money exchanged and no animals hurt in the process. Anderson basically argues that the times they are a changing in terms of the way we look at scarcity and markets.

The things that power the web-storage, processing power and bandwidth-are getting cheaper by the day, according to Anderson, making it feasible for companies like Google and Yahoo to give things away (web space, blogs, etc) for free while still making a profit in other arenas. It's all very clever and insidious, and I think the whole free thing could be used to great effect by us non-Capitalists trying to keep our heads above water in a deeply Capitalist world. (Is it possible to be a non-Capitalist in a capitalist world?)

Thought of the Day

"It doesn't matter how many freedoms you claim-even the freedom to change jobs you hate, even the greedom to vote among corporate-owned representatives-if you can't breathe the air and can't drink the water (except the water they sell you).

From "On Freedom" by Derrick Jensen