We think that if he knew us, Charles over at SFist would get us. Like really get us. He’s about 20 posts in to a weekly series called Blocker, where he explores a specific block of San Francisco, noticing all that usually goes unnoticed. Like a true merry wanderer, he snaps photos of birds and colorful doors and barefoot surfers, and documents the smallest diary-worthy details with literary flare, such as “homes here come in a few different flavors, with the most popular appearing to be lime and bubble gum. Blueberry ice also appears to be a contender.” His Thoreau-esque musings not only mellow me out (and if you’ve read my recent posts, you know that me and mellow is hard to come by) but they are also reminders that despite all the concrete and steel condo towers that seem to be closing in on us, there’s still a heck of a lot about this town that’s downright lovely.

charles hodgkins

You may have seen the fliers:

home for Halloween YES
this Halloween
NO castro
no party
no fun
no reason to come.

It’s also printed in Spanish:

en casa por Halloween SI
este Halloween
NO castro
no habra fiesta
no habra diversion
no habra motivo para venir

The fliers are distributed by an organization called Home For Halloween. Officially sponsored by the office of Mayor Newsom, the Home For Halloween campaign has made substantial political inroads. There are no official events in the Castro this Halloween, and to keep people away the 16th Street/Mission Station will close at 8PM. This decision, according to BART, is “at the request of San Francisco leaders involved with the ‘Home for Halloween’ organization whose goal is to control Halloween-related activities in the Castro”.

The violence in the Castro on Halloween last year was awful and the city’s goal in canceling the Halloween event this year is to pre-empt more violence. But I think that the city’s cancellation of the event should raise some concern, and I worry that the city’s approach may lead to even worse outcomes this year.

Let me start by asking the question: Is it the city’s place to decide where people should turn up for Halloween? Is it appropriate for the city to determine that people should have “no fun” in the Castro?

The Big Brother language in these fliers screams out that the city is overstepping its bounds. But leaving aside the issue of a government attempting to “control” a population’s holiday activities, I think that there’s a deeper issue here. One of the best things about living in a city is the availability of public events. The city government has an important responsibility to support them and to provide infrastructure to ensure they are safe. Now Halloween is more popular in SF than anywhere else I know. And besides it’s sheer popularity here, I think Halloween has special significance as a public event. This suggests that there is even greater reason for the city to support it. What is special about Halloween is that it is truly a public event. There are no religious or ethnic prerequisites and those of all social classes can celebrate it. The Castro Halloween party has mass appeal for all sorts of people, and it provides one of the few occasions where a large and radically diverse group can come together and participate in a public spectacle. It seems to me that this is precisely the sort of public event the city should support rather than shun. It may be difficult to hold events such as the Castro celebration safely. But I think there’s great loss in not having the event, and the city doesn’t appear to recognize this loss.

Let me turn now to a different issue. What if, despite the Home for Halloween campaign, people show up to the Castro anyway? This seems like a real possibility. I, for one, have an interest in going to the Castro simply to prove that the city can’t tell me where I can have fun. So, suppose that people do show up. Has the city adequately prepared for this possibility? If they haven’t, it could be a disaster. Last year’s party succeeded at least insofar as the city provided appropriate infrastructure to deal with emergencies. There was an extensive police presence and there was a free-lane dedicated for ambulance access. This year the city isn’t planning on blocking streets or cordoning off ambulance lanes. So what if violence does occur? The city will be at fault for not taking simple steps to mitigate the harms.

One last point about the potential for violence over Halloween: Does keeping the party out of the Castro really diminish violence? It’s possible that there will be less violence in the Castro itself, but this doesn’t mean that the city has really dealt with it. Pushing violence outside of the city does not constitute an adequate governmental response. If anything, there is far less capacity to deal with the effects of violence in outlying communities than in the Castro with an extensive police presence prepared for the worse-case scenario.

I know I leave more questions here than answers. I’ll be in the Castro on Wednesday night and will report back on how the city fared in controlling the party.

I’m feeling a bit pessimistic today, what with the state burning down and polar ice caps melting and all. Mark Morford at the Chronicle can always be counted on the shine the light of sarcasm and dry wit onto our many crumbling institutions and values, and he did so in perfect fatalistic fashion today with a depressing account of how dumb today’s youth are. As in absolutely clueless, uneducated and incompetent. While I’m just the messenger, I’ve always suspected as much. While this entry may seem more relevant for the little locked diary I keep under my mattress, I decided to write about it here because Ethsix is my outlet for believing that some people are still doing amazing, selfless, brilliant things, and if I toss this crisis out to the clued-in masses maybe someone will one day do something about this. Our public schools inflict systematic child abuse, and once again, as with so many other of our misdeeds, we will all suffer the consequences. Doom and gloom indeed!

One of the (many) wonderful things about San Francisco is the abundance of amazingly talented artists, writers and thinkers — many of whom I have the honor of calling “friends.” I was impressed and surprised to hear from former (briefly) San Franciscan Jennifer Whitney, who e-mailed last week with a photo essay that ran in the Columbia Missourian. Jenn’s in graduate school studying photojournalism at the Missouri School of Journalism. And while I haven’t been able to fathom the idea of living in middle America, she has taken advantage of her time there and has come out of it with some truly remarkable photos. The photo essay is an amazing piece of work about a young couple called the Silveys who are tackling raising three kids (one of them with pretty severe epilepsy) on the streets. I won’t say any more because I think the pictures speak for themselves — and Jenn’s also a great writer, so check out the accompanying article — but I really wanted to draw attention to her startling talent… More of which I’m hoping we’ll see in Ethsix’s next issue.

Report on the Construction of Situations
“FIRST OF ALL, we think the world must be changed. We want the most liberating change of the society and life in which we find ourselves confined. We know that such a change is possible through appropriate actions.”

eve ekman

“Our specific concern is the use of certain means of action and the discovery of new ones, means which are more easily recognizable in the domain of culture and customs, but which must be applied in interrelation with all revolutionary changes.”

sham saenz

michael page

linda nguyen

OUR CENTRAL IDEA is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality. We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviors which it gives rise to and which radically transform it.”

nadim sabella

“A person’s life is a succession of fortuitous situations, and even if none of them is exactly the same as another the immense majority of them are so undifferentiated and so dull that they give a perfect impression of sameness. As a result, the rare intensely engaging situations found in life only serve to strictly confine and limit that life. We must try to construct situations, that is to say, collective ambiances, ensembles of impressions determining the quality of a moment. If we take the simple example of a gathering of a group of individuals for a given time, it would be desirable, while taking into account the knowledge and material means we have at our disposal, to study what organization of the place, what selection of participants and what provocation of events are suitable for producing the desired ambiance.”

L-R eve ekman,monica canilao, gaelen mckeown

yael martinez

invisible cities

projection!

lovely ladies of ethsix

jana flynn

crowd!

ethsix*’s biggest fans

sword and sandals!

“ART CRITICISM is a second-degree spectacle. The critic is someone who makes a spectacle out of his very condition as a spectator — a specialized and therefore ideal spectator, expressing his ideas and feelings about a work in which he does not really participate. He re-presents, restages, his own nonintervention in the spectacle. The weakness of random and largely arbitrary fragmentary judgments concerning spectacles that do not really concern us is the lot of all of us in many banal discussions in private life. But the art critic makes a show of this kind of weakness, presenting it as exemplary.”

All quotes Guy Debord 1957-61

“think beyond google”
AC Thompson

Wednesday at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, there was a cozy lecture/seminar between an artist and journalist about the complex-creepy-elusive-dark vaults of our government’s special intelligence information and actions and how we as individuals, artists and writers can crack the code. Trevor Paglen is an writer, artist, and geographer at UCB working on experimental geography art and information projects that range from displaying a full list of the mysterious and strangely poetic world of code names of military project to leading trips in to the desert to test the limits of legal boundaries around military test zones such as area 51. His art is in a current exhibit at the YBC. AC Thompson is a locally renowned investigative journalist who raked deep muck for SF weekly and the Guardian on everything from gang violence to telemarketing fraud over the last decade until landing at Oakland’s Center for Investigative Reporting, “a nonprofit organization that reveals injustice and strengthens democracy through the tools of journalism.”

Thompson and Paglen are masters of information, conjuring impressive paper and people trails. In the lecture they broke down the kinds of information you can gather in spy terms, human intelligence (human interviews and information) and signal intelligence (paper, email, electronic communication). AC discussed his tactics on classic journalistic sleuthing- using the example of looking in to the environmental footprint of so called clean energy technology corporations by going to the sewage plant to get info on their gross water use and tracking the history of 911 calls for injuries related to the sulfuric acid used in production.

Paglen employed these same tactics when he first began looking at the geography of secret military test sites. The beginning of the talk was a how to of investigative techniques, everything from knowing how to excursive your rights to government collected information through This duo recently released a book titled “Torture Taxi, on the trail of the CIA’s rendition Flights”, tracing the tangled web of covert military operations taking prisoners to torture facilities world wide for ‘interrogation’ and torture. Though the YBC lecture veered away from discussion of this book, the investigative work these two did is inspiring, they literally tracked the flight patterns and deeds to so called civilian crafts executing these kidnapping missions worldwide to prove their nebulous existence for the public. You may be asking yourself, well why didn’t I hear more about this? The best kept media secrets are not locked inside some vault but buried under other coverage, this is by no means to diminish the profound contribution of these two authors but rather to highlight the difficulty of really reaching people, really exposing the activities of our government. ABC 7 news did cover the opening and Paglen’s website has list of relevant clips from when the book was first released!

art by jana flynn

Thank God college life is behind me. While there were some sweet times, I can’t express how grateful I am to have moved beyond the days when cooking my own dinner meant microwaving my Tupperware to death and interior design involved Christmas lights and Bob Marley posters. Sparking those warm memories was this week’s New York Times Magazine all about college life. Along with humorous and bittersweet essays by young, emerging writers, and William Safire’s dissection of Campuspeak is an exclusive web documentary by Deirdre Fishel about suicide on campus. With in-depth interviews with school officials, psychologists, and family members of students who committed suicide while away at school, the film touches on thought-provoking issues such as therapist-patient confidentiality on campus and the difficulty of recognizing signs of mental illness through the stresses and stimuli of college life. The film, which is only 15 minutes long, won’t be up for any statuettes come Oscar time—it’s got a workplace-safety-video quality to it, and the graphics are less than stellar—but it covers an often sensationalized issue with a thoughtful eye.

The Chron ran a story Saturday discussing an issue we included in the second issue of Ethsix*: transition-age youth in foster care and the need to improve services available to them. In the story, writer Julian Guthrie discusses the bill introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer that would extend foster care benefit services to age 21 instead of 18, giving kids a few extra (optional) years to grow and learn and benefit from the programs before being tossed out into the big scary world (avoid it as long as you can, kids!). According to the Chron, a few states, including Illinois and Iowa, have already started enforcing similar programs with state money.

Personally, I’m all for anything that offers more support for kids in foster care, a system that most people agree is strained and under-funded. The years between ages 18 and 21 are huge developmentally, and a little extra help in vocational and life training can’t possibly hurt. Plus, it’s likely to keep those kids “aging out” of the system off the streets (as in the case of the Chron’s first interviewee, Kristal McCoy).

The article also introduces the nine foster care overhaul bills that are currently sitting on the Gov’s desk for approval or veto by Oct. 14, which would help generally protect the vulnerable percentage of the child population currently in foster care. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that they all go through!