181. Flower Piano

Previous - 180. Kite Festival 2017

Trending towards Braudel

Today (that was) I worked Flower Piano at the Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park (see HERE). It was a lovely event on a near perfect day, but there was very little for me to do. On what I consider a "good" day I fill around 30 bags of compost but today I only pulled two.

But that gave me time to think. I had been thinking about the origin of the bourgeois world order so was trying to work out a chronology with the Crusades, the Black Death, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. (Did you know that one of the most recent proposed causes for the Little Ice Age is reforestation following the Black Death in Europe and then again following the mass die-off in the Americas after 1492?) Then it occurred to me that I could fall back on Fernand Braudel and start with what he considered the origin of modern capitalism in the market fairs. (I have, once again, been unable to find the passage I'm recalling in Civilization & Capitalism. I don't even know which volume it should be in. Four months later: On a hunch I consulted not Braudel but A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne and found the passage I remembered. It is around page 209 in the Book about The Formation of the Bourgeoisie.) 

This is interesting because it reasserts the Jewish connection. (And thinking about that made me aware that I can't recall why the Jews were able to give credit when the other "People of the Book" couldn't. Also, it seems like futures could have been a brilliant work around for credit. Braudel starts (in my recollection, which I can't substantiate) with farmers needing credit to plant their crops, but buying the crop in advance wouldn't seem to involve credit -- though maybe futures would have been just as bad in some way I will never understand.)

It is interesting that capitalism as we know it today had its start in helping farmers plant their crops. It all seems so innocent.

Before I started my shift I had breakfast at the Pork Store again. I ended up sitting at the counter next to a person who must have decided he was a sullen, disheveled woman trapped in a man's body and decided to do something about it. My hair is longer than hers and, I believe, better looking. *Flips hair dismissively*

I so lucked out working Saturday in GG Park, yesterday and today have been typical summer days when the fog hasn't burned off anywhere near as far west as the park. Did I even write about the clouds that day? They were so lovely. We hardly ever see clouds in the summer, so there was the novelty, but beyond that they were just lovely little clouds. Not as high as cirrus but less substantial than the usual cumulus. Maybe stratocumulus? Undoubtedly related to some storm system out in the Pacific, but I didn't hear about an actual hurricane or anything spectacular. Just enough of a front to push aside the marine layer for a day or so.

Rattlesnakes & Pigeons

In a recent SciShow YouTube video (HERE) I learned that, thanks to Rattlesnake Roundups, today's rattlesnake is less likely to have a rattle. I'm imagining some conservative Arizona rancher reacting to this consequence of natural selection with, "Well damn, that Darwin fella might have been on to something after all." But that's just crazy talk.

Anyway, this morning I was waiting for a BART train at Powell Street Station -- so three floors underground with MuniMetro trains directly above and the shared mezzanine above that. There were at least three pigeons working the platforms down there, as they often do, and with rattle-less rattlesnakes in mind, I wondered if they might come to forsake the surface -- with all its hawks and unpredictable cars -- for a subterranean life. I know they can go from station to station riding inside trains because I've seen them do it. And since BART can't stop people eating on the platforms or on the trains, there will always be something for them to eat. Will we see a generation of pigeons who become traumatized by a space larger than a train station? (I doubt it.)

Climate

Yesterday it was over 100F in Portland, OR -- I heard on the radio as I nestled under my extra layer of comforter this morning. Also yesterday, I read the local fire department is planning a floating station on the Embarcadero where they dock their fireboats. These two bits of information go together, Because Global Warming. 

I've seen interesting floating building projects from the Netherlands (of course) and even Britain, but this is the first local project I've heard of besides houseboats. Which I don't understand. We are in the process of "redeveloping" Treasure Island (TI) -- a man-made island in the middle of the bay created for the 1939 World's Fair and intended as a location for an airport, but then taken over by the US Navy for WW2 and only recently returned to the City. TI could combine features of Venice with the best of today's floating building technology, but instead they seem determined to go with generic development that could be anywhere. Perhaps the fire station idea will at least get people thinking about the option of having buildings rise with rising sea level rather than attempting to keep the sea always at bay. (ha)

Dwell

Without a book to read, I'm finally catching up with the latest Dwell magazine. What I like about Dwell is that so many of the houses are for the architects themselves. They may be a little stark, but they are usually interesting. I did have to laugh just now when I read about the decision of an architect couple to boldly paint the interior of their Brooklyn townhouse... white. Really thinking outside the box there. 

The last house I read about is from around here, but on the other side of the Oakland Hills. It is by an architect but the clients merely gave him freedom and a large budget to work with. I have to say I really like the house, it's mostly Cor-ten steel and glass on the outside and bare wood inside, the mezzanine layout is inspired by Le Corbusier's Unité -- which was referenced but not shown. (Are all Dwell readers familiar with architecture to this extent or is the magazine satisfied to leave many of their readers in the dark? Those architecture survey classes I took in college, in retrospect, could have been titled, "Preparation For Consuming Dwell and The Like.")

Not only is this house in Orinda stunning to look at, it is "sustainable" in all the check list ways: Solar panels; Rainwater catchment for everything but potable needs; Over insulated (and, while they don't mention it, I'm sure it's seismically sound.) Of course describing this as sustainable makes me gag given that it is also a huge house for four people in a location that requires automobile use for everything.

But then I look at Tiny House videos and think I could do better with less.

Next - 182. Of this and that

152. 420

Previous - 151. CBF and Sisters

Link to Table of Contents

420

Tomorrow we're Greening the 420 (cannabis) celebration in Golden Gate Park's Sharon Meadow for the first time. Not sure what to expect but wouldn't be surprised if it was a shit-show. Today a crew set-up and the day after tomorrow another crew is scheduled to do the final clean-up. I'll just be there for the main event which should be similar to any number of other free concerts we've worked at Sharon Meadow. But we will see.

Sallie Tisdale

Yesterday I started reading Violation, a collection of essays by Sallie Tisdale.  I love Tisdale both for her prose and for her eye -- she and Annie Dillard are very good at seeing nature for what it is.

I'm four essays and the introduction in and haven't taken a single note. Which is a good thing since I procrastinated starting the book and don't have that much time before our club meeting. But I can't really explain why I both enjoy this and feel no need to write anything down. 

After 420

I wasn't wrong about it being a shit-show. The report I heard on the radio this morning claimed the crowd was around 15,000, but it felt larger than that to me. There was great footage of what it looked like from a helicopter, but I can't find it now. (I had everything ready to publish last night when Blogger let me down and ate everything I had done that day. Not even the Cloud can stop this from happening on occasion.)

The morning news also reported that the park looked strikingly clean at dawn -- for years they had been reporting on what a disaster it was the day after. In fact, the park looked great by the time I left at 7:30pm and there were still teams picking up trash and bringing it to our crew to sort. That process was to continue the following day. 

We didn't collect that much waste during the event. I probably collected, and hauled to the compost dumpster, 20 bags of compost plus some cardboard. I also pulled a half dozen bags of sorted landfill and even a couple bags of recycling. The majority of the waste was left behind at the very end when the "celebrants" finally were convinced to go home. 

This event does not go into my list of favorite events to work, but it was very satisfying to finally be able to Green it. I would be willing to grit my teeth and do it again.

What made the event hard to work was also the most interesting aspect of the event for me. We and everyone else were told there would be no glass allowed in the park (no bottles or bongs) and people would not be allowed to sell water and the like as often happens at large gatherings like this. That's what we were told. Instead, free enterprise found a way and the main, paved, cart path that I usually use to haul heavy toters full of waste to the dumpsters, was almost impassable because of all the commerce that lined and crowded the little path. People were selling water and other beverages, food, bottles of beer, weed, "edibles," and even the forbidden glass bongs. And they positioned themselves and their wares where the foot traffic was best, as this was where one of the main entrances emptied onto the meadow. 

I finally gave up on the path and hauled my toter over the gopher pocked lawn. 

There was one sad (for me) aspect of the day. One of my favorite crew members, who I rarely see as it is, has finished her nursing classes and is leaving Green Mary to start her new career as a psychiatric nurse. I joked that this event would be a good transition. She should be very good at her new job. I hope I run into her when I finally lose my mind.

 

When is it too long?

I'm talking about essays... what did you think I meant? You're disgusting.

I finally have something to say about Sallie Tisdale. Most of her essays are reasonably short, but the one on elephants went on and on. It was no surprise when I finally reached the end and discovered it was written for The New Yorker. I recall reading a series of New Yorker essays on rice, wheat, and corn (if memory serves) that were wonderful, and this one is also great. I don't know that I would want to cut anything out. Still, I had to read it in two sessions and I don't think that was the intention. It should have been divided into more manageable sections, except that an essay is supposed to be all of a piece.

Anyway, I know a lot more about Asian elephants than before I read this. She makes the point that we never really know what elephants are thinking. We tend to think they are like us when we have no real idea what is going on in their heads. But isn't this nearly as true when it comes to other people? I may think I know what life is like for women or people of color, but I'm just assuming that their reality is the same as mine with a few superficial differences. Which is nonsense. 

If subjectivity is the basis of modernity in a post-quantum world where complete objectivity is a discarded notion, then we have to give up the idea that we can know what is going on in anyone's head -- human as well as animal, Just as we can only talk about probabilities when it comes to fundamental particles.

Death

I'm thinking there are basically three kinds of deaths: A. Sudden/surprise -- where you die in your sleep or just keel over or get hit by a bus; 
B. Quick, but with notice -- where you probably suffer more but have time to sort your affairs and say your goodbyes; and 
C. Protracted -- where time and suffering are a major aspect of the event.

I would like to ask people frequently involved with the deaths of others (doctors, nurses, hospice workers, priests) if they think there are advantages to B. and especially to C. I haven't seen advantages (for the person dying) in these cases myself, but perhaps my sample size is just too small. And, of course, people are different so even if A. or B. are best for most people, C. might be better for some.

Next - 153. Violation

49. HSB 2016

Previous -  48. Gears & webmail

HSB 2016

We had a little pre-HSB meeting in Golden Gate Park this afternoon. This is the view from our small dumpster location across from Arrow stage, 

That's Arrow stage on the left (note red arrows above on either side) with part of the line of vendor tents I will be servicing on the right. In the distance, just to the right of the cart, is Banjo stage, the main stage of the event. In the foreground are a couple of our large blue (recycling) toters

And this is my first selfie, with the three dumpsters (compost, recycling, landfill),

And here is my second, and possibly last, selfie inside one of the dumpsters,

I hope to make a large contribution to filling these dumpsters over the next three days.

Either you won't hear from me until Monday or I will get chatty and actually blog the event after I limp home each night... too soon to tell which is more likely.

What I do know is that our heat wave from last weekend is a thing of the past. It doesn't look like it will hit 60 F at any time over this weekend. When it comes to hydration (and cramps from being dehydrated), this is good news. It could also reduce the size of the crowds which would mean less trash to sort. On the other hand, I'm going to have to bring another layer for the first time in four or so years because it will be cold by the time I go home in the evening.

All I know for sure is that there will be unforeseen problems and I will be very tired each night. 

Next - 50. A perfect day