Mission Mission

A herd/troupe/gaggle – whatever you call a big mass of bikers on a mission – made it over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco last night, to give a talk at the Mission District Sports Basement about what they’re out to do. It’s a good thing: on bicycle, traveling from Vancouver to Tijuana down the entire Pacific Coast of the United States to raise money for microfinancing through Kiva. The basement of Sports Basement was speckled with stars of the microfinancing movement, including the folks who created Kiva, one of the founders of Global Agents for Change, and the Mission District’s own Jess Arnett! The bikers are staying in the Mission for a few days – keep an eye out for people with unreasonably huge thigh muscles – and will be participating in Critical Mass this Friday. They head south on Saturday (San Francisco bikers are welcome to join them for a day or two, if you feel like a challenge).

Since you’re on the internet already, take a look at what GAFC and Kiva are doing. The concepts behind these groups are pretty fabulous, and the microfinancing movement is becoming big news. This is the sort of trend that makes the internet a source of democratic power, and is a potential venue for action that can have help equalize the messed-up global distribution of wealth. Don’t mind the global distribution of wealth? Feel free to point someone towards kiva.org next time they start complaining about it. We live in San Francisco. It’ll happen.

Please excuse this quick detour from the Mission to the Bowery, but Animal just published this beauty and we thought you’d like to see it. Link.

Previously on Mission Mission:

Matt Gonzalez T-Shirt Drew No Ire

When It Rains It Pours

Mission Mission pal Norm invites us to tonight’s screening of What Would It Mean to Win? at ATA:

Filmed on the blockades at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany in June 2007. In their first collaborative film Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler focus on the current state of the counter-globalisation movement in a project which grows out of both artists’ preoccupation with globalisation and its discontents. The film, which combines documentary footage, interviews, and animation sequences, is structured around three questions pertinent to the movement: Who are we? What is our power? What would it mean to win?

Find out tonight. Only $6. Link.

Photo of riot police at Heiligendamm last year by paper_riot.

Okay, these dudes aren’t coming here exactly, but they’ve opened a training facility in San Diego, and that just might be the first step toward the death of democracy in California. Say an earthquake or terrorist act plunges the city into chaos. Blackwater could land an invasion force in a matter of hours, herd us into camps, torture us — accountable to no one in particular. Bummer!

Or so says Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He appears Thursday at 7pm at Modern Times Bookstore to talk about his book and these new developments down south. I’ll be there, and I might ask him if he likes The Unit.

(via funcheapSF and Courage Campaign)

Photo of Blackwater personnel in Iraq by James Gordon.

This sure is a beauty: San Francisco as a bright, shining fortress from which mothers, bums and elderly are booted by the big black wingtip of the elite. It’s a gripping story, told wordlessly in a single panel, by artist Eric Drooker, who is known in part for his wordless graphic novels Flood! and Blood Song, seen here:

Link to Drooker.com, where you can purchase these and lots more, and learn about Drooker’s musical slide show performances, which are amazing too.

Link to No on 98.

That’s right, to celebrate the announcement that Mayor Newsom is getting married again, it’s a sidewalk-stencil graffiti street-art ode to “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield — starring Newsom and Ruby Rippey Tourk. See all photos and make them bigger here, or visit them in person on 20th Street between Dolores and Guerrero. Best wishes!

Jessie’s Girl on Wikipedia.

Jessie’s Girl on YouTube.

Previously on Mission Mission:

‘You Are Here’ Sidewalk Stencil Graffiti Puts You in the Cockpit

Stencil Graffiti: In The City We Trust

Gentrification Implications of Sidewalk Stencils

KQED just published The Needles & Pens Twenty-Three Dollar Adventure, in which writer Suzanne Kleid asks the question, “If I wanted to get 4 or 5 great zines, and spend about twenty bucks, what should I get?” The helpful staff hooks her up with some good stuff, and she sets about picking it apart.

Now I love Needles + Pens, and I spend $20 there often, and I’m glad they’ve gotten this good press. But after reviewing her haul, Kleid concludes:

Blogs are a dime a dozen. They require very little financial investment on the part of the creator, and none at all on the part of the reader. It takes a bigger, more special burst of inspiration to make a physical object out of your life experience.

Ouch. I mean, maybe she sees it that way because she blogs for big corporate media entities like KQED and McSweeney’s. But you can’t tell me that some zine is better than WHATIMSEEING because somebody stapled some papers together and Plug1 didn’t.

Don’t want to end on a negative note though… What great titles have you guys come across at N+P? (I tend to love everything by that Please Let Me Help guy, Titty City for the articles, and I hear good things about StreetWorthy.)

Needles + Pens on Myspace (for bulletin updates like “Hey KQED wrote about us”).

Romantico, the 2005 film that follows mariachis Carmelo and Arturo around the Mission as they sing for tips, was unbearably depressing. The highlights include: a tour of their apartment, which they share with 8 other people and where Carmelo sleeps in a tent made out of a sheet and a shelf. A phone call in which Carmelo calls back home to speak to his wife Carmela (yes, seriously) and finds out that his mother has lost her other leg to diabetes and is now fully legless, blind, and almost inflables completely deaf. Later Arturo enters “daycare” to cope with his alcoholism.

Basically, the message of the film, if there was one, was that these guys have to choose between living a lonely and poor life in the Mission to send money back to their families or living a lonely and poor life in Mexico where they don’t make any money at all.

The film was 83 minutes long. And I felt every single one of them.

After it ended, I looked to Pauline and said, “Oh GOD I need a hug.”

“The only thing Obama has going for him is Opera.”

“Oprah?”

“Opro! [...] Opera! [...] Opro!

“Oprah!”

“Op- [...] That black lady from TV.”

More Obamarama on Mission Mission.

The afterschool kindergarten class at the Mission’s own Fairmount Elementary School took action on Friday to protest the enormous proposed budget cuts for education in California schools. When rates are adjusted for parcours obstacle gonflable regional cost differences, California is already ranked 46th-47th in the nation for per student spending, investing almost $2,000 less than the national average per child per year. The proposed budget cuts are equivalent to cutting $24,000 from every classroom in the state or laying off almost 110,000 teachers. More details and photographs:

Things we learned in kindergarten