Lee.org

Travis wrote about the Pink Pistols last week. The news story that he quoted and my comment bears repeating here:

SAN FRANCISCO - The National Rifle Association sued the city of San Francisco on Friday to overturn its ban on handguns in public housing, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a handgun ban in the nation’s capital.

The legal action follows a similar lawsuit against the city of Chicago over its handgun ban, filed within hours of Thursday’s high court ruling.

In San Francisco, the NRA was joined by the Washington state-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and a gun owner who lives in the city’s Valencia Gardens housing project.

The gun owner, who is gay, says he keeps the weapon to defend himself from “sexual orientation hate crimes.” He was not identified in the complaint because he said he fears retaliation.

Mayor Gavin Newsom said the city will “vigorously fight the NRA” and defended the ban as good for public safety.

“Is there anyone out there who really believes that we need more guns in public housing?” Newsom said.

Mu.

I really believe that there should be no such thing as “public housing”.

The very phrase is a perversion - an abomination in two words like “poisoned icecream” or “abandoned dog”.

(my comment)

#  Lee Says: June 28th, 2008 at 6:08 pm Quote

Putting aside the “public housing” question, I think that the best argument to eliminate the public housing ban are Newsom’s words, “Is there anyone out there who really believes that we need more guns in public housing?”

To reword, “I know that illegal handgun possession is rampant in public housing. We don’t regularly enforce the public housing handgun ban. We would rather there -only- be illegal handguns in public housing.”

On 3 of the last 3 nights I’ve been in Hunters Point (at The Box Shop art space), I’ve heard gun shots coming from the projects. While firing a weapon in San Francisco without cause is illegal, no police ever showed up.

I’ll look into getting behind this Pink Pistols initiative.

I have been talking with the person who wrote “The Best Thing I Read All Day“. the project that he is working on is pretty sweet. From Sasha:

Here is our artcar project this year: http://urbanabsurd.com/reelmobile2008/ (don’t miss the “night view” :)) and the previous one, “dust2music”, several years ago: http://www.urbanachiever.com/gallery/Burning-Man-2005/aav
Trainspotting was this train station I made - http://www.urbanachiever.com/gallery/Burning-Man-2005/aaw - with sound, light and motions from the passing “phantom” trains - when the batteries that ran the whole thing were fresh, that is, which unfortunately was far from 24/7. That was my tiny BM claim to fame that was burned - apart from the laptop and the lamp with the servos that swang it - at the end.
http://www.urbanachiever.com/gallery/SashaBM2005/abq

The truck burned too - the engine ignited on the freeway - http://www.flickr.com/photos/maximbo/739460049/ - and we all took a break from BM last year, for the first time since 2000, to “mourn”.

P.S. Btw, I found this - http://lee.org/blog/2008/06/05/san-francisco-rent-strike - particularly, I guess, encouraging and refreshing? — since the views on topics like this by the majority of SF (or Berkeley, etc.) BM attendees are depressing to even think about.

The consumerist menace that is Burning Man, with all it’s bunny ears and cool neon and pasties, is back.

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Here is my own Burning Man guide I wrote a couple years ago. I start with that each year.

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JRS VOLUME #12; ISSUE #18

Burning Man Update: The Jack Rabbit Speaks
Volume 12, Issue #18 (Resources Edition)
July 9, 2008

Welcome to the Resources Edition of your Jack Rabbit Speaks Newsletter!

OK, so apparently there are oodles of great resources out there that can help you prepare for Burning Man. In fact, it seems a full-fledged cottage industry has sprung up around the event. Big surprise, right? Well, we get emails from some readers pretty regularly, offering up wares to other attendees, and in the early days, we just passed on the ones we thought were truly relevant to preparing for Burning Man. But for the past few years, rather than mention them piecemeal, we gather ‘em up into a single issue so you can refer back to it and save yourself going bonkers searching your inbox.

(more…)

Is Government Cheese

I’m off for a week to go see family. I’ll land in New Jersey and then we’ll be wisked off to Vermont. I haven’t been there in… geez… years. But I’m confident that the place will be relatively unchanged and comforting.

Cracked Magazine did a piece called

5 Works of Art That Can Probably Kill You
By Robert Brockway

I’m proud and jumping-up-and-down happy to be part of a group and project that could read like that! W00t!

Below is the Serpent Mother portion of the article. If you click on the image to the right, you’ll see an image of the entire article. It’s funny and oh-so endearing!

Go read the whole article

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The Serpent Mother is an interactive sculpture, originally designed by The Lotus Girls for the Burning Man Festival which, for those of you who don’t know it, is essentially a bunch of filthy hippies getting burnt off of their asses, stripping naked, and then welding monstrous devices out of scrap metal in order to dance around them. Kind of like combining a Phish concert with the A-Team, if that helps.

(more…)

A while back I paid a dealer to “fix” my brakes because they were squeaking when I drive at low speed and put the brakes on. I would pull up to an intersection and SQEEEEEEEEK to a stop. Having the dealership work on my car did not work out too well. I paid $400 and I got… pretty much nothing for it.

Here is how to fix your squeaky brakes: just get your brakes very hot. That will clear the glazing off of them. Every now and then I have done this and my brakes stop squeaking. One way is to drive down the highway at about 50 miles an hour while holding your foot on the brakes pretty hard for 2/10s of a mile. After a riding like this for a short bit I notice that the brakes feel a little different and I am done. After they cool off, they feel the same only they don’t squeak anymore. just yesterday, I held the brakes on for two full blocks while driving through the Mission. No more squeaks.

Many brakes (including mine) rust very quickly. In the morning my brakes squeak the first time I come to a halt. Then they are good all day.

:-)

I was speaking to a solar panel prospect of mine a while back. I was telling him how he probably should not buy panels made by Sun Tech because you can’t really trust the reliability of high-tech products from China. I started talking about Harbor Freight and he told me a story.

He went to China recently, up the Yangtze River and some of those “brand new” cities that are being built there. I had heard a while back that China is building a city every week (!!). He had gone into one of these cities of like a million people or so. He described how every building is built to eight stories tall because at nine stories you have to put in an elevator, so there are all of these 8 story walk-ups. He saw a person there and he actually asked, “why did they put you in this old city?” because everything was broken down. All of the concrete on the sidewalks was cracked and everything looked… old. he met this gentleman who lives on the first floor of this eight story building. it was a farmer who had been transplanted there by the state into an apartment building. He was one of the many refugees from a dam expansion. Actually, it was the farmers niece’s apartment. so he was in the first floor of this eight story building and there were all of these really large cracks in the wall. That just can’t be good, being on the first floor of an eight story building that is three years old and it’s cracking and it looks like it’s going to fall apart. “So -that- is why”, I explained, “you should not buy Sun Tech panels.” And there is also the bit about how they’re probably dumping all of their toxic solar panel waste into that same river. That sure makes the panels cost less.

China is being built like Harbor Freight builds tools. I can imagine them saying, “Chromium is too expensive to put in steel, so we won’t use it. We’ll be fine without it.”

Today: went to acupuncture. I feel great after.

Mailed off several boxes of photos from Morley’s house. Productive…

Went to the Box Shop. I was greeted with 3 different people wanting help from me :-).

1. Figuring out how to keep a Mac Mini cool on the playa (put it in an ice chest in a waterproof box, replace the ice daily, (to be experimented with))
2. batteries for Mutopia (loaned from the vast pool of batteries that Peter Luka gave SWARM)
3. Welding together some petals for this firey flower. I practiced and then was able to TIG weld the thin stainless steel for the first time. :-)

Finally got FL Studio. I’m excited about making 6 part music for SWARM. One thing I’m going to do is transcribe some poliphonic african drumming music I learned in college and have each orb play an instrument :-). That music from Professor David Locke’s class is STILL buzzing around in my head more than 15 years later.

Over the last few days, I’ve cleaned house in a few ways.

I went to my neighbor Samantha’s apartment and her place looked so gosh darn airy and serene. I vowed to make some of that happen in my apartment so I’ve cleaned the house and put lots of things AWAY. Clearning the sight-lines is the best… I cleaned the tops of bookshelves so you can see more wall and glass-doors. Charlotte got into the act and cleaned such that it’s easy to open and close the doors between the kitchen and living room. I was really struck that in Samantha’s place, all the doors were workable; in our place, we’ve blocked open one set and blocked closed one set :-(. That’s got to be some feng shui no-no. In any case, it feels better to have a clean place.

I’ve been cleaning at the Box Shop. SWARM’s work space had become a mess. Under our work table was this scary jumble of parts with no order. I found all the items that don’t belong and told the mailing list “claim it or it gets discarded”. Some items were claimed and some are destined for the trash bin. I put all the scrap in a scrap bin, put all the long items in one pile, got some parts boxes and put parts away. I threw away like 5 large cardboard boxes and 30 tiny boxes. I found that we have duplicates of lots of bolt-y things. Hopefully, that process now has a chance of reversing itself. Everything fits in 2/3 the space and is much more findable. There’s a ways to go with sorting through electronics items that we might or might not use any more but things are way way better.

WATCH THE TRAILER

SF-based, female-driven and fuel-powered art collective The FLAMING LOTUS GIRLS announce a benefit with the screening of “Dust And Illusions”, by director Olivier Bonin for our mega fire-art project MUTOPIA, destined for the playa of Black Rock City 2008. All proceeds go directly to the Flaming Lotus Girls.

PLEASE SAVE THE DATE!! JUNE 28th 2008 at CELLSPACE.
2050 Bryant St., San Francisco, CA 94110. MAP IT

Door Cost: $10-$20 Sliding Scale

Doors open: 8pm

Movie at 9pm. Make sure to come early, 100 seats limit.

Meet the director at 10:30pm after screening.

Film Synopsys: Once a year, on a vast Nevada lake bed surrounded by mountains, the Burning Man festival brings together tens of thousands of people who are attracted by the festival’s promise of seven days of “decommodification,” “community,” “artwork,” and “revelry.” But increasingly, many question whether Burning Man’s mainstream appeal threatens—or even upends—the festival’s utopian vision. Through a series of in-depth interviews of the festival’s founders, organizers, and participants, DUST AND ILLUSIONS traces the festival’s history, while examining whether the festival is a victim of its own success.

Thanks for all your support!!
Your Flaming Lotus Girls