Mike Davis from the City of Quartz to Gentrified San Francisco
A conversation with Tim Redmond
Los Angelenos who read his “City of Quartz” never looked at their town the same way again. Seen from the intersection between kitsch and ecological disaster, Davis reveals the hidden history of the city that points into a future shared with other towns. This conversation centers on that common pattern of development.
Mike Davis is a former meat-cutter and long-distance truck-driver. He now teaches Urban Theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Tim Redmond is the editor of the weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian.
code: A 178 >To order a copy click here: $8.00
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Rebecca Solnit: Hollow City
A place for artists, activists and working folks: that’s what made San Francisco the great city it was. The city we love is disappearing and turning into just another sector of corporate monoculture says poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Why are so many of our cities becoming uninhabitable? Rebecca Solnit’s “Hollow City” is a mix of personal diary and historic study on par with the modern analysis brought forth by Mike Davis and Gray Brechin’s in “Imperial San Francisco”. This interview gives thought provoking answers as to why and how this happened and what can be done. – Rebecca Solnit is the author of: “Secret Exhibition”, “Savage Dreams”, and “Wanderlust, A History of Walking”.
code: A 179 >To order a copy click here: $8.00
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Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Gold and Water
The mystique of San Francisco as one of the most beautiful cities in the world still endures beneath the growing urban blight of cheap and greedy development. How did this city come about where not a building stood only 170 years ago? – Brechin likens all great cities of history to a vortex or maelstrom. As a city grows, so does both its reach and its power to transform the natural world. Among the cataclysmic events San Francisco set in motion or accelerated, were the gold rush and the large water control projects of the 20th century.
code A 177 >To order a copy click here: $8.00
Side A: The Underground History of the Gold Rush
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Side B: The Quest for Water and the Flooding of Yosemite (Hetch Hetchy)
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti
When Ferlinghetti became the first Poet Laureate of the city of San Francisco, city librarian Regina Minudri introduced him as a literary legend and a voice of dissent. In this most unusual acceptance speech Ferlinghetti takes on car culture, the annual air show by the Blue Angels, and chain stores. He surprised the city dignitaries with a broadside against pro development policies that have turned the city into just another corporate town, ecologically devastated, inhospitable to the arts and hostile to the homeless.
Side B: The San Francisco Anti Gentrification Movement
Within a five-block radius of TUC’s studios, a grassroots struggle is being waged to protect an area that has been home to the City’s Latino community. Hear from community activists engaged in the struggle to save what had been our city from becoming the most expensive real estate on the planet.
code: A136 To order a copy click here: $8.00
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Satish Kumar, interview and talk
Born in India, Kumar became a Jain monk at the age of 9. Influenced by Gandhi’s writings, he left the order and became an activist in the Land Reform Movement. At 18, he walked through the length of India persuading landlords to donate land to the landless. Approximately five million acres of land were collected in gifts and donated to the poor.
Kumar then took an 8,000-mile journey for disarmament. He walked from India, through Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, the former Soviet Union, Poland, Germany, Belgium, France, England and America, where he was received at the White House by the Disarmament Adviser to President Johnson. He is the author of “No Destination”, co-founder of Schumacher College, and editor and publisher of the magazine, “Resurgence”.
Code A186 >To order a copy click here: $8.00
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Landscape of Freedom
Landscape of Freedom is about wildness, diversity, and compassion. This is a conversation between Chellis Glendinning and Carl Anthony. Chellis is the author of When Technology Wounds and My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization. Carl is Director of the Urban Habitat Program at Earth Island Institute.
code: A 112 >To order a cassette copy click here: $8.00
Frances Moore Lappe & Paul Martin du Bois: Doing Democracy
People do not go hungry for lack of food, but for lack of democracy – i.e., control over and access to food. This is a report of active, locally based, and empowered forms of democratic self government: elementary school children are supervising the clean-up of a toxic spill; citizens groups are founding their own radio stations or taking over manufacturing plants. (1995)
code: A 117 >To order a cassette copy click here: $8.00
