THE PROBLEM WITH BART

BART is on everyone’s mind right now, and not in a good way. In 2010, a few years after BART’s 50th anniversary, the transit system is closely associated with controversy and mismanagement, and at the same time it is more essential than ever to people’s daily lives in the Bay Area. BART’s presence in the headlines consists of the shooting of an unarmed passenger by a BART police officer, the loss of $70 million in federal funding for non-compliance with the Civil Rights Act, and the giveaway of a $2.3 million surplus to passengers in a fare-reduction that will save riders pennies while wasting funds that could be put to good use. Meanwhile, with Bay Bridge tolls rising sharply – from $4 to $6 per car during peak hours and $5 on weekends, and from free to $2.50 for carpools – more and more Bay residents are bound to be considering riding BART.

Stop to stop, city to city, the BART system is part of the connective tissue that holds us together in the Bay Area. We know it’s expensive, it’s limited, it has a trigger-happy police force and a staff of public employees making six figures a year. But unlike SF MUNI, AC Transit, and other regional transit systems in the Bay Area, BART is wide-ranging, reliable, and best of all, fast. So we rely on it. I ride it nearly every day, to get to work, to visit friends, to get from neighborhood to neighborhood. And at this 50 year mark, myself and many other riders are asking for more. BART works; its principal shortcoming is that there is simply not enough of it.

Riders are asking for more: more trains, later schedules, more stations, more access for different communities, more safety, more sanity, and more vision. What is BART’s problem? Is it a lack of imagination, political will, money, or physical infrastructure? Or a combination of all of them? This is my admittedly biased look at the problem with BART, or rather, several problems with related causes and solutions. I have a few suggestions, too. You should take them with a grain of salt, since I am admittedly no expert. If they are flawed, I hope at least they can fuel the discussion – a discussion we need more of.

GUNS, TASERS, AND PUBLIC SAFETY

We’re all familiar with the events on New Year’s Eve 2009, when at the Fruitvale Bart Station, BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle shot unarmed 22-year old passenger Oscar Grant in the back, killing him. After passenger-documented videos posted online became an internet phenomenon, the slaying sparked public outrage, including a protest shutting down the Fruitvale Station and continuing into Downtown Oakland, where demonstratators smashed windows and lit cars on fire. Witnesses to the shooting claimed they were beaten and illegally detained, and sued BART. Grant’s family sued, and received a settlement a year later.

In ’09 and ’10, Oscar Grant’s picture became ubiquitous in Oakland, appearing in store windows and apartment windows. The public clearly felt that the young African-American shot on the BART train by a white officer spoke to their experience. Grant became an icon, a symbol, and the media followed Mehserle’s verdict with the expectation of more unrest in Oakland. When it came down as “involuntary manslaughter” – many were hoping Mehserle would be charged with murder –there was a mostly peaceful response, with pleas by Grant’s family to keep it quiet. There was some rioting that followed, but of the 78 people arrested, presumably mostly for property damage, only 19 of them were Oakland residents.

What was BART’s response to all this? In the days after the shooting, the agency managed to react at least somewhat competently. BART cooperated with local authorities in Alameda County to give them the means to charge Mehserle with murder. BART called together a committee to respond to “major police events.” And BART quickly suspended BART Officer Tony Pirone, the racial-epithet spewing cop who violently escalated the situation between Grant and the police with displays of unnecessary force. The man whose knee was on Grant’s neck when Grant was shot. But BART continued to pay Pirone’s salary for over a year before getting around to firing him. Pirone collected over $100,000 while BART was figuring out what to do. BART also paid other officers connected to the shooting who were on administrative leave.

In the wake of the verdict, a year and a half after the incident, BART has yet to respond significantly to the shooting death of Oscar Grant. Evidently because Mehserle confused his taser with his gun (many remain skeptical of this claim by Mehserle’s defense) BART leadership has gone back and forth on the taser issue, revoking the use of them and then allowing them, then recently recalling them again after a BART officer tased a 13-year-old boy for the grave crime of hopping a turnstile.

Here’s my first suggestion: if BART wants to address the concerns of thousands of citizens and riders in the wake of the Mehserle trial, how about a comprehensive program for training all BART Police in non-violent conflict resolution or some other professional training that will instruct them how not to taze, shoot, wrongly detain, beat, or otherwise mistreat passengers? I am sure there are organizations and non-profits that could assist BART in educating its police force. It’s not like BART can’t afford it.

TAKE OUR MONEY, PLEASE

BART’s problem isn’t money. They have so much, they don’t know what to do with it. Otherwise why would the visionaries on the BART board temporarily reduce fares by an insignificant amount, saving riders pennies over weeks and months, rather than take the initiative to do something with their $2.3 million in spare cash? The money comes from a $4.5 million surplus that the BART board divvied up into unimpressive improvements such as car cleaning (the cars always seem pretty clean to me, but I rode MUNI for years so maybe I have low standards).

Now, I’m just as willing as the next person to get a deal at the turnstile. A permanent fare reduction would allow Bart to extend access to people who need it and can’t afford it. That might even help their civil rights problem (more on that later), part of which is surely equal access in the community. But a temporary reduction is just stupid. Bart riders I have asked indicate that they won’t even notice the 3% fare reduction, and would rather have the money used to improve the system or expand service.

There are many good uses for this money. As I mentioned before, they could retrain their law enforcement staff to restrain their use of force. Another potential use would be employing a temporary staff to go into stations and gather feedback, interviewing passengers to get their feedback. Since BART framed their temporary fare reduction as an “economic stimulus” wouldn’t it be better to actually give a few people jobs, at least for a while? The most obvious, and boring, use for the money is just to save it so that future, permanent fare increases can be avoided or at least postponed. But that wouldn’t give our officials on the BART board much to talk about come election time. Better for them to make a big deal out of the five bucks they saved you in 2010.

CIVIL RIGHTS AND PUBLIC OUTREACH

BART has a civil rights problem. The Obama Administration thinks so anyway. BART lost $70 million in federal stimulus funds earlier this year when the Feds found them in non-compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. BART wanted to use the money to build an extension to Oakland Airport, and the Obama administration took a look at BART’s plan–and perhaps other things about BART that a Google search might reveal as unimpressive – and said no. You have to applaud, really. The extension from the Coliseum station to the Oakland Airport would cost half a billion at current estimates. Given how these things go, let’s round it on up to a billion. Social justice groups filed the Title VI complaint with the Feds, claiming that the extension is a misuse of public money that would serve a small, affluent group of Bay Area residents, and that the BART system could put the funds to much better use if its intention is to serve all Bay Area communities.

BART’s response is defiant. They plan to go ahead with the Oakland Airport connector anyway, cobbling together the funding from various sources, without federal help. In a way, I understand. Would it be a bad thing for Oakland Airport to connect with BART? Of course not. Yet most Bay Area residents, myself included, fly in and out of SFO. The BART access to the SF airport is great, but here’s the thing: it’s not why I fly in and out of SFO. It’s because when looking at flights, I’m looking for the cheapest tickets and so I want to biggest airport with the most direct flights. And in the Bay Area, that’s SFO.

If BART were to really go out and ask people who ride the system on a daily basis what they think BART needs, I guarantee you that a connection to the Oakland Airport would not be first, or even tenth, on their list of priorities. Deep down, I’m sure the BART board knows this, and if so, that would explain why their efforts at getting public feedback are a big waste of money, a half-assed effort at getting the public’s opinion and involvement.

In what the Oakland Tribune called a “case study of government bureaucracy run amok,” BART is holding a series of outreach meetings to get community input. The poorly publicized meetings are so ill-attended that the Tribune estimated BART spent $375 per person at the meeting. BART is blowing through $1.2 million, having held 53 meetings so far. I ride the BART every day, and I was unaware BART was even having public input meetings. If there were, say, posters in the BART stations advertising them, I don’t see how I could have missed them.

I certainly never miss the enormous ads in BART’s stations. If BART was serious about getting public feedback, there’s many ways they could go about it for that kind of money. Start with advertising the outreach meetings. Then cut the number of meetings in half, and spend some of the half million left on hiring a small army of temporary workers, sporting BART logo t-shirts and armed with voice recorders and clipboards, to go out into the stations and document riders’ viewpoints, priorities, and requests.

Maybe this would violate some of BART’s union contracts. If so, a half mil is still a good bit of money to throw around. You could even pay a lucky handful of feedback-gatherers six-figure salaries, as far as that took you, and I bet that after a few weeks you’d have more substantive feedback than what comes out of dozens of these meetings. BART’s meetings are bound to be attended mostly by people with an agenda of their own and an axe to grind. Ask every-day transit riders for their big ideas, and I’ll tell you what they’ll say. They’ll ask for trains more often, for space for bikes, for real discounts for regular riders and college students, and more accessible discount tickets for children, seniors, and the disabled. And they’ll ask for something else too – something that I would ask for and have long wished for – late-night service.

PLEASE DON’T STOP!

Why do the trains stop at midnight when our lives don’t? In a sort of transit-enforced curfew, the stations shut down and tell us to go to sleep. But why should the Bay Area go to sleep? In New York doesn’t the subway run all night? Trains run around the clock in Chicago, too. And Philadelphia. Not to mention outside the U.S., in London and Copenhagen. Many stations around the world run all-night trains on the weekends, including Berlin, Stockholm, Vienna, and Warsaw. Barcelona’s trains run all-night Saturday. Why is it that our trains don’t run all night, or even late on the weekends?

While it’s nowhere on the map in terms of political issues one hears discussed in the news, the dream of a 24-hour BART came back to me in the form of a very active and popular Facebook page. Nate Payne, a young candidate for the SF Board of Supervisors in the district representing the Tenderloin, started the “Make BART Trains Run 24 Hours” Facebook page in January 2010. The page soon exploded in popularity, winning 17,830 supporters. The page has become an active forum for BART users, with people sounding off on all the issues discussed in this article, and many more. It has the energy of a grassroots campaign, and with this fresh impulse behind it, and increasingly frequent articles asking with frustration why the Bay Area doesn’t have 24-hour BART service, it seems that this is an issue whose time has come.

Time for some highly speculative calculations. What would it actually cost? To estimate BART’s operating cost per hour, I took 168 hours in a week minus 34 hours in maintenance down-time, to get 134 hours a week of operating time over 52 weeks, or 6,968 hours of operating time. Divide that into the 08-09 budget of $558,609,478 in operating expenses, and it costs somewhere around $80,000 per hour to run the entire BART system. That means the $2.3 million surplus that BART is handing back to ticket buyers could be used to run the system an additional 28 hours a year. That could keep BART going two hours later on Saturday nights for the whole summer!

Of course, this is assuming that the engineering constraint BART claims is the reason is has no owl service is legitimate. BART says that it needs to shut down tracks for daily maintenance. I’m no engineer, but I don’t see why this necessarily prohibits limited late-night or all-night service. The Transbay Tube has two tracks, which during the day carry trains in opposite directions. But couldn’t the BART be single-tracked for selective service at night? Only one train at a time, one way at a time. Maintenance could be conducted on one track while the other is in operation.

I have yet to hear an explanation of why this wouldn’t work, but maybe it just couldn’t. If so, the last hope for 24-hour (or late night) BART service is another tube. This might not be as far off or undreamed of as you think. Currently BART estimates that the existing tube will be at capacity by 2030. Since planning and building a new tube will take 20 – 30 years, there are some planners already considering how this will be built. Transportation planner Tom Matoff suggests a new tube serving Alameda before going under the bay and emerging at the Transbay Terminal. The tunnel would have four tracks, two for BART and two for California’s new High-Speed Rail. Since High-Speed rail has political steam behind it, and money, a second Transbay Tube just might happen before I’m too old to care about running around the Bay Area at 3 a.m.

BART FOR ALL

With all the anti-sprawl sentiment in the Bay Area, you would think that universal public transit accessibility would be a more urgent political issue. In the Bay Area, we tend to think of LA as the urban area in California that suffers from unabated sprawl. But look at us. San Francisco proper has less than a million people–except during the daytime, when it swells considerably– while the surrounding region including SF and other bay counties has more than 7 million. Counting all the other counties, the Bay Area is the 6th largest urban area in the country. And while San Francisco may be 2nd after New York in urban density, there’s an awful lot of sprawl in the greater Bay Area. San Jose is actually our biggest city, not San Francisco. The lack of transit access in the inner city encourages sprawl. If you’re not able to live a viable urban life with the advantages that can involve (ready access to the rest of the metropolis) then why not just get out and move to the suburbs?

What some have in mind for the future of BART is very discouraging. An SF Chronicle article on BART’s 50th anniversary in ’07 featured a bad set of plans for the Bay’s urban majority. A speculative map (pictured above) featured a line connecting some point south of Fremont with Pleasanton, Walnut Creek, and Martinez… an epic new rail line further connecting already-served low-density outer Bay counties. With the exception of a new Transbay Tube, there was little else on the map adding service to the Bay’s densest neighborhoods, the places where common sense – and the parking situation – tells me people actually use transit the most. According to BART’s own numbers from a 2008 study, 81% of riders at 16th and Mission in SF, 71% in Downtown Berkeley, and 70% at 19th St. in Oakland got to the station by walking. The numbers for Fremont, Dublin/Pleasanton, and North Concord? Respectively 17%, 4%, and 4%. Is that really the future of BART?

BART’s problems – including the heavyhanded policing, ill-conceived projects and priorities, and lack of 24-hour accessibility – are part of BART’s larger identity crisis. It caters to yesterday’s ridership rather than tomorrow’s. It is locked into an identity as a commuter train for working professionals, and not the vital backbone of Bay Area-wide public transit for each and every citizen. That’s what it is, and that’s what it should be: let’s clear up any doubt. Even assuming BART’s riders are predominantly affluent white professionals from outer Bay Area counties–though I doubt this is the case–BART fares cover only about half of BART’s expenses. The rest comes from all of us, the citizens, the taxpayers. When I lived in San Francisco, for years I rode the BART for short daily trips, going two or three stops away. Now I live in Oakland (a city, not a suburb), and I ride it to and from SF but also on short trips across Oakland, from Oakland to Berkeley, and still on short trips within San Francisco. I observe my fellow riders doing the same thing.

BART has the capacity to go long distances, and to their engineers and planners, it may be a case of ‘every problem looking like a nail to the guy with a hammer.’ It may make sense to them to have BART act like a ‘public transit freeway’ and leave local transit to local agencies. But there is no right or wrong use of BART, just what people need and use it for. If that’s mainly for short trips inside a city or medium-range hops across the denser, core Bay cities, then that’s what BART needs to adapt to. There’s no reason BART can’t do both, and do both well. But with increasing urban density and population in the urban center, it seems likely that BART’s reality over the next 50 years is going to have to include not only going farther, but going deeper into the existing urban area. Serving all communities, and doing better to serve communities of color and working people. Running more often, and later. Making genuine efforts to listen to the needs of BART riders, and making sure that all passengers, even rowdy late-nighters and fare-evaders, are safe from violence.

That would be a BART that could really serve us all.

–Justin Allen

SOURCES:

The $100,000+ a year average union salary for Bart workers is from Bart’s website, 7/2/09. Visit source.

Bart’s loss of $70 million in federal stimulus money: Daily Californian 6/13/10. Visit source.

The next 50 years of Bart, SF Chronicle 6/27/07. Visit source.

Pirone’s salary, KTVU, 3/35/10. Visit source.

Pirone’s knee, The Militant 7/19/10. Visit source.

Out of town rioters, KTVU 7/9/10. Visit source.

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A girl shouts those words in ecstasy as the teacher instructs the small group of students to close their eyes, undulate their hips and shout out the hottest image they can fathom. For this class of participants, they’re learning how to make a porn—not the hand-held amateur style for your lover’s eye, but the kind of porn you can actually produce and distribute.

As a prominent adult performer/director in the BDSM community, the class’s instructor, Madison Young, imparts the participants in her “DIY Porn Workshop” with all the knowledge she’s gained over the past eight years in the industry. She teaches the seminar at the Femina Potens gallery in San Francisco, a space dedicated to feminine and transgender artists to create a dialogue of sex, art and gender, in which she is also one of the co-founders.

Many of the attendees are interested in either pursuing porn with their backgrounds in video production or simply spicing up their sex lives. Numerous couples have contacted Young about how extraordinary her work in BDSM has been.

“The workshop is for your erotica so you can tap into what’s erotic and what turns you on,” Young exclaims as she states the mission of the seminar. “To really connect with our erotic center, we need to get into our bodies. We’re going to cover everything and hopefully change the world.”

After the class shouts out their erotica and free themselves from their comfort zone, Young leads the group straight to visualization. For this exercise, she passes out a script from one of her movies and asks the class to write the next scene. “A director films picture by picture, not by action,” Young says. “They need to identify the shot.”

Young’s workshop has been met with praise and popularity, leading her to teach the class near and afar, to Santa Cruz, Milwaukee, and even Toronto. But with all her travels, San Francisco will always be her home.

“I’m still deeply in love with San Francisco. There is an immense sense of belonging with a lot of strong and diverse communities,” Young recalls as she grew up in the tiny conservative farm town in Loveland, Ohio. “San Francisco is for people outside of the box, like an ‘island of misfits.’”

With her knowledge of porn Young is the perfect teacher, but just as many multitalented artists come across obstacles, she mentions performing and directing simultaneously has proven the most difficult. “They’re completely two different parts of your being. With performing, I can go in and just do that job one-hundred percent without worrying about other details and where everything should be.”

During her two-hour long seminar she speeds through every minutiae detail of the porn industry including distributing, producing and budgeting. Young mentions that it can be hard creating a typical sixty minute-long film without a ludicrous amount of money, but sometimes you “just need that one killer scene.”

She also goes through minor details such as location, model release forms, scene lengths, talent rates, AIM (adult industry model) testing, and the box cover as she passes numerous handouts. “[Even] setup can be just as important,” Young adds. “And with location, how many different situations can [the director] work in one room.”

For many viewers and couples, porn can be a facilitator for communication as Young states that her work even helped saved relationships and spark something new. “Porn can be inspirational and provide guidance for people. It’s about visually watching instead of telling. Make it sexy and people will listen,” Young says as she states that good communication is the most important lesson for newcomers.

Ultimately, she wants her class to know that making porn doesn’t have to be what she calls “mainstream, fast-food porn.” Young states that porn doesn’t have to solely sprout from Los Angeles and show unsafe sex from only one perspective, usually ignoring the mens’ pleasure shots.

“[Critics] go off that pornography is demeaning to women but really the men are the ones who are completely objectified. They are referred to as the ‘penis’, like that is what they are there for,” Young says referring to porn in Los Angeles and soon urges for more sex positive porn. “What really turns us on is showing a lot of the reaction, showing a lot of the pleasure, and showing that connection with close shots of both performers.”

And to make that exceptional sex film, she attests the director needs to collaborate with their team to engage their audience.

“You need to get them on board for your vision and collaborate with them,” Young says as she instills this lesson when she directs her own films. “Incorporate their fantasies and turn-ons because it helps the performer get involved. You can’t fake that kind of chemistry.”

Words by Chris Huqueriza
Photos by Taylor Whitehouse

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Make sure to visit the Femina Potens website and gallery for upcoming events and exhibits.

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Despite what you hear though, it isn’t all big name publishers and celebrity appearances—a number of DIY and underground creators often exhibit at Wondercon and these were a few that caught our eye.

16th & Mission Comix – Endearingly self-proclaimed as “gutter comix for losers,” brothers Chris and Cameron Forsley run 16th & Mission Comix right out of their apartment, toking, joking, and drawing their way through everyday life. And in case you were wondering, that is indeed the Scarecrow from Wizard of Oz saying, “I’m stoned!”

Girls Drawin Girls – Founded in 2006 by longtime Simpsons contributors Melody Severns and Anne Walker, GDG looks to stand as a female force to be reckoned with in the perpetually male-dominated world of comics and animation.

Super 7 – Specializing in clothing, prints, and custom made figures, Alex Zavaleta’s Super 7 is a haven for serious collectors and curious visitors alike. Be sure to also visit their storefront location in SF at 1628 Post Street.

The Homicide Chicks – A comic about tattooed punk-rock zombies chicks by tattooed punk-rock zombies chicks…what’s not to love?

Of course, they weren’t the only ones all dressed up… why what would a comic book convention be without all the costumes?

There was even some musical entertainment going down thanks to the Vallejo-based Venat. Imagine if Tom Waits and Danzig had a kid but with a much more fun-loving personality and you get the picture. Check them out here.

And then there were these guys, who by the sole fact none of them were wearing a Batman or Star Wars t-shirt, probably managed to be the only ones to get laid that weekend. I sure as hell know I didn’t.

Words and photos by Sean Logic

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For more info on WonderCon and other Comic-Con sponsored events, be sure to check out their official website.

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“What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen in the Tenderloin?”

Asked on Market Street and around Civic Center.

I saw a woman, obviously homeless, she pulls her pants down, bends over, starts getting talcum powder and padding it down there and sits back down. I look at the guy next to me and said, “Only in San Francisco.” -Anthony

The general penis flapper, which would be the gentleman peeing not towards the wall, but liberally and freely onto and into the street, just flapping it to get the urine off. -Keely

I saw a guy who was smoking…there was literally smoke coming from his body. The fire ambulance was there and his shirt was just on fire. I don’t know what was going on, I guess they put him out. –Aaron

One guy—I didn’t see him get stabbed—but he had obviously been very recently stabbed. A few blocks down I saw one of those stakes you use to hold up young sapling trees with covered in blood on the sidewalk. –Hadidjah

Right up here on Turk, I saw this woman laying on the ground with no pants on with her legs spread open like she was delivering a kid, and she’s got piss going all the way down to the street curb. She’s just laughing her ass off. It looked like a monstrous hairy Bigfoot. –Barrie

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The impetus for the Ho-Down came from a forum discussion on Etsy’s San Francisco message board, explains Rick Kitagawa, one of the fair’s main organizers. “We were all talking, wondering why [Etsy] hadn’t had an event like this in San Francisco.” After proposing the idea to a few other members of the online community, and convincing Etsy to become a committed sponsor, Kitagawa was on his way making his vision a reality. There was however one more focus he wanted to incorporate into the event beyond the merchandise vendors would be selling. “From the get go we wanted something more than just a craft fair,” he explains. Kitagawa and the other organizers wanted to give back to the community their art thrived in, and when they came across Drawbridge, a local charity that donates art supplies and workshops to inner-city youth, it was a perfect opportunity to help out by donating part of the night’s proceeds to the organization. “It’s art, it’s kids—it worked.” Filling three floors with nearly sixty sellers and upward of 1,800 attendants, the night was by all means a success, and hopefully that’s an indication we haven’t heard the last of this fun filled event, because like the crafts on display, it is undoubtedly one of a kind.

There was a little bit of something for everyone this year, and all the vendors had bargains you couldn’t find anywhere else. Below are some of our choice exhibitors of the evening…

Sinkitty - A Bay Area retailer specializing in custom frames, crucifixes, and sculptures drawing influence from the Mexican holiday of Dia de los Muertos.

Recover Your Thoughts – When Doug MacNeil came across his local library tossing piles of books into the garbage he came up with an ingenious way to reuse the old hardcovers by turning them into journals and sketchpads.

Monkey + Seal - Run by Eve Skylar and Handmade Ho-Down organizer Rick Kitagawa, the Monkey + Seal booth had zines, screenprinted ties, and art prints for sale—they even had a charger to put it all on your card!

Eristotle - Oakland’s Erin Cadd can make a pillow or pincushion out of anything; old fabrics, sheets, and even sweaters! Each piece is individually crafted and no two are alike.

Laserkitten - Offering laser cut fine jewelery, Laserkitten’s designs pull inspiration from glam rock, the 80’s, 90’s, and as owner Marisa Ravel joked, “anything sparkly.”

Vinyl Frontier – Hailing from Petaluma, Nicole Vasbinder started Vinyl Frontier when she noticed something missing from other fairs she’d attended. “You see plenty of stuff for girls, but never any stuff for guys too,” she explains. Selling everything from record bowls to LP sleeve notebooks, you’re bound to find something with your favorite band on it.

Words and photos by Sean Logic

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For information on The Handmade Ho-Down visit the official website.

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But where do you go if you’re searching for a copy of Ben Weasel’s old travel zines? How about hard-to-find early issues of Cometbus? While rummaging through some crusty punks’ attic may seem like the only option, Matt Wobensmith has another solution; Goteblud, San Francisco’s only vintage and back issue zine archive.

Wobensmith, a Bay Area zine mainstay and founder of Outpunk Records, opened the space earlier this year and already has over 3,000 zines proudly on display and for sale in the shop, many of which, at first, came from friends on the verge of tossing them out.

“A couple of years ago I had some people telling me that they had just thrown away a bunch of boxes of zines, and that sounded kind of wrong to me,” he says. “But I couldn’t really tell them where to go cause there’s no secondhand kind of market for zines. So I said, ‘Hey, I’ll take those,’ and started getting donations from friends.”When going through those collections Wobensmith came to a conclusion that continues to drive his appreciation for the medium. “You start to realize how transient zines are–how impermanent they are—how they disappear real fast.”

When a spot opened up in the Mission looking to rent, he knew everything was falling into place. “This space was perfect, just ideal. I couldn’t ask for something better,” he gladly recalls, adding it gave him a chance to see what was going on in the scene. “It was also an excuse to get myself out there and get involved again.”

Over the course of the last year Wobensmith’s selection of titles has grown exponentially. From back issues of well known music zines like Maximum Rock N’ Roll and Flipside to cult classics like Sniffin’ Glue, the shelves at Goteblud are lined with every title you’ve ever heard of, forgotten, or used to own.

“It’s my thrill to find that weird, obscure little title,” he chimes. “I actually use my customers to teach me about zines all the time. It’s a very useful thing when people come in, pick something up, and start talking about it. I pay close attention and ask them questions because I want to understand if I don’t already know where that zine is.”

He also insists starting discussion about zines is just as important to him, if not moreso, than selling them. “It’s a little store but there’s a table and four chairs here for a reason. People are not pressured into buying things, I just like making these old zines available. If people want to sit here and take a stack of ten zines out, read them, and put them back, that’s fine with me. I like the idea that there’s a space you can go where commerce isn’t that important.”

From the opening days of the store’s inception Wobensmith has also utilized the space to put zine exhibits on display. An informal and retrospective tribute to the titles he curates, past exhibits include a full run of LA punk tabloid Slash, a collection of 80’s queercore perzines, and their latest showing, You Are Her: Riot Grrrl and Underground Female Zines of the 1990s. The Riot Grrrl movement, epitomized by bands such as Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, was also the fertile breeding grounds for a number of revolutionary and outspoken zines, making it a time in underground publishing whose influence is still felt today.

“This isn’t super-old,” he comments. “But maybe it’s too new for museums to be doing shows on, but old enough that generations heard of and know about it. There’s an appreciation and a curiosity.”

Beyond the shelves, bins, and binders however is a man who at his core truly loves these little photocopied pieces DIY self-expression, and being able to share them with the public maintains their importance and relevancy. “It’s like an oral history, it’s not on the internet, you can’t Google it, it’s only in the hearts and minds of the people that were there.” And while many of the creators of these works have long moved on from their xeroxed manifestos, the messages within their pages stays the same. ““They’re almost like letters to a small group of people,” he asserts. “There’s just a certain level of authenticity conveyed in a zine.”

Words and photos by Sean Logic

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The “You Are Her: Riot Grrrl and Underground Female Zines of the 1990s” runs through mid January 2010. Goteblud will be hosting a special panel discussion with female zinesters Iraya Robles (“Marks in Time”, Sta-Prest), Bianca Ortiz (“Mestiza”, “Mamasita”) and  Layla Gibbons (“Drop Babies”, “Chimps”, Skinned Teen, editor of “MRR”) on December 12th at 7pm.

For more information on showings, events, and what’s in stock, visit the official Goteblud blog.

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My first exposure to the California Bonzing Company (CBC) was a YouTube video featuring Graziano flying down Market Street on a full-size ironing board with trucks and wheels bolted to the bottom. Since then the CBC has come out with video after video, done two successive Parking Day events, and released the first board this summer along with a new video featuring skaters bombing down Twin Peaks.

I grabbed some enchiladas with Austin to catch up on what the California Bonzing Co. has been up to and get an idea of what exactly bonzing means: an approach to skateboarding that gets to the roots of the practice.

J: What’s the California Bonzing Company all about?

AG: It’s about the joy of skating. And what skating opens up to us… the unique perspectives and beauty that skateboarding allows us to have. We ride boards of all shapes and sizes, and we believe that each individual has their own style that can only be defined by the individual.

J: And what is the latest with the California Bonzing Company?

AG: We just finished Parking Day on September 18th, where we supported the building of San Francisco skate parks. This year we teamed up with the San Francisco Skateboard Association. We took over about 7 spots, had a mini halfpipe and a street course. We’re working on our second board, with artist Dane Spriggs. Really excited about it, should be pretty awesome. And.. continuing working on our films of San Francisco.

J: What’s the most recent video?

AG: Twin Peaks. That came out in June.

J: Twin Peaks is a crazy hill.

AG: It’s an awesome hill.

J: Kind of the mother of all San Francisco hills.

AG: Yeah! Yeah, you know it’s kind of hard to convey that in video. In my first cut I tried to explain that in the video. Most of the audience is outside of San Francisco. So everybody’s like, uh… yeah. Didn’t really get it that well. I cut out trying to explain how ridiculous the hills are.

J: When you look at a hill (to skate) what are you looking for?

AG: You don’t really pick out hills. Some turns in it are good, what I personally like, but it’s kind of the way you ride it, the way you break it down when you’re riding it. There’s some things you have to worry about – the lights are kind of like close-outs, you can get caught in front of the light or behind the light and have to bail or almost get hit by a car or something.

J: How did you first start skateboarding? Were you drawn to the big boards at first or did that come along later?

AG: I first started skateboarding when I was like 8 years old. Plastic board, plastic trucks, that kind of thing.

J: When did California Bonzing Company start?

AG: In 2006. It started shooting the videos. The videos that we produce are unlike other skateboarding videos. Skateboarding videos for some, one director called it “skateboarding porn” – where it’s just like trick, after trick, after trick, and there’s not too much variance in the way you watch your skateboarding. So, we produced these things where it’s not just like someone doing this kickflip – which is pretty cool, yeah – but we also try to capture what that skateboarder is feeling when he’s doing that trick, that’s what we try to portray, that headrush, that head high.

J: The other thing I noticed is that with each video, there’s a really strong sense of that place and that moment.

AG: All the videos are shot at specific skate spots in California. We try to explain a little bit about the location and the feeling of it. Parking Day was really cool. The core of skateboarding in the world is very, a tradition of you know – fuck your mother, skate or die, hardcore, punk rock… we understand that, but what we produce is different, you know, we’re kind of interested in the bouyant feeling of skateboarding. Parking Day put me into contact with the kind of core skateboarders that maybe aren’t my normal audience, so that was one cool thing about it.

J: What’s the state of skate parks in the Bay Area?

AG: There’s three (in SF). There’s Crocker Amazon, one down Potrero, and a little dish, literally like an oval with a nub in the middle. Even if you were to include all of the Bay Area, Alameda and like the North Bay, it only totals to like seven skate parks. Portland Oregon has like 24.

J: That’s crazy.

AG: Puts it into perspective. It’s like any other sport – football, baseball, basketball – people need a place to do it. You’ve got to do it somewhere. There’s totally that inconsistency. We’re not allowed to skateboard on the sidewalk, we’re not allowed to skate on the street. Where are we supposed to skate? It’s illegal on the sidewalk, it’s illegal on the street.

J: What gave you the idea to put wheels on an ironing board?

AG: I thought it would be silly and funny, and why the hell not?

J: What’s the experience riding such a huge board?

AG: It’s a little crazy, yeah. I want to produce a board like this – I’ve ridden one like it before. With the big boards, you can come into a turn, and the board will flex your weight, and just when you think you are not going to make it at the apex of the turn you bounce into the center of the board, the board takes the weight flexs and makes the turn, you can like pop it and it digs in and turns really tight – it’s pretty cool.

J: Riding these really big boards, it’s almost like turning back to the roots of skateboarding – you’ve probably seen Dogtown and Z-Boys and stuff – the roots of skateboarding in surfing, like wanting to surf the pavement.

AG: Waves that break 7 days a week. You really do have to look at the history of skateboarding to see where it is now. Even understanding it, and redefining what skateboarding is – not just in a halfpipe, or on the street – it’s everywhere.

J: Your first board came out in June this year…

AG: The name of the board is De Stijl – pronounced “Da Stall” – and in Dutch it means “The Style” – and it’s also the name of a 19th Century Dutch art movement, and the artwork on the board is inspired by this movement. It’s the first convex longboard ever, and it’s made out of bamboo and maple.

J: The first convex longboard ever. How did you come up with that?

AG: Well, when we’re riding our boards… we go really fast and turn often.

J: How fast?

AG: There’s terminal velocity, seriously. It’s hard to say… 30, 40 miles an hour, going the same speed as the cars definitely, no doubt. With the concave boards, when you’re going too far, then you’ve got to rebalance yourself, okay, then push on the insole of the board, just enough to slow yourself down – or if you go too much you have to kind of do this balancing act.

People have tried to make up for this by making flat boards. But even the flat boards, when you’re going fast and turning a lot the board torques from the front and back adding uncertainty to your turn. If you were to put all your weight on your heels, it would put too much pressure on your heels and throw your board out, so you have to kind of put some weight on your toes, and kind of turn, spreading your weight evenly. It doesn’t feel that comfortable… it’s not as pure as it could be. So man, one day I was like, let’s turn this thing upside down. And I did, and it was great. You sit on the inside of this centrifugal force, in the turn, and you just sit up on the outside of the board. It’s great. It’s pretty awesome.

J: What’s next for California Bonzing?

AG: More boards, clothes. San Francisco to San Diego – bonzing worldwide. We’re in the process of shooting a series of videos in San Francisco, something I wanted to do from the getgo. Sunset, Downtown and Chinatown.

We’ve done the longboarding thing now, Twin Peaks. Chinatown is going to feature sliding, where you slide on the ground. Downtown’s going to have street skating. Sunset is going to have street skating, longboarding, and sliding.

Another thing we’re working on is pave reports. I don’t think pave reports have ever been done in the skateboard industry. Every time a street is paved in San Francisco, we’ll be reporting on it, letting you know where the fresh pavement is being laid.

Interview by Justin Allen
Pics by Eric Carlson, courtesy California Bonzing Co.

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For more info, visit californiabonzing.com

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Buzzworthy events to check out include opening night’s Black, White, and Read: Litquake’s Book Ball (a masquerade dedicated to famous Bay Area writers), Monday October 12th’s Journey to the End of the Bay: Punk Rockers Spill Their Guts (a storyteller’s session with infamous members of the punk community), and next Friday the 16th’s Underground Exposed: A Zine Retrospective (a discussion about the world of alternative and underground press).

For more information, visit the festival’s website at: www.litquake.org, and browse through their schedule here.

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August 22nd and 23rd was the 9th annual San Francisco Zine Fest. Over 100 exhibitors were showcasing there, and Ashcan Magazine was proud to be amongst some of the Bay Area’s best creators.

Ashcan editor Sean Logic and comic artist Daniel Kaufeldt exhibiting at our table. Check out the incredible 3-D model of our logo Dan made!

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Clarion Alley, Mission District

Mural by Skinner, Fillmore and Haight, Lower Haight

Fillmore and Haight, Lower Haight

Fillmore and Haight, Lower Haight

Clarion Alley, Mission District

5th and Harrison, Soma

Gough and Market

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