If you want to get an idea of how San Francisco was in the early twentieth century, it is fun to check out the photos at https://www.opensfhistory.org/ Not too long ago people got around on horses and entire neighborhoods had dirt streets. Empty lots where now there are houses that look like they have been there forever. Less trees.
Excelsior Playground – 1912
It is a bit shocking to see how a neighborhood on the south side of the city, the Excelsior, looked a little over a hundred years ago. At the time there surely were farms close by. Cows, goats and sheep. I attempted to get the same shot today of the photo above but so much has changed and the angle was tricky. There is a baseball field there now where you see the lumber. The playground today has fences, basketball and tennis courts, a kids playground and a clubhouse.
Excelsior Playground – 2025
If you go north of here, there is a similar story with Bernal Heights.
Here is looking up Cortland from San Bruno. Now, every speck of land is a lot with a house on it.
On the other side of Bernal going west, looking down to Mission Street. Too bad the trains are no longer running. Now you can take the 24 Bus.
Above is the “proposed” Alemany Boulevard. Now Alemany Boulevard runs next to a massive interstate interchange where 101 and 280 meet and go their own ways. Cars and truck roar down raised concrete highway cloverleaf structures, banking to the left and the right. A hundred years ago it must have been very quiet with probably hundreds of rabbits hiding in the brush.
No collection of historic San Francisco photos would be complete without a photo from 1906, the earthquake and the fire that destroyed a lot of the city.
It has made it so tech companies and publishing empires no longer have responsibility for what is published on their applications, websites and what they now call “platforms.” Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars. Digital Millennium Copyright Act 25 Year Anniversary – SF Journal
Piracy is the foundation of the commercial internet. It is all just stuff. The digital world is a non-destructive medium. I can copy and paste anything, it loses none of its quality, and it is all mine, evidently free to use (except if it is owned by Getty Images). It matters not whether someone “owns” it. Indeed, no one owns the stars. Furthermore, my experience of your art is just as valid expression of art as your art. Today, the experience of art is often now monetarily more valuable than the art. Copyright laws are meaningless. This is why music fans can create a YouTube channel and make more money off of a musical artist than the artist. In 2025, I can create software that gobbles up your art and creations and create new creations. They call this Artificial Intelligence or AI. It is just the latest version of the piracy that has been going on since the beginning of the internet.
While early photography was analog, using silver and glass plates and large box cameras, it always seemed fascinating to me the observation of some of the Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century when they first interacted with this technology. When they saw the photographs they thought the white man was stealing their souls. They may have been on to something. Today large tech companies are not so much stealing souls but making money off of them. The most important events and parts of peoples lives are being “monetized” and in a way stolen. Who really owns your address book, contacts and photos from that last birthday? “Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.”
In the realm of recorded sounds, a similar dynamic happened at the beginning of the twentieth century. New Orleans trumpet player Freddie Keppard feared that if he was recorded, people would steal his ideas. He was definitely on to something. The development of “jazz” was moved forward by recordings and people playing along and transcribing solos of the greats. Evidently, if you wanted to cop Freddie Keppard’s licks, you had to go to Bourbon Street. “Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.”
New Orleans Jazz Fest 2016
It is now 2025 and the mining of original creative content by the tech companies is on full throttle. The pirates are in control of the ship as they have always been. The AI bots are sucking up all the work of the creative class and “monetizing” it. I was reminded of this when author David Baldacci made a video of how his novels have been ingested and now can be spit out by AI. In his own words “[they] backed up a truck to my imagination and stole everything I ever created.” These services now spit out novels that read as if they were written by Baldacci, with similar plots, dialogues, and even character names. “Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.”
Where this will all end, no one really knows. The control of information, the manipulation of people and the censorship of ideas is as great as ever while at the same time the billionaires mine and pillage the movements and work of just about everyone on the planet. I did have a strange dream the other night. I dreamt that a driverless Waymo taxi pulled up to our house in San Francisco and a robot passenger got in the backseat of the car. The taxi drove off. Not a soul onboard. “Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.”
One day it will happen. Though billionaire Peter Thiel thinks he can become immortal, the beauty of life is that it has its seasons. One day we all die. I did not make up this rule. It is just the way it is.
No Kings Day – Grass Valley, California. It always amazes me the signs at demonstrations in 2025. The biting humor and the clever observations. “Happy Birthday, Now DIE!” Good one!
So when Donald Trump dies and finds himself at the pearly gates and meets his maker, he asks God to let him into heaven. God then asks Donald why? What virtues he has lived, whether he believes and loves Jesus and why he should give him eternal life. Donald responds that he Made America Great Again, deported all the brown-skinned people. God responds that the immigrants were just his children looking for a better life. “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” —Leviticus 19:33–34. God goes on to say “even my only son Jesus had to escape tyranny and travel to foreign lands. And besides, the lettuce and tomatoes on your Big Mac hamburgers were picked by these hard working immigrants.”
Donald then says that he should go to heaven as he dismantled the corrupt federal government and the deep state that ruined so many lives. But God answers that “the federal government programs he cancelled were mostly virtuous, programs that feed the poor and needy, aided the sick, infirmed and elderly. It aided people that respected the natural world and lived to protect and defend God’s many wonderful creations.”
Donald, in a bit of distress, then asks God if there is anything he can negotiate to gain his entrance. Perhaps New York real-estate, Jeffery Epstein’s favorite underage hookers or perhaps an undervalued crypto-currency to which God just shakes his head. Then Donald said that his greatest accomplishment was banning abortion. That it rallied the troops to save the unborn, to which God says “au-contraire.” “You never really had any true beliefs in your heart on the subject but used it to simply divide people. In the end, many women who were not ready to be mothers or were raped had to give birth to children that then had little food and support. Others died of sepsis and suffered painful deaths. Your heart had no compassion for the poor and suffering.”
No Kings Day – Grass Valley California
So then Donald, out of options and realizing he did not have the cards, asks God what his plan is for him, to which God said it is best that Donald J. Trump spend eternity in a hot and humid climate, like the Florida Everglades, in a cage, surrounded by a cheap poorly made tent, surrounded by hungry alligators.
If you are interested in learning about how our world got to this gilded age, where a few billionaires have amassed great wealth on the backs of ordinary citizens, a good place would be to check out of your local library Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Thiel believes that monopolies are a good thing. His book is a business school manual and outlines how to create a monopoly and squash the little guy by getting the wealthy and hedge funds to invest in your company. You intentionally sell products for a loss. This process can last up to even ten years. Your competition eventually goes out of business. You then jack prices back up and become the only player in town. Such is the business plan for monopolies like Amazon and Walmart. Meta simply buys any competing company and often just shuts them down. This is the recipe whereby you dominate a market. It is the formula for our gilded age.
Creative monopolies give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopiles aren’t good for the rest of society, they’re powerful engines for making it better. – Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
Of course, Thiel makes the usual ignorant assumption that all over the world people lived a “extremely hard life.” p.9 An anthropologist he is not. He then goes on to admit that during the late 1990s, while working on PayPal he worked 100 hours a week. Surely more hours and stress than fishing, gathering berries and root vegetables, playing with your kids and sitting around a fire and weaving baskets.
Today, Peter Thiel and his company Palantir Technologies is a key contractor for the U.S. defense department. It is presently taking all the data from various systems and creating a digital footprint for every citizen and probably non-citizen in the U.S.. It is very much like Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. We are all being surveilled.
But why should anyone care what Peter Thiel thinks or does? Because he is a very wealthy and powerful behind-the-scenes player in our world. It is a bit like why General George Patton read Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography. If you want to understand the powerful, it is best to study their work which is often in plain view. Zero to One. is an easy read, a little book and less than 200 pages.
Peter Thiel’s influence in politics is large. He bankrolled JD Vance’s senate election. In this way he is a bit of a king maker. Of course, another book to check out of the library is Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by JD Vance. I read the book before watching the movie. It is a “rag to riches” memoir where the hillbilly instincts of his grandmother are idealized and the driving force of his character. JD Vance, in real life has steely blue eyes and a bit squat. In the movie, the actor playing him has soft brown eyes, and is much leaner. In our image-obsessed world, where fact and fiction are constantly blurred, biographic films often become a way to define the narrative.
Perhaps as long as we are going down this road, another book to read would be Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal but Trump surely wrote little of that book. It was written by Tony Schwartz who regrets writing the book. He has stated that if the book were written today, he would name it The Sociopath.
Peter Thiel is 57. JD Vance is 40. Both will be around for a few more decades. Thiel wrote his book with a student, Blake Master. JD Vance did actually write his memoir. These two men will be very influential for years to come. Understanding the realities and myths of where they have come from will be important to understand the future.
Recently, I tried to explain to a friend why I like doing these weeklong bike trips, camping out, eating in diners, living the simple life. I explained that what is really valuable is that the trips make me much more aware of the world. When you get done with the trip, you notice things in your everyday surroundings that you did not before you left. You start hearing things that you had somehow ignored. You see things about your city that you never noticed. Trees. Graffiti. People waiting for the bus. It helps to make a person fully alive.
When I was on the ride I discovered an interesting theme – the crucifix. While I was not riding El Camino Real, the road that the first missionaries traveled, I did pass by a number of old churches. In the end, I realized that there were three crosses that told a story of my journey and of the time and geography I had pedaled.
ACT 1: RIP Our Beloved Eurovan
RIP Our Beloved Eurovan 12-4-2001 – 7-27-2023
You would never see this cross from a car. It is along Skyline Boulevard, about 20 miles outside of Santa Cruz, high on the road, before you make it to Highway 9. If you were in a car you would have zipped by it and never knew it was there. I saw it out of the corner of my eye and had to stop, thinking it was a cross for some poor person who had perished in an automobile accident. I paused and drank some water and took it all in. Fortunately, it was just a van. Obviously, the climb up the coastal range finally did in the German engineering. The Eurovan surely had a good life and was much loved but maybe overheated and the engine seized? The twentieth century and into the twenty-first was a time when the internal combustion engine became something often more loved than other humans. At some point we are all guilty of this fetish. We all at one point gave our cars names and bathed them on the weekends. Cleaned their hubcaps. Worried about their overdue oil changes. That we anthropomorphize them to the point of an afterlife is a bit strange but it sort of makes sense. This must have been a Christian Eurovan. Surely Catholic.
ACT 2: Mission Carmel Basilica
Of course, Mission Carmel Basilica was the second mission in California, and was one of the places where in California the “saving of souls” all began. In this land where all the manmade things are so new, something that has a bit of history stands out. I wonder what the first Indians thought of this place and the cross that adorns the top? The story of the tragic demise of the native peoples and the history is well-known at this point. RIP dear friend. I am sorry you got one of those nasty viruses that came over on the boat. Some day your great, great, great grand daughter will be able to drive a Ford F150 pickup and get vaccines for the diseases that wiped your people out. Let us pray.
ACT 3: Henry Miller Library
Christ on the MacPlus’s – Henry Miller Memorial Library
The third cross that I came across, that really grabbed my attention, was this sculpture above at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur. The cross is made out of old Apple MacPlus computers, stacked up so that you do not realize what you are looking at. Jesus, is but a twist of wiry vines, dried and dead. Is this a statement on the futility of progress and the modern life? Is it a complex diagram of our soulless world that has been usurped by technology, where even Christ gets eaten up by the mayhem of technology and becomes but a tangled mess? Is it a battle between the inorganic and the organic, where the machines always win and both sides die in a tragic death? One obsolete trash. The other just a tangled mess of organic wires impersonating their master? Who’s to say, but it does seem like a tragic omen to our feeble chances of survival.
This genre of art I like to call technomacabre. Along the coast you see it every now and then. Found objects from our recent technological past that are turned into a statement of demise, oppression, humor or even violence. There is no service out here anyway. These things are useless.
Technology, Nailed to the Fence – Mendocino County
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Great Highway traces the roots of Bay Area surfing and explores the changes that time reveals. The history is told by those who lived it in the freezing cold Bay Area conditions. Starring Jack O’Neill, Jack LaLanne, Fred Van Dyke and Michael Ho. The local surfers of Northern California are full of character, and offer their own perspectives on the history and the future of surfing.
Great Highway: Journey to the Soul of San Francisco Surfing is a documentary film about surfing in San Francisco. You can read more about the movie at https://www.greathighwaymovie.com.
What makes the movie all the more valuable and entertaining is that it is not just about surfing, but really about the history of San Francisco, especially on the west side of town. It goes back to the nineteenth century and takes a geographical perspective on Yerba Buena. Eventual, it focuses on what was called The Outside Lands, the sandy desolate place out by the ocean that is now called the Sunset District. We get a view of the various scrappy settlements that took hold out there including Carville, which was made of reused abandoned horsecars (horse-drawn trolleys) and, later, cable cars for housing and public buildings. You get to romp through the period of the heyday of Adolph Sutro’s Sutro Baths and the massive Fleishhacker Pool where now the San Francisco Zoo is located. Eventually the salt water of the ocean had its way and these public places are long gone, though there is still a good left exactly where the Fleishhacker Pool bathhouse once was and old timers still call it Fleishhacker’s. The bathhouse eventually did burn down.
The actual Great Highway was built in the 1929. The movie then romps through grainy footage and interviews of the various surfers who braved the cold water and surfed without wetsuits on crude, homemade boards. It highlights the rebel nature of these early surfers. a persona that interestingly has sort of disappeared as surfing has become more mainstream. The audacity of people like Fred Van Dyke, Bill Hickey, Bill Bergerson and Rod Lundquist to name but a few who broke trail, surfing without wetsuits in the frigid Ocean Beach waters. The movie goes on to talk about the wool sweaters, the fires on the beach and Jack O’Neil inventing the modern wetsuit. The movie has a very raw, low-budget appeal, just like the early days of the sport. It was timely that the film came out in 2017 as many of the old timers that were interviewed have now passed. Their recollections and candor are awe-inspiring. A great movie for people of all ages.
The Quarterly Report: A brief synopsis of the news in San Francisco over the last three months. You are now reading “Slow News That Doesn’t Break” – the exotic internet.
Weather
April turned into May and now it is June. Summer in San Francisco has begun. Along the coast you often have a marine layer, otherwise known as fog. This marine layer will sometimes burn off in the afternoon and then we get the strong onshore northwest winds. It is a time for morning walks and afternoon kiteboarding. The surf season is pretty much over until the fall as most days the ocean is blown out. If you are visiting San Francisco, bring a light jacket and layers, maybe even a beanie. Summer is great time of year to walk along the Embarcadero or better yet to visit wine country where it is much warmer. If you have more time, head to mountains and enjoy the streams and lakes.
Sunset lighting San Francisco City Hall
National Politics
Nothing to report on the national politics front that you probably do not already know. The news cycle is manufactured for the attention span of gnats. The current president is a cunning and treacherous man (pay not attention to that strange man behind the curtain). His weird notion that raising tariffs will bring back manufacturing is silly and naïve and more of a marketing play for some nostalgic bygone era. In the twentieth century, the growth of U.S. manufacturing was a decades-long process. We have sold all the manufacturing equipment to Mexico, China and Brazil (Punching Out – One Year in a Closing Auto Plant by Paul Clemens).
Matt Stoller in his Newsletter Big illuminates this slow news quite well.
In truth, America’s vast productive capacity was built on skill with machine tools, which are the specialized tools that cut, bore or bend metal. In the 20th century, it was America’s capacity to create factories that sparked the “arsenal of democracy,” and America led the world until the 1960s in machine tooling. We were a high productivity and high wage nation, and the basis was a fierce competitive drive to pull out costs in production as aggressively as possible, using our ability to wield machine tools creatively and cheaply. China Is Not Why America Is Sputtering – Matt Stoller on Substack
In the 1980s, the United States economy moved to finance and transferred power to Wall Street where the easy money is had and the people in power could make a quick buck. All the major industries: housing, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, banking, transportation are controlled by Wall Street. It is but a financial game where the oligarch leaders are the casino dealers and they get to count cards. Sorry for the buzz-kill Donald. Tariffs will simply be a tax on mostly poor people. Price inflation on consumer items will be the only result. The factories are not coming back. We are truly living in the Age of Delusion.
What is really happening, if one looks at the larger picture, is that we are in an economic state of Technofeudalism as outlined in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis. Big data now dominates our lives and we are unknowing serfs volunteering our time and energy for the oligarchs who rule the day. Pretty fair assessment. Yanis Varoufakis solutions are a bit overidealistic and impractical, but his birds-eye view of our modern economy is right on. Very chilling.
Another of Donald Trump’s deplorable initiatives is deporting migrants, many whom are in the U.S. legally, and most who do not have a criminal record. Most are here to simply work, make $15-$20 an hour and send some money back home. This is all more than ironic as Mr. Trump is a convicted felon. Our supposed free press has done a deplorable job investigating Trump’s businesses hiring practices. It is common knowledge that people who do the grunt work in hotels, real estate and golf courses are often recent immigrants, often undocumented and living in the shadows. Where are you New York Times and Washington Post? It’s pathetic.
Local Politics
When you visit San Francisco this summer, you may be surprised that there are less unhoused people on the streets. Major Daniel Lurie has done a fine job getting them out of Civic Center, 5th Street and Market Street areas. Often times they do end up getting services and he has been creating more beds. Sometimes the homeless simply move on to the next neighborhood. The Mission District around 16th Street has had a new influx of unhoused people. Indeed, they have made it five miles south of downtown all the way to the sidewalks of the Excelsior District where they camp out on a sidewalk with a fifth of something strong and a cardboard sign pleading for mercy. We have seen this playbook before. However, I do give Mayor Lurie credit. The Civic Center is free of tents and Park & Rec are there with some cool games to play.
Jerry Day in McLaren Park is around the corner on August 2nd
Sporting News
The Golden State Warriors made it to the playoffs but were trounced by the Minnesota Timberwolves. Steff Curry was injured. the team is getting a bit older and without the usual depth. As the saying goes: you can’t win them all.
AT&T Park where the SF Giants play
As of this writing, the San Francisco Giants are playing well and just 2.5 games behind the Dodgers in a tough Western Division.
Author Paul Lyons and Trumpeter Luis Gasca (85 and still doing it)
Road Repairs, Parking Tickets, Do Not Parks Signs and Other Treacherous Endeavors
I recently had to get a new set of tires after just four years for a car that rarely leaves San Francisco. Many of the roads in San Francisco are terrible. This is especially true in the less affluent parts of town.. The City tries but it is odd that high-traffic streets like Mission Street get very little love (this was once the “royal highway” where the early missionaries first traveled). It must be pretty high maintenance for the 14 and 49 Mission buses that bounce their way down the El Camino Real. Below are some of the photos of the roads that I took without even trying. There are worse spots on Mission Street. No bueno!
Mission Street in San Francisco in need of repair
Mission Street in San Francisco in need of repair. You could lose you a child down there.
Mission Street in San Francisco in need of repair
Mission Street in San Francisco in need of repair
That is The Quarterly Report – June 2025
Some photos from the last few months.
The Farmer’s Market on Alemany. Where the real food is.
From Steve Leiner’s The Honest Truth Real Happenings Far Funnier Than Fiction
A woman’s car broke down at a stop sign. As she tried to restart it, the car behind her kept honking. The woman calmly got out, walked over, and politely asked the man at the wheel. “Sir, if you could help me start my car, I’d be happy to sit here and honk your horn for you.” – The Honest Truth: Real Happenings Far Funnier than Fiction by Steve Leiner
San Francisco Carnaval in 2025 took place on May 24 and 25. Both days were mostly sunny with strong westerly winds in the afternoon. I caught a little of the 17th Street stage on Saturday. Sunday we went to the parade. True to form, San Francisco Carnaval is an amazing display of the diverse cultures in San Francisco from the Latin American and Afro-Caribbean worlds – Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, Peru, Cuba, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, Trinidad. I am sure I missed some countries. It is festival and parade were there are no corporate sponsors. So refreshing! It is a once a year event not to be missed.
Lots of horns this year. Banda bands showed up!
Loco Bloco
Loco Bloco
Loco Bloco
Loco Bloco
Classic!
Recology, the garbage collectors do their thing.
Ray Martinez y Los OG’s playing the after-party and Blondie’s’s
Miguel Govea and Edgardo Cambon in a rare photo. Two outstanding musicians and band leaders
The Valencia Street Bike Lane Project is really pretty much done. They got rid of the ugly silly center lane earlier in March and repaved that part of the road with fresh blacktop. The bike lane now zig zags around parklets. Cars have to park further into the street (I like it how now car folks need to watch out for the bikes when walking to the sidewalk – the narrative is flipped). Also, there is plenty of space for cars to drop off people. This is the plan that I thought would work best a few years back. It is like how the bike lane was implemented originally at 14th Street. Bravo!
With the advent of the Great Highway closure and Sunset Dunes Park at the beach, San Francisco is becoming a fine bicycle town.
Cars are still getting use to the bike lane. This driver thought that green zone means that is where you park.Valencia at 22ndValencia at 21st. As bicyclists we are use to going around stuff.
Valencia Street Bike Lane looking south at 22nd Street
Valencia Street Bike Lane looking north at 22nd Street
“That is why, today, I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.” Donald Trump = May 5, 2025, AP News
It never ends. The crazy, ridiculous ideas. Donald Trump wants to save the government money but at the same time wants to open a prison that was closed sixty years ago because it was far too expensive to maintain and run. He seems to have a fetish with incarceration. Someone should inform him that there are many famous prisons in California. For just one of his many offenses and felonies he could be locked up in say San Quentin. That has a ring to it. Or perhaps Folsom Prison where Johnny Cash made that famous album. I am sure they could round up someone to sing the Folsom Prison Blues while Donald lunches on some toxic thin gruel. But I always thought Rikers Island Jail in New York is the most appropriate. Like Alcatraz, it is an island and this way he could get easier visiting rights from the likes of Melania and other friends and family. Just saying.
