To mark the occasion, San Francisco muralista Mona Caron has created a stunning poster, revising her “Bike Angel” character from the poster she created in 2002. Check it out:

Says Mona:

10 years ago I drew a poster for the 10th anniversary of the bicycle movement Critical Mass. Hard to believe it’s been a decade! This mere fact called for a remake. So here’s the sequel: an aged bike sprite with a new generation, plus a little reminder of good old CM etiquette tucked in, and an homage to a random assortment of rad bicycle people from SF and around the world.

If you’ve wandered around San Francisco long enough, you’ve likely spied Mona’s stunning, detailed murals. We wrote about her work back in 2010.

The poster is available to purchase from the sfcriticalmass.org site, and you can also download free jpgs of the image from the associated Flickr page.

Many people know conceptual artist John Baldessari as “the guy who puts dots on people’s faces.” But did you know that he is 6’7″ and that his wifi password is 123456789B? This short documentary tells you all you need to know about Baldessari, crammed into 6 minutes, with gravelly narration by Tom Waits. The film was commissioned by LACMA in 2011 for their “Art + Film Gala” honoring Baldessari and Clint Eastwood, and was directed by Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is heading to Las Vegas this week for DEF CON 19, the elite conference that gathers hackers, crackers, journalists and FBI agents together under one roof to discuss all things cyber.

To commemorate, EFF has produced a special shirt by Robots & Monsters charity demigod Joe Alterio. The shirt looks cool enough under ordinary light conditions, but walk under a black light and super-secret computer codes are revealed. And if you walk into a completely darkened room (where most hackers spend their time), the shirt glows in the dark to reveal a very important message: STRONG ENCRYPTION SAVES LIVES!

The shirt is only available at DEF CON, but EFF has other great swag available when you join or renew online, including their new Bit-Blaster Mecha shirt, designed by yours truly.

For more information on encryption and how it does, in fact, save lives, check out the handy encryption advice to be found on EFF’s Surveillance Self Defense site.

Four guys inside a wind flight simulator in Prague have invented a new form of synchronized skydive dancing.

via Daily Mail

To learn more about your rights if one of your videos is removed from YouTube, check out EFF’s guide to YouTube removals.

Awesome cartoonist and free culture activist Nina Paley has produced “Credit Is Due”, another of her great minute meme videos, encouraging those of us who like to share and re-mix the work of others to be sure and give credit where credit is due. Check out Nina’s blog post for more on the subject.

And there’s also Nina’s book Misinformation Wants to Be Free, collecting some of the great comics Nina has used to explore ideas about copyright, free speech and intellectual property.

“Star Drek” and “Other Vaders”, from the series of delightful comics by San Francisco illustrator Adam McCauley. Adam has also illustrated a number of fantastic books for kids, including The Monsterologist and Mom and Dad Are Palindromes.

Wait — was there even such a thing as color photography in 1906? In fact there was. The science behind color photography was introduced in the 1850s, and by the early 20th century there were pioneers around the world racing to invent a commercially viable means of bringing photos to life with color. Among them was Frederick Eugene Ives, the man behind the camera that took these images.

Ives’ color process was called “Kromskop” (pronounced “chrome-scope”). Wikipedia’s entry on color photography has some great details:

The color images, dubbed “Kromograms,” were in the form of sets of three black-and-white transparencies on glass, mounted onto special cloth-tape-hinged triple cardboard frames. To see a Kromogram in color it had to be inserted into a “Kromskop” (generic name “chromoscope” or “photochromoscope”), a viewing device which used an arrangement of colored glass filters to illuminate each slide with the correct color of light and transparent reflectors to visually combine them into a single full-color image. The most popular model was stereoscopic. By looking through its pair of lenses, an image in full natural color and 3-D was seen, a startling novelty in the late Victorian age.

The results won near-universal praise for excellence and realism. At demonstrations, Ives sometimes placed a viewer displaying a still-life subject next to the actual objects photographed, inviting direct comparison. A Kromskop triple “lantern” could be used to project the three images, mounted in a special metal or wooden frame for this purpose, through filters as Maxwell had done in 1861. Prepared Kromograms of still-life subjects, landscapes, famous buildings and works of art were sold and these were the Kromskop viewer’s usual fodder, but a “multiple back” camera attachment and a set of three specially adjusted color filters could be bought by “Kromskopists” wishing to make their own Kromograms.

Ives is also famous for his contributions to the halftone reproduction process, whereby photographs are reduced to a series of dots to aid in print reproduction, a technique still used today.

MondoWindow is a new site that aims to help you overcome this coastal elitism. If your flight offers Wi-Fi service, you can log in to the MondoWindow site from the air, type in your flight number and airline, and be instantly served a bunch of data on where you are. You get a zoomable satellite image of the terrain below you, with links to items of interest on the ground, pulling geo-tagged content from Flickr, Wikipedia and the site founder’s own research.

The site was co-founded by San Franciscan Greg Dicum, author of the amazing illustrated series Window Seat, which took a similar approach in book form. Says Dicum, “I have been dreaming about something like this for a decade, and I just cannot believe that not only does MondoWindow now exist, but that I’m one one who made it happen!” Dicum and co-founder Tyler Sterkel have only just launched the site, which they plan to develop further with additional social networking capabilities, games, and other content. At the moment the site covers only the lower 48, but it will soon include worldwide coverage.

You don’t need to be in the air to check out MondoWindow. Just choose a flight or a destination and you can see it in action. I can’t wait to try this the next time I’m on a flight!

MondoWindow CNET article.
MondoWindow on Facebook.
MondoWindow on Twitter.

Soderbergh, of course, is the director of some fantastic films. Since 1989, he has made on average a movie a year (sometimes 2), ranging from experimental, low-budget indie classics like Sex, Lies and Videotape and The Limey to mainstream blockbusters like Erin Brockovich and Ocean’s Eleven.

Personally, when I heard Soderbergh was in town, I was hoping it was to film The Limey, Part II with Terence Stamp. Now that would be a nice way to transform the city!

Two things might pop into your head when you first meet Diamond Dave. One is that this guy looks like he walked off the set of a movie about the ’60s generation — as if central casting just sent over the guy who’ll be playing the aging hippy radical. The second thing you notice is that he can’t be so easily pigeonholed. This larger-than-life character is really way more complex than any label you might try to put on him!

Dave talks fast. The words tumble out of his mouth in a long stream of allusion and alliteration, rhythm and rhyme. If you’re not listening carefully, you might miss a brilliant line or turn of phrase. You have to tune in to Dave’s frequency, and when you do, you get turned on to a whole new story.

Dave has a lot of stories. He’s spent a lifetime — several lifetimes, in fact — steeped in the underground culture of the Bay Area. He came here in 1957, and remembers the moment Jack Kerouac arrived with new copies of his totally obscure new book, On The Road. He knew Bob Dylan back before Dylan was famous (and introduced him to Woody Guthrie). Dave was Beat before there were Beatniks, hip before there were hippies, punk before punk even happened. He’s had his finger on the pulse of nearly every famous, infamous, obscure, underground, marginal and influential cultural moment you can imagine.

Throughout it all, Dave has been more than an observer or commenter. He’s been a poet — constantly performing, speaking, telling stories, using language to engage and connect. At the moment, Dave hosts the Common Thread show and open mic on Pirate Cat Radio in the Mission, and appears on KPOO from time to time. He’s constantly promoting and celebrating the work of others. (True to form, when I showed up at Pirate Cat to interview him, he insisted on putting me on the air to discuss Laughing Squid!) And he’ll be teaching a class at the Free University of San Francisco shortly!

Diamond Dave is not some sort of museum piece — in fact, he’s the opposite! He’s a living, breathing poet and teacher from an old but very much alive tradition. The reason Dave has been able to keep going strong for all these years is that he’s always changing, adapting, seeing what’s new, always with a great appreciation for the creativity and genius of the next generation. He’s not frozen in time, he is of his time — in the most radical, uncompromising way.

Thanks Dave, for 5+ decades of poetry, politics, and people power!

photo by Eddie Codel

Less than two months in, and it looks like 2011 will be another banner year for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They scored a landmark ruling in favor of your right to re-sell promo CDs in January. This month they convinced a copyright troll to drop a bogus lawsuit against hundreds of alleged downloaders. And just this week they contributed to the successful outcry against fast-track reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act.

To celebrate these and other future victories for your digital rights, come help celebrate EFF’s 21st birthday at BAMM.TV studios in San Francisco, this February 16th.

Join us as nerdcore and chiptune artists Dual Core, Crashfaster, Trash80, and Doctor Popular sling dope rhymes and bangin’ bleeps for EFF’s 21st birthday at the future-focused BAMM.tv studio in San Francisco.

Dual Core became the first nerdcore group to play both the main stages at Las Vegas’s DEFCON, the world’s largest hacker convention, and the CCC Camp hacker conference in Germany. Crashfaster is a chip musician, retro remixer, and low-bit concert promoter whose outreach has galvanized the Bay Area’s vibrant chiptune community. Trash80 is the eminent chip musician behind ArduinoBoy — software that helps integrate the Nintendo Game Boy into any existing electronic music arsenal. Doctor Popular is the ironic nickname of professional yo-yoer, nerdcore artist, and innovator Brian C. Roberts. His name is ironic because he is neither a Doctor nor popular.

Concert host Bricks and Mortar Media (BAMM.tv) uses slick technology and a breakthrough business model to help artists capture performances and distribute their music and video online. BAMM.tv Studios will be live-streaming the concert for anyone not in San Francisco on Wednesday night.

The suggested donation for this event is $30, which gets you access to the show, drinks at an open bar (while supplies last), and the opportunity to hob-nob with some of the legal and tech geniuses that are on the forefront of the fight for your free speech, privacy and other rights in the digital world!

EFF’s 21st Birthday
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011, 8pm
BAMM.tv Studios
43 Norfolk Street
San Francisco

You can donate at the door or buy your tickets now!

With the tuition fees shooting through the roof at UC and State schools, wouldn’t it be nice if there were some way to get a free education? The new Free University of San Francisco aims to do just that, offering classes on all sorts of subjects that will be absolutely free. No charge. Gratis. On the house.

The classes are held at Virachocha, 998 Valencia at 21st, and the historic first teach-in is this Saturday! Matt Gonzalez will teach “Fundamentals of Law,” Alan Kaufman will lecture on “Jack Kerouac, Thelonious Monk and Jackson Pollock,” and Diane Di Prima will speak on “Vision and the Visionary Poet.” And that’s just the beginning! The whole day is packed full of fascinating people talking about fascinating stuff.

Free University of San Francisco (website)
Free University of San Francisco (Facebook group)

Our mission is to oversee the restoration of humanity—warm, literate, democratic—to vibrant human life. In order to achieve this aim we must take hold of the very hub of our culture, which is education, and create a brand new kind of institution, one whose existence makes no sense in the current social order, one that stands in direct defiance of the privatized profit-oriented social engineering centers that pass for universities today.

Poster art by the amazing Chuck Sperry!

Robo-Rainbow by Akay.

via Wired Underwire

The artist behind the animation is Berkeley artist and New York transplant Eric Drooker. You might have seen some of Drooker’s work on the cover of the New Yorker, where he regularly produces some of that magazine’s most stunning and iconic images:

“I worked as animation designer on Howl for about three years,” says Drooker. “I created hundreds of storyboards, character designs, and a ton of concept art—the best of which has recently been published as ‘Howl: A Graphic Novel‘”

Drooker was a natural choice for the filmmakers. Ginsberg at one time collected Drooker’s street art in New York, and the two were friends and collaborators.

On Wednesday, February 9, Drooker will give one of his famous slide lectures (free!) at CounterPulse in San Francisco. Here’s the blurb:

Visual artist Eric Drooker will project hundreds of images and explore his early years as a street artist in New York City. He’ll trace the evolution of his graphic novels into animation, as in the recent hit film HOWL, and discuss his experiences creating street posters, covers for The New Yorker—and his slow infiltration of the mainstream.

Eric Drooker—The Art of Animating HOWL!
February 9, 2011, 7:30pm
CounterPulse
1310 Mission @ 9th Street

See you there!

Photo of Drooker and Ginsberg: Arne Svenson (1995)

If you’re an artist, self-employed or just underinsured, you might be interested in San Francisco’s health care option, Healthy SF. And what you need is a local singer/songwriter to explain it all to you. Rupa Marya, from Rupa and the April Fishes, is more than qualified. In addition to being a chanteuse of epic talents, Rupa is also a health practitioner — and I don’t mean that metaphorically, as a reference to the healing powers of song. No, Rupa is an actual MD!

Here’s the scoop:

The Community Music Forum brings you another chapter. . .A FREE presentation of how to access services available at low cost (or no cost) in SF. This session is OPEN TO ALL—not just artists but will highlight health issues that tend to be more prevalent in SF’s art scene.

We will have a representative from SF’s HEALTHY SF there to demystify the enrollment process and answer any questions you have about HEALTHY SF–if you qualify for it (you probably do), what medications and services are covered, what is not covered and how you get set up.

We will also have a list of providers available from other healing traditions who provide sliding scale services. And if you have any random health questions, there will be a handful of doctors in the house.

COME ON BY! and RSVP so we can get a headcount and make enough chai. ..

Date: Saturday, January 8 · 2:00pm – 3:30pm
Location: Porto Franco Art Parlor, 953 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA
Facebook Event Listing: Accessing Health Care for Artists in SF

photo by Thomas Hawk

Here’s why I think you should consider giving a year-end donation to EFF: this tiny organization manages to rack up victory after victory, year after year, in the defense of your digital rights. Just this year, they succeeded in freeing your smart phone from restrictions against jailbreaking, fought back against copyright trolls shaking down individuals for alleged infringements, and helped you take better control of your privacy on Facebook. Just this month, they scored two additional major victories: they helped convince a federal court to rule that your email is protected by the 4th amendment, and they secured better protection for your cell phone location information. The EFF international team alone does the work of several organizations.

As a former employee of EFF, I can confirm that your money will be well spent. There are no fancy offices, no exorbitant salaries, and only a small staff working full time to defend your digital rights, all year long. Every penny you give will be used to continue the fight for free speech, privacy, innovation and transparency in the digital world — with hopefully more victories to come in 2011!

Support EFF this holiday season!

The Humble Indie Bundle from Wolfire Games is back! Five of the hottest games from independent developers, offered without DRM on a pay-what-you-want basis. Even better, you can divide your payment however you like between the developers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Child’s Play Charity.

From the EFF blog:

It’s a great promotion, proving once again that consumers, given the right opportunities, can be trusted to support content they want—without having to be sued, surveilled, or censored into compliance. EFF continues to protect freedom and innovation in the gaming world, whether we are arguing for the right of gamers to speak anonymously, defending video games from unconstitutional censorship, or protecting your right to resell, modify, or copy the games you have purchased. EFF has also urged the United States Supreme Court to protect the free speech rights of videogame creators and users, throwing out unconstitutional restrictions on violent videogames. To find out more about our work related to video games, visit our latest issue page.

Get it while you can!

Phil Lord and Chris Miller who created this brilliant ad say: “This was a fake commercial we made in 1998 for a series of educational shorts about action figures based on historical figures. Its educational value was somewhat suspect. It was never aired.”

Nina’s feature-length opus, Sita Sings the Blues, will be screened on July 20th at the Delancey Street Foundation Screening Room as a benefit for EFF and the Cartoon Art Museum. Get tickets in advance at action.eff.org/ninapaley. And if you’re a fan of Nina’s work, you can see a wide-ranging retrospective of Nina’s work at the Cartoon Art Museum through October 24th.

Muralist Mona Caron (left) working in the Tenderloin with project manager Lisa Ruth Elliot. Photo: Nick Kasimatis.

I once rode the J-Church in San Francisco with my friend, the muralist Mona Caron. When you ride that train, there’s a brief moment where you can see the tail end of Mona’s first public artwork, the Duboce Bikeway Mural, and as she and I passed we chatted about that project — how she did it, where the funding came from, etc. When the other passengers overheard our conversation, realizing she was the artist behind this epic work, the entire car spontaneously burst into applause.

A detail from Windows Into the Tenderloin. Photo: Mona Caron.

For the people that live near or pass Mona’s murals on a regular basis, her work is a gift that keeps on giving. In part that’s due to her technical virtuosity, which puts her in the company of the very best of the mural tradition in this or any country. She has a rare mastery of perspective, anatomy, rendering and color that gives her work an undeniable authenticity as art, that makes you stand up and take notice. But I think the real pleasure people have in her murals, and the thing that brings them back to view and enjoy them again and again, is the radical utopian vision that animates her art.

You can see that utopianism in her newest mural, Windows Into the Tenderloin, which Mona will be dedicating at a party Friday afternoon:

MURAL DEDICATION EVENT
Friday, March 5th, 3:30pm
Corner of Jones & Golden Gate
Everyone welcome!

Located on the corner of Jones and Golden Gate in the heart of the Tenderloin, the piece is an honest picture of the neighborhood, created in part through hours of community input, and enlivened by portraits of the local characters that Mona has befriended over the year and a half she has been working on it.

Photographer unknown.

Photo: Mona Caron.

Photo: Mona Caron.

Photo: Mona Caron.

The finished work uses virtuoso trompe-l’oeil to open windows on the social life of the area, expressing in art the deep social bonds that always exist, even in the most devastated community. Mona doesn’t sugarcoat a tough situation, but she reminds us that in the Tenderloin, just like anywhere else, good things as well as bad things are happening. Crime, drug use and poverty make life more difficult, but social life goes on —people laugh and talk and eat together, raising children and watching out for each other in countless ways.

Elsewhere in the mural, she peels away huge swaths of wall to reveal the natural ecology that stubbornly refuses to die, even as the urban environment masks it, paves it over.

Photo: Mona Caron.

Mona’s work is epic, but it calls our attention back to the little details, the small signs that life continues, refusing to be crushed or defeated, even in the face of poverty, urban decay, racism, environmental degradation. We can call that vision utopian, but it’s also just a fact, a truth that we all know but that is so rarely spoken aloud.

Thanks, Mona, for this great gift to our city and the world!

Check out more of Mona’s amazing murals and artwork on her website: monacaron.com.

One of my most prized possessions is a handmade doll created by local artist Jennybird Alcantara. It’s sweet, sad, creepy and eerily lifelike, like so much of Jennybird’s art.

On her website, Jennybird describes her art as inspired by “fairytales and fables, mythology, the flora and fauna of the natural world and freaks of nature, melancholy and classical music, Victorian customs, folk art, costuming, creepy religious statues and paintings, Symbolism, carnivals, trips down memory lane, broken dolls and objects out of place. As well as all the beautiful and sad things that could not exist one without the other, life and death and the veil in between.”

Jennybird has a show of new work called Treacherous Gardens opening Friday night at Varnish Fine Art in San Francisco.

Treacherous Gardens
7-10pm
Varnish Fine Art
77 Natoma street between 1st and 2nd St. and Mission and Howard

image via Jennybird Alcantara & Varnish Fine Art

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hosting a fantastic Geek Reading fundraiser this Monday evening at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. Come hear some of the leading lights of contemporary science fiction read from their latest works, and support EFF’s work defending freedom and protecting rights on the electronic frontier!

Here are the details:

Geek Reading
Cory Doctorow, Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders
Reading from their latest works
Monday, March 23rd at 7pm
111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna at 2nd Street, San Franicsco
$25 donation, no one turned away for not being a billionaire
21 and over

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing, and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, Make, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. Cory is an EFF fellow and the former Director of European Affairs at EFF. Cory will be reading from his novel, “Little Brother,” a story of high-tech teenage rebellion set in the familiar world of San Francisco. As he currently calls the UK home, this is a rare opportunity to to hear Cory read from his work in person.

Rudy Rucker is a 1st generation cyberpunk author, winner of the Phillip K. Dick Award, and author of the recent novel “Postsingular.” Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rudy studied mathematics, earning a Ph.D. from Rutgers University in the theory of infinite sets. After working 15 years as a mathematics professor on the East Coast, Rudy moved to Silicon Valley in 1986 to become a computer science professor at San Jose State University, also working as a software engineer at Autodesk, Inc. “The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul” — his most recent nonfiction book — is about the meaning of computation.

Annalee Newitz is a journalist who covers the cultural impact of science and technology, covering such topics as open source software and hacker subcultures. Annalee writes for many periodicals, including Popular Science and Wired, and since 1999 has had a syndicated weekly column called Techsploitation. From 2004-2005, Annalee was a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She is the editor of io9, a Gawker-owned science fiction blog.

Charlie Jane Anders blogs about science fiction at io9.com. She organizes the Writers With Drinks reading series and is starting a weekly podcast called “I Am So Smart.” Her writing has appeared most recently in “The McSweeney’s Joke Book Of Book Jokes,” Mother Jones magazine, and the upcoming “Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2009 Edition.” Charlie wrote a novel called “Choir Boy” and co-edited an anthology called “She’s Such a Geek.” Find her on Twitter as “charliejane.”

photos by Patrick H. Lauke, Gary Boodhoo, Scott Beale & Kirk Brooks

You don’t know what you’ve got till you’ve gone.

I was never a big fan of the Mr. Pickle sign just down street from my workplace — it’s big, it’s neon green, it’s garish as all hell. But now that Mr. Pickle has been stolen, I’m distraught. What will become of our native San Franciscan culture if quirky, imaginative signage like Mr. Pickle can be so easily plucked from the city streets and made to disappear without a trace?

My co-workers at EFF say Mr. Pickle has the best sandwiches in the neighborhood (though being gluten-intolerant, I can’t confirm this). The owners would like their sign back. If you have any information, please help Mr. Pickle find his way home!

via Mission Mission

photo by Todd Lappin (Telstar Logistics)

I’ve been attending the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair (and creating graphics for it) for at least five years now, and the thing I love about it is the sheer size and cacophony of the event. You step inside and find booth after booth full of books, pamphlets, and zines on every conceivable fringe-y subject — plus comics, music, t-shirts, an art show, and speakers on subjects ranging from how to compost to how to survive industrial collapse.

Here’s the poster I created for the event this year.

Here’s a list of items I’ve bought at past Anarchist Bookfairs:

• very rare Emma Goldman classic, “My Disillusionment in Russia”
• a bike zine on how to build your own cargo bike which I have never used but will some day
• actual (pre-Kool Aid) Jonestown pamphlet from 1977, all about the beautiful utopia being built in Guyana
• “Resistance is Fertile” t-shirt with cool woodcut graphics
• hard-to-find copy of “Mr. Block” cartoons from old IWW papers
• Ken Knabb’s excellent memoir, Public Secrets, describing 30+ years of political agitation in the Bay Area

You don’t have to agree with everyone there — in fact, that would be impossible, given the wide range of totally contradictory ideas on offer. You’ve heard about the marketplace of ideas? This is what it looks like.

This year’s speakers this year includes my friend Chris Carlsson, talking about his new book Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today.

Here are the details for the event:

Bound Together Books Presents:
The 4th Annual Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair
Saturday, March 14, 2009 (10am-6pm)
Sunday, March 15, 2009 (11am-5pm)

SF County Fair Building
Ninth Avenue and Lincoln Way
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
Valet bike parking and Kid/Family space provided
Free

And here’s a link to the CC-licensed Bookfair posters I’ve designed in years past.

poster by Hugh D’Andrade