So my housemate, Tiffany, and I met up in dowtown San Francisco this morning around
\n10:00 or so. Protestors were chained to large cement garbage cans in
\nMarket Street near 2nd. People were banging on drums and dancing around.
\nThen the police got into formation and started marching around. They told
\neveryone to get out of the street or face arrest. Most folks got out of
\nthe street and then the cops started very calmly arresting people one at a
\ntime. It all seemed very civil. The people waiting to be handcuffed
\nseemed to be having amikable conversations with the cops. They were sat
\ndown, cuffed, then one by one phtographed and put onto a bus.
\nThen the fire department showed up and started cutting through the pipe
\nand chain binding the chained-up protesters together. the police were
\ngetting frustrated and treating non-cooperative protesters roughly. they
\ndropped one woman to the ground and twisted her arms back painfully. When
\nshe said she was in pain, the guy supervising said her pain was nothing
\ncompared to what she had caused commuters that morning.
\nThe bus filled up. People on it were singing “We all Live in a Yellow
\nSubmarine.” they drove away to cheers from the crowd. The crowd was
\nnon-confrontational. They were shouting things like, “SFPD, 99% of the
\ntime, you’re the greatest!” And there were hundreds of cops. We
\noutnumbered them, but there sure were a lot of them.
\nThe problem for them was like the story of the person trying to move the
\nocean with an eyedropped. When they got an intersection cleared, we just
\nmoved down a block and stopped traffic there. People in office buildings
\nstared down at us. work was stopping.<\/p>\n
Tiffany and I walked to the Civic Center for the noon rally. There
\nwere hardly any cops around. The mood was more stressed, but still
\ncarnival like. Some speakers shouted. I purchased some sketchy food that
\nwill probably result in food poisoning.
\nAll of us marched over to the federal building and surrounded it. People
\nhanded out flyers on upcoming protests, other political campaigns and how
\nto be and stay a non-violent protestor.<\/p>\n
We blocked traffic around the federal building. People sat in front of
\nthe parking garage exits. There were a few more cops, but not many. A
\nreporter asked a cop behind me how they were planning on getting people
\nout of the building. the cop said he didn’t know. My father-in-law used
\nto work in that building, I’m pretty sure. Stopping the Forrest Service
\ndoesn’t seem super-productive. Anyway, it seemed like that if folks
\nwanted out, the protesters would not only have let them out, but would
\nhave cheered them for leaving work. going back might have been a problem,
\nit seemed, but then later I heard folks verbally discouraging a court
\nreporter from going to work, and he got in anyway.
\nSome guy was holding a sign that said “Puke for Peace.” I just read a
\nnews report that said that 300 people actually did vomit as protest.
\ngoodness.
\nI walked up the street and saw a marching band and asked them about
\njoining, explaining that I want to get a marching harness for my lap tuba. The
\nsuosaphone player was exhausted. It was 2:00-something and he’d been
\nplaying since 7:00 AM and the wind was very gusty, which is hell for
\nsousaphones with their big bell facing forward. So I marched and played a
\ncouple of songs. There was no printed music. He told me the songs were
\nin d and F mostly, so I faked it.<\/p>\n
The crowd at the federal building was thinning out, so we called Christi, my wifey, to find out what was
\ngoing on. She had a tough call to make this morning, since she works
\nfor a struggling non-profit. After seeing the CHP looking grim in riot gear on the way in to the city, she decided
\nto go to work rather than risk a scary encounter with one of them.
\nAnyway, she told us that there was rubber bullets and tear gas being used
\nover at 7th and Market and that there was an officer down.
\nTiffany and I walked over to see what was going on and so I could get
\nfield recordings of it. I wore a pair of binaural mics in my ear all day,
\nrecording to a sony minidisk. the minidisk is the bomb. I never have
\nbrought my DAT recorder to a protest, even with the ghigher quality. I
\ndon’t yet have a didigtal out for the disks yet, but anyway, we walked
\nover there.
\nthere was some spray paint and a group of what looked like black-block
\nprotesters. Thos are anarchists who wear black, spray paint and break
\nwindows of war profiteers. they want to end capitalism. there were a
\ncouple of folks sitting in the street, handcuffed, a lot of people milling
\naround and a whole lot of cops. chanting was sparse all day and the
\nafternoon crowd there at Market was nearly silent. Watching, waiting.
\nthe cops outnumbered the crowd. while i was there, a whole bunch of CHP
\nshowed up. The cops standing next to the sidewalk were the same cops I
\nsaw that morning, only they looked tired, more grim and angry. A few
\nmeters from me, they started arguing with some woman standing on the
\nsidewalk. they threw her to the ground and cuffed her. She was
\nscreaming, that she wasn’t a protester, she was just standing there, she
\ndidn’t do anything. As far as I could tell, they did pick her at random.
\nshe was on the sidewalk, not blocking traffic. And they seemed to be using a lot of force. She was yelling that them, but dropping her to the pavement face first seemed to be excessive
\nEveryone was angry and the cops outnumbered us and seemed very determined.
\nAt the noon rally, the protest organizers told us to go to the financial
\ndistrict at 4:00 to block evening commute traffic. I think the cops were
\ngoing to open the street, damnit.<\/p>\n
No sign of what we’d been told over the phone happening… yet. So we
\nwent for a walk the other way. There was a crane picking up all the
\ncement grabage cans and putting them on a truck so that nobody could drag
\nthem into the street and be chained to them anymore.<\/p>\n
after sleeping less than an hour last night, I’mm too dern tired to block
\ncommute traffic this evening. think I’ll do more stuff tomorrow instead,
\nafter I write the music I need to write (deadlines….)<\/p>\n
if you had an orange vest and some safety cones, you could cause traffic
\nhavok, just going from intersection to intersection, coning it off. The
\nsalvage yard in berkeley at 7th and ashby sells cones for like $1 each.
\nfyi. there’s also a movement to drive really slow. Drive slow, walk
\nslow, hold up traffic. the slow-moving protest actually was instrumental
\nin driving a dictator out of power, but i’m too tired to remember where.
\nTiffany knows all about it though. Ask her.
\nanyway, i have 4 or 5 minidisks full of field recordings, but no digital
\nout anywhere on my recorder. la la la. need to get the recorder to dump
\nto my puter.<\/p>\n
stop work to stop the war!<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
disrupting san francisco Morning So my housemate, Tiffany, and I met up in dowtown San Francisco this morning around 10:00 or so. Protestors were chained to large cement garbage cans in Market Street near 2nd. People were banging on drums and dancing around. Then the police got into formation and started marching around. They told … Continue reading <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[76,214,81,286],"class_list":["post-1860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-celesteh","tag-peace","tag-protest","tag-tifanjo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1860"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4112,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1860\/revisions\/4112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}