Baudelaire on the Flaneur (was Re: Global Warming)

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Fri Apr 6 13:03:56 PDT 2001


Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>You live too far away from work, which is a common problem under post-WW2 industrial capitalism. Separation of work from the rest of life has done damage to working-class self-organization.

One of Jerry Brown's ideas when he ran for Mayor of Oakland was to move towards high density, ecologically sustainainable work/live situations in downtown Oakland. I'm not connected anymore with the circles in the East Bay I used to be but, from KPFA and folks like Wilson Riles, Jr., http://vsasf.org/moonbeam.htm and Dan Siegal, (People's Park leader ["Take The Park!] now lawyer for Oakland Public Schools) almost all I hear about Jerry these days is "racist, gentrifier" and militarist mofo for the ROTC academy idea http://www.google.com/search?q=jerry+brown+sustainability http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_4_a2.html ("He's a f--k, announces Scrappy, a blue-haired 25-year-old with tongue rings, nose rings, and dagger-shaped earrings. "Oakland used to be a cool town, but now we can't hang out on the streets without someone saying you gotta go." Last time he wandered through downtown Oakland with his sleeping bag, Scrappy says, the police stopped him five times in seven blocks to ask about drugs. He shakes his head philosophically: "No, they don't like gutterpunks at all in Oakland.") And that that his ex-Maoist Froggy aide, Bazargghi, is a sexual harasser.Which sounds true. Any non-flammage opinions out there? Not that I wouldn't agree with most of the case against Jerry but, so much one hears about him seems overheated. Michael Pugliese



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