updated 25 jan 2020
new dec 2016
(december 2016) what with the recent horrific fire in the oakland queer warehouse, and discussions about *physically* supporting queer and other outlier culture, i thought that some of these pictures might be part of the conversation. previous to all this, i had been asked to locate some pics of this era for a documentary. it took me a while to find the particular shoe box and hand scan (poorly) a small number of photographs. that induced me to have them professionally scanned as they are a snapshot, literally in in this case, of our/my time (1984 -- 1996) in queer san francisco.
most of the the ahhh-fucking-propos pics involve our Shred of Dignity Skaters Union, housed in a warehouse at 164 Shipley from 1986 until 1990, the year after the earthquake. our scumbag landlord attempted to scam us out, we sued, won, and spent the proceedings moving to fancy (sic) digs at 666 Illinois Street. all of these pictures need captions, by me and everyone involved too (all our stories will overlap but be totally different). not sure how to pull that off. later on that.
but that fire could have been us, at 164, less so 666. and we were probably better prepared than others, duke and i were highly skilled adults and kept things somewhat less lethal than they might have been. i'm fairly sure we outright absolutely banned candles, for instance. footnotes in history now. but the conversation is more complex than "you need to meet code". the hostility from city infrastructure at large towards non-compliant culture -- even us white folk, i can't even imagine black and brown folks' issues -- is hard to imagine. cops denied permits. harrassed shows. even venues like the cruddy wagon (aka Covered Wagon, bar and venue on Folsom Street) constantly harrassed and shows shutdown -- keeping everyone involved poor and constantly defensive -- by police and fire (gratuitously, even places that did meet code), by pressure from commercial shitbag fucktards like Bill Graham Presents (now Bill Graham Dead, Fuck You shithead, smacked your helicopter into a high-tension tower, haha). we could barely afford the 85 cents per square foot for Shipley (it was twice that, but we built a huge mezzanine). not that this matters, in any need to justify or account for ourselves, but Shred directly hosted or supported lots of social/political stuff; no on 96/102 propositions, countless protests, hit'n'run punk shows (we preceded pat cadigan's lovely fiction), weekend portable skate events for kids homeless and not, fund raisers (shawn alone did many Women's Building fundraisers when they were still making their balloon payment), etc. it was all done for fun, and on the cheap, largely invisible, to support our friends and what little infrastructure existed (eg. the Women's Building for example, hosted HOMOCORE shows, got broken into by the FBI illegally looking for political records). the ghost ship in oakland was the same, but probably better, and on a vaster scale. it's a huge loss, and fuck you to anyone blaming the victims.
anyway enjoy the pics. wysiwyg.
here's some more 1990's internet hits. (you may not) recall that images of any kind were slow to load at 2400 bits/sec. my first Shipley web page. some pictures of various shits annoying us in and around the U.S. at that time. greta snider's punk dating game, an unthinkably huge 8 million bytes long. and then later i did this toilet cam hoax that got noticed by TIME magazine and used as evidence of the decline of civilization. little did they know they got it exactly backwards.
