WORD SALAD

Word Salad - Full set from a 2007 show I booked for them in Berkeley, CA

Dave Mello

Jewdriver original lineup after a show I booked for them in Oakland at "Punx Not Presses" on 40th and Adeline in 2003. It's their guitar player Dave's birthday, so wish Mr. Mello a happy one if by chance you spot him in line at Gordo on Solano.

Pigheart Transplant

Still Not Quiet On The Western Front: Sunday Matinee

Ludicra

Ludicra - Urban Guerrilla Zine b-day show in Berkeley, 2002

Photo by Sam Bortnick

Ai Weiwei

Photo by Ai Weiwei

Malcolm X

"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against." 
-Malcolm X

1963, Malcom X at a C.O.R.E. sponsored protest for more jobs for black Americans at Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York.

 -Photo by Bob Adelman

Discordia

DISCORDIA - live in Mexico 

I used a song from their demo on the first Urban Guerrilla Zine compilation back in 2001 (it came free with a zine). This video looks like it was probably shot in the late 90s. Members of Discordia went on to play in bands like Bumbklaatt and Coaccion, both of which I booked shows for here (Bay Area) up until the late 2000s.

Women of the Mexican Revolution

Soldadera during the Mexican Revolution 

Reprinted from Elena Poniatowska, Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution.

16th and Shotwell

This used to be Rolling Stock Tires & Auto Repair before it was demolished in the middle of the night last November by the building's owner after a suspicious fire that displaced 21 people. Last I heard they were planning to build condos on the now empty lot.

Photo by Jay Unidos

Mike Giant

Slap tagging, San Francisco, 1994.  

Photo by Ben Lovejoy

TDK: The Dream Kontinues

Still Not Quiet On The Western Front

Maximum Rocknroll presents their first fest in almost a decade! STILL NOT QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT Fest will be happening in the Bay Area Thursday February 11th through Sunday February 14th of 2016. Forty DIY punk bands from all over will be playing shows in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, with five main shows, two day shows, and three after shows. 

For more info: https://www.facebook.com/events/1717331005163685/

RIP Filip Fuchs

This photo was taken by Murray Bowles at a show See You In Hell played in Oakland at a now defunct cafe. Definitely not one of our (UGZ) shows, which is what happens sometimes when you lose touch over the years.  The show before that was in SF at a cool, basement style venue around the block from the old CW, but it’s not where I would've imagined SYIH playing after waiting so many years to to tour and play the Bay Area. Filip and I talked about a bunch of stuff (an attempt to quickly catch up) that night, but the one thing I definitely took away from our conversation was that his enthusiasm for that tour was waning, to say the least. As a booker/promoter I wasn't too stoked on the Oakland gig (although the bands were solid), but at least it was packed for that venue. I didn't recognize as many people as I would've even 5 years earlier, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. At the end of See You In Hell's set, someone associated with the cafe got in Filip's face for who knows what reason.  I didn’t know or recognize the kid that did that, but already knowing how Filip felt about the tour prior to the Oakland show just added to the frustration I felt when I saw that.  To make matters worse I found out later that someone stole the band's tour money at that show.  Oakland, a city that Filip was genuinely excited about playing when we discussed it in the early two thousands at one of the Super Sabado Gigante shows had turned out to be nothing like the way I’d described it to him thirteen years earlier.  

Like I said, I lost touch with Filip and a bunch of my pre-social networking pen pals from back when Urban Guerrilla Zine was bigger, and a momentarily a record label, so it was cool to discover things I missed in the last 24 hours, like a video of See You In Hell playing a breakfast show in Austin at Chaos In Tejas, as well as videos of the band playing shows in BRNO, Czech Republic, including one where they dressed up like Discharge, charge hair and all.  I was writing and trading with Filip over a decade ago, but he was only in his mid-thirties when he lost his battle with cancer this past weekend.  I think his young age speaks to how active and committed he was to the spirit and ideal of hardcore D.I.Y. punk.  He accomplished a lot (more than I know actually) in his relatively short time here on this plane of existence, and his passing is our loss.  RIP Filip Fuchs.

Thursday Blog 1.7.16

Here is my first blog of the new year, and even though I’m looking forward to 2016, this is going to be a look back at Urban Guerrilla Zine in 2015.  I attempted to post a new blog every Monday towards the end of last year, which pretty quickly turned into every other Monday, but even so I’ve decided to commit to posting a couple a blogs a week in 2016.  Now, let’s take it back to time not so long ago.

In 2015, I managed to put out two zines, which isn’t that impressive.  On the other hand, when you’ve been putting out a zero zines per year for the last seven or eight years, two’s pretty good.  Urban Guerrilla Zine has never really gone away or stopped being active.  When there wasn’t a new issue of Urban Guerrilla Zine there were over a hundred UGZ Presents shows that I booked and promoted, like the UGZ Speed Trials for example, and when I stopped booking shows there was the internet.  When the internet started to feel a bit too isolating and detached, I decided to make zines again.  For most folks Urban Guerrilla Zine existed from 1997-2006, and that was pretty much it until 2015.

Urban Guerrilla Zine #17 was made to accompany a UGZ themed art show that took place in early 2015 at 1-2-3-4 Go! Records in Oakland, at the urging of Pat Libby for which I am grateful.  Urban Guerrilla Zine #17.5 was a half issue entitled “Summer Of No Love”, which was supposed to be out by late summer, but didn’t actually see the light of day until the fall due to issues with the printer.  In fact both zines had printer issues, and in both cases I found myself at Inkworks Press (a worker owned collective) in Berkeley, having to photocopy what were intended to be offset printed zines.  Inkworks doesn’t have the best copy machines, but they are well maintained, so the zines looked pretty good.  The biggest drop off from offset to photocopy would be the photo quality.  In the case of #17 I had to have it done in time for the art show, which we’d also advertised as a zine release party.  As far as the “Summer Of No Love” half issue went, I wanted that out as quickly as possible because I know me, and if I’d waited any longer then it would’ve ended up with all of the other unfinished projects cluttering my work area.

Urban Guerrilla Zine #17.5 is a very personal issue, but not a “personal zine”.  Maybe I should’ve made that distinction a bit more clear when describing it in previous posts.  I wasn’t that concerned with how much the graphics or stories resonated with the reader as much as I wanted to recreate this one summer in Emeryville, standing at a bus stop next to a casino that was in the process of being torn down, surrounded by elderly Asian gambling addicts and crack addicted prostitutes from the stroll a few blocks away on San Pablo Ave.  The vibe I felt while waiting to transfer to the bus I rode to my summer job at a bookstore, where I spent all day indoors when all I wanted was to hang out on Telegraph Ave with my friends.  I didn’t actually write any of that in the zine, but it’s there.

Looking ahead, I plan on doing more zines in 2016, one or two of those will be newer issues of UGZ for what has admittedly become a somewhat limited audience.  On the other hand, I don’t miss printing a thousand zines at a time, and distributing them, then trying to collect the money I’m owed from all the various distributors around the country.  I’m making zines at this point because I enjoy the process, and so I’ll see where that approach takes things from here on out.

If you didn’t get a copy of Urban Guerrilla Zine #17, the only remaining copies I know of are at Needles and Pens, 1173 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA

If you want a copy of Urban Guerrilla Zine #17.5 aka “Summer Of No Love”, then you can still purchase a copy at:

1-2-3-4 Go! Records, 420 40th Street #5, Oakland, CA

Issues Magazine + More, 20 Glen Ave, Oakland, CA

Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA

Bound Together Books, 1369 Haight St, San Francisco, CA

Huey P. Newton

Monday Blog 12.14.15

There used to be a time when I’d think, “this is too much”, and, “they’ve finally gone too far.”  The first time I watched the Rodney King beating video I thought that, but then there was the trial and all of the officers involved were acquitted.  The L.A. riots that followed had flashes of sending a message, especially when they started to move towards the wealthier areas of the city, but in the end the folks who rioted only managed to burn and loot their own neighborhoods.  I should know better than to think that any one incident will turn the tide at this point because the list of demands from communities most affected by these types of incidents usually focus on reform, which is the same reform that previous generations have been calling for since the 1960s.  

Last week’s Monday blog was about the SFPD’s execution of Mario Woods by firing line, which was all captured on video, from multiple angles in the city’s Bayview District.  I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see when Facebook autoplayed the first video I watched of Mario Woods being gunned down by the SFPD.  That’s a shitty function by the way, and who knows why Facebook feels the need to shove video content down the throats of its users, but either way I watched that video, and later the other videos from different angles before writing last week’s blog.  It was shocking, and after two years of protests around the country, and the Black Lives Matter movement, to think that something like that can happen in a so called liberal city like San Francisco just underlines the fact that we are way past the point of fixing things with simple reforms.  Oh, and if you watched the Mario Woods video(s) and thought, “this is too much”, and, “they’ve finally gone too far”, then you probably missed the video of Los Angeles police officers shooting a man 33 times as he attempted to crawl away.  The LAPD says they found a gun on the man they shot from behind, then continued to shoot as he crawled away, and they also claim that they received 911 calls from citizens in the neighborhood reporting gun fire, and that the young African American male they shot to death matched the description of the suspect.  If only we had a system where we could trust that all of those claims would be followed up on and properly investigated.

There used to be a time when people believed that art and music could change the world, but that got commodified and turned into art and music becoming a soundtrack for social change, then finally a soundtrack for a generation that once called for change in this country.  They protested in the streets and occupied their college campuses, then graduated and got married, had kids, bought property, turned their homes into apartments, and their backyards into apartment buildings, then rented these units to students so they could circumvent rent control laws, and so on.  That’s a different subject for a future blog perhaps; the Baby Boomer generation and the pitfalls of granola based diets.  

A creative, conceptual, free form approach to addressing the inequality and injustices in our society can change the world, as we observe it.  It’s not literally the art or music, but a state of mind.  I know that’s a fairly abstract statement to make without expanding on it further, but the point of these blogs is not to delve deeply into every thought I have concerning whatever subject I’m addressing, but it’s more of an immediate response to what’s most on my mind on any Monday morning when I sit down to write.  

Darby Crash

Darby Crash (September 26, 1958 – December 7, 1980)

Monday Blog 12.7.15

Here are links to two videos showing how SFPD handled a similar incident that took place last Wednesday in the Bayview District. Video One and Video Two.  All three videos contain graphic violence, so please take that into consideration before clicking on any of these links.

I posted the above video as an example of how someone wielding a knife can be apprehended without the use of deadly force.  That much is obvious, but I also included links to videos of the SFPD basically playing judge, jury, and executioner when five of its officers opened fire on Mario Woods, who didn’t appear to be any more threatening than the man apprehended by the London police in the first video, and if anything he appeared (in the videos) to be less of a threat.  I could write more about the particulars of this incident, but why?  The videos speak for themselves, and that’s one of the reasons that I find it so ridiculous that SFPD Chief Greg Suhr would try to spin last Wednesday’s events by using photographic evidence instead of the multiple videos, that had already gone viral on social media, at Friday’s community meeting, which took place at San Francisco City College.  It’s even more ludicrous that police departments around the country are still allowed to deflect by using the same tired “We’re currently conducting an internal investigation” response.  

One of the things I’m seeing a lot online is that citizens are calling for SFPD Police Chief Greg Suhr to step down, or be fired.  Another thing I saw immediately after the first video of the SFPD killing Mario Woods surfaced was a call for massive reform in the San Francisco Police Department, which is a reasonable response after witnessing (on video) what was clearly an excessive use of deadly force by the SFPD.  My response would be, yes, Greg Suhr has to go.  Why?  It’s simple, that’s the job he signed up for.  He could’ve told all of those officers personally behind closed doors to never do what they did on numerous occasions, but they did it anyway, and the buck stops with him.  That said, he could’ve come out and admitted that what happened was wrong, and that the five officers involved would be held responsible for their actions by the department (i.e. lose their jobs), then even go so far as to suggest that said officers be tried in a court of law.  Last but not least, he should’ve taken responsibility for what happened, played the two videos, apologized again, then again after that, and listened patiently while citizens from Bayview yelled at him for the duration of the community meeting.  There’s a time to spin and a time not to spin, and that was not the time.   

People have been conditioned to immediately call for reforms when government institutions are exposed as being incompetent or corrupt, but that’s an age old trap that was set years ago by the same power structure that controls this country.  With roughly only 50% of the eligible voters in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley being registered to vote, and only around half of those registered actually voting, the people calling for these reforms lack the leverage needed to make their demands heard in the proper context.  Even if there was greater voter turnout, there is still the issue of how city governments conduct business, i.e. the system that is already in place, which is often a local version of everything most Americans detest about big government bureaucracy at the state and federal levels.  I think the SFPD and police departments around the country need to be reformed,  but more than that I think they need be restructured and reimagined as something completely different than what they are today.  Every police department, which I’ll continue referring to them as because I haven’t yet thought of a new name, would answer directly to their local communities in a way that would ensure that if five police officers executed a man carrying a kitchen knife on a public street, then those officers would be fired immediately, as would the chief (assuming that position still existed in some capacity), and a trial would take place to determine whether what they did was voluntary or involuntary manslaughter, as would be the case for any of us now, even if our defense was “self defense”. 

GODSTOMPER

Godstomper in Berkeley, 2008