I had hoped that wouldn’t happen so soon…
News: Global Pandemic Cases Pass 11 Million
News: Pandemic-inspired Slow Streets in San Francisco
With so many of our streets largely deserted by cars, and people desperate for some fresh air, why not give the streets back to HUMANS?
That’s the idea behind Slow Streets, which also helps local businesses by providing space for customers to wait outside their businesses in safely spaced lines, while other people can safely walk through the area. It is a clever adaptation, and a good one to see!
Slow Streets
Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.
On seventeen weeks of pandemic (and local prevention)
As you can tell by the prior posts, while my life (and the life of many people in my county/region) has changed significantly, yet not all of us are actually sticking to the plan to limit the spread of the pandemic.
Yes, the health orders are still in effect – here in SF, the active order explicitly says:
8. All travel, including, but not limited to, travel on foot, bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, automobile, or public transit, except Essential Travel, as defined below in Section 15.i, is prohibited…. This Order allows travel into or out of the County only to perform Essential Activities, Outdoor Activities, or Additional Activities; to operate, perform work for, or access a business allowed to operate under this Order; to perform Minimum Basic Operations at other businesses; or to maintain Essential Governmental Functions.
–ORDER OF THE HEALTH OFFICER No. C19-07e
And there are similar health orders in effect in other counties, yet… people within my social circles within California are taking vacations. *face palm* As in: leaving their homes, going to another city/county/state, staying in hotels, eating out, socializing with travel companions who are not from their households, sitting in the sun on beaches even they describe as “packed,” etc. Because: they are adults who are slightly bored.
I’m so glad I’m not interacting with any of these people in person, dear though they may otherwise be – and luckily, they don’t live in MY county. But I’m disappointed in them. Yes, we are all restless. Yes, I’m daydreaming of glorious, sunny, breezy moments from past trips. (I stared adoringly at maps of Lugano, Switzerland, today, which came to mind because the Swiss have decided that Americans (and visitors from 28 other nations) are too risky to allow in as visitors right now. (See the last item in this summary from the UK Guardian.) Really, based on the lack of self-control of people I know, who would blame them?) Yes, I’d love for the pandemic to be over – we would ALL love that. BUT IT IS NOT OVER. In fact, it is getting WORSE, because Americans have the self-control of small children. (No offense intended to any small children WITH self-control out there.)
I’m blaming those few, reckless people I know for the delay of museum re-openings, hair salons, and other services that could have gotten more of us living something closer to normal life, with more people CAUTIOUSLY working again.
~~~
The “New Normal” is more established now. I no longer receive mail about upcoming museum shows, library lecture series, bookshop author signing events, or public festivals: those colorful, festive newsletters have been replaced with small, polite-but-desperate pleas from local non-profits about our uncertain future, and how every activity they would ordinarily do to raise operational money cannot be done safely.
Many stores are closed permanently. Signs are down, and windows are papered over or covered in plywood. I’ve received numerous goodbye emails from those that were only open for office worker lunch shifts. My friend at a beloved local coffee chain let me know that many of our mutual friends are now seeking work.
Food delivery app-backed services are now (finally) viewed skeptically, as their business model of taking 35% or more of each sale while somehow also underpaying their delivery workers is recognized as exploitative of both restaurants AND delivery personnel.
To escape from that exploitation, restaurants near me are now running their own on-line ordering & delivery. This means some of them won’t deliver to me at all (they chose to service smaller delivery areas), foiling my earlier, successful attempts to support local restaurants. The few that do deliver to me still require full contact delivery (they want a human to touch their pen to sign a paper copy of an on-line receipt for a transaction that has already been paid (!) OR want tips handled as in-person cash transactions).
Companies that CAN support working remotely but never did before suddenly realize that people DO WORK while remote. This is transformative (I’m hoping this could be great for the physically disabled, who were not adequately accommodated in the past), and permanent remote work arrangements are being cemented at some large, digital-economy-centric corporations. The ripple effects of that alone are huge.
I continue to stay inside.
I am resolving my supply logistics. I have a stockpile of gluten-free, vegan dried proteins to tide me over if my deliveries are interrupted again. I subscribe to a local, weekly, produce-waste-prevention service, which gives me a crate of hardy fruits + veggies that can’t be sold in supermarkets due to size or color standards. My local gluten-free-sourdough bakery order will come through once the bakery completes their COVID-19 deep-cleaning and implements additional safety measures (hopefully the employee who tested positive will recovery quickly!). I am using local suppliers (for tea, olive oil, spices, grains) that can ship to my home.
My diet has changed in unplanned ways based on what I can/can’t get, which has caused me some problems (I have heartburn for the first time in 14 or 15 YEARS), and I’m trying to get a handle on that WHILE ALSO doing things like making sauerkraut or pickling beets for the first time, and making the most of what I have.
I appreciate that I have food, that my housing is stable, that my COVID-19 screening test yesterday came up clear, that I have a job, that my loved ones are reasonably healthy, that I have medical insurance. I am not going to risk the lives of others and stamp my feet over an inability to take fancy vacations to relieve some unstated existential crises or gaps in Instagram lifestyle posts. I AM going to continue to be concerned that so many Americans aren’t good at what the kids call “adulting.”
On the Internet(s)
I sometimes think I expect too much. I’m reading McSweeney’s 54: The End of Trust, and thinking of my early (early 1990s) ideals around the Internet and personal computing, which were both evolving so rapidly.
Confession: I thought that everyone I knew would be doing AMAZING THINGS with this technology, especially once software and hardware evolved for key activities like music composition, video editing, digital painting, and more. I was certain that everyone I knew had a hidden composer/filmmaker/author/artist in them just WAITING to get out.
But… it’s 2020, and most people I know use this truly amazing content creation/sharing infrastructure to: post photos of their (purchased meals), post photos of themself drunk, make their children self-conscious by “sharenting” (oversharing as parents), repost unreliable information found on unreliable source pages of dubious origin, or watch (and repost) cat videos.
*me staring at the reader with alarmed expression*
Yes, there is some nice citizen science stuff, and the libraries are doing a great job, but I EXPECTED that.
No, really, I didn’t expect [gestures toward the screen] this. I thought tech would revolutionize education and communication and film and science in ways that… HAVE NOT HAPPENED. I did not anticipate “social media” where people talk about themselves endlessly, and misrepresent how they look and live to their “friends.” I was not cynical enough to envision paid “influencers” peddling products. I would not have anticipated the web being used to hype imaginary events like the Fyre Festival. I did not think so many people had an inner scam compulsion and/or marketing ambition and/or cat obsession to resolve.
I… feel like such a wacky optimist.
ANYWAY, the End of Trust is really good, and I can tell because I am using up tape flags over things I want to dwell on further. It’s a great sign. I’ll write about it, of course.
News: Current Confirmed Pandemic Figures
I had intended to comment here on major milestones, but we are just flying through them so quickly now that recent “reopening” (which is more like “denial” or “pretending coronaviruses take time off” than it is “cautious and aware activities”) has had its incubation period run out.
Reading news on the phone is now called “doom scrolling,” to give you a sense of how poorly management of this virus has gone in my part of the world. (It’s possible to do better, and many countries have, but the US has chosen a different path.)
News: Pandemic Impact on International Mail
The lack of flights to countless countries means that the mail can’t get around so easily. In some cases, it can’t reach countries AT ALL. (!!!!!!!!!)
Here’s a link to current restrictions disclosed by the US Postal Service.
International Service Alerts – Newsroom – About.usps.com
Updated: July 2, 2020 The Postal Service™ is temporarily suspending international mail acceptance for certain destinations due to service impacts related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Customers: please refrain from mailing items addressed to the countries listed here, until further notice.
News: Pandemic Rise in California
It seemed like all was going well, and then… people decided that coronaviruses take vacations, and now we can’t continue with our expansion of business activities: here in SF, the June 29th planned expansion has been “paused.”
People who won’t wear masks are ANNOYING – and are now costing people their livelihoods!
San Francisco’s Department of Public Health has an additional dashboard available now, and it shows how we are doing against our activity expansion metrics. (I love living in a City that loves data!)
Key Health Indicators on Containing COVID-19
Safely reopening San Francisco requires a strong partnership among city leaders, public health experts, businesses, and the community. Our commitment to safely moving forward together comes with the awareness that reopening too quickly may pose health risks and economic setbacks.
To give you a sense of one of the two metrics that we flubbed, here is one of the graphics from the site above as of June 30th showing the steep increase in hospitalizations:
Book: Mira Schendel
Mira Schendel
edited by Tanya Barson and Taisa Palhares
published by Tate Publishing, London
2013
In 2014, I was struggling with my abstract drawing practice, and needed to see how other artists managed some of the geometric ideas/problems/experiments I kept sketching out. By some amazing stroke of luck, I wound up in London on business, and was able to drop by the fantastic Tate Modern to see the Mira Schendel show.
Mira Schendel was a remarkable, Swiss-born Brazilian artist whom I’d never heard of, but whose work was STUNNING and completely on point as a contrast to my own work (and sometimes, it is easier to clarify your own thoughts in contrast to others’!). She worked with text! Translucency! Layers! Perforations! Her work is a revelation, and impressed me with its depth, experimentation, breadth (she has a remarkably diverse practice), and the great presentation of some very delicate work at the Tate.
This book is the sold-out catalog from that show, which I was able to buy YEARS later through a used book shop online. (Every time I’ve tried to stop taking photos as notes, and relied upon a show catalog, I couldn’t get one…) The reproductions, including those of oil crayon on translucent paper – which I was CERTAIN would be too difficult a challenge – are beautifully reproduced.
The essays in this catalog are a bit dense: Schendel was a fan of philosophy, and so folks who aren’t fans of Wittgenstein and others of his era might skim these for key clues about Schendel’s interest in language as an organizing concept for the world, and focus on the one about Immanence before jumping into the reproductions. The reprints of interviews with Schendel at the end are a great way to end.
As with other artists I find “revelatory,” Schendel may have been omitted from the resources available to me while researching art because (a) she wasn’t based in Europe, (b) her work is not in the collections of major US museums, so (c) the major institutional museums don’t promote her as part of the official modern/contemporary art “canon” (which is based on what they have collected, conveniently), and (d) she wasn’t part of a group movement, which is a conveniently self-organizing set of practices or themes that make it easier to file work within a particular era’s “canon.” (It’s all so tedious, though I understand the desire for organizing principles.)
This is a well-produced catalog of a truly impressive show, and the Tate and its partners in Brazil and Portugal should be proud of it.
Music: Mask, Gloves, Soap, Scrubs by Todrick Hall
My theme song for housework and general anti-COVID cleaning.
(Yes, it is a parody of one of Todrick’s other songs. The parody is easier to sing.)
News: 500,000 OFFICIAL COVID-19 Deaths Reached Globally
The Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Mortality Dashboard shows we hit 500,306 a short while ago. Today. This very afternoon. Unfortunately. And this is still an undercount, because it is just the official toll.
Was this preventable? Yes, but: HUMANS. Humans chose to prevent it in some places (I’m STILL looking at you, fantastic and careful South Korea and Taiwan!) yet chose to pretend it would disappear, “like a miracle,” in others, because key leaders haven’t watched enough horror movies about pandemics, in which terrible things happen because no one listens to the scientists who were right all along. (Truth is stupider than fiction.)
It’s strange to live in a country that regionally chose to let a global pandemic run wild. The US is still leading in the sheer volume of cases and deaths (2,510,151 confirmed cases, 125,539 deaths, and a 5% fatality rate at this moment according to the Johns Hopkins Mortality Analysis page).
I may be living in a region that set the first quarantines in the country, and benefit from excellent regional coordination of precautions, but that hasn’t spared my large state from being one of many places where videos of white women ranting about being forced to wear a mask as part of a political conspiracy keep cropping up. (Link provided to ABC7, so you won’t have to log into Twitter, where I saw that.) And our excellent regional approach won’t spare us if and when people from lax, conspiratorial areas come to visit. Which we are already dreading.
One awkward thing to note about the JH Mortality page is that it is sortable, and you can sort by which countries have the worst outcomes by population size (measured as deaths per 100,000 people). And what is terrifying is that, while the US is a big and CARELESS country without a functional leader, there are other countries that are somehow doing WORSE.
I just can’t find a polite way to discuss this with friends in other poorly-performing countries, though I’ve tried things along the lines of, ‘so sorry that our countries suck at preventing death’ and ‘I’m sorry to report we have surpassed your bad track record in the death percentage reports.’ It isn’t great to discussed shared incompetence in the absence of someone agreeing there is a problem, however, so it feels like a sensitive subject; it also feels like looking at the scaled rate it is a distraction from the US’ position as the worst-hit place, math aside.
I’ll go back to dreading ‘breaking news’ again…