Chris Carlsson – författare

San Francisco is an iconic and symbolic city. But only when you look beyond the picture-postcards of the Golden Gate Bridge and the quaint cable cars do you realise that the city's most interesting stories are not the Summer of Love, the Beats or even the latest gold rush in Silicon Valley.Hidden San Francisco is a guidebook like no other. Structured around the four major themes of ecology, labour, transit and dissent, Chris Carlsson peels back the layers of San Francisco's history to reveal a storied past: behind old walls and gleaming glass facades lurk former industries, secret music and poetry venues, forgotten terrorist bombings, and much more. Carlsson delves into the Bay Area’s long prehistory as well, examining the region's geography and the lives of its inhabitants before the 1849 Gold Rush changed everything, setting in motion the clash between capital and labour that shaped the modern city.From the perspective of the students and secretaries, longshoremen and waitresses, Hidden San Francisco uncovers dozens of overlooked, forgotten and buried histories that pulse through the streets and hills even today, inviting the reader to see themselves in the middle of the ongoing, everyday process of making history together.

'A dissenter's guidebook' - Peter Booth Wiley, author of The National Trust Guide to San Francisco'Scores of sparkling vignettes illuminate the city with the torch of social criticism and the sharp lens of a local sage' - Richard Walker, author of Pictures of a Gone CitySan Francisco is an iconic city. But beyond the picture postcards of the Golden Gate Bridge, the city’s most interesting and radical history is waiting to be uncovered.Hidden San Francisco is a guidebook like no other. Structured around the four major themes of ecology, labor, transit, and dissent, Chris Carlsson peels back the layers of the city’s history to reveal a storied past: behind old walls and gleaming glass facades lurk former industries, secret music and poetry venues, forgotten terrorist bombings, and much more. Carlsson also delves into the Bay Area’s long prehistory, examining the lives of its indigenous inhabitants before the 1849 Gold Rush changed everything.This second edition includes new tours on the wild and natural parts of San Francisco that most tourists never visit, from Glen Canyon to Sutro Forest. There is also a new introduction examining the impact of the pandemic, as well as a mini-history of tech in the city, from the Gold Rush to AI.

Bad Attitude is a collection of writings and graphics from the extraordinary Processed Word magazine. Dedicated to giving voice to the benumbed foot-soldiers of the information age, it contains blistering first-hand accounts of life at the bottom of the ladder in big banks, defense contractors, computer manufacturers and food processing factories. In these pages the service economy and the new high tech jobs often touted in glowing terms by the mainstream media are exposed for their quotidian banality, their essential uselessness, and the catch-22 absurdity that permeates all corporate life under late capitalism.Moving at bike messenger speed between offices, Bad Attitude describes the hazards of the office computer and how to sabotage it, mutant culture in Silicon Valley, the new transiency undercutting links at work, the connections between time and money, bosses and secretaries, resistance and resignation. It provides a unique basis for new theoretical developments in the struggle for human liberation, and, above all, it assures the thousands of isolated rebels mired in dead-end and deadening jobs that they are not alone. The spark of revolt can and must be nurtured until the next wave comes along.

Reclaiming San Francisco is an anthology of fresh appraisals of the contrarian spirit of the city - a spirit "resistant to authority or control." The official story of San Francisco is one of progress, development, and growth. But there are other, unofficial, San Francisco stories, often shrouded in myth and in danger of being forgotten, and they are told here: stories of immigrants and minorities, sailors and waterfront workers, and poets, artists, and neighborhood activists - along with the stories of speculators, land-grabbers, and the land itself that need to be told differently. Contributors include historians, geographers, poets, novelists, artists, art historians, photographers, journalists, citizen activists, an architect, and an anthropologist. Passionate about the city, they want San Francisco to be more itself and less like the city of office towers, chain stores, theme parks, and privatized public services and property that appears to be its immediate fate. San Francisco is not alone in being transformed according to the dictates of the global economy. But San Franciscans are unusual in their readiness to confront the corporate agenda for their city."Having read this kaleidoscopic investigation of the great Pacific metropolis, I stand in awe at San Francisco's raw energy but fear, simultaneously, its dispersion into affluence and make-believe. The radical energy that animated San Francisco is pulsing in these pages, as does dismay at its murder by greed and promotion." -Andrei Codrescu, poet and National Public Radio commentator "A wonderful tour through the City's history and cultural life." -Chester Hartman, author of The Transformation of San Francisco "This book celebrates the fact that we live in the most glorious of human creations, a city, with living streets, more like ancient Athens or Samarkhand or Calcutta than like the aggregate office block/parking lot/shopping malls that once were modern American cities and still bear their names. Read it to understand why San Francisco is still alive - and how we have to defend it." -Joan Holden, San Francisco Mime Troupe James Brook is a poet and the principal editor of Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights) and the translator of many works, including My Tired Father by Gellu Naum and Panegyric by Guy Debord.Chris Carlsson, executive director of the multimedia history project "Shaping San Francisco", is a writer, publisher, editor and community organizer. He was a founder of the ground-breaking magazine Processed World, and helped launch the monthly bike-ins known as "Critical Mass" that have spread to five continents and over 300 cities. Nancy J. Peters is a former publisher at City Lights Books, co-author of Literary San Francisco and translator of Dreams of Dreams by Antonio Tabucchi.

A collection of essays spans the tumultuous decade from 1968, the year of the San Francisco State University strike, to 1978 and the twin traumas of the Jonestown massacre and the assassinations of mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. This volume provides a broad look at the diverse ways these ten years shook the city of San Francisco and shaped the world we live in today. From community gardening to environmental justice, gay rights and other identity-based social movements, anti-gentrification efforts, neighborhood arts programs, and more, many of the initiatives whose origins are described here have taken root and spread far beyond San Francisco.