gail williams's Open Salon Blog

Cheery, if not natural

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:12:55 -0500

May tides of cheer wash over you this holiday season ... hmm. It almost works.

In this case the artificial pink scented "pine" has been felled on the driveway of the do-it-yourself carwash. Looking down at its pinkness, I was thinking of the day-glow optimism of the fake tree. It represented a wish, if not a holiday one. Something like, "please make my car stink less."

The custom of bringing a real freshly felled tree into a home has a more authentic aromatic connection to ancient holiday wishes. A young evergreen pulled into the lodgings in the dark of winter was a European sign of hope that predated Christianity. The newer religion swept through on a tide of conquest, appropriating little bit of tradition here and another dash from there, letting the conquered keep some of the comforts of their own traditions of meaning and celebration. Evergreen: meaningful and very ancient. Embracing that green that survives through winter resonates deeply with hopes for eternity. How lovely that bringing a little tree into the living quarters also acts like an air freshener. That bonus benefit must have felt like yet another sign.

I've spent much of my life nostalgic for the fir trees that brought an ancient though not particularly religious Christmas joy to our house when I was a child. I'm also routinely filled with holiday sorrow about the baby tree industry. Let forests become forests, I would think each year when I saw the city lots fill with fresh-cut trees. My revulsion increases in January when the sidewalks are piled with discarded trees.

No doubt the baby tree slaughter is less of a slap on the face of the living planet than a dozen other practices from manufacturing and discarding huge volumes of plastics, to raising beef for burgers in the clear cut rainforests. This fast-vanishing year was, after all, the year of a nuclear power plant meltdown. We do still attack the planet that is our only mothership.

So as 2011 slips away, here is a toast to the trees. May evergreen be as enduring as humans have ever imagined. May our lovely gem of a planet continue to sustain people and trees, and to bring a balance with so many other wonderous life forms large and small. May we find and listen to enough wisdom to avoid deliberately and unnecessarily killing not just individual animals and plants, but whole species. And may we extend that wisdom to stop war and genocide among our own species, something we have still not outgrown this far along. We sure do need a holiday from all that. Cheers to the trees!

Occupy Art!

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:11:24 -0500

The tents are such an icon. Each day the rumors fly, and twice the police have moved the tents back into a small section of land by the San Francisco Ferry Building.

The image of them is burned into our imaginations. A local painter was working here a couple of weeks ago. I didn't post it at first because I had been too shy to interrupt and ask his name. So here is the unknown OccupySF painter at work.

Some of the OS bloggers are talking about baking Occu-pies for Thanksgiving dinner, to bring the conversation home. Now, that's art. Look at this pie!

Community event with Glenn Greenwald

Fri, 4 Nov 2011 22:11:17 -0400

After this week's Glenn Greenwald speech in San Francisco, there was a gathering of Salon community folks. Here are a few snapshots, some posed...

some randomly informal in party mode...

Altogether, a lot of talk and some significant bit of book signing took place after the formal discussion. It was quite an evening, and quite a week.

Here comes our winter monsoon season

Mon, 3 Oct 2011 22:10:38 -0400

The wet season has begun again.

California is a strange wet/dry climate like that of Italy and coastal Chile. San Francisco has three summer months of nearly no rain at all, and another two -- May and September -- that are almost that dry over all recorded history. October usually means both rain and some really warm days. Tonight the rains started. I had better pick up an umbrella at the corner store and head home. It's wet out there!

What does Open Salon want?

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 02:09:57 -0400

I'd like to re-introduce myself today as a member of the Salon team, and now as part of the Open Salon team. Hi!

I have been right here from the very start of Open Salon, through the beta teting stage, but only lightly since those days, with a little visit now and then. I've been distracted by the rich Salon forum communities at The WELL, and until recently at Table Talk. I love the context of the "room" created in an old fashioned forum, but communities of writers like Open Salon make a very exciting new context of their own.

Now I'm delighted to be able to include Open Salon and Salon Comments (formerly known as Salon Letters) among my current projects. I will not have anything to do with Editor's Picks or deciding what mix of pieces makes a good cover. I'm working on improving the tools and the overall experience of OS. I will be participating more to get the sense of this place. I am not sure I will have time to do much writing, which I am rather slow at, and which is what most of OS seems to do best. Since I have a photography habit already, perhaps I can share some of those moments here and do my bit for the bounty that is OS content.

One change we've all waited for, for a long time, is a faster Open Salon platform for blogging and commenting. Staffers currently have our fingers crossed not to jinx a thing, but we expect you to see a change in hours, if not before you read this. The ability to move around with agility at the speed of reading is part of what makes a good blogging community thrive, and that's the goal.

While some things are better faster, there are also some things we want to stop. We are working on spam solutions on the main Salon.com site right now, and looking forward to turning our attention to the abuse of the community hospitality here at Open Salon. Spammers make the experience worse for everyone here. We're deleting them by hand when we can, but there's a better way, and I can't wait for it.

While I've been observing some of the ways people use the site, you know it far better than I do. I'll probably do a proper survey at some point, but right now I'm still figuring out what the questions are. I'm curious about how the toolset here is working for you, what doesn't work for you technically or culturally, and what makes this place tick. What changes are you interested in seeing, to let you manage your blog better or otherwise improve the site? What do you cherish and not want to see disrupted?

Thanks for being a part of OS, and hello!