Brazil protests continues despite fare cuts

Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians are pouring onto the streets of cities across the country, demanding an end to the ongoing neoliberal changes in their country.

Initially sparked by increases in fares on public transit at a time when massive sums are being spent to create a Potemkin Village front to be ready when the eyes of the world Brazil-ward for the 2014 World Cup matches.

Demonstrators were out in force again today [Wednesday] even though fare hikes had been rescinded in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, cities where the improvement gained massive support.

Robert Mackey of the New York Times writes of today’s hottest confrontation:

Tear gas once again filled the air outside a gleaming stadium in Brazil as the police in the northeastern city of Fortaleza blocked an estimated 35,000 protesters from approaching the venue where the national team, known as Seleção, met Mexico on Wednesday afternoon in a tune-up for next year’s World Cup.

Before the day was over, though, the protesters had the last laugh, as placards echoing their demands were waved by fans inside the grounds, several leading players voiced their support for the protests and the authorities in some parts of Brazil started to back away from the planned increases in bus fares that were the initial catalyst for the demonstrations.

Read the rest.

From the BBC, here’s an aerial view of the police tear gas assault on protesters in Fortaleza:

Asher Levine and Tatiana Ramil of Reuters report on action elsewhere in the country:

Protesters blocked roads in Sao Paulo and marched toward a stadium hosting a major international soccer game in Brazil’s northeast on Wednesday in a growing wave of nationwide demonstrations against poor public services, inflation and other woes in Latin America’s biggest country.

After more than a week, the biggest series of protests to sweep Brazil in more than two decades continued in major capitals and moved into smaller cities. Focused at first in cities like Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and the capital, Brasilia, demonstrations in more than 70 smaller cities were expected across the country on Thursday.

Wednesday’s protests in Sao Paulo, the site of the most frequent marches, followed overnight demonstrations that led to looting and vandalism. Police arrested more than 63 people after protesters torched a police facility, tried to storm City Hall and broke windows and ransacked stores.

Read the rest.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts reports on the fare hike cancellations in the country’s two largest cities:

Authorities in Brazil’s two biggest cities have made a U-turn on public transport fare increases in the face of mass protests that have overshadowed the country’s build up to next year’s World Cup.

In advance of major demonstrations on Thursday, the leaders of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro announced that bus and subway price rises will be rescinded, but it is far from certain that this will be enough to mollify public unrest.

Although the demonstrations began on a small scale last week in opposition to the fare rises, they have spread rapidly to encompass a variety of frustrations. A quarter of a million people took to the streets in at least 12 cities on Monday to call for better public services, an end to corruption, punishment for police brutality, and less wasteful spending on the World Cup.

Read the rest.

Tuesday night protests brought out large numbers

First, a video report from euronews

From the accompanying story:

Around 50,000 flooded the streets of Sao Paulo for another night of protests in Brazil.

>snip<

One protester explained why they had joined the mass demos:

“It is against the corrupt Brazil that we are living in – health, unemployment, education, everything. Everything’s wrong.”

Another explained, “it’s the fury of an irritated Brazil with this damn corrupt stealing government.”

Riot police struggled to contain the situation in Brazil’s largest city. Shops and banks were vandalised and twenty were arrested for looting.

Read the rest.

And from vlogger strainey123, here’s the scene outside the national legislature in Brasilia Tuesday night:

And for some background, here’s a report from The Real News Network featuring a Jaisal Noor interview of expatriate U.S. journalist Julia Michaels, a 30-year resident of Brazil and creator and author of the RioReal Blog:

Hundreds of Thousands of Brazilians Protest Country’s Harsh Inequities

A transcript is posted here.

And, finally, a very important little RT video featuring a very appropriate question.

Should the US be protesting like Brazil?

The program notes:

Massive protests have rocked Brazil this week as the World Cup looms next summer. Demonstrators want to know why billions in public money is funneled away from essential services like education and healthcare, and toward massive sports stadiums. But, how is this problem even worse in the United States. RT Political Commentator Sam Sacks explains.

California lawmakers fight open records rules

Yet another major threat to the nation’s badly weakened and downsized news media.

From Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition:

GOV. BROWN: VETO CPRA THREATS IN BUDGET BILL

The California Public Records Act (CPRA) is gravely threatened by stealth amendments revealed for the first time yesterday as part of a “trailer bill” to the new state budget. Instead of the relatively minor cost-saving tweaks proposed earlier by the Governor and approved in legislative committees, the actual amending language will gut key transparency safeguards in California’s most important open-government law.

I am writing to ask you to call on Governor Brown to veto the relevant portions of the budget trailer bill that is headed to his desk as early as tomorrow. We invite you to do this by email to the Governor office, using the form provided in this email.

How, exactly, will the budget trailer bill undercut the CPRA and set back open government?

1)  Public access to data controlled by local governments, so important to open-data and big-data initiatives, will come to an end. The final trailer bill, SB 71, eliminates the requirement of existing law that agencies must make available “electronic”  records or information in “any format” in which the agency already holds them. Gov Code sec. 6253.9(a)(1).  Instead, according to SB 71, “the local agency may determine the format  of electronic data to be provided in response to a request for information.”

This change will empower local governments to limit data access to situations in which the requested data will show government agencies and officials in a positive light. All other requests for data will be blocked by producing data in formats that are unusable in databases. Example: Requests for data held in .xls (Excel) or .csv formats will be produced (if at all) as .pdf files–even though the agency has the data in the requested formats and therefore can provide it in the requested formats at no cost.

2)  Local governments, when denying written requests for public records, will no longer be required to give a reason for the denial. SB 71 purports to make that common sense requirement (found in Gov Code sec. 6255(b)) completely optional.  What does optional mean? You can be sure that all lawyers for cities, counties or school boards,once they become aware of this change, will advise their clients to give no reasons for denying records.

3)  Local governments may even take the position that SB 71′s changes free them from any obligation to communicate–at all!—with requesters about the status of a denied CPRA request. Agencies that believe requested records are exempt from disclosure could elect to say nothing to the requester, leaving him/her in the dark, unable to determine–without suing–whether the requested records will be disclosed or withheld.

Tell Governor Brown to veto the provisions of SB 71 that would effect these changes in existing law. The link below opens an email form with an email message for the Governor and his staff (which we will print out and deliver). You can use the email message content provided or delete it and write an email in your own words.
FAC@firstamendmentcoalition.org

To view section 4 of SB 71 dealing with the CPRA, use this link: SB 71 Excerpt Relating to CPRA

Massive protests underway in South America

We bring you reports from three countries, Peruo, Chile, and Brazil.

Peruvian students protest law changes

Latin America has a grand tradition of autonomous universities, self-governing institutions which set their own destinies and are off-limits to law enforcement.

But the concept is under attack in Peru, and students have been taking to the streets in protest. The story has passed almost without notice here in the U.S., and we learned of it only though a post at For what we are… they will be.

Via a Google translation of the Spanish language original at Webguerrillero:

Thousands of Peruvian students have continued on Saturday and for a third day protesting against the project of the New University Act.

Some 6000 students of the National University San Antonio Abad have taken to the streets of Cusco, in southeastern Peru, to express their opposition to the new law, they say, university autonomy injured.

Those present at the protest say the project violates the freedom of expression of students and establishes regulatory bodies to supervise the higher education institutions in the interests of politicians and businessmen.

“We question what violates the autonomy of universities and students sanctions ranging from reprimand to permanent expulsion” said Miguel Angel Quispe Huaman, vice president of the University Federation Cusco (FUC).

During the protests on Thursday and Friday were clashes between students and police, which left dozens injured and at least four students arrested.

The only report in U.S. media we could find was a Reuters video posted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Meanwhile, student protests continue in Chile

First, a video report from Reuters:

From the program notes:

Chilean students hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at police in the latest mass demonstration to demand the government overhaul the educational system.

Most of the demonstrators — which local reports indicated police had estimated at 45,000 while student organizers said there were more than 80,000 — remained peaceful as they marched through central Santiago streets carrying banners demanding free higher education and condemning conservative President Sebastian Pinera.

Students, both secondary and university, have led regular demonstrations, calling for a free and quality education for all Chileans since the protest movement started in 2011.

More coverage, without narration, from RT:

The program notes:

In Chile, thousands of students angered at rising education costs, clashed with police in the capital, who responded with tear gas and water cannons. The students had flooded the streets for a peaceful march, still wearing their uniforms and backpacks, before it then turned violent. At least 40 were arrested. The students oppose the fact they have to pay 75% of the cost of their own educations – one of the highest rates in the world.

Brazilian protests target transport fare hikes

It’s not just students who are taking to South American streets, as the Wall Street Journal’s Loretta Caho reports:

The latest in a string of protests against transportation-fare increases turned violent on Thursday, as tensions grow over unemployment and rising inflation in Brazil.

Thousands of protesters gathered in the late afternoon at the Municipal Theater in central São Paulo and marched through the city center. Just after 7 p.m., police began firing tear gas into the crowd, sending protesters running. People screamed “Fascist police!” and threw stones at the police as smoke filled the air.

The demonstration was the fourth since last week in response to a nearly 7% increase in public transport fares in the city to 3.20 reais, or about $1.50. It was also met with the most force so far by police – by the end of the demonstration late Thursday night, after officers in riot gear pursued and shot at groups of protesters all around the city center, dozens of people had been detained. Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported that seven of its reporters were hit, with rubber bullets, including two who were shot in the face.

Read the rest.

And a video report from Euronews:

The violence spread Saturday to target the government’s plan to spend million on hosting the 2014 world soccer championship, as the BBC reports:

Up to 1,000 Brazilians demonstrated outside the country’s national stadium to vent their anger at the amount of money the country is spending on staging next year’s World Cup.

Police used tear gas and pepper spray to control protestors before the match, in which Brazil beat Japan 3-0.

There were also reports rubber bullets were used and 30 arrests were made.

Demonstrators held up posters reading: “We don’t need the World Cup” and “We need money for hospitals and education”.

Read the rest.

Chart of the day: Gay friendly, or not?

From “The Global Divide on Homosexuality: Greater Acceptance in More Secular and Affluent Countries,” a report just published by the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project:

Quote of the day: Estranged from nature

From poet and lyricist Phil Rockstroh, writing at Counterpunch:

To turn a blind eye to the natural world, as we have done, translates into psychical ecocide. Perception is degraded. Language truncated. Life becomes dispossessed of purpose and meaning. Apropos, the rise and banal persistence of: The United States of Whatever.

Under these circumstances “whatever” translates into, inner and extant, deadly super storms, ecocide, and desertification (including and related to the desertification of language). As we decimate the earth’s biodiversity, we diminish our lexicon. Our thoughts cannot take wing; our imaginings cannot take root and flower; our passions cannot flow; our putrefying pathologies cannot be composted.

Divested of an eloquence of thought, expression, and action — devoid of a deep connection to and denied of constant dialog with earth, sky, wind and water  — we cannot retain enough humanity to remain viable as a species.

By evincing a state of mind that is indifferent to the wanton destruction of our planet’s interdependent web of biodiversity, we lay waste, on a personal and collective basis, to the evolving, vital ecosystem of the psyche, thereby creating a bland, dismal, corporate monoculture, that is both manifest and internalized. The emptiness of life in the neoliberal corporate/consumer state has grown increasingly unbearable; the carnage inflicted on our planet is indefensible; and its present trajectory is tragically untenable.

Read the rest.

Documentaries! Greek worker factory takeover

Two fascinating documentaries on the takeover of a Greek factory by workers, who are now running it on their own.

Even more remarkably, the action in Greece was inspired in part by actions a decade earlier in Argentina, as ROAR Magazine reports:

The story began in May 2011, when the parent company Philkeram-Johnson stopped paying wages to its subsidiary Viomichaniki Metalleutiki (Vio.Me) located in Thessaloniki, Greece, in the midst of the devastating economic and social crisis that has been facing the country for the past three years. After the failure of negotiations to collect unpaid wages, the workers occupied the factory, and only a short time later, its owners abandoned it. First, the workers decided to stay within the facilities in order to look after the machinery as well as the stored products for sale, but in January, after various assemblies, they decided to take it a step further and start producing under worker self-management, an unprecedented decision in Greece.

Read the rest.

Vio.Me: Self-Organization in Greece

The program notes from filmmaker Brandon Jourdan of Global Uprisings:

The workers at the Vio.Me. Factory in Thessaloniki, Greece have quickly grown into a symbol of self-management internationally. After going on strike and occupying their factory, on February 12, 2013 they re-opened the factory and started production under worker’s control. For many, the factory represents a new potential way forward for unemployed workers in Greece — seizing the means of production, running factories without bosses, producing only goods that are needed, and distributing them through solidarity networks.

“Every extra profit we make will be given out to people who need it. Our plan is to offer help to unemployed people or others who are in great need.”

This film tells the story of how the worker’s re-opened the factory under self-management and looks to where the factory is headed now.

H/T to From the Greek Streets.

VIO.ME.: WE CAN DO IT!

A 29-minute documentary from the vloggers at DiakoptesAthens released in February.

While it’s in Greek, simply click on the CC box on the lower right to turn on English subtitles. UPDATE: For some reason, YouTube doesn’t display the CC box when embedded here, so go to the YouTube post here, where the box does appear.

For more on this remarkable response to economic crisis, see the Vio.Me blog.

Chicago saga: Schools close, millions for stadium

A report from journalist Jaisal Noor for The Real News Network on the fate of Chicago under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama.

As Noor notes, “Chicago’s board of education voted Wednesday, May 22 to close 50 Chicago public schools, the largest such wave of closings in U.S. history. The schools are almost all exclusively located in black and Latino low-income neighborhoods in Chicago’s South and West Side.”

Meanwhile, the city is spending $100 million of the money saved from closing schools to build a new athletic stadium for DePaul University, the nation’s largest Catholic university.

A transcript of the program is posted here.

Occupy the Farm returns to UC Berkeley land

It was three days short of a year since UC Berkeley campus cops evicted Occupy the Farm from their three-week takeover [previously] of the university-owned Gill Tract in nearby Albany when protesters returned to their occupation today.

From vlogger Em Raguso:

Judith Scherr reports for the Oakland Tribune:

Chanting “Whose farm? Our farm!” some 150 people marched from Albany City Hall to a weed-strewn plot of University of California-owned land where they yanked out 3-foot-tall weeds and planted squash and tomato seedlings.

>snip<

Protesters want the Gill Tract to become an urban farm, while the university said it uses the land for agricultural research. A development is planned for an area adjacent to the land which has not been agriculturally zoned in decades, university officials have said.

As protesters entered the area Saturday, bringing with them two chickens, three goats and a rabbit, police informed them via bullhorn that they were trespassing and subject to arrest. As of late Saturday afternoon, no arrests had been made.

Read the rest.

And from the Occupy the Farm website, a report on today’s action:

Three days after UC Berkeley’s new development proposal on the Gill Tract was voted down at the City of Albany’s Planning and Zoning Commission meeting on May 8th, the organizing group Occupy the Farm has again taken a stand for public education and urban agriculture, setting down roots on the hotly contested land.

“People have been fighting to preserve this land for farming for decades, because they recognize that because this is UC land, all residents of the East Bay have a stake and a say in what happens to this public resource,” said Lesley Haddock, a third year student in UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. “After fifteen years of trying to work through UC’s undemocratic process, public protest is our last option.”

Since 1997, coalitions of local residents, non-profits, and UC students and faculty have brought forth proposals to the UC administration for the creation of a sustainable urban agriculture curriculum on the entire Gill Tract. Administrators consistently rejected these proposals, and have been accused of not giving the proposals due consideration.

“Today we’re planting on the site of the proposed commercial development because we want to remind people what they will lose if a chain store and parking lot get built here,” stated Ashoka Finley, urban farmer and UC alum. “The UC, Albany even, could be on the cutting edge of participatory, community-based urban ag research, and they’re just throwing that opportunity away.”

Building on Occupy the Farm’s action in April-May 2012, today’s protest was focused on community education around food production . Farmers and activists were seen planting vegetables together, watering crops and passing out free plant starts to passers-by. There was a range of educational activities, including a seed-ball making workshop organized by a seven year-old. The young girl stated, “I just wanted to do it at a time when I knew a lot of kids would show up.”

As one of the last large plots of fertile agricultural soil left in the East Bay, the Gill Tract holds great potential for shifting our communities towards self-sufficiency through large-scale urban agriculture education. Occupy the Farm will be working all weekend to turn the south plot of the Gill Tract from an empty lot into an urban farm and community asset.

For more visuals and interviews, see this brief clip from ABC News 7 in San Francisco.

And here’s a report from the Daily Californian on the 14 May 2012 police raid ending the last occupation:

 

Chart of the day: If it’s closer it’s better?

From the Pew Research Center, a graphic look at an interesting shift in American attitudes:

South Berkeley Street Seens: The numbers game

Bet you can parse this plate, affixed to the rear of a Smart:

19 March 2013, iPhone 4S, ISO 100, 6.9 mm, 1/125 sec, f3.9

Better late than never: Book fair alert

It’s in San Francisco and we’d go, except for that old chemo fatigue. Though it’s already begun, there’s plenty left on the program, which is just getting underway as we post.

Click on the poster [by Hugh D’Andrade] to enlarge:

Quote of the day+: Berkeley’s biggest landlord

Just to remind Cal students who live the the Gaia Building, Berkeleyan, and other apartment buildings owned by Chicago real estate mogul Sam Zell’s Equity Residential, their landlord was the man who bankrupted the Los Angeles Times.

That paper’s up for sale again [as noted yesterday, even the Koch brothers may offer some cash], and a timely piece in LA Weekly on the latest buy offers provides a nifty little vignette about Berkeley’s number on private sector landlord.

Hillel Aron writes about what happened when. . .

the spoils went to Sam Zell, the real estate mogul who looked like a character from Tolkien’s Middle-Earth dressed for a night at a disco.

Zell’s nickname was “Grave Dancer,” and his crassness disgusted many journalists — he once suggested that Tribune papers allow X-rated ads because “everyone loves a good blow job.”

“He was the most vulgar, repellent rich person I’ve ever met,” says Tim Rutten, a journalist at the Times for 40 years, who was laid off in 2011.

Any journalism students who reside in one of Zell’s apartments must feel a bit of shame every time the rent check is signed.

But Haas students can rejoice that they’re living a place that made a very tidy fortune for David Teece, one of their plutocratic profs, who put up cash and clout to get them built, then made a pile selling to Zell at the peak of the market.

Chart of the day: American Catholics, losing faith

From the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, dramatic proof that today’s American Catholics are much less zealous than a generation ago:

Quote of the day: Seeing the future in urban form

From a stunning and very perceptive 1999 report by Robert Fishman for Fannie Mae Housing Facts & Findings on the trends shaping of American cities, past and future.

The number one trend he saw for the first half of the 21st Century is proving right on the money:

The past 30 years have seen increasing concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the income scale, relative stagnation in the middle, and worsening poverty at the bottom. Our respondents expect this trend to continue in the next 50 years, with possible dire consequences for American cities and regions. For growing disparities in income and wealth lead inevitably to an increasingly divided metropolis. If, as our respondents believe, these growing disparities of wealth will become the most important single influence on the American metropolis in the next 50 years, some of the negative consequences are detailed in the rest of the top 10 list: a perpetual “underclass” in central cities and inner-ring suburbs and the deterioration of the “first-ring” post-1945 suburb, as the struggling portions of the middle and working classes find themselves trapped in deteriorating older suburbs. On the wealthier side of the great metropolitan divide, we are likely to see the winners in our “winner-take-all society” isolate themselves in gated communities or other exclusive preserves at the edge of the region.

Other likely trends include a home-building industry increasingly focused on high-end “trophy houses” or “tract mansions;” a similar concentration in retailing on upscale malls; office parks located near the enclaves where the top executives live-locations that often leave the bulk of the employees with long, difficult commutes; and increasing disparities between the quality of the school systems and other services in elite suburbs versus less-favored suburbs and inner cities. We are also likely to see new building focused not just on the outer edge of a region but in certain “quadrants” favored by the affluent: for example, in Washington, DC, the Northwest; in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Southwest; in Atlanta and Chicago, the North. For the affluent who choose to live in gentrified neighborhoods in central cities, the rule of isolation will also obtain, as the wealthy use the techniques of privatization, ranging from private schools to special tax-and-service districts, to insulate themselves from the urban crisis around them.

Quote of the day: The deep politics of online ed

From Patrick Bigger and Victor E. Kappeler, writing in anthropologies:

The decline of the traditional campus in favor of online education has the added bonus of post-Fordist dispersion of dangerous populations and elimination of sites of struggle and resistance. It’s also cheaper. Furthermore, the reassignment of educational costs to students and families through rising tuition mirrors the neoliberal tactic of shifting the cost of workforce training from the private sector to the public, as in decades prior. This has the added bonus of propping up the financial industry that holds more than $150 billion in private student loan debt. This debt is different from almost any other form of debt, in that it cannot be discharged in bankruptcy proceedings. It does not require much imagination to speculate as to what private financiers might do with $150 in debt assets, or its potential effects on the broader economy.

Finally, we note that in addition to having hugely negative ramifications for students and society at large, faculty will not emerge unscathed. The shift towards adjuncts and other forms of contingent faculty labor is well documented, as is the move to abolish the tenure system. However, these are only precursors of academic labor restructuring which the ‘training-ization’ of education promises. On offer is a three-tiered labor system consisting of a ruling class of content creators who designate what constitutes appropriate learning content and outcomes and who make course modules that can be licensed to individual institutions. The institutions (or individual academic units) would designate a content coordinator to select the modules best suited to their training programs. Finally, the vast majority of faculty would be relegated to the inauspicious position of “content deliverer,” clarifying the message of the content creator, contextualizing the material in the overall training program, and assigning grades to students who are overpaying for such certificates with extortionist private loans.

The shift toward training through the growth of online education is detrimental for students, educators, and society alike. But if this is the case, then why pursue this disruptive path? As in most things political-economic, this is a question best answered by asking ‘who benefits?’ In this case, the answer is fairly transparent: financiers backing for-profit education, private student-loan originators, and venture capitalists supporting online education software developers. As usual, the economic rationality is cloaked in the normatively positive language of ‘democracy’, ‘access’, and ‘efficiency’. In other words, the shift toward training is an explicit class project engineered to more effectively transfer wealth toward to those who already control a lot of it. Consequently, our response must recognize this transition as such and respond in kind.

Front porch views: Other front porches

Taken from our front porch as the Golden Hour approaches. . .

20 February 2013, Nikon D300, ISO 320, 90 mm, 1/320 sec, f10

20 February 2013, Nikon D300, ISO 320, 200 mm, 1/250 sec, f10

Quote of the day: Five-star resort socialism

It’s about time somebody said it.

From María Sosa Troya of El País:

The conference organized by the Socialist International in Portugal between February 4 and 5 garnered little attention among the world’s media, but one moment went viral on the social networks. Beatriz Talegón, the Spanish-born secretary general of the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY), lambasted delegates at a luxury hotel in the chic beach resort of Cascais, who included representatives of the ruling French PS and Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE), accusing them of being out of touch with the problems facing young people.

“When people are taking to the streets in Madrid, in Brussels, in Cairo, in Beirut, they’re fighting for what we here, as convinced socialists, defend. [...] Unfortunately, it has not been us socialists taking enthusiastically to the streets and mobilizing,” said the 29-year-old, looking around at her increasingly uncomfortable audience, before continuing: “I am surprised that we claim to lead the revolution from our five-star hotels, traveling in luxury cars. When you political leaders tell people that you understand them, that you support them, that we are socialists, do you really feel their pain inside? Can we really understand them from a five-star hotel?”

Read the rest.

Here’s a video of her remarks. We’ve not been able to find a English-subtitled version.

 

Front porch view, revisited

We’ve posted the view of this wall before, the first sight to greet our etyes when we walk out our front door.

Now another, fresher view, with an assertive addition.

19 February 2013, Nikon D300, ISO 320, 32 mm, 1/160 sec, f4

Chart of the day: Blood on the newsroom floor

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, graphic proof of the sad state of the community newspaper.

In the ten years between 2001 and 2011, newspaper employment dropped from 404,072 to 239,375, while the number of papers dropped from 9,300 to 8,280 and the average number of employees per paper dropped from 43.4 to 29.9.

Surreal collage?: A long-awaited moment

Here’s a shot we’ve been waiting months to capture, the side of the neighborhood that greets our eyes the moment we open our front door.

We wanted to capture the play of light and shadow, architecture and cultural icons in a precise way, using morning light and a view without a car in the way.

That’s been hard to capture, with cars parked blocking a full view of the wall most of the time [as in the second and third pictures here], and on those rare days without cars, clouds and rain ruled.

But Friday morning we got what we wanted. . .

1 February 2013, Nikon D300, ISO 320, 32 mm, 1/500 sec, f4.2