A long time ago when I was living at The Playground in its early years, I was also part of a collective that was building a music recording studio in a warehouse space south of Market in San Francisco of the ’80’s. There are many stories to be told about this time (and perhaps it is not necessary to remark that the recording studio was never actually completed). We shared our warehouse lease with a ’zine called Processed World. ¶ One day I was there working on the studio, and I went to use the shared bathroom, where I found a stack of these photos from work on a current issue of Processed World. Since there were a bunch of copies (and we were all anarchists anyway), I snagged one. The composition of the photo, the text (complete with its cross-outs), the posture of the young sidewalk artist whose face you don’t see, all took a grip on me. ¶ I now keep this photo in the room where I sometimes stay at The Playground. ¶ It speaks to me of that time, its wildness and its wide-open possibilities. And also it speaks of the enduring truth that, if the System is the Answer, it must indeed be a Stupid Fucking Question.

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