Joan Blades, who describes herself as an accidental activist and is the other half of the political action group Moveon.org, loves to dance. So last night she picked me up at the Hillside Club (designed by local Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck in 1896), where I had been at a Grizzly Peak Cyclists meeting and snatched a bicycle fender bumper sticker, "There's No Car Like No Car," to drive across the Bay Bridge (I realize the irony, but it was in a Prius and my club had just been discussing a way to extend the bicycle lane on the proposed east span of the bridge across to the west span, so one could bicycle or walk the seven miles from shore to shore) to the Presidio, a recycled U.S. Army base in San Francisco where Link TV, a satellite TV channel on world news and culture, known for its award-winning show, "Mosaic," about Al Jazeera and other Mideast news stations, was holding its fifth anniversary party.
I told Joan about my blog and Eason Jordan and Davos, and Joan said that a lot of her friends had gone to Davos this year and wondered who got to go. "Mostly rich white men," I said, because I had just read a report in the NY Times (old school journalism!) and even though people from our world like Dave Winer get to go once in a while as a token celebrity (like Sharon Stone. whose claim to fame is uncrossing her legs on camera, and Orville Shell, dean of the journalism school at UC Berkeley), you don't get asked unless you're very rich and/or very powerful.
That wasn't the case at the Link TV party, where we walked right in and people we didn't even know welcomed us warmly. We came too late for board member Harry Belafonte, who had delivered the keynote, and for Dave Matthews, the troubador who received an award for supporting the progressive channel and who played a couple of songs on his acoustic guitar, but the band was still blasting a fast-paced samba and Link President Kim Spencer, looking dandy in a bejewelled string tie and borrowed tuxedo pants, roped Joan and I for almost an hour of blissful dancing. And thinking about Davos, I felt that last night was my own private Davos, and so, too the night before at the blogging party thrown by Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress (who is only 21, he says, not 25 as I reported), and Davos is every night I share with people rejoicing in our power to make the world a more beautiful place.
And maybe Blogland is Davos, too, my own private Davos open to everyone.
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