Chicken John who would be mayor:
Burning Man devotee says his platform is bed of pickup truck
by Cecilia M. Vega
SFGATE.com
July 9, 2007
If Chicken John is elected mayor of San Francisco, one of his first orders of business will be to hold a raffle so that some lucky person wins the chance to drive a truck smack into the gigantic bow-and-arrow sculpture that sits on the Embarcadero.
Mayor Chicken John would see to it that more city money goes to the arts, but not the kind of art like the 60-foot-tall fiberglass and stainless-steel structure by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen erected nearly five years ago on San Francisco’s waterfront, which he calls an insult to every artist in the city.
His platform, he says, is the bed of his 1975 GMC pickup, which he converted to a zero-emissions vehicle that runs on coffee grounds and walnut shells. His party affiliation is simple: “I like to party. Party hardy.”
So what if Chicken John, ne John Rivaldi, doesn’t pay much attention to city politics and the only thing he has ever really run for in his life was from a fight as a child (hence the chicken nickname). The longtime Burning Man devotee, who is a superstar in his own right among the large community of festivalgoers, hopes to give Mayor Gavin Newsom a run for his money in November. Read the rest of this article and check out a video clip of Chicken John here.
Here’s more about Chicken John’s candidacy and links to his petition (he needs signatures from 10,000 registered voters in San Francisco by July 26) from Scott Beale at Laughing Squid.