of randomness and chaos

bringing the crazy

2009-09-03T21:22:00.000-07:00

After Obama was elected, I had this idea that perhaps political discourse in this national would be somewhat elevated. I imagined that with a smart and articulate president, people would actually talk about ideas. Holy Fuck-Stockings, was I wrong! Ok, I knew it was incredibly naive to think that, but I had high hopes.

The Crazy has been coming out of the woodwork all over. It's a deluge of Crazy. First the Birthers, who insist that Obama was not born in this country despite proof that he actually was. Then there was all the talk of Texas succeeding from the union. And the "Tea Bagger" tax protests. People showing up at Obama events with guns. The kicking around of the Thomas Jefferson quote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants." The irrational conviction that Obama is a socialist dictator, planning to take away our freedoms, suppress dissent and put republicans in concentration camps. The comparisons of Obama and Hitler. Then there is all the disinformation about the health care reform, which has veered into bold-faced lies and weird fantasies about "death panels." The latest is that Obama's planned speech to school children, to stress the importance of education and encourage them to work hard in school, is actually an attempt to "indoctrinate our children with his socialist agenda."

There will always be paranoid and delusional people, at all parts of the political spectrum. But I am stunned, and scared, that this level of insanity has become so wide-spread. It's not just the fringe now; people with power and influence are spreading this Crazy. Sometimes it seems that we, as a species, will just keep getting more and more insane until we destroy ourselves. It's actually a pretty likely outcome eventually. What's surprising is that we have not done it yet.

Well... this is turning into a happy blog post, isn't it?

Of all the sources of Crazy, there are two people that really worry me. I would like to dismiss them as harmless, but I can't. I think they will provoke the right-wing nutjobs until one finally cracks and does some serious violence.

One of these nut jobs is talk-show host Glenn Beck. He's one of the loudest voices in meme of Obama as socialist dictator. And he has a show on Fox with many rabid, brainless followers.

The other one that scares me is Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachman. Her brand of Crazy is more ridiculous than dangerous, but still dangerous. She makes Sarah Palin look reasonable. I first became aware of her when she proposed on TV that the media should start taking a look at what people in congress are actually "un-American". Here are a few other examples of what Bachman has to say:

“The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It’s all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax,”

"And the real concerns is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums."

"We're running out of rich people in this country."

"What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This [health care reform] will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass…Right now, we are looking at reaching down the throat and ripping the guts out of freedom. And we may never be able to restore it if we don’t man up and take this one on.”

"Many Americans pay more than half their income in taxes... it’s nothing more than slavery.”

"I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We're the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs."

“He [John McCain] is not my man. Our candidate was chosen by the media. But there are other races out there.”

This goes on and on...

How on Earth does an insane person like this get elected to office? I am SO glad I don't live in her district.

Only in San Francisco...

2009-07-29T23:00:00.001-07:00

Recently, I saw this on the side of a bus here in San Francisco:

Yes, those are really cartoon penis men. Apparently it's part of a larger public service ad campaign in the city. Although I have not seen this in person, the campaign has taken 3-dimension form too:

You can read all about it at healthypenis.com.

The Fog

2009-07-27T19:54:00.001-07:00

Sometimes the fog looks quite dramatic coming over Twin Peaks. This was taken on Saturday from the steps across the street from our apartment.

The Murals of the Mission

2009-07-26T19:00:00.000-07:00

I've always admired the great number of murals in the Mission district, and for a while I've wanted to photograph a bunch of them. Today, being a beautiful sunny day in the city, I finally made the time to do just that. Unfortunately, my digital camera is with Stella in North Carolina right now, so I took all these on my iPhone. While I was biking around, the streets of the Mission were full of cars stuffed with Mexicans waving theirs flag, honking and screaming. You see, Mexico had just beat the US in Soccer to win the Gold Cup. My Mexican neighbors were very, very excited.

Here is a but a sampling of some of the murals in neighborhood.

Zen and the Art of Palm Maintenance

2009-07-15T17:47:00.000-07:00

I've never thought too much about palm trees until recently. On the five minute walk between the train station and my office I pass roughly 75 palm trees (no, I've never counted them, and I'm not going to). Recently, a crew has been doing maintenance on them. I never realized that palm trees needed to be maintained, particularly with such big machinery.

It makes sense that you should cut off the dead fronds, lest you end up with a tree like this:

But what surprised me was the workers striping the old remains of the fronds off. Here are before and after photos:

I don't see what the purpose of this is, other than to create a more manicured look. Personally, I prefer the "before" look to the "after" look. Anyone else agree, or is this just evidence of my preference for all things scruffy?

Sierra 1990 - 2009

2009-06-10T22:02:00.001-07:00

Sierra, my feline companion since January of 1991, was put to sleep on Sunday. She would ld have been 19 this fall, in late September or early October.

This was one of the most difficult things I've had to go through. Sierra was my constant companion through some of the most formative years of my life. I was 22 when I got her, and a very different person than I am now. She first lived with me on Prospect Street in Ann Arbor while I was attending the University of Michigan and playing guitar in the band Assembly Required. She was such an adorable kitten.

A few months later we moved to Longshore Drive, a beautiful secluded street along the Huron River. There is a beautiful trail nearby that winds through the woods along the river. I would often go walking on that trail and Sierra would follow me. We had a favorite spot where we would sit near a tree that had fallen out on the river. This is where I intend to scatter her ashes when I return to Ann Arbor in a couple of weeks to get married.

Next we moved to a farm in northern Vermont, near the town of South Alburg on the shores of Lake Champlain. It was February when we arrived, in a house heated by a sub-par wood burning stove. I slept bundled up in my sleeping bag covered by blankets, and Sierra would crawl into my sleeping bag with me to keep warm. Come summer time, she loved to be in the field, among the vegetables and herbs we were growing. She particularly loved laying in the shade of the broccoli plants. In addition to the farming work, I was also working part time in Burlington, 45 minutes away. When I would return home, I would wander out into the tall grass near our farm plot and call her name. I would then see the grass rustling, moving closer to me. As she approached, I would lay down in the tall grass, and Sierra would sit on my chest and purr. We were so happy to see each other.

After a year, we moved back to Michigan, living with my friend Steve in Whitmore Lake. She loved the open country, and sometimes would disappear for two or three days at a time, exploring. Later, we moved to an apartment on Fountain Street in Ann Arbor, where we lived for nine years. We briefly had another cat, named Boutros Boutros-Ghali. I called him "Booty" for short. Sierra didn't much like living with another cat, and was happy when Boutros left one morning and never came back. I, however was sad. A few years later, I got another cat, Ariel, who still lives with me.

One of my favorite memories of Sierra in that house was how she let me know when she wanted to come in. She loved going outside, but when she was ready to come in, she would climb up the screen door until she could see through the small window in the door at just above human head level. It looked as if a tall person with a tiny cat head was peering through the window. My neighbors would sometimes walk by and see her clinging to the screen near the top of the door. They loved it.

After nine years at that house, we all moved in with Shannon in a house on Spring Street, a block away. Here the cats now lived with Tierra, Shannon's dog, and Amber, her cat. This experience brought Sierra and Ariel together as a family, trying to cope with this new living situation. Before too long, though, I bought a house on Sunrise Street, where we all lived together; two humans, three cats and a dog. The cats loved the garden and would lounge about among the flowers and on the patio or deck I built. One of my favorite memories here is when Sierra would jump on my bed at night, crawl beneath the covers and lay next to me and purr loudly.

After four years in this house, Stella & I moved to Berkeley, California. Sierra and Ariel lived mostly in my office, which had a door going out to the beautiful patio and garden. Ariel loved the garden, but by now Sierra was so old that she preferred staying inside. Still, she occasionally explored the garden and enjoyed the California sun.

After six months, we moved to San Francisco, to a large house in the Outer Richmond. Here, Sierra had the run of the house, but preferred mostly to lie in a corner in Stella's office or on the sofa bed in my office. By now she really seemed old.

One year later, we moved to our current apartment in the Bernal Heights neighborhood in San Francisco. It's a much smaller place, but with a nice deck overlooking Noe Valley. Again, Sierra mostly stayed in her bed, but would often sit on the deck and enjoy the sun.

Last Thursday it became more obvious that Sierra was very old and in less than great health. She was peeing on the rug rather than making the short walk to the litter box. I decided I would take her to the vet the following Tuesday, when I planned to work from home. Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse on Sunday. She was very sick and could barely walk and wouldn't eat or even drink water. I took her to the animal hospital where I learned she had acute liver failure. To attempt to save her would require at least 48 hours of hospitalization and the vet doubted that she would even make it through the next 12 hours.

We both agreed that the best thing was to put her to sleep. It was one of the most painful things I've ever endured. I held her in my arms, looking into each other's eyes, as she passed away. I can't remember the last time I cried so hard.

So much in my life has changed in the last 19 years. But the one constant through it all has been the companionship of Sierra, my Familiar, my friend. She enriched my life greatly, and I can only hope I was able to do the same for her.

I take some comfort that in the final few days I spent a lot of quality time with her, knowing that our time together was growing short. It was still shorter than I expected, but I am grateful that I had that time at all.

Sierra, I miss you. I love you. I will remember you always.

waiting...

2009-05-17T22:13:00.001-07:00

Damn, now that's a long wait!

In Rainbows

2009-04-07T22:14:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is also the name of the last Radiohead album. This post has nothing to do with Radiohead.

But it does something to do with rainbows. And trains.

On the CalTrain ride home from work today, we sat at the Bayshore station for 20 minutes because there was an accident on the tracks somewhere in San Francisco that prevented the trains from going through.

But as I sat there on the train I could see a full rainbow over the bay. I took photos with my iPhone and tried unsuccessfully to stitch them together on my computer. So here are the two photos, of either end of the rainbow:

I also tried to take another photo of the rainbow while passing by a scrap metal dump, but the rainbow was barely visible:

This could be seen as a metaphor for urban life: fleeting moments of beauty sitting upon a huge pile of shit.

missing the ocean

2009-04-02T08:19:00.000-07:00

We used to live less than one mile from the ocean. We could see it from a window in our house. Now we live on the other side of the city, several miles from the ocean. I used to go to the beach, either to surf, run, or just watch the sunset, nearly every day. Now it's been weeks since I've seen it and I realize just how much I miss it. Something about the ocean just draws me to it, and I'm really feeling that pull strongly right now.

I will, however, have some time to go this weekend Stella & Jeffrey are going to Ann Arbor on Saturday until Thursday. Some portion of my free time will involve the ocean, hopefully surfing on it. The surf report for Saturday looks a bit intense for me with waves 5-8 feet high. I like around 3 foot waves the best, since I still totally suck at surfing. Hopefully sunday will be calmer, but if not, I'll probably see what I can do with the bigger waves.

a taste of Bar Kokhba

2009-03-20T10:44:00.001-07:00

After I raved about the Bar Kokhba show in my last post, I figured I should follow up with a taste of their music. Here's a video of a performance in Marciac, France August 10, 2007.

Zorn/Masada fest

2009-03-18T18:33:00.000-07:00

Last week was a intense week of live music. While I still go to a fair amount of shows, these days it's rare for me to be at something this involved. Just Edgefest every October. Years ago, I would often travel to extended festivals in New York or Victoriaville, Quebec. Life is very different these days.

New York composer/musician John Zorn did a five night residency at Yoshi's in San Francisco starting last wednesday. Each night was a different group, two sets per night. As soon as I heard about this last fall, I became terribly excited. I LOVE Zorn's Masada groups, especially The Masada String Trio and the sextet known as Bar Kokhba. Both groups have Erik Friedlander playing cello. He's something of a hero to me and is the main reason I starting playing cello years ago. Over the years, every time I've read about the Masada groups playing somewhere, always in New York or Europe, I try to figure out if I can fly out for it. It's that amazing to me. Finally, they do their first US Masada festival outside of NY and it's in my city! Wheee!

I knew that I definitely wanted to see the first three nights and bought tickets as soon as they went on sale. I figured I would see how things went with the last two nights. While interested, I figured it was a long stretch of time to go out and leave Stella & Jeffrey to their own devices. Who knows what trouble they could stir up without me looking over them!

A Brief History of Masada: Four of the five bands play tunes from Zorn's "Masada" book. His first Masada group was just called "Masada" and consisted of Zorn on alto sax, Dave Douglas on trumpet, Greg Cohen on bass and Joey Baron on drums. The music was jazz heavily influenced by sephartic Jewish musical traditions and other eastern and klezmer influences. It went so well that he ended up writing over 100 pieces. Masada recorded 10 studio cds and a number of live cds. He then created The Masada String Trio, The Bar Kokhba Sextet and Electric Masada to also explore the compositions. This was all in the mid to late 90's. More recently he wrote a whole second book of compositions called "Book II: Book of Angels" and invented even more groups to play the music.

Wednesday night was the String Trio; Erik Friedlander on cello, Mark Feldman on violin and Greg Cohen on bass. Zorn sat on the floor in front of them conducting. The first set was pieces from Book I, the second from Book II. I bought tickets for both sets. It was absolutely amazing. All three musicians are virtuosos and master improvisers. Listening to the recordings is one thing, hearing and seeing it unfold before mes was a whole other thing. Watching Zorn conduct them... deciding who improvises when and for how long, dynamics, whether to bow or play pizzicato, whether to improvise melodically or just freak on their instruments... it was amazing to behold.

Thursday night was the Masada quartet. I had seen them in Columbus, Ohio years ago. I had a ticket to the first set and met a new friend at the club. The set was amazing, of course. Zorn and Douglas have been playing these tunes together for so long that they could really do amazing and things with them. My favorite parts where when the two of them improvised together, weaving a spell-binding conversation.

I decided not to stay for the second set... I had to work the next day and was already pretty tired. I should have stayed to see how they did with the Book II pieces.

Friday night was Bar Kokhba and my expectations and excitement were high. I was not let down. This was the String Trio plus Marc Ribot on guitar, Joey Baron on drums and Cyro Baptista on percussion. Ribot is mindblowingly amazing. They all are, really. Again, I stayed for both sets and had a near religious experience. It was one of the best shows I've seen in my life. If you ever get a chance to see Bar Kokhba live, GO!!!! Even if you think you won't like it, you will. I promise.

As Saturday night approached, it became clear that Stella was still way too busy with work to even want me around to distract her. So I headed off to Yoshi's again to catch the first set of The Dreamers, the only non-Masada project of the Zorn residency. The Dreamers is a recent creation, put together for a new cd a year ago. With Marc Ribot (guitar), Jamie Saft (piano, Fender Rhodes, Hammond B3), Kenny Wollesen (vibes) Trevor Dunn (bass), Joey Baron (drums), Cyro Baptista (percussion) and Zorn directing and playing alto sax, this group plays music exploring a bunch of Zorn's influences in more "popular" music traditions - exotica, surf, film music, etc. The structures were fairly straight-forward but interestingly arranged with complex rhythms. But it was the soloing and group interplay that was most amazing. It times it was almost like listening to jam band, but much more focused. I loved it, but it wasn't on the same level for me as the previous three nights. I declined to pay for the second set and was home by 10pm.

Finally, as Sunday evening rolled around, and Jeffrey was in bed and Stella busy with grading again, I decided to head back to Yoshi's to hear the final set of Eletric Masada. This was the group I was least familiar with, not owning any of their cds (as opposed to many cds by the other bands). What little I had heard of them didn't impress me all that much, but I figured live it would be a different experience.

I arrived at Yoshi's at 9:35, expecting to get a good seat and wait for the next set. Instead I learned that Sunday's showtimes were at 7pm and 9pm. I talked my way in for half price and it turns out they started late, at 9:15, so I only missed 20 minutes or so. It was just as well; i still heard over an hour of music for half price and what I heard did not thrill me on the level of the other nights. While the lineup was much the same as The Dreamers (adding Ikue Mori on electronics and switching Kenny Wollesen from vibes to a second drum kit), the music was very different. Loud, bombastic, structurally simple, noisy in-elegant solos. Ribot sounded great, and Saft had some great solos, but much of it I could have done without. Maybe, isolated from the other nights, I would have enjoyed it more, but compared to the first 4 nights, this was a bit of a let down. The crowd loved it, of course. Zorn has a devoted cultish following that worships every scrap he produces.

Overall, I am immensely gratified that I had the opportunity to witness such a wonderful series of events. Next week I'll be heading over to Yoshi's in Oakland for a double bill of Myra Melford's Be Bread and Alex Cline's group.

ski weekend

2009-03-03T07:54:00.000-08:00

I know... it's been forever since I've last blogged. I've been busy.

This past weekend we had our first ski weekend at Lake Tahoe. It was wonderful. We went with another family of three from our neighborhood; Jeffrey goes to school with their son. We rented a house in Truckee for two nights and drove up Friday night. On saturday it was a bit warm and sunny, but the snow was still good enough for skiing at Mt. Rose, just over the Nevada border on the north side of Lake Tahoe. It was Jeffrey's first time skiing and he did quite well. It was my first time in two years, since skiing in the French Alps. It didn't compare to that, of course, but it was much more mellow and less crowded, which we loved.

By the second day it had warmed up even more and was raining, so we headed to Kirkwood, one of the few resorts high enough to be above the snow line on warm days. And it was snowing non-stop. This place was nice too, but the constant snow made skiing slightly less pleasant. But it was great skiiing on all the fresh powder. Here I had my first fall, trying to ski down a black diamond slope I had no business being on. I like the blue squares the best. Steep slopes with moguls are just no fun for me.

I had been to Tahoe in the summer, but never the winter. It was amazingly beautiful in the mountains, particularly when covered with snow. We can't wait to go back again! Here are a few photos taken with my iPhone.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes

2009-01-14T20:13:00.000-08:00

So much has changed recently. We moved across town, from the Outer Richmond to Bernal Heights. It's the third time in 18 months that we've moved. I have not moved this much since college. After the last move, which nearly killed me, I swore I would hire movers the next time I moved. I guess I lied. We moved ourselves again and it nearly killed me. I'm surrounded by boxes in our new beautiful, but small, apartment. There's still a bunch of stuff at the old house, which we're paying for until the end of the month. And worst of all, until I get this damn cat door installed, my kitties are living alone at the old house.

About that cat door... since the new place is SO small, there is no good place for a litter box except on the small back deck (which has a wonderful view; photos to come later). So I bought a new door from Lowes, cut out a hole & installed a cat door, cut holes for the door knob & dead bolt, and chiseled out space for the hinges. Now I have to cut about a half inch off the bottom of the new door before I can hang it where the current one is (the current one will go into storage until we move out). Then I have to paint it. Once I finish all that tomorrow, I can finally introduce the kitties to their new home.

I also bought a stackable washer/dryer combo that is currently sitting in the garage because it's so incredibly heavy that we can't move it up the stairs. Fortunately our friend Elliot has some kind of contraption to move incredibly heavy objects up stairs and will be helping us out on Saturday.

What prompted this move was the fact that I was laid off from my job of 12.5 years back in late October and have not been able to find a new job. Faced with the possibility of prolonged unemployment, we decided to move to save money. I love the new neighborhood; we're on the eastern edge of Bernal Heights, one block from Mission St, so it's very close to The Mission, Noe Valley and Bernal Heights. Unlike living in the Outer Richmond, this really feels like urban living and all that entails. So far, I love it.

The irony here is that on the first weekday in our new apartment, which we moved into because of my unemployment situation, I was offered a new job which pays more than the job I lost last year. The company is located in Santa Clara, which is about a 40 minute drive south (up to 70 minutes in rush hour traffic). I, however, will start by taking CalTrain instead of driving, since we currently have only one car. I can bike to the CalTrain station on 22nd St in about 15 minutes, I think. Then it's just over an hour train ride to Santa Clara. Fortunately my new job is about a 5 minute walk from the train station. Still, that's about a 90 minute commute each way, but I can read/work/whatever while riding the train. I'm thinking it won't be too bad. I start on January 26, so I still have some time to get settled into our new place.

In the South

2008-12-22T11:33:00.000-08:00

I'm currently with Stella in Greensboro, NC, visiting with her family. Although this is technically "The South", it's not the southern experience one might imagine. Being near a University of NC campus, it's actually fairly liberal; walking around I see enough Obama signs and stickers, plus the occasional Grateful Dead sticker, that I don't feel too out of place coming from San Francisco. However, I just had a little encounter that reminded me that I am, in fact, in "The South." Of course, this actually could have happened anywhere, but I'd like the view it as a "southern experience."

I wanted to take a little walk to a nearby drugstore, and since it's quite cold out and my winter coat is in my still-missing luggage (that's a story for another blog post), I borrowed Stella's grandfather's army jacket. A real army-issued jacket. I'm guessing he served sometime around WWII, but I'm not sure.

On the way out of the store, I'm chatted up by a local. He's very blue-collar looking with some very noticeable silver teeth in his crooked smile, speaking with a thick southern drawl. We'll call him Blue-Collar Silver-Teeth Guy (BCSTG). I had two dialogs going with him, one in my head, the other spoken out loud. It went something like this:

[BCSTG]: It's a cluster-fuck out there, huh?
[Me, internal thought process]: I don't know what cluster-fuck you are speaking of; everything outside this store appears normal to me. I'll just politely agree.
[Me, spoken]: Yeah, man, it sure is.

[BCSTG] (Noticing my army jacket): Was you in the army?
[Me, internal thought process]: No, I'm part of the educated liberal elite in San Francisco. I wear this jacket as an ironic statement; a symbol of the imperialism and suffering our crypto-fascist government is spreading throughout the middle east specifically, and the world at large in general.
[Me, spoken]: No, man, it belonged to my grandfather.

[BCSTG]: I like the jacket anyway.
[Me, spoken]: Thanks, man. Later.

Bill O'Reilly on Our Fair City

2008-11-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

We all know what a dirtbag Bill O'Reilly is. Recently, O'Reilly aired a brief "documentary" segment on San Francisco as a "warning" about what Obama's secular-progressive agenda could mean for America. Needless to say, it's highly sensationalized, focusing exclusively on the more "colorful" aspects of our city. It's amusing to watch, but of course it's not at all an accurate representation of what it's like to live here.

A World Transformed

2008-11-05T10:52:00.000-08:00

Keith Olbermann Special Comment on Sarah Palin

2008-10-08T13:59:00.000-07:00

I know I'm probably preaching to the choir here... but in case there is anyone reading this who still thinks Sarah Palin is even remotely competent, please watch this. Even if you already know how pathetic and dangerous she is, it's still a good watch.

Sarah Palin debate flowchart

2008-10-03T20:52:00.000-07:00

phun with phishing

2008-10-01T10:55:00.000-07:00

I've received my share of phishing scam emails, most of which are pretty obvious, but today I got one that is head and shoulders above the rest for it's sheer stupidity.

This one purports to be the IRS emailing about a refund they want to put on your credit card. But the email sender is the "Internat Revenue Service". What the hell does 'Internat' mean? Gotta love it.

The text of the email, under the actual IRS banner copied from their website, reads:

One would think that if someone is going to all this trouble to create a scam, create a website to harvest credit card numbers from victims, and obtain a list of email address to spam, that they would at least spell check their text and use proper grammar. But perhaps my expectations are too high.

Update: I just received another email from the same people. This time they fixed the spelling of the sender to "Internal Revenue Service." But now the subject reads "Tax refound (28371231) $620.50". Sigh.

why i should be vice president

2008-09-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

Apparently, anyone can be Vice President now. The bar has been lowered so much that even I could be Vice President. In fact, I absolutely should be Vice President. Here's why:

I lived for nearly half my life in Michigan. You can see Canada from parts of Michigan. Thus, I have the necessary foreign policy experience for this office. Now that I live in California, who borders Mexico, my foreign policy experience has doubled! Plus, when I'm out surfing, I always see those container ships heading towards Oakland from somewhere in Asia. Thus I am involved in trading missions with Asia. From my surfboard. Impressive, no?

One of the most important qualification of being Vice President is being able to not blink. I can not blink with the best of them. I'll beat anyone in a non-blinking staring contest. Bring it on, blinkers!

The 1992 campaign proved that someone who smoked pot can be President. Well, I once smoked pot. I even inhaled. Probably more than once, but who's counting?

Sarah Palin took six years and four colleges to get a journalism degree. I took ten years and two universities to get a computer science degree. Enough said.

Conventional wisdom says that you have to be religious to be elected to office. I am an atheist, but since the current Vice President is the anti-Christ, an atheist is a step up.

Dan Quayle marred his term in office by taking on Murphy Brown, a fictional TV character. I wouldn't make that mistake. I will only take on animated characters. My platform will consist of condemning Papa Smurf for promoting Communism and going after Elmer Fudd on gun issues.

I expect to hear from Obama or McCain any day now...

played by a third grader

2008-09-24T14:23:00.000-07:00

Last night as I was cooking dinner and Jeffrey was hanging out and eating pretzels while asking his usual series of odd questions, he asked if he could put some pretzels in the water I was boiling for the pasta. Of course I said no, but he went on about how he thought boiled pretzels would be a good thing. Finally, I told him that I would boil a pretzel for him if he agreed to eat the whole thing even if he hated it. He agreed and so I boiled a pretzel for a few minutes for him.

While it was boiling, he asked if I would please try one too if he liked it. There was no way I wanted to eat a boiled pretzel, but since we are struggling to get Jeffrey to try more foods, I felt that it would set a bad example to refuse to try something he liked.

Of course, at this point, I knew he would claim to like the damn pretzel no matter what. Sure enough, when he tasted it he went on about how awesome it was and that I had to try it.

I knew he was playing me. I knew I was being punked by a third grader, but there was nothing I could do about it. I had to boil a pretzel and eat it.

Boiled pretzels taste exactly like you would expect. Soggy and warm with the salt boiled off. I can safely claim that boiled pretzels are just a bad idea.

At least I can say that the next time Jeffrey is reluctant to try something new, I am better armed than he from this incident. Is that worth eating a boiled pretzel? Probably, but the jury is still out.

a new board and a boneheaded move

2008-09-16T14:44:00.000-07:00

While I'm extremely grateful for the free longboard that Scott gave me, I've already been feeling a desire for a shorter board, one that I can use on the waves at Ocean Beach (near our house) on more than just the calmest of days.

I've been checking craigslist regularly, hoping to find just the board I desire: something around 7 to 7.5 feet, in relatively good shape, and not too expensive at under $300. Boards of this length are often referred to as "funboards"; they fall between the longboards (9 to 10 feet) and shortboards, typically around 6 feet. They give you the stability of a longboard and the maneuverability of a shortboard. In other words, they are fun. They are funboards.

So this morning a new ad pops up for a used 7'3" Doug Haut surfboard for $150. Wow, great price, perfect length. I google "Doug Haut" and learn that he's a very well respecter board shaper in Santa Cruz and his boards typically go for around $600. I call the number and arrange to go see it. The seller lives very close to me, just on the other side of the park on 36th Ave. (we're on 35th). It's the perfect board for me and in good shape, so I buy it. I only have $20 bills and she doesn't have change so she says "how about $140?". Excellent. I am very happy.

In fact, I head straight home, grab my wetsuit and drive to Ocean Beach. I had a great time on it and even managed to get up a couple of times. I definitely like the board. It feels much better to me than the longboard I had been using. A very good board at a great price! Joy!

Now here's the boneheaded move. In my haste to get home, after putting the board on my roof rack and peeling off my wetsuit, I forgot to strap the board onto the rack. I pull out of the parking lot and in my rear view mirrow I notice something very large falling off the car! My brand new surfboard has flown off my car and is sitting in the middle of The Great Highway. OK, it's not really a highway, but a four-lane road with a speed limit of 35, but still! I stop the car in the median and go running after the board. Some kind surfer getting ready to go out runs into the road, grabs the board and meets me half way with it. I strap it on and drive home, wondering how badly it's damaged.

Thing could have been much, much worse. It could have caused a major accident. It could have been run over by a truck. It could have broken in half. Instead it just has a ding on the nose that needs to be repaired and a few other scrapes. With a $20 repair kit and a few hours time, it should be nearly as good as new.

From now on, I will double and triple check those straps before driving off with a surfboard on my car!

surf's up

2008-09-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

Once we moved to our current house, I found myself often going to the beach, less than a mile away, and watching the surfers. Finally, I decided I just had to try that myself. So in June I talked Stella into taking surfing lessons with me in Bolinas, a cute little town about 40 minutes north of San Francisco where the waves are gentle and not too crowded. (No, that is not me in the photo.)

We had a blast! The following month I purchased my own wetsuit (you need a thick wetsuit to surf in these cold northern California waters!) and did some surfing closer to home, in Pacifica, about 15-20 minutes away. After a couple of times renting a board there, a co-worker of Stella's was kind enough to pass on his old long board to me. Beginners typically start on a "long board" around 9 feet long. Advanced surfers move to short boards around 6 feet. The longer a board, the more stable it is and easier to get up on.

So now I have my own wetsuit and surfboard! And I've found that if I start work at 6:30am, I can take a long lunch break and go surfing for a couple of hours. So I've been doing that whenever I can.

Most days I make the drive to Linda Mar Beach in Pacifica, just south of San Francisco. The waves are nicely shaped there, and well spaced apart, making it easy to get out on a board. The main drawback is that it is crowded. It's hard to carve out your own spot to surf without worrying about running into someone (or someone running into you).

Some days I go to Ocean Beach, which is less than a mile from here and just a couple of minutes by car. But the waves here can be intense. They are usually spaced too close together to get out on a longboard; you really need a shortboard to surf here. But on some days, it's doable with my long board.

I went out twice last week and twice so far this week. I didn't realize how hard surfing can be. It's a challenge to stand up in one motion just as you're catching the wave. I usually go tumbling off the board and get tossed around by the wave, covering my head with my arms so the board doesn't slam into my head. But I feel I'm on the verge of "getting it". I hope to move up to a short board by the time winter sets in. Right now, though, my wimpy little bicep muscles feel like jelly, so I need to take a couple of days off. Surfing really takes a surprising amount of upper body strength, which I clearly need more of.

I think this new found surfing obsession is of some concern to Stella, though. She's afraid I'll drown, get eaten by a shark, or even worse, turn into a stereotypical Surfer Dude.

This isn't me either, although my wipeouts are nearly as spectacular!

yet another palin post

2008-09-05T08:05:00.000-07:00

At the risk of adding to Palin overload, I have to post one little item about her. Stella sent me an article that I feel compelled to share. It's an email written by a resident of Wasilla, the town in Alaska where Palin was once Mayor. It's a very frank history of Sarah Palin and her roots in politics. Very much worth reading.

And if you are considering voting for McCain (although I can't imagine who would read this blog and consider voting for McCain), please read this.

About Sarah Palin: an e-mail from Wasilla

"Karl Rove bitterly divided on the experience issue"

2008-09-04T12:59:00.000-07:00

This clip from The Daily Show is a must see, perfecting exposing the hypocracy of Karl Rove and others. Brilliant!

more on sarah palin

2008-09-04T07:10:00.000-07:00

It appears that I was wrong about Sarah Palin in my "This is what we came home for?" post. It does appear that there was no baby cover up and that she really did have that last baby herself. And I don't believe now that she will withdraw her nomination. In fact, conservatives, particularly the religious right, have rallied behind her in ways I didn't expect. And the more I learn about her the more concerned I get. The idea of her becoming president is truly terrifying. Here are just a few of my concerns:

The AP article Palin: Iraq war 'a task that is from God' reveals how Palin seems to inject God and religion into her political life. She claims that the US sent troops to Iraq on "a task that is from God" and called a plan to build a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in the state "God's will."

According to this NY Times article, immediately upon becoming the mayor of Wasilla, Palin tried to get books she deemed "offensive" banned from the town library. The librarian resisted any attempts at censorship so Palin fired her. This didn't go over well with the townspeople so she eventually gave the librarian her job back. Do we really want a book banner in the White House?

She repeatedly touts her opposition to the Alaskan so-called "bridge to nowhere", saying "I told the Congress 'thanks, but no thanks,' for that Bridge to Nowhere." But the Ketchikan Daily News reported in 2006:

“Palin said Alaska’s congressional delegation worked hard to obtain funding for the bridge as part of a package deal and that she ‘would not stand in the way of the progress toward that bridge.”

So she is a liar too. Perhaps she is a good fit in Washington after all.

In a video interview with Larry Kudlow (June 2008), she responds to a question about the number two slot by saying she'd like to know "what is it exactly that the Vice President does every day" and that she'd like to ensure that the position is "fruitful," especially for Alaska.

So just over two months ago she didn't know what the VP does. And her primary concern with the job seems to be to promote Alaska, rather than representing the entire US.

And, as is well known, she is under investigation for abuse of power for the so-called "Troopergate", where she tried to force the Alaskan Public Safety Commissioner to fire her brother-in-law as he was going through a messy divorce with Palin's sister. In fact, she has a history of firing people she doesn't like or that she feels isn't 100% behind her agenda.

The more I read about Sarah Palin the more frightened I become. John McCain is 72 years old and if he wins he will be the oldest elected president in US history. That, sadly, makes the idea of President Palin a very realistic possibility. You thought President Bush was bad? I fear a President Palin may well be even worse.

more insanity in St. Paul

2008-09-02T22:25:00.000-07:00

A woman, standing on the side of the road holding a flower, is pepper sprayed by the police. See the video here.

What the fuck?????

Glenn Greenwald is documenting the madness at Salon.com.

This is what we came home for?

2008-09-01T21:44:00.000-07:00

We just got back from a long weekend in Yosemite and it seems as if the country has gone insane. Of course, it already was insane, but now it seems even more insane.

As we neared Oakland on our drive back we turned on NPR to hear All Things Considered. Initially we felt relief that Hurricane Gustav turned out to be fairly minor. Then we heard that Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. Well... ok. That happens. Not such a big deal, really, except we all know what the right-wing media & blogs would be doing if it were Obama's or Biden's daughter. But the real story here seems to be that Palin may have actually covered up her daughter's previous pregnancy. It is appearing that Palin suddenly announced she was seven months pregnant, then gave birth to a baby with Down Syndrome. The speculation is that this may have actually been her daughter's child and she merely covered this up by claiming she was pregnant. I'm sure this will get sorted out eventually, but it does appear likely that some sort of lie or coverup has happened here. The choice of Palin for running mate was certainly a strange one, but it appears to be looking worse and worse. I predict that she will "withdraw" her nomination (much like Harriet Miers) before too long.

But the real shocker is the police and government reaction to the protests at RNC convention in Minneapolis. The more I read about it the madder I get. Rather than try to sum things up, check out these links for more info:

Salon.com: Massive polive raise on suspected protesters in Minneapolis

Daily Kos: The Police State in Minneapolis

I-Witness Video blog

Perhaps what most shocked me was what happened to the I-Witness group. This is a group whose only purpose is to videotape police behavior at protests to document abuse by the authorities. Their actions at the 2004 convention helped get charges dismissed against hundreds of protesters who were arrested. The police surrounded the St. Paul house where they were meeting even though they had no warrant, told them that anyone who exited the house would be arrested, and then -- even though they finally, after several hours, obtained a warrant only for the house next door -- basically broke into the house, pointed weapons at everyone inside, handcuffed them, searched the house, and then left.

If this kind of behavior goes unchallenged then we surely do live in a police state. I feel disgusted.

Give What You Take

2008-08-27T11:59:00.000-07:00

The title of this post comes from a song by Mojave 3 (on MySpace), one of my favorite bands. Mojave 3 rose from the ashes of Slowdive (on MySpace), one of the original so-called "shoegazer" bands that explored the beauty of noise, using lots of guitar effects and feedback to create a kind of shimmering "wall of sound" texture to their music. The unfortunate term "shoegazer" cropped up because many of these bands seems to stare down at their effects pedals while playing, appearing to be staring at their shoes.

Mojave 3, however, abandoned that style of playing and embraced a mellower style with elements of folk, country and dream-pop. They have now released five albums, my favorites of which are "Out of Tune" and "Excuses for Travellers".

The point of all this is that last night Mojave 3 singer Heil Halstead (MySpace) came to town for a solo performance at Cafe du Nord. I've been into Mojave 3 for about five years now, but have never seen them live. Last night Neil performed a roughly even mix of Mojave 3 songs and songs from his two solo albums, plus a few songs I had never heard before. About half the show was just him and his acoustic guitar, the other half he was joined by a bass player and a guitarist/mandolin player. I was very happy to hear some of my favorite Mojave tunes like "Prayer for the Paranoid", "Give What You Take", and "In Love with a View".

I have to start bringing my camera to shows... This post feels naked without photos from the show. I had to google these images.

Outside Lands

2008-08-24T21:01:00.000-07:00

The Outside Lands Music Festival has been going on for the last three days and it so ridiculously close to my house that as I type this in my dining room I can clearly hear Jack Johnson performing. I opted not to buy a ticket to the fest, mainly because it cost around $165 and I'm not crazy about crowds that huge. But two of my favorite bands, Radiohead and Wilco performed there and I managed to experience them for free in nearly as good a way as if I had paid to go in.

Our house is circled in red on the left side

On Friday afternoon, as I worked in my home office, I could clearly hear Radiohead sound checking "Talk Show Host", so right then I decided I would get as close as I could for free and enjoy sets by Beck and Radiohead that night. It's no more than a 5 minute walk from my house to the festival site, so I wandered down there after a sushi dinner friday and hung out listening to Beck at one of the side stages. Through the fence I could kind of see the stage, but the sound was quite good. He did a nice set, but from the couple of times I had seen him before I felt much of the enjoyment of his shows is visual as well as musical. I do really dig his new tune "Chemtrails", though.

After that, Radiohead played the main stage, where the sound easily carried up to our house on 35th ave. I spent most of the set hanging out on the grass just outside the fence surrounding the polo field. The sound was quite good, but it would have been nice to see them too. At least I've seen them twice before.

At the encore break I started wandering home, knowing I would still hear everything the whole walk home. By the time I got home they were playing Paranoid Android (which I love), so I sat on our front stoop and listened to the last three songs. It was actually louder, although less well defined, than it was by the fence. How cool to listen to Radiohead perform live from my front stoop!

The next day I biked around the festival site a bit, just people watching and checking things out, but didn't really stop to hear much music. Regina Spektor is the only artist that day I would have really liked to hear, but the timing didn't work out. Then, as a drawback to being so close to the festival, Tom Petty was seriously intruding on the film "Henry & June" that Stella & I watched at home that evening.

Today I biked back over and caught most of the set by Stars, and enjoyed that pretty well, largely because I found a spot outside the fence, on a hill, where I could see and hear them perfectly. Fortunately, Wilco was playing that same spot this evening, so I went back and caught their entire set. I've seen them many times, but I think they are one of the best bands around right now, so it's always great to see them. Their addition of the avant-jazz guitarist Nels Cline to the lineup was an inspired stroke of genius.

Well, now summer seems to be over. Stella is beck to work teaching at University High School. Jeffrey is back with us after a summer in Michigan and he starts third grade tomorrow. Fortunately, fall is the real summer here in San Francisco. September through November are the warmest and least foggy months.

and it looks like we have a date and location...

2008-08-21T14:43:00.000-07:00

We're tentatively booked for:

Saturday, June 27, 2009. The Michigan League in Ann Arbor.

Let the planning fun begin.

where to have the wedding

2008-08-18T13:46:00.000-07:00

Stella and I have spent much time discussing where to have our wedding. She's already posted about this on her blog, but I feel a need to write about it too. Ideally, we would do it here in California, either at a winery in Napa or an inn somewhere in Marin County. We could count on perfect summer weather and it would be very beautiful. However, a great many of our friends would likely not be able to fly to California for this.

So the other option is Michigan, where we used to live and the majority of our friends still live. Here, again, there are two options:

1) Get married at a beautiful location in northern Michigan, like an Inn where guests could stay the night or the weekend.

2) Get married in Ann Arbor, which has very limited options for beautiful wedding settings.

What is most important to us both is to have our friends present as we get married. That probably rules out the California location, unless suddenly large numbers of our friends started telling us how much they would love to fly out to California to be at our wedding.

Getting married in northern Michigan, while much closer to Ann Arbor, may still keep some people away who would attend an Ann Arbor wedding. After all, we would still be asking guests to drive four hours each way and pay for accommodations for one night (or two nights they were in the wedding party or just wanted to make a weekend out of it).

One obvious advantage of a destination wedding is that guests don't have to worry about driving somewhere after a night of celebrating. But there are various advantages and disadvantages to each scenario.

Since this event is very much about celebrating with all our friends, I'm curious about any thoughts my friends might have on where to best do this. We're looking either at next summer (if we can get it together in time) or summer 2010.

Any thoughts?

catching up (hiking up Half Dome)

2008-08-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

I've been terrible about blogging this summer. So I am going to attempt to catch up a bit by blogging about some of the fun things we did this summer.

I'll start with one of the most amazing, and difficult, adventures - the hike to the top of Half Dome.

The view of Half Dome and the valley from Glacier Point

Half Dome is perhaps the most striking, or at least most well known, feature of Yosemite National Park. Stella and I spent a few days there in July and had an amazing time. It may be the single most beautiful place I've ever been to. But for now, I'll focus on the hike we did on our last day there.

The hike to the top of Half Dome is intense. It is 8.5 miles one way (17 miles round trip) with an elevation of nearly a mile. That's a lot of serious uphill hiking! Imagine taking the stairs to the top of the Empire State Building... four times. That's the elevation involved here.

We got up at about 6:45 am to head out for the trail head. We finally started the hike just before 8 am, a little concerned that we may have started too late for such a long hike. But the timing worked out fine... it turns out that we're faster than average hikers. All that running we do, I guess.

There are two wonderful waterfalls along the trail, both with intense but stunning climbs. The mist from the first falls is so intense that it's almost like walking through a shower. Very refreshing on a hot hike!

Hours later, we finally arrived at the base of the "dome". The last part of the hike to the base was a bit scary at times... it's basically rough stairs carved out of the rock with some rather steep and precarious areas.

But it was the climb up the dome itself that was most intense. When first discovered, it was deemed unclimbable. And until around 1920, only experienced mountain climbers had gone to the top. But in 1919, the park service installed two sets of cables to the top of allow "normal" people to go to the top.

The cables from the base of the dome

I'm actually rather terrified of heights, and normally wouldn't even think of doing such a thing. But when we finally got in sight of those cables, with the top right there in front of us, I told Stella, who expressed uncertainty about climbing the cables, that I'm definitely doing it. It must have been the lack of oxygen that made me decide to do this. By the time I was half way up, holding on to the cable for dear life at a 45 degree angle slope, I made the mistake of looking down. I had that brief moment of panic where I suddenly realized that I could actually die if I wasn't careful. Fortunately that feeling passed and I continued on the top.

The top was stunning. Amazing views in every direction, particularly of Yosemite Valley.
We hung out at the top for a half hour or more, then began our descent. This, to me, was even more scary than coming up. Contending with climbers going the other direction and waiting for the people ahead of me to move on made the climb seem unbearably long. Stella, however, had no fear coming down. I couldn't wait for it to be over. I felt amazed that people didn't often die here. Later I learned that people do, in fact, die here. Last year, three people slipped off the cables and fell to their deaths. You can read more about deaths at Half Dome here.

Finally, eight or nine hours later, we were back at the trail head, exhausted and sore. We both had blisters on our feet. My leg muscles were sore for a few days. But it was all worth it.

the ring

2008-08-16T13:21:00.000-07:00

This is the engagement ring that Stella and I picked out. It's recycled white gold with a sapphire mined in an eco-friendly, conflict-free manner for Brilliant Earth. You can read more about it on Stella's blog.

This is the spot...

2008-08-13T17:05:00.000-07:00

Lake Tahoe, California. August 11, 2008.

This is the spot...

This is the spot where I asked Stella to marry me.

She said yes.

summer travels

2008-06-09T08:59:00.000-07:00

The thing I've been most looking forward to this summer is being able to travel in California. With Jeffrey back in Michigan for the summer and Stella off from school, I will be using much saved up vacation time to explore California with Stella.

I learned too late that in order to booking campsites in the major parks (Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Sequoia, etc), you have to book the site in the first moments that you are allowed to, 6 months in advance. It's crazy, but they book up that fast! Fortunately, since we're traveling during the week, I was able to get us some campsites in private campgrounds very near the parks we want to see. So far, I have arranged two trips for us.

The first, in early July will bring us down to Big Sur where we will camp here for two nights. From there we drive down to Los Angeles where we will meet up with Stella's mother and niece and spend a couple days with them and explore LA. From there we drive into the desert and camp two nights at Joshua Tree National Park before returning home.

Later in July we have a campsite just outside of Yosemite for three nights. We'll probably have time for one other small trip... I would like to visit Lake Tahoe and stay somewhere nice and romantic for a couple of days before Stella resumes her teaching duties in mid August. So Sequoia will have to wait until next year, but we'll still take some wonderful day trips around the area. We still need to explore Santa Cruz, Monterey, Pinnacles National Monument and so much more!

winning streak

2008-06-09T08:45:00.000-07:00

My final kickball game of the season was last Wednesday, and we ended the season with a three game winning streak, moving from dead last to 9th place (out of 12 teams). This whole thing has been a surprising amount of fun; i will almost certainly do it again next year.

Actually, the season is not completely over... this Saturday is the playoffs, an all-day elimination tournament. Had we remained in last place, we would have been placed against the first place team in the tournament, surely eliminating us in the first round. Now we should be placed against a lesser team, giving us a much better chance to make it past the first round.

what am I, 25 again?

2008-05-15T18:35:00.000-07:00

Since moving to San Francisco, I've needed a way to get out of the house and meet people. I work from home and the bulk of my social interaction is with an 8-year-old boy. So what's the solution I find? Join an adult kickball league, of course!

My friend Pamela (who I've known since college, 20 years ago) and I joined the WAKA Kickball League which has 4 or 5 divisions in San Francisco. We arranged to be put on the same team and ended up on the team called Galactic Prophylactic. Yes, it's a very silly name. It was inspired by an Eddie Murphy skit on Saturday Night Live. You can read the script here.

It's actually turned out to be quite a lot of fun. Although I'm 10-15 years older than most everyone on the team, it's actually a very nice group of people. We play every Wednesday night and I've come to really look forward to it. Unfortunately, we're terrible. We haven't won a game and we're in last place in the division and likely to stay there. But it's all about the fun.

I was worried that it would be too fraternity-like for my tastes. And it is a lot like that. A lot of jocks and former fraternity/sorority types drinking bad beer from cans while getting rowdy on the kickball field. But what the hell... it's still fun.

That's me diving for a ball in short-center field. I missed.

I don't know that I'll make any lasting new friendships from this, but it's helping to fill my social vacuum for now. Sometimes Pamela and I even go to the bar with the teams after the game to engage in team drinking games. I never would have thought I would play drinking games at 40. What the hell has happened to me?

"the heat was hot"

2008-05-15T17:53:00.000-07:00

Remember that terrible song "Horse with No Name" by America? It contains one of the single worst lines of a song ever written:

"The heat was hot and the ground was dry"

The heat was hot? Really. I'll let someone who actually knows something about poetry comment on that one. (Stella?)

Heat is not something one experiences much in San Francisco. It's generally very mild here, consistently 4-8 degrees cooler than our old place across the bay in Berkeley. And we live in the Outer Richmond, which is milder than the rest of San Francisco, being right up against that frigid Pacific Ocean.

But today it is a different story. It's hot. Hot enough to make me think things like "the heat was hot". Of course it could be this massive head cold that has reduced my thought process to the equivalent of bad America lyrics. But it's still damn hot. Even in the Outer Richmond.

How hot you ask? I'm glad you asked. Since I have this miserable cold and it was too hot for me to sleep, I had nothing better to do than lay around and watch the thermometer. It peaked at 100.6 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm sure it set some records. The average high in May is 65.

The past few weeks, as spring blossoms in our old home town of Ann Arbor, Stella and I have been lamenting the mild temperatures of San Francisco. We have been missing hot weather since we moved here. Well, today we got it. And I'm laid out with a cold, unable to enjoy it. I should have been at the beach. It would have been a perfect day for those surfing lessons I've been thinking of taking. Instead I've got a terrible cold that kept me up half of last night. Oh well... it will still be nice this weekend and I fully intend to enjoy it, cold or no cold.

to blog or not to blog

2008-05-15T17:37:00.000-07:00

It has been said that I never blog anymore. True, it has been a while since my last post. There may be a little laziness involved there. But I've also been questioning the purpose of blogging. There are 10,000,000 blogs out there and at least 99.9% of them are pointless drivel. We can count my blog among the blogs of pointless drivel. Do I really have anything to say worth spouting to the whole world in this format? Isn't it just a little narcissistic? I'm not a great writer. I'm not unusually insightful, eloquent or entertaining. I'm just a guy with a laptop. What's so special about that?

So that's my darker, more cynical side posing such questions. In reality, this blog isn't trying to be anything special. It's just a way to let my friends and family around the country know what I've been up to since I moved to California. If you're looking for social commentary, wry insight, political analysis, etc, you're probably in the wrong place. Not that I wouldn't love to offer you those things and more. And perhaps, from time to time, something special actually seeps into this blog. Or not. It doesn't matter. The point is that I'm back and I'm blogging.

We'll see how long it last...

one more thing to love about San Francisco

2008-04-07T11:59:00.001-07:00

A commission has been formed in San Francisco to find the most appropriate memorial for President Bush. They've decided to rename the "Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility" the "George W. Bush Sewage Plant". It will be a ballot proposal in November.

http://www.presidentialmemorial.org/

Here's an interview:
http://sfist.com/2008/04/03/sfist_interview_15.php

quote from the interview:
Q: Anything else you want SFist readers to know about the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco's plans?
A: This is not a hoax.

My Birthday

2008-03-26T20:41:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday was my birthday. My 40th birthday. Unfortunately, I managed to catch a cold a few days before my birthday. We had been planning a housewarming/birthday party, and we came close to canceling the whole thing, but I decided to persevere and do this no matter what it took.

Well, perhaps we should have canceled it. The problem is that we just don't really know enough people around here yet to throw a party. If everyone, or even close to everyone, that we invited actually showed up, it would have been a good party. But apparently I wasn't the only person in town dealing with a cold. Of the 30-35 people we invited, only 8 showed up, with no more than 5 people here at one time. We managed to have fun anyway, but I can't help but think it would have been better to get a babysitter for Jeffrey and go out somewhere with Stella.

The highlight of the evening was a photo/video card that Stella made for me. She had contacted many old friends and my parents and asked them to send her old photos of me, the more embarrassing, the better. She posted her creation on her blog here, or you can just view the video here. She did a great job with this and I was very touched. At least there was hardly anyone at the party to see the embarrassing photos of me in my youth.

You would think that after 40 years on this planet, I would have learned my limit with tequila. Sadly, no. I spent the first half of Sunday in bed recovering from the excesses of the night before. But once I did get up, we headed out to Fort Funston on the coast in the southern part of San Francisco. A quiet walk along the striking dunes & cliffs was just what I needed.

Unfortunately, the excesses of the party may be responsible for setting back my recovery from this cold. It's now been a week and I am still in the throes of it. I'm hoping I will have recovered by this weekend.

The view from the sand dunes of Fort Funston

Me at 40 and only slightly hungover

I love the diagrams of the dog and person falling

those dutch cellists

2008-03-03T08:10:00.000-08:00

Years ago, when I first started playing cello, I heard about a dutch cellist who had developed a technique of playing with two bows - one played conventionally, on top of the strings, the other under neath the strings. Both bows are held in the right hand and the "underneath" bow can only play the outside strings - C and A. This opens up all sorts of possibilities of the cello as a chordal instrument. Periodically I heard more about this cellist and her fascinating technique, but never actually heard her play.

Fast forward to last Wednesday. My friend and pianist-extraordinaire, Myra Melford, was doing a gig at CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies), a UC Berkeley performance space conveniently located 5 houses up the street from my old house in Berkeley. The two times I went there while living in Berkeley (once to hear Myra with Frank Gratkowski, the other to hear pianist Georg Graewe), I reveled in the ability to walk up the street 5 houses to see such great musicians. On Wednesday, however, it was about a 50 minute drive from the Outer Richmond in San Francisco. 35 minutes in light traffic.

This particular gig paired Myra with Frances-Marie Uitti, a dutch cellist visiting the area for a new music festival. About 10 minutes into their captivating set, the cellist picked up a second bow and started playing with both, one underneath, the other on top. I suddenly realized that I was watching that dutch cellist i had heard about for years. It was a rather thrilling realization. Their set was wonderful, if a bit too short. Very much worth the drive across the bay.

Tonight I'm headed back to Berkeley again see Myra play a double bill at Freight & Salvage - the Myra Melford/Ben Goldberg Quartet, followed by (or preceded by) Wayne Horvitz's Sweeter than the Day.

frozen in Grand Central Station

2008-02-07T07:54:00.000-08:00

I love this! A group of over 200 actors all froze on the spot, at the same time, for 5 minutes. Then they simultaneously resumed what they were doing as if nothing happened.

Running

2008-02-01T14:26:00.000-08:00

My temperature threshold for running outdoors is 50 degrees. Any colder than that and it's just no fun. Back in Ann Arbor, that ruled out almost every day from sometime in October until sometime in April. Here in San Francisco, almost every day is above my threshold. Today was one of those days.

This is the third day I've gone running since we moved to San Francisco. I loved running through the cute little hilly neighborhoods in Berkeley, getting high enough to get a view of the whole bay. But running here isn't terrible at all. I head straight for Golden Gate Park, a block away, and wind my way down to the ocean and run along that for a while. Every time I emerge from the park and see the ocean, I'm totally amazed. I can't believe that I actually live here!

Here's a map of my run today, which was exactly 4.5 miles.

the view

2008-01-22T20:33:00.001-08:00

This is the view from the master bathroom upstairs. From one window in our apartment, you can actually see the Pacific Ocean!

(This photo is zoomed and cropped a bit. The ocean may not be as close as it appears in this photo.)

we're here

2008-01-20T21:23:00.000-08:00

Well, we now live in San Francisco. The move was ridiculously difficult. I took friday off work, picked up the rental truck at 8:30am that morning, and started moving everything that I could lift myself, since Stella was not able to take time off work, being a teacher and all.

By about 2:30pm, I had moved what felt like 3 tons of boxes, furniture and assorted crap into the truck, pretty much filling it up. The drive across the East Bay Bridge was just fine, although traversing the hills of San Francisco felt like it was pushing the limits of the engine of a fully weighted truck. By the time I emptied the truck, carrying box after box after box up 14 steps to our front door, I was bruised, sweaty, sore and completely exhausted. And it was a warm and sunny California day - usually perfect weather, but for moving it was just too damn hot. After all that heavy lifting, the long, slow drive back to Berkeley in rush hour traffic was actually a relief.

The next day Stella & I managed to complete empty and clean the Berkeley house, although I finally pulled out of the driveway just after 5pm, again completely sweaty and exhausted. Unloading in San francisco was even harder, since I left the heaviest items for the second day. Fortunately, we were able to dump much of the heaviest stuff in the garage, which is at ground level, to contend with the next day. We finally finished around 9:30 or so. While we were unpacking, one of our new neighbors came by and introduced herself to us and insisted and getting us a couple of burritos from a place near by. Those burritos may have well saved our lives. At the end of the evening, when I finally was able to shower, I was stunned by the amount of bruises covering my arms and legs. Next time we move - and hopefully it won't be for a LONG time, we will definitely hire movers. I think it is probably worth the expense.

Today, Sunday, we moved the last of the heavy items from the basement and spend much of the day putting things in their proper place. We're all completely exhausted, Jeffrey has a bad cold and mild fever, Stella is getting sick and I'm sitting in the living room blogging when I should be sleeping.

Our phone and internet, which was supposed to be turned on Friday, is not working. They are sending someone out tomorrow by 7pm, but that means I can't work tomorrow as planned. honestly, I'm not too upset by that. We still have so much more to do here.

I'll miss Berkeley. It really is a wonderful city to live in. But San Francisco is pretty amazing too. We're half a block from Golden Gate Park and roughly 12 blocks from the Pacific Ocean. We can even see the ocean from the upstairs bathroom window. You can't get too much further west that we are now.

Things Happen FAST!!!

2008-01-02T15:47:00.001-08:00

I feel a little bit crazed right now. Okay, a lot crazed. Due to various circumstances with Jeffrey's schooling, we've decided we need to move to San Francisco, the sooner the better. Our lease here ends at the end of June, so we figure we'll look around for the perfect place and try to time finding a replacement for our current lease so that we're not paying two rents at the same time. We figure this could happen fairly quickly or take the next six months. But I didn't think it would happen almost instantly!

We spent much of our christmas vacation driving around San Francisco looking at various places, most of which we could cross off our list without even viewing the inside. And of the places we did see inside, most were crap. It's amazing how much money people will pay to live in crap in San Francisco. So we saw two really nice places inside. One was just two small - two bedrooms, under 1000 square feet, which is small for three people and two cats.

But then we saw an amazing place with 3 bedrooms plus a study, a garage, living room, dining room, 2 and a half bathrooms, a great updated kitchen, and a wonderful back yard. It's a bit pricey at $3500 a month, but actually a good deal for San Francisco. (Did I mention that rents and home prices are totally insane here?) So at the open house we looked around and said to the realtor "We'll take it!" Unfortunately, at least 3 other people did the same thing. So we drove home and emailed the realtor all our application info and waited, thinking we'll never get it. Then came follow up calls from the realtor. And a conversation with the owner's sister. (The owner lives in Florida, the sister is local). Then the realtor telling us that the sister really liked us and things look good.

In the meantime, I put an ad on craigslist to find someone to take over our lease. A precarious juggling game, to say the least. If we don't find someone, we're stuck paying $3150 + $3500 a month until this place is rented!

As soon as I put the ad up on new years day, people started emailing and calling. I set up the first showing for the following morning. A really cool couple came by and looked around for about 5 minutes and said "We'll take it!". They sent their applications to our landlord, who accepted it. Now all we can do is wait until we hear about our new place.

So 15 minutes ago I get the call. They owner chose us! We got it! The only catch is that the place is available now and the owners don't want to wait until February 1 to start collecting rent. They want to start mid-month, which still means paying two rents for half a month. But wait - the people taking over our lease would actually like to move in early if possible. I'm stunned at how this is working out. I still need to call the owner of our new place and negotiate when to actually start the lease (I'm hoping for the weekend of the 19th), but I think this will all work out perfectly.

Of course the downside to this is that we're moving again. soon. very soon. panic inducing soon.

The new place is in the neighborhood known as The Richmond. It's the area north of Golden Gate Park and south of the Presideo. We will be pretty far west, about 10 or 12 blocks from Ocean Beach on the pacific ocean. What this means is when the infamous San Francisco fog moves in, it covers us first. In the summer, the fog should lift late morning and return early evening or even late afternoon. I can deal with that. I can deal with being half a block from Golden Gate Park. I can deal with being walking distance to the Pacific Ocean. I can deal with being in a nice house in San Francisco. It won't suck. Not at all.

Now is the time to go crazy with moving, setting up utilities at the new place, renting a truck, and all that fun stuff. Anyone want to come help us move?

The World Explained by a Venn Diagram

2007-12-03T20:05:00.000-08:00

This perfectly sums up the attitude of the stereotypical elitist music snob. And yes, I admit that sometimes I may be just a little bit of guilty of being one.

Control

2007-11-29T20:25:00.000-08:00

You remember the band Joy Division, right? from the late 70's? Don't remember that far back? It's ok, I don't either.

In 1983, a friend turned me on to the band New Order, my first real taste of "alternative" music (as it was called back then - now they call it "indie rock"; today's "alternative" is bland and commercial). Shortly thereafter I learned that New Order formed out of the ashes of the band Joy Division after singer Ian Curtis hung himself. What little Joy Division I heard at that time sounded primitive and dark in comparison to New Order, so I wrote it off and put my interest in current bands.

Years later I had the chance to revisit Joy Division and found I really liked them, and have periodically gone back to their music ever since. And recently the film "Control" was released, a biopic on the life of Ian Curtis. I went to see it at the Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley. It really was a beautiful film. Shot in black & white, it really captured the industrial decay that defined Manchester, England at the time. It was the perfect backdrop to Ian Curtis's dark and often tortured lyrics. The film was based on the book "Touching From a Distance" by Ian's widow, Debbie Curtis. Ian Curtis was practically doomed from the start; very intelligent and insightful but moody and depressive, he married way too young while still in his teens. As the band became more popular he battled with increasingly frequent epileptic seizures, the pressures and demands from the band and feelings of being trapped in a loveless marriage with a child. After releasing only two albums, Ian Curtis hung himself in his kitchen in May of 1980. He was only 23.

What's amazing is that such a short life and burst of creativity could have such a profound and lasting impact. They essentially invented "post-punk" and created the template for almost all the alternative music of the 80's and beyond. The film does a fantastic job of capturing his life and what his art was about without romanticizing it in any way. I highly recommend seeing this film if you have even the slightest interest in Joy Division, New Order or alternative music.

Sunset at Indian Rock

2007-11-29T18:00:00.000-08:00

These days the sun sets here around 4:50pm. At that point, I'm usually done with work and have some time to kill before picking Jeffrey up from the Kidz Club after school program, so lately I've been driving to Indian Rock to watch the sunset before getting Jeffrey. This evening I brought my camera and took some shots. Unfortunately, the top of a tree is visible in most of them. But this time of year the sun sets right behind the Golden Gate Bridge, which makes for a wonderful sunset. Just a few weeks ago it was setting above the hills of Marin; soon it will be setting behind the city.

Biking in Tilden

2007-11-14T20:56:00.000-08:00

I finally made some time to take my mountain bike out to the trails in Tilden Regional Park in the hills above Berkeley. Yesterday I began work at 6:30am so I could take a long lunch (2.5 hours) and go biking. It was perfect weather - 65 degrees and sunny.

I started out at Inspiration Point, on the east side of the park, and rode on the Meadow Canyon trail, which was a gradual descent into the valley. You can view a details trail map here. When I hit the start of the Gorge Trail, I was in the lowest part of the park. The Gorge Trail is really beautiful and lush, running beside a winding stream that connects the two lakes in the park. This was probably my favorite part of the ride. Then I began the long ascent up Curran Trail, which was fairly difficult but had some incredible views of the valley and stream below. Soon I completed the loop and it was still early and I was hungry for more. So I decided it would be a good idea to head up the Seaview Trail to the East Bay Skyline National Trail. Big mistake. It was one long steep uphill. It nearly killed me. Less than halfway up I knew it was a mistake, but I decided that since I'd come this far I had to go all the way. I finally made it to the top but I was completely exhausted and thought I might die at any moment. At least I had an amazing view of the whole bay and the valley and Mt. Diablo to the east. All from one spot. Pretty incredible. Riding the crest of this trail was very nice, but too short. Then began the descent down the Big Springs trail, which was just too steep and rocky to be much fun. I then came to the Quarry Trail which led me back to my starting point. This trail would have been a good ride, but by this time I was so tired and sore I could barely peddle. The ride was just under 8 miles, but since near half of it was steep uphills, it really kicked my ass! It was a much more intense workout than the 3.5 to 4 miles I've been running regularly.

I actually can't wait to bring my bike back out there. I'll just avoid biking on the ridiculously steep trails next time.

Friday Night in the City

2007-11-12T20:59:00.000-08:00

I'm generally not a huge fan of stand-up comedy, but years ago I stumbled upon Marc Maron (MySpace) on some TV special and was instantly won over by his sense of humor. He's intellectual, very left-wing, dark, angry, twisted and self-deprecating... my kind of guy. I don't quite know why his humor resonates with me so much. He can come off as kind of an asshole. But a highly entertaining asshole. The kind of guy I'd love to hang out and drink with. If he still drank. He did a weekend at the Punchline Comedy Club in San Francisco and I met up with Pamela and her friend from NYC on Friday night to go see him perform. He did not disappoint. I was one ear-to-ear grin the whole time. I even got to chat with him briefly after the show. Good fun!

After that, we hung out at Pamela's place in SF for a bit before she went off to some DJ thing and I went to the Rickshaw Stop (a small club in SF) to hear The American Music Club, a great indie rock band led by singer/guitarist/songwriter Mark Eitzel.

Eitzel recently moved from San Francisco to LA and subsequently put together a whole new version of the band with only the other guitarist remaining. The show was the first on a long tour, and one of only two shows in the US. It was quite good, but the band hadn't had a chance to learn much old material, so 90% of the setlist was new material from their upcoming album. I would have liked to hear a few more old tunes, but it was great to finally hear them live at all.

Muir Woods and Redwoods

2007-11-06T20:32:00.001-08:00

This past weekend involved two wonderful days of outdoor activities. Saturday we went tromping around Tilden Park again, which is full of great hiking trails through the hills above Berkeley. Then on Sunday we headed over to Marin County to explore Muir Woods, which I had never been to. I had heard that it was pretty great, but it surpassed my expectations. Located in the valley and foothills just south of Mount Tamalpais, it's quite large and extremely beautiful. It doesn't have the huge old growth redwoods that exist further north in California, but there are a lot of quite huge and majestic redwoods. After a short hike on the shorter main (and touristy) trails, we hiked a longer trail up in the hills towards Mount Tamalpais. This trail was stunningly gorgeous, winding across streams, crossing over small gorges on footbridges and over huge fallen redwoods. After winding up and up and up, we ended up on a trail called "Ocean View", which we hoped would afford us a wonderful view of the ocean. Unfortunately, on the part of the trail we were on, we were not quite high enough to see the ocean beyond the ridge just before the ocean. Had we turned left on the Ocean View trail, away from our destination, I'm sure we would have had the great view. But alas, it was time to head back to our car as we had already pushed the hiking limits of a 7 year old boy. I'm already looking forward to our next visit so we can see more of the Ocean View Trail.

Did I mention that all our hiking this weekend was done under clear blue skies and temperatures in the mid 70s? In November? Yes, living in California does not suck.

Here are a few photos. They do not at all convey how amazing this place is.

Trial-By-Fire Emergency (Step)Parenthood

2007-10-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

It happened at roughly 2:30 pm - the phone call from the after school program at Jeffrey's school. He had bumped his head by running into a pole and apparently there was a lot of blood and though it wasn't serious he wanted to come home. So I rush off to pick him up. He's not happy, but not terrible either. There's two blood soaked band aids on his head and it just appears that it's just a big bump underneath. After we get home I call Stella at work and tell her what happened. While I'm talking to her I take the bandages of Jeffrey's head and see that it's not really just a bump - it's gash large enough, and deep enough, to require stitches.

At this point Jeffrey is terribly, terribly unhappy and just wants his mommy. The last thing he wants is to spend Halloween in the ER getting stitches. He's crying, saying that this is the worst day ever and saying he refuses to go, clinging desperately to the curtain in his room. Finally I convince him that it won't be that bad, that it needs to be done, and if he hurry we can be back in time to go trick-or-treating. Armed with a Harry Potter book, we finally head off to the Emergency Room so they can sew up his forehead while Stella starts the almost 90 minute commute to Berkeley from her school.

After waiting an hour for the initial consultation (reading lots of Harry Potter to Jeffrey), Stella shows up just as the clinician is interviewing us and deciding what's required. As I thought, he definitely needed stitches. After another wait (and more Harry Potter) we get into a private room where the doctor does things to Jeffrey's head that make me a little squeamish, and I don't typically get affected by stuff like that. But Jeffrey takes it all really well, with no crying at all! The local anesthesia helped a lot for sure. Everyone was very impressed with how well he accepted five stitches to his forehead. If only we had planned a Frankenstein costume for him for Halloween.

We did finally make it back in time to go trick-or-treating, which was totally crazy in the particular neighborhood we went to. They take their Halloween very seriously out here in Berkeley, I must say.

I guess this was trial-by-fire parenthood. Fortunately, I think I passed. But it proved to Stella that she needs to work in the same city that Jeffrey lives and goes to school. So after our lease is up here at the end of June, we will almost surely be moving to San Francisco.

Return To Ann Arbor

2007-10-27T20:56:00.000-07:00

I know, I know... it's been too long since I've been blogged. What can I say? I've been busy. I went back to Ann Arbor last week to see Edgefest and visit old friends. I was a great experience. I'll do a separate post about Edgefest shortly and focus now on what it was like to be back in Ann Arbor.

I lived in Ann Arbor for about 21 years, other than the (almost) year I lived in Vermont for most of 1992. Now I've been in Berkeley for 3 months and returned to Ann Arbor to visit. I feel like I'm still trying to sort out the experience. On one hand I felt like I was returning to my home; It was so familiar and full of friends and acquaintances. On the other hand I also felt like a visitor since I was a guest in someone's house and my life is now 2500 miles away. Overall, it was a strange feeling.

After flying all night tuesday night, then renting a car wednesday morning, I made my way to Eric & Anica's house, just a few houses away from my old house. In my slightly sleep-deprived state, I really had to focus to not just drive to my old house, park in the driveway and walk inside. After a few hours of sleep, I met up with Stella (who flew in earlier Wednesday) to have dinner at Pacific Rim, my favorite Ann Arbor restaurant. Their seared tuna is outstanding.

The next day I paid a visit to the people who bought my house. There is a group of five lesbians living there and they were quite receptive to me visiting. Of course I had a legitimate reason - I had some info on the house that they needed. I had left it on the counter when I moved, but somehow it got packed and moved to Berkeley. The women seemed like a great group of people and they loved what I had done with the garden and seemed genuinely interested in maintaining it. It was also nice to catch up with a couple of my old neighbors who happened to be out when I went by.

The rest of my stay was a crazy whirlwind of avant-garde improvised music and seeing old friends. It was fantastic to reconnect with old friends and I felt very at home while simultaneously being aware that I was just visiting. It was an odd sensation - part of me looked forward to being back home in Berkeley while part of me longed to be home again in Ann Arbor. One thing that really struck me, however, is how small Ann Arbor felt. It was all so familiar that it made me more aware of how much I loved living in a new place with so much to explore. The BayArea, and even just Berkeley, is so much larger than Ann Arbor. There is an endless amount of new things to discover here and I love being in such a radically different environment. If only I could just move all my Ann Arbor friends here too. Then I would REALLY love being here.

From The Onion: Report: Swelling Hippie Herds Pose Threat To Delicate Freakosystem

2007-10-10T08:21:00.000-07:00

(Thanks to Warren who posted this on MySpace...)

Report: Swelling Hippie Herds Pose Threat To Delicate Freakosystem

WASHINGTON, DC-The indigenous North American hippie population has expanded to the point that its teeming herds are endangering the planet's fragile freakosystem, warned a Department of the Interior report released Monday.

Report: Swelling Hippie Herds Pose Threat To Delicate Freakosystem

December 9, 1998 | Issue 34•19

WASHINGTON, DC–The indigenous North American hippie population has expanded to the point that its teeming herds are endangering the planet's fragile freakosystem, warned a Department of the Interior report released Monday.

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Earth In Crisis: An Onion Special Report

According to the report, over the past 20 years, the wide-ranging, largely migratory hippies have more than tripled in population, insidiously infiltrating nearly every other U.S. subculture while venturing far beyond their natural Vermont and Colorado habitats.

"Due to the species' lack of predators, willingness to live almost anywhere and rabbit-like breeding habits, the hippie has become the most prevalent feature on the American countercultural landscape," Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said. "If we do not soon find a way to thin their herds, they will overwhelm every other subculture on the continent, potentially leading to freakological disaster on a mass global scale."

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A herd of hippies grazes in a field near Burlington, VT.

Experts say the hippie-related environmental damage has largely been the result of their sheer numbers. Long regarded as a mere nuisance species, the hippies have grown over the past 10 years into one of the most populous in North America, numbering close to 20 million. Further, because of the hippie herds' normal daily cycle of waking, bongo-playing and large-scale grass consumption, followed by a brief period of torpor and then aggressive nutritive replenishment, their freakological impact is enormous.

"Each summer, the hippie herds migrate north to Boulder, wiping out 80 to 90 percent of the hummus supply of the regions through which they pass," National Park Service director Roger Kennedy said. "In certain parts of Colorado, by mid-August, the patchouli reservoirs are entirely drained."

The burgeoning herds–identifiable by their dreadlocked hair, hemp jewelry and distinctive tie-dyed markings–have greatly affected the quality of life of people living in these areas of high hippie concentration.

"They're everywhere," said Linda Hewson of Albany, NY. "Last night, when I went to take out the trash, I found one of them foraging through my garbage cans for Dead bootlegs. I shooed it away, but a bunch more came by later scavenging for discarded twirling sticks."

"My property is overrun with them," said Vallejo, CA, resident Patrick Davis, who said he is considering moving if the problem gets worse. "They even set up a bead-vending stand in my backyard."

First introduced into the cultural landscape in the early 1960s, the hippie, or homo habilis VWbus, was initially applauded by freakologists, who believed they would be beneficial in curbing the growth of the then-ubiquitous Establishment Type. When the crisis passed in the early 1970s, the hippie population was reduced to a fraction of its former size, creating room in the American freakosystem for numerous other subcultures, including punks, new-wavers and goths. Social developments of recent years, however, have caused the hippies' numbers to balloon once more.

A 1985 photo of an Olympia, WA, meadow sparsely populated with hippies. By 1996, the meadow was destroyed, its topsoil stripped clean by migratory hippie herds numbering in the thousands.

"For some time, it was believed that the extinction of Jerry Garcia and the dispersal of The Grateful Dead would have a suppressive effect on the size of the hippie population," Kennedy said. "Surprisingly, though, exactly the opposite has happened: The herds have grown, diversifying and spreading out. In the past, if the Dead were playing in Chicago, the entire hippie species would be singularly concentrated there. But today, you could have a herd of hippies at Red Rocks to see Phish while, at the very same moment, an equally large herd is massing in Ann Arbor for a Widespread Panic show."

Another reason for the hippie explosion, environmentalists say, lies in the differences between the current crop and the more mature, "old-growth" hippies of the 1960s. While old-growth hippies were a gentle species that was considered a mild annoyance at worst, the new breed, they say, is a hardier, more insidious creature which seems to thrive in virtually any environment.
"We're seeing these young hippies in the malls, in fraternities, on Madison Avenue–all kinds of places where hippies were once considered non-indigenous," said Alfred Meijer of the Nature Conservancy. "Years of cross-breeding and exposure to television have produced a hybridized, consumer-culture-bred hippie that can adapt to literally any environment, countercultural or mainstream. And unlike the old-growth hippies, which at least were anti-materialistic, the new ones are voracious consumers, swiftly depleting their habitat of all resources and purchasable goods."

Though most experts agree that the vast herds must be thinned, they are divided on how to go about it. Some are calling for the hippies to be spayed and neutered and then placed in designated preserve areas, where they would be free to roam peacefully and play hacky-sack. Others suggest more extreme measures, advocating the use of large, headshop-shaped traps to lure the hippies. Once inside the traps, the hippies would be poisoned with super-adhesive, cyanide-laced Guatemalan blankets and sweaters.

"Whatever we do, we must do it soon," Babbitt said. "If we don't, we are dooming our children to live in a world overrun with backless apron dresses and bare feet. And that is a fate we can ill afford."

and just for Andre...

2007-10-07T21:05:00.000-07:00

some pictures of the Klingons at the Be As Berkeley As You Can Be Parade.

Be as Berkeley as you can be

2007-10-03T20:16:00.000-07:00

On Sunday we all biked to downtown Berkeley to watch the Be As Berkeley As You Can Be Parade. It's an annual parade that celebrates the various eccentricities of Berkeley while also kind of making fun of itself. A few civic and non-profit groups marched, but it was mainly various Berkeley freaks being silly and a whole bunch of art cars. Art cars, as you may know, are just cars painted and/or covered with a whole lot of crazy crap. Oh, and there were also cupcake cars. Plus a few Klingons. What would a parade be without Klingons? The whole thing was very amusing, but photos tell the story much better than my words could.

more great jazz in San Francisco

2007-10-02T21:06:00.000-07:00

One really positive aspect of moving to the bay area is getting to see one of my favorite musicians, Myra Melford, perform so often. On saturday she did a duo performance with saxophonist/clarinetist Marty Ehrlich at The Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco. Even though it took longer than driving, I took the BART there, which involved nearly two miles of walking to & from BART stops. But I really love public transporation, particularly the BART. While there are so many ways in which it could be improved (more destinations, more frequent trains, longer hours), and it pales in comparison to the New York subway, I still love it. I would much rather take the extra time and not worry about driving and parking and just enjoy the ride while people watching and/or reading. One of these days I will bring my bike on the BART and bike around San Francisco.

But I digress; this is a post about music, not public transportation. The Noe Valley Ministry is a church in the Noe Valley neighborhood (just west of the Mission) that has been hosting a jazz/new music series for ages. It's a beautiful sounding room with a really nice grand piano. I had seen this duo one other time, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in my last visit to New York just after 9/11. I enjoyed that show but left thinking that this duo didn't rank near the top of my list of favorite Myra Melford projects. Well, Saturday's show changed that opinion. It was a fantastic performance that surpassed my expectations with some wonderful new compositions from both musicians. After the show Myra offered me a ride back to Berkeley, so I rode back with her & Marty after we all stopped for gelato in SF. I had met Marty once before but never spent time with him; he's a really cool guy. I'll never forgot the story he told about Leroy Jenkins, the jazz violinist who passed away earlier this year:

Years, ago, probably in the 60's, Leroy Jenkins was staying with Ornette Coleman when Leroy was just starting out in the jazz world. But Ornette kept on calling him Leon and Leroy didn't say anything, thinking he didn't want to risk blowing this great deal of getting to stay with a legend like Ornette. Finally Leroy just couldn't take it anymore and after Ornette once again called him Leon, Leroy finally says "Ornette, you know my name is Leroy". Ornette pauses and says "I'm sorry Leon, I'll never call you Leroy again".

Phil at the Greek

2007-09-25T09:03:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I revisited an aspect of my past by going to see Phil & Friends in concert at The Greek Theatre in Berkeley. Phil Lesh, as most readers here would probably know, was the bass player for The Grateful Dead and has been touring with his own ever-changing band since the demise of the Dead. Although once a huge part of my life, The Dead don't really occupy any part of my daily life anymore, other than the fact that I am still very much connected to many people I met when I was into the Dead.

The last time I went to a Dead related show was about 4 years ago, i think - another show by Phil & Friends. That show was amazing, probably better than most Grateful Dead shows I saw (and I saw between 65 and 70 of them!). The excellence of that show was largely due to the two amazing guitarists, Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring, as well as the deep, intuitive musical bonds that had developed between the band. Phil's current version of the band has only one member from that older band - the drummer. On guitars he had Larry Campbell and Jackie Green. Jackie Green did most of the singing and was a very good singer, although he struck me as trying too hard to be Bob Dylan circa 1966. Even his original songs that the band played sounded like Dylan tunes from that era. Larry Campbell is a fine guitarist, but his strength is in straight-ahead rock & blues, not the extended, out-there jamming that the Dead excelled at.

Unfortunately, I have to say that I found the whole show rather disappointing. The first set was stuffed with mostly boring blues-based tunes and old rock covers ("Good Morning Little School Girl", "Good Lovin'", "Why Don't We Do It in the Road", "The Weight"). The highlight was a ripping version of the Dead's "Cumberland Blues", which normally doesn't excite me all that much but stood out rather starkly in an otherwise bland setlist.

After a set break that was just over a full hour(!), they hit the stage again and opened with "Playin' in the Band", usually a great showcase for what the Dead did best - extended, exploratory and exciting collective improvisation. This version was alright, but never seemed to really gel or go anywhere and there were none of those transcendental musical moments I look for in music like this. The rest of the set was mostly an exercise in unused potential. "St. Stephen" was nice, but not inspired. Instead of going into "The Eleven" like I hoped, they did another mediocre Jackie Green tune. "Fire on the Mountain" was pretty good, but I would have much rather heard the song it's usually paired with, "Scarlet Begonias". "The Wheel" was done in a tepid arrangement that lacked the life of the Dead's version. "Eyes of the World" was alright, but fizzled out when it should have just started to get really interesting. They closed the show with "Sugar Magnolia" and "Going Down the Road", two of the most boring, over-played Dead tunes to my ears.

Sorry if this review seems overly harsh, but I felt very disappointed by this show, particularly after being so impressed last time I saw them. I will not bother to see this incarnation of Phil & Friends again. Perhaps I'm just too jaded by Dead music now as well. Anyway, those "transcendental music moments" I look for abound in the jazz I now prefer. I'll take a show by Tim Berne or Myra Melford over this any day.

On the plus side, I did get to spend some time with Caroline, Lela and Kait, who came down from Arcata. And after the show, I saw Karen Garfinkle, a former housemate in Ann Arbor nearly 20 years ago. She was rather shocked to see me: "What are you doing here?" "Oh, I live here now... about a 10 minute walk from here, actually!". That was good fun. She's in Santa Cruz, so I'm sure I'll see more of her now.

The Cat in the Kayak

2007-09-19T19:57:00.001-07:00

Ariel has found a new favorite spot to lounge about in the back yard.

He has many favorite little spots around the garden to do what he does best - lounge about. Why he likes the kayak is a mystery. I wonder how he would like it if it were actually floating on water.

The rain in the Bay falls mainly in my brain

2007-09-16T10:45:00.000-07:00

Here in the Bay Area we are in the middle of the dry season. We've lived here for two months now and have not seen a single drop of rain yet. And we likely won't see any for the next two months or more. But lately I've been having a surprising number of dreams in which it is raining in my dream. I'll eventually wake up and think to myself "Oh, it rained last night." Then I remember that I am actually in California now, not Michigan, and that it is still bone-dry outside. It appears that my subconscious is attempting to compensate for this lack of rain by creating rain in my dreams.

All of this makes we wonder what my brain will do to compensate for the lack of friends in Berkeley. I'm probably too old for imaginary friends now. Although I've seen people walking the streets of Berkeley who seem to have very active social lives going on entirely in their minds. Hopefully I won't be reduced to wandering the streets muttering strange conversations with people who don't exist.

bands and animals

2007-09-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

Last night at dinner, as Jeffrey was singing "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly" and inventing new verses with Stella about different animals to swallow, I thought it oddly appropriate that I was about to leave for San Francisco to see two bands with animal names - Band of Horses and Dinosaur Jr. I've been digging Band of Horses for the last year or so; they are a new band who's second album is due out next month. I quite like their first one and was quite excited to see them live. Dinosaur Jr is legendary in that kind of 80's alternative/90's grunge/stoner-slacker corner of the music world. I've been aware of them and have heard stuff by them since their first album in '85, but only really dived headlong into their discography earlier this year. Their new cd, Beyond, is easily my most played cd this year. And last night, i finally got a chance to see them live. I had tickets to see them at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor but has a 102 degree fever that day and couldn't go.

The show was at the Mezzanine in SF, which is a fairly intimate club near 5th & Mission. It took less than 20 minutes to get there by car, which was nice. The opening set by Band of Horses was great, a nice mix of familiar tunes and new stuff from their upcoming cd. The lead singer has a really great voice and i liked the way they orchestrated three guitars without any of them stepping on each other.

After a 45 minute set, then a half hour set break, Dinosaur Jr took the stage. J. Mascis, the guitarist, singer and principle song writer, has a reputation as somewhat of a guitar god, but also as the definitive stoner-slacker. With his long white hair and introverted demeanor, he hardly embodies the rock god. But he certainly is an amazing guitarist. No wonder Sonic Youth titled one of their songs "J. Mascis for President". I could have done without the slam dancing and occasional stage diving that began near the stage around halfway through the show (and by the looks of things, the band would have strongly preferred to do without it too), but overall it was an excellent show and I'm very glad I was finally able to see them live. The next rock show in SF I'm considering seeing is the Jesus and Mary Chain, although at $40 per ticket, I'm not sure I'll make it.

The whole experience got me thinking about bands with animal names, particularly current bands in the "indie" world. Just off the top of my head we have Eels, Sparklehorse, Deerhoof, Deer Hunter, Wolf Eyes, Wolf Parade, Wolfmother, The Fruit Bats, Grizzly Bear, Pedro the Lion, Modest Mouse, The Field Mice, The Arctic Monkeys, The Mountain Goats, Gorillaz, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, The Unicorns, Minus The Bear, Panda Bear, Caribou, and Le Tigre. Going beyond the indie world, you have the Eagles, Byrds, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Jayhawks, T. Rex, Phish, Fish, Swans, The Monkeys, Boomtown Rats, Buffalo Tom, Donna the Buffalo, Leftover Salmon, Counting Crows, Black Crowes, Yard Birds, Flock of Seagulls, Grant Lee Buffalo, The Roaches, Three Dog Night, The Turtles, The Stone Ponies, Eek-a-Mouse, Iron Butterfly, The Scorpions, The Stray Cats and Skinny Puppy. Then there's non-specific animal names - Animal Collective, The Animals, Super Furry Animals, Be Your Own Pet...

Obviously, I've been thinking about this way too much. I must stop now.

a weekend of live music

2007-08-28T16:09:00.000-07:00

After two weekends of wonderful nature experiences, it was time to immerse myself in some live music. The weekend started out with a concert by Wilco at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. Wilco, in my opinion, is one of the best live bands out there right now. And the Greek Theatre is legendary, known as one of the best outdoor concert venues around. It certainly is a beautiful and intimate theatre, although i have to say that the concrete benches are rather uncomfortable to sit on without some sort of padding. I can't complain, though, that it is a mere 10 minute walk from our house. Since Stella was unable to attend, I went with my friend Myra Melford, the wonderful jazz pianist who moved from NYC to Berkeley a few years ago to teach at UC Berkeley. She's generally not one for rock concerts (she said this is probably the first rock show she's been to in about 30 years), but she had an interest in Wilco and has performed with Nels Cline, the newest guitarist in Wilco. The concert was pretty great. This was, i think, my seventh time seeing them, and they get better each time. I love the way they vary the arrangements of the pieces from the studio recordings, and particularly when they deconstruct a piece in the middle, swirl it into chaos, then bring it right back on queue.

The following day Stella, Jeffrey & I went to check out a couple of the free outdoor performances that were part of the annual Downtown Berkeley Jazz Festival. The festival was almost exclusively area musicians, so I didn't know a lot about the various performers. But Saturday at noon was the band Disappear Incompletely doing jazz arrangements of songs by Radiohead, who I think are pretty great. They did a pretty interesting set, although I felt they may have been keeping things a little tame to appeal to a more general audience. The start of their set had some really interesting and adventurous arrangements of tunes like "Optimistic", "Kid A" and "Climbing Up the Walls", but the second half seemed to consist of more conventional arrangements featuring the bass player as a vocalist.

From there we wandered over to the Farmer's Market where mandolin great Mike Marshall, who lives in nearby Oakland, was playing with a Brazilian pianist. I've listened to Mike Marshall for over 20 years now, typically playing the style of "New Grass" that David Grisman pioneered. In fact, Marshall was in Grisman's quintet for a number of years. This set of Brazilian jazz, also with a clarinetist/soprano saxophonist & percussionist, was quite good, but didn't exactly blow me away. But it was a wonderful way to enjoy the California sunshine while enjoying some tasty crepes (both savory and sweet) from the Farmer's Market.

And finally, that night was the only non-free performance of the festival I attended - the Myra Melford/Ben Goldberg Quartet. This was held in the performance space of the Jazz School, an interesting music school in Berkeley dedicated to the study of jazz. It was a nice space with a cafe vibe. They did two sets with about 60% of the compositions by Myra and the rest by Ben. It was my first time seeing Ben play, although I have several recordings he plays on. It turns out he lives in Berkeley not too far from me. The concert was truly amazing and I thought everyone played exceptionally well. I am very lucky that one of my all-time favorite musicians lives in town and I'll get a chance to hear her perform so often now. She has two more gigs in the area in September that I can look forward to.

and speaking of spiders...

2007-08-23T12:10:00.000-07:00

meet Spider Pig, from The Simpsons Movie.

so many spiders

2007-08-22T15:32:00.000-07:00

There are SO many spiders in California. All over the place. Almost every night just before we go to bed, we have to remove at least one spider from the bedroom ceiling.

Walking around town, you see hundreds, if not thousands, of webs in the plants in people's front yards. Next time we take a vacation, I'll expect our house to be completely filled with spiders and webs when we get back.

Most of them are fairly small and non-threatening. But I've seen quite a few pretty scary ones. The only one to worry about is the black widow, which is fairly common in California, but bites from them are still very unlikely.

If bad old horror movies have taught me anything, it's that one must always be on guard... you never know when a giant spider might creep up behind you.

Adventures at Point Reyes

2007-08-20T21:32:00.001-07:00

On Saturday, Stella, Jeffrey and I took a long day trip to Point Reyes National Seashore. This large and stunningly beautiful area is just a bit north of San Francisco, and an hour drive from us in Berkeley. We started our visit with a picnic at North Beach, just one of thirteen beaches in the park.

After lunch we headed south to see the lighthouse. Known as the windiest place on the pacific coast, we had an amazing view of the beach we were just at.

Then we headed for the northern most beach, McClure Beach. It was here that I proclaimed "This is my new favorite beach in California". There's a quarter-mile hike down from the parking lot to a beach surrounded by beautiful cliffs.

At the southern end of the beach, there was a passage that led to another small but beautiful beach, only accessible when the tide is low. This was my favorite part.

We barely scratched the surface; there is so much more to explore at Point Reyes. I look forward to spending more time there.

Michael Chabon on Berkeley

2007-08-20T21:15:00.000-07:00

Michael Chabon, the wonderful author of the novels The Wonder Boys (also a great film), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Mysteries of Pittsburg, and The Yiddish Policeman's Union, is a fellow resident of Berkeley. Today I came across a great little essay he wrote about our fair city. Originally printed in the March 2002 issue of Gourmet magazine, here it is, reprinted without permission.

The Mysteries of Berkeley

by Michael Chabon

Berkeley.

Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture. None of these is really an unfamiliar presence in the tree-lined streets of Berkeley, California. For a city of one hundred thousand people-toss in another thirty thousand to account for the transient population of the University-we have more than our share of geniuses. The town, to be honest, is lousy with them. Folklorists, chefs, tattoo artists, yogis, guitarists, biologists of the housefly, GUI theorists, modern masters of algebra, Greil Marcus: we have geniuses in every field and discipline. As for neurosis, you can pretty much start at my house and work your way outward in any direction. Obsession, fixation, phobia, hypochondriasis, self-flagellation, compulsive confession of weakness and wrongdoing, repetition mania, chronic recrimination and second-guessing-from parents of toddlers, to fanatical collectors of wax recordings by Turkish klezmer bands of the 1920s, to non-eaters of anything white or which respires, to that august tribunal of collective neurosis, the Berkeley City Council: if neuroses were swimming pools one might, like Cheever's swimmer, steer a course from my house to the city limits and never touch dry land. Madness: a painful thing, which it does not do to romanticize. But it seems to me that among the many sad and homeless people who haunt Berkeley one finds an unusually high number of poets, sages, secret Napoleons and old-fashioned prophets of doom. The mentally ill citizens of Berkeley read, as they kill a winter afternoon in the warmth of the public library; they generate theories, which they will share; they sell their collected works out of a canvas tote bag. As for rapture, it is harder to observe firsthand, and is furthermore something that people, even people in Berkeley, do not necessarily care to discuss. But Berkeley is rich with good places to be rapt: at the eyepiece of an electron microscope or a cloud chamber, at a table at Chez Panisse, in a yoga room, under a pair of headphones at Amoeba Records, in Tilden Park, in the great disorderly labyrinth of Serendipity Books, on the dance floor at Ashkenaz while the ouds jangle and the pipes skirl, in a seat at the Pacific Film Archive watching Kwaidan (Japan, 1965). I'd be willing to bet that, pound for pound, Berkeley is the most enraptured city in America on a daily basis.

If that statement has the ring of boosterism, then permit me to clarify my feelings on the subject of my adopted home: this town drives me crazy. Nowhere else in America are so many people obliged to suffer more inconvenience for the common good. Nowhere else is the individual encumbered with a greater burden of shame and communal disapproval for having intruded, however innocently, on the sensibilities of another. Berkeley's streets, though a rational 19th century grid underlies them, are a speed-busting tangle of artificial dead ends, obligatory left turns, and deliberately tortuous obstacle-course barriers known as chicanes, put in place to protect children-who are never (God forbid!) sent to play outside. Municipal ordinances intended to protect the nobility of labor in Berkeley's attractive old industrial district steadfastly prevent new-economy businesses from taking over the aging brick-and-steel structures--leaving them empty cenotaphs to the vanished noble laborer of other days. People in the grocery store, meanwhile, have the full weight of Berkeley society behind them as they take it upon themselves to scold you for exposing your child to known allergens or imposing on her your own indisputably negative view of the universe. Passersby feel empowered-indeed, they feel duty-bound-to criticize your parking technique, your failure to sort your recycling into brown paper and white, your resource-hogging four-wheel-drive vehicle, your use of a pinch-collar to keep your dog from straining at the leash.

When Berkeley does not feel like some kind of vast exercise in collective dystopia-a kind of left-wing Plymouth Plantation in which a man may be pilloried for over-illuminating his house at Christmastime-then paradoxically it often feels like a place filled with people incapable of feeling or acting in concert with each other. It is a city of potterers and amateur divines, of people so intent on cultivating their own gardens, researching their own theories, following their own bliss, marching to their own drummers and dancing to the tinkling of their own finger-cymbals that they take no notice of one another at all, or would certainly prefer not to, if it could somehow be arranged. People keep chickens, in Berkeley-there are two very loud henhouses within a block of my house. There may be no act more essentially Berkeley than deciding that the rich flavor and healthfulness, the simple, forgotten pleasure, of fresh eggs in the morning outweighs the unreasonable attachment of one's immediate neighbors to getting a good night's sleep.

The result, perhaps inevitable, of this paralysis of good intentions, this ongoing, floating opera of public disapproval and the coming into conflict of competing visions of the path to personal bliss, is a populace inclined to kvetching and to the wearing of the default Berkeley facial expression, the suspicious frown. Bliss is, after all, so near at hand; the perfect egg, a good night's sleep, reconciliation with one's mother or the Palestinians, a theory to account for the surprising lack of dark matter in the universe, a radio station that does not merely parrot the lies of government flaks and corporate media outlets-such things can often feel so eminently possible here, given the intelligence and the passion of the citizens. And yet they continue to elude us. Who is responsible? Is it us? Is it you? What are you doing, there, anyway? Don't you know the recycling truck won't take aluminum foil?

So much for boosterism. And yet I declare, unreservedly and with all my heart, that I love Berkeley, California. I can't imagine living happily anywhere else. And all of the things that drive me crazy are the very things that make this town worth knowing, worth putting up with, worth loving and working to preserve.

Part of the charm of Berkeley lies in her setting: the shimmer and eucalyptus sting of the hills on a dusty summer afternoon, hills whose rocky bones jut through the skin of Berkeley in odd outcroppings like Indian Rock; the morning fogs of the flatlands along the bay, with their smell of mud and their magically vanishing glimpses of Alcatraz and towers of San Francisco. But I have lived in places, from the Puget Sound to the Hudson Valley, from Laguna Beach to Key West, that rivaled if not surpassed Berkeley in spectacular weather, thrilling vistas, and variety of terrain. Not, perhaps, all at the same time, but to greater extremes of beauty. And yet a city with a beautiful site is about as reliably interesting as a person with a beautiful face, and just about as likely to have been spoiled.

Laid atop her remarkable setting between hills and bay, less consistently fine but at its best no less charming, is the built environment of Berkeley. The town, though laid out in the 1880s, boomed in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fire, when it was settled by refugees from San Francisco, fleeing hither under the mistaken impression that the jutting rock ribs of Berkeley's hills would be proof against temblors. The town grew explosively, to its borders, in the twenty years that followed, and as a result the architecture, especially that of her houses, has a pleasing uniformity of variation, with styles ranging from Prairie school to Craftsman to the various flavors of Spanish. There is even a local style-I live in an exemplar, built in 1907-called the Berkeley Brown Shingle, which combines elements of the Craftsman and the Stick: overhanging eaves, square-pillared porches, elaborate mullions and built-in cabinetry, the whole enveloped in a rustic skin of the eponymous cedar or redwood shakes. It's a sober style, at least in conception, boxy and grave and appropriately professorial, and yet after decades of benign neglect and dreaminess and the ministrations of an unstintingly benevolent climate, the houses tend to be wildly overgrown with rose vines, wisteria, jasmine, trumpetvine, and outfitted top and sides with unlikely modifications: Zen dormers, orgone porches, Lemurian observatories. Certain of her streets offer endless instruction in the rich and surprising expressiveness of brown, houses the color of brown beer, of brown bread, of tobacco, a dog's eyes, a fallen leaf, an old upright piano. The harmoniousness of Berkeley's streets and houses is far from perfect-there are tons of hideous concrete-and-aluminum dingbat monstrosities, in particular around the university, and downtown is a hodgepodge of doughty old California commercial structures, used car lots and a few truly lamentable late-sixties office towers. But even the most down-at-heel and ill-used streets offer a promise of green shade in the summertime, and many neighborhoods are densely populated by trees, grand old plantations of maple and oak, long rows of ornamental plums that blossom in the winter, persimmon trees, Meyer lemon trees, palm trees and fig trees, monkey puzzles and Norfolk island pines, redwoods and Monterey pines nearly a hundred years old. One of the remarkable things about Berkeley is that, in spite of its decided inferiority to its great neighbor across the Bay in clout, preeminence, population, notoriety and fame, it has never seemed to dwell in San Francisco's shadow (unlike poor old Oakland down the road). I believe that this may be in part due to the fact that when it comes to trees-a necessary component, in my view, of the greatness of a city-the Colossus of the West can't hold a candle to Berkeley.

But houses and tree plantations, like hills and foggy mudflats, are no reliable guarantors of the excellence of a place to live. That elusive quality always lies, ultimately, in the citizenry; in one's neighbors. And it is ultimately the people of Berkeley-those same irritating frowners and scolders, those very neurotic geniuses and rapt madwomen-who make this place, who ring an endless series of variations on its great theme of personal and communal exploration, and who, above all, fight tooth and nail to hang on to what they love about it.

If there were a hundred good small cities in America fifty years ago-towns built to suit the people who settled them, according to their tastes, aspirations, and the sovereign peculiarities of landscape and weather-today there are no more than twenty-five. In ten years, as the inexorable lattice of sprawl replicates and proliferates, and the downtowns become malls, and the malls downtowns, and the rich syllabary of mercantile America is reduced to a simple alphabet composed of a Blockbuster, a Target, a Starbucks, a Barnes and Noble, a Gap, and a T.G.I.Fridays, and California herself is drowned in a sea of red-tile roofs from San Ysidro to Yreka, there may be fewer than ten. When the end finally comes, I believe that Berkeley will be the last town in America with the ingrained perversity to hold onto its idea of itself. This is a town-on the edge of the country, on the edge of the twenty-first century, on the edge of subducting plates and racial divides and an immense sea of corporate homogeneity-where you can still sign for your groceries at the store around the corner. A Berkeley grocer is a man who preserves such an archaic custom not in spite of the fact but exactly because it's an outmoded and cumbersome way of running a business.

It's in the quirky, small businesses of Berkeley, in fact, places like the old soda fountain in the Elmwood Pharmacy, Alkebulalian Books (specializing in books on the African diaspora), d.b.a Brown Records (just on the Oakland side of the city limits), or the Sound Well (used and vintage hi-fi and stereo equipment) that the tensions of Berkeley living, the competing claims on the heart of a Berkeleyite to follow one's bliss but at the same time to reach a hand out into the void and feel another set of fingers taking hold of one's own, are resolved. These are not merely retail establishments, poor cousins of Rite-Aid, Borders, Sam Goody's and Circuit City. They are shrines to the classic Berkeley impulse to latch on to something tiny but crucial-the warm sound provided by vacuum tube amplifiers, the mid-sixties sides of Ornette Coleman, the African roots of Jesus Christ and his teachings, or a perfectly constructed Black-and-White (with an extra three inches in the steel blender cup)-and pursue it with a mounting sense of self-discovery. And yet they are also, accidentally but fundamentally, gathering places; they all have counters at which the lonely amateur of Coleman or Marantz, the student of Martin Bernal can pull up a stool and find him- or herself in the company of sympathetic minds. Berkeley is richer than any place I've ever lived in these non-alcoholic taverns of the soul, these unofficial clubhouses of the oddball and outr*. And it seems as if every year another one pops up, at the bottom of Solano Avenue, in a faded brick stretch of San Pablo Avenue, unfranchisable, inexplicable except as a doorway to fulfillment and fellowship. A business that would never thrive anywhere else, patronized by people who would never thrive anywhere else, in a city that lives and dies on the passion and intelligence, the madness and rapture, of its citizens.

Originally published in the March 2002 issue of Gourmet

Mount Diablo

2007-08-19T20:37:00.000-07:00

This entry is really about a week late; we went to Mount Diablo just over a week ago. For me, it was a pilgrimage of sorts. When I was very young (2-5 years old in 1970-1973), my family lived in Lafayette, not terribly far from here. We used to have picnics at Mount Diablo, which we could see from our back yard in Lafayette. My memories of these trips are quite fuzzy at best, but my parents have assured me that wonderful times were had. So now, roughly 35 years later, we returned at last to Mount Diablo. The base of the mountain is only about 30-40 minutes away from us in Berkeley, which is nice. It's the tallest mountain in central California and on a clear day you can see as far away as Yosemite to the east. The weather was perfect - clear blue skies and warm, even hot, but not too hot. At some point during our ascent we stopped for a little picnic lunch.

At the top we took in the magnificent views and hiked the "fire trail" around the peak.

All in all, an outstanding day!

I've been Simpsonized!

2007-08-16T11:49:00.002-07:00

I've been Simpsonized.

What Are You Grateful For?

2007-08-13T15:28:00.001-07:00

The other night we decided to try out the local vegetarian restaurant called Cafe Gratitude. We enticed young Jeffrey by telling him it would be like Seva in Ann Arbor, which he loves. Man, were we wrong. Some people may complain that Seva is too "crunchy"... Cafe Gratitude makes Seva look like McDonalds. It's the most "crunchy", politically correct, new agey place I've ever been too. My inner hippie loved it; my inner cynic wanted to puke.

Their whole philosophy is based on "the being of abundance" and being grateful for all that you have in the abundance and bounty of life. It actually started out as a board game called The Abounding River Board Game before it became a restaurant. The food is purely vegan and is all "live food", meaning it has been cooked, if at all, only at temperatures below 118 degrees. Each item on their menu is named something like "I am abundant", "I am accepting" or "I am whole" and as the server brings you your dish they say "you are divine" or "you are sublime" or whatever the name of your dish is. Throughout the experience I was simultaneously enchanted by how positive it all was and nauseated by how sickeningly new agey it was. The food was quite good, but not amazing. Although it was slightly on the bland side, I felt like I was eating about the healthiest I've ever eaten.

I would have been enthralled by this place 20 years ago. Now, perhaps I am a little too old & cynical to not smirk a bit at their over the top sincerity. And that, I realize, is probably my loss.

But I'll leave you with a few questions from their employment application. Tell me if I'm being too cynical.

"What inspires you about the possibility of sacred commerce?"

"What are your thoughts about service as an expression of spirit?"

"What can you say about your ability to love and be great with people?"

"What do you love about yourself?"

"In life, how do you get in your own way.what stops you?"

My First Earthquake

2007-08-12T20:56:00.000-07:00

Earthquakes happen all the time here. Most of the time they are so small that you don't feel them. Once in a while one happens that you can feel, although still quite small. Last night was one of those earthquakes. I was in bed reading and heard a rumble and felt the house shook. It was over in an instant - for a moment I thought someone had slammed a door really hard; it was that quick. But yet it was unlike anything I had ever heard or felt. I asked Stella, who was drifting off to sleep, if she felt or heard anything. She hadn't and I said that I might have felt an earthquake but wasn't sure. I made a mental note to look online the next day and see if there was any seismic activity around 11:45 on Saturday night. And sure enough, there was an an earthquake that measured 2.7 centered in El Cerrito, less than three miles from us.

I wondered how long it would be before I experienced my first earthquake. I find it kind of exciting, in a weird way. Let's just hope all future ones are all small like this one, although experts think a big one is likely in the bay area within the next fifteen years or so.

From Jules to Jules

2007-08-08T09:16:00.000-07:00

It's now final... I've sold my house. I received my copies of the final closing papers yesterday. It's a little bittersweet. Sweet in that I am finally free of it, particularly in such a poor housing market. Bitter in that I loved that house and put a lot of work into it and I lost quite a bit of money on it. But hopefully the new owners will get some enjoyment out of the work I put into it, particularly the gardens and the deck.

I never met the new owners, but heard their interesting story through a neighbor who knows them. Apparently a woman is buying the house to rent to her daughter and her daughter's girlfriend. The daughter's partner is named Julie. She is in the process of becoming a man, upon the completion of which she will be known as Jules. So the house passes from Jules to Jules. And, apparently, it's Julie (Jules) who really liked the gardens at the house. So there is some unique kind of continuity there, since there will still be a Jules there tending to the garden.

Enjoying Berkeley

2007-08-07T11:39:00.000-07:00

We had our first local visitor to the house - my friend Myra Melford, the wonderful jazz pianist who now teaches at UC Berkeley. She stopped by on saturday to see the house and catch up, as it had been nearly a year since I've seen her.

Later that day, Stella, Jeffrey & I went to Tilden Park, which borders Berkeley in the hills to the east. It's quite large and is really a wonderful place! I'm so thrilled to have such amazing beauty so close to my home. We first hiked a trail in middle of the park, taking many photos along the way:

Finally we made our way up to the highest point in the park, on a trail called "Sea View". The views were stunning, although by this time the fog had already enveloped most of San Francisco.

The view east of Mount Diablo isn't too bad either:

All in all, a truly wonderful day in California.

Welcome to Berkeley

2007-08-07T11:29:00.000-07:00

It was my third or fourth night in Berkeley when it happened; hopefully it wasn't the official welcome wagon. I was walking home from the grocery store, about 4 blocks away, with a bag of groceries in each hand. It was shortly after dark. As I walked up Cedar street, a well traveled street in the neighborhood, i felt a sharp pain in my back that propelled me forward a bit, causing me to stumble but not fall. An instant later, the car drove by me and I heard someone say "Whoa, we got him!" and they laughed as they drove off. And I realized that someone shot me in the back with a pellet gun. A few days in Berkeley and I'm already the victim of a drive-by shooting - shot in the back by a pellet gun! Fortunately, it really didn't hurt and left no marks. It surprised me more than anything else.

This is definitely a much more urban environment than Ann Arbor. Welcome to Berkeley - here's your pellet-gun shot in the back!

2358 miles

2007-07-31T21:51:00.000-07:00

2,358 miles in just under three days.

Somewhere in Nebraska we came across Julesburg, which is actually just across the border in Colorado.

You can get a little bored being in a car for 13+ hours a day... I was determined to get a shot of our car reflected in the hubcap of a passing truck. After many attempts (much to Stella's chagrin), this was the best i could do.

In Utah, the road stretched out forever. Or maybe this is Wyoming... or Nevada. Who can tell?

We finally arrived in Berkeley around 6:30 pm on the evening of thursday July 26. The trip was quite smooth, other than the muffler problem in Nebraska. Driving through the desert at the Utah/Nevada border was crazy though... one of the most intense rain storms I've ever driven through. In the desert. Does that strike anyone else as odd?

Unpacking was a tedious exercise... combining two houses of crap into one smaller house was quite challenging, but we finally (mostly) have it done. it's always that last 20% of any job that seems the hardest. We're loving it here, though. After a full week here, we finally got some use out of the lime tree growing in the back yard, first with a wonderful grilled salmon dish that Stella prepared, then with some mojitos that i mixed. What could be more perfect than a mojito with good white rum and freshly picked limes? I guess I'll have to grow some mint in the garden.

Nebraska

2007-07-25T06:22:00.001-07:00

Made it to Grand Island, Nebraska yesterday... about 800 miles, so we're ahead of schedule to make it to Berkeley in three days. It helps that we cross into a new time zone each day, giving us an extra hour of driving each day.

Last night was rough though... we tried about 6 motels before we found one that had vacancies and accepted pets. We finally found a Motel 6 which allows one pet, so we put both cats in a pet crate and brought them in. Surprisingly, they dealt with that pretty well. But while we were driving around looking for a motel, the muffler came detached from the exhaust system. So first thing this morning (7:30am) I called the nearest Midas and asked if they might be able to do something with it this morning. "I'll see what I can do..." the man says. I drive right there, they weld the thing back on in 10 minutes and say "you're all set".

"What do I owe you?", I ask.

"Nothing."

Wow. Fixed for free first thing in the morning. I'm still amazed. Now we can resume our cross country journey.

Stella is doing most of the driving so I can read the new Harry Potter book. I'm loving it!

moving day

2007-07-23T14:36:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged… I’ve been crazy busy with getting ready to move. To sum up since my last blog…

The going away party was great fun. Lots of people showed up… my “hippie” friends, my “free jazz musician” friends, Stella’s co-workers and Stella’s neighborhood friends. And no fights broke out given the vast differences in personalities. Quite amazing. Stella blogged more about the party, so check out hers to see more. She also made references to the tequila hangover I had the next day. Her blog is invite only, but if you ask nicely, she’ll invite you.

Then we had a series of dinners with various people. Much wonderful food was consumed and great conversation was had. I got to eat one last time at my now favorite Ann Arbor restaurant, Pacific Rim. They have a seared tuna dish that is absolutely stunning.

Today was the big moving day… after a weekend of frenzied packing, the moving van showed up at 9am this morning. I was out borrowing a friends pickup truck when it showed up, but I arrived home moments later.

They then took of for Stella’s place to load her stuff. Shannon came over and helped me load the two pickup trucks with trash and recycling, both of them filled. It’s absolutely amazing how much crap one gathers from living in one place for a while. We drove to the dump and emptied our loads then I was off to return the truck and stop by my office to say goodbye to my boss, who was on vacation the last 7 days and didn’t realize I would be gone when he returned to work today. Now there are a mere three employees at the Ann Arbor office of Net-Linx Publishing Solutions. And now I get to work from home in Berkeley, California. Pretty damn cool, if you ask me.

I’m about the head over to Stella’s to deal with the last of the trash, and then we’ll sleep on an air mattress tonight and hit the road first thing in the morning. I just wonder how much the cats will like being cooped up in the car for 3 days of travel.

Here they are, enjoying their last moments of freedom for a while.

If I get a chance to blog from the road, I will. Otherwise, see you in California!

almost on our way...

2007-07-10T05:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the new movers came out to both our houses to give an estimate of moving costs. The cost is based on the total weight of our stuff. Good incentive to get rid of things. The estimate came in higher than we expected, but the guy also estimated our weight on the high side - 10,000 pounds. We're hoping we actually have closer to 8000. The estimate came to $9000, which is a lot of money, but probably worth it to insure our stuff is well handled and delivered on time. We also set the pickup date for Monday, July 23. I don't know whether we will start our long drive that day, or the following morning. I wonder how the cats will deal with 3-4 days in a car. I've called a vet to ask about some kind of kitty tranquilizers, but have not heard back yet.

Today is the buyer's home inspection of my house. Fortunately, they are not doing a radon test, which would involve completely shutting up the house for 48 hours. Since we are in the middle of a heat wave and i have no air conditioning, this would make the house unlivable for two days. This inspection is the last hurdle to the sale - if everything works out, the sale will be a done deal. wish us luck.

I'm glad that our drive happens to be timed to the release of the final Harry Potter book. Stella and I may have both finished it by the time we reach California.

Impeach Cheney

2007-07-09T09:49:00.001-07:00

A serious movement is now underway to initiate the impeachment of Dick Cheney. A large coalition of organizations has united behind the effort to bring the movement into the mainstream debate and persuade congress to act. The Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers, is now officially in favor of the impeachment of Cheney. This is big, since it's the Judiciary Committee that has to first approve articles of impeachment before they move on the House.

At the very least, please sign the petitions at impeachcheney.org and moveon.org. If you can make the time, also write to your congressional representative.

A new blog...

2007-07-06T14:25:00.000-07:00

I've been sporadically posting blog entries on MySpace, but since I am about to embark on a huge life change, I thought it would be appropriate to start a "real" blog. Plus Stella started a "real" blog and I aspire to be as cool as she is with the written word. This, of course, will never happen, but I hope to have fun trying. Her blog is open only to friends (since she is a teacher and thus a public figure of sorts), but i am sure she would welcome you among her readers if you asked her nicely.

Much of this process of moving has been fraught with stress, but yesterday was particularly intense. It started as a great day - Stella & I took her son Jeffrey to the Tigers game (where, unfortunately, they beat my hometown Cleveland Indians). Though we saw only a light drizzle just after the game, apparently a big storm blew through Ann Arbor - enough to break off a huge part of a tree in Stella's back yard. It took down an electrical line into her neighbor's house and the phone line into hers. All this while it's on the market. Great timing.

But to add to the stress of that, we also learned that the moving company we hired for our move to Berkeley is somewhat less than reputable, and we had already given them over $800 in deposits. We happened to look them up online and found various forums about moving with complaint after complaint about the company. Everyone reporting about them had been charged significantly more than originally told and were threatened to have their belongings held unless they paid. When finally delivered (often up to a month late), things were broken, missing or severely water damaged. Their moving license was revoked in their home state of Illinois so they could only do long distance moves, there was a class action lawsuit against them, and hundreds of complaints with the Better Business Bureau. At this point we knew we had to pursue other options, but booking a moving company this late in the game can be impossible. Fortunately, it appears that we got the deposit back, although I'll believe it when i actually see the refund posted.

So now our options are:

1) rent a truck ourselves and drive it there.
2) hire a reputable moving company and hope they can squeeze us in last minute

I'm not crazy about driving a 26 foot truck to California with us and two cats in the cabin.
Fortunately we found a well reviewed Ann Arbor company that can do it. It will likely cost between $6000-$8000, depending on the actual weight of our combined crap, but it's likely much better in the long run than what the original movers (Best Price Moving & Storage) would have put us through. They are coming monday to estimate the cost for our stuff, and hopefully then we can set a moving date fairly close to our original one. We're thinking sometime around July 22.

In other news, I once again have a signed sales contract on my house. The first one fell through after the inspection. I believe it inspected fine for a house of this age and price range, but those first-time buyers with no buying agent were spooked enough to back out. I'm hoping things go better this time. Still not sure when the inspection is, but I hope it's soon. Should this fall through, Shannon & Nikki are waiting in the wings to rent my house.

Tomorrow will be a day of boxing up as much stuff as I can - mostly books, cds & clothes for now.