November 2011
28 posts
1 tag
Landscape
I waited for the end of the world for seven weeks, so really this is nothing I haven’t seen or heard or felt before. You’ve got to open the door a little further to scare the living hell out of me. I woke up in a landscape shaped like a gun pointed at my head and it wants me dead — or maybe it’s indifferent. You don’t live rent-free in my head. Tell me, why would I...
October 2011
31 posts
1 tag
Answers from the answerless
It’s a shock to look up one afternoon and say to myself “oh, here I am again in a bookstore and here are a bunch of interesting books and magazines in front of me and they are full of words and pictures and advertisements and some of them even appear to come close to my psychometric demographic profile.” Or some such.
It’s slightly less shocking to look up and find...
1 tag
Between black and white and color
I am not standing by the side of Interstate 580 with a cardboard sign in my hand asking for change — at least, not today and hopefully not after next week.
I was sitting at Lynne & Lu’s Escapade Cafe on Grand Avenue, drinking coffee and eating tofu sautee.
I can thread my way through crowds of people dressed in Halloween costumes on my bicycle and pick up food at Rudy’s...
1 tag
The waiting game
I walked down a second-floor aisle to the morning news meeting. Passing an open door, I noticed a T-shirt hanging off of some binders and books on the office’s shelf. I asked the man in the office if he minded me taking a picture of the shirt, and he said not at all, go right ahead.
So now we wait for all of the good things on the way. And we wonder which of us will be left to...
1 tag
What once was and what’s on the way, pt. 2
It’s funny when you stay up waiting all night for a raid that never comes, and you go into work the next day and never see other stuff coming.
And now we know some more of those changes.
I did get to ask Steve Rossi, CEO and president of the California Newspapers Partnership, if the points that Jeff DeBalko made in his Tumblr post were something that the organization was paying attention...
1 tag
What once was and what's on the way
It’s really weird to go to a daily news meeting and sit next to these guys and then find a link and read about them. This is how Michael Shapiro’s Columbia Journalism Review article “The Newspaper That Almost Seized the Future” opens:
Randall Keith and I are talking about the past when his boss, Dave Butler, slides open a glass door, eases his long frame into a chair,...
1 tag
The day after
It is one of those days where all I can hold onto is what I can get done, what I can share and go forward and feel positively about, a step or two forward, something accomplished.
It is good to show and to share someone motivated and curious how to use a phone to post a tweet. It is meaningful to answer questions from someone else about the social media clients I use, the ways I think URLs should...
1 tag
Looking west from Lakeshore Avenue
One of the nice things about living here is being able to jump up on a night when Erica Mauter pops up nearby, grab Ankita and go meet her and Missy and travel around and point stuff out and show it off. I love this place. It’s unique, like everyplace else, but … uniquely so? How do I put it?
I missed Erica’s heads-up tweet days before, but I was glad to be able to come...
1 tag
Review: B. Hamilton, 'Everything I Own Is Broken'
“Me and Margaret Counting Countdowns”: Seven minutes in pop-punk closet heaven but the timer only says 3:15. Huh.
“Miss Carolina”: I’d pay to see the beauty pageant where this band plays this one at the end.
“Gold Tooth”: Like listening to Britt Daniel declaim over tumbling, tom-driven, strings-spiked rock, but way better.
“Between the Gutters...
1 tag
Marchers and bikers
I’d passed by a corner of Frank Ogawa Plaza a few days after Occupy Oakland set up out front of City Hall, but I hadn’t visited it for any real length of time until late in the evening a couple of days ago. Today’s march, led by a band through the streets of downtown Oakland, began just after Amy Gahran and I were able to bike over and walk around the camp in earnest.
After...
1 tag
Don't talk to strangers
[…] The consolidation plan angered many Oakland residents, who considered it yet another slight to their oft-maligned city. Bay Area News Group President Mac Tully said the company had received a lot of feedback from readers and public officials throughout the East Bay. But he stopped short of saying that the company would ditch its consolidation plans.
“We probably will make some...
1 tag
A series of soft shocks
I’m sitting nine floors off the ground at a desk in the Oakland Tribune newsroom. Suddenly the room rocks back and forth faintly. Then it does so a couple of more times, much more deliberately. Then it stops. I have a couple of Twhirl windows open already. I ask folks if they felt it.
2:42 PM Karim: did you feel it
i’ll tweet
if you didn’t
2:44...
1 tag
Soft rock and punk rock, pt. 2
I have a television. I just don’t watch it at home. I don’t have cable either. There are still plenty in the newsroom where I work, usually tuned to CNN during the day or some sports match in the evening if they’re not turned off entirely. It’s interesting to watch what goes into making the reports people watch at home.
I think, maybe wrongly, that people are much more...
1 tag
Soft rock and punk rock
Here I am in West Oakland, on a street named after a tree, in the company of bright-eyed, shiny-faced youngsters, holding down the low end on yesteryear’s hits on a Tuesday night and loving it. Except I keep getting texts from Lisa Rein about a rumored crackdown on Occupy Oakland camp’s satellite location in Snow Park. I hadn’t been paying attention. Who would camp over there,...
1 tag
Three rules for cell phone waiting lots
One: Don’t look a soul directly in the eye. You wouldn’t think it would matter whether you did or not, but just don’t do it. No one is there for idle conversation. Clock-watchers under fluorescent-lit cubicles don’t track the flashing colons that mark passing seconds as closely as people do once they pull into spaces here. All you’re going to do is get your feelings...
1 tag
Trains missed, cabs caught
Every day, dozens of people must miss the last eastbound trains out of San Francisco and have to find all-night buses or walk to those lines’ stops, or find ATMs and grab enough cash to cover the cost of a lone or (if they have willing company) split cab-fare back over the Bay Bridge to Oakland. I’m not sure I’ve ever taken a cab anywhere that far before.
One thing about...
1 tag
An evening in the 1980s
I’m 40, and that means I can legitimately travel through time whenever a radio dial scrolls and comes to a stop at a station playing some twenty-odd-year-old song Casey Kasem employed to remind people to keep their feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.
Over the course of an evening, DocFest 2011’s 80s New Wave Sing A Long seriously destabilized my time-traveling...
1 tag
Breaking and owning
The only phones I’ve ever purchased have been either Samsungs or Nokias. For me, the right phone isn’t just something that works and does what I ask of it. The right phone offers me the freedom to learn how to work it and make it do more than what I might have asked of it the day before. The right phone has the potential to be an extension of the values I hold dear and wish to...
1 tag
Black mirror
Here I am. Here’s my phone. It’s bricked. Is it bricked? Is it soft-bricked? Is this model of phone unbrickable? Should I replace my micro-USB cable? Why can’t I connect my phone as easily to my Mac as others do to their PCs? Am I paying too high a price for living in a mixed household and believing in multiple devices and platforms? Only some of these questions have answers in...
1 tag
Occupy Walnut Creek
I was coming up the west side of South Main Street in downtown Walnut Creek when I saw the first folks holding signs. Some were retiree-old. Others looked junior-college-student young. All held signs. Some had or held American flags. I remember thinking that I’d just passed a Barnes & Noble Booksellers, a Gap Kids and an Apple Store to reach them, and that all these folks were standing...
1 tag
Occupy Oakland
I’m remembering the last time I saw this many people in Frank Ogawa Plaza. It was St. Patrick’s Day of 2007, and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama was campaigning in front of Oakland City Hall. I went out of curiosity, surer of the man than I was of the crowd. I remembered thinking that I rarely stood out in a public space in downtown like this. I’m always headed somewhere, not...
1 tag
Standing on the corner
1 tag
Stepping out
I know I’m dressed up a little bit for an evening out at a Piedmont Avenue bar with Ankita, but I’m thinking about my father. don’t know how I expected to look at this age. I only looked forward to getting here.
The model I’d expect, the original model, would be my dad. I only knew him for several years when he was in his thirties. When I was a kid and he wasn’t...
1 tag
The first two Saint and Kings albums
Saint and Kings by allaboutgeorge
These aren’t really the first two albums. Well, sure, I can call them that, but that doesn’t make them “albums,” you know: coherent statements, unified conceptual visions meant to convey aesthetic creativity, you get the drift.
Sometimes musicians will say something like “oh, what was on my mind didn’t really come into view...
1 tag
Comedy Off Broadway Oakland
I’d seen some listings for the series at Miss Pearl’s Jam House before, so I was more than ready when Amy Gahran invited me to come check it out.
Live comedy is really odd: you, a microphone, maybe a glass or a bottle of water if you have the presence of mind to request it, and dozens of eyes expecting you to make them narrow in pleasure and crinkle with delight. You want to leave...
1 tag
Keep on truckin'
1 tag
Our garden, our building
Endings are necessary things. They’re hard when we see them coming. They’re harder sometimes when we do. Today, I thought the biggest news story was going to be the shooting at the cement quarry down in the South Bay. Then I see a tweet from Jonathan Weber’s account (which I hadn’t noticed he had changed to reflect his new job title). Right away, there’s one more...
1 tag
Sip and sing
You don’t know when the memorable nights are going to materialize. Say you do, and I’ll call you a liar. Of course, I had one hanging out with Micah a little over a month ago. But I know just as well as you do that correlation doesn’t equal causation, even with the involvement of really cool people like her.
So when they appear — the nights, not the people — you...
1 tag
Twitter brown bag in Walnut Creek
A brief introduction.
Then a picture of poor old Anthony Weiner, a cautionary tale.
Then distinctions between Facebook and Twitter.
Then reasons to tweet.
Then a tweets-per-second report with a chart on the night they drove Osama down.
Then the recommendations-by-interest page (which drew questions from folks here and down in San Jose about how it surfaces accounts related to journalism),...
1 tag
The fear
A friend put it, in part, like this:
[…] This is not a football team. It’s important not to get macho about things, at all, because it breeds insecurity in others who, at the moment, many not be feeling quite as macho as the rest. Fact: We all get the fear sometimes. If you don’t, you are messed up. Nobody has any place to judge anyone else about it. […]
I feel it....
1 tag
A visit to the vet
OAKLAND — A household cat expressed anger, bewilderment and consternation over a catnapping incident that led to its detention, transportation and inspection Sunday.
“I was home, minding my business, when the male of the household picked me up and carried me into our living room. He was saying something about visiting the Oaktoberfest event over in the Laurel District. I said that...
