December 2011
30 posts
1 tag
Meeting Isabelle
Lives, with luck, begin like this. Swaddled in blankets, studied and ogled and cared for, expected and planned out, cushioned and provisioned, passed from hand to hand and back to the crooks of arms and against bosoms.
With more luck, parents can keep putting one foot in front of the other to continue caring until the weight lightens, the load lessens, and children become more and more...
November 2011
28 posts
1 tag
Atmospheric conditions
I don’t know how things are going to come together. I’m only going to see bits and pieces revealed on someone else’s timetable. I’m not happy about this. It’s not much consolation that the people in charge don’t seem to know much more about the process themselves, and they seem pretty insistent on seeing and talking about processes in certain ways, not least...
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Braced for the chill
I love autumn. Don’t you? I’d rather see leaves turning colors, light slipping out of the skies earlier and earlier each evening than any other sign of any season you have to offer. I want more clouds, more fog, more drizzle, more darkness. Lengthen the shadows, lower the temperatures, let the birds head south in flocks and packs. Cover the tree trunks with moss, fill the creeks with...
1 tag
A cup of contemplation
A good day starts with coffee, black and hot and sweet, in the largest mug within reasonable reach, and a quiet warm comfortable space where it may be sipped and savored.
After a meal and a walk and whatever tasks require attention, a good day continues with beer, either at the Parkway Lounge or Rooz Cafe, or maybe Baggy’s-by-the-Lake or (if I can get it together to make it when...
1 tag
All over the place
First there were open eyes, and feet planted on carpet. Then came coffee, clothes and car keys. After that, a new city with more coffee, and plans for errands: medicine at the local HMO for starters, and stamps at the post office to send packages. Then came an amusing conversation to eavesdrop on while waiting in line (the woman who believes the United States has grown even more socialist than...
1 tag
Shelves and shelves
My bookshelves accuse me. Every day, I pass them by and continue not to re-read books I’ve read once or twice.
I don’t carry as many as I used to in my bike messenger bag, or pass them out to friends or leave them at cafes. It’s as if they don’t exist. And it’s not as if I don’t read anything. I’m just more about what’s online and linkable and...
1 tag
Ever since I was little it looked like fun
Thanksgiving means a holiday here and more holidays ahead, right? Since moving out to California and working shifts at newspapers, holidays were for civilians. One thing that makes them better than bearable: the chance to sit down & see people I don’t meet as often as I’d like.
MJ’s often made space for holiday orphans and just people she knows to swing through, and...
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I want to be there in my city
Looping thoughts at the Berkeley farmers market on Derby Street:
Beating is for riot cops, not for news coverage. Sure, I believe in scoops and in competition. But I think we should at least explore collaboration with these guys, hear what they have to say.
Building a brand is something done with other people and other outlets, not without or against them. They’re in our community. Why...
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Outside the newsroom
I don’t get up as often as I should. I could, you know. Get up, I mean. The wifi signal in the photo department at the newsroom’s center extends out to the employee entrance and the picnic tables beyond where the smokers congregate.
On the other side is another picnic table and a bicycle rack that no one seems to use. Most bikers lock up somewhere inside. Days I bike in, I walk mine...
1 tag
Watching 19th and Telegraph
I snapped awake. I must’ve slept. I just didn’t feel as if I had. I rarely did these days, staying up late watching everything and watching for everything. An inventory check found all of me was in bed, and most of me under the blanket.
I looked over the side of my bed. There was my laptop, safe and sound. I hoisted it up to my lap, sent off some e-mails and chatted briefly with a...
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Photowalking and panel-watching
Biking over from home to Rudy’s Can’t Fail Cafe to meet Melissa (and then walking around bits of downtown Oakland nearby) made it clear that something was about to happen. It was hanging around in the chilly air, more so than in the signs on a fence or a wall. Not that signs weren’t clear themselves …
… they just sort of added to it, to a zeitgeist?...
1 tag
Commuter eye
I rarely get to stop on the way back and forth between Oakland and Walnut Creek. But traffic lights afford the occasional glimpse sideways onto a sidewalk, or ahead through a wet windshield into an intersection.
I almost never open my phone’s camera app these days. Usually I open Vignette, shoot and then (when I get around to it) uploaded to Flickr. I kicked the tires on the Flickr...
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Engaging the community
I got to The Trappist a little late, but still in time to greet Martin Reynolds and several folks: readers, a manager and at least one alumnus of last year’s Oakland Voices project.
I noticed the cardboard stand-ups on the tables where people were standing by and nibbling on snacks. Hauling out my phone, firing up the Barcode Scanner app and holding it over the QR code on one took me to...
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Visiting East Bay WORKS
Some places you go look nothing like they should. An address like this one, an employment development center full of people in between jobs, careers, lives, should be full of tables and chairs and fluorescent lights and PCs. It should blink on maps and glow from a distance at night.
I took a former co-worker here for a meeting. While we waited for it to start, I filled out some information...
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You keep me coming back for more
I came to Oakland Soft Rock Choir practice tonight and found a dozen bodies, after weeks of limping by with six or seven hardcore folks.
There’s just something about a gig like the one coming up at Bar 355 that lifts some folks out of sickbeds, pulls them away from distractions. Something I need myself, after another drag of a breaking-news day.
We even had two women show up to listen,...
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Post-panel thoughts
Maybe staying up all night to live-tweet Occupy Oakland’s eviction wasn’t the best advance work for driving down to San Jose to attend this panel. I’m glad it happened, but I wish I could have enjoyed it more.
Its intent was to show folks that social media isn’t an abstract concept or the latest management-driven fad, but something the woman in the next cube or the guy...
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Life is
Life is not just work. It’s shopping for food, or rather marching up and down grocery store aisles so you can pull all the food together, followed by queueing up  in order to pay for it.
After shopping, if one is lucky, there may be beverages while one waits for the washer and dryer across from the local drinking establishment to properly minister to one’s clothes. Undoubtedly...
1 tag
Punching Down podcast
eveb: […] podcasts are so 2004! I feel positively steampunk being involved in one
me: Hello, goggles. Hello, raygun. Greetings from Camp 2004, son.
This looks like fun. More to the point, it sounds like fun. It makes me miss rolling with Tony and Karim, just chopping it up in the photo studio. I hope we’re able to get it together and meet up and decide what we want to do, or what...
1 tag
Cake kibitz
Another less than salutary work-week, capped by another evening technically not really on call but still utterly unwilling to drop everything and walk away. But even as events unfold, there is no reason not to find friends and pay respects and hoist a glass and simply be as present as one can.
Sometimes, like tonight, there are hugs and introductions. Sometimes there is a small pug dog...
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Death at Frank Ogawa Plaza
Reporters came to Frank Ogawa Plaza today expecting to cover the Occupy Oakland camp’s one-month anniversary saw two things: something that no one could have predicted, and something that was completely and utterly predictable.
I mean, it’s horrifyingly commonplace: a young black man as a homicide victim in Oakland, except, not this time. Let it happen downtown with hundreds of...
1 tag
A sitdown with SoundCloud
I try to visit the Oakland Tribune newsroom once a week. Yesterday, reporter Angela Woodall told me that a guy she knew who worked at SoundCloud would be visiting today.
True to her word, when I got to the Tribune today, I got to meet Evan Tenenbaum. He answered a few questions about the service, talked up sound as an important and powerful gathered add-on for news stories and had cool stories...
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Dave Newhouse moves on
I looked up and there he was, quietly peering around and talking to people, unobtrusive and classy and casual. Talking to him was always a little bit like I imagine talking to the Dixie Flatline must be like: talented but not flashy, deliberative, remembers everything. I wish I he’d stayed. But it’s better for him to leave while he can, intact, with his reach still able to exceed his...
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After newspaper layoffs
You should have ended up with something more
than what you gave, what you started out with:
those deadlines met, attentions that you tore
away from tasks to make that monolith
of headlines, bylines, paragraphs so placed
upon a page and perfectly aligned;
cutlines and photographs carefully spaced
to disappear within (and by) design;
of care, connections, consultations kept,
embargoed, then...
1 tag
Meeting Myriam Joire
I didn’t expect a reminder at a birthday party for someone I’d never met. Ankita knew someone, and they had invited her, and you can’t very well not come along.
Plus it was raining pretty steadily all afternoon and into the early evening, and getting over to that corner of San Francisco wasn’t going to be simple. So there I was, nibbling on crackers and making eyes at...
1 tag
Bent notes and ears at the cop bar
There needed to be wise words on the way back from Walnut Creek, and a shot and a beer at the end of the week, and some loud music and a little license to look up and see fellow survivors. There was all that and more, later, in the odd setting of the Warehouse. I went to Jack London Square all the time, to the chicken-and-waffles place at Broadway and Embarcadero, or the bar next door, or to...
1 tag
Time for some top-shelf
Empty streets after a day like yesterday are true and false statements. They are empirically verifiable realities.
But if you’ve been up until 4 a.m. the night before, you can wonder if everything you were reading about and helping to cover from a short distance away really happened.
In some cases, you may wonder to what extent it could still be happening right around the corner.
I...
1 tag
Strike and counterstrike
I wasn’t fit company after yesterday, so I stayed home, close enough to come at a dead run (more like pedal) if the need arose — not that I was likely to run since my back was acting up. It turned out to be a double shift’s worth of sitting and craning and peering into my laptop, and a little bit of rebooting and rubbing my eyes, and an amount somewhere between the two of...
1 tag
Days like today
They linger in your head and in your memory, the capper of one chapter or another in a career, a series of choices, arbitrary, nearly random in some respects, or specifically, cruelly, vindictive in others, and you are left behind, walking into the newsroom again as if nothing has happened and you still aren’t manifesting another daily miracle, conjuring up copy out of ether, forming it...
