February 2012
28 posts
1 tag
Getting engaged
I spent a little time today watching Steve Buttry address a Connecticut newsroom with one of Digital First Media’s Digital Ninja School presentations.
One thing he said that stuck with me was about TalkingPointsMemo’s approach to crowd-sourcing on Bush’s Justice Department machinations: how the crowd, if you ask them, can help give you a lead on other folks and keep that lead:...
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Black love in public
Who are we, we people who look the way we look to each other and to others? How do (and can) we treat each other when it is just us picking a time and a location of our (or somebody’s) choosing? Do we drive or walk, bike up (like I did) or take the bus? Do we hum when we arrive, play loud or soft music, oldies or newer stuff, word-heavy and message-laden or more instrumental and abstract?...
1 tag
Natural Bridges
The recommendations came in over the phone while we were still riding south toward Santa Cruz, so we figured it would only be fair to take them at face value and try to find what truth there was to them. There were monarch butterflies by the hundreds in a forest alcove at the bottom of a long ramp. There was an algae-covered pond filling the air with life. But it was the beach, coated with...
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Seeing 'Rubber'
Wheels within wheels: you can see them turning within the mind of a sentient car tire coming to life in the desert, pulling itself up out of the ground and coming to grips, to terms, with its landscape and the the objects and the people around it. I can’t remember the last time I saw ideas unfolded from a scenario like this in such a slowly and grudgingly articulated manner. Where does it...
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No sale
Signs like the first one above must be more prevalent at apartment buildings like the one across mine, right? Maybe they’re just phrased differently, or the landscape, the tenor of the language, has changed over time. If I’d lived in the neighborhood back then, I’d know more about who they were hoping to deter. “Peddlers”? “Agents”?
Freedom from the...
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All a cat could possibly need
I think she’s finally used to me. I’m not just the stranger who occasionally fills up her water or food bowl, or who she takes off running from everytime he comes tromping through the front door. I’m not saying we’re besties or anything, either. She’s still probably never going to be really happy with me when I trim her claws, but I can’t say I blame her after...
1 tag
Dollars and songs
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/allaboutgeorge/status/172203424706859008”]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/allaboutgeorge/status/172208632899960832”]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/allaboutgeorge/status/172221526345658368”]
I don’t usually think all that hard about stopping in someplace like the Parkway Lounge to get...
1 tag
10 items or fewer
The sign hanging up over my head is never just that.
I look up at it as it hangs over my head. I remember the less than thoughtful decision earlier in the day, and the rush to make up for it. I recall what came after: apologies, silence, attention and space.
So when I’m standing in the aisle at the grocery store with some dinner to go, and feeling really stupid about ruining what could...
1 tag
Sunday rounds
The kind of day where you get up and it’s bright out and you head up to Berkeley and you drive around and around and around and finally find a parking space but you still have half an hour at least before your movie starts so you walk around near the high school and the courts and some houses off Shattuck and then you take one picture that you actually like. Then you go see the movie and...
1 tag
Peregrination
I went everywhere today: down to brunch at Chop Bar, where I enjoyed some amazing company and spied on readers of the New York Times.
Then I attended, alongside several wonderful people, what sounds like the start of an interesting discussion series about relationships, power, permission, choice, identity and visibility. After that came a lot of walking (and a little driving) around...
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First and last chance
It wasn’t countrypolitan, or even country. It felt more like the sound of mid- to late-nineteen-seventies or early-nineteen-eighties countrified pop music: not quite Alabama or Kenny Rogers, but nearer Crystal Gayle or Linda Ronstadt. And it kept sneaking out of the speakers and perfuming the air inside Heinold’s tonight. In low light, you could make out the slope of the bar as the...
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A day, done well, is something like a cup
A day, done well, is something like a cup,
empty at dawn and waiting to be filled
with coffee or whatever wakes you up
enough to move, to say that you treadmilled
that half-an-hour allotment (gym-allowed)
before that brief mid-morning conference call.
A day, done right, humbles the o’erly proud
with evidence of what precedes the fall:
the pavement pothole safely steered around;...
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I'm your baby tonight
I thought of this when I drove past tonight’s Good Times gathering at The Den At The Fox and heard a long mixed-together stretch of Whitney Houston songs spilling out into the street at top volume.
When the news of her death broke Saturday night, in the slow-motion, cascading way news breaks these days—in tweets, emails, wall posts, text messages, unannotated video posts, and hasty,...
1 tag
I call for love, not made-up holidays
I call for love, not made-up holidays,
over these manufactured candy hearts.
I recommend attention to the place
where objects of affection get their starts
instead of affections I must object
to giving attention in the first place.
Aim carefully, for all you would protect
from time and random chance will one day face
the depredations of our mortal plane,
the unexpected tap — the...
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The trouble with cats
From Kathleen McAuliffe’s “How Your Cat is Making You Crazy” in TheAtlantic.com
GIVEN ALL THE nasty science swirling around this parasite, is it time for cat lovers to switch their allegiance to other animals?
Even Flegr would advise against that. Indoor cats pose no threat, he says, because they don’t carry the parasite. As for outdoor cats, they shed the parasite for only...
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A Sunday kind of love
Today’s Sunday Kind of Love 2012 gathering at Julie’s place in West Oakland brought together a choir-off (Albatross and Oakland Soft Rock Choir), a slowed-down version of “I Want To Dance With Somebody” for voice and a piano named Whitney, and that previously mentioned Paul Simon cover with the previously mentioned Julie. Not a bad way to spend a Valentine’s...
1 tag
What practice makes
I have a big, old songbook of Paul Simon songs on one of my bookshelves from back in the day when I was learning how to play guitar. But there was a gap between where the book ended (in the mid- to late-70s) and ”Graceland” dropping in ‘87.
I can’t say I heard lots of people shouting out songs from this period. One person who comes to mind would be Nick Laird-Clowes of...
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Sleep, meet and eat to the beat
My days are full of small highlights. I rarely take the time to acknowledge them. More often they just sort of slip off my radar into the recent and undistinguished past. But today there are at least three toppers: noticing that there’s enough morning sun these days for Shamsher to take up her favorite spot in the house at the foot of the bed; making it over to Tenderloin bar Whisky Thieves...
1 tag
Oakland to San Jose and back
At Ridder Park Drive / afternoon planning meetings / set the agendas
Under high ceilings / you will have no need at all / of natural light
In my neighborhood / we have natural light, but / not traffic signals
At day’s end, I sit / and take in a well-told tale / about old Oakland
1 tag
Close to home
I haven’t spent much time playing with configurations of the camera apps that have lived on my phone. The one I’ve kept and used most often, Vignette, has several settings that are must-haves for me, more than a few I’ve little to no use for, and a few I’ll try out from time to time just to see how they look.
Today I shot a few pictures in something called “fake...
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Reading 'Killing The Messenger'
I can slide it back and forth with the tip of my finger on my phone, this masterful narrative collected and collated by colleague Thomas Peele. It’s a story that slips straight out of the file cabinets and microfiche collections into the warp and woof of the Web. It’s history made all the more disorienting for not being distant at all, but still within easily recalled memory. I...
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Dream machines
I remember carrying around my first laptop, a battleship-gray Macintosh PowerBook 170. I think I remember spending some quality time with a PowerBook 5300. There should still be a photo or two somewhere of my tangerine clamshell iBook. But I wish I’d had an inkling that machines like today’s MacBook Air were on the way.
Thinking of a possible replacement for a desktop that’s...
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Reading 'How To Be Black'
I’m not reading a book I could have written, but I could have lived some of what’s been written in it, I have lived other parts of it and there are other parts I can still live. These are not things I would have thought to say about a book like this, but it is rare that I can do so and I feel grateful for the chance.
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Winning weekend
A good day pulls you out of yourself, away from your routine. If you’re used to hovering over a keyboard and riding herd on an e-mail queue and rationing out fun links to click on, then you know how shocking and vibrant and engaging the world can become when you unplug and untether.
You enjoy brunching hard at the spot a mile away from your place, poking your nose past a farmers market or...
1 tag
California Honeydrops at Ashkenaz
These guys might be my favorite live-music act. They’re not a buzz band. They draw more fifty- and sixty-year-old ticketgoers than any ensemble I’ve paid money to see more than once (not counting Yoshi’s). But here they are, amazing musicians with thousands of road-miles on them and solid independent bonafides. And here I am, forty years old, no longer in need (if I ever really...
1 tag
In memoriam
I took a walk down to the end of the block tonight. I stood in the dark outside the house owned by people I’d never met and now never will.
Flowers and candles and rocks spelling out “L O V E Y O U,” potted plants and mementos lined up next to a painted-white wrought-iron fence were all there. And so was I, thinking about the times I’d seen workers outside in the last...
1 tag
One of those days
Some days are better seen in black and white
with colors drained, with pigments put away,
for capturing with darkness and with light
each moment you can capture as you may.
