April 2012
30 posts
1 tag
And maybe we both can learn
We met at a choir member’s place in Albany and we warmed up, and then we went over to the Hotsy Totsy Club and met a couple of other members there. We wore blue and we brought our soft-rock choir A-game. I brought my gut.
Five at practice is quorum, but performing with just six is still an exercise. When it’s just you and a few others, you listen more keenly and you time your notes...
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Events sneak up on everyone
I biked over to Air Lounge to check in the Bay Area Black Journalists Association afternoon mixer, missing a few folks I’d really wanted to see but still managing to catch up with a couple.
Coming back from Old Oakland, I came across this fender-bender at 13th and Harrison streets. I don’t think anyone was seriously injured.
I think I remember deciding I was hungry at that...
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Strange brew
I don’t think I’d set foot in the newly renovated Starbucks in downtown Walnut Creek before now. I’m pretty sure I don’t remember being introduced to this beastie here. I should have been taking notes when I said yes to the barista about getting a cup of fresh-brewed from it.
I should have gotten definitely gotten a copy of the receipt so I could remember just what...
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More trouble
Everything we do can go away at a moment’s notice. I don’t mean hit-by-a-bus go-away. I’m thinking more of attention spans. I mean, yes, if you don’t watch where you’re going, you can involuntarily wind up under a large transit vehicle. Heh.
But I see stuff like this and then I attend an all-hands meeting and I hear about a co-worker’s plans to leave and I...
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Back at the lab
I see more general-strike signs, literally found in the lobby of the West Oakland public library, for anyone to take. It’s interesting to get a tiny glimpse at all of these pictures of what’s coming, who’s showing up and what they think is important (or at least enough of a priority to play up visually).
I’m starting to get to the point that I want it to get here, and...
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And I know it's only words
Tonight was the second time I’ve set foot in Bar 355, and the second time I’ve sung here as a member of the Oakland Soft Rock Choir. Once again, we assembled (as part of the bar’s weekly Smoothday) to sing our ancient pop chestnuts off, and were met in response with applause and approval.
It’s very strange to have a place like that as a performing venue, not just a spot...
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Waiting until night lifts
Monday mornings have been about getting up and going over to Gold’s Gym on Grand Avenue. Sometimes it’s been about the oddity of the silent street, broken only by the sounds of my own footfalls or a car swinging along the avenue’s curve. Today, it was about the sight of a bunch of women at the Lake Merritt pergola exercising in unison. Because of where I’d parked, I was...
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The day as you find it
I actually live here. Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it. I wouldn’t have had the tools to take it all in. Living on the West Coast, in a city like Oakland? Biking alongside a lake in sunny weather and watching people exercise or lounge on blankets and chairs?
It’s hard to believe this is home, a home. Familiar and noted when I notice it and ignored when I’m...
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Thinking globally, drinking locally
There’s a spirit in people, a spirit in the air, something that comes around once in a while, perhaps seasonally, tied to some formula that recognizes the amount of light in the sky and the number of people ready to show up and show out.
I don’t know what that’s going to look like with the folks attending the event above. Maybe it’ll look like what Occupy put on last...
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"Jiro Dreams Of Sushi"
I don’t have a family business to go into. I worked a couple of government jobs in high school and college before I left D.C., but that was nothing like my mother’s career. I wouldn’t compare the elementary school tutoring I did as part of my high school’s volunteer requirement anything like my dad’s teaching stints.
Oddly moving, then, to sit in the dark and learn...
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Eight Belles at Vitus
Henry and the other guys sure can play. And man, can Jessi sing! Vitus is pretty big, so it was good to see them up close, nice and loud, different from those Highway Haven singer-songwriter get-togethers back at the start of the year.
I ought to get out and play too. Even if it’s just an opening gig somewhere far off in the city on a weeknight where nobody makes it out to hear. I like...
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The children and the future
Running into Justin Beck a while ago meant, among other things, telling him that I’d love to visit his class. Today I made good, showing up for his students and somehow managing to split the difference between a curmudgeon and a neophile. I remember running my mouth like I had some idea of what I was saying, only occasionally wishing I’d taken some notes. I hadn’t wanted to...
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OAK to SFO
Everyone goes to airports sometimes. Either you’re flying or you’re dropping someone else off or you’re picking someone else up. How often are you picking one person up at one airport and turning around and picking up someone else at another airport? That’s a rare day.
But nowadays it’s relatively easy. We have tools that let us know when to expect an arrival,...
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Café habitué
Today I got to hang out with two new acquaintances in downtown Oakland: one I met at an Oakland Local News Cafe late last month, and another I met at a gathering in West Oakland in February.
Besides the pleasant weather and the new-to-me settings, I think the best part of taking the time out was the conversation. It just so happened that one acquaintance, a business owner, had just been...
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Attending #cjsoakland
The first thing that came to mind months ago, when Susie Cagle told me what she was thinking about setting this up, was science fiction — mostly the Holocaust Education & Avoidance Pods from Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon.” Because, hey, when I overthink a plate of beans, that’s just how I roll.
Related Google Doc:...
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Long weekend
I was up early again. Not as early as last August, but still early. Back to the weird place, the regional wormhole where people you love and care about and feel connected to go to disappear and go fly through the air at hundreds of miles an hour in a long, sleek metal tube with wings and then reappear days later with stories about other realities (“cities,” “flyover...
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Hello Jingletown
I’ve passed by on Interstate 880 or on International Avenue, or taken the Park Avenue Bridge to Alameda, but I can’t say I’ve ever stopped in this part of town before more than twice in all the time I’ve lived in the city. So when I heard about a gallery showing within the tiny tolerances allowable by the homeward-bound commute, Ankita and I managed to swing by.
We...
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Close to home
I wonder what’s like to live in a part of the city where you never walk or drive past a corner and see a strange piece of furniture appear, something furtively delivered and deposited, abandoned and available to a new owner or none. Our stretch of Oakland between the Merritt and Cleveland Heights neighborhoods hosts all sorts of gear year-round. Sometimes it’s infuriating. Something...
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Visiting the media lab
I started out today working at the Oakland Tribune’s office at Oakport Street, but realized it might be a good day to visit the paper’s Community Media Access Lab at the West Oakland public library.
Swinging north along Interstate 880 and pulling off of Interstate 980, I saw this California Highway Patrol car stopping someone. I kept on going.
The lab was pretty quiet, though...
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Town business
Today’s re-read (thanks to recent events): Craig Silverman’s Poynter column “Plagiarism may be part of weeding-out at Journal Register”
Under the old leadership, and culture, there’s no way a paper would have publicly shared an incident of plagiarism, according to DeRienzo, who has been with the Journal Register Company since 2004. The offender probably wouldn’t have...
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Under construction
One day you walk into your store and you see a sign about coming changes. They’ll take a while to finish and they’ll inconvenience you slightly, but you hear promises that the changes will improve your experience.
One day you walk into your newsroom and sit down at your computer and you see a tweet and you look for confirmation that it is real, and then you find that it is.
And...
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Dolores Park and back
Some cities and some holidays just conjoin like stars, and I’m not talking about marketing (eyes on you, Thanksgiving, Macy’s and New York City.) Easter makes me think of San Francisco, and not just because of that lovely stretch in Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” where the goddess Eostre talks with the Norse god Odin. It’s a perfect place to find the sacred in...
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Crime and astonishment
Driving through downtown Oakland earlier today, I saw a bunch of Oakland police cars at the intersection of 17th and Alice streets. I stopped and talked to an officer and took a couple of pictures, and passed them along later on to a producer on duty for inclusion in the Oakland Tribune article about it.
Later, I got to go with Amy Gahran to see David Wax Museum and the Carolina Chocolate...
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Mother Goose takes a walk
Nature is cyclical. Even when so much around us happens or seems to happen once, only if it ever happens at all, that is still true.
This time next year, odds are good that there’ll be a goose nesting atop the room of the building where I work. Odds may be slightly less good that I’ll be able to call that building “the old Contra Costa Times...
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Lower Polk Art Walk
Just a week or so after seeing workers set up a gallery show at San Francisco’s White Walls around the corner, I got to attend this month’s Lower Polk Art Walk and see a bunch of galleries’ displays tonight with Eddie Adams. The most memorable works for me were the “Justified Scriptures” paintings by Niels Shoe Meulman.
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Oikos arraignment
Randall Keith asked me to go down to see the suspect in the Oikos shooting get charged in court today, so I biked down to the Wiley Manuel courthouse on Washington Street in Old Oakland. Outside the courtroom, a couple of dozen reporters from other media outlets assembled to wait to get let in.
An Alameda County sheriff’s deputy gave us a bunch of rules about how to behave if we made it...
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Instagram
Finally we great unwashed Android owners get to join up and see what the fuss is all about. We’ll sign up and try out features and complain about crashes.
We’ll take pictures and more pictures, and we’ll swear that we still don’t have as many nice features as the iPhone folks.
We’ll continue to edit pictures in other on-camera filter apps because some of us still...
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Oikos
I thought the Oaksterdam raid in downtown Oakland was going to be the day’s biggest story. And then it wasn’t.
reports of shots fired near 7800 Edgewater in Oakland.possible multiple victims.OPD and ambulances are responding.
— Brian Dinsmore (@DinsmoreDesk) April 2, 2012
Thomas Peele and Danny Willis, who’d been heading down to a training session in San Jose, went over to...
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Tango at Cato's Ale House
Pubs are for people, for bodies, for sound and chatter and a drink hoisted in one hand and an ear cocked for the pair of people in the corner playing instruments.
They’re for the introduction to a musician dressed as informally as you, or to the gentleman standing off to the side who sheepishly takes a nod to come in and sing a couple of songs.
They’re for watching people eat and...
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Not done with the rain
I want a better day than today. I was pretty zonked out in the morning and couldn’t respond to a request for safe space and support first thing. Then I got a $40 parking ticket in downtown Walnut Creek. Later, back at home, I had to clean up after the cat after she ate too fast and couldn’t hang onto her food.
