allaboutgeorge's unstorytime beta

I hung out with my old pal Seeley at hir new North Oakland spot so we could practice singing a version of Joan Armatrading’s “Love And Affection” for a housewarming party in a few days. It’s a lovely little co-housing setup a block from the Berkeley border with lots of little rooms and apparently chill roommates taking phone calls and wandering in and out of view, a shared kitchen and a big chart on a nearby wall that gets used to track chores and other responsibilities.

We sat in the backyard next to a big trampoline and a lemon tree and a fenced-in chicken coop against a fence, and we played until I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to mess up too badly. I don’t think all that much about how I learn new songs, but it’s always good when you can listen to the original, make choices about how faithfully you want to reproduce it given, say, my own limitations with dexterity and timing.

I don’t spend much time looking out windows onto Grand Avenue when I’m at the gym. I go straight to work, up the stairs, into the locker room to stow whatever I’m carrying and out to the second floor to make the rounds on the circuit weights. Give me shoulder work, give me a little lower-body work (because I don’t exactly have chicken legs), give me some more shoulder work, let me hit the abs and get some hanging leg-lifts in. But then I get bored of either ignoring the music blaring over the speakers or I’m actually digging it slightly, and I wander over to the windows to see what the light looks like outside, and just like that, there’s someone getting into their car. Heh.

When Amy sent me this:

“Buffett wants to talk like a philanthropist and an investor at the same time, not understanding that the public good and the bottom line have diverged. A newspaper used to be both a profitable business and a public service, but this was just an accident of the competitive (or rather uncompetitive) media landscape. His commonsense approach to saving papers won’t work, because there is no longer any commonsense business model for a former monopoly that is still seeing its revenues erode faster than its costs.”

I remembered reading this a few weeks ago:

“[Newspapers] have been giving away their product at the same time they’re selling it…and that is not a great business model. When they put papers up on the Internet and you get free, you’re competing with yourself. And throughout the industry you’re seeing a reaction to that problem and an answer to it. … You shouldn’t be giving away a product you’re trying to sell.”

And then, in part because of brief exchanges with Matt Krupnick and Gary Bogue about their approaches to posting links to their articles and blog posts on Twitter, I remembered Paton:

One of the reasons I am so stern on paywalls and other walled gardens is because I firmly believe that in the future content will go to the audience and not the other way around. Smart, original content, tagged with advertising will gain value by being shared through networks. Shared content equals influence. And influence in the new ecosystem equals engagement. And engagement equals value to those advertisers and others trying to reach that engaged audience.

So, that’s us, then, with our front row seats to two competing visions of a big issue when it comes to the FoN (future of news) right there. No word yet on how many rounds it’ll go, whether it’ll get called by judges’ ruling or by KO.

A pound and a half of Atlantic salmon, drenched with lemon, pepper and salt and wrapped in aluminum foil and grilled for about 30 minutes, is about the best thing I think I’ve eaten all month. The only way to improve on it, of course, would be to consume most of it while standing atop a roof among friends of friends.

Aside: I sincerely appreciate conversations that start based on a fellow gathering attendee’s T-shirt, require the use of a smartphone to chase down band members’ names, veer into music scenes in a city with shared but not-quite-overlapping residence histories and lead to shared car lifts.

Rounding the corner of El Embarcadero on the edge of the Adams Point neighborhood in Oakland after a visit to my gym, I see some of the goslings still trailing their parents around near Lake Merritt’s pergola. Lining up in a row, they stalk along with their curious walks, able to be distracted by stray blades of grass or insects nearby without losing track of their fine feathered caretakers. For them, the bird is the word, papa oo mow mow. For me, the birds are just the birds, tiny avatars of nature giving me a reason to pause briefly before pedaling back to my apartment.

Absent an external prompt like a Nick Kristof column in the New York Times or a post on certain Tumblr blogs, I can probably count the number of times I’ve thought about sex and work in the same sentence. That means, I guess, that I’ve been operating from advanced levels of distance and privilege. I’m pretty that’s what I thought when I walked out of the Shattuck Theater in Berkeley today after seeing a documentary called “Whores’ Glory.” Casual moments like seeing two young women brief praying at a roadside shrine before punching the clock at their brothel, or of having post-coital chores in another brothel turned into displays of power and prosperity: they shock me, and then they shock me again when I realize I’ve stopped feeling shocked.

I needed a break. My eyes were tired. I’d been staring at my laptop screen for what felt like hours. I got up from my seat and wandered out of the newsroom and out the side door that leads to the employee parking lot. I stopped by the picnic benches in the shade of the pine trees next to the building. Struck by something, I walked over to the base of one and took this picture. I just stood there for a while, taking in the wood leaping up out of the earth and waving its limbs high above me, and listening to the tree say absolutely nothing.

“West End Girls” still sounds like almost no other songs from the 1980s, city noise slipping under synthesizer smears sliding into a spare drum-machine groove and perhaps the plainest Philip Larkin-esque lyrics ever to ascend the pop charts on either side of the Atlantic.

“Let The Music Play” reminds me that I have more gaps in what I know musically than I like to admit, and the only good that has come of it is that I’ve gotten more out of discovering the spaces and gaps than I might by assuming an integrated, wholly complete knowledge of the canon of song. I never knew what freestyle was when I was listening to this song on the radio, but I knew I liked it and never understood why it and Shannon’s follow-up “Give Me Tonight” weren’t bigger hits.

I’m pretty sure I only heard the Moments’ version of “Love On A Two Way Street” years after Stacy Lattisaw sang this for what felt like every other four minutes or so the whole summer of 1981.

I rode the rails and trails today, under my own power and electric power too, pausing for breaths made of vapor before heading to help put out the paper.

I passed old men with heavy heads and heavier helmets, bent over handlebars and cranking out watts and asking themselves what they were doing, shouldn’t they be sitting somewhere in the shade of a paper, snoring their way to glory? I got to work, got busy, got hungry and got food at a truck. Then I got going back the way I’d come.

On the way back, I saw ad ad for a party, a sign protesting a school district and a label for a brewed beverage.