Crew slideshow

My multimedia slideshow on the Jack London Aquatic Center's crew team for Oakland youth is not up at OaklandNorth.net.

More to come...

Lazy Sunday

After days spent immersed in the arcane minutiae of municipal bond markets, it was nice to take a short day assignment that basically involved hanging out with kids in a neighborhood park.

(Of course, I do still have to write the bond piece.)

Breakdancers, rocking it for the camera on Dipolog beach.

I'm leaving again for the mountains early tomorrow morning. This time, I'll be well and truly off the grid -- 12 km hike in, no cellphone signal -- so I'll be out of touch for at least the next 2 days.

Geeky digression: the only Tagalog word, to my knowledge, that has become completely integrated into English is bundok, aka Boondock, which means mountain. During the Philippine-American War (and ever since) the mountainous hinterlands were tactical centers for resistance. When asked where the rebels were, locals would respond "sa bundok," which entered military slang, and from there vernacular english.

May Day

Some photos from the May Day march in San Francisco

More, and more to come, on my flickr account

Marlena's

The (semi)final cut of my series on the drag show at Marlena's Bar in Hayes Valley:


Check out a few more from the series on my flickr acount

Irises

Irises, in January.

Everytime I remember to look around, this city astonishes me.

Melilla, a photoessay by Flo Razowsky

Flo -- activist, photojournalist, friend and inspiration -- has just posted a beautiful new photoessay from the Spanish-Moroccan border at Melilla.
http://www.lightstalkers.org/galleries/slideshow/9398

"This portfolio is part of a bigger project focused on the look of borders become manifest, the look of the land and the people when the arbitrary line in the sand takes form. These shots were taken from Melilla, Spain, a Spanish enclave cut off from the north of Morocco by a militarized and deadly triple layer, 10ft high structure. Migrants travel for 4,5,6 years to reach this side of the line only to be held in migrant detention centers, some for years, awaiting the legal system to either award them papers or deport them to where they started out from so many years ago and worked so hard (and many died) to get away from."

Cabazon's Creationist Dinosaurs

This friendly looking dinosaur at a truckstop in Cabazon, Southern California:

Holds a creationist museum in its belly.

You climb up its tail, and are greeted by exhibits like this:

Finally, when you reach the top of the stairs, you arrive in the mueum/gift shop, where a variety of dinosaur paraphenalia is sold, and a slack-jawed adolescent stares at a video of a sermon about how Noah took dinosaurs onto the ark with him.

"But of course, he took baby dinosaurs. Why? Because they're small...duh! And light. This will be important later." (Verbatim, to the best of my memory. I only wish I was making this up.)

[it's worth clicking to view the larger picture sizes, and actually read the exhibit labels]

New Year's Eve

The Sun Sets on 2007

from my back porch. 

(Squint and you can see the Golden Gate Bridge)

From my bedroom window.

Happy New Year everyone. More posts in 2008.

Winter

Winter 2001: Minnehaha falls, frozen. Me, so acclimated I'm not even wearing gloves.

I'm not going to pretend there aren't things about California that make me want to spit nails. People, for example, who actually think talking about chakras is a reasonable way to chat me up. Or endless discussions about feelings that never actually seem to result in people saying what they're feeling. Or being asked what my spirit animal is (actually, that happened in Washington, but you get the idea).

Numerous other things reconfirm that, at least when it comes to interpersonal communication, I'm East Coast to the core.

But then I read about the crazy ice storms gripping the Midwest, and remember the terrible things Midwestern winters did to my head, and realize how much worse I could have it. Which, come to think of it, is one of the few things the Midwest is consistently good for.

I'm trying to make a point of spending some time everyday barefoot on my backporch, looking at the hills across the bay, and appreciating civilized weather.

It's that time of the semester again...

Continuing my series of desk portraits, here is the wreckage of my desk as I near the home stretch of a marathon last-minute paper revising session:

It may not be a system of organization that works for anyone else, but I seem to have done alright for myself with it so far.

Now, if I can just stop procrastinating and find 2000 more words I can get rid of without undermining my thesis before my eyes totally give out, I may just be through with writing about impunity in the Philippines forever. 

Well, probably not forever, but I feel like a nice long break is in order.

I am so ready for the semester to be over.

UPDATE @ 2:30: Oh, it hurts, it hurts! Every line in this paper represents hours of research and writing. The fat's trimmed off, so is a lot of the meat. I'm starting to hit bone.

Bloke Metges evicted

Free community bicycle shop in CSO Metges, 2003

CSO (Squatted Social Center) Metges  in el Forat de la Vergonya in Barcelona was evicted after 6 years. 4 people (and I don't yet know who) were beaten up in the process.

The eviction happened Tuesday morning, though I've only now gotten the news. 

 

This house was one of my most beloved homes, and an amazing center for resistance and organizing for the whole neighborhood.

My heart is truly broken.

Breakfast at Metges, 2003

More images

Spanish language story on the eviction. Sorry, best I could do. At least it's not Catalan.

Mt. Shasta, from I-5 in Northern California

It’s been a rare sunny day in Olympia. And cold! Four months of living in the Bay Area has made my blood thin.
On the way up here, I was remembering the only other time I’ve ever been on I-5 between Oakland and Oregon -- tail end of what was probably the most miserable trip of my entire life. I was seventeen, on the West Coast for the first time, hitchhiking south after the WTO protests in Seattle.
My companion and I were both broke, and sick from all the teargas and nerve-gas we’d been exposed to. I remember being cold, throat aflame, and with wet feet for days on end, walking and walking in the rain and finding it nearly impossible to get picked up. In the realm of small miseries, I can think of few worse than waking up in the morning and having to put back on the same wet clothes you were wearing the night before. I think it took 5 days to get from Portland to Oakland (including a disastrous detour on the 101), and I can’t recall ever being happier to make it somewhere.
Doing the same trip in reverse took about 13 hours, including a surreal stop at a casino and the requisite tire blow-out 15 miles before our destination (fortunately, the only roadside emergency I actually know how to deal with). Quite a pleasant trip, all things considered. And I’m happy for a change of scenery.
I still have to spend a few hours working every day to justify leaving town for nearly a week, but the rest of the time is mine to explore, think about food, and spend with old friends.

I've been feeling kind of stressed lately, so I'm trying to remind myself of small things that consistently make me happy no matter how stressed or grumpy I am:

• Photobooth pictures
• Dancing
• Skating
• Swimming
• Mail (paper, though email's not bad either)
• First cup of coffee (and second! The best thing about addictions is that you create problems for yourself that you can then easily solve)

Go look at my photos...

I'm still working on getting all the tags and dates organized, but I've started putting some of my photos from the last 5 years up on flickr.
Check them out at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/19958499@N03/

My most disjointed post ever...

“Like many people, I started blogging out of an urgent need to procrastinate” –Alex Ross, in the New Yorker, Oct. 22

While I’ve been distracted by other things:

The Glorietta blast has been ruled, officially now, an accident. I'm still not sure what to think. And I also can’t quite help being suspicious about the timing. Though only confirmed in the past days, the initial declaration of this revised assessment came October 24, after an emergency meeting of the National Security Council at Malacanang that also led to a rapprochement between Arroyo and Speaker of the House Jose de Venicia Jr. Convenient, as usual.

I’ve finally taken the plunge and purchased a computer which should, I feel it’s reasonable to hope, work properly. I eagerly await the return of the hyphen, zero, underscore and close parenthesis to my writing.

I’ve been going through a lot of my old {and recent} photographs, and will start putting them up on flickr, though probably not until my new machine has arrived. I will put up a link when it’s available.

Some previews, chosen more at less at random on the theme of “ruined buildings”:

Ruins of Tito’s mansion in Mostar, Bosnia i Herzegovina, 2002 {destroyed by war}

El Forat de la Vergonya, Barcelona, 2003{destroyed by gentrification}

Angel Island

Angel Island. {Clearly} not by me

The past is a foreign country...

Self-portrait, 1998

I've realized I have a tendancy not only to think of the past as a foreign country, but also to treat my earlier self as a citizen of that country -- a distant friend perhaps, with whom I share a past but not a present.
What a shock, and a needed one, to be reminded that we share the same body, the same brain and the same heart.

Music

I listen to classical music so rarely that I sometimes forget how much I love it.
But an afternoon spent trying to drown out background library chatter has reminded me that certain pieces, like Satie's Gymnopedies, can transport me in a way that almost nothing else can.


When I got home this afternoon I was inspired to play my violin, for the first time in longer than I care to admit.
At times, I'm frustrated by the limits my diminished motor skills impose. I simply no longer have the kind of precise muscular control I had when I was 15. I struggle through music I mastered as a teenager, and it's hard to imagine having the drive -- or the time -- for the consistent, disciplined practice it would take to get back up to a reasonable level of proficiency.
It's still a joy, though, just to play. To draw my bow across the strings and hear the bright, clean sharpness of a perfectly-tuned E string, the murky complexity of a minor scale, or the exacting precision of a Bach Minuet.

The eucalyptus grove -- my favorite place on the UC Berkeley campus.
I wish these photos could capture the smell of sunlight hitting the leaves drying on the forest floor.