Midnight Christmas Mass

The Catholic church a few blocks from my house had a real midnight Christmas Mass which was cool.

A huge, 100-foot Christmas tree, a black Catholic church with a white (German?) priest, a piano player that rocked the house, and a soul singer that couldn't hold back at times "Hmmmm." Ha. He did that one time at the end of a song, the congregation laughed, and the priest turned around in a funny, joking reprimand. Regardless, the house rocked like no Mass I'd been to. People were dancing in the aisles during certain of the more passionate songs. The theme "Go Tell It On the Mountain," was one of them. It approached, but didn't reach, my experience with a friend's of mine, Zach, African Methodist Episcopal Church in Des Moines, Iowa. The congregants had tambourines and other instruments (!!), and I think we danced for about 75 to 80 percent of the service (awesome).

The priest himself is an odd character, a showman. When I walked in he was humming, figuratively, with energy, a babe in his arms, as he strolled down the main aisle greeting the congregation. I happened to bump into him in the darkened chapel as I looked for a seat and I said quickly, unconsciously, "Excuse me." And he responded, just as quickly, looking into my eyes, "You're excused." Hmmm. What is this? I know he was pumped up, but it was definitely odd. At the end, in a wonderful, touching moment, he took the same baby, lolling, though awake, and stood amid the congregation and lifted him up while talking about the "innocence of babes, we are all like little Ezekial here" etc. It was beautiful, but strange as well. When he finished, as he was walking back to return the babe to his mother, he said, to a kind-of relieved, though genuine and exuberant, laughter from the congregation, in showman style, "And, no, he's not mine." I had a feeling he was. Ha.

More later.

5 shots fired

hot corner

At Sacramento and Ashby: saw a gunman today running after firing five shots. Crazy. Apparently it's a hot corner.

Best of the Year?

And a related question: Why are these articles free? May be one reason for the sad state (pitiful pay, for the most part, for good work) of American journalism.


Vanity Fair: Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds by Michael Lewis. Oct. 1, 2010.


The Atlantic: The End of Men by Hanna Rosin. July/August 2010. [A pitiful article, pitiful.]


CNN Money.com: Inside the secret world of Trader Joe's by Beth Kowitt. Aug. 23, 2010.


New York Magazine: The James Franco Project: Is James Franco For Real? by Sam Anderson. July 25, 2010. [No.]

The American Scholar: Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz. Spring 2010.
[A surprisingly good publication. Didn't know about it until grad school. See Priscilla Long's poem published in The American Scholar that won, amazingly, the American Society of Magazine Editors (now Magazine Publishers Association) (they do a yearly industry-wide recognized/standardizing National Magazine Awards) 2006 feature writing award. Beautiful, and if this counts as literary journalism, then the world's wide open - thank god. Priscilla said the article was a blind submission to the magazine - amazing. Hear that, aspirants? (Took her three years though). If you're too interneted-out to click on a link, here is a snippet:

Courtly cows dispense with diphthongs. Chocolate-covered theories crouch in corners. Corners rot uproariously. Refrigerators frig worms. Catastrophe kisses the count of five. A statement digests its over-rehearsed rhinoceros. Bookworms excrete monogamous bunnies. Blue crud excites red ecstasy. All this during the furious sleeping of colorless green ideas.
]

The above list generated from The Sidney Awards in the NYT by David Brooks, via @cristinadaglas.

A Tale of Two Cities

Up Oakland, Down Oakland

Ah, Men and Women

At Philz Coffee. They don't make espresso because it "ruins the coffee." Whatever. So I got a double-filtered something. Good, but no cappuccino.

Next to me, two women (middle-aged, not that it matters) talking about finding the right man.

Depressing, and not in that way, but in the way women deconstruct the man they want. I have a feeling it's universal. We are not tools! (but we are) Don't objectivize us! As my friend Daijo said one time, hilariously, to his wife when we three were casually talking about the subject: "We're people, too!" Ha. You must be laughing out loud. :).

I have a whole theory. It involves lions ...

SOLSTICE

Went on a Solstice (3:38 p.m. PST) hike today into the Berkeley hills. Above the Greek Theater (didn't know it was outside! A show there must be stunning.) And into, and quickly ushered out of, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Didn't know.

A glorious walk, though. Up the hill, the Bay comes in view (it was clear today; it's clear randomly; rains randomly; whatever). Was listening to a Fresh Air Podcast. Terry Gross is a little prudent (overly), but her intelligence and perception is stunning; she always asks the questions you logically are asking yourself (they're deeper, more subtle, and the talk flows better) than most other interviewers. It's amazing. Try it. She doesn't hold back, too; she'll ask some amazing, personal questions. Unfortunately, most guests are too cool for school on the show. Too level-headed, to self-serious about their work. This one was Sofia Coppola, who just must be one of the most ideal women (wanna hang out/date?), but she was too cool for school, too. But her new film sounds intriguing. Like her Lost in Translation, it looks like it creates the same smooth, languorous aesthetic: a supple, tangible, bubble-ball feel of relationship between two people, moving in, now out, now glancing into/around each other. Father/daughter, lover/friend, man/woman. Hope to see it. Somewhere.

More later.

Rain!

Will you please stop?

Colossus at Rhodes

Amazing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_of_Rhodes

More to come, amazing.

Four, then five, older dudes at a cafe

These guys were sitting around a table at Au Coquelet, a somewhat depressing, though well-visited wifi coffeeshop/restaurant on this cold, rainy, dark night at about 8:30. Fighting a cold and a writing assignment, the oddness of these guys blended with the atmosphere, but also became unavoidable to notice/observe.

One of the dudes with a beard and glasses in halting, slow speech (slow and unsure to the point that it's surprising no one steals the floor from him),

"A male lion is roughly twice the weight of a lioness, but his heart is only 50 percent larger than hers. So, it explains a lion's overall lazier demeanor." What?

And then I notice (there's harmony in all things), the folded-paper sign: BUUG (Berkeley Unix User Group) that sits on the table.

Life at the Y

"It's the first time I saw Arturo in clothes," said one of the morning loudmouths, jokingly, to a couple of guys sitting just outside the steam and sauna rooms on the white plastic bench that serves as a semi-uncomfortable (for me at least) lounge spot in the men's locker room at the Downtown Berkeley YMCA. There's a crazy amalgam of regulars; it brings back high school - the institutional feel of it and the absolute mix, about as egalitarian as our modern democracy offers nowadays (struck up a brief conversation with who I guessed is some type of venture capitalist ("I'm flying to Austin at the end of the week"); he was characteristically wary in his responses to my enthusiastic talking (I saw basketball shoes and a basketball in his locker and I was quizzing him on the pick-up game situation (for the info, he could've been homeless for all I care), as some "successful" guys are). The curiously-shaped guy that sits directly in front of the hot tub so you have to curve around his feet, one of which (his left) is elephant-man deformed, a couple of nobs are all there are for toes. A big belly, shorts that somehow hug his big belly, shirtless, and calling out to his regulars when he sees them, "Hey now." (Saw him riding his motor scooter in a different part today). Another guy talks to everybody; I was unfortunate enough to match his flow. Heard him loudmouthing a guy at a neighboring locker as he changed into his swim trunks, yelling at the guys as we passed through the sauna/steam room area to the showers, giggling to himself and others in the shower (soap shower required by state law before getting into hot tub, pool), and then jabbering with the elephant man in the hot tub ... and then yelling to the lifeguard and to his lane-neighbors in the pool. A one-man show.

Anyhow, I had never seen Arturo in clothes either; he's a shuffling, mumbling older hispanic guy with a snow's-spit moustache and a nickel-sized medallion that swings, bounces from clavicle to clavicle just behind the beat of his shuffle; and he's always in the locker room. I had never not seen him actually, and I go at random times during the day.

Okay ... more later. This one is ripe.

Holocaust

Suitte Francais by Irène Némirovsky (2007), trans. from the French by Sandra Smith.

Published after years in the hands of Némirovsky's daughter who refused to look at the leather-bound book of notes for decades, afraid to re-open the wounds formed in her from her mother's and father's 1942 death at Auschwitz. Suitte Francais was written in occupied France during the war and was interrupted by her abduction by the Nazi machine in July 1942. The book contains two of five planned novels detailing life in war-time, occupied France. It's a devastating work, particularly for the factual appendices, which contain her notes for the planned book series, her impressions of what felt like (and was) impending doom, and the letters surrounding her and her husband's ratcheting trouble from having Jewish ancestors in Nazi-occupied France.

Some random quotes:

Appendix, Némirovsky's handwritten notes:

My God! what is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life. And the other countries? What are they to me? Empires are dying. Nothing matters. Whether you look at it from a mystical or a personal point of view, it's just the same. Let us keep a cool head. Let us harden our heart. Let us wait. (Appendix 1, 373)

1942:

The French grew tired of the Republic as if she were an old wife. For them, the dictatorship was a brief affair, adultery. But they intended to cheat on their wife, not to kill her. Now they realise she's dead, their Republic, their freedom. They're mourning her.

For years, everything done in France within a certain social class had had only one motive: fear. This social class caused the war, the defeat and the current peace. The Frenchmen of this caste hate no one; they feel neither jealousy nor disappointed ambition, nor any real desire for revenge. They're scared. Who will harm them the least (not in the future, not in the abstract, but right now and in the form of kicks in the arse or slaps in the face)? The Germans? The English? The Russians? The Germans won but the beating has been forgotten and the Germans can protect them. That's why they're "for the Germans." At school, the weakest student would rather be bullied than be free; the tyrant bullies him but won't allow anyone else to steal his marbles, beat him up. If he runs away from the bully, he is alone, abondoned in the free-for-all. [Analogous to America, psychologically, economically, now? The country is a lot weaker, more ridden with fear, fragile, in that devastating place of powerful illusion before the disillusion, than anyone wants to acknowledge (look in your heart, and it's clearly there). Look at our (the policy-makers, big-time journalism) judgements in the world - they're clouded by a destructive self-interest. We have to have self-interest, obviously, but "our way of life" is clouding all reasonable, common-sense, logical, sustainable decision-making. It's immensely sad - the karma that started with the response to the World Trade Center bombing and our vow to "root out evil," is coming home to roost.] (377)

They're trying to make us believe we live in the age of the "community," when the individual must perish so that society may live, and we don't want to see that it is society that is dying so the tyrants can live (378).

[To herself, about Suitte Francais] Have no illusions: this is not for now. So mustn't hold back, must strike with a vengeance wherever I want (379).

Inimitable descriptions but not historical (383). [Of her approach to writing a novel, capturing the spirit, not constricted by documenting inane facts.]

[About Suitte Francais] Keep it simple. Tell what's happening to people and that's all (380).

I think that what gives War and Peace the expansion Forster talks about (Forster: Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? Is not there something of it in War and Peace?), is quite simply the fact ... (386-387). [She was thinking very carefully, intelligently how to tell this devastating story.

What lives on [in the midst of tyranny: life, art, and God (page 388)]:

1 Our humble day-to-day lives

2 Art

3 God

The Holocaust is absolutely mind-boggling. So must all genocides. Think of Rwanda. But something feels so much closer to home about the Holocaust, maybe because of the stronger, more immediate cultural ties (as a nation).

I grew up Jewish, and I must say I'm tired of seeing films, etc. come out about the Holocaust. Can we somehow funnel Hollywood Jewish money differently? I understand, never forget ...
Having just read Suitte Francais, the poignancy and unbelievability of the event is mind-crushingly nuts. Némirovsky wrote the novel/notes during the World War II in occupied France and didn't finish it because, as a Russian Jew (though she was a practicing Catholic; to Naziland, three Jewish grandparents = a Jew, no matter the later manifestation of life - some curious twist on a biblical generational curse), she died in Auschwitz in 1942. The absolutely nuts part about the book and its circumstance is (the book ends with a sequence of her letters and husband's, etc.) is that she knew (as attested in the letters) she was going to die and could do nothing about it. The Jewish round-up slowly constricted life, and she (and many others about themselves) knew it. One day she was taken, and her husband's progressively frantic letters about finding/retrieving her are devastating. As the program intensified, he met her same fate, later, in Auschwitz. What the hell was going on? And France was occupied, but what the hell were its citizens thinking letting this happen? I know the psychology of a slowly ratcheting pain/change, but damn. Slowly boil, instead of flash-fire. Neighbors just watched it happen, but also, as described in the novel, the French soul had rolled over for the Germans (including the country's daughters), so they were basically lifeless/heartless/backboneless, but still. It is absolutely amazing.


Appendix II includes Némirovsky and her husband's, et al., letters.

Michel Epstein [Irène's husband] to Andre Sabatier [publisher] (19 September 1942) [unknown to Epstein, who would be taken to Auschwitz on November 6, 1942, and immediately sent to the gas chamber, Irène had been dead for just over a month by the letter's date]:

Our letters have crossed. I thank you for giving me some news, no matter how depressing it may be. Could you please find out if it would be possible for me to be exchanged for my wife - I would perhaps be more useful in her place and she would be better off here. If this is impossible, maybe I could be taken to her - we would be better off together. Obviously, it would be necessary to speak to you about all this in person.

The blaring question is Why?

For some context, some snippets from Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under the Nazi Occupation (2010):

Poorly prepared, the French Army was soundly defeated in less than six weeks [less than six weeks!] by the German offensive in the West, which was launched on May 10, 1940 (30).

The armistice of June 22, 1940 divided France into two zones, separated by a demarcation line: to the north, territory under the administration of the German Military Commander in Franche (Militarbefehlshaber im Frankreich); to the south -- until the German invasion of November 1942 -- territory under the authority of the Vichy regime. (64).

Collaboration with the Nazi Occupier was the official policy of Vichy France (132).

A timeline:

1: July 22, 1940, outlaw of recent foreign nationals.

2: October 3, 1940, (first ("Statute on Jews") proclamation: defined Jews (three jewish grandparents or two jewish grandparents and a jewish spouse); quit working life and go into exile.

3: June 2, 1941, (second "Statute on Jews"); further employment restrictions, new definition (two jewish grandparents = Jewish).

4: January 20, 1942, the Wannsee Conference, Nazis planned the "Final Solution of the Jewish question." WTF!

5: March 27, 1942, first convoy to Auschwitz, all Jews required to wear yellow Star of David. The mighty king.

6: June 16, 17, Spring Breeze [Némirovsky among this one]; round up, with help of French police, of registered Jews (28,000) and then sent to Drancy and then off.

Summer 1942 to end of July 1944, 76,000 Jews deported from France. Only 2,500 survived.

See Paul Gray's amazing review of Suite Francais in a 2006 long, Sunday New York Times book review here.

Some thoughts on love

Don't know about all this ...

Your hair hangs like
autumn rain
full; bunching down, overgrown

- - -

surprised into love by the songs of a nun,
singing like a mantle of worn rock
in a previous sea.
waltz and blush,
gaping at the absent sky
in the catacombs of a once-convent.

move just so,
so we may stand on the lip
of a wasteland
with clouds, dark as mid-storm
above us...

poem after the dash, adapted from a poem by Katy Didden

Some ruminations on personality, business, making, as Juve says, something out of nothing

You know, this might come off as bitter. It's not. I swear. Today I went to a volunteer orientation at 826 Valencia at 826 Valencia, San Francisco, the organization founded by novelist Dave Eggers and someone else. What's fascinating about 826 is its relationship with what has become a massive Egger empire - Dave's personality, personal expression, comes through in it all (McSweeney's, 826, The Believer), pervasive. Unfortunately, I find his style to be fussy, put-on, facetious, overly fastidious, tiresomely ironic, and annoying. BUT, he's no doubt a large player in the modern American literary landscape. And amazing in his own way. His 2000 breakout novel, A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius (A Staggering Work of Outlandish Self-Reflection (Navel-Gazing) and Inanity) put him onto the scene. Note: Finally reading the whole thing (I know shameful to judge without reading, but I read parts of it!) and will have a more intelligent, detailed critique soon. But, the Berkeley Public Library has it filed in its Teen section. Enough said?

Dave founded McSweeney's, the West Coast's representation of a "serious” literary journal, a la The Paris Review, Granta. The journal paused as it transmuted a couple of issues into make the outstanding one-time-only newspaper, The San Francisco Panorama. Amazing! I first heard about it from my grad school cohort and bluegrass bassist extraordinaire Brian Heffernan who interned at San Francisco Magazine one summer. He was here (in SF) when Panorama was published. The newspaper listed its exact publishing costs, line-itemed. Insightful, intriguing, a genius-move. It was an experiment in newspapering in this chaotic digital time.

---

826 is just as Eggerish – rococo sheets billowing from the ceilings, bookshelves/books everywhere, and most notably, the storefront (about 18 yards wide, 15 yards deep) is a Pirate Shop, no doubt born from Eggers's whimsy. He or whomever might argue the details of who did what (suggested what, etc., but the details aren't the issue, the issue, it's the broad vision/inspiration), but the style is unmistakedly Dave's; some people just provide a vision/framework/style and then people take that and run. There's nothing like having a framework in which to work. I've seen this exact same thing before; we all have probably, but this one is notably, remarkably similar. When in journalism grad school at the University of Missouri, Columbia, I came across Paul Sturtz. His name first entered my realm as a public life beat reporter at the Missourian, the MU journalism-student-produced city newspaper (with bunches of issues all its own. Inexplicably, it loses (or did when I was there in 2008-ish) one million dollars a year and has a circulation of 1,200! Pathetic, inexcusable, a waste of time and money (the competing city paper, The Columbia Daily Tribune, had successfully argued that a university newspaper competing against a city paper was unfair, and dangled a lawsuit over the Missourian's head; there has to be a functional, good resolution, compromise. Maybe the Missourian becomes a section of the Tribune. But, whatever needs to be done, stop beating your heads against the wall, please! As a former Missourian, it was painful; the wall stared at you everyday, large thick bricks. You walked in in the morning and there it was about two feet in front of you (no way around, no way over, no way under, and, tragically, no way through) waiting for you to make the percussive next move, over and over and over)). But, unfortunately, this circumstance resonated a certain harmony that sang throughout the journalism school: extreme, professional effort with absolutely no vision, a sincere blindness to common sense.

(I am aware of the irony of this juxtaposition). Anyhow, my great editor, great human being, cool, real, hardworking, inspiring, a canoeist, lead-singer of a rejuvenated teenage Sedalia, Missouri, 80s punk band, The Abusers, skinny-ass Levi pants that accentuate his legs' stork-like thinness (fragility, impression), ending in big brown, clunky work boots, an inveterate smoker, coffee drinker, a deep voice, a very simple, logical, at-the-surface, always-ready-to-gurgle-up sense-of-humor: Scott Swafford (earnest: he was also taking graduate classes with us grad students. In one seminar, I sat next to him in class; several of us had noticed that he had meticulously highlighted all of the text, all of it, on a page of an obscure reading in the meaningless, useless qualitative research methods class. The whole page! It was hilarious; he held it up for a second and shook his head in acknowledgement of the acknowledgement). In the Fall of 2007, when I was a reporter at the Missourian, Scott asked me, excitedly, to contact Paul Sturtz as he had just entered the First Ward city council race. The First Ward is the core of the pop. 100,000-ish town, dominated by the university, State Farm Insurance and Shelter Insurance. It's a swale in the middle of central Missouri's crop fields. Anyhow, Scott was notably reverent toward Paul; the descriptive quote about him stuck out (and indicates Scott's mix of purity, naivete and unabashed straightforwardness), "He writes poetry.” Ha. Scott, 45-ish, grew up in Sedalia, Missouri, and has been a newspaperman since right after school. He has the Show-Me-state sensibility to his core. So, because of my reverence for Scott, and his for Paul, I took notice. Slowly, I learned that Paul (co-(see my Dave Eggers vision point))founded the True/False Film Festival, a world-class international documentary film festival held in Columbia each twilight-of-winter. And he used to teach at the Missourian and he helped save a park and he (co-)founded the independent bar/cafe/movie theater in town.

So, I went after him. Like Dave, he's an amazing hub of energy: directing, inspiring others with a resolute, dependable, detailed and always-reliable vision. I pitched a profile of him to one of Columbia's lifestyle magazines, Inside Columbia Magazine, and got the go-ahead. I then went after Paul. I emailed him and emailed him. He never said no, but he was trying to brush me off. But, I wrote/told him each time, "Just say, 'No,' and I'll go away. Until you say 'no,' I'm going to keep asking you for the profile.” He finally acquiesced. It was about a week before the city council election. He graciously had me over to his house. I walked in and Paul's style/sensibility struck me immediately as a carefree, slightly mischievous Calvin and Hobbes one; maybe because among the books that lined the room was a Calvin and Hobbes collection. He sat down, collapsed in a chair and rubbed his face; he looked exhausted, he didn't want me to do the story in the first place but I went for it. His exhaustion was something deeper. He calls himself a "social entrepreneur," and he said (paraphrasing), "Sometimes I just feel so drained. There are amazing highs from motivating, inspiring people to do something great; and there are great energy lows.” In other words, he's completely conscious of his talent. I was drawn to him because I recognize in me the same skill/gift/way-of-being/curse. Anyhow, I walked with him around the neighborhood on the cold, cold day, his nose running a little, my hands numb. He knocked on each door, wrote a hand-written note on each flier. His goal was lofty: to knock on every door in the First Ward. I said something like, "It's a good way to go," and he replied, quickly, "It's the only way to go." Gives you an idea of his striving for perfection. He said several times in several different guises that what motivates him is a sincere need to justify his existence on earth. With limited resources, what are you doing to justify your place on earth? My piece ("Walking to Utopia") in the magazine ended with a quote from a book that he recited to me in his house, the same quote he closed his First Ward City Council seat victory speech with at The Pasta Factory in Columbia on April 8, 2008: "What is utopia for? It is for this. For walking."

marching to utopia: T/F 2010 opening second-line (band from New Orleans) parade through downtown Columbia - UTOPIA

Just before he acknowledged the win, his True/False co-founder, David Wilson, and he had an aside-moment. David was saying, "Dude, you won. Give the speech,” and Paul was demurring, "I think it's classier if I wait, don't you?” Thorough to the end.

So, the Eggerish thing about Paul is really seen at the True/False Film Festival. As his ex-partner and mother of his son Zola, Sheila Johnson, said (paraphrased), "The year they brought the whole Afro-Cuban All-Stars, that was all Paul.” (In the context of our discussion, to be clear, she was confirming the overwhelming, unmistakable impression I had that Paul was the fest's primal force). I covered the 2010 festival for Inside Columbia (story). Glorious (photos). A true utopia over four days. Art, music. Buskers on the street, throughout downtown, filmmakers everywhere. Encountered a NYC busker wailing Charley Patton with a finger-slide and guitar the opening Thursday of the fest outside a coffee shop in the heart of downtown, a couple of blocks north of the University of Missouri campus. Made your heart sing. And the legendary Timothy "Speed" Levitch gave walking tours of downtown Columbia. Timothy "Speed” Levitch!? He's a legend. I was mesmerized by his starring role in the 1997 bio-documentary The Cruise, in which he basically performed one long paean to the city of New York and the soul-warp of its upper-island grid and the birds-nest creative expansion of South-of-Houston glory. (Click on the freeze-frame below of Speed sitting gloriously framed on his NYC tour bus throne, caught in rapture, mid-top-of-the-brain-ramble, mid-exuberant-seemingly-always-present-poem rhapsodizing from his rara avis genius). He was there in person! I still can't believe it. I went to two of the tours he led. And in a down moment, 15 minutes before one of the tours, I asked him what he's up to now. Living with his mom in Kansas City! Crazy!

Paul, 45-ish, won the seat. Sheila, his former partner, said to me (we became friends; I took over her amazing clifftop house in Columbia's best neighborhood when she went to Nepal for her master's project), in a tone that whispered both admiration and respect, "When he won and we talked, he said, 'You know, it will be just such a great opportunity to learn.'!" I did one more accuracy check with Paul in his True/False Film Fest office a few weeks after he won; he was noticeably happier, more relaxed. It wasn't the happiness/relaxation of a person achieving something specific they wanted, it was the happiness/relaxation that comes, finally, in a life where amazingly hard work has led you to a full place from which you know you will never leave; this was his culminating/climax moment where life and work finally merged. He said, in his office (left a deep impression), "My life finally has some grace to it now. It wasn't easy." I saw the same thing with my brother recently. Where everything (life, work) seems like it's going downhill, in a good way. Nice to see.

Anyhow, at 826 Valencia there is a pirate store with supplies for pirates, stuff they would need like sand, eyepatches, rope (and also some booky stuff and t-shirts). 826 needed a storefront for their proposed tutoring center because the site was zoned commercially, and, thus, the founders had to find something to sell to make the location work. The ironic thing … the store makes a profit and accounts for 10 percent of 826 Valencia's operating budget. The harmony of flowing with the particulars of life. Okay enough for right now …

Will tie this up some time soon, hopefully.

Random Ephemerata

City Planners!: please install/design bike racks parallel, not perpendicular, to the street.

Ladies!, The boots are getting a little out of control: 1) It's not that muddy/rainy to require tucked-in knee-high boots (I know that's not the point though, but still), 2) They are no doubt cute, and there are some very nicely designed ones (very nice leather!), but I think we're nearing the end of the fad. It's getting a bit much. Can we move on to something different? I honestly expect now to see girls walking around in boots that reach the upper thigh (saw it recently, oh no). It's getting crazy. Would make a great New Yorker-style cartoon. Might have to draw one. New fad idea: How about flip-flops all the time, any weather, with rhinestones and tattoo designs like you all like?

NOOOoooooo! Saw a guy with pants-tucked-in patent-leather knee-boots on yesterday. Please stop it. Don't. Let. It. Happen.

Trader Joe's has 3.5 oz 85% good dark chocolate bars for $1.49! Makes the disgusting trend of boutique 6-, 7-, 8-dollar chocolate bars all the more insulting (racket).

When looking for housing, skip over the ads with "420 friendly" in them.

Keith Richards's new book is great. Never cared too much for The Rolling Stones, but, as with anything, it's compelling to learn the inside of taken-to-the-limit passion. Since I'm on the down-$ side of things at the moment, I can't buy the book, so I'm reading UC-Berkeley's (at the Morrison Library) copy piecemeal, in steps. Can't complain - the library is stunning (couches, leather chairs, old, comfy, nice wood, check out an awesome panorama of it here). I hope to give a talk there someday, maybe like the one I gave at the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri. Hopefully, it will be for some great work of mine! I'll keep you posted. The university sponsors lunchtime poetry recitations at the library the first Thursday of each month. Maybe break in there.

Anyhow, Keith Richards describes the The Rolling Stones's first gig (and guess what?: he gives credit for the Stones making it not to Mick or himself but to Stu (forgot his last name)), (The Rolling Stones name was born off the cuff as they were booking their first gig and trying to save money on the phone call - an album of Muddy Waters (I think) was laying on the floor and the first song was "Rolling Stone" - that's how it happened according to Keith): Keith says there was something special right away with a group of guys harmonizing in effort and idea, wanting the same thing - elevation. As he put it, it was "flying without a license." Up in the ether. Another great insight: "Everything's conversation. No matter the genius, the latest incarnation is just a variation on a theme," Keith paraphrased, explaining the great influence the Blues had on the Stones. The style is a jerky, short-sentence, though on-topic ramble - Keith speaking. It really feels like the ghostwriter simply organized (themed) his interviews with Keith.

Sadness

I don't eat meat much (I didn't eat a single bite until I was 24!), but recently I've been eating and eating and eating and never getting full - a consequence of this persistent low-grade cold, perhaps. So, I had a gyro wrap for lunch; and it hit the spot.

Anyhow, in a crowded gyro place near Cal's campus, the Telegraph madness, I ordered the wrap and sat down in the less-busy-than-it-seemed place. The blaring middle eastern music supplied about a 30-percent crazier atmosphere than the actual lunch-rush din itself. The spot was more-or-less packed. I sat alone at a four-top, and a girl had to sit down on the other side because of a lack of other seats. Every now and then it's nice just to talk with strangers. We started talking, she had an accent. I asked her where she was from. Palestine.

I didn't go there for a while, but then I did. I asked about the Occupation. Her whole being saddened. A rock, the size and fragility of a powdery limestone, cactus-strewn boulder, crushed her soul/face.

I asked her what should be done. "Two states. It's the reality of the situation." Then we changed the subject.

Supernonnucleophilic

I have a B.S. in Biochemistry and it's coming in use on a freelance article for a European patent award. Some dudes patented a way to make "living" polymers, as in always growing, never stopping until you want them to.

A lot to do in a short while.

Just finished the article. It was great to get back into the meat of science again: mechanisms of reaction, carbocations, olefins, tert-butyls, polyisobutylene, etc. Got to speak with Dr. Joseph Kennedy, of the University of Akron, Ohio, about his ground-breaking 1986-ish invention of a "living" cationic polymer process. That's just fancy talk for building molecules with a reactive end that is a cation, has a positive charge. You ask: Just what is "living" polymerization? When I first got the assignment that question jumped out at me, too - and there weren't quotes around "living" in many of the documents I was reading, i.e. original European Patent Documents - pages and pages of technical, in-depth descriptions of reaction processes/structures/possible outcomes. The patent documents are riddled with ridiculous language, numerous noncommittal, all-encompassing quotes, repeated over and over "It is preferred, though not requisite," "not particularly restricted but is preferably ... ." I guess the idea is to establish as wide-ranging a sphere to your patent as possible, so that any other patents might infringe on your territory and get you P A I D. See the European Patent document associated with the invention here.

The "living" aspect of the polymerization process is quite interesting, and Kennedy and Rudolf Faust's breakthrough with the carbocationic version of it is a good story, recounted by Kennedy here in 1999, volume 37 of the Journal of Polymer Science: Part A: Polymer Chemistry. The living aspect of living polymerization allows polymer scientists to have complete control over the polymer they are building; they are able to terminate the growth at any moment, cap the polymer with specific functional groups and or add one or more repeating groups of monomers to form what are called block copolymers (or terpoloymers (three monomers)), etc. The control results in precisely structured, and sized, polymers: an extremely useful tool for synthetic polymer chemists, as you can imagine. Living anionic polymerization had been around since the 1950s, but living cationic polymerization was very difficult because carbocations are extremely reactive. Dr. Kennedy and Dr. Faust found out how to prevent the growing end of the polymer from reacting with the polymer's body in what's called a chain transfer. Also, nonliving polymerizations terminate randomly, resulting in a bunch of polymers of different sizes (molecular weights). The cation process opened up the living polymerization world to olefins (typical carbon-hydrogen molecules with a double bond of the form CnH2n) like isobutylene, the basis of elastomeric polymers like widely-used butyl rubber. The olefins are cheap and readily available, so the wide applicability of the process is promising, cause money makes the world go round.

The notable extension of living cationic polymerization has been Boston Scientific's Taxus® drug-eluting cardiovascular stent. The invention was used to make a complex block copolymer that coats the stent (a device placed in portions of the heart to unblock it/facilitate its working) that gave it both the valuable property of biocompatibility, but also a finely-tuned drug-eluting mechanism. The block copolymer, made by mixing monomers of thermoplastic and elastomeric properties in an exact proportion provided the biocompatibility and also its specific, timely release of important drugs that aid a patient's recovery. Over five million of these Taxus® cardiovascular stents have been used worldwide.

One of Dr. Kennedy and Dr. Faust's key discoveries was a supernonnucleophilic counteranion complex that would stabilize the charge on the reactive carbocation of the growing polymer chain, but resist the extreme temptation, as its anionic nature would dictate, to nab the carbocation's proton and thus kill the polymerization. Supernonnucleophilic anion is basically an oxymoron, but Kennedy and Faust figured it out, and thus "living" cationic polymerization was born.

A Paean to Youth

globular, aesthetic

like the sun on your face
a post-cappuccino dream
everything that's right/safe
beautiful, delicate, intimate
loving, caring, sweet
"in here we protect, comfort"
swings with that quarter-sized
pendant between tangible sensitivity
helpless/sirens
milk-drunk, mesmerized

Am I allowed to write that? :) Ha.

There it is ...

Went running this evening in the new neighborhood, which is, ironically, near the Oakland Flea Market where I scoured for my just-stolen $1400 bicycle about two weeks ago.

The run was prompted by one of those moments where physical exertion needed to happen. Traffic! Oh ... My ... God. Don't ever drive east on Alcatraz Ave. toward Adeline/Shattuck/Telegraph in Oakland/Berkeley at rush-hour. The light at Adeline is surprisingly congested going east; it's really short. My theory is that it's short because to the west the neighborhood is grittier, poorer and the traffic patterns may suggest not much need for a longer light. The area might be blowing up!? Catch up lights!

Like any new move, it's nice to get a feel for a place on the ground. The location I'm in has all the indications of American ghetto: lingering, shady guys and girls on various corners and along the streets nearby, shady bodegas, liquor stores, burglar bars on every house. (Everyday that I wake up to see my car still on the street - relief and surprise, honestly). But there's also something amazingly alive, one of those pulse-places in the city, where poverty, striving and opportunity meet a gritty stagnancy. The house across the street encompasses some sort of band; my roommates: guy works at Burning Man (Is that actually a corporate situation? It is; office (40 employees!) in San Francisco!); girl does modeling for the Art Insitute in San Francisco and makes jewelry (was looking at one of the books she checked out from the library on ancient Asian art (Iran included) that was left on the kitchen table - was intriguing and prompted me to look up the root of the word votive - vow); guy works at the Berkeley YMCA and is studying to get into a Naturopathy school in Portland; girl butcher (butcher!) of organic, cared-for animals; and me, writer, on the hustle ...

The run was really good. The streets are gritty, but just north the area gets notably more affluent (not "better") with Berkeley Bowl West and a glorious jewel in the night seen from many blocks away that lured me like a beacon does a lost ship on some mild-stormy, cold wind-whipped sea; a glow, approaching gold, lit up the cold see-your-breath night. It attracted me with the same mesmerizing humming comfort-glow of a mosquito zapper (I remember some of those full nights outside in Austin, Texas, with my dad and full family; a table outside - picnic/potluck, the long evening under a huge 500-year old live oak, bordering Boggy Creek, bamboo (with body-sized paths through its seven-foot thick, and at points much, much thicker, thicket) making up the back alley border. The image brings up my father strongly. Bittersweet. Something so right about a young, sincere, striving trying-to-do-it-right man heading a family. The fruition! What happens to a family? Life? How does it disintegrate? So much beauty? The weight of the world, holding the sky aloft Atlas-like. So necessary, so whole, so full, complete, loving, right, perfect, sweet, harmonious, sing-to-the-sun glorious, cry-to-the-gods lovely. The apotheosis of our family came when we took road trips to Taos for skiing from Austin: a Suburban family-deep, blankets, the long soul of northwest Texas, Lubbock, flatlanders, American hippy/country soul music - Bob Dylan, Jimmy Rogers, Johnny Cash, a touch of Sweet Honey in the Rock, my Dad laughing and happy, relaxed. :). The railroad-tie-straight fencelines of eastern New Mexico mountains and plateaus surrounding in the forever-distance, the loggerhead shrikes' canvas, skewered insects, hawks on wires, the approaching enchanted-land. Happiness.) I miss him. I miss that.

Anyhow, the fields lured me and I slowly approached; the glow seemed to shift, like some far-off flat shoreline. I couldn't place it, it shifted with the northward run. Finally, I caught it. Young black kids in football pads practicing. Younger ones practicing next to them. A line of older black parents/uncles/moms on the dark sideline talking among themselves in groups and everynow and then bantering with the kids on the field, "Y'all are getting sloppy now."

The fresh-cut field gleams, a golden hue emanates from the damp, dew-like wet grass with the tracks of the mower still visible across it, creating glorious lighter/darker shades of royal green.

And once again this reminded me of my father. He says he won't start playing the Dobro because he's not ready to give up hardball (baseball). He's 64-ish! "I feel like a kid on the field, heaven." I understand. The sunset over the green expanse - field of dreams. A revolving, dimensionless dream, the comfort of ages, a soul exposed in green, a room open for all the world's hopes, ready to accommodate. I understand.

And this night on the run, I understand again. The bitter, sweet smell of the fresh-cut, wet, gleaming grass - you can almost smell milk and begin to wobble, drunk off the grass's unmade/cud-unchewed milk.

The run continued from that glorious climax. Returned to great-smelling food by the YMCA roommate. I decide to do the food-share; he says it works.

Adios.

Technical difficulties. Be back up soon.

Everytime I download and install the most recent Mac OSX Snow Leopard update, the wireless internet reception goes out. Fix this please Apple! It's almost driven me nuts ...

Happy Thanksgiving!

Family visits are a logistical challenge.

Some rules?! ...

Some thoughts on a niece

I recently moved to the Bay Area largely because my brother and sister, and my brother's family, live here now. We were born and raised in Austin, Texas.

Anyhow, my brother has two children, 5 and 2, girl and boy.

I've been staying in their Oakland Hills house for a few months (which has a whole separate level), and it's been great to form a casual relationship with the little ones.

Jolie is a thin, sparky, quirky, imaginative girl. We got to know each other pretty well when Mom and Dad went out of town for a NYC long weekend and I watched her and her brother. Even with a nanny, a very demanding enterprise (lame?). By Sunday, my meter was running down; sleep, focus slowly dissipating. I just wanted to watch TV and eat bon bons after they finally went down. Married With Children.

Anyhow, Jolie and I don't get to see each other that much during the week. I come and go through a separate entrance and live and be on a separate level of the house. So, via Mom and Dad, Jolie and I started setting dates. She inexplicably started talking about fishing and how cool it would be to catch and eat fish we caught, so for her 5th birthday I bought her a fishing pole.

We went to the glory that is Wal-Mart, a mind-boggling event for a kid at any age; I don't think she'd experienced it before. After a brief foray into the Barbies, which majestically draw her by a fairy, mermaid magnetism, we made it to the fishing poles. She was immediately drawn to the pink, flowery, good-for-nothing two-foot-long poles that eventually end, scatter-like, in a sad front yard the same day it comes home, wallowing until some ambitious adult decides to throw it away, finally.

I tried hard to explain that they are worthless poles, that we actually want to catch, clean and eat some fish, not be pretty. She refused a practical one. It was too "ugly." We compromised, ironically, on a red one with "Ugly Stick" declared in large, full letters down the package's side and on the pole itself. I didn't say anything.

We eventually made it to San Pablo Reservoir, a large stocked lake just inland from the East Bay ridge that separates Oakland and Berkeley from the inland valley countryside - cows, farms, open roads.

We pulled up and bought a fishing pass and picked a spot near some Hmong, who were fishing up a storm. Hmong, a people of the mountainous regions in southeast Asia, were the only ethnicity out there that I could see, 50 or so. Their presence reminded me immediately of one of my journalism professor's favorite books and required reading in one of the classes I had with him: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. A story of extreme cultural disconnect with a young Hmong girl and her family in its center, told indefatigably by Anne Fadiman, daughter of former New Yorker book critic Clifton Fadiman.

My professor, Berkley Hudson, was impressed by Fadiman's tireless work on the book. When The New Yorker inexplicably hired 38-year-old Tina Brown as editor, Fadiman had been working on the piece. She turned it in, or it was already there, and Brown rejected it. For the amount of work she put in, it was crushing (this is all according to Berkley). She published it as a book and, as related by Berkley, said something like: "A woman goes through delays, gives birth. It's different for a woman."

Anyhow, the Hmong were catching these huge 4/5-pound channel catfish - grey, momentous fish. We inspected one of the catch and Jolie said, "No way I'm touching one of those." I said, "Then how will we catch, clean and eat them?" We fished off a dock into the stocked reservoir grey water with nightcrawlers, but nothing bit. The Hmong were fishing with thawed frozen shrimp and were cleaning up, which was surprising. And they were fishing off the lake's bottom, using tear-drop shaped large weights. They would heave-cast, with large, long poles, the bait 60 to 70 yards out and the weight would sink the baited hook to the bottom. To know when a fish was on, they placed a bobber between the rod's first and second eyelet; when it jiggled, they jumped to yank the rod and hook the fish.

We didn't catch a fish, not even a bite ... even though a Hmong guy gave us two frozen shrimp and we adopted their technique.

...

Jolie started looking forward to "special time."

So that's how we started the dates. And for the last one we went to the Berkeley Botanical Garden, which is a great 34 acres. The gardens sprawl out into Strawberry Canyon, the canyon that carves uphill above UC Berkeley; the gardens ared divided into sections by region of the world - an amazing layout, and one maybe only California and a handful of other places could hope to put on: everything grows here.

Her little heart/being effusively brightens at random times, particularly related to conscious flights of imagination.

I transcribe a redwood poem of hers at the base of one the garden's most prominent redwood trees with the Golden Gate Bridge anchoring the wide bay in the distance.

The Redwood Tree

We are at the redwood tree.

The branches look like spider legs

and they're trying to take us.

The top looks like a crown.


It's really pretty,

tall and nice.

I'm scared of the spider legs

It's older than us

It's like [effusive, heart-brighten moment] so big

I've also been introducing her to some music. She agrees that Big Poppa's the best rapper:

Biggie Biggie Biggie can't you see?

sometimes your words just hypnotize me

And I just love your flashy ways

I guess that's why they broke, and you're so paid

Ok. Not so many thoughts on a niece, but there it is ...

An Online World

A friend (Greg T. Spielberg) and I have been working on developing something for a long time.

We met at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in the fall of 2007; we were both first-semester M.A. students. We sat down to figure out how we could mix our unique perspectives because we recognized an unmistakable subterranean harmony. Art, parties, the real.

Started with Indigo Oak, which stuttered and stopped that first semester, moved on to Testament, which started, plowed ahead, stuttered and stopped in the second semester.

The third semester was a chaos of plans ... then we started again with his re-birthing of Streetwater, a Vail, Colorado, endeavor he did with a friend, David Dean, who now runs Serial\Optimist.

Anyhow, we have been doing the Facebook (1,156 Likes) and Twitter (373 followers) thing, but it has been a halting affair, largely because it's not defined too well. We both want to do an online publication. But there are some amazingly difficult issues to confront in developing/conceiving an idea -> business plan. Online seems free, but it's not. We want to be a daily original presence; not commentary/aggregator, which is beaten to death and (humble opinion) worthless. How do you do that with little or no money?

Where will consistent content come from? (Written and visual).

How do you ensure quality?

Anyhow, more to come ...


Building something beautiful on the Lower East Side.

The New Yorker

For anyone who loves The New Yorker ... About Town (2000) by Ben Yagoda.

Explains some of its frustrating aspects and instills admiration for its purity, focus on an elegant, sophisticated, though quirky and very ivory-tower-ish art for art's sake iron-grip perspective.

After 50-plus years of existence (founded 1925), the magazine had become decorous to a fault, largely because the long-time editor William Shawn (1952-1987), over decades, slowly wrested power into a dictatorial kingdom at the magazine: suspicious of detractors, afflicted with the intriguing aging monarch condition of seeing the end of power and not wanting to let it go. Yagoda writes, "But now [the early '80s] the talents of contributors new and old were unable to transcend the essential dysfunctionality of the magazine. It was simply a creepy place" (404).

Even the hallowed New Yorker writer title seems tenuous with the revelations untomed in Yagoda's book; contributors would write and submit pieces and would not be guaranteed publication or payment, and if a piece was accepted, all too often it took months/years of limbo and had to deal with sometimes amazingly arcane and peculiar edits. How does it work now?

I went to the 2008 Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference (ran by Harvard and I just found out it's being discontinued; horrible) in Boston and Dan Baum, a former New Yorker staff writer, lamented, disgruntledly, that his contract did not get renewed for the next year. He had written extensively on Hurricane Katrina's aftermath for the magazine as the man-on-the-ground for the mess, but, surprisingly, he emoted the gut-wrenching frustration of what appears to be (post-reflection) The New Yorker's edit machine of his long Katrina piece. He called it the "New Yorker deflavorizer," and afterward I noticed it all over the magazine, more so in some places than others. Art critic Peter Scheldjahl's, a climactic exception, always. Have to give him a shout out! Probably my favorite staff writer, and not for subject matter, of the magazine. (Aside - I just met a former good friend of his daughter's. Ah! the glory of a tenuous one-degree of separation).

-- interlude/flashback (Nieman Narrative) --

Me and Anne Hull. Cool!

Nieman Narrative: the main reason I went was to meet/see Anne Hull, an amazing national beat writer for the Washington Post. She might be the best newspaper writer working. It's a shame there's not a wider outlet for her. (I first encountered her as I prepared to be a teaching assistant for Cross-Cultural Journalism in J-School; her piece was featured in the class's somewhat-mundane textbook. Her 2002 piece: Rim of the New World. See the popping, alive first article in the series here. It reads as a poetic, off-the-cuff freestyle (in the freeing sense of her voice and perspective) exposé of changing demographics in the Atlanta metropolitan area evidenced by the 2000 census. A snippet:

Cisco gives the man his ice cream cone, mocha-colored fingers wrapped around the white napkin that covers the cone, and into the outstretched knuckles that spell S-K-I-N.

As soon as the man puts the car in gear, Cisco whirls around and spits out a rap.

I represent the South

where the niggas stay scared.

red mouth, nobody mouth as red as mine

down south affiliated with that Georgia pine.

Anne and I corresponded before I arrived; I asked to sit down with her. She gave me her cell number and we texted back and forth at the conference to coordinate (I'm not typically star-struck, but that was cool). And more cool: we (two J-school colleagues and I) were staying in the conference hotel and one of us had got bumped up to the special penthouse breakfast privileges. We all showed up for breakfast the morning of the keynote address and there were Anne Hull and Dana Priest eating breakfast, before their keynote address (within a few months they would win a Pulitzer Prize for their story exposing the pathetic operation of Walter Reed Hospital, run by the U.S. military in D.C.). And there was Roy Peter Clark (a professor's, Berkley Hudson, good friend) who is a big player in journalism, writing, etc. Anyhow, on the way downstairs, guess who was in the elevator? Me and Anne Hull and Dana Priest. Dana was talking about the mundanity of leave-town chores; they were gossipping like any girls would (of course). It was just cool.

When we talked, I asked Anne why she wasn't writing books or writing magazine pieces. Read the story that caught my attention back in 2007 and see why I asked the question. She said she was going to take some time off. A few months later I saw a piece by her in The New Yorker! Her first in the magazine. Didn't have her characteristic freeing voice or spirit (but was good) - maybe because of the deflavorizer?

Note: I looked on Washington Post's website yesterday to read some of Anne's recent stories and there were none for about 15 months, so I emailed her. She responded. She's on sabbatical, working on a book. Thank goodness. It should be a great book with her clear intelligence and her great, clear, free, open, fun writing style.

-- Interlude over --

In 1985, The New Yorker was bought out by Advance Publications, which ended its heavenly, skewed bubble-life; and Shawn was subsequently pushed out, but his farewell letter to the staff indicates the absolute high charm of the magazine and what made/makes it so special:

"Dear colleagues, dear friends:

My feelings at this perplexed moment are too strong for farewells. I will miss you terribly, but I can be grateful to have had your companionship for part of my journey through the years. Whatever our individual roles at The New Yorker, whether on the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth floor, we have built something quite wonderful together. Love has been the controlling emotion, and love is the essential word. The New Yorker, as a reader once said, has been the grandest of magazines. Perhaps it has also been the greatest, but that matters far less. What matters most is that you and I, working together, taking strength from the inspiration that our first editor, Harold Ross, gave us, have tried constantly to find and say what is true. I must speak of love once more. I love all of you, and will love you as long as I live" (416). [My emphasis] Truth and love!

Interestingly, the magazine began to "bleed red ink." After Roger Gottlieb, an interim editor, Si Newhouse, the new owner, hired Vanity Fair editor British Tina Brown, then 38 years old, in 1992, and she moved the magazine, extremely, into photography and timeliness. David Remnick, the current editor (since 1998), took it down a notch, but the magazine still frustratingly covers the exact same topics that spread through the media: The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and NPR's Fresh Air. It really feels like there's a weekly manifesto sent out to the "cultural elite" about what to cover. Come on! Can we do something about this please? I'll add some specific examples later, hopefully. Back to the red point ... between 1994 and 1998 the mag ran a $60.6-million deficit (424). How can that be/be tolerated? It's too good of a product. Is this public knowledge? I'll report back its current economics, if so.

Anyhow ... Regardless ... Look forward to my pieces in the magazine!

Some ridiculous quotes (from the fashion designer Tomas Maier profile "Just Have Less," by John Colapinto in the Jan. 3, 2011, issue), illustrating the "too-elegant" (a friend's criticism of the magazine) realm of The New Yorker:

Maeir [Tomas, "creative director and head designer of the Italian fashion label Bottega Veneta"] asked Longo [a fashion photographer famous for developing, in the 1980s, the modeling pose of reacting to the impact of gunshots] to reproduce the series himself, using models with Bottega Veneta clothing and bags. The proofs had no credit line identifying Longo as the photographer. When I asked Maier about this, he said that anyone who couldn't distinguish the difference between a real Longo and an imitation was not the customer he was after (37). [!!].

and

As Maier finished lunch - a salad - I asked him about the ethics of creating astronomically costly things when many people are having trouble meeting their food bills. Maier insisted that his prices reflected the cost of materials and labor ... He insisted that Bottega's goods were not beyond the reach of middle-class people, who have simply been trained to want too much stuff. Anyone, he said, could afford one five-hundred-and-fifty-dollar hand-painted cashmere scarf. "Just have less," he said (37).

The Meadow: a novel-poem

A friend lent me The Meadow (1992) by James Galvin a few months ago. I didn't realize it would be such a masterpiece, but poets have been outside of my sphere, unfortunately.

It is a devastating work set in the Colorado/Wyoming borderland, a region where Galvin himself was raised. Only a living intimacy could create the work, a 100-year history of the area depicted through the lives of several interconnected generations of families. Part of the charm is the omniscient narrator's perspective; Galvin dances in and out of his characters' lives and thoughts - both contextualizing them and allowing the characters to express the searing, what appears to be one slow-drawn, wagon-through-mud-consistent drama of their harsh-landscape life. The revolving perspectives and simple, rugged intimacy recalls, strongly, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

When the moment ebbed and the horses stilled and the situation bespoke itself in the silence that followed (even the creek's roar was a silence now), the silence issuing from the old man overwhelmed it, and the creek became a noise again, and the roaring in App's ears came out of it, and all the sounds together became the sound of his father's wrath building. App knew what was coming so he just sat there waiting, still as granite, not from fear but from a calm prescience of the inevitable. Without turning he heard the old man's breathing and the crunch of his boots punishing the gravel. He felt the back end of the wagon lift perceptibly, which was not what he was expecting, so he craned around to see the old man squatted down behind the wagon, heaving-to in a carnival-like attempt to lift the impossible back onto the road (51).

Tempering different grades of steel is a subtle art that can't be explained in any book. People see colors differently, so that the relationships of colors as they shade down a metal rainbow from red to purple to tan, can only be hinted at. It takes years and failures to learn (123).

He scoured the desert for agates and jade. He made a saw to cut slabs out of stones. He filled several boxes with the cut and polished jewelry he made. Some of the agates are like tiny landscapes with trees and a river or distant mountains under dawn. All women's jewelry - pendants, brooches, earrings - never given or worn. Put away in boxes in a drawer (126).

In the spring the new grass grows in standing water. At sunset the white mirror-light shines through the grass. That's when the beaver ponds light up, too, and the rising trout make bull's eyes on the surface.
A doe that has been drinking lifts her head to listen. Done irrigating, Lyle heads home across the shining field. He has a shovel on his shoulder that looks like a single wing (142).

A heartbreaking lament of a stolen bike

Fussy note of the day: *** Not from the bicycle's perspective as the title may suggest (though that would be degrees more poignant and desolate); title has the right rhythm/cadence/feeling as is, so it's there, though misleading ***

Bikes should never be stolen, especially ones that take on the intimacy of pain, self-reliance and companionship that accompanies a simple existence made concrete by muscle-pedal-chain-wheel transportation.

Of course, who's to blame? The victim or the thief? Most often the victim probably. In this case for sure - a beautiful, hot bike cable-locked to a tree in the heart of midday Cal-Berkeley's campus. Tragic ignorance.

Walked around the Oakland Flea Market the next morning: cars, a blue, aching god-knows-what machine, bicycle tires, more than a few disabled, rough armoires, a restful chaos of perhaps useful things - just focus on one rusty or semi-tattered item at a time. Dance along the miraculous, apparently straight paths through the junk, the piled, ramshackled Toy Story despair of usefulness in a hopeless borderland.

I arrived a little after opening time, a guy in a semi-nice VW pulled up and looked to get in. We talked for a second, re-determining the opening time, now 20 minutes past. "It's one of those places where that's fluid," I said, with a slight glance to the junk in the open-air, and then I walked back down the street to the corner "not just another wifi shack" cafe to not-contemplate the soul-crushing reality of a beloved, used-everyday bicycle, stolen, gone, vaporized into the blue, sunny sky of the East Bay, dissipated through the red-green-gold redwood trees of Cal-Berkeley's grand entrance, just down-slope of one small, perhaps justified, tyranny.

It's the second life-altering stolen bicycle: the first was worse, just because a 10,000-plus logged miles and four-year, cross-country relationship is more like losing a partner than an item. Okay have to stop here ... RIP GF Paragon.

Hope, a useful endeavor? Craigslist, the Berkeley flea market, the absurdity of any immediate-action faultless despair.

"Ayaaaa..."

Yoga

Note: Sorry for the post. Who doesn't love yoga? Ok, maybe some. With that, though, here's a post:

I started doing yoga when I was 19 as a sophomore and an NCAA Div. II basketball star (I wish :); should've been). But, I was on the team and performed the consequent bull-headed, meat-head, intellect-dominated training regimen of muscle-by-muscle training. I do biceps now, I do my stomach now, I do my chest now, I do my shoulders now, I do my legs now. Consequently, I couldn't sit cross-legged or touch my toes, etc.; I was a tight, muscle-bound person.

I started doing yoga because of my girlfriend at the time taught it; I thought it was a joke, for a while - until the day someone pointed out, when watching me sit in pain, that my body was a wreck. There was nothing overtly wrong with it, I just couldn't sit on the ground without pain. A flash-of-light realization occurred: I have to change this, this is not right. I started doing yoga everyday at age 21 and have continued until today, age 32.

I slowly got more flexible and better at yoga, and eventually I taught several yoga classes at the University of Missouri while I attended journalism school there, and the aphorism: "to master something, teach it," I found to be absolutely true. I wasn't the greatest teacher though I tried. I never systematic, long-term training; I just had an experience with a series of exceptional teachers, and a desperation to change my body. And I had a very solid grasp of the absolute basics: alignment, state of mind, attitude, which help create a successful session. Some of the absolute keys (this is gold):

• Always relax the face and breathe into whatever position you're in

• Shoulders always relaxed, dropping away from the ears. Shoulder blades reaching back toward each other, opening the upper chest and aligning the spine such that the body is supported so you feel the your flesh draped off and the energy/framework of the spine by grounding from the floor/feet through the hips up to the crown of the head. A light, free sensation

• Engage the lower back slightly, slightly; be aware that it's the absolute key between the two halves of the body, the nexus that once activated, stimulates balance and an amazing surge of energy, releasing all the power of the solar plexus (the spot two inches below the navel and our center of gravity/source of being). Gets on another level, but that's where you are

• Be aware of the hips' position relative to the shoulders, feet. In general, they will be even, horizontally speaking, and working to be either square, both hip points facing the same direction, or open, hip points spreading 180 degrees away from each other, following the knees

• Relax/spread the toes; it's surprising how this relaxes the face immediately and lets you sink deeper into whichever pose you're in

• Activate an interior line of energy; find the dynamic tension that remarkably anchors and energizes each pose
  

This post is inspired by a great yoga teacher I've been fortunate to study with in the Bay Area. Good teachers, in anything, are so rare. Jessie Holland is calm, confident, knowledgeable, thoughtful in the layout of her classes, and gives amazing, ever-changing, insightful body cues: spread the energry starting from your core outward to the hands and back toward the feet. Wow! It feels like the body floats away and supports itself.

Anyhow, excellent teachers are rare; it's a treat.

Hasta luego.

The Natural World of San Francisco by Harold Gilliam and Michael Bry (1967)

A great book, at times a little overwritten, that gives a great, detailed perspective to almost all the elements of San Francisco's natural history, from its geology to its seasonal climate to its trees, fog, physical evolution ... . Great photographs by Michael Bry illustrate the text by Harold Gilliam, former environmental writer and San Francisco Chronicle columnist.

An example of the natural history insight the book offers: did you know that the 1017-acre, three-mile long, lush, green, amazingly treed Golden Gate Park, which anchors the city's northwest end, was sand dunes in the 1860s and took decades of cultivation to get plants to even take root?

And, the ubiquitous California tree, the eucalyptus, is not native - though this is a fairly well-known fact. But still shocking nonetheless for any of us who hike, ride through the stands of the tall, iconic tree of today's California. It was brought here for timber from its native Australia, but by a key oversight the wrong species, the blue gum (one of 600 Australian species), was picked and broadcast, and before the nascent Californians knew it, they had established a thriving area tree that was useless for anything but its being.

The eucalyptus light is not the bright metallic luster of the Lombardy poplars and the cottonwoods of the arid regions or the dazzling mirrorlike glitter of the quaking aspens in the high mountain passes; it is rather a muted scintillation like late afternoon sunlight on the blue-green waters of an ocean cove as seen through the filtering boughs of pines. This special quality of light is partly the result of the arrangement of its leaves ... Look upward from a point near the base of a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot eucalyptus and you see terrace after terrace of foliage, each with its clusters of leaves shimmering with a different vibration as they are stirred by any slight movement of air. It is as if your eyes were moving upward from the base of a Gothic tower as the sunlight illuminated, one after another, successive rising arches and buttresses, spandrels and spires (82-83).

Gilliam spends an admiringly large portion of the book contextualizing the Great Bar, a curving, thin, underwater sandbar that spans the Golden Gate and, in many respects, is inexplicable. Theories swirl around the nearer geological history of the bay; for instance, when a lot of the current seawater was locked up in Ice Age glaciers, the current coastline was 25-ish miles further to the west at the Farallone Islands. One theory suggests that as sea levels rose, the Golden Gate forced the growing ocean to deposit its in-bound sand, forming the Great Bar. Later, when the overall forces of water through the Gate reversed, the sandbar took on its current seaward-bulging shape. The Bar must be dredged to maintain a shipping channel and is not an important feature in and of itself, but offers distinct, physical evidence, laden with concommitant theories of the area's particular natural history.

The most compelling chapter of the book, "The Sky," discusses the Bay Area's weather patterns, in particular the subtle changes in types and timing of seasonal fog with its attendant causes. Gilliam describes how he can, amazingly, wake up in the morning and tell what the weather forecast holds for the day just by sniffing the air from his one-time Telegraph Hill home:

The aromas drifting in the window were sure signs of things to come. If the odor was salty, we could expect cool, breezy weather off the ocean and probably fog. But a pungent aroma from the coffee roasters near the Ferry Building would be borne on a south wind, a reliable indication of an approaching rainstorm. An odor of burning or an acrid tang in the air meant the breeze was coming from the industrial areas northeast of the bay, particularly the oil refineries at Richmond and beyond. The day was sure to be sharp, clear, dry, and extraordinarily cold if the season was winter, or equally clear and dry but unusually warm at any other season (203 - 204).

SF in five movements:
1. The Land and the Waters
2. The Trees
3. The Parks
4. The Wildlife
5. The Sky

Chocolate Croissants!

Who knows how it started, but it definitely began. Somewhere along the way chocolate croissants became a part of my identity. As a staple in bakeries, I must not be the only one. I don't know if that's a consolation? I really would like to go back to my formative pre-7-year-old days and count how many times my mother brought me to the bakery, with me as an excuse (who can say? :) ), when the chocolate croissant situation started via a weekly (or bi-daily) titration of butter, filo dough and chocolate. As a young adult and as a growing-older one, it's become a routine to sample cafes', bakeries', boulangeries', etc. chocolate croissants of any area I happen to land, if even for a little while. Honestly, it is not just an excuse to eat multiple chocolate croissants day in and day out. I swear.

Paris! And your chocolatines! How disappointed I was. The birthplace (I assume(d)) of the chocolate croissant. I sampled them everywhere, all over the city. Near Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur, Museo de Picasso, Latin Quartier? Nothing.

There've been many heartbreaks.

Having recently moved to the East Bay, I continued my sampling. It's unconscious, I swear. For the first time, however, I made the tasting systematic by recruiting some people (analysts).

Here's the deal. A research program was designed loosely after another, albeit plain, croissant-off; the top four bakeries in the eastern north-Oakland/Berkeley area were sampled: La Farine, Market Hall Bakery, Masse's Pastries and Semifreddi's. La Farine, Market Hall and Semifreddi's were somewhat in-the-know spots for the analysts before the test, but Masse's Pastries in north Berkeley was off the radar. In the croissant-off linked above, Masse's wins, and after reading some of the comments I thought they might dazzle on the chocolate croissant frontier, too. While I was at Masse's Pastries, the last bakery on my chocolate croissant run on the day of the analysis, I asked the baker why chocolate croissants are rarely made into real croissant shapes. It's rare, as you probably know, to see an actual chocolate croissant (croissant, from the French: "crescent"); typically, its representation is a folded-over mess with chocolate stuffed inside. One bakery around the corner from where I work in Berkeley simply makes a flat bread roll and stuffs chocolate in to it (to be fair, it's called a "pain au chocolate" - but what's the point of that?. Needless to say, they were not included in the croissant-off). The baker at Masse's said that it's simply easier to make the folded-over version because the chocolate for chocolate most often comes in sticks of a length convenient for folding in - it's a little more, or a lot more, complicated to croissant them in.

-- interlude --

On a Mexico trip, I found a great bakery in Barre de Navidad, Jalisco, run by a French-Canadian (if I remember correctly) and his wife. They got up everyday at 3:30 a.m. to make the day's croissants - plain, almond and chocolate - all about half the size of regular croissants. I got up early one morning to bake with them, and while the husband lamented, sadly, that his parents would not visit or respect him because they thought he was on vacation and not really working in Mexico (though he was!), we talked about and made croissants. To get the traditional form, the filo dough is buttered and cut into triangles, and the triangles are then, surpringly, simply rolled up from one point to make the characteristic, texture-laden croissant shape. I learned something important that enlightned much of my croissant experience, too: many bakeries don't use butter, but margarine, because it's much easier to work with, but a lot less tasty. Isn't it the blending of butter and chocolate and flaky dough that make choclate croissants great?!

-- back to the contest --

Two croissants were purchased from each bakery and then cut up into two or three pieces with the ends removed and then placed on four plates. The five reviewers had no idea which croissant came from which bakery.

-- a note --

I had been blown away by Market Hall Bakery's chocolate croissants - buttery, chocolate-y and flaky. A rare combination. And, they dame in completely off the map; no blogs or food sites mentioned them in the little research I did for the taste-off.

-- back to the contest --

The results (listed in order of favorite):

Analyst K: La Farine, Masse's Pastries, Semifreddi's, Market Hall
Analyst M: La Farine, Market Hall, Masse's Pastries, Semifreddi's
Analyst N: Market Hall, La Farine, Semifreddi's, Masse's Pastries
Analyst Ra: La Farine, Masse's Pastries, Market Hall, Semifreddi's
Analyst Re: Market Hall, La Farine, Masse's Pastries, Semifreddi's

Obviously, La Farine won, but Market Hall is clearly the second favorite. After tasting both one after the other, and vice-versa, it was clear that they were very similar but differed in the taste of their chocolate. La Farine's was less sweet, mor dark; Market Hall's more milk-buttery. Surprisingly, the heavily touted Masse's Pastries didn't do so well. Maybe an off day.

Regardless - a very one one for a chocolate-croissant addict!

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

A wonderful, devastating book. I had no idea that the fantastical beginning, "GhettoNerd at the End of the World," would turn out so soulful. I stopped reading after 10 or so pages assuming that the boasting of Dominicano young Oscar was leading to some self-indulgent, self-esteem-building work about a niche life. Couldn't have been more wrong. The seams of the book tore apart, the words ached with tragedy, a multilayered profile of a country raped and beaten by a tyrant - the effects beading through time and a space and landing on a young, awkward boy, one that we, in melting-pot America, have likely encountered growing up (I know I did, intimately, in the public schools on the poor side of the tracks in Austin, Texas). The weight of history, the subtle karma of trenchant tragedy.

I never would've finished the book if it hadn't been for the chance encounter with a Berkeley undergrad work-study student who had to tour me through the Berkeley Art Museum because I wanted to photograph the building for the first blog post; some angles in the museum require permission for some reason. Her (Jennifer's) thesis has to do with the book and its unusual use of footnotes. We didn't go into it in depth in the short time we talked, but maybe (hopefully) this post will be expanded if we get to meet about it. It would be a great book to talk about. I randomly saw her at the corner of Ashby and College, big sunglasses that swallowed her eyes and cheeks, Frenched-out (she lived in France for awhile), thin, skirt, leggings, big boots, a cigarette coming and going from her mouth, dangling, during the nonchalant movements, between her middle and index fingers. The way she leaned into her hip standing on the curb looking downstreet at the busy intersection, she brought Paris and the beautiful fashion-flowers of Madison Aveenue as they wait in the brief light for their car concretely into the day. I said hello not sure it was her; it was. We talked a bit and said we should talk about Oscar Wao, and her eyes, after she brought down the huge, dark glasses had the harried, overworked, stressed look of the passionate undergrad (N O T E N O U G H T I M E T O D O W H A T S E E M S L I K E R E A L L Y M A T T E R S, C O N S T A N T L Y I N S P I R E D A N D T R I P P E D U P B Y E C O N O M I C S O R S O M E O T H E R S U R V E Y C L A S S; Little do you know then that this is the problem of life: keep the fire burning strong in the midst of the (seeming) mundanities of living. I did a biography for the University of Missouri Journalism School's centennial celebration of probably the most all-star dean in the school's history (outside of founder Walter Williams, of course (blasphemy); note: he was scandalous; he married a younger student. In the archives during my research, I came across a handwritten note by her to a friend describing his come-ons, and her confusion and disappointment because she respected him - they eventually married) Pulitzer Prize winning magazine historian, Frank Luther Mott. His great life's motto was "Time Enough": there's always time enough to do what you want to do! Great to hear and true!).

Junot Diaz's footnotes, for the most part, fill in the reader on the central aspect of the story, the nonfiction core of the fiction - the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.

The joy of the book was the poetic power-punch adrenaline of the prose. It reminded me of Kerouac's in On The Road; it was like Junot Diaz entered some entranced zone and let the story go, rife with Spanish slang words and phrases and inspired, random inter-chapter divisions. Some of the story is from an omnipotent narrator, some from the characters themselves (at least one).

Some inspired passages:

But that's not what I wanted to tell you. It's about that crazy feeling that started this whole mess, the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my bones, that takes hold of me the way blood seizes cotton. (Page 72): The way blood seizes cotton.

Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral:

a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her

so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked

who, like her yet-to-be-born daughter, would come to exhibit a particularly Jersey malaise - the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres. (Page 78).

Shuffling back through the book what stands out is not the prose itself, but the underlying force and power and inspired telling of the story. This is obviously Diaz's soul exposed in a high form of art. Pulitzer Prize 2007. Indeed!

Note: just read James Agee's A Death in the Family, his semi-autobiographical, supra-mundane, 1958 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Published posthumously (not a finalized manuscript by Agee), the prize must have been a life-award, because the book is remarkably bland, though it has some concrete-crushing-skull tragic overtones. It's about a sensitive 4-ish-year-old boy, Rufus (the story encircles his perspective, though told using adult language and perception, but we never lose the boy's heart)), losing his gentle, loving (to him), wonderfully loving, father in the mountainland of rural early-20th-century Knoxville, Tennessee, and his/life's intimate impressions of the event. The greatest, amazing, scene occurs near the end of the book when Rufus (or the book) flashes back to the whole family, father included, traveling to visit his great-great-great-grandmother in the rural mountainland in a loaded-down-with-family car, his uncle standing on the running boards guiding (somewhat) the way. The old woman, on a porch chair, Rufus remembering her wrinkled, minute, square-cracked, channeled skin, and after a few Rufus-gestures of hugging-hello, kissing, gloriously, her smile. And pee.

Anyhow, as disappointing as A Death in the Family was, Agee deserved every award possible for it or anything else he did, for his amazing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). One long prose-poem characterizing the Depression Era of the deep South via the intimate portrait of a couple of families. A quote:

Huge thunderheads were barely lifted on the horizon, their convolutions a scarcely discernible brain-shape of silver in the strength of the light. They were no use; they were a trick a drought sun likes to play; and get away with over and over again. They ride up looking rich as doom, and darken; the look of the earth is already dark purple, olivegreen and wealthy under their shadow and the air goes cold and waits (Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 337).

A redwood building

Berkeley's Newman Hall and its muted grey 30-foot-high windowless, free-standing concrete walls sits like a massive bear on its haunches would on the corner of College Avenue and Dwight Way.

The building's set back from the street some, but its blunt, overwhelmingly two-dimensional, barefaced and supple exterior grabs your attention; at the lip of the Berkeley hills before the land accelerates to the ridge above, the structure anchors, in your mind, southeast Berkeley with its Greek houses, its student living towers, its two-story rental houses.

Just a few blocks from Cal, it's planted as one big, welcome clog in the artery of College Avenue's headwaters; College, which begins at Cal's south border, is the easternmost heartline of Berkeley's north-south traffic, the correspondent (all parallel) of Telegraph, Shattuck, MLK, Sacramento and San Pablo to the west. Above (east of) College, the upscale, convoluted neighborhoods fade out into the narrow ridge that separates the Bay Area from the inland countryside, shadowed, powerfully, by Mount Diablo a few miles away. As College tumbles headlong at a slight decline, basically running due south, it approaches the charming Berkeley/Oakland interchange, announced quietly by a large rectangular green sign, "Welcome to Oakland; pop. 409,300, elev. 42 Feet," heavily shaded by sidewalk maple trees and an energy-burst of boutique businesses, all in a row: Wood Tavern (woody, taverny restaurant), La Farine Bakery (see the chocolate croissant post), a flower shop, an upscale grocery, and then Cole's Coffee.

Like BAM (see 11.08.10 post), Newman Hall was designed by Mario Ciampi and stands, interestingly, just a few blocks south of the museum (which is just west of College on Bancroft Ave.). The two structures are remarkably similar, primarily in their boldfaced bare concrete walls, which provide a framework like bone of a fleshless body, that bleed through both both buildings - similar massive, poured, segmented concrete blocks serve at once as interior and exterior. The most stunning aspect of the building is subliminal, however. You know there's something eerily familiar about the texture of the vertical, irregularly spaced grooves that run down the concrete-grey 30-foot tall, massive walls. The sightline up the building's facade is slightly disjointed by the offset stacking, edge-over-edge, of three similarly grooved equal-height (10-foot high) segments. The building's structure, consciously and unconsciously, sings in your mind when you recognize the similarity, harmony, dialogue, conjuration with the six-tree grove of redwoods that stand, symmetrically, 10 feet from the Dwight-College intersection, at once shading and introducing the Center's entrance which ducks about 30 feet behind the grove at a diagonal before straightening to parallel Dwight and College on either side. A couple of redwoods, about 120 feet down College at the far end of the Center's bordering monolithic wall, complete the complementary impression.

The rhythm and texture of the concrete's grooves suggest it was carved by slow, persistent, trickling runnels of rain; an even more powerful impression emerges from its offset, irregular furrows, which call up the nature-crafted, ancient, deep rusty, ruddy spongy gold of redwood bark. In that realization, the concrete grey becomes both a canvas and a mirror for the sun-filtered red-green gold of redwoods. Stunning.

Inside the chapel, the back wall of which is the same free-standing 120-foot long wall bordering College Avenue on the outside, the concrete is grooved as well, but has a different effect, not as elemental or environmental. It creates a dominating two-dimensional sensation as if the back wall is a placemat unrolled. The grooves and the overwhelming 2-D impression create a sense of flight, an elevation, a lacy green sky-gaze, the sensation you get from resting your chin on the soft, light bark of a redwood's trunk and staring upward along its grooves hundreds of feet into the air, ending in sky and flight. Inside, the lack of color envelopes you and enhances the imagination's more glorious, multidimensional completion.

The consequent Mass I wish I could say matched the space's glory. The round priest seemed a bit off balance, more from disinterest or boredom than from intoxication, though that could've been the case, too. The Catholic experience reminded me of a previous life, one involving a Catholic formation house at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, a Holy Cross school, sister of Notre Dame, the source of my B.S. and first M.A. The youngish (40-ish) director of the live-in program, a Holy Cross Brother, from Baton Rouge, wonderfully Cajun, drank seven and sevens (w/ Seagram's Seven, no doubt) every night. But he was cool. More than once, he recounted his experience as a teacher at a Catholic high school in Louisiana, in particular regarding a test question he gave on his final in some type of a Catholic religion class. His principle test question went something like: "What is the Church?" And his point, paraphrased was, "Anything involving a building, a document or a ritual was wrong. It's about the people." And, undoubtedly, that's true. There're not many occurrences in life of the right person and the right time coming together at the right place. Relationships are the only thing that's real, and when they go right, the world goes right; it'd be nice to hit a homerun with each one: professor, teacher, boss, friend, lover, priest, rabbi, whatever. But that just doesn't happen. Maybe ten percent are great? That's a whole other discussion. Not going there now.

Regardless - Berkeley Newman Hall, thank you for bringing space and being so interestingly together.