West Oakland signage

Stuff you see in West Oakland.

Beginners is a beautiful movie:

Sex, Life, Healing, Sunlight, Nature, Magic, Serenity, Spirit

"Simple ... Happy." This is what I meant to give you.

Misty Mountains

These are the East Bay Hills

Midnight Mass

Read from notes. Totally inane.

Winter Solstice, quiet, dark

See the blog's new home here.

There's something so quiet and dark about the shortest day of the year. The sky was a bruised, fading purple-pink. The ocean seen through the Golden Gate reflected the short indigo-ing sun's light, as the sun fell off the end of the globe.

$ flows like water

No joke.

Happy Hannukah!

Coming into the Mountains: Puma Robles

The Sierras, 6,000 acres, meadows, purple oaks, mountain lions, deer by the thousands, hot springs.

Head off into the mountains.

In Long Valley, the depression point between the east-dying Sierras and the inner Cascades, meadows pour off the mountain in gullies, their golden color, a frozen stream, rich. You can feel the meadows are gold. They've never been ploughed, though grazed in this sheep-rich American Basque country. Some Basque-style artisan sausages for breakfast bring that point home. Walking over the meadow feels like swimming, the bent-over, dry, winter-dormant grasses sponging your steps, thrusting you forward, and the sensation comes: you could just forego feet and dive headfirst and begin alligator-crawling down-meadow with a meadow-wave every now and then picking you up and carrying you forward 20 or so feet. From afar, in this sage desert, the meadows are narrow and obviously precious in their soil that's spilled along from their mountain's heights, 2,000 feet above, and, likewise, with their water, which always finds the lowest way home.

Meadow pouring off a purple oak Sierra hillside.

It's 5,000 feet here. And on the eastern side of the Sierra, which means it's desert; the Sierra's 8,000-foot crests block a lot of moisture. So, outside of the yellow, rich meadows, you have amazingly rich, earthtoned mauve, green, tan, beige, purple, mustard, olive sageland.

We set out cross-country, 6,000 acres, no fences to worry about. Felt aboriginal blood beating. Felt the hunting instinct come back as the mountain-worn ranch-complex, tucked into the valley between two of the country's seedfruit-meadows, receded from view and the jagged cliffs, just beyond the valley's only river, called. If you looked back, the last of the Sierra hills looming just above, near, the winter oaks spanning the hillsides to the ridges above, their branches a bruised, soft purple, tinging the slopes, subtly, with that one soft sageland color. A constant hushed whoosh, an east-bound wind cresting the sharp Sierra ridge, poured around you into the valley, the Cascades offering their distance, a super-big giant's half-pipe.

Blue-gold.

We sometimes sit for a while in the sageland, ducking the cold wind in the land's minor undulations, feeling the pre-Solstice morning sun bathing the valley, all of which makes this prime napping country. Walking again, we sometimes follow the clear animal highways, worn by all kinds of paws and hoofs (no cow), rabbit, kangaroo rat, bobcat, deer, mountain lion (we keep looking). The ranch is called Puma Robles, Cougar Oaks. The area's supposed to have the highest concentration of mountain lions in all of the Sierra. They're drawn by the wide, rocky desert and the abundant deer that stream out of the mountains by the thousands on their migrations to and from the food-rich high Sierra summer meadows. It seems like we just miss actually seeing one, a moment too late, just when one stops moving, ducks down.

We reach the jagged rocks jutting out of the smooth hillsides that border the river. They leave questions. "Do you want the scientific explanation or the Native American one?"

We jump across the river, walk up the hillside between masses of unusual rock outcrops, climb up one and crawl out to its western overlook, which brings those Sierras, the river, and a long, baulked train course along its base into view. Leaning against a large boulder, the sun beating down, a banana is split, and a long, heavy train, ominous, crawling, dragging hundreds of what must be oil-bearing cars, round, black, full. The train's feel was overwhelmingly dark. From our mountain outpost – and not only that, this was an evil load – the slow, struggling train, dragging miles of oil across the desert valley, felt like Lord of the Rings marching, soulless dwarves preparing for battle. One hundred dollars says that oil's going for war.

--

The cold comes down out of the mountains in the early morning. A couple of days ago it was at about 6:30; you could feel the temperature drop, your skin sting slightly from the waft of cold. It happens when the sun rises on the other side of Long Valley, said Marco, and we speculated that that early-morning, thick, orange, light-blue light pulls the mountain air down off the National Forest-owned Sierra hills, whose feet the end-of-the-road ranch sits on, 2,000 feet below.

Hot springs pour into the creek periodically. One has been tapped. Steam rising as the 130-degree water meets winter night air. A hose collects the water and directs it into a baby blue round plastic tub, a kiddy pool on steroids. Regulating the flow allows temperature control and you to soak in air-cooled once-130-degree streamwater. A couple of claw-footed porcelain tubs add to the atmosphere, too, one directly in the curving-, coursing-around-the-base-of-a-small-round-hill stream, providing a touch of Dali to the day and night. A tub in the hot-stream, prairie grass all around and nothing but water and grey sky.

The only sound this night far-off 395 traffic heading to and from Reno, which glows the sky pink and purple just northwest in Thursday night splendor.

A hawk ...

Play that sh#$, DJ.

--

More mountain views, aqui.

Black-indigo Sierra

Entering the Tahoe valley at night on 80 from the Bay Area delta, the night, indigo black, folds in, heavy, a few miles northeast of Sacramento. Entering the Sierra foothills, it's tar pit black, the sky, the numerous trees that you can't see, but feel, and the slow, upwinding road add to the lost-in-space feel of the experience. It's quite striking. The mountains begin to assert their dominance as you slowly wind up to Donner Pass, where they once asserted it unequivocally, as the mass of 87 people, taking a short cut, got caught at what is now Donner Lake, just a few miles away and 2,000 feet below their golden gate that would lead to the Golden Gate, so named because it's the only exit to the ocean for landborne glaciermelt, snowmelt, rain, and mysterious groundwater for 2,000 north-south miles of central and north California. Instead, as Richard Rhodes' The Ungodly tells us, they lost half their crew that winter and some ate each other. "It was the world's worst wagon-train tragedy." What a statement!

The striking, huge bronze caste pioneer family memorial at Donner Lake State Park, at Donner Lake, where the Donner Party built roughshod cabins and lean-tos that American mythical winter, is not of any of their party, but a dude and wife and young daughter and babe-in-arms that came three years before in 1854, and called an "American hero" by the accompanying bronze plaque, for having survived alone at the lake while nursing an illness and a generally frail body.


But check out that sculpture! 20 feet tall at least, and one look at those praire-sprouted, mountain-tinged people, squat, strong, weather-beaten, mule-ish, but overwhelmingly indominatable, you feel they could muzzle-gun hunt deer and bear, huddle against wind and rain and hellish snow storms and trudge mile by mile across country and survive. It's all there in that belt.

All water west goes to the Pacific; all east of the Sierra evaporates. That means Truckee River, which courses magnificently through the charming side of the freeway of that 16,000-populated ski- and country-living town. The river's the only outlet from the great Lake Tahoe and flows east 20 or so miles to Pyramid Lake, where, if it be true, it meets its east-side Sierra evaporation fate.

Woke up in the morning and had my friend, masseuse, assess my what-must-be broken rib. The break's been pinpointed to just under my left arm, but where the ribs are still thick and heavy like a train.

She put one hand on either side of my bare-skinned back under my arms and in the morning cold grey light felt softly both sides for a few minutes, and then pinpointed the hurt. Felt like a protruding bone maybe. No good.

My people, if you with me, where the f@#$ you at?

Went on a random West Oakland walk yesterday to break up work, work, and just happened across the planned 12.12.11 Occupy Oakland mob heading from downtown to the Oakland port today. It was a grey day that bled into the afternoon. Cold.

There's a park about five blocks from my house that I usually walk to when I walk. As I approached the park, a half-block away, a few masked bike riders rode down from the park, into the street that bordered the park, and then away. Then some more showed up, masked, like buzzing, scout bees. Some frontrunning ghostriders.



Then, as I approached the park and the divided, four-lane road, 14th St., that borders it, perpendicular to my walking path, I saw the mob of people about six blocks up-street, coming slowly like a massive grey fog in the somber, tired day. It was impressive. Five minutes straight and the four-lane road was still packed with people, slow-moving third-world-looking dumpster trucks booming weird, hazed-over pop songs, hauling ganja-smoking, somewhat-bewildered kids who danced disinterestedly, their bodies moving deadly as their faces spoke a certain serious despair, the same despair you saw on almost everyone's faces, thousands and thousands, in serious despair, no smiling, no joy, this was not a buoyant event.

Upon first seeing that mass approaching down the street, a slow-moving storm, I thought, "That explains the helicopter." Which had been humming up above for the last hour. The 'copters are semi-regular (there's one buzzing now up above; it's Tuesday night, 8 p.m.) and just seem to be up there, droning away, because they can, and that domain is definitely an untouchable kingdom. Like, "You may be marching down there, but we're up here and you can't do sh#% about it." Initially thought the 'copters were monitoring a traffic situation. Apparently not. They're keeping an eye on the port and the marching proletariat. Can you see the angst in the march from the video?


Thought of Wu-Tang's Killer Bees, immediately.

Happiness and some others' writing

Happy. To Nar!

Lost in the YMCA men's basketball playoffs today. Horrible.

My favorite New Yorker writer, one of my favorite period, art critique Peter Schjeldahl;
snippet from "Old and New: The reopening of the Islamic wing at the Met," New Yorker, Nov. 7, 2011:

Details in illustrations of a Sufi poem, "Language of the Birds," were painted with hairs from the bellies of squirrels. Sit, look.

...

But for the majestic halls that are hung with Iranian and Ottoman carpets, a gallery of mostly Iranian ceramics, often created for middle-class markets from the ninth to the thirteenth century, harbors more concentrated beauty than any other in the wing. I can close my eyes now and summon the aqueous aura of a blue-glazed bowl in which silhouetted fish swim, surrounded by radiating lines that are sublimely both perfect, as design, and imperfect, in the slight vagaries of the painter's hand. As a one-off visual definition of the word "sophisticated," that bowl will do. Exiting the room, I felt a trifle different from the person I had been when I entered.


The vagaries of war illustrated by World War II US Major General Curtis LeMay, who led the US firebombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000 civilians, quoted in Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atom Bomb:

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time. It was getting the war over that bothered me. So I wasn't worried particularly about how many people we killed in getting the job done. I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side. Incidentally, everybody bemoans the fact that we dropped the atomic bomb and killed a lot of people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That I guess is immoral; but nobody says anything about the incendiary attacks on every industrial city in Japan, and the first attack on Tokyo killed more people than the atomic bomb did. ... I guess the direct answer to your question is, yes, every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral, and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.

The Rare Urban Rooster

The rare urban rooster. Took some photos at The Ranch at Dogtown in late afternoon for the urban farming story today. Roosters aren't common because they crow, and neighbors, those who don't wake up at 4 a.m., don't like that. This one slipped through the cracks. The hen-supplier, said Kathryn Porter, who owns/runs Dogtown, mis-sexed the rooster. It will be sent up north to a farm sometime soon. The city just can't handle a rooster.

More photos:

Arcana of Public Life

In a dull, yellow-lit room of SF City Hall, wood-paneled, godfather clock carvings filigreed periodically into the wall, you can’t help but think about the pointlessness of public process. People and people and people and people talk for the preservation of life, then the preservation of money, then life. Two sides offering conflicting factual statements again and again.

Photo of Laguna Salada at Sharp Park by Matt Jalbert (mattjalbert.com), who donated the photo for the Bay Nature story that brought me into the metaphorically rotting bowels of SF City Hall to cover a San Francisco Board of Supervisors subcommittee meeting for a story on 417-acre Sharp Park, which, as a lowland, meeting the ocean for the Sanchez Creek watershed, is a rare-ish central California coastal lagoon wetland. That's significant because a federally-endangered snake, the San Francisco Garter Snake and its prey, a federally-threatened frog, the California Red-legged Frog, both live there. And what you don't see is the 18-hole golf course which winds in and around the ocean side of the park, the wetland side. This photo was likely taken from a fairway.

See the guy eating in the doorway in the background? He's Sean Elsbernd, one of three supervisors on the subcommittee, and he's against the ordinance to transfer Sharp Park's management from the SF Recreation and Parks Department to the National Park Service. The supervisor really supporting the ordinance, he wrote it, is John Avalos, and he's sitting down, but you can't see him because the standing dude is blocking him. Avalos and Elsbernd jabbed back and forth at the beginning of the meeting.


It's guys like this that help long public meetings. Guy laughing next to me heard on the video, which was shot from the overflow meeting room downstairs in City Hall, was the primary author on the 211-page ecological study on Sharp Park commissioned by two environmental groups and published earlier this year. Pretty interesting.



Guy just starting singing, clearly freestyling. Amazing.

What a beautiful building to hold such insanity.

Trucks in the Sky; A white, 8-cylinder M3 BMW semi-remembered dream

These trucks fly in the sky above the unfortunate West Oakland neighborhood, South Prescott. It's horrible. Basically, the neighborhood's tucked into a triangle, bordered by highways on two sides and the raised BART rail on the other. The BART rail, I just realized, is above ground everywhere in its north and northeast East Bay routes (outside of two stops in downtown Oakland0) besides its Berkeley section. As soon as it enters Berkeley, it goes underground; as soon as it leaves, it shoots up.

Anyways, on the ground in the South Prescott neighborhood, it feels like you're in a Fifth Element-like future city with flying cars, trains, and a chaos of noise. Feels like the houses are burntout chunks of white, loose bedrock of a weed-straggled forsaken, sunburnt parking lot. You know the kind. There's no rest, no peace. I went there to see about an EPA project that revitalizes the lead-infested soils of the 100-year-old neighborhood, contaminated by years of car exhaust and lead paint peeling, dribbling into the soil, by depositing ground up fish bones. The high concentration of phosphate in the bones reacts with the toxic forms of lead in the soil to make them harmless to humans. The New York Times did a pretty good article on the situation. This research continues the urban farming story, which is a sprawling mess of a subject. It's going to be hell to write. Just did 400 words. How do you keep it all straight ... and which plethora of data do you include ????

The EPA dude was smooth, polished, had designer blackframed glasses, the kind with a subtle, elegant burgundy on the skinside of the frame, and wore a musky cologne and some kick-ass cowboy boots. Spiked, gelled, stylish black hair, handsome. He walked out, and immediately I thought, "Harem." And he was polished in the government way, the know-the-game, know-the-rules way, in the hit-your-numbers, have at least one immaculate-showcase-available-to-show-off way.

We talked outside his office in front of his attractive, tough jeans-wearing assistant, woman, and first went to the boneyard outback to see the one-ton bags of ground Pollock bone and smell their surprisingly still-fishy smell, and then to the South Prescott neighborhood, which was just around the corner from this outpost, temporary headquarters.

---

Remnants of a Sunday morning dream:

Multi-colored, electric green, yellow, orange, red, 8-cylinder enhancing things. Asian shop. Called Two Stairs Chop shop. It was a shady operation, to say the least. I kept wondering why the fuck I was bringing my car there.

Posey Tube, Chinatown, Occupy Oakland Trees, Job

My new part-time job is in Alameda, the little island that noone knows about unless you live in the East Bay that's just a channel-skip away from mainland Oakland. It requires tube-travel. It's the travel that almost killed me going to Alameda for the interview of the very job I have today via the Alameda-bound tube, the Webster Tube. The Posey Tube is outflowing. Now picture, after watching that video, a person riding a bike through the tube, on the road, no shoulder, no lights, no helmet, early in the morning. The Webster tube has no measly sidewalk like the Posey. Didn't know how to get there and was going to be late. Should be dead.

The video above is from the absolute nadir of the tube; judging from its depth, the water surface must not be too far above, maybe 20 feet from the top of the tube? And, as you can see, it's loud, and the yellow, blaring light is disorienting. Riding along that narrow path, I keep waiting for:

1. A big overhanging bus mirror to knock me out;

2. My bag to snag on the leaning, inconsistent metal railing, which would bend my front wheel toward the wall, send my back sliding along it briefly, and then, after a time-dragging prologue, the climax: the bike finally catching for good on the metal railing, corkscrewing me, with 200-pound momentum, into the shoulder-less road and an amazing modern stampede death;

3. The same thing to happen, but the inciting incident would be an 18-wheeler (which do come through there often) and its amazing negative-pressure whirlwind rush;

4. Me, losing it in the yellow light and blaring noise, throwing my bike over the railing and walking, stat, to Chinatown, whose chaos pulses on the Oakland side of the tube, to eat sesame sweetgum-filled beanpaste buns and mysterious, stale-tasting rice-noodle stir-fry for the rest of the day.

Chinatown welcomes this impending daylong flipout.
With sesame "ching doi."

On the way home from the new job, which I'm thankful for, but something that leaves you thinking empty thoughts and assuming some cog-wheel, office identity. Weird, the dynamic of what I imagine to be most "professional" offices. Reminds me of The Office, really. And, it's where you learn, while researching for a short news post, that startup companies, not this one, lose $20 million a year and then $6 million a year, and it's considered normal, acceptable. How does business get done like that? Guess I'm stuck in a mini-micro-economic mindset. That sh#% just doesn't fly in the real world. But that seems to be the sugardaddy, read private equity, hedge fund, weird unreal world we live in now. Confounds the mind.

And Oakland's trees, or should write tree, are, is, still being Occupied. Just so you know. This dude's been up there for a few days. The tree's occupied in shifts from a couple of days to four or more. "It's a nice retreat, if you're into that sort of thing," he yelled down.