A Four Year Hiatus

Our first child's birth coincided with our adoption of Facebook. Took the momentum out of this blog and the one we'd started for him as well. In the way of most hopes and dreams, our shifted and gave way to new priorities. But something's been on my mind for about two years and this seemed like as good a place as any to address is.

I'm talking about the way in which our 1,500 square foot version of the American dream had the wind sucked right out of it and how we've taken it in the chops for years while various city, county, and federal offices add insult to injury on bases that our daily, month, quarterly, and annual.

Details are forthcoming.

"How do you roll?" - Office Edition

There has to be a blog dedicated to photos taken from offices with killer views. Office porn if you like, though I'm sure clicking on that link will take you to many many web pages filled with explicit images of "secretaries" and "bosses daughters" demonstrating innovative uses for office chairs.


I'm posting this shot taken from my office though in the spirit of the gone but not forgotten Photoshop Tennis, or maybe Kitten War - where our boy Tuncer has garnered a gaudy 914 victories.

I'm less sure of my chances against the admittedly stunning view from our friend Ayelet's new office in Haifa.


While I can only say that on a clear day I can see practically to San Leandro, I am also only ten minutes away from Arizmendi pizza.

The Struggle Between Summer and Fall

Dying tomato plants are what passes for fall color in our yard, I thought I'd share.

A couple of week ago now, I tried to sneak a dinner by Amy that would have included leafy greens and portobello mushrooms. She called me on prematurely 'going autumn', and was having none of it. Our tomato plants are on their way out though, and the light is taking on the qualities I associate with fall.

Life In a Brick House

It's been a while since we posted any photos here. The process and I went through a dark period after I threw web pages for vacation photos together. But this photo, taken just after the last guest left our paella party, seemed to capture something of our life in a brick house. Enjoy.

Kernighan vs. Allison in City Council District 2

The runoff election between Pat Kernighan and Aimee Allison in Oakland's City Council District 2 has been on my mind all weekend. I drove down Trestle Glen Road Friday night, and the only yard signs I saw were in support of Pat Kernighan. On MacArthur boulevard there was an apartment building sporting easily 10 Aimee Allison signs.

Yesterday I walked past Allison's head quarters on Grand Avenue to get to our bank, and past Kernighan's HQ on Lakeshore Blvd. to get to Arizmendi. It felt just like a neighborhood election should, with supporters wearing t-shirts and carrying clipboards. With candidates and volunteers working the crowd at the farmer's market.

The thing is, Pat Kernighan wanted no part of it.

Just before the election earlier this year, the Oakland Tribune ran an article that included this paragraph:

Late Tuesday night, as results showed Kernighan with a substantial lead, she said she was pleased with the figures but still concerned about a runoff. "I would much rather have it decided now, a runoff is such a waste of time and money,'' she said.

The runoff might have been avoided if the constituents of district 2 had voted for Pat Kernighan in sufficient numbers. We didn't. Therefore the election isn't a waste of time, but rather part of the due process of becoming our duly elected representative.

After the last two presidential elections, I find it baffling that anyone affiliated with the Deomcratic party would begrudge an aspect of the election process. That they would characterize any aspect of the process as a waste of time. Of course, outside of the page listing her various endorsements, the word 'democrat' doesn't appear on Pat Kernighan's website.

Lacing Them Up

I've recently started running again, even participated in a race with my wife while we were down in Florida (I'm the one in long sleeves). Those of you have known me for a while may recall that I ran competitively in High School. That I had knee trouble, something to do with my meniscus, and eventually took up rock climbing instead.


The running hurts in different ways than I recall, but it's been close to two months now. My lap around the lake tonight actually felt good.

A Competitive Impulse

Just after 6:30 this morning I loaded the ESPN home page. It took me a bit to notice the "breaking news" box, the picture of Jan Ullrich. That they treated the story in this way, should have given me some indication of the severity of the doping allegations that have emerged on the eve of the Tour de France.



My interest in the tour began back in 1997; desparate for a sports fix after the NBA finals. Two years ago A. and I sprang for cable TV, and we've been faithful watcher's of OLN's coverage ever since. That coverage can be maddening. They run the same handful of commercials over and over for the full three weeks of the race. A given day's coverage lasts for hours. The action hinges on a handful of moments.

Decisions to respond or not to another cyclist's attack, deferential gestures of camraderie, the curious sentimentality that enters into the latter stages of the race. Hand shakes or pats on the back as one rider moves ahead and another falls behind. Reinforcing the sense that the tour is a thing that the riders are enduring.

A thin collection of video highlights are yours for the viewing here. But like the last chapter of Mason and Dixon, the full weight of what you're taking in can only really be felt when you've put in the time.

Many of the cyclists implicated in the so-called Operación Puerto investigation had figured prominently in such moments. They were also favored to win this year. According to fellow cyclist Bobby Julich the evidence, at least against his team captain Ivan Basso, is largely circumstantial.



I'm inclined to be sympathetic either way. I can imagine the pressure to win the first "post-Lance" tour, and the quality of the competition compelling someone to go the illegal route. I can't imagine how terrible it would feel to be clean and realize that you wouldn't be participating in the tour. I can even imagine years of adversity, being so close to winning, compelling someone to believe that they are pure of heart and conscience no matter what they did.

Points South

You will have to take my word for it, but our tomato plants are going like gangbusters. Our pepper plants are getting tall and leafy. The creeping thyme I planted in the herb garden is looking to start some static with the sage and rosemary. All of which would I could feel good about in advance of a 4th of July party if it weren't for the mostly dead lawn. Our front and back yards are much on our minds, but then so too is vacation.

We'll be travelling to the Galapagos Islands for a kayaking trip. Flying into Quito, where we'll stay for a day before flying to Santa Maria Island (also known as Floreana). If the list of recommended items for purchase, and the list of recommended amounts for gratuity didn't make the trip excruciatingly real, the arrival this afternoon of two dry composting toilets --I prefer the term EcoBaños-- on our door step certainly did.

We first learned about the possibility of kayaking through the Galapagos in a New York Times article. The photo below ran along side the article, took up the front page of the Travel section that week actually, and I never really recovered from seeing it.


I intend to do some homework prior to our leaving. Brush up on my Darwin, that kind of thing. Reading through The Flamingo's Smile I was surprised to find that Darwin had set out from London as a doctrine-embracing fellow, who only reluctantly accepted the theory we now associate with him. Of course, prior to booking this trip I thought of Darwin only rarely. Usually as an otherwise indistinct white male wearing period knickers.

Amy's pregnancy has reached the point where folks often ask if we're excited about the baby's pending arrival. Having the baby, being through the pregnancy is very much on Amy's mind. But I think the reality of it is mitigated to some degree by the trip we'll be taking. We'll take lots of pictures.

Total Loss Weekend

In 1972 Don Delillo wrote a piece for Sports Illustrated titled Total Loss Weekend. The story followed a bettor who spends an entire weekend losing every bet he places. To be sure, the teams and players I followed this past weekend won some and lost some, but looking back from the gathering dusk of a Tuesday evening I'm wondering where the hell my weekend went.

I'd known this particular weekend was coming for a while. The NBA Finals plunging head long into the opening weekend of the FIFA World Cup, while the French Open drew to a close. In my mind, this perfect storm was ample justification for the purchase of a hideously expensive flat panel television. Throw in the Tour de France, and the purchase seemed like a no brainer. I'm happy to report that other priorities emerged.

With the bubblicious CRT in full effect, I watched and watched some more. The weather cooperated. By the time I made it out to the hammock on Saturday afternoon, I took a hooded sweatshirt with me. When Amy and I napped in the hammock Sunday, she brought a blanket.

Small and earnest

You may or may not know that I invest considerable psychological capital in my appearance. I experienced yesterday mostly in terms of heat and friends visiting. The official high temperature was only seventy-five degrees, but it had been a long couple of days in the yard. As afternoon rolled around, and friends began dropping by I worried in no particular order about whether or not I had hat hair, how sunburnt my face was, and whether or not it looked like we'd actually accomplished anything in the backyard.

I also worried that I'd crossed some sort of invisible threshold in perceived maturity because I was considering the shade and comfort of one of those floppy hats.

We do have large-scale plans for our back yard. Two retaining walls, a cast concrete fireplace for the patio, maybe a fountain. Since we also have big plans for the kitchen and the front yard, we decided that incremental progress would be better than letting nature take its course. The first two friends who stopped by could not say what had been done, though they've been unduly generous when surveying our homestead before.

We planted a small vegetable garden, turned an unused patch of bark into a fledgling herb garden, and even mowed the lawn. Of these efforts, the lawn-mowing was the biggest surprise. We're both decidedly anti-lawn, but didn't see ourselves removing it in the next couple of months.

Another friend described our fledgling tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants as,"small and earnest." The garden gets an incredible amount of sun though. A mix of western and south western exposure that stays with the plot through most of the afternoon. I know our garden will appear tall, weathered, and productive.

Floating Holiday

One of the numerous perks of my job is the availability of a floating holiday. It's essentially a get out of work free card, and each year you are given one. With good weather arriving in earnest yesterday, I decided to cash in my floating holiday today. Motivated, at least in part, by a strong desire to not find myself at Home Depot on Saturday morning during the first warm and dry weekend of spring, I started on our garden.

Like most of our projects so far, this one involved reversing certain decisions that the previous owner's of our house had made. In this case, removing chunks of bark that they'd covered raised garden beds with. Two hundred square feet of bark.There might be more efficient ways to dispose of all of it, but I went with these 30 gallon paper bags. Because they look cool.


Tomorrow we'll be mowing our plot of grass, and finding a way to get all this yard refuse to the curb.

Last storm of the season

I don't think of our brick house as having a view on par with other homes in the bay area. No bridges, no bay. The house is elevated from the street though, and you can see across the bay to the peninsula if we stand in a particular sport in the back yard.

These photos were taken a week ago. A storm front was supposed to blow in last Friday, with thunderstorms following Saturday. The rain never materialized, but we had big clouds and dramatic sunsets all weekend. With some luck, it will be the last storm front we see for a while. Here's the view I mentioned from the backyard:

With the Spurs up by 30...

I'm packing some calories in as we head into the last few hours before our "Did he, or didn't he?" dinner. Where we'll open up our long standing debate, over whether or not Werner Herzog really did eat his shoe, to friends. A. contends no way. I'm a Werner-ite, and I glory in it.

It may be a thinly veiled excuse to grab some screen time on day one of the NBA Playoffs - the Spurs are up by 34 over the Kings.

It's been a heckuva day. We made it to Berkeley Bowl, the Grand Lake Farmers' Market, and Arizmendi by 11:22 this morning. Our East Bay culinary hat-trick included nearly an hour of looking for parking spots.

I will now go brown chicken livers, sweep, and wipe.

Soup and Ice Cream for Dinner

It had been a long time since I visited a dentist. Ultimately A. would have to insist. And when she did, it was a short hop from dentist to oral surgeon. You may be asking yourself what the appropriate photo for this post will be. Despite the three (3) teeth in a small manilla envelope on my dining table, I thought we'd go picture free - just this once.

Memorable moments along the way, include a dental hygienist describe my cleaning as, "removing barnacles from rock." She also asked me to stick out my tongue so that she could remove the accumulated plaque flakes from my tongue.

The oral surgeon removed those three teeth, and placed me on a soft food diet for the next seventy-two hours. This will make my other line of blogging , well, challenging. But it should contribute greatly to the health of my mouth.

Of the tooth extraction procedure, I will only say that despite a pineapple flavored numbing agent, a steady stream of nitrous, and the Mostly Mos' playlist on my iPod, the violence of tooth extraction was not lost on me. It came through mostly in the form of a vigorous back and forth motion as each tooth was removed by what looked shockingly like pliers.

Where straight teeth in your mouth
are more important than the words
that come out of it...

There's nothing indicating it's going to stop

At the end of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, there's an observation that's been on my mind lately,"That's the problem with the British, their weather." In the context of the book the weather may explain hundreds of years of imperialist impulse and agression. We're in for another wet week here.


A big storm is supposed to arrive Tuesday. We haven't been able to grill for weeks. The local paper ran an article on how to cope with seasonal affective disorder:

... even folks who don't slip into depression every winter are starting to feel weighed down by the nearly nonstop storms -- especially when there's seemingly no end to the rainy days.

"A lot of people are at least paying lip service to this idea that the extended winter weather is having an adverse impact on the way they feel," said Dan Weiner, a clinical psychologist with the San Francisco Bay Area Center for Cognitive Therapy in Oakland.

It's April, I have an olive tree, and a book on creating mediteranean gardens. I spent yesterday cleaning the basement.


It's tempting to reconcile this bout of weather with our recent drought, though I fear something more insidious may be at work. Or, as a guy from Zimbabwe asked at the Farmers' Market yesterday,"What have you crazy Americans done?"

Soldiers and Suits Follow-up

My earlier post, on the increasingly present soldier and suit motif, prompted three unsolicited reactions:

• My lovely and talented wife liked it, but wished the post had a more pronounced critical perspective.
  
• An old friend from high school wrote from Cincinatti to say that she found the mural particularly interesting, and that she wished there were more of that sort of thing near her.
• As I mentioned in my last post, another friend responded by requesting more photos of shrubs.

Three unsolicited comments is something of a highwater mark for feedback around here, and for this and other reasons the soldiers and suits have stayed on my mind. Imagine my surprise then, as I walked by the Grand Lake Theatre today and ran into life-sized cutouts of the soldier and suit figures from that mural.


The cut outs were place there by Matt Reynoso, the artist responsible for the mural, who indicated that he'd been placing the soldiers in local cafes, including Arizmendi in Emeryville.

Matt's looking for sympathetic walls to place more murals on. If you have any leads send them his way.

Where are the shrubs?

Received an IM from a friend yesterday who expressed a longing for posts on, as he put it, "...paint choices and shrubbery and stuff". Paint choices are on hold for the time being, but as luck would have it, I did snap pictures of shrubs the other night. I was attempting to capture for posterity what I've described elsewhere as the "slow erratic descent of snow flakes" in our backyard.



As folks with lots of interests, it's difficult to maintain the separation of church and state - where church is our house, and state is the larger world. A. posts on everything from Jazz to TV commercials over at Tear In the Buttonhole. In addition to the more observantly critical stuff I've been posting here, I also sound my food yawp over at The Happy Consumptive.

I imagine each of these sites with a distinct --if modest-- following of colleagues, family, friends, and internet wanderers. Even with our own relatively small media empire, it can be difficult to post regularly. This will keep us, for the time being, a three blog family.

Soldiers and Suits

A couple of days before I started gathering images for my post on the geo-political nuances of the housing market, we noticed a building in West Oakland covered with stenciled images of business men and soldiers. The business men carried brief cases, the soldiers had a shilouette that was distinctly modern. I understood this to be a comment on the location of lethality and agency in our culture. I even felt vaguely guilty about appreciating it. It seemed anti-corporate in a way that wasn't —on some level— ironic.


A counter example might be the comic strip Get Your War On. To some extent, Get Your War On capitalizes on a technique popularized in Red Meat. Each strip relies on stereotypically representative characters, who say unexpected things.

In the absence of spirited dialog, juxtaposed images of business men in suits and soldiers in fatigues can only transcend their status as stereotypical representations through sheer repetition and our very specific socio-political context.

Something about the mural also reminded me of figures we'd seen at a war protest. A group of performance artists were walking through the crowds of people heading up Market Street in San Francisco. Dressed in suits and covered in fake blood. They were acting the part of television reporters - present, commenting, but not participating.


The visual register of the mural was evoked directly by a New York Times article entitled Death Wears a Crisp Black Suit (Requires Times Select). The article makes the point that one thing war might be good for is "making artists directly address political issues of their day."


Of course the iconography of privilege and the iconography of war have been closely associated for thousands of years. Suits have long since displaced more elaborate indicators of political power. These depictions though seem to have more to do with a very specific notion of enfranchisement than than they do privilege.