Back Again

It's hard to come back to this after such a long absence. Where to begin? Shall I go back to the beginning again, pick up where I left off, or kick in with the now, as though that little tear in the space-time continuum never happened?

Back to the beginning again...



Well, 2005 is long past, but everyone loves a photo retrospective, even if it is late in coming. I started the year in the company of friends and loved ones. I remember that clearly. Then things get a little hazy. I do recall having sangria just before a ferry ride to San Francisco, some time in mid May.


After a few glasses of fruited wine, we crossed the Bay in a big boat, as the moon rose and the sun begain to set. In the city we enoyed a pelaton and a merry-go-round and assorted related and unrelated merriment. We had a devil of a time getting back Oakland though--KFOG held a free concert and all of San Francisco decided to ride BART simultaneously.
















In June I headed to Pittsburgh for the annual Porter Family Reunion. Gramma Porterphine's children, grands, greats, and great great grands gathered at Penn State University, Mckeesport to remember and believe. I debuted my video documentary of the family history, as told by my eldest uncle, Cardie Jones. The video was about a half an hour long, but if you have 3 minutes and Quicktime, you can watch the first few minutes of the photo collage. Over the course of the reunion weekend two of my favorite people, Jared and Jasmine, commandeered my camera phone and composed several self-portraits. I like this one.



And what else happened in 2005? I went to Rohit's wedding. It kicked ass. There were all manner of festivies, including traditional dancing, mango ice cream, a few hours at a sports bar, and Rohit in a horse-drawn carriage. I love that guy. I think if Jesus were from India, he'd look something like Rohit on his wedding day.

Home is where the broadband is...

Sorry for the dearth of posts of late. Since I moved to Oakland I've been "sharing" wi-fi with a neighbor. Unfortunately, that neighnbor up and moved. The network went dark and 6:33 am Friday November 11th. A moment of silence please.

*sniff*

I tried to get Comcast when I first moved into my loft, but to no avail. Several phone calls over several weeks and one visit from a wholly pleasant young man yielded no signal. This past Wednesday morning I spent 42 minutes failing to navigate Verizon phone trees and talking to operators who provide local phone service in New York--that got me nowhere but late to work. For my next trick I signed up for a local phone line from SBC with some small hope that I can parlay that into a 100 mbps stream with a week or two. I'm not convinced.

In the mean time I swallow wi-fi and espresso at Gaylord's, Jahva House (you gotta click the link at the bottom of the page) and Nomad. While it's nice to be out and about among the respectively queer, black, and green I'd rather be surfing the light fantastic at home where I can be all three in peace and foment my little revolution in my pyjamas.

I got an idear!

I just got back from London, Paris, and Berlin. It was a business trip, and rightly so, I spent the vast majority of my time working. The first two days were in Berlin. I left the San Jose office at 11am and arrived at the Berlin office at 2pm the next day. The commute to work involved two days, two planes, and about two hours of sleep. Tuesday and Wednesday at the office entailed many small rooms with big white boards and pleasantly intoxicating marker fumes. But work aside, I did manage to learn a couple of things about the German culture.

In fact, the learning began even before I left California. I sent an email to the car company to tell them that I was joining the trip, and that they should be prepared to shuttle four people instead of three to and from the airport, office, and hotel. I signed my mail “Thanks, Monifa” and within a few minutes (so prompt, the Germans) I received a reply, “You’re welcome, Monifer.”

Interesting.

On our first night in Berlin our Deutsche colleagues took us out for traditional German fare at a lovely restaurant, Lutter & Wegner. I looked at the menu and immediately concluded that I was going to need to suspend my meat-free food guidelines for a few days. Steamed veggies simply weren’t to cut it. I ordered the Vienna Schnitzel and a heifeweissen. Vienna Schitzel. Vienna. I always thought that it was wienerschnitzel and that it was some sort of German sausage. Turns out that any schnitzel is breaded fried meat and this particular one is a pork cutlet served in a traditional Austrian style. So that explains it. That’s why the kid on Silver Spoons, little Ricky Schroder, would inevitably burst onto the set each episode and exclaim, “Hey! I got an idear!” Schroder. It’s a German thing. Now I understand.

We didn’t have much time for tourism in Berlin. On our last evening we took a short walk to Checkpoint Charlie. The wall came down in 1989, but the food on the other side continues to suck. I had a salami cheese and mushroom pizza that was the envy of the rest of the table—they were suffering through soggy broccoli and low grade steaks. Thankfully, I was in my bed by 10pm. I was already severely sleep deprived by this point—jet lag and the furious pace at the office left little time for sleeping. My circadian rhythms refused to shift to the zeit of the reich. I had a 5:15am wakeup call, but my eyes popped open at 2:15 am (5:15 pm Cali time.) When the car service picked us up at 5:45 am for our flight to Paris, I was surly and confused.

Bioneers: Michael Ableman

Good food is the result of the passion of the people who love and work the land. Michael Ableman made this point well with slides of photos catalogued in his book Fields of Plenty. He talked about simple solutions, kids raised on kale, and families who have lived on the land for generations. He described grain share program for residents of San Francisco who buy whole grains—oats, wheat, millet, and the like—grown by a single farmer named Jennifer and some horses. Two of my favorite photos were of rooftop gardens in New York City and some wacky people who decided that a sheep dairy was a good idea. They make sheep cheeses that look like "moldy horse turds." Mmmm...horse turds. I also loved the images of black farmers who work with black farmers collectives. They drive their goods into Chicago for the Austin Farmers Market in a neighborhood that doesn’t have a grocery store. There’s a black farmers market here in West Oakland too, and of course, the People’s Grocery which drives an organic grocery truck around West Oakland trying to heal food poverty one block of tofu at a time.



Ableman says that those who know how to coax food from the earth are true leaders. I believe that. The passionate, beyond-organic farmers that he described are leaders pointing a way to a new future. Another speaker, David Orr, contended that ecological design points to two different futures: one, agrarian-based, simplified, and extremely local, and the other technological, prosperous, and fecund. I don’t see the conflict between the two. Why not build a world where there are small organic farms at the heart of every neighborhood, people work near where they live or telecommute frequently, mass transit provides comfortable and convenient transport, and the biological and technological ingredients of our world—from the plastics in our computer monitors to the toppings on our pizzas flow continuously in separate cycles of reuse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and why don’t we all just hold hands and sing. I type that with a sort of bitter sarcasm borne in the distance between utopia and reality, but there’s real power in song and Bernice Johnson Reagon told us all about it at Bioneers. More on her later!

Bioneers: Jeremy Narby

This past weekend I went to the Bioneers Conference in Marin County. I might get to a few comments about affluent white hippies later, but in the mean time, I'll post some notes from the speakers and try to boil down their main points to just a few sentences.



The first speaker I saw was Jeremy Narby. He’s a slow talking anthropologist who aims to hold the scientific community in the same high esteem as he holds shamanistic communities around the world. Narby got his Ph.D at Stanford--mattafact he was in the same program as my dear friend Marcia Ochoa. He has lived in the Amazon for the last 15 years and has spent a good deal of time communing with the vegetable mind, sucking on tobacco paste with shamans. The basic gist of his talk was that nature, the source of life on the planet and everything that supports life in the world, is intelligent. He asserts that intelligence, intentional behavior and the capacity to know, may be a property of all forms of nature and may be fundamental to life itself. He talked about recent experiments with slime molds that can solve mazes and bees that can abstract that particular patterns result in reward, and stilt palms which walk about imperceptibly slowly foraging for sunlight, all possess a capacity to know and intend.

This area of study has caused some consternation in the scientific community; it’s been called an “awkward growth of knowledge.” It’s awkward because it requires humans to rethink our notion of intelligence, and step down from our privileged position as the only species who possesses it. We’ve got this silly idea that nature is everything in the world except humans and that humans are the only species that possess intelligence. Thus it’s conceptually difficult for us to even conceive of sentience beyond ourselves. Narby contends that it’s not nature that lacks intelligence, but our concepts.

I love my new neighborhood.

I just posted an audioblog as I walked down the street in my new neighborhood. It hasn't arrived yet, so I'll re-cap the key phrases:

"...tight white pants..."
"...she hopped out of book-mobile..."
"...black cowboys riding horses in the street..."

This may not make any sense to you--I was there and I'm a bit baffled yet pleased. Too bad I only got one photo.




A cowgirl on mount at 18th and Adeline gave a brilliant speech about why William Bennet should be deported.

The End of an Era

Tonight is our last night at 130 Holly Court. The Whisman Bruisers Varsity Yoga team is disbanding. We've dreamed up rock bands and book clubs, food free dinner parties, croquet tourneys, escandalos, and mathematical constants in this sliver of suburbia. Jung, Dave and I hosted guests from across the nation--exalted principals, mincing Republicans, babies, toddlers, and school aged children. We lost our lunch money to CKE in poker and we're still waiting for Shani to pick up her sleeping bag. Road weary commuters have slept on our couches and Joyce left her shampoo here. Kat knew where to house her all wheel drive safely and securely. Things happened at Whisman. We saved the universe, for the second time, in two days flat. "My name is Jason. What's your name again?"

At 130 Holly skipping, singing, and dance dance revolution were the rule rather than the exception.

Dave's at the hospital, saving lives or perhaps sleeping and Jung and I just did our final walk through. We lit candles and walked from room to room solemnly singing, "Loving you, is easy 'cause you're beautiful." We lit the fire place for the first time since the great toiletry melting of 2004. It's over. We're moving on.

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510....dammit Dave!!! You can't just keep going on your own!

Happy Birthday Donna Jean!!!

Today, well actually yesterday because it's after midnight, is my friend Donna's birthday. She's really something special. She remembers everyone's birthday, even the kids she knew back in elementary school at St. Isaac Jode's (I don't think I spelled that quite right, but hey, I didn't go to elementary there.) Anywho, ("anywho"--I picked up that word from Donna back in grad school at Ohio State.) Donna's the bomb diggity. Happy birthday to ya! I hope you got my voice mail--Jung Dave and I were singing and skipping in Target today just for you!

Raider Nation

Jung, Dave and I just got back from a long day in the Raider Nation. The Raiders took on the Kansas City Chiefs and we took on drinking copious amounts in the parking lot before the game. The tailgating was easily the highlight of the day--we grilled coconut shrimp skewers and pineapple slices and made cocktails out of root beer and Skyy Vanilla. We aspire to the level of citizenship of neighboring gaitors--one guy had on a Raiders chef hat and apron and was cooking an extensive meal for 20 on a propane grill. A 14-piece band was playing a couple of rows over. Good times were had by all. I think the Raiders lost.

A quick comment for Mr. Cheney...

One man speaks for many and tells the Veep to go fuck himself.

Aaron Broussard indicts FEMA

I've seen snippets of the Jefferson Parrish president replayed on CNN, but not the entire clip. Watch it here:

http://www.BradBlog.com/archives/00001798.htm

From the paper of record

A Can't-Do Government

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 2, 2005

I couldn't have said it better myself. It's exactly what we get when the right wing cuts taxes and dismantles government. Bastards.

Kanye West on the Hurricane Relief Concert...

Live TV kicks ass. Kanye West just said, and I quote, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

He had a script and a teleprompter and Mike Myers standing next to him looking puzzled but after a brief tirade that was clearly improvised, but he quickly honed in on the truth. It was like he couldn't help himself. He just blurted it out: "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

They cut to Chris Tucker backstage, long enough to get Kanye and Mike un-mic'd and away from the camera. A few minutes of Aaron Neville swinging sweetly and then a quick fade back to the tragic photos, soothing yet urgent voice over, and Hallmark music.

You'll have to watch this online, because as NBC rebroadcasts the concert, they leave in the initial tirade, but display a full screen "Concert for Hurricane Relief" logo and gentle harmonics over Kanye's declaration that "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Watch the unedited version here.

I gotta go buy his new record.

Michael Moore's open letter to Bush

Read the whole thing here.

It ends like this:

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
www.MichaelMoore.com

Listen to the Mayor of New Orleans

This is from early Friday morning. The federal response to this disaster has been shameful.

Mayor Ray Nagin lashed out at federal officials, telling George Bush and Governor Blanco to "get off your asses and let's do something, and let's fix the the biggest god damn crisis in the history of this country."

"Keep the animals at bay"

Some bastard on CNN just said, and I quote:

"It was like lighting a fire in the wild, to keep the animals at bay."

He was describing what happened as night fell in New Orleans and they turned on all the lights on their news truck. A man had offered to pay him $30 for a gallon of gasoline so he could get his family out of the city.

What the fuck??

How the hell have news trucks been able to move about the city to utter racist bullshit like that? Why not scoop some of those people up and take them somewhere? Because they are afraid of "the animals?"

A reporter just asked Laura Bush, who is far more articulate than her husband by the way, what the world thinks about the fact that poor blacks were left behind as others were able to flee before the storm. She said, "That's what happens. The poor are the most vulnerable to natural disasters." At least she's honest. Emergency planners in New Orleans gaming "Hurricane Pam" last year estimated that 112,000 people in the city of about a half million don't have cars. That's about 20% of the city. They knew that these people, poor and mostly black, would be unable to evacuate the city in the case of an emergency evacuation. That's what happened. The poor were left to fend for themselves.

Laura just referred to her husband as "The President." I wonder if when she's at home, she says, "Mr. President, could you please pass the salt?"

...we've got to get to Wolf Blitzer in the situation room.

Sydney Blumenthal on BBC World Today

Hey folks,

I was dropping Jung off at the airport and happened to hear former Clinton aid Sydney Blumenthal on the BBC program The World Today. (The September 2nd 06:00 GMT program.) He described a list put together after 9/11 describing the biggest threats to the US. They were:

1. Another terrorist attack on New York City
2. A major earthquake in the Bay Area
3. Flooding of New Orleans due to a hurricane

The threat of hurricane and the threat of a levee breach were widely known by the appropriate government agencies and had been widely reported in the press. The Times-Picuyne, now delivered only online as its presses are under water, apparently did a series of stories about the scope of the threat a while back. But dear Mr. Bush said this morning on ABC that no one could have anticipated the breach of the levee. Idiot.

Blumenthal reported that funds that were earmarked for the Army Corp of Engineers, ostensibly to study and repair levees around New Orleans, were directed to the war efforts in Iraq. I'll post the audio as soon as I can get it. In the mean time, read this article by Blumenthal in a German newspaper:

"A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late."

black folks = looting

white folks = eating

This is so fucked up.

Give help now.

Give to the United Way.

I can't believe what I'm seeing. I just can't believe it.

Actually, I can.

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?

I have no idea. Bryce, however, is in Israel and he's reading my blog. Check it out!

And a shout out to Demet in LA, and Jung who logged in from Miami. Bienvenido a Miami! Houston, DC, and Los Gatos in the house! Who's in Seattle? Bill G. is that you?








Gvisit is pretty cool--you can see where people are viewing your site. I'm assuming they combine an IP-geo match with Google Maps' Open API. There's no individually identifiable info though, so don't be scurred. Big brother is watching, but not very closely.