Been around the world....

And I-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi, I can't find my baby...

Ok, so I've only been around the country. You can tell I drove out from Ohio to California once--check out all those drive through states! Bryce and I had a blast. Camels and Chocolate drops the whole way!



create your own visited states map

Taping up my girl

On the way to work I blew the seam out of the crotch of my jeans. No, I don't know how. Maybe climbing onto the Amtrak required more denim dexterity than I could muster? Anywho, I just suffered the embarrassment of sitting through two meetings with an uncomfortable breeze blowing betwixt my nethers and then walking into the bathroom with a scotch tape dispenser in hand. I don't even want to imagine what my co-workers made of that. Now I'm walking around with 14 strips of tape holding my pants together. They make a crinkly noise and chafe my inner thighs when I walk. God help me if one of the strips gets loose and lands sticky-side-to-my-girl. Dang.

Octavia Butler, another great one passes

One of my favorite authors and friends of my mind, Octavia Butler, died at 58 on Friday. She was a brilliant writer, a recipient of the Nebula and Hugo awards, and the only science fiction author to be awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Award. If you haven't read her work, do. Her near-future dystopias Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents paint woefully possible pictures of what our world could look like if trends such as global warming, religious fundamentalism, and class division remain on their current trajectories. She utilized the genres of science fiction and fantasy to discuss race, class, gender, and the human condition, and she did so masterfully.



The one thing I saw in the news that said something about the depth of her work is this clip from the Democracy Now! website:

OCTAVIA BUTLER: "I'm going to read a verse or two. And keep in mind these were written early in the 1990s. But I think they apply forever, actually. This first one, I have a character in the books who is, well, someone who is taking the country fascist and who manages to get elected President and, who oddly enough, comes from Texas. And here is one of the things that my character is inspired to write about, this sort of situation. She says:

"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

And there's one other that I thought I should read, because I see it happening so much. I got the idea for it when I heard someone answer a political question with a political slogan. And he didn't seem to realize that he was quoting somebody. He seemed to have thought that he had a creative thought there. And I wrote this verse:

"Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see. Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To hear and to see even an obvious lie again and again and again, maybe to say it almost by reflex, and then to defend it because we have said it, and at last to embrace it because we've defended it."

Read her work. You'll be better for it.

Blogligations

I promised my friend Shani that I'd write more, so here's another wee posting from yours truly. It's gotta be quick though because I gotta go see my girl Kofy and her all blackgirl rock band SISTAS IN THE PIT in like 10 minutes. Ok, I gotta go get my head bang on!

Blasted organics!

There's nothing worse than a moldy fungus. Just imagine my chagrine when I discovered that my hellof expensive organic oyster mushrooms had grown a layer of penicillin while awaiting their turn in the cookpot. Blasted organics! I just bought those mushrooms! Okay, I bought them on Wednesday and today is Saturday, so whatever.

My Saturday night supp is inspired by the stuff in my fridge: scallops, shrimp, a little bit of crab meat leftover from my Thursday night DIY sushi situation, oyster and shitake mushrooms and this little nifty little tool. I chucked the oyster mushrooms, typed the other stuff in the search box and landed here. I didn't have half the required ingredients or any past experience with Béchamel Sauce, but I have six wee tiny ramekins, so I decided to run with it. I made the Béchamel with soy milk, but I used a shitload of butter and the aforementioned creatures of the sea so I don't think this meal will appear in the Vegan Lunchbox anytime soon.

The entree is baking now; I'm pondering steamed green beans and swigging a Black Toad Distinctive Dark Ale. I'll post a picture when it's ready.



Ah, fine dining in the glow of my 15" Powerbook. Does Saturday night get better than this?

Two bridges and a pyramid

I just got back from a quick "get back in the saddle" bike ride along the Bay. If you look closely at the pic, you can see the Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the pyramid of the TransAmerica building. Ok, even if you squint, you prolly can't see it, but it's there,I promise!

Apparently I'm it again.

Ok, so I tried to post this last night. It seemed to work and then it seemed to mysteriously disappear. Weird.

Tag, I'm it.

My friend Donna Jean tagged me, so I'm it. Here are my requisite lists of 3:


Three books I can read over and over:

1) Beloved by Toni Morrison.

"As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk. How quick the jailed up flavor ran free. No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you. How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free."

2) The Hidden Connections by Fritjof Capra

"Cognition . . . is the activity involved in the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living networks. In other words, cognition is the very process of life. The organizing activity of living systems, at all levels of life, is mental activity. The interactions of a living organism--plant, animal, or human--with its environment are cognitive interactions. Thus life and cognition are inseparably connected. Mind--or more accurately, mental activity--is immanent in matter at all levels of life."

3) White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

"Kicking off their dime store flip-flops the two badly coiffed bullies marched through the sandbox without a flinch or a grimace. A little diaper clad boy waddled up, blew a kazoo tribunal, and heralded the dyspeptic duo: 'That my sister Fas' Betty and her bestest friend Vamp a Nigger on the Regular Veronica. They fixin' to kicks yall's ass.'"

Three places I've lived:

1) Italy (Naples)
2) Ohio (Dayton and Columbus)
2) California (San Francisco, Palo Alto, Oakland, Redwood City, Mountain View)


Three TV shows I love:

1) Lost
2) Little House on the Prairie
3) Extreme Makeover Home Edition (good lord)


Three highly regarded and recommended TV shows that I've never watched a single minute of:

1) The Office
2) Everybody Hates Chris
3) The Family Guy


Three places I've vacationed:

1) San Juan, Puerto Rico
2) Whistler, British Columbia
3) Aspen, Colorado


Three of my favorite dishes:

1) Mom's spaghetti
2) Zachary's pizza
3) I used to love al pastor burritos with no beans and extra avocado from Taqueria Cancun, but me and the al pastor don't mix it up too much these days


Three sites I visit on the daily:

1) http://www.gmail.com
2) http://donnatroka.blogspot.com
3) http://www.nytimes.com


Three places I would rather be right now:
*(with friends and family!)
1) NYC (in the Bat Cave and Harlem!)
2) Washington, DC
3) Forest Ridge


Three bloggers I am tagging:

1) bomboniera
2) tyrus
3) peaches

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.