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Showing posts from December, 2005

on a clear day

On clear fall and winter days in the East Bay you can hike up the hills and see the Farallon Islands rising like stone giants over the Golden Gate bridge. The Farrallones are 27 miles off the coast and are usually shrouded in thick fog and marine layer. It's a reward, hiking up the steep East Bay hills through eucalyptus groves...and shadowed by flitting jays and juncos...to arrive, at last, at a view of the entire Bay. And there, just on the horizon, rise the stone pyramids of the Farallones in the Pacific..matching in shape Mt. Tamalpais, the Twin Peaks of San Francisco, or the human-made towers of the Golden Gate Bridge and the TransAmerica Pyramid. Site of the Egg War and shipwrecks and seal hunting, the Farallones, for as remote and pure as they seem, have only lately returned to their "quieter" natural state. They are home to pinnipeds, petrels, puffins, auklets and murres, not to mention a natural breeding grounds of the Great White Shark, and a waypoint for w

back in Oakland

Ah, the blog machine is back running here in Oakland. I was a "read only" Christmas blogger. I'm back...and the machine is whirring again. But, like most bloggers. I need my coffee. peace, kid o.

a christmas message

I've been reading some of the noxious media tripe about attempts all over, I guess, to put the "Christ" back in "Christmas".... I'm sorry, but I'm still waiting for them to put the Christ back into Christianity. ........ Let me tell you something about the Jesus that I know. He was a real man.  Born in a poor region to working poor parents.  He loved learning, he loved his mother and his father. But he left them and spent his life with the poor, the outcast, the rejected, the defiled, the sick, the sinners, the bedraggled, the bereft, the self-hating, the lonely, the banished, the foul, the miserable, the desperate and finally, those sick with their own power. He did this, not because of his ideology or his creed.  He did this not because of his doctrine.  He did this, quite simply, because he loved them.  He preferred them. He preferred their company, their stories, their lives, their environs, their plight and their faith. And they loved him.  Because

Starting with the Districts: a model for House Targeting

"It's not often that I find myself taking the moderate position," says Joshua Grossman,  SF Bay Area-based political demographer and founder of the congressional vote tracking website ProgressivePunch.org ..."but  when it  comes  to House targeting , you can call me a raging moderate ." Grossman, a committed and pragmatic progressive, says this with a twinkle in his eye...and then launches into the heart of his analysis.  "The DCCC has traditionally done targeting in such a narrowly focused manner, targeting and fully funding so few races, that the Democrats would have to draw an inside straight to take back the House...pretty much taking every seat they contest.  On the other hand, and in part in response to this narrow point of view,  the netroots has tended to choose races as if resources and political capital were in endless supply.  Too often, there's been heartbreak at the end of the rainbow for the netroots...dollars, sweat and tears have run up

Starting with the Districts: Examples and Conclusion

Take NY New York is an excellent test case for this analysis.  At great deal of netroots focus has been put on:   NY-13 , the Staten Island district of Vito Fossella (a district with a slight net registration gain by the GOP since 2004) NY-26 the district of NRCC Chairman Tom Reynolds and NY-29 the district of right wing Republican, Randy Kuhl All those districts are districts that Joshua Grossman classifies as "safe GOP" and currently likely unwinnable.  According to Joshua's analysis the voters in these NY districts are likely to act like the voters in other "Safe GOP" districts like OH-02 (Jean  Schmidt) and CA-48 (John Campbell), ie. they are likely to vote Republican even  given excellent, well-funded Democratic candidates with netroots support and third candidate challenges .  That is the flip side of this district-based model; it tells us districts where our efforts, however  well-constructed, will likely fail. In New York, Joshua's analysis i

stargate / sphinx

In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think there was a more purely happy and innocent moment in my life than, when traveling with my family on vacation through Iowa, I discovered a Stargate machine without any quarters up. I was twelve.  It was summer.  There were high school kids groping each other in the parking lot next to the mini-golf course.  (That was big in 1981: getting “on base" in public through a pair of tight blue jeans.  People forget.) At any rate, I was a video game junkie. The sound of twenty quarters spitting out of a change machine, was, quite frankly, almost sexual.  Coins on metal.  Electronic sound effects hitting my ears.  And me laying out a five-dollar bill for an afternoon’s fun.  I’m sure I blushed… ......................... Stargate was one of those Williams classics (Robotron 2084 and Stargate’s predecessor, Defender, come to mind) designed to strip quarters from kids faster than a bully’s grubby hand.  It was intimidating.  It had more fucking butt

blog notes

This blog hasn't been at it's best of late. That's pretty clear to everyone involved. Including me. There are...well...a TON of reasons for this. Not least of which is how busy I've been in my work and personal life. Regardless of any of the particulars, I think it's time for some reinvention here, if not a reinvention of how I "blog" in general. And...rrrg....I don't know exactly what that means or how to achieve that. (Though I've got some ideas cooking right now.) Part of the issue is how this blog looks and reads. Part of it how it works. Part of it is the expecations I set for you...as readers and commentors...and part of it is expectations I set for myself. All I can say is that I am making some changes...even doing some new projects...and that will involve a bit of awkward transition here or there. I want you all to know, however, that I appreciate your readership....and that my goal with this is to make something sustainable that wo

meditation

Lots of people will die tonight. One of them will be Tookie Williams. He won't be alone in that. Not on this planet. No one ever is. It just feels that way. He may be a murderer. He may not be. But he was a gang leader. If he didn't pull a trigger...he'd still be complicit in killings. Everybody knows that. Including him. But there's this odd thing about a 'Christian country' that executes people. You'd think it would be the other way around. Jesus said turn the other cheek, to forgive. Rome killed Jesus. Rome tortured his followers. And then Rome took over the religion...they put the cross on their shields. The cross was an execution device. A means of enforcing a death penalty. Americans love our guns. We shoot each other like its going out of style. But when we officially kill someone as punishment...we use a needle. Not a cruise missile, or a cluster bomb, or a round from a machine gun. America is so proud that we are a "Christian&q

Stanley Williams

The death penalty is always wrong. It's barbaric, useless. It is a waste of time and money. It sends the wrong message. It is foul. That is true if the person sentenced to death has behaved well in prison or not. If they are guilty, or not. If they have attempted to redeem themselves, or not. Today Gov. Schwarzenegger will decide whether a man should live or die. Think about that...what it says about our society....about where we are at in 2005. And more than the life of Stanley Williams, the health and safety of many other people may hang in the balance. If there is rioting and unrest, if someone else loses their life from this event...will the interest of the common good have been served? Will the families of the victims have received justice? Of course not. Stanley Williams maintains he is innocent. That may or may not be true. Regardless of that, he has spent his time in prison trying to teach a postive lesson to kids: don't get involved in gangs. Get an educ

an american character

There are many aspects to Henry Ford that come clear in Steven Watts new biography The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century not the least of which are Ford's anti-semitism , his isolationism , his pioneering adoption and perfection of the techniques of mass production , his anti-labor views and practices and, last but not least, Ford's wistful late-life fascination with Americana of the 19th-Century. This fascination was best expressed in a museum Ford built called Greenfield Village , a museum, ironically enough, representing the best collection of artifacts from pre-industrial American life...purchased and preserved, of course, with the profits from Ford's automobile factories. That is but one of the many contradictions to be found in the life of Henry Ford. Steven Watts , whose previous work includes a biography of Walt Disney, skillfully navigates the history and personality of the "man and the myth" of Henry Ford. Already a living f

a new york education

When I was eighteen years old I met an older woman in Manhattan named Ellen.  Everyone who went to my university knew her.  She was a fixture.  Like Amir’s or Mama Joy’s deli or the Cosmo restaurant.  A small, quick-moving woman always carrying two or three heavily laden bags with a voice that was pure New York...distilled through years of cigarettes and bus exhaust.  Her voice was kind of a female equivalent to Lou Reed’s: smoky, knowing, world-weary. Ellen was in her late forties.  Her politics were radical.  An advocate for the homeless.  A tireless debater.  An opponent of both Reagan and Bush and everything bourgeois.  She was an inveterate smoker.  Bipolar.  A mother of three.  A veteran of years of New York politics.  And, like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers in 1987, Ellen had no place to live.  She slept where she could.  She, too, was homeless. I’m a city kid.  I grew up in the Reagan 80’s.  Things were tough all over.  I worked in soup kitchens as a teen in the midwes

road trip

You can tell a great deal sometimes from a simple list.  a 1964 Dodge Dart, a 1974 Plymouth Valiant, a 1982 Ford Fairmont, a 1988 Chrysler Reliant K. These were the cars I grew up in, cars my dad and mom bought...“used" except for the Reliant...and the cars we drove around the center part of this continent for our family camping vacations.  Solid, reliable, affordable, if not exceptionally boring, American cars.  Cars, that nevertheless hold meaning to me: falling asleep with my sisters looking out at the stars from the back of the Dart, my dad listening to jazz on the radio of the Valiant, me learning to drive stick on the Fairmont in South Minneapolis, and, eventually, the sight of a 5-ton truck crashing through the driver’s-side window of the Reliant as I drove it on the last day of its existence (I walked away unscathed), but this is a different story… In 1986 I was 17, it was May, and my legs weren’t working right.  I’d had a cold that never quite went away, and my fingers an

a PC festival

I was a student in Paris. It was 1989. I went to the "activities coordinator" of my school and asked if she knew of anything relating to left politics. She looked at me with a quizzical smile. "You might try SOS Racism in the 11th Arrondisment...or, if you like, you could try the festival this weekend held by the Parti Communiste ." I couldn't tell from her bemused expression if that meant the festival would be full of cool people like her...or, um....not. I went to both. SOS Racisme was impressive. It was interesting to see how anti-racist politics was different in France than in New York. The two cities...and our two countries...are really worlds apart, with very different histories, activism and realities. Racism, of course, is concrete and real in both places...just with different flavors. As the link tells... SOS Racisme drew on France's Republican traditions...and its politics of human rights . At the time, opposition to Jean-Marie Le Pen

paris

I lived in Paris once. 24 Rue du Four. Between the Rue des Ciseaux and the Rue des Canettes . (That's 24 Oven street between Scissors and Duckling streets to you.) My apartment was cheap. And my landlord, Mdme. Barrère, didn't try to sell the location, which was surprising, given the neighborhood. The apartment was a chambre de bonne , a maid's room, on the sixth floor, accessed by means of what the French call an escalier en colimacon ...a snailshell staircase, or so I'm told...which meant you felt like you were walking in an eternal circle to the top floor. It was a small room...12' by 8' ...and it adjoined the restroom...shared...which consisted of two metal footprints and a basin in the floor. For amenities, I had a hot plate, a 2' by 2' shower, the world's smallest water heater...and a tiny electric radiator affixed to the wall. My window looked out over rooftops which led to...but did not afford a view of...St. Germain des Prés, the olde

open thread

What's on your mind today? Today is a beautiful day in Oakland, hope you've got the same where you are.

collapse

There's a moment driving the morning commute over the San Francisco Bay Bridge that exemplifies who we are and where we are at as a civilization. Driving through the tunnel on Yerba Buena Island in five lanes of traffic (the bridge is crossed by 280,000 vehicles a day) one can see opening up along the entire length of the first part of the western span...in one gulp...a little over one mile of jam-packed traffic sitting 300 ft. above the surface of the Bay. Before one's eyes creeps a sea of steel and rubber riding on a suspension bridge of steel and concrete...powered, built, fabricated and maintained by the burning of fossil fuels. It's something to see. And something to think about. I just finished reading Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed . Here in the Bay Area commuters on the Bay Bridge have that word....collapse...both burned in our memories , and literally present to us in the ongoing $6 Billion construction of a new east

work

Ah. Work. Left home today at 6:15 AM, got home tonight at 7:00PM. My job isn't like most people's jobs...it varies. But in one respect, what I do is singular. Many of you will see the results of one or the other of my day's work, or, since I'm most often a crew member, the part I played in it. It's weird to think how many of the images I've worked on that any individual reading this might have seen. (I've done photography long enough...that you're almost guaranteed to have seen something I've worked on...that sounds like an idle boast...but I've picked up issues of a major magazine, or driven down a freeway with billboards..and seen multiple images I've worked on....so, yes, you've seen something.) Hell, in all likelihood you have seen images that I've worked on but haven't seen myself...images for which I loaded the film, or set the light, or scouted the ad, or shot the catalog. That's kind of weird, but par for