The following is a short history of Oakland’s Miller Avenue Library written in 1996, excerpted from the registration form for the National Register of Historic Places (available in PDF form at the National Park Service website). The vacant, city-owned building is currently the site of the Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez, or the People’s Library, where […]
I wrote half of a post the other day about the Tucson shootings and related matters, but it wasn’t really coming together as I hoped, so I’ve set it aside for now. Maybe after my thoughts jangle around in my head for a little while, they’ll emerge more fully formed at some later date. Meanwhile, […]
Almost a year and a half ago I posted a photo of The Grateful Tree a few blocks from my apartment. In the intervening months, time and the elements took their usual toll, and the little tree eventually looked like it would be grateful for a bit of sprucing up itself. I walked the dog […]
I haven’t posted—or written, for that matter—any doggerel since my very first post, but since I apparently don’t have much else to say these days, I might as well. I happened to look up at the moon when I went out for my little just-before-bed dog walk last night, and this is the result. My […]
“May you live in interesting times” —Ancient chinese curse, likely apocryphal Over a year ago I posted this photograph from a vacant lot along the Oakland waterfront. One commenter suggested that it looked like a relic of the dying American economy. Another thought, more colorfully, that it was “maybe the last known hideout of a […]
“The ball is round; the game lasts 90 minutes; everything else is pure theory.” — Attributed to Sepp Herberger The World Cup begins tomorrow. This means, of course, that it’s time for romantics worldwide to abandon themselves to a monthlong orgy of self-indulgence. For most of us, this just means plopping down on barstools before […]
Thursday, February 11, 2010
It’s been a terrible week for pedestrians around here. On Tuesday alone, a woman was killed in an Oakland crosswalk by a hit and run driver, a woman crossing the street in San Francisco was killed by a city utility truck (she appears to have been in a crosswalk too), and yet another woman was […]
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
I was flabbergasted when a commenter on one of my Flickr photos back in April told me about an elementary school in San Jose which had (at the behest of the SJPD) instructed parents that bicycles “are not allowed as a means of transportation to or from school,” apparently because traffic patterns around the school […]
Friday, September 11, 2009
This painting by Gerhard Richter is my favorite piece of 9/11-related art or literature; in fact, it might be the only piece of 9/11-related art or literature that I’ve ever actually liked: I first came across it in The Atlantic about 2 years ago, and it resonates with my own changing perspective on September 11th […]
In a review of Milk in the New York Review of Books (yes, it’s from March, and yes, I’m a little behind in my reading), Hilton Als asks the following question: One may find oneself powerfully moved by the images of candles flickering on that cold November night in San Francisco, and the close-ups of […]
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If you’ve set foot in an American city in the past few decades, then you are probably familiar with hipster T-shirts. They might be regular old T-shirts, but instead of having earnest logos such as “Dysart’s Truck Stop, Bangor, ME,” they have ironic logos such as “Dysart’s Truck Stop, Bangor, ME.” The sensibility is what […]