November 2003 Archives

Thanks to shacker I just noticed that Mike Watt is playing bass with a Stooges reunion in SF this December:

iggy pop + the stooges watt gets the incredible honor of adding bass to the lendary team of iggy and the asheton brothers in some re-ignited stooge fury!

friday, december 12
part of the not so silent night at the bill graham civic auditorium
99 grove st.
san francisco, ca
(415) 974-4016

I'm already thinking of seeing Watt with Banyan this Saturday (Nov. 29, show starts at 10) at the Great American (859 O'Farrell St., SF, 415 885-0750).

(Mike Watt is on my very short "always try to see 'em" list.)

Sometime when I'm headed to the Berkeley Bowl late in the day and my digital camera's battery is charged up, I grab the cam and stick in my pocket because there are times when the parking lot of the Bowl will provide several wide vistas showing interesting East Bay cloudscapes or sunsets. There's something about the spot, a kind of wide-open crossroadslike area with a big sky overhead that often makes for fascinating images.

Pushing my cart across the parking lot on Wednesday, I noticed a purple-and-orange sunset happening down the road (I'll upload those photos later), so I paused, got out my camera, and started snapping some pictures. As I did so, I noticed a waft of clouds from overhead drifting into the sunset, so I started snapping shots up and over my head, catching segments of the wispy ribbons. Suddenly, I noticed a distinct skeletal image, a skull atop a sort of twisted body.

I couldn't believe how vivid it was. I decided it looked like skeleton riding a harley, flames or shreds of hair flowing in the wind. I briefly wondered if I was seeing an actual deliberate artwork by some local Dead head but that was clearly impossible. I looked and looked again to be sure that I wasn't imagining what I was seeing.

I also started snapping pictures because I know clouds change quickly.

It's normal for the human mind to perceive faces and other coherent images in random Brownian patterns. I realize that. I know intellectual, as a rationalist, that this was just a coincidental set of flutterings that happened to gather themselves into a freaking Rick Griffin poster in the sky.

As I kept snapping pictures I heard a black woman approach, saying something like. "Look at that! A man in the sky. It's a skeleton." As she got up to me, she asked me, "Are you a cloudwatcher? Do you see that skeleton in the sky?"

"Yeah," I said. "It's creepy. That's why I'm taking pictures." But she had already continued on and was asking the next person if they saw that man up there. I was oddly relieved that I was not the only person seeing it.

I kept taking pictures of the sunset as I pushed my cart to the curb. I passed a man selling Street Spirit at the edge of the lot, wearing a hand-me-down denim jacket with dancing bears embroidered across the shoulders. Not an uncommon sight in Berkeley, but it briefly gave me pause. Was there a message in all this, a code? Did the beggar put that image in the sky so I, a longtime Grateful Dead gomer would feel inspired to make a donation? Was he some kind of psychokinetic character out of a Jonathan Lethem novel?

I don't know. I didn't buy his paper. I wasn't moved to give this time. Superstition reared again and I wondered if the image in the sky was an omen. Should I drive especially carefully on the way home? I took a few more shots of the pattern now that it had drifted into cottony incoherence. The image was gone, but I had captured its soul in my magic box, and another human being had seen it the same way while it was happening, so I'm not crazy, right?

The picture at the top of this entry links to a halfsize image of the Harley-riding skeleton-man. I've uploaded the original picture of the sky-spectre as well. It's only about 300 K since it's mainly blue with some white.''

I've posted a gallery of photos from a recent geek dinner in San Francisco, as well a series of food and drink shots, some Halloween pumpkins, and a nighttime shot of the Bay Bridge over at my photo log, Mr. Spontaneous.

Although you're hacking out the future in RDF, you realise that all technology boils down to dating in the end.

What social software are you?

Scot Hacker asks the musical question, What was your first record?

My older sister had the Partridges record he depicts (as well as a few others - all of them?), but the first record I bought myself was Kiss Destroyer, an LP that by pure coincidence was given to me for my birthday last week, years after I had sold it to the Princeton Record Exchange along with all my other Kiss albums out of embarassment (a decision I later regretted, of course, both for the irony value of the Kiss LPs as well as out of shame for denying my own roots).