wake up!

hackday stage
Originally uploaded by xian.

I’m going to name the robots Foo and Bar. We still haven’t announced the musical act that will be performing on this stage tonight.

So far I’ve heard Cody Simms and Neal Sample (Cody and Neal, hmmm….) give a great overview of YOS (with great visuals by Micah Laaker), and am now listening to Allen Rabinovich explain how to hack with Flash and Flex.

At 2pm I’ll be talking about patterns and stencils and how they can help coders build better interfaces.

I just heard today about Not Just A Number, a community journalism project coproduced by the Oakland Tribune and InsideBayArea.com.

It endeavors to tell the real human stories of Oakland homicide victims, rather than letting them become merely statistics.

The site speaks for itself, and I feel like I might be cheapening it by talking about how it works technically (there are maps that show murder sites that lead to multimedia testimonials about the victims, and so on, but how it works isn’t really the point).

It just seems like the right sort of response (among many) to one of the worst crises in my adopted home town. It’s not like it solves the problem, of course, but it feels like a way to keep the humanity in the picture. I wonder if a similar approach could be applied to other, possibly more positive, community needs?

After I posted about that Louise Nevelson exhibit at the de Young museum and seeing the model for the sculpture near my parents’ apartment at 92nd and Park Ave in New York, my sister scanned and emailed me a photo of the four of us siblings posing in front of the sculpture, circa 1974.

(The image above links to a much larger version, not quite as cropped.)

From left to right, handlewise, that’s xifer, moo, xourmas, and xian. I’m making a muscle and entertaining xourmas. moo is, I believe, pretending to smoke a cigarette and not making a vulgar British gesture. xifer is looking stylish in her coat.

Yes, we really dressed that mod back then.

So yesterday B and I went into SF in the afternoon to visit our friends D and P and get some cultcha. We went to the deYoung museum in Golden Gate Park and took in the Louise Nevelson exhibit.

For some reason I did not know who Nevelson was. I read her bio on the large placard and started looking at her mostly wood sculptures, but she was unfamiliar to me. A gap in my art education. I liked her work a lot, her way of using found scrap wood and then painting it all matte black (later white and still later gold) and then assembling it into towering cubes of surfaces, patterns, shadow and depth. I liked her obvious cubism influences and her prints and drawings.

When looking at a wooden piece (shown above) called Model for Night Presence IV, I suddenly did a double take. I knew this work, or at least the work it was a study for. Night Presence IV is in fact a huge metal sculpture situated on Park Avenue (in the middle of the boulevard) at 92nd street, the intersection nearest to my parents’ apartment.

I never really liked that sculpture much. It’s a muddy brown color and the scale is kind of oppressive. Also, we were young when we moved up there (it had only been dedicated, it turns out, a year earlier), and it’s not quite the right size for climbing on, especially when compared to Hans Christian Andersen or the Mad Hatter in Central Park.

The shapes were incomprehensible to me as well, but looking at the small wooden sculpture I liked it very much. I could see that the cut round pieces of wood were from balustrades or carpentry. The wavy columns looked sensuous and inviting. The shape harmonious overall. Was it simply a matter of scale? Looking at a photo of the large sculpture (and consulting the memory imprinted in my mind) the proportions seem different, but is that simply a matter of foreshortening and perspective or did she truly alter the design when going from the wooden model to the metal final version?

Also, will I now appreciate and even like the sculpture next time I’m visiting at home, now that I know who made it and how it was made? Only time will tell.

Well it took nearly forever, but I’ve finally got all my photos from my trip to Oaxaca posted to Flickr. I organized them into umpteen sets by event and then collected those all together into one master collection, linked from earlier in this sentence. The badge in this entry points to the same photos except because the badges don’t work with collections yet it does so by pointing to a unique tag applied to all the photos.

I have stories to tell from the trip as well, but one thing at a time.

UPDATE: for some reason the Flash badge I tried inserting is breaking here in my blog even though the code for it seems to work in a number of other test situations. I’m looking into that now. Meanwhile, I’ve tried making a non-Flash badge and inserting that above in the hopes that that will resolve the problem. In the meantime I’m pasting in the code for the non-working Flash badge below until I get things sorted.

UPDATED UPDATE: Well the other badge broke too. Some conflict between the CSS for the blog and for the badge, I bet. Oh well. I added a sample picture above and am parking the code for both badges below, which will render as a long hash string until or unless I figure out a way to make them work.

UPDATED UPDATED UPDATE: Even the broken badge code seemed to be breaking the rest of my blog, so I’ve removed it for now.

Posting over low bandwidth. Consider this photo a down payment toward a great deal more imagery and tales to come.

This is one of the many artworks, most with religious themes, decorating the hotel I stayed in my first night in Oaxaca, the Hostal de la Noria.

UPDATE: (or del, I have to doublecheck that) thanks Alex!

The Illuminated Corridor meets the Internet Archive. What does that even mean? To find out, I went to the source, Oakland artist, musician, and impresario Suki O’Kane:

wake up!: What is the Illuminated Corridor?

Suki O’Kane: The Illuminated Corridor is a next step in outdoor cinema: a nomadic public art installation that creates site-specific illumination of public space, drawing on local traditions of film and live music. Using the model of temporary public art intervention, we mask street lighting and relight facades with projected video and film, accompanied by live musical performance.

Launched in the Summer of 2005 and involving a collaboration of over 75 Bay Area filmmakers, media artists, sound artists and musicians, the Illuminated Corridor catalyzes new work, showcases diverse collaborations between performative projectionists and performing artists, and covers a vast territory of film and music genres.

That sounds really interesting. How do people respond to it?

They perambulate, mostly, caught in the various gravitational pulls of the simultanous work the way folks are drawn to, or driven from, works in a gallery setting. Two unique things happen: the viewers walk among the performers who are set up in the middle of the street, unmediated by stage or velvet rope; and the view is not traditional. No projection screen or makeshift shower rod proscenium is used. The image goes directly onto facades, which absorb and reflect in very different ways, bitten by age, use and grime.

We’ve been asked, and by as many artists as audience members, why we would permit light to get swallowed up by the facades when we could cloak, Christo-stylee and light a place up like, well, Christmas. We might someday, but for now we’re confusing matters by experimenting with the perception of where illumination is coming from in a Corridor. Is it what the artists are applying? or is it what the facades are releasing?

How many times have you done this before?

We are Number Six. From the original Bayennale version at Jack London Square to the encyclopedic circus of Oakland Ironworks we moved to an exquisite corpse model: a righteous cut-up of Vertigo outside the LAB built from a deft edit of the film by Sarah Lockhart and assignment of notes from Bernard Hermann’s score. We reconvened at the spiritual home of the IllCorr, 21 Grand Art Gallery, in the Fall of 2006 with Mobility, a themed performance that asked artists to consider the range of meaning in the word: from the darkened lot of Saturns to the creeping gentrification of Northgate to the iconic story of 21 Grand itself, displaced three times yet continuing to grow as a central force in Oakland arts.

Then, with enormous irony, we were the inaugural performance on The Great Wall of Oakland, an 8-story windowless facade addressable only from the rooftop of the Broadway Grand, a condo project that evicted and razed 21 Grand as a first step in realization. Good Times, which they were, was the name of the piece we commissioned local composer Dan Plonsey to create for an eight-piece string ensemble.

What’s the theme this time?

Prelinger on Prelinger. This Corridor seeks to illuminate the Prelinger Library, a private research library open to the public with collections encompassing some 50,000 books, periodical volumes and printed ephemera. The Library is linked to the Prelinger Archive, a collection of ephemeral films that are a key creative resource to artists of the Illuminated Corridor, and serve as a touchstone for the broader community of film, sound and bricolage artists. For many of the artists participating in this Corridor, it’s a love letter to the Prelingers for their contributions to the creative commons, their stewardship of the artifact, and their encouragement of appropriation and associative discovery.

The Corridor will take place during the Library’s traditional Wednesday Open House evening hours, where we are inviting people to lose themselves in the stacks of an extraordinary library turned inside out for an evening.

Why? No really. Why why why?

Corridors have a lot of subjects in them: public art, expanded cinema, intermedia, cultural intervention and reclamation, and this particular Corridor is meant to press questions straight from archive.org: how do we protect our right to know and our right to remember. But we try to never forget that it is simply fun to watch movies outside with the neighbors. Innocent, ad Hoc, unfiltered, community-based, with a transgressive overtone (we were meant to use the building to hold the contents, but we’re using it to show some cinema), it’s hard to walk away from a Corridor without feeling like you just got away with something. We want to transform these spaces, so that when we all return there in the course of our normal day, we can never see it in the same way again. Ephemerally imbued. Like that.

~~

So there you have it. The Illuminated Corridor, a collision of public art, live music and film, next happening on Octoer 3, at the Prelinger Library, bounded by Eighth, Folsom and Rodgers Streets in San Francisco, CA.

Seaside Jazz Fest 2007
Originally uploaded by andytnisbet.

B’s brother Andy took this really nice picture of my sweetie and me. We spent Sunday down in Seaside (right next door to Monterey). Good food, great people, fantastic music (with a rotating cast of players), not too many speeches, birthday wishes to B’s sister Peg, anniversary memories of B’s mom, cold weather, no sunburn, fine beverages, did I mention the good food?

UPDATE: Andy’s photo above links to all of his photos from the party at Flickr. You can also see B’s photos from the same event there.

The talented Lisa Williams has launched Placeblogger: PressThink: Check out Placeblogger.com. It’s About All Those Hyperlocal News Sites Springing Up…

…via George, who pointed out the article in Poynter wherein it is written

[…] Today, Lisa Williams debuted Placeblogger, an online resource that lists and showcases placeblogs — so far 713 from around the U.S., with a few scattered elsewhere around the globe. What’s a placeblog? Williams defines it as “an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time. It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution. It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism. It’s about the lived experience of a place.” Her own community site for Watertown, Mass, H20town, is an example of a placeblog. […]

(emphasis added), noting that I (or really Adrian Chan) had once speculated on this site that identity might in some sense, at least online, be equated with “attention over time.”

(George will be on my “Every Breath You Take” panel at South by Southwest this year and we’ll be talking about identity online, as well as attention, privacy, trust, and presence. Got to remember to add the “see me speak at SXSW” badge sometime soon.)

Jim Goldstein was up in Alaska in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge recently and brought back these photographs.

He says, “A conservative friend asked me, ‘Is ANWR as really as ugly as they say it is? This alarmed me a great deal after having one of the best photo trips I’ve taken to date. The beauty of ANWR is almost unparalleled.”

Jerry Brown is blogging. He is also running for attorney general of the state of California. He is also the mayor of Oakland.

I voted for him in the California primary in 1992.

He still has the generic TypePad design.

Welcome!

I woke up at 4:30 am on Monday for a 5 o'clock pick up to get to the airport by 5:30 for a 6:15 flight. As it was Monday morning, the security lines were incredibly long, but I had no problem making my flight (on Sky West, which shuttles for Delta). My plane on both legs (lay over in Salt Lake City) was tiny. I think I saw Buddy Holly piloting the first one.

It was snowing and cold in Salt Lake as we deplaned onto the tarmac and I managed to get some breakfast (a croissant with eggs, ham, and cheese; plus coffee) and read the Times while waiting for my next leg. I slept as much as I could but still arrived in New Mexico wiped out. It was cloudy but warm when I got into Albuquerque, but it got a lot colder during the evening - no thermostat in my hotel room as far as I can tell.

My original reason for arriving in town two and a half days in advance of the conference was to catch up on things with a good friend and colleague, ngm, but sadly he had a family emergency and couldn't make the trip, so I've been bumming around town on my own for the past few days, getting my wireless fix at Starbuckses and generally wishing I had packed a warm coat.

If I can make it to Santa Fe tonight, I will. Otherwise, it's more HBO and fast-ish food. (There's a Denny's right next door to my hotel.)

I'm headed to Albuquerque early this morning for a pop culture conference that starts later this week. I'll blog from the site assuming connectivity is adequate.

A month or so ago my city council representative, Danny Wan, resigned to take a better-paying position with the Port of Oakland.

Justin Horner, the chief of staff for city councilmember Jane Brunner, is one of the candidates for the seat in the special election. He's also a neighbor of mine. He came by knocking on doors a few weeks ago and we talked about the Dean campaign. He had hosted a houseparty as a volunteer for Dean and raised a lot more money than he had expected, which planted the seed in his mind that it might not be far-fetched to run himself.

I'd like to know more about the other candidates running, so this event I read about on the Well looks like something I should try to attend:

Another date to put in your calendar is Monday, February 28. Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church's sanctuary will be the site of a District 2 Council seat Candidate's Night to be coordinated by the League of Women Voters beginning at 7 PM. If you can't attend that evening, the League is also hosting a debate later in the week at City Hall that will be broadcast on KTOP.

(thanks to the Dead) World66: visitedStates

Wow, I haven't done too much of the world traveling I had in mind.

(via camilo's Mercurial)

You can create your own visited country map, which is part of some new (in beta) collaborative travel guide called World66 ("the travel guide you write").

B commented on how it seems that numerous people we know have bought houses in the Brooklyn area on the south side of Lake Merritt (between Lake Shore and Park Boulevard). We live in a strangle little interstitial rhombus, bounded roughly by Oakland High on Park Blvd., Highland Hospital over on 14th. Ave., 580, the great class-divider in Oakland, between hills flats, high foothills and low foothills, the old MacArthur Boulevard route that turned Oakland into a commuter throughway, its traditional thoroughfares reduced to snaking over and underpassing the concrete, and some arbitrary point around 27th or 24th Street, in what used to known as the San Antonio area - probably a former ranch.

The patch between Park Blvd. and the Lake is more fashionable than our multiculti enclave, but they're not too far apart. If you include the lately bustling Lake Shore area on the near side of the Grand Lake Thetre and the Trestle Glen / Glenview area near Park Blvd. above 580 (sometimes known as "baja Piedmont"), you've got a nice little thing going on.

I'm calling this rough area South Lake to give it some geographical context around Lake Merritt, which is the geographical focus of Oakland for me as well as, of course, not actually being a lake.

I just bolted off the couch when a very sudden sharp earthquake (rather vertical in its motion) flashed through our house. It was followed by some rapid juddering that shook the chandelier. Apparenlty it was about a 5.0 (felt like more) and centered near Piedmont (no wonder, that's just a mile or so from here). Talk about panic. I was up in a flash and my heart is still racing.

I'm really happy to be home. It's even hot here but not swamply like the big apple.

My trip was great, really invigorating. Even got two small shreds of writing (posted over at Infinite Work with the dates and times close approximations of when they were written) out of the trip, as well as a lot of great meals and get-togethers with old and new friends (and family), including my mom and dad, one of my brothers, his wife, and his 11-month-old boys, a java programmer who was a painter when we first met, a telecom dude who's also a poet, a writer and journalist who used to work on Wall St., the web designer who maintains my server and has a famous music collection, two writers who run a literary web site, a writer with big ideas about ontologies and data structures and storytelling, and the editor of an amazing art magazine who plans to finish his dissertation some day.

I missed seeing another up-and-coming writer by just a hair, but I'll try to catch him next time.

Mixed in with those were college friends and roommates, antiwebbers from the early days of creative experimentation on the web, Dead Heads, and some younger writers who are so talented it sometimes scares me.

Now, all I have to do is finish this book and that seminar and I can take it easy the rest of the summer, trying to figure out new ways to stay cool.

The only night I had unbooked during my brief New York jaunt tis summer was last night (Friday). That's probably not surprising, since this whole thing was short notice and that's the night people were most likely to already have plans. After a nice dinner with my parents at home, I looked through some entertainment listings and saw that the Greg Osby Four were playing at Birdland, the legendary nightclub.

I caught his 11 pm set, and it was great. I'd heard of Osby but never heard him perform live. I'd recommend his group to anyone who likes adventurous jazz somewhere on the spectrum from bebop to contemporary, difficult but melodic. It often seemed like the drummer, stand-up bass player, pianist, and Osby on alto were all playing in different time signatures, but somehow it worked.

It was so nice out even around 1:30 or so when I came out of the club, balmy and warm, that I decided to stroll around Times Square a bit. No longer the thrilling furtive cesspit of my youth, the area is now something akin to Fisherman's Wharf, with arcades, wax museums, and other tourist-y attractions. Lots of people out at that time of night, many of them young - teenagers or young adults, all ethnicities, all nationalities. Plenty of tourists, of course.

This beautiful young Italian woman walking with her tall handsome boyfriend stopped me and asked me they way to Times Square.

"You're in it," I said.

They looked puzzled.

"Was there something specific you were looking for?" I asked, trying to be helpful.

They looked at each other, hesitated for a moment, and then both said, "the square."

"Oh," I said, thinking quickly. "There is no square."

They still looked confused. "This is all you get," I said. Then I headed off for the subway.

Later I wondered if I should have pointed them toward the giant famous neon intersection at Broadway and 7th, but I still think they would have been disappointed. There's nothing in Times Square like the plazas you find in Italian cities.

This morning I was talking to B about this, and our conversation ranged from the history of Times Square to Herald Square to Union Square, to Union Square and Washington Square in San Francisco, and to other intersections and roundabouts, such as Piccadilly Circus in London, which we'd visited once, the night we ate at the Metropole during the mad cow square and the entire wait staff thanked me vigorously for ordering the calf's liver.

I mentioned how the circus in Piccadilly is the roundabout itself (what they to call a traffic circle in New Jersey), and that there's no circus there in the sense we mean today when talking about Barnum and Bailey (coincidentally, my father mentioned that P.T. Barnum used to have a hippodrome where Union Square in New York is located now).

"There's no circus in Piccadilly Circus," I said to B. "There's no square in Times Square...."

"Isn't that a Cole Porter song?" she said, reading my mind.

"If not," I said, "it should be."

So kiss me and cry for me, I'm leaving on a jetblue plane today, flying from OAK to JFK, getting it late tonight east-coast time.

Announcing my travel plans in my blog worked like a charm. People got in touch. I have plans. Usually I get into town and then find out that everyone is in the Hamptons or in Cabo or wherever these rich New Yorkers who used to be stoners go.

Hey, and it looks like I may get to meet Paul Ford, one of my personal heroes. w00t!

Eat your heart out, Gwen! I'm just keeding!

I'll be in town for a week. Greg S., did we pick a time yet? I'll still have email, cellphone, etc. in town, thanks to my parents' Roadrunner cable modem (meep meep). Anyone else, give me a ring if you want to see if we can still squeeze something in.

Otherwise, there's always next time, or maybe bothering to come out to California some time, huh?

I told B to start reading my weblog so I guess I may keep blogging while in NY. Photoblogging would be the fun way to go. I should make a category just for B, but then creepy voyeurs would watch. Or I could password-protect it and label it "B only - keep out!" so no one would complain when challenged for a password. Or just go back to using LiveJournal for sterile modern pseudopersonal electronic mediated interaction with my significant other [to be read by Stephen Hawking's vocoder].

Anyone who thinks cats can't speak should have seen the Fraidy just made me open the front door to let her out because she's too lazy to walk down the back steps to the open back door.

What I'll be missing:

Deadlines have killed my urge to blog lately. I've been in more of an unblogging mood. But news that Gwen's Ladies (and Gents) Who Lunch is having its long promised post-work happy hour edition this week, Wednesday night have got me back typing into this here teeny text box.

Teaser at Finally, a happy hour we can all be proud of. Details to appear Monday. I expect to be there.

Rich Frankel's got foxgloves coming up everywhere.

A week ago today, before I realized how sick I was getting, I made it down to downtown Oakland for (second?) Oakland bloggers' (and auxiliary) luncheon at the Pacific Coast Brewery, aka Ladies (& Gents) Who Lunch (or: A much-needed excuse to leave the house).

What a great gang of folks, some familiar to me from their web presences, other delightful to meet for the first time in any medium!

I will steal Gwen's HTML to deliver some hyperlinked shout-outs:

George, Bob, Adrienne, Robyn, Jhames, Gareth, Lisa, Ben, Min Jung, co-Nonchalance-ateer Melissa, Lara from Oaklog, Starmama, Jessica, Joe (archive), his site-less (!) friend Joe, and a too-brief appearance by [her] luscious boy.

It was nice connecting with Adrienne, who was once my contracts contact at one of my publishers and who came bearing a copy of ZZ Packer's short story collection, which she will be reviewing for Salon.

It was a great time. What awesome people orbiting this cool little city. Supposedly, the next event will be a happy hour, and I hope I have my drinking legs back by then (a week from now?).

I snapped some pictures and, as I occasionally do, accidentally shot a snippet of movie footage as well, which I've thrown together into a quick-and-dirty photo album with Dreamweaver.

I think I followed Scot's link to Justin Hall's environs and ended up at the Beast Blog ("Because East Bay is Pig Latin for Beast"), reading about this Oaklandish logo:

A deco tree with big branches and big roots both - "Oaklandish." I first saw it on a sticker in the window of Walden Pond books on Grand Avenue. There's a web site, Oaklandish, run by Nonchalance.org. There's good browsing there: Oakland history from Native American "Temescal" sweat lodges to hip-hop. East Bay grafitti coverage. Pictures of memorable Oakland signs. And tales of other misadventures: slide projecting hometown heroes onto freeway underpasses. And things to buy: Oakland smart-art-boostering posters and buttons, a local history reading list.

All sorts of pride rendered in media that's not ironic or too spare, but rather luscious, rich and local. This group seems to be fighting the sad side of Oakland's underclass identification by commending urban beauty. I admire their agitprop style and perseverance. Read SF Chronicle coverage of the Nonchalance Collective. And if all that wasn't enough, there's an affiliated OakTownUnderground online event listings service.

I'd like to see Oakland-based or Oakland-related blogs and websites tied together more easily or cross-referenced more thoroughly. Lazyweb?