Twelfth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues

How to slice it

How to slice it. To find the angle. I want to tell a story, to take you on a journey full of wit and insight. To show the world and myself what I’m capable of. To create something fine. To feel that in the instance of creation, I ably rode the waves of thought and chance that normally drown us. And I emerged with a mirror that pefectly shone back on me and the world.

Yet here comes the turn. I’ve chosen to do this online, on this blog. People will actually read this. Who knows how many, but I’ve learned to assume that people will read. That everyone from my boss to my mortgage broker will see this. That every word could end up on Boing boing. That’s how this works online. But my dream (see two posts below) told me it’s OK. Go ahead and write. You need this right now.

So I’m an X-wing fighter slicing the Death Star trying to find the angle. I don’t want to reveal too many details that could be seen by co-workers and other colleagues. I cover politics and am circulating in that world now so I don’t want to reveal my political sympathies. I don’t want to say anything too personal that would cause online embarrassment.

But I want to do everything mentioned in that first paragraph. It would seem the two forces contradict each other, that anything interesting would necessarily cause online embarrassment or be seen as inappropriate. Do I want people to know that I really liked the new documentary “The Tillman Story?” Does that mean I’m a liberal anti-George W. Bush-ite? What if I mentioned that I was writing this on the train from the Bay Area to Sacramento? Wait a minute, why are you on a train from the Bay Area?

Am I being narcissistic? Does anyone really care? Maybe not, but I’ve learned to always be on guard. I’ve got some ideas though...

Back in Blogsville

Well, Jack seems to have reactivated this blog and all his posts are showing up on my Facebook page where my friends are commenting approvingly, but thinking I wrote them _ despite the fact that I'm not in San Diego or haven't broken up with anyone in over 15 years. So Jack's doing some good stuff, but it ain't me. I still kind of like the idea of getting back to blogging and I will but right now I just wanted explain what was going on with my Facebook feed which I am now trying to disable.

Best,
Michael

Journey to the Heart of Party

San Diego! Who knew? I had wrapped up a day interviewing Republicans, listening to Meg Whitman and Damon Dunn, writing blogs and stories when I and several other journalists at the California Republican Party convention realized we hadn’t eaten dinner yet. How about it then? Would something still be open at 11 at night? None of us wanted to stay inside the hotel where we’d been cooped up all day.

A group was formed, and a plan hatched. Meg Whitman’s campaign was having drinks somewhere in the Gaslamp neighborhood a few blocks away. That’s where we headed, uncertain whether we’d end up back at the hotel anyway, begging for an after-hours meal.

Although I grew up in the Los Angeles suburbs, San Diego had long been a mystery to me, actually, a place not worth thinking about. I had visited when I was 5-years-old and then again last September, when I rented a car for a trip to Baja California. On that last visit, I noted the city’s busy skyline and crystalline, ocean sunshine – an extension of sorts of Orange County with its clean lines and blond, laid-back fog. I remembered the middle-aged couple that rented me the car, hanging around their lot in tank tops and flip flops, as if life was one big barbecue. I instinctively distrusted this lack of edge, this easygoing amble, although the couple seemed nice enough. I knew this world. I’d grown up with it in my Los Angeles suburb. And just as I had no desire to move back home, San Diego seemed familiar in a brain-numbing way.

So that's what I imagined I’d encounter as I left the hotel’s opulent lobby with about a dozen colleagues. The downtown streets were empty – the sidewalks and glass-and-steel towers glowing orange from the streetlights. Turning onto Market Street seemed to confirm our fears that San Diego was closed for business. Yet we pushed on, in hopes of at least finding some fast food to fill our stomachs.

The first signs that a whole unimagined world awaited us were two drunk girls in black minidresses struggling to stay standing on the sidewalk as their boyfriends or escorts for the night or whatever patiently waited. The girls taunted each other and the world in piercing screeches – “Look at how drunk you are! Hey, let me smell your cologne!” I felt an animal-like sense of danger. These women in their Friday night glory and their boyfriends were capable of anything. I recognized this sensation – I had felt it growing up in suburban Los Angeles, when young men and women of the same party-hardy ilk, although sober, had ceaselessly taunted me with various Asian racial epithets. I steeled myself for such an assault. Happily, our group passed the pair without incident. What would I have done this time around if it had happened? I was probably too tired to avenge old injustices that night.

As it turns out, those girls were but sentries for an entire sloppy world of vodka shots, booming SUV sound systems and backward baseball caps. I’d discovered the city’s soul, I thought, as we walked past bar after bar packed with co-eds gripping Silver Bullets and freaking each other on the dance floor. Hordes of buzzed young men in their out-on-the-town collared shirts formed a rowdy gauntlet on the sidewalks, pummeling us with stares as we passed. “Hey, she’s cute!” one said about someone in our group.

Strangely, the enormous drunken crowds that stretched on for blocks reminded me of carnaval in Brazil. Except in Brazil, I mostly felt like a visitor to the party, an observer, which made all the urine and malevolence picturesque back there. In San Diego, I knew these people, had once partied with them, been taunted by them, still circulated among them. I could imagine what their apartments and houses looked like and exactly how their cars or trucks were tricked out.

We eventually found our way to a restaurant still open for the night and probably too expensive and quiet for the party crowd. Settling into my seat, with the party outside, I felt like I had survived a trek through all my high school yearbooks. I had earned my shrimp pesto angel hair that night.

Photo: BrokenSphere

I had a dream...

More than a year has passed since I last wrote here. I ended things then at a properly melancholic note. It was a mournful time for me - a bad break-up, questionable career choices, culture shock at being back in the United States. I'd been content to let the blog sit - a sad time capsule of a tumultuous period. Oh yeah, there was also that episode where one of my blogs caused a stir at my company - further incentive to let it rest.

But I just had a dream about 10 minutes ago. In it, I was renting a room in a big estate somewhere in the forest and a drum troupe dressed in crescent-shaped Brazilian Lampiao hats were pounding away in a neighbor's patch of forest while my angry roommates threw spears at them (I watched part of "Spartacus" last night) - anyway, the important thing is that in this dream, I was also writing a blog. This blog, in fact. And I was excited about it. All kinds of people were contributing to it. Michael too.

Two days ago, I was rereading a blog I had written while covering the Beijing Olympics and was struck by how alive I sounded in it. I pulled off some good jokes, connected the dots, wrote about the Chinese security apparatus with a startling fearlessness. I'd like to find that guy again, I thought to myself. I miss him.

So the dream is telling me to recapture that spirit here. Keep the magic alive.

What will I write about? How to walk that thin line between privacy and too much disclosure? Will I even follow through?

Anyone out there at all reading this: Stay tuned.

33 1/3

I remember that fateful Sunday in early February when I met up with Michael and his family for lunch in Brooklyn. That's when I told him about my plans to move back to the Bay Area and take a job at my current newspaper. Michael sounded skeptical.

"I just want to have all my stuff in one place," I told him. "I want to listen to my records."

"So you listen to your records and then what?" Michael asked me.

I thought for a second. "Then I'll listen to more records."

Such was the thought process back then and here I am, nearly four months later. Just a few weeks ago, I finished compiling the components to my new sound system, and yes indeed I'm listening to my records. So was it worth it, you ask? That's a hard question to answer. But I am enjoying my records.

I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska," which I played probably all of once back before I went to Brazil. This time around, I'm connecting to the Boss for some reason, to the loneliness of the record, the desolate tales of violence. I was about a mile away when Springsteen performed at the Lincoln Memorial before the inauguration and basically watched him on the Jumbotron screens and was impressed by his agonized howling, his body jerking up and down in the cold, him just unloading into the microphone. "Nebraska" is much different from that performance with its gospel choir and such, but it's designed to haunt and it's haunting me.

I've enjoyed my cassette tapes too. Miles Davis, for example, sounds great after four years in storage, and I was grooving to Workin' With the Miles Davis Quintet the other night. I haven't really sat down and listened to Miles for years. So sitting there in the semi-dark listening to him float from my JBL speakers, that dude seduced me all over again. His tight, bad-ass control of the instrument, his muted tone swooping and diving, sounding like a whisper on the low end and a child on the high, his precise, lethal phrasing.

I've also listened to Robyn Hitchcock, Bob Dylan and the Band, Brian Eno and Harold Budd, Throwing Muses, a lot of the Byrds. I play one record and then I play another.

The Scene Replayed

Consuming the news today about the Air France crash brought back some scary deja vu. My 3 1/2 years in Brazil were marked by disastrous crashes and air traffic meltdowns, and this flight was traveling from Rio to Paris when it plunged into the Atlantic. During my time in Brazil, there were two major airplane crashes, a mid-air collision involving a plane flying from Manaus to Brasilia and then on to Rio and another plane that crashed while landing in Sao Paulo.

I remember driving to and from the airport in Rio countless times and admiring the big white Air France planes sitting on the tarmac, admiring how unadorned they looked, just a big white fuselage and the blue and red stripes on the tail, free from all the curlicues and adornments other airlines' planes wore. It's likely I saw the very plane that plunged yesterday at the airport several times in Rio.

Then there was the plane that crashed in Sao Paulo. Soon after that happened, through some sleuthing, I figured out I had been on that very plane just two days before, flying from Foz de Iguacu to Rio.

When I moved to South America, I had no feelings one way or another about flying. But living there while planes were plunging and the air traffic system was melting down instilled in me a certain uneasiness with planes. I had no problems with takeoffs or landings, but the mid-air bouncing would bring out the flop sweat.

So today, as I read about the Air France crash, and imagined the very plane I saw at Rio's airport tossed around in that electric storm and then diving, well, it brought back that old feeling. How many times had I seen the same pictures of weeping relatives awaiting the sad news about their relatives at Galeao? And how many times had I studied the map of Brazil with the X where the plane went down?   

Dusk or Dawn

Last night, I attended the East Bay Press Club's awards dinner, and the tenor of the evening was what had I expected it to be. More of a wake than a celebration. Several of the award winners had been recently laid-off or taken buyouts. Many of the conversations revolved around the grim future of journalism.

It'd been about five years since I last attended the dinner, and the turnout this time was noticeably smaller. There were many more categories, such as for best online news site, graphics and multimedia presentations, which meant pretty much everyone there won something. That also provides me with a nice segue to the title of this blog entry.

While the signs all around us tell us this is the end of an era, the hope I heard from several journalists last night was that it might also be the start of something. What that might be, of course, no one has any idea. Whether that new something would provide a decent living for journalists or support in-depth reporting and writing, also no clue. No one was even sure if there'd be a next something beyond what exists today. And what exists now means a lot more unemployed journalists.

But there was still hope. One former colleague was diving into multi-media and excited to break out of the newspaper mold. There's also this great article in San Francisco magazine this month about the green shoots sprouting around the region. Hyper-local journalism. Nonprofit outfits.

Then again, I've also heard several reporters talking about getting out of the biz for good, which would be totally understandable. It's hard to come up with a 5-year plan much less a 6-month plan these days.

So are we looking at a dusk or a dawn? No answers last night, only questions and lots of beer. But hope hasn't died yet.

My Jeff Koons Moment

It doesn't get much cuter than this, now does it? This is my dog Zim Dollar (good looking but essentially worthless) surrounded by fallen cherry blosoms in Prospect Park. Zim was good enough to pose to for this picture. All in all, he's a pretty good dog. The only annoying habit he has is that he basically follows me everywhere I go in the house. If I get up he gets up if I go back to get something he goes back with me, my friend Doug says it may be because he still confused by all the moving we've been doing and thinks he's going to be abandoned. Sera? In any case he didn't follow me around like this when we lived in Brazil. Prospect Park has been a bonanza for Zim. He can run free before 9:00 a.m. in this field not too far from the house and he can also run free at night. One thing that's changed since I left town is that you can walk through the park 'cause it ain't crazy after dark no more. Well, the other night I biked around Prospect Park and on the northeast corner there were a lot of large gentlemen just standing by themselves in the bushes _ smoking herb I suspect, but no one bothered with me so whatever.

Prospect Park is alot more relaxed than Central Park and Brooklyn in general is a lot more relaxed than Manhattan: they don't really shovel the snow off the streets, some dog owners don't even pick up their dog's poop. But I saw something in the Daily News calling Park Slope the new Greenwich Village. They said it in a derrogatory way, but in many ways it feels to me like the West Village used to feel in the late 1970s _ forget about it nowadays. There's just this happening feel I like, the times have certainly changed there is a more young professional vibe and big emphasis on families, maybe not as many artists, but there's nice mix especially over by the South Slope where it blends into Windsor Terrace.

I was going to write some boring stuff about banks and executive compensation but I'm just feeling the spring vibe too much to get indignant and I'll save that for another post.

How Much Art Can You Take?

When I was just a lil youngin' thing, back in the day, I actually managed to get into CBGB. That was pretty impressive since the drinking age back then was 18 and I was only 13. For all it's reputation, though, CBGB was pretty much a dump. Sure you could see great bands once in a while and you could usually find Joey Ramone making out with some skinny pimple-faced chick he just picked up, just because he could and because she looked just like him. But it wasn't much of a place on an off night _ usually some prog rock band from New Jersey playing for five or six friends and relatives. The first night I went there was this band playing called The Mumps. They were getting pretty good reviews around that time but I didn't learn their back story until later: The singer Lance Loud had been part of the that proto-reality show "An American Family." The show followed a family around and filmed them and showed the compacts on Public Television in the late 1960s or early 1970s or something. During the filming young Lance managed to come out of the closet on TV which may or may not have been a good thing, I seem to remember hearing somewhere he committed suicide but I may be wrong.



Anyway, you can imagine a 13 year old kid at CBGB to watch the Mumps live and I was pretty excited. The only thing I really remember though was this song that went "How much art can you take? How much art can you take? How much art can you take?" Each time he sang the lines he enunciated them a little differently but you get the point.



I myself have a very high tolerance for art. My wife, who is playing Carol Marol for me in these pix, may not. Oh she likes art and all, but when she was growing up on the farm back in Bahia, her father used to say, "Daughter, stopping doing art," by which he meant stop fooling around. For him art was a fool's game. He may be right in the country. But, as someone once pointed out to my wife, in the city, fools can make a lot of money with their art. My wife is especially fond of Basquiat and Kiefer and Dali and has at various points in her life threatened to purchase a canvas by one or the other, without a fraction of the funding needed to do so. When she sees art she doesn't like she'll often say something like: "I wouldn't want to have that in our living room," or "why would any one want something like that in their living room." I've tried to explain to her that not only do you not buy works by Kiefer, Dali or Basquiat unless you're mega-rich and that the sole purpose of art is not to decorate the living room. It's something to think about and that's what you take home with you, anyway that's what you do if you're po'.



Which brings me to the recent art show "Street Art" featuring my friend Linus Coraggio plus Ken Hiratsuka, Paolo Buggani and, yes there were even a few works by, Keith Haring. We have a big painting by Linus up in our living room that he gave us as a wedding present and if you walk outside our house you maybe able to glimpse a bit of it. This may be where my wife derived the idea of art as something you put in your living room. Linus doesn't do many paintings though, mostly he does sculptures, mostly chairs and more recently motorcycles, choppers to be specific. In the 80s he used to weld forks and stuff to street signs. Ken chisels things into rocks and in the 80s he chiseled these Mayan-looking (to me anyway) patterns into sidewalks around the city. If you look on the wall in the picture of Linus and Ivandy you can see this really awesome photo of Ken standing in the ocean chiseling a pattern into a huge rock as the waves wash over. He's this really solidly built Japanese guy and he just looks marvellous in the picture. Linus once told me a story about how one time Ken had some bad mother push over his motorcycle outside a redneck bar somewhere. Ken was unfazed he just said in his heavily accented English, "A tough guy, eh?" sound a lot like the sensei in Karate Kid. By end of the night Ken and the tough guy were fast friends and drinking buddies.

Paolo Buggani I had never heard of before, but I really suggest you check out his videos on YouTube. He is a self described "Fire Artist" with a fondness for roller skates. There's some particularly good footage of him dressed up like a dragon fending off bottle rockets with some sort scepter-like thingy.



All of this art, and some of the wine, got me to explaining to my wife how wierd the whole event was. The street artists had finally made it to Soho, only Soho was no longer Soho. Chelsea is now Soho, sort of. I tried to explain the transformation of Soho _ which I touched on a little in an earlier post _ and started to explain how Keith Haring and Basquiat's Samo stuff just started appearing out of nowhere in the 1970s and how exciting it all was. And how I first discovered Linus' work at SUNY Purchase when I was walking around the student's studios and his was the only one that impressed me. He wasn't there, though. A little later I was talking to some students I had met there and asked if they had heard of him. One of the students replied, "That fucker, he stole my bicycle and welded it into a sculpture." My wife then pointed out that there were some Keith Haring's on the wall, which I had failed to notice. They were apparently originals drawn in chalk on the black paper the MTA often used to cover subway bill boards between advertisements. They were mounted and framed behind Plexiglas. "Hell, to authenticate," I thought to myself, but I appreciated them nonetheless.

I tried to make sense of the crowd. There were some people who looked liked they'd been in Soho forever and many looked like David Byrne. Others looked like Marcel Duchamps and others still seemed newer to the scene. Others I couldn't really figure out where they came from but everybody was nicely dressed. I told Linus how weird it was on so many levels and he said, "I know, tell me about it."

The Importance of Well-Placed Furniture

No, this isn't an IKEA catalog.

Tonight marked a landmark of sorts. I finally assembled all the furniture I plan on assembling in my apartment. Some of it comes from IKEA, most of it are castaways from various friends. I framed and hung two woodcuts I bought in Rio as seen in this photo. My apartment is complete (although I plan to buy a turntable and stereo and move my treasure trove of vinyl and CDs from storage).

Somehow, with this step, the transition has hit a new phase. It took 2 1/2 months, but there it is. I put away the red suitcase that I had packed back in Brazil in late-September and stuffed all the crap in various nooks and crannies around my apartment. No suitcases anywhere anymore. No one could tell I had just arrived.

I wish I had done this back in DC. Maybe, that would have helped me feel more settled. But, you know, I never felt settled enough to do that. Or I never let myself feel settled enough. Am I settled now? I don't really have any choice in the matter now. 

Yes, things are drifting into some kind of routine. The morning walk by the lake to the BART. The lunch at the handful of options around my office. The afternoon walk by the lake back to the apartment. The apartment. A routine is hardening now, like concrete. God help me.

Monkey

How'd you get so funky? Did you do the monkey, King Tut? Now, that's a good question how did he get so funky? But more apropos perhaps is what is the monkey? What exactly do you have to do to do the monkey? Is it a dance and if so how does it go?

All of this is a kind of round about way to talking about a monkey I saw once by the side of the road in the Brazilian Pantanal _ which is great big wetland that is tons more interesting than the Amazon in terms of seeing nature. Where the Amazon is mostly a vast wall of green when it isn't devastated for pasture, the Pantanal is vast flood plain chock full of wildlife. Trees hang heavy with huge storks, crocodiles fill the rivers and cute furry capivaras litter the sleepy dirt roads. At one point during my first trip to the Pantanal the photographer I was working with said to me, "I know I'm being paranoid, but I can't help but think they're putting all these animals here for our benefit." Whatever. He was paranoid that way.

But it was really an amazing trip and what was even more amazing is we must have seen only three or four other cars on the road, either coming or going, over a couple of hundred miles of driving _ in terms of people and cars it was just that empty. On the way back though we saw this black monkey standing on the side of the road looking lost, hurt and angry. I wish I had a picture but we just breezed by. At the time, it looked like the road scared the fuck out of him. His expression seemed to say, "What madness has man wrought with this?" Thinking back he also looked like he had just escaped from a massacre or something. But that didn't hit me at the time.

I thought of the monkey yesterday as I was bicycling down Prince street in Soho and glimpsed this strong, Italian-looking man with a healthy five o'clock shadow trying to take a picture with a profession looking digital camera. He exuded confidence and certainly looked the part of a famous photographer but what what he doing taking a shot of a facade in Soho. I mean where is the art in that? Soho is like so over-played now isn't it? I mean is there any art going down there any more, anyway? I remember back in the day when there were only about three restaurants and the ever present smell of baking that left tourists searching for the source after they had their Sunday brunches only to discover it came from a factory and the galleries didn't open on Sundays. I remember sitting on the scrap metal sculptures in the motorcycle park on Broome street with my friend Noel after we'd checked out the record shop over on Prince street _ forget the name of it but it might of been something like the Music Gallery, I was really into Public Image and early Clash at the time. And then Soho just kept growing and growing until it looked more like Rodeo Drive than anywhere else, more shopping, less art. Still, it's fun to bike through it on these hot spring days to see the pretty woman and men all shopping and eating in the outdoor cafes.

But the Italian photographer, he can't be real, can he? He should be in Bushwick or somewhere in Brooklyn these days, maybe even Newark or who knows the Bronx. Look at what madness man has wrought with this.

Get Your Mother Off The Crack

If you pressed me for my favorite rap song of all times, I'd have to say it was "Top Billing," by the Audio Two. It's really bare bones and the kid rapping "Milk Dee," is all business, he just gets to the point: "I get money, money I got / Stunts call me honey if they feel real hot / That's how it is, you can ask Giz / I stole your girl while you were in prison / Jail, for MC assault / You was jealous it's all your fault." They had a couple of other good songs, too like "I Don't Care" and "The Questions," but I think their next best song had to be "Get Your Mother off the Crack." You know the song is great because they didn't have to call it "Get Yo Momma Off Da Crack," it's just that real. Anyway, check it out.

I bring this up because I came up DJing during the 1980s crack epidemic. In fact, my first stab at white boy rapping was the song "I Want Some Crack," which I wrote back in 1986 or so. So yes, it's true. I invented Crack Rap, much props due. Thank-you. Thank-you. Anyway, it was a funny time that, all these really skittish people hanging around pre-gentrified Williamsburg making me nervous: hoes turning tricks by the river and then walking past my apartment to score some crack from the Latin dudes over on Driggs and then heading back toward the river to give some more head. I read somewhere that some crime experts don't think the drop in New York crime statistics had that much to do with Rudolf Giuliani's "Zero Tolerance" policies as much as it did with the crack epidemic just burning itself out. That makes sense. If you saw the folks I saw cracking up you wouldn't want to go there. You would, in fact, want to get your mother off the crack soon as possible. It wasn't like the that Furious Five song "White Lines" that told you "don't do it," but that all coke heads got pumped up dancing to anyway. "Get Your Mother Off the Crack," wasn't a party song, no way, no how. It was a stone cold diss.

I bring this up to point out how much things have changed since I've returned from Brazil. I left right around the time Giulani took office. Today, no more crack hoes, not too many addicts hanging 'round and rap has gotten pretty damn baroque compared with what the Audio Two was doing back in the day. This point is well illustrated in the movie 17 Again (which is actually, not bad). As you might already know, or could probably figure out, the movie is about a guy who gets to re-live his high school years again. So in the late 1980s the cheer leaders dance to Young MC's "Bust a Move," and today it's Fergie's "Fergalicious." Needless to say, I really dug the old school but the cheer leader moves for Fergalicious were just that.

Okay, so what's my point here? This whole digression was touched off by digging through You Tube and coming upon some videos by friend Bo. Bo is this really top notch DJ based in Rio de Janeiro who plays capoeira and travels around the world producing tracks for third world rappers. Basically, all the stuff I would have really liked to do when I moved down to Rio but instead I became a foreign correspondent and raised a family. Oh yeah, Bo also surfs, which is something I could slap myself for never learning having lived for nearly 15 years a few blocks away from a surf break. But here's the thing, I was busy trying to get myself together as a journalist and a pop and never found the time. And now that I'm back in New York on an editing desk, I'm starting to see just how glamorous the path I did choose to take might seem to those of you who aren't me. But I'm always a road not taken kind of sucker. But anyway, I got over all the envy stuff and instead I'll share with you some Maga Bo videos for your enjoyment. Any of this making sense?



Oh yeah, there's a post script: I was walking down Av. Visconde Piraja one night with Nicholas about a year or so ago and we ran into Bo who Nicholas hadn't met before or had but was too little to remember. And after we said good-bye Nicholas asked who he was and I filled him in. When we got home Nicholas told Ivandy "Yeah, and we met a DJ friend of Papa's from back in the day. He needed a haircut."



And check out Bo's blog:

http://comandodigital.com/kolleidosonic/

Living on the Top Floor

A heat wave's descended on the Bay Area, and it's about 80 degrees in my apartment right now at 10:17 p.m. I live on the top floor of my apartment building, and the walls of my place are still radiating heat. My cat Canela - a Sao Paulo native - was in a coma when I came home tonight. He usually meows wildly to greet me when I come home. I was glad he was still alive.

The heat started yesterday, and I celebrated by driving out to the hottest part of the Bay Area, Mount Diablo, and going on a five-mile hike. I hadn't been out that way in four years, when I used to work in the area. Driving around, I was amazed by how much I still remembered of Contra Costa County. "That mini mall wasn't there four years ago," I pointed out as we drove by. "Clayton Road's another few miles ahead." And it was.

We got out on the trail and learned that an extreme Marathon was happening on the mountain. We saw lots of rather tired-looking people with numbers pinned to their chests struggle along the trails holding containers of precious water in their hands. One even held a whole gallon jug of water. From what I could gather, they were running 50 miles around the mountain. 50 miles! Culture shock again. I don't remember people doing that when I was last here. The oughts have been a masochistic few years for Americans, I thought to myself.

Speaking of masochism, we trekked up the mountain, through wavy fields of grass, past oak trees, along a weak little creek, and pleasantly, the heat stayed under control. Swept poured down my face, nonetheless, dripping down my sunglasses, mixing with my sunblock into a pungent glaze. A pungent glaze. 

On the way back home, we stopped at a gas station mini mart to snack up. I ducked into a High Tech Burrito. Inside, two guys in their early-20s were working behind the counter taking orders, wrapping burritos. A young woman also in her early-20s walked in and knew both the guys and they all chatted about something I couldn't quite catch. A middle-aged woman walked in and also knew one of the guys. I imagined the web of connections between these people - the schools, football games, pool parties, parents' friends. Suburban America. Another dose of culture shock.

By the time we got to the other side of the Caldecott Tunnel, with the bay misty on the horizon, I was glad to be back in this cooler, less insular, more anonymous world. That's how I felt the hundreds of time I drove through that tunnel and emerged on the other end during the years I worked out in the suburbs. Like taking a deep breath of fresh air. 

Chang is Missing

Okay, and I've been a little a.w.o.l. myself. Where have I been? Around, reading, thinking and I've come to some conclusions. I've also pulled a muscle really badly so I'm limping around town. One thing I've decided is to put back most of the stuff I took off the blog. We discovered the posts are cached anyway _ that's kind of what freaked Jack out, the whole Hotel California aspect of life on-line: You can take it off the blog anytime you want but it will never leave. See? Anyway, I've decided to stand up and be accountable, not tonight, maybe tomorrow, though. I've also been reading a bit about Ian McEwan and Donald Barthelme _ an old hero _ I've also been reading a bit about Nixon, an old villain. It's a really interesting history called Nixonland, which describes the cultural climate during the years I was growing up. A lot of people consider growing up their teens etc. I consider growing up like the time I was four, five, six and seven. I was kind of over the hill at 22 _ or rather approaching my mid-life crisis. not that I plan to die young or anything like that. If anything I'm hoping for a second burst of enthusiasm. Okay, so the Nixonland stuff got me to thinking about how little I knew about the background of things I'd been living and feeling in those heady late 60s early 70s days. A lot of the hippie stuff, the revolutionary stuff I was feeling, spewing was just kind of in the air, I had no idea about the context, what came before. Being all that young, I may not have even knew what was really happening but I could feel it, it was blowin' in the wind and back then Bobby Dylan would tell you, that you don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows. When I get back to this and edit it some I'll add a link here with stuff Bob Dylan said about Obama, which I think is pertinent. I like Bob Dylan because he hit on a time all so well. Then he kind of lost it for a while, but lately he's kind of attuned to what it's like to be an old guy _ this is what I'm trying to figure out. How to position myself at 44. (Note to myself: link to article about people over 45 being out of work longer in yesterday's New York Times.)

That's another thing I'm trying to do with this blog, more links. Just that I'm too lazy when I'm writing to go through the whole process. I fear that first adapter of this blog will miss out on the final versions of things, but that's how I work in washes. I do something rough and then tighten and if I'm lucky tighten and tighten. Things I think are worth linking to today: DJ MagaBo's mini documentary of Ghislain Poirier and Marc Bittman's column about exotic greens because Ghislain reminds me of the name of some kind of exotic green. I'd also like to link to the catalogue for Michael Jackson's cancelled Neverland auction, which is better than a Matthew Barney exhibit. Note to the readers: if for any reason you want to buy me a pricey present I'd really like the boxed set of catalogues.

Anyway, have you ever heard about the shy photographer syndrome? It's apparently very common, in fact I learned of from a guy I consider a very good photographer and apparently he suffers from it, too. It's when you can't just get into someone's face to get the shot. Well, the photo above is a good example of the shy photographer syndrome, but I think it works. I liked all the orange going on with her and the view from the back expressed it better than from the front. Her face distracted from all the Orange and wicked witch of the west boots. It also leaves a sense of longing that I needed for the Chang is Missing theme, which you probably guess is a homage to Wayne Wang's first feature Chan is Missing, which will probably piss Jack off on some level. But that's not what I'm trying to do. What am I trying to do? Well, express something new and original pull it all together like Donald Barthelme or maybe like, oh I'll figure it out. You don't have to watch but I'll figure it out, so stay tuned. Carnaval may be over but there's another one on the way.

Lunch with Miss Lizza

I had a very nice lunch with my friend Lizza yesterday. I met Lizza a couple of years ago in Rio when she came into the AP offices to work as an intern. She was very green and I busted her chops a bit to make what? Red? Well, anyhow she went back to the states and went to Colombia Journalism School and today she's a staff writer on the Village Voice. Congratulations. It turns out she's one of the few people from her class to get a job, so I guess double congratulations are in order. At our lunch, she did, however, express some of the discomfort all of us feel in this business for various reasons, but I won't go into details because we all know where that has gotten us on this blog. The point is that when you have a cool job, like her's certainly is, you kind of take it for granted. When you don't have it, it seems like a job to die for. As fed up as I got with my job in Rio I knew there was no lack of fools dying to take it. The fact that the pay is never very good doesn't come into play much until you get hired. But she's youngin' and the Village Voice is a cool (though not as cool as it used to be) paper to be hooked up with. I mean cool in the way that you can hear about cool things happening around town, you get paid to have your ear to ground and hang around others in the same situation. The thing that appeals to me is being able to go around the city and ferret out stories. I never did that in New York, sometimes I think I'd like to be metro reporter or even a cop. I knew a guy in Rio who used to go back to Berlin for vacation and work as a Taxi driver just to get back in touch with his home town. I just like walking around different neighborhoods and seeing what's going on, I'm interested just to discover what is there. Niether would I mind being one of those reporters who does the kind of column showing cool things you can buy around town, I just dig checking things out. But now I have a wife, two kids and a dog to support so I'm not going to be doing that stuff I don't think.

The other thing during my lunch with Lizza is that I noticed that we are both in different stages of Brasilophilia. I know it sounds disgusting doesn't it? But she arranged to meet at the Brazilian coffee shop where I waited for her drinking, what I consider, awful espresso and piss poor pao de queijo. She is still at the point where it all seems marvellous. (I'll explain below why Brazilian coffee just aint't that great, though toward the end of my stay in Brazil I was beginning to be able to find export quality coffee which was decent if expensive.) I'm past that, I think I have a pretty realistic take on things, I pine for Brazil fully aware of how shitty so much of it is and how shitty so many things are here. Lizza said when she met me I was very down on Brazil, which is probably true, but then I haven't wonder if I'm not very down on everything _ maybe I'm too much of a complainer. I should probably stop it. Whatever. Lizza took the above pictures so I thought they were fitting for this post, I'm not sure why she sent them to me but what the hell.

Below please find the low down on Brazilian coffee for your reading pleasure. It's a little out of date, I wrote it in 1998 but you'll get the idea:

^Brazil is land of coffee, but good luck finding tasty cup to drink<
^By MICHAEL ASTOR=
^Associated Press Writer=
¶ POCOS DE CALDAS, Brazil (AP) _ Sure, Brazilians down enough thimble-sized "cafezinhos" to make them the world's second-largest nation of coffee drinkers after the United States.
¶ It's also true Brazil is the largest producer and exporter of coffee.
¶ But that doesn't mean it's easy finding a steaming cup of good coffee.
¶ "Brazilians have gotten used to drinking bad coffee," laments Jose Barbosa do Rosario, who edits Coffee Business magazine.
¶ Brazilians grew accustomed to bad coffee in the 1960s, when the government decided that instead of destroying the accumulating mountains of coffee beans it was obliged to buy from growers, it would practically give surplus beans away to domestic roasters.
¶ Because good quality beans commanded higher prices on the international market, the coffee left over was usually poor, and Brazilians got used to it.
¶ "It doesn't pay to produce quality coffee if there's no market for it," grower Oswaldo Aranha Neto says.
¶ There are, however, some encouraging signs.
¶ The Association of Brazilian Coffee Producers is running a school to train restaurant and cafe operators how to make good coffee. And the Brazilian Coffee Industry Association recently began awarding a seal of purity to roasters who can prove their coffee is pure.
¶ Purity does not necessarily spell quality, though. Because of the harvesting techniques employed, Brazil ends up with more bad coffee beans than some other countries.
¶ In Colombia, for instance, coffee berries are picked from the trees only when they are ripe. In Brazil, the berries are taken in a single swoop. Unripe, overripe, bug-eaten and broken beans are sifted out later by machines.
¶ It is those rejected beans that are the raw material for all those cafezinhos _ "little coffees" _ that Brazilians know and love.

Book Report

Here's a book review I just wrote for Evan Wright's new book. I shared a house with Evan (and a couple of other guys) the second semester of senior year at Vassar. We lost touch a while ago. He was very mild mannered and easy going, he unnerved the hell out of me by spending the whole of exam week planted on the couch watching television when everybody was freaking out and cramming. I doubt he even left the couch to take any exams, it was that bad. I took the picture above in the fall, during our disasterous stay on Long Island. When I took the picture it made me think of the Clash song "Safe European Home," even though it was an American home and it made we wonder what people were doing at that very moment in some of those small hamlets I'd visited deep in the Brazilian Amazon and I thought about how vast a world we lived in. Looking back at the photo it also says "Hella America" to me. Here's my unedited review of "Hella Nation":

¶ The September 11 attacks left more than a few Americans shocked to discover the depth of anti-U.S. hatred that exists in some corners of the world. Many of these same Americans would also probably have been shocked to learn life in these far-flung places bears little resemblance to the modern day U.S.A. with all the conveniences they have come to take for granted.
¶ That point is effectively driven home in the first chapter of Evan Wright's "Hella Nation," where US army troops stationed in Afghanistan are easily conned by an Afghan translator into believing the former-Taliban stronghold of Kandahar with its "medieval bazaars and dirt roads clogged with donkeys and chickens" also has a McDonald's of its own. One soldier, pining for someone to make a chow run, shouts out, "Get me Supersize everything."
¶ "Hella Nation" _ a collection of 12 previously published magazine articles written for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and LA Weekly among others _ is filled with details like this, painting a comically macabre portrait of present day America with a clear and sober eye.
¶ Wright made his name with his first book, 2004's "Generation Kill," chronicling his time with the United States Marine Corps as an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone. That book has been adapted into an HBO miniseries, complete with a character standing in for the author. Not bad for someone who got his start reviewing adult movies for Hustler magazine. "Hella Nation" is essentially the story of his unlikely road to success.
¶ Most of this information is in the newly-penned autobiographic introduction, but the stories that follow serve to flesh out his character and fill us in on his career path. In the book, Wright's father praises his son's promotion to Rolling Stone's unofficial ambassador to America's underbelly as being "one step up from ambassador to the crotch." It's a mere question of degrees, but the difference is an important one.
¶ Wright traces his success back to the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Miller v. California that provided magazines like Hustler a loophole that allowed them to avoid obscenity charges, provided they publish at least one article a month that aspired to serious value. This requirement gave Wright his chance to shine after publisher Larry Flynt _ who believed white supremacists were behind the 1978 shooting that left him paralyzed _ gave him a break from reviewing porn movies and assigned him an article about the Aryan Nations _ included in the book.
¶ The other factor to which Wright attributes his success is Alcoholics Anonymous.
¶ Wright's work _ which has taken him from desert war zones to forest canopies in the company of eco-anarchists and into homes of HIV positive porn starlets _ have been likened to the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson.
¶ It's a comparison Wright rejects.
¶ He claims his reporting differs from Thompson's in that it is more about the subject than it is about the reporter. But that's a difficult argument to make when Wright's stories find him in such odd positions as wistfully regretting not holding the hand of crying porn star Jasmin St. Claire as she prepares to blow flames out of her rectum or driving around with anarchists preparing to vandalize symbols of corporate America.
¶ This is not a bad thing, since his stories are more interesting when makes an appearance. Portraits of ultimate fighter Tito Ortiz and the rock group Motley Crue are good, but don't rise too much above standard magazine fare. His article, "Scenes from My Life in Porn," originally published in the LA Weekly, is by contrast a near masterpiece and his portrait of Pat Dollard, who abandoned a successful career as a Hollywood agent to produce pro-war films in Iraq, verges on the epic.
¶ Wright may have even created his own genre of reporting: "Hella Journalism," which rather than viewing the world through a cascade of drugs and alcohol, applies the prism of a 12-step program to a society that has thoroughly assimilated Thompson's gozno excess.
¶ Here, for example, is Wright describing conservative commentator Ann Coulter asking Dollard to blow cigarette smoke in her face at their first meeting: "She leans her oblong, Brazil-nut-shaped face toward Dollard's lips, and he exhales through his yellow, cracked teeth. Coulter, who later explains she recently quit smoking and is still jonesing for tobacco, shuts her eyes and coos, 'Thank you.'" In short, the terminology of addiction and the lack of repugnance at the yellow, cracked teeth have all become acceptable part of the national discourse in the quest for a legal high.
¶ Although some of the stories predate the Bush years, the book comes together as a powerful portrait of America during that time. Many of the characters who inhabit Wright's landscape can be boiled down into some form of con man or prostitute, who in this era rife with reality TV and toxic mortgages, in many ways have come to stand in as our new American idols.

The Bitch is Back

Sorry I haven't been posting anything lately but yes, that unpleasant experience from last week dampened my appetite for writing the blog. I'm trying to figure out how to navigate all this. I was talking to a friend Sunday about the whole episode, and he said he had no clue why anyone would put themselves out there like that with twitter, Facebook, blogs and the like. Why cause yourself trouble and reveal yourself to people who may not have your best interests at heart? Why create trouble for yourself? What do you get out of it?

I kind of agreed at the time, especially just days after the blog fiasco. I mean, I've been enjoying doing the blog, and it really is my only creative outlet these days, but what am I getting out of it? It seemed the potential for harm, as demonstrated last week, outweighed the potential for good.

So I've had trouble figuring out what to write now. I've opened the "New Post" page a few times over the past week and hemmed and hawed, maybe even typed a few words, but then closed the page. OK, I've pledged not to write about my old company at all, not that I wrote about it very much before, but why share personal details with the whole world?

But then again, should I let all this silence me? I'm still trying to figure it out. Maybe, I'll just post pictures of cute animals like in cute overload. Or talk about the 5K I ran last Saturday in Napa, my first ever race. Or just keep it to Brazil nostalgia. Or why write anything? Is all this communication doing anybody any good? Still figuring it out. Will report back.

Growing Up (Old?) in Public

So just a week or so ago we were happily (or sadly _ a friend said this blog was sad) chugging along, picking up steam wondering if we had any readers or what we might do to attract more readers when we found out we did have readers in the worst way. Seems some of Jack's post about his former job found their way on to someone else's blog and were read by people who still worked there and they were hurt by the sentiments expressed. I didn't think he said anything hurtful, but when you're scared about losing your job and someone is performing the mathematics of elimination, even math can be pretty scary. So Jack pulled all the stuff he posted relating to his former job and warned me to read over what I'd written just to make sure I didn't get in trouble with my job. I did some minor editing, but didn't feel too concerned about anything I had written. Then I thought about an article I'm writing about white supremacist groups and that after it gets published, or even since I've already done the interviews, they might Google me and learn about my opinions and things like where my kids go to school _ so I woke up and pulled all that stuff. A university guy who studies these groups did actually Google before agreeing to be interviewed and was surprised to find I wasn't still in Brazil. Did anyone even notice the blog has gotten a little thinner? I doubt it, but then these are leaner times, heh, heh. Well, it's kind of pain that only press we seem to be able to get is bad press. We haven't had a single comment posted, though I heard someone tried but couldn't. I think I've fixed that. I'd also like to thank our two followers and apologize for not be more diligent about posting lately but the whole experience sort of got us down. I saw Jack even posted something explaining that he'd pulled stuff and then he pulled even that and I haven't heard from him since. Which brings me to the photograph of the guy up above. He's got a really cool look, especially his beard which is hard to make out in the photo. I invaded his privacy to take the picture, but didn't have the courage to get up real close for a better shot even though he was sleeping. But with my iPhone it was pretty easy and discreet to take the picture. This is the new world we live in where we live our lives in public, on-line and all our faux-pas and foibles are easily (and cheaply) beamed around the globe. That may be why soon we won't be needing journalists anymore. Nor will we need record companies, books on paper, movie theaters whatever. I'm not bemoaning it, there's really no point, since it is pretty much inevitable, unless of course the Internet crashes. Wow, what an impact that would have.

Pimp My Ride

The other day I took the kids to see "Race to Witch Mountain," which I believe is a remake of a movie whose title, as a kid, I used to confuse for "Race to Which Mountain," conjuring visions of race cars speeding around in search of a finish line. Okay, now I understand that's not the case. I bring this up because in the movie Dwayne Johnson's character says to himself at one point: "Don't go inside the pimped out refridgerator," which caused my son Nicholas to ask what "pimped out," meant. Oh, Nicholas if only it were that simple. I could say, "Festooned as if one were a pimp," but that would still require me to explain to my 10-year-old son what a pimp is. And do pimps even get dressed up like Antonio Fargas's character in the movie "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka," anymore? Somewhere a long the line, pimped out has come to mean, souped up, with all sorts of extra gadgets, bells and whistles, forgetting the implicit misogony. And it was that I sought to impart to my son, reminding him of the time we watched MTV's "Pimp My Ride," while staying at a five star hotel in Gdansk.

Alas, I digress. The car above is a Plymouth Valiant. It is also my response to Jack's Miata shot down below. (Note to Jack: Keep the Miata it looks good on you.) Chrysler, the imminetly disappearing American auto manufacturer, used to make them and they are truly the symbol of another era, another America _ a time when pimped out, really meant dressing like a pimp and cars didn't need pimping. I wanted to take the picture from the other side because there was an American flag on the back window but I couldn't get far enough back on the sidewalk to make the whole car fit in the shot. Boo hoo. Which reminds of the red 1966 Cadillac my dad bought back in 1970. When we first rode in it, we felt like we were in an Airplane, everything about it was lux: electric windows, climate control, you name it. It even had an American flag decal, which as kid I remember excited me. That was until the day after we bought the car and I saw my dad scraping the flag off with a razor. It kind of upset me and I asked him why he was doing it and he told me, "when the U.S. ends the war in Vietnam we can have an American flag on our car." I remember thinking I hoped the war ended soon but for entirely selfish reasons.

Happy Sunday

Dumbo

The other day I took a cab to cover Gordon Brown speaking at NYU. The cab driver outside my office on West 33rd Street asked me how I wanted to go and I really couldn't think it out, so I said "whichever way you think is best." That kind of answer is the kiss of death in Rio de Janeiro and maybe it would have been back in here in New York before I moved to Brazil in 1994 but I was pretty relaxed about it now. I spent the next couple of minutes trying to send an e-mail with my iPhone to someone's Tmo-mail so they could get it as a text message and when I looked up we were in the West Village and I was kind of surprised to see it, I hadn't been in the neighborhood since I got back in September. It hadn't changed that much in terms of character just the specific stores and bars mostly but it was still a surprise. But that was nothing compared to what happened to Dumbo. I headed down to Dumbo _ Down Under Manhattan Bridge (yO) _ last night for this auction to raise money for my daughter's school and the whole neighborhood was totally transformed since the last time I'd been there maybe 17 years ago. I met one of my serious girlfriends at a party in dumbo back in the late 80s and I'd been back a few times or gotten lost around there for various reasons. Back then it was pretty much just factories and lofts. But now it was all big glass windows boutiques and boom! It was very impressive.

Thanks, Michael, for posting that nice picture. I was getting worried the blog was looking too drab again.

Carnaval's Never Really Over

One of the things I spend an inordinant amount of time doing since I got back from Brazil is consigning all these press releases and other information sent to me by flacks to my junk e-mail folder. But it just keeps coming. Nearly 15 years gets you on a lot of lists, I guess. But some of them I keep, things I'm still interested in like the e-mail I get, from Adan Nascimento, who appears to be Rosiane Pinheiro's (pictured above) press agent. I don't know why I get them but I appreciate them. I've always appreciated Rosiane. I think she's a dancer for Gang de Samba, one of the a million bands that go under the loose rubric of Bunda Music (or butt music) I'll dedicate an entire post to that sub-genre someday but today I want to talk about something else. About what we in the Northern hemisphere can learn from Brazil. And that is that Carnaval is never really over, it keeps coming round again year after year. You may not get on down and party, but you can't avoid it, when it comes barreling down the street. I want to fix the little blurb I've written up at the top about the blog and its purpose to extend the Carnaval's over metaphor to the current economic crisis and general depression Jack and I have come back to here in the old U.S.A. and I want to use the fact that Carnaval never really ends to make things more hopeful. Ohh chile, things are going to get easier. In Salvador da Bahia, the never ending Carnaval can be a little much, though. When they see gringos on the streets months after Carnaval has ended they always ask if you were in town for Carnaval it's an easy in. And after it actually ends on Ash Wednesday the Baianos are like kids trying to sneak their hands back into the cookie jar with spontaneous outbursts and off-season Carnavals, the next weekend and the weekend after that. I once wrote an article explaining that for 50 out of 52 weeks of the year you could experience and off-season Carnaval somewhere in Brazil. That's where Rosiane Pinheiro makes a good deal of her money, it would seem. I met a guy who had been to Bahia and told me that we needed to learn to live more like the Baianos, learn to live more and work less. Nice idea but actually the Baianos really over do and the economy is a mess. You could romanticize and say the people are poor but they're happy, which is amazingly enough true, but they are REALLLLY poor and most of the time that just sucks. But remembering that Carnaval comes back around might help us soldier through these trying times.

Hanging with the Haters

Tech Me Amadeus

I'd say the biggest difference between Brazilian and American life that I've had to get used to is the American tech fetish. Yes, that means you. You Americans are obsessed with your gadgets and blogs and gadget accessories. Every morning, I still marvel on the subway at all the people with their iPods, laptops, Blackberries and what not nerding away and oblivious to their neighbors.

The thing is, in Brazil, no one can afford gadgets because they cost at least double the price here due largely to insane Brazilian import taxes and general Brazilian weirdness. As a result, walking around the streets there, I saw much fewer people with the cyborg blueteeth headsets. I never once saw a Wii there and never played Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Instead, people on the subway just read newspapers (yes, newspapers!) or talked to each other, like back in the old days here.

So as I let go of Brazil and relearn my American ways, I've realized that the first I have to do is tech my shit up. Flatscreen TV? Check. The latest digital camera? Check. This week, I bought myself a Blackberry. Next week, cyborg bluetooth earpiece.

And how does it all make me feel? Somehow, more complete. The difference is back in Brazil, people hung out more, talked to each other, drank endless chopps on the street and ate endless sticks of barbecued meat. That was their world and their community, and it went all night.

Here in the States, I've noticed everybody's purpose-driven. Eat dinner, see movie, go home, fornicate, sleep, find job, read book, on and on. People don't hang out, they don't drift, they're in their own heads.

So no wonder Americans look to virtual Playstation worlds or their little Blackberry pastures with the cute icons for solace. If you were Brazilian, instead of reading this blog, you'd be talking about the same shit with your friends on the street as you chewed on some lamb. 

Which way's better? I have to admit that back in Rio, I'd walk back from the bus stop past a bar packed with people talking and drinking beer, and I'd wonder, "Where the hell do they find the time to hang out so much?" I'm into tech. It fills me up. 

There Goes the Neighborhood

First I was going to call this post, "Ponderations on Architecture and Design," then I came up with something better. The other day I was in a Park Slope bicycle shop to buy a bike pump and I saw Jeremy Irons trying to return a rental bike. My, my I thought, that's either Jeremy Irons or Hank Azaria, I always get them confused. He was rather tall and had a very regal presence so I figured it wasn't Azaria. He also had his pants tucked into boots, not high boots, but boots nonetheless. He had a black leather vest under his tweed jacket. Which reminded me that I heard somewhere he rides motorcycles in some elite club with the likes of the architect Frank Gehry. This set off a lot of different trains of thought. And if you've been reading this blog for any amount of time, you are well aware that multiple trains of thought are my speciality _ or perhaps, downfall, but we'll get to that in another post. Irons was a hero of mine from the days when he played Charles Ryder in the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited. I also enjoyed him tremendously in Stealing Beauty. He was kind of stiff in that film about Claus von Bulow, but he got off a great line about ordering his very own plate of prawns. I thought of saying something to him about how much his performance in Brideshead influenced my foppish early college years, but rather thought the better of it. Stars never return the compliment. Anyway, it got me thinking if Park Slope, or rather my humble stretch of it where it fades fast into Windsor Terrace, is the kind of place you might happen upon Jeremy Irons. I mean, of course it is. I just saw him there, but it seems a little too sleepy for that, maybe Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill perhaps, even North Slope. Whatever, you see where I live there are nice shops, restaurants, schools but they are still a little funky and you get off the main avenues and it falls off fast into those horrible houses with that awful siding. I won't say aluminum siding cause it's mostly wooden, but it's that bad. So while you do get these great old brownstones and sculptured brick row houses you also get a lot of the shabbier looking ones with the siding. Windsor Terrace itself is an archtectural hodgepodge with some great pale brick structures and these awful Queens looking deals, also brick. But real estate being what it was in New York, if it isn't that exactly anymore, had people pushing out to the edges of happening neighborhoods and that's where I found the above pictured structures. It's the two in the middle I'm impressed with, they kind of offer an elegant solution to those houses with the evil siding. I included a couple of adjoining houses with the siding I'm talking about so you understand what I mean when I talk about these evil siding houses. I would be proud to live in either one of the gussied-up ones. The problem is your neighbors are living in the ughs. So they're right next door. A block down, I found something approaching an architectural masterpiece incorporating stone and glass and I'll post a picture in upcoming days. But again the same problem, the other houses next door, just kind of bring it down. A lot of the improvements around here have been kind of hapahazardly designed, its nice to find someone thinking of elegant solutions. The question is who will prevail; gentrification or reverse gentrification? I guess it all depends on the Obamulus. When I was looking for a place to live in the fall, real estate agents kept pulling over to the far reaches of Windsor Terrace, I even made it as far as Kennsington one day. But the houses just freaked me out, I'm funny that way about architecture. Now, if people start remodeling like this there may be hope. Which brings me back to Frank Gehry who is one of those architects you can love without ever having seen any of his buildings up close. In fact, it might be better to see them only in pictures, since the only one I got to see up close on the West Side highway seems completely souless. But one balmy morning in Rio, I met Gehry at a press conference _ this was back when some still dreamed of a Rio Guggenheim _ and he said he was really impressed with the city because, without intending any disrespect for the local architects, the buildings were just buildings and yet they blended in beautifully with natural stunning natural surroundings. In New York we don't have that luxury.

'specially when we used to eat sardines for dinner

I heard near the end of his life Andy Warhol was really impressed by Jean-Michel Basquiat, because Jean-Michel could still think up ideas for things to paint. Wow. But tonight I'm up until 3:00 a.m. and I'm less than inspired. I thought I might talk about how I'd like to be like Hendrick Hertzberg of the New Yorker, but when you're less than inspired it's not that easy. Some political commentary, nicely thought out and well expressed. Well, I don't have it in me tonight.

But I would like to share some thoughts about the media getting played and, though, I think it probably doesn't have to do with the sorry state of newspapers, it might be a factor. One of things that really irks me is all the ink the media gives to people like Hugo Chavez, Sarah Palin and of course the Octamom. I kind of like Hugo Chavez, I've covered him a bunch of times and the man has a certain charm. And, at least, while Bush was president I think he even had a point sometimes. The man is a dictator, but his points about the elites in Venezuela are legitimate as are the ideas of Bolivia's Evo Morales. I think Morales has more of point and is less of dictator, though, I may be wrong. At the same time, I think Morales is less reality-based than Chavez, but that's not the point I'm trying to make here. The point is that while I kind of like Hugo Chavez, I really hate having to cover Hugo Chavez. Because he talks for eight hours and then drops something like "Fidel Castro will live for another 100 years," and everybody goes ape shit and we have to alert it and it's big deal all because it's Hugo Chavez saying something about Fidel Castro _ another leader the U.S. has blown all out of proportion _ but it's not true. Fidel Castro will not live for another 100 years, nobody does and we shouldn't be giving him the ink for saying it. I was once at press conference where Hugo Chavez declared that MCI/Sprint was tapping his phone and everyone went ballistic, we even had to get comment from MCI/Sprit which predictably denied it. Then a couple of weeks ago he said the Russians could use Cuba or Venezuela to base long-range bombers and that was a big story and of course nothing came of it. So stop giving the guy a bully pulpit, okay? Same goes for Sarah Palin, the woman had a story on the wire about how she was offended by Obama's special Olympics comment. Get real. Because she has a special needs kid, because she's the hottest thing the Republican party has to offer she gets to weigh in on Obama's missstatment? And I'm not even going to comment on Octamom, the woman speaks for herself. And then there was Princess Diana, the so-called People's Princess, killed by the paparazzi. Thing was I don't think she deserved any media coverage either, I mean what was she again? A princess? Pul-eeze. But here's the thing, Pricess Diana coverage apparently sold newspapers, people wanted to hear about her. About her doing what exactly, I don't know but the paparazzi were there only because there was a market for Diana news and in that sense the people were the ones who put the paparazzi in place. But what about the media, doesn't the media have a responsibility to say: "Enough, we're going to cover only things important." No, of course not but it would be a better world if it did and we did and everyone was a little bit more responsible. Okay, so it's not that easy to be Hendrick Hertzberg.

The thing I'm playing around with here is getting thoughts down, and then trying to fix them up. The thing about the blogging form is that when I go back later and fine tune and fix things up, I doubt anyone even notices. Of course, I doubt anybody even notices this blog much anyway. In a way, that's kind of nice because it gives us an opportunity to try to figure out what we're doing and maybe one day somebody will actually read it and wow, that would be a terrible responsibility.

Parkway Part III - The Last Dance

Blowin' up Like the World Trade

No, that's not me in the above shot. I don't get off dressing up like a Brazilian federal police officer and marching around with an assault rifle. If I did, I'd be kind of kinky, but I guess I'm not. But I was there when that picture was taken and I am responsible for the shot. Here's the story:

After U.S. Nun and rain forest defender Dorothy Stang was murdered I was the first foreign correspondent to arrive in the town where she was murdered. I got there and photographer Paulo Santos, who arrived the day before, came to pick me up at the airport in Altamira, some hours away over the TransAmazon Highway. While I waited for him and for him at the airport I encountered her coffin returning from the coroner's office in Belem. It was accompanied by all these government officials and I managed to do most of my mornings work there at the airport. Lucky me. Then me, Paulo and another photographer Paco (it's spelled Paco but pronounced Pac-Oh) headed down to Anapu where Stang was killed. We accompanied the body through town along with hundreds of people and all the way to the burial site in a wooded area. Then the next day we didn't really know what to do. Paulo wanted to hang around town and wait for the army that was arriving and I wanted to go to site where she was shot deep inside the rain forest about 50 or 60 kilometers down a bad, dirt road. Paulo was not in the mood and we had a bit of a fight. He was afraid he'd miss the arrival of the army, who the president had ordered sent in to keep order. I figured they might or might not come but it was worth sitting around waiting. Worst case we'd buy the picture from another paper. This really pissed Paulo off, as did my suggestion that I take the pick-up truck and he get around town on a moto-taxi. He is a rather portly man and he argued he had a lot of equipment and it was he through his connection to the Senator (who he was "married" to) that secured us a pick-up truck and driver. He had a point, but I somehow prevailed. As we were heading along the dirt road we ran into a truck load of federal police who weren't able to make it up particularly steep and muddy stretch of road. We said we were going to try and two of them came along in the back of our pick-up. So the first federal police to arrive at the crime scene we're given a lift by the AP. Anyway, we made it there and there was this little cross fashioned from tree branches marking the spot. The federal policemen poked around and Paulo got the shot. When we got back to town, the army hadn't arrived and Paulo became convinced his shot would make the cover of the national news weekly Veja. I told him if it did, he owed me a dinner and he asked why, having totally forgot that he didn't even want to make the trip. Later that night the owner of the hotel let us know he had bought the bottle of whiskey Paulo had asked him to. After drinking for a while with cops, the owner of the hotel came up to me and said pointing around the room: "Michael, Mr. Paulo wants another whiskey but he's got one that's almost full there and there's another one there, and another there." I told the guy to cut Paulo off. The next day I was taking a motor taxi to the accounting office where we'd arranged an Internet connection on the back of the moto-taxi when I heard the helicopters bringing the soldiers rumbling above. And where was Paulo?

The New Me

Part of the confusion I've felt upon returning to Oakland has been in trying to figure out who the hell I am now. I'm no longer a writer, or at least a professional writer. I'm not a foreigner in a strange land like I was in Brazil. And now, I drive a Miata.

This hot number is how I've been getting around for the past five weeks or so. It's my friend's ex-boyfriend's car, and no, it's not the kind of car I would have bought of my own volition. But my friend has very kindly lent it to me, and I'm enjoying the ride.

For example, I drove around the Berkeley hills with the top down a few weeks ago, when the sun was out and the sky was a brilliant blue, and I thought, "Yes, this is California!" Sure, it only fits one other person and has no room for anything other than two bags of groceries and has the kind of 1980s headlights that flip up like a Japanese pencil box's drawers.

But still, I'm Miata-man now. I've been thinking seriously about buying it from my friend.

This decision, however, isn't proving too popular with some people, and I've been having second thoughts. I've also found myself apologizing to people I meet for the first time when I pull up in the Miata, saying, "Ha ha, it's not my car, it's my friend's."

I'm sorry, Miata, for forsaking you. We were always a weird fit, even though I thought I could make it work once. I know I'm a Californian now, but buying the Miata might be rushing things.