Category: Life Page 6 of 13
Well, I’m okay, after all the protests that turned into scattered rioting within a 10-block radius of my apartment.
Here are some pictures of what happened tonight; people protested and rioted in response to a BART police officer killing a 22-year-old BART rider in the early morning hours of January 1st, a week ago.
My recap based on the aerial footage and reporting that was all over local TV tonight: The protest was relatively peaceful when it moved from Fruitvale BART to Lake Merritt BART (the next stop down the line). Police closed then re-opened those stations as the crowds grew and shrunk. The protest got rowdier as it moved to 12th Street/Oakland City Center (the next stop, and the closest to Oakland City Hall [and incidentally my workplace at 350 Frank Ogawa Plaza]).
Quite a day today. This afternoon, I went to the press check for the CLCV Scorecard at Alonzo Printing in Hayward. That’s always fun (no, really). I got to go on the tour for about the fourth time (because I was there with my new boss; it was her first time there). I think Alonzo does great work, I like the people there, and it’s now the #1 environmental printing company in the country or something like that.
As an aside, the two things I describe here are better documented on Flickr. I use it [or did at the time — JG, 1/21/2023] as a complement to what I’m doing here.
Anyway, after work, I finally let Amy — who is my semi-erstwhile trivia teammate and a former Pub Night denizen — drag me along to this thing called “Dorkbot SF“. This group of total rejects (or Übermenschen — who can figure it out?) gathers together, in their words, in “a monthly meeting of artists (sound/image/movement/whatever), designers, engineers, students and other interested parties… who are involved in the creation of electronic art (in the broadest sense of the term).”
It is definitely a broadly inclusive thing — the folks presenting tonight showed off: a faux-touchscreen/Wii-controller-hacked visual solution to the problem of not being able to mouse fast enough to DJ; artwork created on a “laser cutter,” which, you know, cuts or etches many types of materials using a laser, based on raster or vector artwork (but don’t put anything in there that will give off toxic fumes); and plans, or maybe just pipe dreams, for truly kick-starting space tourism.
I enjoyed it, of course, and will certainly go again. One of the things that appeals to me about Dorkbot, despite its silly name, is that it exists at the crossroads of art, science, technology, and long-term thinking. One of my other recent local discoveries, The Long Now Foundation, is somewhere in the same neighborhood, but Long Now could be Dorkbot’s more serious uncle.
Seeing the passions that people pursue — what they throw themselves into — really inspires me. It makes me think about how I could express what I want to express in different media. (It also makes me realize I don’t pay enough attention to what it is I actually want to express, or express it enough.) Music really resonates with me at a special level.
It seems to me that to this point I really haven’t decided exactly which way I’m going to go yet. I definitely continue to put my effort into things I consider at least somewhat worthwhile. I’m certainly going to avoid doing things that I don’t enjoy OR I don’t think are doing anything to improve society. Ideally, I will continue to iterate myself to a point at which I love what I do all the time, because it’s my own unique contribution to making this world better in some way. Ambitious? Yes.
Perhaps the important part of what I’ve been doing to this point in my life is the documentation and synthesis of all these different kinds of ideas and experiences and situations I’ve encountered. At the risk of sounding simultaneously pompous and hopelessly trivial (a particular talent of mine, I think), I’d like to be something like a really great bottle of Scotch. All these crazy things thrown into a wine barrel for many years, waiting, deepening, growing… and then all of a sudden you pour it out and it’s a masterpiece like nothing else you’ve ever tasted.
In the short term, at minimum, I’m at CLCV. And 2009 is going to be my most productive year there yet. The changes that have taken place since May — Susan leaving and Jenesse and Warner being hired — make me certain of that. CLCV’s incoming CEO (starting January 2nd, 2009), Warner Chabot, is already hitting the ground running. He has indicated quite clearly that he plans to give some desperately needed executive-level attention to CLCV’s brand and communications efforts, both online and off — as well as some actual investment. (By the end of 2009 we might actually have launched a new back end for our website that allows us to actually interact with our members online.)
To which I say “Thank you,” and “Finally.” I have said a couple times to anyone that will listen (and probably people that don’t) that, when Jenesse and then Warner got hired, it was as if I got a new job without going anywhere. Except some of the good things stuck around, like the good working relationships I’ve built with the vast majority of my co-workers, and my knowledge of the organization, and my nice 11th-floor office, and my five weeks of vacation.
(It occurs to me that the changes at work echo the larger context of emerging from the long national nightmare that was Dubya’s so-called presidency….)
I slept through my BART stop.
Coming back from SFO to 19th Street is nearly an hour ride. I slept through most of it, waking up briefly at 24th and Mission, Montgomery, and right when the doors closed at my stop. Oops.
(I’m writing this at MacArthur, waiting for the train home–a little too keyed up to fall asleep again.)
My third niece, Susan, was born today in North Carolina! I get to meet her in about six weeks.
Edit: Here she is!
Oh, and, yeah, there’s an election! Things have been incredibly busy at work lately — what with the election coming up, and the Scorecard scores being released, and the preparations needed for the December 3rd fundraising event…. and though I didn’t give a ton of my free time to helping elect Obama, I spent a lot of time at work doing so, and gave his campaign money on nine occasions in 2008. Plus I contributed to some local and national Congressional races.
Jeffrey Goldberg writes about the “hopelessness” of airport security in The Atlantic:
During one secondary inspection, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a “Beerbelly,” a neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder and drinking tube. The Beerbelly, designed originally to sneak alcohol—up to 80 ounces—into football games, can quite obviously be used to sneak up to 80 ounces of liquid through airport security. … My Beerbelly, which fit comfortably over my beer belly, contained two cans’ worth of Bud Light at the time of the inspection. It went undetected. The eight-ounce bottle of water in my carry-on bag, however, was seized by the federal government.
This is an adaptation of what I posted on Metafilter about the death of David Foster Wallace, one of my favorite authors (despite my relative neglect of his work in the recent past):
I can’t say anything that others haven’t already said, but I’ll say it anyway, and I’ll say it relatively simply, despite that not being precisely the way DFW would have done it.1
I loved his work. I finished Infinite Jest years ago. I will read it again.
I’m really sad that when I finish Oblivion and the various other essays I haven’t read that that’s it — no more David Foster Wallace.
I’ve been thinking about Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams and Hunter S. Thompson in the wake of this horrible shock. This is different, though. DFW was a hero and an influence that was closer to a peer than any of those other heroes of mine. I recognized something in him, and in his writing, that reminded me of me, more than any other writer, of someone who could see the complexity and the absurdity of everything, of someone who was from the Midwest and smart and young-ish and a little bit angry and a little bit sad. Or maybe a lot of each. (More than I evidently knew.)
I’m not going to get over this quickly or easily, even though (or maybe because) I never met him in person.
I’m glad that I heard the news from Will, who introduced me to DFW, though it was strange that it was in a Facebook posting.
I have felt really alive lately, really engaged in my life to a degree that I hadn’t been for a few years, but this was like a punch in the gut. And the head. And the heart.
Goodbye, David.
.
1 (Mostly because, among many reasons, and obviouslya, I am not he.)
a [I hope]
From “Cars won’t always rule the world and its cities” by architect Arrol Gellner in the SF Chronicle:
“history has a way of casually demolishing institutions that seem impregnable”
Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle columnist, remembers author David Foster Wallace after his suicide at age 46.
I loved David Foster Wallace’s work and I was very sad to hear of his death. DFW was brilliant and he knew it. He skewered the absurdities of our society by being as complex as the ridiculous world we live in. And yet, as reported by Mr. Carroll, DFW understood that:
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
“That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”