Kyra blogged this awesome sales pitch pic of me at buckle brown: 'tis the season.
The Download Squad blogged about this browser based implementation of BASIC and it brought back memories of learning BASIC when I was about 10 at the Randall Museum. Wow that was a long time ago! But I remember thinking how neat it was to list out commands and the old Apple II would actually would actually do what I told it to do! It was magic!
Very classy that Lego is selling this off at an eBay auction as a fundraiser for Habitat for Humanity. What an amazing dispaly piece!
I drove down Octavia this weekend and was sad to see the David Best temple was gone. SFMike has a nice photo essay on the loss and a new appreciation of Santas at Marlena's at
Saw this SNL skit, Chronic of Narnia on the net today. It's prett darn funny.
I don't know. I sort of like this mock-up at the British National Maritime Museum then the Cousteau grandson's
The Pulse has a review of the 826 Valencia sister store 826 NYC, "A Superhero Grows in Brooklyn?". I had no idea they had a cool superheros theme?!? I just assumed they had pirates too :-( Not that I'm complaining about the pirates shop and their lard bucket, but having to go to Brooklyn to get that Hero & Sidekick Communication System sort of sucks. And now 826 Chicago is going to get a secret agent shop called The Boring Store?!?
I took some new cameratoss photos this week. They're intense with a lot of light sources (green x-mas lights), but for some reason they're missing a crispness that I like.
Wired has this great article, To Boldly Go Where No Fan Has Gone Before, in their Dec issue on a bunch of people that are making episodes from the non-existent season 4 of the original Star Trek series. They're calling these Star Trek New Voyages and offering the episodes as free downloads. Amazing stuff!
NPR : Neighborhood Up in Arms over Home Cyclotron
I've been getting way too much of my new music from Warren Ellis lately. He recently posted this heads up on The Metasciences. They've now got their whole album available for download on the myspace. Good stuff!
Six Degrees Records artist Shrift finally has a full-fledged page now, with a link to their first video off the forth-coming album! I thought I'd put in an advance order for the album on Amazon, but people already selling advance copies. So I snagged one. This is the most excited I've been by a new disc in a long, long time.
Heard this story, 
gender is just an excuse,
clickykbd choose this photo as a "Pick" for the Camera Toss blog. Once again, my photo is in great company!
The Paul Pope Batman project I previous blogged about is now scheduled to be released in Febuary. From DC Comics, "Acclaimed writer/illustrator Paul Pope (SOLO, 100%) delivers a startling four-issue miniseries set in Gotham City in the year 2039! Detective Gordon, grandson of Commissioner Jim Gordon, is baffled when a Federal agent is found murdered on his beat.
Last night was beautiful mild full moon last evening, so I finally dragged my telescope up to the roof and did some moon-gazing. Well worth it and even as big and bright as the moon was I was struggling to get the scope lined up correctly. What an amazing thing it must have been for Galileo to put together his telescope and see the moon for the first time with such brilliant magnification.
Like an aged filmI was in India when my Grandfather died. He died alone in his apartment in Santa Cruz and wasn't found till many days later when his body began to rot. But I was far from the stench, far from family, on my solitary aimless travels, alone in my hotel room in Kerala. I was waiting for more friends to show up and in the meantime just hanging out in town, going to the book stores and drinking too much coffee. So I thought it would be a good time to ring up the family. I called my dad and he dropped the news. He had just found out himself the day before yesterday and he and my uncle were heading down to Santa Cruz the next day to wrap things up. Even though I was thousands of miles away, I was one of the first to know. My brother and sister were still in the dark, and the emotional weight of Granddad’s death hit me hard.
Fuck it hit me hard! The tears of the intervening oceans captured my eyes. Shut up in my cheap Trivandrum room, I ragged with sadness and loss and wrote out my pain. He was part of the chain that made me who I was and got me to India in the first place. Granddad had been in India some twenty years previous and I had had been looking forward to finally having something to talk about that might interest us both. He’d gone to Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, and for the rest of his life wore the Hindi sacred saffron orange. I wanted to see the things he had seen and more, be able to make some more real connection with him. I really wanted to hear his stories beyond the bullshit that he was usually spouting off about. Out of everyone in the family, I was the most sympathetic to his selfish, self-centered ways, but I accepted him in spite of them. But despite that I never expected to be so torn up by his death. Maybe it was because my early childhood memories had been in such sharp focus.
I remember when I was maybe four or five, he had this huge argument with my mom and she kicked him out said he could never come back. I have no idea what the argument was about, but it was loud, confusing and frightening. And then for years he was gone from my life, just this vague presence only rarely referenced. Then after my parents divorced, our dad would take us sometimes to Café Flore to see him. He always had these little plastic pouches that he'd pull out and give us each a sticker. I'd drink my Calistoga and we'd sit with him while his friends (or as I later learned, his acid customers) came by to pay their respects. And as I grew up, that was pretty much the only place I saw him. Once hanging out with a friend in the Castro, I joked that he was always at Café Flore and sure enough, we stopped by and there he was. Even now, if I go there, his presence there is strong for me and I half expect him to be sitting at his table, pulling things out of his bag and going on about the Goddess in his soft sing-song voice.
For much of my life, he was this clownish, pitiful, charlatan character that was largely irrelevant. What I knew about him was inferred from snatches of conversation and wrapped in his myth making. I knew he was adopted, the supposedly illegitimate son of his "uncle". The guess was that his mother was probably Native America or at least half, but the people who would have known were long gone. He fought in Europe in WWII and had a medal. Going through his effects years later, there was only a photo of war buddies and a hand of cards that must have meant something. Maybe a big payoff? , He never really wanted to talk about his war experiences though, as long as I had known him. But for the rest of his life he carried a "lucky" cricket-clicker like those used on D-Day. But I did hear the story once that after the war, he swore off meat, shaved his head and moved to San Francisco. And to me that sounds like a man that had miraculous escaped some horrific circumstances and was both traumatized and transformed. In the fifties he had a job delivering Coca-Cola, and fell into the Beat culture, or the at least it’s outer fringes. He wrote poetry and got a few published, I think, in various, obscure, small-circulation beat magazines of the day. Somewhere in this time period, he knocked some girl up and the baby, my aunt, was "adopted" by his mom. I think it was soon after this that he met my grandmother through his mom. His mom lived in the same small Central Valley town as my grandmother and thought to introduce them. My grandmother moved up to San Francisco and I think she started nursing school with her sister, but it wasn’t for her. She was hooked into my grandfather though and they'd go drunken sailing with her sister and her brother-in-law. Soon enough they were married and she was pregnant with my dad, maybe even in that order. They lived in some little cottage in Bernal Heights and lived the high life, drinking, smoking and partying it up. As my aunt got older, she'd come up to San Francisco to visit her "uncle" who was gradually revealed to be her dad. Of course, my grandmother was not very happy about the whole situation and I imagine there were some big, drag-out, alcohol infused fights. My uncle was born, and soon after, granddad got a writing residency in Mexico City. So the whole family moved down there for a momentous year, and he wrote as the illusion of a family life eroded around them.
When they moved back to San Francisco, the marriage sputtered on, but I think it was already largely in tatters. Eventually, he was ready in Timothy Leary's terms to "drop put". My dad had already left home at 14-15 and was finding his way into proto-hippy circles. My grandfather began flirting with new-age religions, and that was the final straw for my grandmother. She took my uncle, first moving to someplace in the Tenderloin and eventually to Georgia, with her new husband. I think it was around this time that my granddad went back to Mexico, following the hippie trail to Yelapa.
Yelapa is about an hour's boat ride from Puerto Vallarta and was a virtual island with no streets, no electricity and no phones. However, it did become an important hideout for the hippie elite, such as Dylan, Fonda, Nicholson, Hopper, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Xaviera Hollander. And there he made his home, organized the first full-moon parties and lived the soft life. At some point, he had acquired two names and two social security numbers (perhaps in the war?) and was able to collect government checks in both, so he had more then enough to live quite well in Yelapa. Then he began to swim in the same water as John C. Lily, reputed to be the best LSD brew-master, and began to quietly deal on his trips up to San Francisco. But while he was never much of a grandfather to me, he did become a grandfather figure in the village of Yelapa.He still carried his tin cricket-clicker and developed a little ritual to satisfy the curiosity of the local children. Once a day, and only once a day, he would hold the clicker towards a child and click it twice, saying "Que tenga buena suerye/May you have good luck". The mystery of who he would click at and when pleased the children immensely, and they began to call him "Chicharra" for the sound of the clicker. He acquired yet another name and the role as the village clown/trickster, loved by generations.
Then when he was in San Francisco, he tried to play the role us grandchildren and give us each a reflective prism sticker. But it didn’t work nearly as well on us. We were sophisticated City kids, not easily impressed, and always picking up the uncomfortable prickliness between him and our dad.
Of course, it was also in the guise of Chicharra that he attempted to seduce whatever young hippie girls where in town with his spiels on the Goddess, the spiritual power of Tantric sex, or whatever new idea he had. He had this photo that he’s always hand out, of himself standing on a rock in front of the Yelapa waterfall with his arms out-stretched as some benevolent god. And he always had some slick plan on how his self-published newspaper "Hola Amigos" or his vast archive of San Francisco '60s alternative magazines was going to make him rich. He was always going through the motions of self-promotion, able to charm the stranger, but never always at some distance with the people that knew him well.
And with his death, all those chances to make some real connections were lost forever.
Fire Truck! Fire Truck! Fire Truck!
Wow! One of my pictures made the top 500 interesting photos on Flickr today! What an honor to be among such beautiful photographs!
Last night was a pumpkin fest over at my friend, David's. We did the whole deal, carving, roasted seeds and even pies! I Hadn't done any of that in years and years, but it was good fun. I went with a very freehand asymmetrical design while the sis did stars.
I pulled a bunch of my portaits together in to Flickr set. It's interesting to see them all lined up. I don't take a whole lot of portraiture work, but I think I'd like to do more.
My friend Jeff just got the website up for his latest feature film, Dick Ho. It's mockumentary and in Jeff's words "Dick Ho is the anti-thesis to Asian male asexuality, which is evident by the absence of the Asian man in mainstream porn. Like that of the stigmatized sex worker, Dick Ho aims to self-empower sexuality and this case, Asian male sexual identity." I haven't seen it yet myself, but the trailer looks great.
So I, and what seemed to be half the City, was at the re-opening of the deYoung Museum this Saturday. Chris and Ollie were the rockstars that waited in line the whole time, while I was just a lame-ass that snuck in with them. But it was a great scene with lost of people dressed up and just wandering about the museum. Even as we left at 2:30am, tons of people were still lining up to get in.
Warren Ellis started up his pod-casting again, this time calling it The Apparat Programme. My favorite geeky find is
NPR : Preacher-Artist Gertrude Morgan, Remixed
I was quite fascinated by Louise Brooks when I first discovered her. Something about the bookish, hard-drinking, stubborn actress really appealed to me. Now she's on T-shirt from Theadless in her most famous role, Lulu.
I finally got a belt buckle from my friend Kyra the other week, I love it so! The stuff she makes is so awesome. Check it out!
My friend Chris got me out to see Serenity last night. After being skeptical for the first half hour, it grabbed me and made me gasp that this was it, truly good science fiction. The strong characters, the cultural pastiche, the incongruous technology, all cast for telling basic morality tales about the real conflicts between people struggling to believe they are doing the right thing. Everything was complex and multi-faceted, and yet there was still the thrill of Buck Rogers, the wild west and kung-fu fighting. All from a movie based on the failed TV series Firefly. But it was written and directed by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, who is a very smart guy. He just finished up an excellent year-long on X-Men and is now poised to bring Wonder Woman to the silver screen. And after seeing Serenity, I can't think of a better person to do it. He writes good, strong, and complex women that can kick some ass.
Was looking at this blog this morning Trans-Eurasia Journey and wishing I was in Mongolia. What a trip! Love to do it myself someday.
Tonight I'm feeling a little homesick for Seoul, so I made a memory map of Insadong. Saturday night I was talking with this Korean-American woman who was planning her first trip back since she was two. Just talking about it made me want to start planning my next trip back myself
So Will's going to be shooting around the bock from me. They've been working on set-dressing York St and 24th this past week. Haven't taken any pictures yet, but I will. It's sort of odd to see them constructing a false wall in front of the side of a building.
I went to the Love Parade this weekend with my sister and friend. Well, really I just sort of caught the tail end of the parade part, which was okay by me since there seemed to a large spectator contingent. But the part at Civic Center was great. Lots of dancing, Lots of lounging in the sun.
Clayton James Cubitt is posting some amazing stuff on the aftermath from Katrina over at Operation Eden. Well worth the time to check it out and maybe make a donation to help his family out. Thanks to Waren Ellis for the pointer.
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