We just never got the East Bay. There is no shortage of charming little enclaves with names like Elmwood, Piedmont, Kensington or Temescal; names that sound, with no small irony, like suburban developments. Yet, I don’t think a neighborhood defined by a three to four block stretch of a busy street has much soul or character, especially when it all but closes down by 7:00 or 8:00 at night. Yes, there are nice little streets and some lovely independent shops and restaurants in the East Bay, but everything is disconnected by great miles of road and swaths of homes.

Oakland itself is such a weird place, all sprawling and discombobulated, from the bay to the wooded hills.  Pockets of extreme wealth and pockets of turbulent poverty. Pristine homes and ramshackle neglect. Manicured front yards and makeshift urban farms. I often felt like a tourist without a map, trying to connect it all. I think it says something that my favorite open space there is an old cemetery: Oakland was once thriving but seems to be just barely breathing at this point. “There is no there there” as it’s been said and repeated ad nauseum. There is tremendous potential there, and perhaps that’s true of the East Bay as a whole, but I’m just not ready to live in suburbia.

Anyway, I’m glad to be back. Here’s a travelogue of sorts from the last 9 months of living abroad:

The Best

Amazing sunsets. Of course, living in the flatlands as most people do, the only time I got to see them was on BART or on the vertiginous trails and lookout points around Tilden. And it’s really those features in the distance – SF’s skyline and Mt. Tam  - that make it.

Urban Biking. For its myriad faults and self-righteousness, Berkeley’s forward thinking bike policy makes for an amazing network of bike-friendly roads. Does it also make for aggravated, insensitive drivers on the more trafficked roads? You bet. Pedestrians, watch your toes. Oakland’s bike routes, while not nearly as seamless or hazard-free, offer a landscape unlike any other. Pedaling from North Oakland through West Oakland to Jack London Square is like watching a reel of Le Voyage Dans La Lune on the set of Brazil.

Springtime. People like to rhapsodize about the better weather in the East Bay but the difference is pretty marginal. The biggest benefit of living there, for me, was watching the foliage change with the seasons. Yuppies sure love to landscape their yards and come March there is a riot of green shoots and flower blossoms. We moved in the dark of January and the transformation was shocking, waking up to literally find flowers budding overnight. I had forgotten, and missed, the natural theater of spring. Walking to BART felt like walking down the yellow brick road…a barren suburban road where people scurry from car to house, but still. Pretty.

Oakland’s Ghetto Deco. I was familiar with the exquisite Paramount and Fox theaters, but looking at the beautiful tiled facades and ornate cornices of the old I Magnin’s, Breuner’s, and Sears buildings, as well as Flora and even the smaller structures in between (wait, that’s a wig shop in that gorgeous space?!), I felt like an archeologist uncovering a forgotten bustling city underneath the grime and mundane boxy office towers.

The Worst

BART. We were so naive. We thought we were trading a primitive, sloth-like MUNI for a more efficient transit system unencumbered by street traffic. Not so. It’s more like we traded plastic seats for cloth ones (all the better to hide mysterious stains, smells and booger collections.  See next.)

People on BART. So appalling, it deserves its own mention. Most of the passengers sleep or pretend to sleep so they don’t have to get up for pregnant women and the elderly. It happens every single day. BART doesn’t provide the same electric and amusing brand of psychotics as does MUNI, but the pathology is merely shifted onto the everyday passenger who treat the seats or aisles like their private powder room. Is it the long commute that makes people crazy? Also, what is it about BART that beckons nose-picking?  It feels like at times like I’m watching a first grade class loafing in Men’s Warehouse and Dress Barn attire.

Medieval sword fights. Dungeons and Dragons?  The knights who say “Ni!”?  I have no idea what these dorks playing with swords and shields in the Rockridge station parking lot are all about, but this kind of shit is soooo East Bay.

Markets. I really don’t understand where or how people shop for food over here. Everything closes early or closes on the weekend. The undeservedly famed Berkeley Bowl is a vortex of angry moms, trustafarian burnouts and mediocre food. And that’s just the parking lot. In other words, a classic East Bay clusterfuck. Monterey Market, while slightly calmer and offering some decent produce, is more warehouse than market and like most places in the East Bay, should require you to sign a release form before you enter the parking lot as a pedestrian or bicyclist. Market Hall is an overpriced bonanza for the banal. The Pasta Shop is fine, for fresh pasta particularly, but the average corner store in SF is better than Market Hall Produce Market which offers basics like milk at more than twice the cost you’ll find elsewhere.

Driving. The East Bay is a series of communities connected, if in no other way, than by roads.  Literal mazes of freeways, major thoroughfares, and endless residential streets winding every which way. Most EBers I know are more apt to drive anywhere and I can sympathize – the geography and lack of efficient transit seem to demand it – but it’s hard to connect to anyone from inside your car and I think the region as a whole suffers from the effects of too many cars and not enough vibrant public spaces.

Like happily wandering through the city at night, hitting galleries and literary talks, sliding into an old theater showing movie shorts, sharing a beer with your graduate student friend who nerds out over their latest obsession/revelation – it was several nights of culture condensed into a couple hours.  From sidebar ephemera to emotionally resonant material, everything was compelling. The event felt like a celebration of great writing and great radio with just a little bit of theater to entertain the eyes. 

I can’t wait for the next one.  In the meantime, it’s got me jonesing for a lazy day with a pile of magazines and a couple beers.

Some net-able highlights:

• Photography: Todd Hido Foreclosed Homes
• Interview: Megan Prelinger of the amazing Prelinger Library
• TV: Botany of Desire as PBS documentary

Blue Bottle is my friend, in that odd sort of way. It’s guided me over the years, cultivating in my palate an appreciation for truly fresh roasted coffee and guiding my own experiments with coffee, espresso and roasting at home.  In turn, I have eagerly watched it grow from farmers market carts to the “convivial” little kiosk in an alley-way garage to its bustling but still tucked-away cafe and now to its corner spot in the Ferry Building, as auspicious a location as Chez Panisse’s must have been on Shattuck thirty years ago.

This morning, on its opening day, we sipped macchiatos from wonderful espresso cups made custom for Blue Bottle by Heath (another operation I feel a special kinship for, as we’ve just started to collect our own set). We celebrated the same way we did in the morning before going to city hall last week, or with Miette cakes at our git-together this past weekend: with good coffee and warm, caffeinated daydreams of a more pleasant life hanging out with our friends.

In line with that, I’d like to inform all two of you that m’ladyfriend and I up and moved to Oakland a few weeks ago. It was an impetuous act, and by impetuous I mean it unfolded so quickly after a solid year of looking for a better place to live that we could hardly process how much moving across the Bay might affect us.

The reality is that it feels like a different state.  Our jobs are the same.  Our commute is seemingly only ten minutes longer (though it feels like much more). And we’re living only a short distance away from the place we’ve called home the last 7-10 years.  We can still see it, in fact.  It looks so strange from over here. But we were unprepared for many things in this move; things that would seem, on face, completely obvious.  

We moved into a house, which was one of the primary motivations in moving over here in the first place. This also meant that we moved into a neighborhood of houses.  Just in terms of density, this is a very different kind of place to live than a neighborhood of apartments.  Likewise, it’s eerily quiet, and suburban-feeling.  We’re a short walk to Telegraph and College avenues.  A short walk to BART.  But in feel, we’re far away from the city. And even those active avenues feel sleepy.  Sleepier somehow than when we walked up and down them before moving here.  There are clearly a lot of great shops and restaurants in the East Bay. But from this nascent perspective, they seem spread across a broader matrix, rather than concentrated in neighborhoods. Thus, the neighborhoods themselves seem defined more by geography than character.

Did I mention that I’ve been a resident of Oakland for all of a three weeks?  Yeah, I’ve got a lot to learn.  But at this point I see our move as simply that: a learning opportunity.  Like studying abroad, I hope to absorb and appreciate the experience and celebrate it even more upon returning home to San Francisco.  We’ll see if we can even last a year.

Dear San Francisco,

We’ve been together almost seven years now.  Though I was long infatuated with you from afar, I never imagined when I moved in that we’d be going as strong as we are today.  Which is not to say our relationship isn’t without its rough patches. 

Let’s face it, your hygiene is a constant issue for me.  And the cigarette smoking is really obnoxious; I can hardly go an hour without smelling smoke all over you.  When I step in feces on the street, or sidestep hostile street urchins, or when that driver got out of his truck and head-butted me, I have to ask myself: Are we really cut out for each other?

Lately, our living situation feels strained.  My landlord is quite possibly mentally ill and knowing he lives above me is not positive for my own mental health.  So I’m looking for a new place for us to share.  But you don’t make it easy.

It’s not just that this is what passes for a kitchen in many apartments.  

It’s that you have to pay $2500 a month for it – that’s if you make the cut over the 20-50 other apartment hunters lined up with credit report and rental history folios. Please note the kind of appliance normally relegated to the basement in the photo, as well as the lack of counter-space.

There was the place in Lower Haight that was essentially a bedroom and an eat-in kitchen for $2400.  And then there are the myriad oddities which seem almost expertly placed to make an apartment less attractive.

Why does one need a corner-mounted TV in their home?

Let alone a corner-mounted oven…

Oh, San Francisco, I really love you, but I must admit, my eyes occasionally drift to other locales.  There are houses with yards and dog-friendly landlords, practically just across the bridge.  And while I feel torn and sad about splitting up, maybe it’s best that we spend some time apart and see what it feels like.  

I promise I’ll bring my dog over to visit. 

An opportunity for real change, real leadership and a populist vision of real America.  I can’t believe it.  In the words of Steven Colbert, somebody pinch me; no, somebody shoot me in the face.

Polaroid recently announced that it would discontinue instant-film production. Even with local film processing shops closing left and right, I was still surprised and not a little nostalgic by this, ahem, development.

Like the Gocco, which was discontinued then revived through grassroots effort, I think the polaroid still has broad appeal to the DIY set. It’s a medium, like photography itself, that caters equally to the mundane as to fine art, and even in between. Call me naive but I believe somewhere in the mechanical-chemical processes involved in exposing and developing film there are mystical forces at work. Particles of life are captured, float mysteriously onto the film and are reorganized in some verisimilitude of the subject. The photograph for me is never as my eyes saw it, but how the film rendered it. As Garry Winogrand said, “what is photographed is changed by being photographed.”

Digital formats just don’t seem to have the same life. I wonder if we’re not losing something to the instantaneous high-bit capture and cataloging of the visual world – like the patrons stepping from Van Gogh to Matisse at the Musee d’Orsay and staring into the LCD’s of their cameras without actually appreciating the art in front of them. There’s transcendence and mystery in emulsion. I look at the work of master photographers and I can sense it.

Many moons ago a friend loaned me a hardcover copy of Phillippe Halsman’s Jump Book. The pictures sparkled with life, demonstrating an ingenious portrait technique that illuminated the character of each individual in ways that traditional portraiture could not. In the accompanying text, Halsman playfully introduces his science of “jumpology”, which analyzes airborne physical expression like a psychologist analyzes behavior. The series of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is one of my favorite pieces ever.

Halsmann’s brand of whimsy is also a principal force in the work of Lee Friedlander, whose retrospective is showing now at the SFMoMA. Though I’m pretty familiar with his work, I was still struck by the stunning composition of even his most improvised street shots. There’s a lot of life inside the frame.

As a weird aside to all this, the life of Philippe Halsmann recently found its way onto the big screen. Jump! explores a sensational murder trial during Halsmann’s youth and features the theatrical stylings of Patrick Swayze!

Related
An amusing modern take on Jumpology

Found Magazine Polaroid Caption Contest

I normally detest the idea of a new year’s resolution but this year I aim to do more. Travel, take classes, cook, bike, hike, actually follow through on those art projects. The pictures from 2008 may not prove any more interesting but I hope the year ahead is full of more of the following.

Walking all over this town, with my lady

Picking tomatoes at Mariquita farm, canning them and making a simple pasta with some of the fresh tomatoes

Going home and swimming in the river, a summer rite. I’m loath to use any words here like peace, meditation, etc but if pushed to define it, this would be my ‘happy place’

The Saturday farmer’s market as sustenance, inspiration, and friendly meet-and-greet. Top, a summer’s bounty; Bottom, handmade foods we started making this year

clockwise from left: tortillas and masa cakes (here with chorizo and potatoes); whole chicken carving (head edited for your viewing pleasure); hand-cranked pasta; pizzas with any imaginable topping, including an egg; roasted beet salad with olive oil-marinated goat cheese

Farm tours (here at Marin Sun Farms)

Journeying in the oft-frustrating, occasionally euphoric art of espresso. I started to roast my own coffee this year too.

Camping and hiking on the California coast

We ended up choosing a loop from segments of Matt Davis, Coastal, Cataract and Old Mine trails. It was one of the best hikes we’ve ever been on, certainly one within 20 minutes of our apartment, but that’s an unnecessary qualifier. The ground was soft and fragrant with downed douglas fir and bay leaf branches; the waterfalls were many and active; the vistas were extraordinary and clear; and strangest of all, only a handful of people appeared to share the mountain with us that day. I think we saw more hawks and falcons than other hikers.

Each time I go to Mt Tam I find it more remarkable. There are seemingly endless ways to traverse its slopes whether on foot or bike, as a backpacker, beachgoer or run of the mill nature-jerk. And though the concept of ‘the Bay Area’s backyard’ doesn’t inspire faith in its preservation or pristine-ness, I think the more people that get out of their cars and onto trails, the more politically viable reclaiming open spaces becomes.

I was randomly surfing through old postcard images on this amazingly vast site, looking for an image of Union Square before its renovation, when I stumbled upon the photo above. It’s a lavish display, with Eames fiberglass chairs, bold fabrics, and patrons dressed not like they just came off the road, but like they’re out on the town…at the Nut Tree?

As inconceivable as it is to my memory of the place, the Nut Tree in its prime was the epitome of mid-century chic. With an eye towards modern design and the cosmopolitan, the restaurant incorporated scandinavian influences, cutting-edge building design and construction, and exotic food presentation. For a time it was even the sole West Coast retailer for Eames furniture. Dig the chair display, below.

Those times when my family had to get out of the car and rest we never even ventured here. We went across the street to the Coffee Tree. The only thing I remember of either place was an unsettling sense of anachronism. The restaurants are gone, but with the communities along I-80 growing like a stucco-colored mold, I pine for a time when this corridor still had a rustic charm and a building in the middle of nothing could lure you off the road and share with you its sense of place.