SF ALL

These pictures all come from San Francisco.

Monterey

Red Violin

And you always need a crazy, homeless person playing a red, plastic violin next to the entrance to the subway.

Creative Growth

Ingrid got lucky getting a great paying and rewarding work study at Creative Growth, a non-profit art-for-disabled-adults space in downtown Oakland. Creative Growth facilitates the art of mentally disabled adults. Cindy Sherman and David Byrne, who I think are now a couple, visited the center, Sherman buying art and Byrne donating the photograph you see above the etching. I forgot David Byrne studied photography for a year at RISD. Byrne dontated the piece. Underneath, is written: "David Byrne My Life in the Bush of Ghosts 1980/2009 $1500"

Some of the art at Creative Growth is great and vivid. The text underneath the etching is great. I forget the name of the artist. The etching was one in five and told what was like a strange child's version of a husband and wife. You can click on the images to enlarge them.

Signs and Cars

Part of this project is to include all the neat graphic and industrial design I've out here. I've mentioned before how Oakland is a like a west coast Detroit, that there is so many well-preserved cars.

But there are also a lot of well-preserved signs. And apparently the martini glass is the symbol for booze.

Oakland is a small city, but has a police force mentality of a small town. I've never seen so many police in my life. I don't know when this used to be the Wild West.

For example, today I was standing against the wall of an abandoned building underneath some trees to avoid the downpour of rain. A cop car slows down, the passenger officer gives me a mean look, and shouts to me, "Do you work there?" referring to the abandoned building. I said, "No, I was waiting for the rain to die on my way to the Post Office". Then, he said, "That makes sense," and drove off.

I'm not sure why there is such a large, angry, white police force in Oakland. With such a diverse population, I'm not sure why all the police I've seen have been white. Even with all the racial tensions in Philadelphia, I remember being pulled over by a proportionate number of non-white police officers.

I don't know if it's because Oakland used to be dangerous, or the white flight in the 50s used to be so bad to justify police oppression or what. I just read Tupac, brutally beaten by Oakland police officers for jaywalking, sued the Oakland police department for $10 million.

I've had more run ins with the police in the past three months here than I've had in my entire life. I got a citation for trespassing on the rail yard near my house when I was walking home from the grocery store. I was holding groceries. The Union Pacific Railroad policeman didn't believe me I've never been arrested before. He searched me and made me put all my belonging on the ground and he checked them. He asked if I was planning to do graffiti. I asked, "How can I do graffiti if I don't have any spraypaint?" "So you WERE planning to do graffiti!" he quipped.

Later that night, I read in Nietzsche's The Will to Power: "The 'state' as a court of law is a piece of cowardice, because the great human being is lacking to provide a standard of measurement." Nietzsche's complaint against the modern penal code was: "if the punishment should hurt in proportion to the magnitude of the crime ... you would have to measure the susceptibility to pain of every criminal. Does that not mean: a previously determined punishment for a crime, a penal code, ought not to exist at all? But considering that one would scarcely be able to determine a criminal's degree of pleasure and displeasure, wouldn't one have to do without punishment in practice?" And, "Ages in which one leads men with reward and punishment have a low, still primitive kind of man in view: it is as if they were children --"

And why should any man answer to any other man?

And, trespassing, I found this temple monument and poster.

ASIA

CarLand

Few blocks from my house. Reminds me of my old car in High School.

SOCIAL SECUREITY SCOLIAL CCURITY CURITY SOCIAL SECURE

So So Long

These are those middle-brow sculptures outside AMERICAN STEEL. This was a couple weeks before I'd gone to discover that there are things going on and young people in Oakland.

So Long

After living in scathing poverty, I'd actually found something to do: I walked by this two block long warehouse with the words "AMERICAN STEEL" painted alongside with my dog since I moved here. I never went in. The sculptures outside the building didn't appeal to me enough. (You will see them soon).

Then, the other night I discovered by accident something to do, where here, in Oakland, people are less abashed and more open about their art.