The Mastick House

Passed by here on the weekly bike ride. The sign in the yard caught my attention. If you click through on the picture, you'll see a bigger size and you'll be able to read it, hopefully. As if the school board recall effort and lawsuit over the gay anti-bullying curriculum wasn't proof enough, this picture further demonstrates that there are idiots everywhere.

In case anyone is wondering, the answer to the question posed by the sign is Hawaii. The question refers to Barack Obama's birth certificate.

North Village

Here, the Alameda Bike Posse encounters North Village, an abandoned Coast Guard housing complex. Surely, it is the future site of the zombie apocalypse.

Loyal readers will remember the site from an earlier post...

The School Board Meeting

Last night, the board of the Alameda Unified School District finally voted on whether to adopt a controversial addition to its anti-bullying curriculum. "Lesson 9" adds some vocabulary, reading material and teaching guidelines for explaining to K-5 students that LGBT families are families, too, and that kids should not be teased because they have two mommies or two daddies. One might ask why an anti-bullying curriculum exists in the first place and whether it has replaced, say, spelling, but that ship sailed a long, long time ago.

The superintendent recommended that the board adopt the new lesson as part of the curriculum at the request of teachers who wanted some guidance and common ground in nixing playground bullying in which children call others "gay" or "fag." Teachers already felt comfortable addressing bullying on the basis of other protected class status, such as race or religion, but needed some backup in talking about sexual orientation issues. To me, this makes perfect sense. A generation from now, our culture will be able to honestly address prejudice based on sexual orientation but, as the community reaction has made clear, these days homosexuality is still tough to talk about for some reason.

That community reaction has been splashed across the pages of the local newspapers and barely contained in several hearings leading up to last night's vote. Although I did not attend those sessions, I decided to go to the board meeting last night to see what would happen. It was painfully boring, but still somehow an interesting process to have seen for myself.

Naturally, before any discussion of the issue that had packed the board chamber at City Hall to overflowing, there was an hour's worth of tedious agenda items to get through. Middle schoolers presented slide shows, student board members were recognized, reports were given, all while the polite attendees waited for the promised vote. Each side was to have 15 minutes to sum up its arguments; just as this process was to begin, the cops kicked out a random group of attendees into the overflow room, including yours truly, due to the concerns of the fire marshall, that iconic civic spoilsport.

We went quietly and remained quieter yet as we strained to hear the speakers' messages, garbled over CCTV. The overflow room seemed about 1/3 pro-curriculum and 2/3 Muslim, which for some reason meant monolithically anti-curriculum. A couple of the men carried signs that said "Alameda Muslims against LGBT," about which I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and interpret to mean "against the LGBT curriculum," which they've simply made slightly pithier by omission. That's what that means, right?

The opposition spoke first. A Muslim woman spoke about the bullying and teasing endured by Muslim girls in the public schools of Alameda when they wear the hijab. She told of one little girl who was particularly tormented by a classmate, who kept pulling her headscarf, and about how some of the parents in the local Muslim community don't feel comfortable enough with English to know what to do about this treatment. And therefore, she concluded, the board should vote down the curriculum.

Just to sum up that brilliant argument, because Muslim students in Alameda schools are sometimes unfortunately bullied because of their observation of their religious beliefs, gay students or students from gay-parent families should not have a curriculum that addresses anti-gay bullying problems. Huh? Wait, maybe I can translate this one: because your lifestyle is an abomination according to my religious beliefs, and your proposed curriculum does not specifically address my children, or respect my desire to teach my children religious intolerance and bigotry, fuck you.

This was more or less the message of a black pastor who spoke for the opposition, too. The other speaker was a lawyer who essentially said that if the school board passed this curriculum, a bunch of angry parents were going to sue the bejesus out of the already cash-strapped district for not providing an opt-out provision, allowing parents to protect their children from having to have this horrible lesson of peace and tolerance. Another wonderfully American way of saying Fuck You.

So, I'm not against the fuck you, if people would just sack up and say what they mean. How refreshing would it be for someone to say, "Yes, I am a bigot, that is my right, and it is my right to teach bigotry to my children, because that's the way Jesus or Mohammed or who-fucking-ever would have wanted it, so suck on that!" The Muslim woman claimed that the kids in her religious community would be forced to admit their prejudices during the lessons about how it's OK for Billy to have two mommies, which would subject them to even more bullying.

This is an interesting point and I won't dismiss it out of hand. Naturally, it is a legitimate concern for members of conservative religious communities that their children be treated fairly and with sensitivity in the public schools. No one who is not an asshole would dispute this. I am kind of an asshole, and I do not dispute it. In fact, I believe this kind of pluralistic fair treatment to be the very cornerstone of American democracy.

Which is why the woman's point of view and, apparently, that of many other members of her community, not to mention many others in the larger Alameda community, is so abhorrent to me: it violates that basic tenet of our democracy. How dare you make a point of demanding fair treatment for your own children while turning around and denying equal treatment to someone else's child?

One might reasonably argue that, by not including other protected classes in the curriculum, the board itself is guilty of this behavior. Reasonably, that is, until you actually look into why Lesson 9 came about in the first place, think about it for a hot second, and stop being a fucking idiot. Teachers felt that they had the tools and vocabulary necessary to make religious and racial tolerance a key aspect of the anti-bullying curriculum already, because those kinds of prejudice are so well known, understood and relatively easy to counter and teach about. What they lacked was a common sense, age-appropriate way to extend the discussion to cover a type of bullying that, by their own report, is becoming more and more common: anti-gay bullying.

Next, the pro-curriculum crowd spoke. Some of their speeches were good, some were classic East Bay hippie-dippy BS. The best was when this dorky 16-year-old hesher kid got up to talk about how he had been bullied for being gay, and how he liked fantasy and heavy metal. He was my hero of the night.

Before voting, the school board members grilled the teachers who had developed the curriculum, or who had been chosen to rep the curriculum, anyway, for what seemed like an eternity of bloviating self-love. Some people started to leave, so I was able to get back into the main chamber for the remainder of the evening. It was here that I had my one personal conflict of the night.

One of the board members, attempting to clarify something, or perhaps just being an ass, asked whether the curriculum would send the message to conservative religious kids that their parents' beliefs about homosexuality were wrong. The pro-curriculum part of the room reacted with a collective No! and I said, sotto voce, "Even though they are." This snide comment, heard by almost no one, caused a laugh-snort from the woman directly in front me and the head of the man sitting next to me to whiplash in my direction. He said, "No more than you," in a mildly shocked and offended voice, and that was it.

This was the most interesting moment of the evening for me because it led me to think about my own intolerance. After all, if I interpret him correctly, he makes an interesting philosophical point. If I would dispute religions claims as false I can, in the end, have no more proof for my point of view than the religious person, therefore I cannot be any more assured of the correctness of my view than I can of the incorrectness of that person's view.

Fair enough, philosophically and logically sound (I am not like the modern atheist whose insistence that logic demands his faithlessness is, in the end, an act of faith) -- but totally irrelevent! You are free to believe whatever you will and to raise your children in your system of belief, to teach them that homosexuality is a sin or that jews are evil or black people shifty. Your freedom to do so is another foundational American right, that I will always defend.

But our public institutions must be agnostic, BY LAW. They must, BY LAW, be equally accesible. They cannot teach one religion or even two or three or four religions as "correct." Sometimes these institutions will come into conflict with people's beliefs. That is the price we pay for living in the United States of America, that we must live with other people whose views differ and be tolerant of their right to profess those beliefs.

I am a tolerant person in that direction: you have the right to believe whatever you want, no matter how foolish or even idiotic I may find your belief system to be. Even if it's wrong! But you will not, cannot, force other people to abide by your belief system in the public sphere. This is the direction in which I am intolerant. I do not tolerate bigotry, demogoguery, lies. I do not tolerate stupidity and prejudice. If that's your religion, keep it in your home, your house of worship and share the public space. But if you want to force your beliefs on me at the expense of justice and equality for all, fuck you.

The curriculum passed, on a vote of 3-2.

Watching the Fire

An abandoned military hospital, as many local reports termed it, burned over the weekend not far from Alameda Point. Scott and I took a long bike ride Sunday, the first part of which consisted of following, then getting away from, the noxious smoke. We circled around and got pretty close to the fire by riding into this weird ghost town on the west end. I think it's former Coast Guard housing and obviously the future site of the zombie apocalypse.

Local Developments in Fried Chicken

The KFC at the corner of Encinal and Jackson Park, the deep-fried stank of which has long enshrouded the surrounding blocks, has been knocked down.


What will take its place, you ask? The construction company, helpfully, has hung a sign on the fence. This has left me both amused and dismayed, AKA dismused.

Indian bones unearthed, Sword murder nearby

Some spooky happenings in Alameda in the last week. First, a public works crew digs up the bones of an Indian child in the 3000 block of Washington street when repairing a sinkhole. In the press, this child has been described as both female and of indeterminate sex.

Then, a few days later and a few blocks away, a 62-year-old man and his 40-year-old friend are drinking a bunch of beer and playing chess. An argument breaks out, they start wrestling and the older man retreats to his bedroom. Moments later, he returns with a Pakistani scimitar and stabs his friend to death. When the cops show up - they were alerted by another friend, who was present at the time - the swordsman is sitting next to his dead friend on the floor, totally unable to explain why he had done this.

Coincidence? Um, yeah. But maybe I don't have to go so far afield to find inspiration for my Indian burial ground story...

The Alameda Sun published an interesting map along with its story providing historical background for the Indian bones discovery. The A on the map is the modern-day intersection of High and Encinal; 1 is the location of the so-called "Sather Mound," one of the Ohlone shellmound garbage/burial sites that used to be here before it was dismantled and turned into concrete mix, 2 is the location of the bone discovery and 3 was marshland at the edge of the bay.

The Myth of My Dumb Friends

Here is a brief article that appeared in the December 2008 edition of Alameda magazine, written by Mary McInerney:

If you love the story of Jim Morrison of The Doors placing a marker in Jackson Park in memory of his “dumb friends” at Alameda High School, maybe you shouldn’t read any further.
The truth is he didn’t do it. Yes, Morrison lived in Alameda. And yes, he attended Alameda High. He may have even hung out in Jackson Park with his friends. But the real story of the marker is a whole lot more ordinary—albeit pretty amusing and kind of weird, too—than the legend that surrounds it.
In 1920, 37 years before Morrison arrived in Alameda, Isabelle Clark, an old-time resident of the neighborhood, had the marker and a giant, curved concrete bench built at the south end of Jackson Park. According to Woodruff Minor’s book Alameda at Play, the marker was placed by Clark in honor of her late husband. It reads, “In Memory of My Dumb Friends.” A slight? Not at all. “Mrs. Clark loved animals, hence the inscription,” Minor writes. A drinking trough—presumably for her beloved but speechless animals—was originally part of the Clark Memorial but has since been removed.
Over the years, the urban myth arose that Jim Morrison, who was 13 when his family moved to Alameda for two years in 1957, came back and placed the “Dumb Friends” marker to remember his high school buddies. The year Morrison moved to Alameda, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was newly published. “Fud” Ford, who met Morrison during the first weeks of ninth grade at Alameda High, remembered the time well.
“We wanted to be beatniks like the characters in On the Road,” Ford recounts in Frank Lisciandro’s A Feast of Friends. “We’d put on sweatshirts and Levis and wear sandals and go over to San Francisco, to North Beach and hang out … in front of the coffeehouses, or go in and listen to the poetry sometimes.”
When his family left for Virginia, Morrison didn’t leave much behind in Alameda, other than his friends’ fond memories. “We wanted to get on the road and travel and go taste beer in Mexico and see if we could pick up women in France,” Ford told Lisciandro. “Just mostly fantasies: what turned out to be fantasies for me, reality for him.”

Ants

Much of December was like this...

Classics at The Alameda!

Kudos to the Alameda Theatre and Cineplex which, beginning next week, will be running a classic film series on Wednesdays and Thursdays. I am very excited about this, even though I have seen this particular slate of films many, many times:

January 14-15: Vertigo
January 21-22: North by Northwest
January 28-29: The Maltese Falcon
February 4-5: Rear Window

It's interesting that's it's basically a Hitchcock series, with a Huston thrown in - but they'll get no complaints from me. I hope this continues on throughout the year. I have longed for such a series since the fabulously renovated theater re-opened in May, but had not dared to hope there was room yet for repertory film programming in this world of ours. I will be attending every one of these films - and hopefully will be able to twist some nearby arms to attend with me.

I believe I have only seen Vertigo on the big screen in the past - though possibly Rear Window, too. The opportunity is simply not there often enough. I hope folks come out for these screenings so they will continue. The theater has changed the website announcement a couple of times since I first saw it; at one point the films were labeled as being on AFI's list of the 100 Best American Films, which suggests they might explore more of that list in the future. Yay! I hope they show Citizen Kane (which actually happens to be one of my favorite films, absolutely thrilling every time I see it, and I've seen it A LOT). I get the feeling that few people have actually watched the "greatest film of all time."

Which, about that - I brought up this series last night at the Lucky 13, where I successfully warded off the urge to smoke as my friends were doing, and there was some general argument about the relative weakness of AFI's list. I'd have to agree that lists that rank films (or whatever) in order of greatness are usually pretty stupid. Or perhaps the word is boring, or pointless. Whether the "greatest film" is Kane or The Rules of the Game or Ants in Your Pants of 1939 is really not a very interesting question. How the estimation of a film changes over time is rather interesting, though, which is why I think the Sight & Sound poll is valuable - this is a critics poll, taken every ten years since 1952 (with a separate director's poll, since 1992) by the British Film Institute, that asks for a list of the ten greatest films. Kane has topped the list since 1962, but what has come next has changed dramatically over time. The first film in The Alameda's series is now regarded as the #2 film of all time, for instance, though it didn't appear in the list until '82.

The best response to AFI's list, now a decade old (though it has been updated since), is that of my favorite film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum. He rips AFI's list to shreds, for all the right reasons, and proposes an alternative list, unranked, that is vastly more idiosyncratic and worthwhile. Check it out here!

Bees

Thanksgiving 2008

Kim's turkey was the best I've ever had. My pies were good, but the crust was on the cakey side. Gotta mix it less next time. Good times.

Quantum of Solace

Saw the new Bond film with Scott and Charlise last night. Here's what I kept thinking:



This video is much better than the film, in spite of how there are better actors in Bond films these days. We sat way in the back, which was a great place to sit (apart from the young children nearby that should not have been there who kept talking throughout) but our vista did not make it any easier to understand the action. As for the story, well, I gave up on that very early. It involved a French dude with stained teeth (a very good actor, the one who looks like a young Roman Polanski), a seriously hot girl and someone from Bond's past named Vespa, which Charlise informed me is Italian for "wasp." She was also able to tell me that the opera featured in the film (at which a group of bad guy conspirators chose to hold a meeting via bluetooth - like, during the opera from their seats) was Puccini's Tosca, and that it was an actual production but without the usual cast.

(About the young children ... I like kids and will soon be a father, but you can't take kids who are under, say, 8 to PG-13 movies that aren't "Mommy and Me" screenings. It's rated that way for a reason, parents! If kids are not involved with what they're seeing - and even if they are, sometimes - they'll just talk, talk, talk. At that point, it is your responsibility to shut them up or leave. For. Christ's. Sake.)

Flies

Counter-protest

Last night around 6 PM, the counter-protest against Fred Phelps' planned protest turned vigil when Phelps' crew decided not to show up. Probably for the best. I rode my bike over to the corner of Central and Walnut, at the edge of the high school.

It was a lovely, warm, blustery evening, a night full of portent. I could have ridden my bike forever under the dark trees.

Kim made salmon, polenta and greens and Val came over for dinner.

Carrier

"People in the paranormal field say it is one of the most-haunted ships around," Carnahan told an audience of about 70 people on Wednesday at the Alameda Free Library. "It also had a high suicide rate, among the highest in the Navy, and that makes it an active place for both the living and the dead." To illustrate his views, Carnahan and colleague Shane Thornton shared a series of audio and video recordings with the library group. The ghost busters recorded "voices of spirits" on the ship picked up as EVPs or electronic-voice phenomena.
From the Alameda Journal, October 31, 2008

The USS Hornet is the decommissioned aircraft carrier at the old Alameda Naval Air Station.


View Larger Map

I went there a few weeks ago when Mom and Dad were here. Maybe I could make a sequel to my haunted dam movie on an aircraft carrier. It's a creepy place.

The Hornet picked up the Apollo 11 astronauts after they splashed down, then put them in this vacuum-sealed Airstream to protect them from Nixon. My folks wanted to see what that was like.According to the Interwebs, more than 300 people died on the Hornet in only 27 years of active service. That's a lotta potential ghosts. Or maybe I could turn it into a zombie-type deal, playing off the name "Carrier." The lady in this old-timey poster is looking pretty scared already:

A lot of famous people visit the Hornet, as evidenced by the guestbook:
Finally, this very tough-looking guy kicked us off the boat...and then disappeared...

So much more than a hardware store

Pagano's is one of the delights of life on Alameda. It's a hardware store that crams everything and the kitchen sink (yes, literally) into a labyrinthine old fire-trap in the Bay Station district of the island (not sure if these districts mean anything or if it's just marketing), a pleasant Sunday afternoon bike ride away. Like that bedeviled Moscow apartment in The Master and Margarita, it's much bigger on the inside.

We bought some twine so Kim can tie up her peas properly.

That parking space has got my name on it

Here's a thing people like to do: get the cops to slap these stickers on the cars of people who park in "their" parking spots. This is not my car, but this has happened to me before. Someone was parked in front of my house, so I parked across the street. Now, I don't drive too often because I take the bus to work. So I left my car parked across the street for several days.

The way I look at it is, I fucking live here and I have the right to park on my own goddamn street. For that matter, it's a public street, so any member of the public has the right to park here, basically forever. But evidently the City of Alameda, and my neighbors, see it differently. When it was my turn to get one of these tickets, my neighbors made no effort to contact me as far as I know. They did not leave a note on my car themselves. They just went for the gusto, called the cops and got them to slap one of these notices on my car, which says:

Section 8-7.8 of the Alameda Municipal code provides that: it shall be unlawful for any person to park or leave unattended any vehicle on a street in the City of Alameda continuously for a period exceeding seventy-two (72) hours.

To comply with this ordinance, your vehicle must be driven at least 1/10 of a mile every three (3) days. (Incidental moving from place to place in the same area does not comply.)

So they covered their bases there, I guess. It is comical, admittedly, the part about 1/10 of a mile. Naturally, this law mysteriously does not apply when parking in front of your own house. I wonder if the cops call it the "Asshole Neighbor" law or something; obviously it was invented to get whiny neighbors to shut up. Merits further investigation. By which I mean, of course, that I should drop it and learn to live by the "community standards." The problem is, that phrase is usually cover for people behaving like idiots.

When I confronted my neighbor about the sticker on MY car, however, I was as sweet and low key and full of remorse for the inconvenience I had caused her as I have ever been in my life. I sometimes regret that life is not a movie in which the Good, by which I mean me, always triumphs over the Bad, by which I mean everyone who pisses me off. I think I may not be alone in that.

I am aware, of course, that many people (like my pal, Val, for instance) DO think that they own the street space in front of their homes, even though they do not, in any way, and HATE it when people park there.

People love to put up signs

This one is at one of the marinas; I guess stones might...hit the boats? Fill in the channel? Become a hazard for...birds?

It's sometimes hard to decipher the rationale for putting up certain signs, if not the meaning of the sign itself. I mean, how big a problem was stone-throwing prior to the signs (of which there are several along the path)? Is it simply a matter of decorum?

Get Spanked

At some point, I will write a bit more about why Alameda has so many hair and nail salons. I have never seen such a concentration of them as can be seen near Park Street especially. There's easily a dozen of them within a couple miles of each other. How they can possibly all stay in business, I'll never know. Or maybe I will know, if I investigate a bit. Last week we saw a new one, up near the marinas in the northeast section of the island.

Most graffitied building in Alameda

Last Sunday, Kim and I biked around the northern edge of the island (the Oakland side) to see how far the public shoreline extended. On the west end of the island, there are a lot of run-down warehouses and derelict buildings near the old Navy base. This one wins the prize for Most Tagged.