A friend’s brother was part of the Moderna vaccine trials during the darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Teju Cole’s metaphor for urban metamorphosis links up with some of Lefebvre’s ideas about space: a dialectic between domination and appropriation.
It seems necessary to explore the resonances, ambiguities and affordances of digital time to better understand and inform cultural theory and specifically, critiques of capitalism.
Earlier this year I launched a new electronic music project called EYE-80, after the freeway I grew up on, on SoundCloud.
I put together the web presentation for an EdSource special report on student homelessness. The five-story package includes a map and audio story, and weeks of on the ground reporting and data analysis to bring urgent news on how the housing crisis in California is being felt by the most vulnerable: youth, students and the poor.
Thoughts on AI hype and the increasingly popular idea of conscious machines. Software is error-prone, brittle, constantly breaking. It is very far off from the self-directed, self-healing nature of the brain.
It’s a hybrid of the code-focused developer notebook a lot of programmer blogs consist of, and a notebook for where tech intersects with other things, like visual art or music.
At the beginning of this month I landed back in the U.S. after two years of living abroad, in Oaxaca, Mexico and Berlin, Germany. Bringing the adventure to a close was bittersweet. It was hard to be sure when the right moment was for it to end, but I’m so grateful I had these experiences, and I’m also glad to be back.
Morris is putting a microscope on the kind of false logic that should raise our bullshit alarms the next time we hear it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about technology and its implications lately, and this morning I sketched out a simple framework for an “anthropocentric technology.”
As you might expect in a book about German resistance to the Nazis during WWII, there are terrible things depicted: torture, suicide and murder. And yet, nobody in the novel is entirely a monster, and nobody is entirely good.
The digital world needs more people in love with the creative process for its own sake: the hackers, hobbyists and tinkerers.
The disruption of the Internet is not being evenly distributed or experienced across the board. Something has to give.
While I’m always craving immersion in the third kind of reading, if I don’t get enough of type two, I find myself distracted by my own lack of knowledge about so many things which I know so little about.
My daughter, Manzanita Rei Allen, was born May 10th, 2012 in San Francisco. Instead of a coherent essay, for now, here’s some pictures, a video, and a couple sketches.
A portrait of my dog, Zora. Graphite, ink, and watercolor on paper.
This is the first of a series of letters to famous and infamous people. I don’t have Nick Cave’s address, so I mailed it to him care of Mute Records.
By unfocusing your lens, straying to the unexpected place, and looking to the periphery, there are all sorts of surprises to be found, and Robert Frank knew that.
There’s a certain kind of uselessness that is entwined with our feelings about art. To make something that is useless is a statement in itself.
It’s pouring rain in San Francisco and there are fireworks exploding. Earlier today I saw some amazing textiles from Anatolia today, dating from the 1700’s, at the De Young.
Black Panthers, Burning Man, and colorful dystopian paintings: recent posts on The Creosote Journal.
A few weeks ago I went to a cabin up above Clearlake that I rented for a writing retreat. Here are some pictures I snapped of the place and the surrounding area—five miles up a county road, above Lucerne, California.
A new website I designed for the San Francisco Symphony’s American Mavericks festival just went live.
The new literary magazine, Fiddleblack (dedicated to “antipastoralism, ecocentrism and existentialism”) published a short story I wrote.
My first foray into book design just was released—the 2011 edition of Mills College literary journal, 580 Split.
A sketch of Joan Didion.
After months of work writing a Wordpress theme from scratch, then scrapping it and rewriting it, the Creosote Journal website is up and running.
Man reading. Ink and watercolor from Christmas Day, 2010.
In the design of BART stations, particularly MacArthur and others that place riders on platforms abutting eight lanes of howling freeway traffic, the Brutalism in effect isn’t only the kind with a capital b.
Final notes from my recent trip to Central Europe.
More notes from my recent trip to Central Europe. Prague is amazing, but the touristed zones are hard to enjoy due to being heavily overrun. I feel like the real Prague is sort of hidden, would take some further digging to get to.
Notes from my recent trip to Central Europe. Berlin is amazing: in a state of beautiful decay and vigorous reinvention.
So I have been thinking: what is a kind of ornamentation that is compatible with clean, modern design? Ornamentation is not purely decorative: it has some very important functions. It guides the eye, it highlights certain elements while downplaying others. It communicates certain aesthetic ideas, feelings, and sensibilities.
Whatever city you live in, your experience depends entirely on the neighborhood.
Took some pics over the holidays with this new iPhone app, “Hipstamatic” that imitates classic plastic film cameras. I like the results.
Tonight I will be reading at the Peninsula Literary Series. I’ll be releasing a new chapbook, called Satellite Memories.
Listen to this man: he is alive. Got this audio snippet while checking out Venice Beach, where I was last weekend.
On Grove and Van Ness today, traffic was blocked by protestors opposed to the California Supreme Court’s decision this morning to uphold Prop 8. Police were managing a traffic reroute and arresting the protestors quietly, one at a time. It was a peaceful event, no apparent anger between the protestors and the cops, who both […]
Walking down Mission Street in the Excelsior on my way home, I found a billboard carrying something other than the usual corporate brands and lifestyle messages. The youth and the youth as an infant. A reward offer splashed in red. The simple question couldn’t be more chilling – who killed Brian Marquez? I found other […]