East Bay/Coming Soon

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Sonoma/Mendelssohn Violin Concerto

Listen carefully about 50 seconds in. This transition from the cadenza to the recapitulation of the 1st movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto is one of those perfect moments in music. Once the bow starts arcing across the strings I get a chill in the back of my skull that starts spreading down through my body as the orchestra comes in. Every time.

Click here to hear the 1st movement from the beginning, as played by Anna Nicole Smith with the NBC Radio Symphony.



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I-880 Oakland

I really like this picture. I like the kid, the Caltrans truck and the fact that the sign above them has stayed up for over three days now, seen by damn near everybody travelling south on the 880 through Oakland: the better part of 100,000 people per day. (880/High Street)

I have no idea how many people actually saw it, how much it mattered to them, or what, if anything, it accomplishes. But I do know this, it was damn easy to pull off. All I had to do was paint the sign, walk onto the overpass, and place it in between the handrail and the fencing. Because of that, a couple hundred thousand people saw protest where they otherwise would've seen nothing.

I used a different overpass for the northbound traffic:


I like putting small signs on really large overpasses. Everybody still reads them, but there's far less incentive to take them down. It's one thing to go out of your way to get rid of some great big in-your-face banner, and quite another to do the same for a tiny bit of cardboard. Either way, the message gets out.

This sign has also been up for three days.

Beethoven's 7th Symphony

If the words "Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, Second Movement" don't mean anything to you, please listen.

If you already know the piece, I'd love to hear about the effect it had on you when you first heard it. I got turned on to it when I was fifteen: played it over and over again for a week and a half and walked around in a deep, blue somnambulent daze. Damn near drove my roomate crazy.

It took me about as long to make these signs as it does to listen to the whole symphony.

More Bay Area Signage

"If those in charge of our society — politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television — can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves." ~ Howard Zinn

"What can be said at all can be said clearly." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally." ~ Abraham Lincoln

"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common." ~ John Locke

"Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough." ~ William Saroyan

"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker

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8/22 Painting & Posting

These are the signs I painted today.



These are the signs I posted.






(I thought this was a bust, but he just kept on driving.)



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More from Around the Bay

"Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." - James Baldwin




"Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children." - Khalil Gibran







"The battle of the sexes will never be won as long as we keep sleeping with the enemy." - Emo Phillips


"Going to church no more makes you a Christian than standing in a garage makes you a car." - Garrison Keillor


"The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others." - Dag Hammarskjöld

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