Stratified in SF

Last week I was lucky enough to land an interview with Jon Hammond [audio | video], a local blues musician and media fanatic and I really wanted to record our interview with high quality equipment so I called in a favor from Pyramind studios, in the office I was consulting for last year. Michael Roache (great guy) said ok, and so I was on my way to the studio Friday to record. But on my way, I had an interesting experience.

This is a building I passed, walking on 5th Street, from the Caltrain station. I have walked this way many times since I used to work in the area. It's the kind of street that's pretty surreal at dusk or dawn.

To me this street is the epitome of economic differences in San Francisco. There is dramatic construction happening here right now, dozens of projects, condos and business business cuildings shooting up into our skyline, overshadowing existing problems. I guess we couldn't give a *&^% about our homeless or the city's paperclip and rubber band public transportation system. No, we just want to build more things. I guess I saw this red building against the cold, morning sky and it struck me. I took out my iPhone and took this picture.

A voice behind me said "Are you taking a picture of the cars?" I replied "No, the building." A tall, good-looking, black man stook staring at my often too-friendly face. I smiled. We stood at the intersection and the light turned and we walked across it together, talking.

"You work up in this facility?" I looked around for what he meant. "No," I said. I saw overpasses and a barren block. As we walked, I saw a homeless man sleeping along the sidewalk, bundled in what appeared to enough clothes to fight off the chill of SF. It can get cold here, but I've seen worse.

I was born in San Francisco and I grew up in Marin County. We didn't have two Ferrari's and a hot tub with *close* friends in it or anything like that, so don't ask me to borrow $20 or score you some coke. When I was younger, we struggled for money and there were even times we didn't have a home ourselves. Luckily those times didn't last long, but I've seen some down and I've seen some out. So, it's not so hard for me to relate to.

"I'm Leroy." said the man, and he shook my hand, "What's your name?"

"Lisa."

He seemed like a together guy, up early and on his way somewhere.

"What do you do, Lisa?"

I excitedly told Leroy about the blues musician I was on my way to interview. I explained that I did marketing for an Internet radio company. I had been working hard for months on a project and had neglected meetings like this, someone out of my realm, something to do with music. The interview was going to be a nice treat for me. I asked Leroy if he liked the blues. He gave me a funny look as if to say "What? Oh, I like the blues because I'm black?"

I squinted at him and asked "What do you do, Leroy."

"Nothing." said Leroy, like the punchline at the end of a bad joke. "I don't do anything."

Realizing Leroy was out of a job, awkwardness set into our moment. We came to the block where Saint Vincent de Paul is, the 'facility' where Leroy was headed, a community center for homeless and unemployed. I already felt a bit like an asshole for having an iPhone, for giving a shit about the color of that building, and for asking Leroy if he liked blues. That's when he scoffed at me, "I bet you never been in this building, obviously."

"Not obviously," I started to say.

"Have you been in it?" he asked, knowingly.

"Well, no." I tried to act offended, but the wind left those sails. I could see where he was coming from.

Leroy must have sensed my empathy and he asked me for my phone number. I told him I couldn't give that to him. I shyly thanked him I don't even know why, and I turned and continued walking. I pretended I hadn't really wanted to know Leroy better, but it wasn't true. I did. Ad I wanted him to know me. I wanted to tell him stories that would make him see I knew that side of life better than it appeared at first glance.

Not long ago on this same street I saw a man riding a bicycle get hit by a van. It was a very loud noise and a disturbing one at that, once I saw what had happened. The driver in the van half-heartedly asked the guy, who was stunned and moving the the curb, if he was alright. The bike rider said yes, and waved him off, and the driver got back into his vehicle and left. You got the feeling the driver wanted out of the neighborhood more than he cared for the well-being of the guy he'd nearly killed. I felt confused when I saw that.

Confused that we are all part of such a large species in which things like this happen. There are sacrifices to progress. There is an underbelly of people that gets swept under and crushed, people just like you and me.

After my interview with Jon, I came home and all day I listened to the CDs he gave to me. And I thought about Leroy, and what the blues mean.

You think terrorists are bad? Watch out for my 11-year old.

Sometimes the passing of a law has obscure and unpropitious results.

With a week left of summer, my 11-year old and her bff trolled around our house yesterday searching for something entertaining to do. The girls, being creative marketeers, spent an hour painting cardboard boxes the likes of a glass of lemon-lime lemonade and quarters. No false advertising under my roof.

They planted themselves on our street corner and started selling. A woman drove by shortly after, waving her fist and angrily yelling something in Chinese the girls didn't understand. Another woman came out of her house near their stand. Speaking loudly on her cell phone and glaring at the girls, she said that she was going to call the police.

When I came outside to bring the little well-behaved, hard-working ladies a snack I was approached by two neighbors who firmly told me it was against the law to sell beverages on the street. I looked at them, dumbfounded. What kind of person is against a citrus-y beverage on a hot day. Had I been working at the computer so long that society's values had changed? What was next?

Finger painting is graffiti?

Playing patty cake is considered ultimate fighting?

Pretending Barbie and Ken were kissing makes you a pimp?

Well, we're good citizens, so we broke down our criminal activity and sat down inside to marvel at the anger of our neighbors and the misappropriation of legislature.

I found this article afterward.

"...before serving the first customer, the child will need to obtain a $60 license to sell beverages. That's what seven-year-old Mikaela Ziegler found out after the city's Office of Licenses, Inspections and Environmental Protection shut down her refreshment stand."

I guess there really is a law on this. We live in a stratified neighborhood of single family homes and a high percentage of Mexican immigrants. A couple of blocks away the day workers line up on the street awaiting a ride to a day of underpaid, illegal hard labor. Many of the immigrants have relatives who work on farms and sometimes they acquire some of their inventory -- oranges, strawberries, flowers -- and attempt to sell them on the street.

The police have regular campaigns to monitor day worker activity, ticketing on behavior like, if a day worker enters a vehicle that stopped on the street rather than a parking place, they say that was illegal. I know this because I found a lost report which had been filled out by an officer who had been marking down, by street corner, how many workers were standing there on any given day and how many tickets they had given out. So the legislation to end illegal activity has now overflowed to a sad point I think.

The problem is not the selling of stuff on the street. The problem is the government's policy and perhaps resource pool to contain and support illegal immigrants.

Momus moment

I am not the type that has a hard time sleeping. I work with several A-type personalities who go at it day and night and together we are building evolutionary ways for people to communicate. I love my job. But I get tired and shut down and rest, very often when I need to. Tonight, a few weeks past our release still working hard and yearning for our launch and a vacation, I sent myself to bed.

But I had a hard time falling asleep. So I traced my day backward to recall if I had had coffee in the afternoon or eaten chocolate that might have kept me up. No, that wasn't it. I picked up a heavy book and began to read. My mind drifted. I closed the book and tried again to sleep but thoughts rolled around inside my head and would not be quiet. Sometimes I write when I can't figure out what is bothering me. As I sat down to the computer, opened my browser and looked at the date, my mysterious inability to sleep finally made some sense.

Two years ago on this day my mother died unexpectedly. It was a very sad day, the saddest, and a lingering one that seems to have stretched to now. Normally I write on this blog about the things that happen elsewhere in the world. But today I am writing about something inside of me and all of us, about the inescapable accumulation of knowledge.

We can't stop bad things from happening. Time, it keeps moving past of course. Things grow and things die. Layer upon layer of memory build and compress. I used to revel that things made more sense as time went by, but to understand is not necessarily to be more happy or feel more solace. There is just more truth. More of it, tipping us collectively into a better way. The future -- though we fight it -- is evolved and better prepares us to survive. We endure it because we must and we claim that knowing is what we want, but maybe you are like me and wish somedays that you knew less. Today I wish I'd seen and heard less. Knowledge is a burden we must carry, whose disappointments and difficulty we must absorb.

John Keats, one of my favorite authors, wrote a piece about good and bad things called A Song of Opposites. The poem points out that beautiful things are ever so much more beautiful when they are present with bad things. What a masochist he must have been, must we all be, and how true the inverse is as well.

Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow,
Lethe's weed and Hermes' feather;
Come to-day, and come to-morrow,
I do love you both together!
I love to mark sad faces in fair weather;
And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder;
Fair and foul I love together.
Meadows sweet where flames are under,
And a giggle at a wonder;
Visage sage at pantomine;
Funeral, and steeple-chime;
Infant playing with a skull;
Morning fair, and shipwreck'd hull;
Nightshade with the woodbine kissing;
Serpents in red roses hissing;
Cleopatra regal-dress'd
With the aspic at her breast;
Dancing music, music sad,
Both together, sane and mad;
Muses bright and muses pale;
Sombre Saturn, Momus hale; -
Laugh and sigh, and laugh again;
Oh the sweetness of the pain!
Muses bright, and muses pale,
Bare your faces of the veil;
Let me see; and let me write
Of the day, and of the night -
Both together: - let me slake
All my thirst for sweet heart-ache!
Let my bower be of yew,
Interwreath'd with myrtles new;
Pines and lime-trees full in bloom,
And my couch a low grass-tomb.

I remember a case study about death in a cultural anthropology course I took. The study highlighted the difference in the grieving of the death of a baby. It compared the still birth ratio in the U.S. with Nigeria and showed how death was so common in Nigeria that the women were therefore less emotional about their loss. If you are surrounded with good and a bad thing happens, it is nothing less than shocking. If you are surrounded with bad and a bad thing happens, you are simply less affected.

Some close to me know I had a challenging childhood, and my relationship with my mother had more than its share of problems. It is not the moments of difficulty now that tear me up. It is the contrast of beauty -- the slivers of time she was laughing or loving, like minerals between the rocks -- which cause the deepest sorrow. She was a beautiful woman, with a big sense of humor and the ability to steal a whole room of attention with just her smile. She tried very hard to be happy, and in the end, failed. To be known is to be loved and so I loved her very much.

Lisacast features a world of new media guests

Lisacast has been all over the place and has more great shows coming. This week I interviewed Dr. Noam Lemelschtrict-Latar about social DNA and his deep experience in new media and it's effect on social interaction and information overload.

He earned his masters degree in engineering systems at Stanford University and a Ph.D. in communications at M.I.T.’s Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Mechanical Engineering and Political Science. Dr. Lemelschtrict-Latar offers insightful thoughts and encouragement directly from Israel.

You can listen to past shows here.

You can listen to the stream via browser or call into the shows while they are live and just listen or ask a question. The US number is (646) 478-4956. Upcoming shows feature the following guests:

August 12th, 2007: Jack Androvich, Sr. Director of Marketing Intelligence and Operations for Worldwide Marketing at Autodesk

August 8th, 2007: Ian Browde, Nokia on the device company’s future and user-generated media

August 19th, 2007: Ning CEO, Gina Bianchini on user controlled networks and what to do with an extra C-series funding of $44 m

August 26th, 2007: Bill Turpin, ex-Netscaper and current CEO of Metaverse.net, multi-player gaming and developer networks

Know someone in new media who might be a good guest on Lisacast? Please email me with your suggestions.

The Return of Reliance

Must the village be a verboten concept? Are we so independent that we cannot collectively agree that independence in the grand scheme is a temporary reality, and not an optimal one. It is the splinter of a moment at the end of a race where one man stands at the top of a mountain and says "Just me." We have not forgotten that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole, have we?

"I am an island", my long-time male friend proclaims as he finishes the build on a beautiful log cabin house on the water in Tahoe this month, customized to every detail of a singular life dependent on no one. Another female aquaintance of mine, a single mother, maintains that she doesn't seek to establish a traditional family scene and in the same breath mentions also that she is exhausted and feels unsupported. And many of us have felt for years that our voice doesn't matter, our votes don't matter, recyclying doesn't matter, my way or the highway and so on.

But I think now there has begun a renewal of community, real community, not just virtual. Whether you believe it or not, virtuality has enabled the return of reliance on one another. Last weekend, because I do less podcasting less these days, I rented out my Marantz sound recorder to a woman who was capturing the sounds of birds. Today I need to find a British army coat for my daughter's 5th grade play. I bet if items like that were listed in some loan database by zipcode, like making my recorder available, I could find one blocks away instead of having to go downtown. I think we're very close to that reality. For resources, for information and support, for all kinds of things.

Last weekend I held a talk show on BlogTalkRadio and my guest mentioned the disappearance of a woman on vacation in Cancun, Mexico. Last night, a woman called me from NY with information about the incident and sent me several articles which lead to the idea that a suspect in the woman's disappearance may be on the west coast now. I wondered if there were any bloggers who had put together an alert system yet about missing persons. In the U.S. anyway, a certain amount of time must pass before a person is considered missing yet homocide police will say that every hour matters in the capture of criminals in cases like these. Again, community stemming from the virtual world can touch our every day lives. These things are coming. If you have any information about the disappearance of this woman, an Israeli tourist, please contact me.

A live voice for press

I keep a Google alert running for the keywrods "citizen journalism" and found out about this story through a blog post from yourfreepress.blogspot.com written by Rafael Martinez Alequin. Mr. Alequin for over 20 years has been covering New York mayors as well as state politics. He is the founder and publisher of a bi-weekly publication covering community, city, state and national issues at http://www.nycfreepress.com. But now that his publication moved online and technically he is also a blogger, he is not considered to have the right credentials as a member of the press and recently he was not allowed in City Hall in New York and is fighting for press credentials once again.

Rafael Martinez Alequin, now 74, was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He studied at Universidad Ibero-American in Mexico City and graduated from Hobart College in Geneva, NY. He was a freelance writer for the New York Yankees Magazine, started a print publication that moved online, ncyfreepress.com, and is known for asking hardball questions.

The timing of my discovery of Mr. Alequin's situation ties in with my joining BlogTalkRadio and expanding my own media contributions to include a live talk show. So I asked this seasoned and passionate journalist to allow me to interview him and he said yes. You can read more at Lisacast.com, listen live to the show, scheduled to air each Sunday at 10 am PST or download it from the archive.

BlogTalkRadio allows hosts the ability to take live calls while the show is aired live and automatically generates a feed for your show so that listeners can subscribe and be alerted when shows are going to be on. There are a ton of categories and countries represented in the programming guide and the site is undergoing some nice changes which will include better search features, listener profiles and promotion tools for hosts. Some very exciting things are coming from the company.

Hamster Pie

I watched an Irina Slutsky video recently about locals in Stockholm, Sweden and their use of the Internet. A gentleman said he participated in a commmunity site called 'Hamster Pie'. I followed my short attention span first to a new browser tab and optimistically typed in 'hamsterpie.com' at which I found a most literal result, i.e. 'pie for hamsters'.

Google search results for hamster pie. And you know what's coming right?

Well hamster owner forums, small animal into food fetish communities, the Swedish mister's social network and yes, a recipe for Le Hamster Pie from the French. I just love the picture at the top of the page. And I give to you, a poem from the food fetish collection, it goes:

"A pan of hot oil
A frog is dropped gently in.
Vigorous sizzling."

The number of cultural differences a couple of words can have is dizzying. I fall into the hamster advocate group, having had 2 as pets when I was in grammar school, however, I've also eaten a frog.