Month: October 2007

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What to Do Now that Oink is Dead

Shit happens.

Sometimes you spend years setting up a highly successful, community-driven website based on equal trade and high standards and someone breaks in one morning and takes all your servers and arrests you and threatens your users by posting an intimidating message on your front page. Sometimes, your system is set up to rip off more of the lower-profile musicians than even a normal ripper-offer and you might even actually be doing something illegal. Oink, R.I.P.

Here’s what I did. Ripping-offing aside, I think what they had was a good thing. What a nice place. People were held to the rule that if you take, you also should give. Metaphor for life, baby. Contributions—if you don’t participate what’s the point? Well, it might be to steal music. It might also be to encourage people to go out and buy the rarer stuff they like, specifically so they can upload it and share it with, like, three other people.. which is what I did. You’re welcome, Esma Redzepova; you’re welcome, three other people.

So, while I don’t care what to use now that Oink’s dead, I think that more of the same spirit would be nice. Know what I did? I bought a t-shirt. Yeah. It’s got a little pig on it with headphones and stars exploding out from a shield bearing a Union Jack—$20 going to Mr. Oink. Know what else? If most of the cool stuff I downloaded from Oink’s Pink Palace of Musical Exclusivity mysteriously appears elsewhere, don’t be all that surprised. The greater number of us deserves to hear this stuff, too.

Good things never last forever. Oink didn’t; I don’t see it coming back. Find something else. It’ll come around. Someday, maybe everyone else’ll come around too.

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Caught

It happens to all of us.

Park Closed I got caught. I was exploring, as I am wont to do, a little-visited and forgotten part of the world. This particular one used to be an old U.S Navy base on the Eastern shore of San Francisco bay: Point Molate. I was there to drop off a certain someone for her certain Dad’s birthday shark fishing trip. I don’t recommend the road unless you use it for offroading. Anyways, coming back in the slight pre-dawn I took a closer look at the rows of oddly placed, identical housing. That’s when I figured that this place was just like the Ord—an old military base that had been decommissioned and left to the elements. That’s what I thought anyways. In the Ord’s case, the place had been partially (and I do mean partially) converted into a college, where quite frankly the coolest thing to study was the Ord itself. Sure—sometimes one has to cross a few barriers to get to somewhere abandoned and cool. It’s best to take a camera in case you can’t again.

So when I found a gate along the way back to civilization, and a smallish turnoff nearby, I was lured in. I sauntered around the edge of the fence and was inside. Seems the City of Richmond has a beachfront park which they keep closed for no good reason. Beached Fences Sure, there are big signs in there nearby the splintering picnic benches and rusted-out trashcans stating “no open fires: high explosive material in adjacent area” but I don’t see that stopping my enjoyment of the place. Finding myself at the the end of the “park” I found myself in front of another gate. To get around the fence (again) it was necessary to get down on the beach and over sea-slippery rocks. Nice views down there of one of the many San Francisco bay bridges, floating away into the morning fog. It’s at this point I see that there’s a gravel path leading around the next bend—a path which is very far and very exposed. Not that there’s much traffic at this hour… but still. I make my way along the path, running some distance and notice that there’s what looks like a house after the bend. And there’s what looks like a guy coming out of the house, and it looks like he’s taking out the trash. And it looks like he sees me. Uh oh…

I turn tail. But it doesn’t really matter as this guy has a truck and to be sure now, he sees me. I’m on foot. I have blue hair. I skirted around two fences to get here in the first place.  Turns out that this area now belongs to the Chevron Oil Corporation, although I didn’t find that out right away. No… I was just asked what the hell I was doing there. I answered honestly: I was taking pictures. Caught, with Blue HairAnd I said “I just walked around. I didn’t break and enter or anything. Just wanted to see what was here.” The guy gave me a long look, and I guess that was the right answer because he told me alright, I just needed to go now. He sped on ahead to the gate and I walked along behind (didn’t really see the need to jog anymore). As I began clambering down the rocks to the sea, I heard the guy call out “you be careful now. Take care.” Of course, I didn’t really know if he meant climbing on those rocks, or going places I shouldn’t, or exploring the world in general or living my life to the fullest or whatever, so I answered back in a way that fit all of them: “Thank you. I will. Thank you.” And then I got the hell out.

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The Long Weekend

On Saturday, I got in a scuffle with my boss over a moral issue which he refused to even acknowledge. I alerted him of my wish to take this concern to a higher authority, and he threatened disciplinary action. After this, I went to see an old friend until 2:00 in the morning the night before Folsom Street Fair. I got on the wrong bus on the advice of the driver, who said that he went to Mission. He went to Mission, alright… the bus was the 91, and he went to Mission and Geneva, almost out of San Francisco county. After the bus let off at West Portal Station at about four in the morning, I collected my bearings, realized the 91 was my only way out of there, and told the driver I wanted to get back on. MUNI pass in hand, we went on to have a conversation about his job, passengers sleeping on the bus or leaving trash, San Francisco, learning a new language, and much else, all in a darkened bus in a quiet neighborhood at four in the morning. The only other humans I saw were trashmen, briefly. Only two minutes off schedule,the driver renewed his route. Damn right I got off on Mission and Geneva that time, only to find that I had just missed my bus connection back home and the next one was in 26 mintues. 27 minutes. 28 minutes. And that it was freezing cold. Seemingly many minutes later, a single taxi passed by and I bit the bullet, and hailed it. Too bad he could only take cash. Screwed, and freezing, once again. Then what do I see? The cab backs up, full reverse down Mission. He asks if I could buy him gas. Hell yeah, I can buy you gas. He took me home, and I talked about the kinda day it’d been, and even paid me back the difference. I got home about 5:30.

I was awakened Sunday to a voicemail from my boss saying I’d been suspended for the “incident” the day before. Well, I called right back and said, ok, I’m fine with that, did you make the appointment with said higher authority as requested? Of course he hadn’t. So I spent the next day, the 30th, alternately gawking at naked weirdoes and writing a five-page letter to by boss’ bosses. It was a good letter, and the only reason I’m not spilling the beans (and they are some juicy beans, mind you) is that I volunteered some confidentiality on my part. They said I was “a good writer” when I presented it to them on Monday. They looked a little worried but I can’t blame them. I don’t know if that they had any idea of the kind of things that’d been going on.

The rest of Monday was nice. Me and the little lady went to Sutro Baths, the Dutch Windmill and Doorhenge in Golden Gate Park, got my favorite Chinese stuffed meat pastry (Chao-Su-Bao) in the Inner Richmond, and generally enjoyed life. I’ve gotten a lot of housework done. Being suspended has sort of been a boon, especially when A) you know you were in the right and could have accepted no less from yourself, and B) there might be a substantive apology for you in the works.

I have a meeting tomorrow at work with the boss’ boss, at 12 noon. Wish me luck.