Talking Harbaugina

Posted on September 20, 2013 by markweiss86

HarbTimesThe Guy: If you are here tonight for “The Harbaugina Monologue” you may be disappointed. “The Harbaugina Monologue” is taking a break, on injured reserve, if you will. Instead we have a new feature called “Talking Harbaugina.” Instead of actually performing the piece, I am merely describing the piece. But like “The Harbaugina Monologue”, “Talking Harbaugina” is a comedic monologue. A comedic monologue differs from stand-up comedy in that with stand-up, I tell a joke and you laugh or don’t laugh; I tell another joke and you laugh or don’t laugh; I tell another joke and you laugh or don’t laugh. With a monologue, I talk, talk, talk for ten minutes and then a couple hours later, or sometime tomorrow, you go “Hmm?!”

So “The Harbaugina Monologue (and of course “Talking Harbaugina”) is (are) a work in progress, a performance piece, an off-kilter and post-modern mock tribute to Jim Harbaugh, Paly class of 1982, former Michigan and NFL quarterback, former Stanford coach and current coach with the San Francisco 49ers. He was a three-sport star at Paly, which he attended his junior and senior years — his dad came here to be an assistant football coach at Stanford. He was all-league or better in football, baseball and basketball. I meanwhile was a very mediocre reserve basketball player for Gunn and competed against Jim at that time. I was also a sportswriter, for the high school paper and as a stringer for the Peninsula Times Tribune, did not write about Harbaugh’s sports exploits, but certainly followed him. I don’t think I covered him in any of our games, even, but I think I shook hands with him — I don’t recall him at that time saying “what’s YOUR deal?” or trying to slap my ass, for the record. And not to be confused, come to think of it, by my teammate Todd Kjos on the 8th grade Terman flag football team, post-game against Jordan, having to fend off one or more Jordan guys trying to steal his jersey or shorts from him. I think there was a play where a Jordan player’s shorts split and he had to leave the game, embarrassed. And they tried a sleeper play on us, although for the record, Terman won, and tied for a league title, although, to reiterate, this was pre-Harbaugh.

The basic premise of “The Harbaugina Monologue” is like Einstein and relativity. And context. People all over the sports world may know and associate Jim Harbaugh the famous coach as being from Palo Alto, but if you are from South Palo Alto, so to speak, and went to or played for Gunn and not Paly,  and are his near exact same age, you have a slightly different perspective. So the piece is also about the speaker being conflicted about being a lifelong Stanford and 49ers fan — I was a season ticket holder and before that my Dad and I went to games for about 30 years, section 20 lower Box 5K seats 3 and 4 — yet having for about 30 years since first meeting him having a certain, shall we say, distaste, for Jim Harbaugh. He was a great athlete, admittedly, but there was something about his demeaner, his intensity, that was off-putting. I don’t clearly remember a distinct insincerity, condescension or cockiness in his dismissive handshake with me, but it is easy to imagine such.

Also, there was a Gunn football player who came over from Cubberley and had a friend and former Cubberley teammate playing for Paly who said that by the end of Harbaugh’s senior year, he had lost the respect of his teammates with his “this is all about me” attitude and that the linemen started letting the opposition get by unoppossed, to sack Harbaugh, and shut him up or soften him up a little. Now maybe that’s apocryphal, maybe it only happened once, maybe it was in practice, maybe the guy missed his block and only was kidding himself or like Alibi Ike making excuses and said there was some kind of Caine Mutiny at the genesis of where we are now 30 years later, “The Harbaugina Monologue” oh yeah, I mean, “Talking Harbaugina” but there was something going on, palpable, even then.

Also, concurrent to the Gunn Paly sports rivalries I was also editor in chief of the student newspaper at Gunn, the Oracle, and we had a rivalry of sorts with the Paly paper, the Campanile, and my senior year we on April Fools Day put out a fake Campanile, called the Crapanile and a key feature of that was content spoofing Harbaugh, who we called “Our Boy Jim”, “Jim Harbarph” — because they talked about him ad nauseum. There was a Campanile where for the winter sports wrap-up they had a picture of Jim playing basketball; and right next to that, for the spring preview, there was Jim playing baseball — pitching. And we thought “What?” out of a class of 450 kids and probably 50 blue chip athletes, you run the same guy twice, what is this? So we borrowed some Paly uniforms from some confederates and dressed up this really scrawny kid, Pat Siegman, to be “Jim Harbarph” and posed him in all those crazy photographs: football, basketball, baseball, cheerleading, competitive tobacco chew and spitting – or we said they sucked Spam. And then years later one of the kids on our staff, Jessica Yu, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary and came back to town for a benefit screening and in an interview with a local paper she said she recalled the fake Harbaugh story as a highlight or her high school years, so that also seems to validate this.

So, and we are probably running out of time here, tonight, at the Philz open mic, but years later when I got the idea for a performance piece I would describe my dilemma to people — obviously it’s as much about the mediocre 49 year old and his foibles as it is the obvious and public flaws and the ridiculousnous of the uber-competitive famous jock — people would give me their Harbaugh stories, you’d be amazed. And it’s sort of like a Joseph Beuys “social sculpture” in that virtually anybody I talk to about this topic — you included – becomes part of the story, their reaction, whether they concur with me — that there’s something wrong with Jim — or they think I’m a dick for doing this.

So I’ve done this here at Philz about five times now and one or two other places. Plus I chronicle it on my blog, “Plastic Alto”. Plus now this “Talking Harbaugina” the piece about the piece.  Maybe someday there will be an actual script and “the Guy” plays me, talking about Jim. There’s also this notion, I crib from David Shields, or Freud, that when The Guy is talking or writing about Jim he is talking or writing about himself — all fiction is part fact, all fact is part fiction — and maybe someday Jim Harbaugh himself will play me and be “The Guy” with the Harbaugina Monologue”.

Although its a work in progress, we generally have Jim Harbaugh waking up some day and deciding he wants to turn over a new leaf and he ends up either playing hand-drums with the Tedesci Trucks band or is a bassist in a reggae group, like the Kyle Machlalan Mayor character in “Portlandia”. I kinda worried about him, you know?

(Today at Philz I took a photo of the tip jar; actually there were two tip jars, under a sign that said “who would you rather have as your father in law, Pete Carroll or Jim Harbaugh?” and then you could vote on that by putting money in – or taking money out, I guess — to either jar, labeled “Pete Carroll” or “Jim Harbaugh”. I struck up a conversation with a lady who likewise bent down to take a photo. She said she knew Harbaugh. I asked if she went to Paly but she said her sister was his nanny and that she and her son (he was playing with some coffee beans on a low table, or maybe diagramming with beans read-option passes and runs) were on their way to see Mrs. Harbaugh and her son was a playmate with the three Harbaugh kids. When I explained the piece and emphasized the point that I worry about him and wish him well she said that he had already had one heart attack (ablation); I said I had saw that in the news. I mentioned that I was being pressured by one of his former teammates from Paly to drop the project and she said she didnt’ know him).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiWbBC0SouU

edit to add, two minutes later: I was looking for what I heard Chris Collinsworth say, that you kinda had to laugh at Jim Harbaugh and his super-intensity, but instead saw a post and video “Richard Sherman Slaps Jim Harbaugh’s Butt”:

http://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2013/9/16/4736038/richard-sherman-slap-jim-harbaugh-ass-dot-gif

edita 2 and I better leave library move car not get ticket:

Chuck Klosterman had a radio piece about Rick Helling that seems to recall my Harbaugh thingy. When I say “joseph beuys” I try to sound like I’m in Public Enemy. Also, and this I added much later in the day I was watching a captured version of a recent “60 Minutes” about Salman Khan’s “Khan Academy” which has gotten millions in venture funding, even as a non profit, from Bill Gates and support from Eric Schmidt and the  example they showed was “graphing fractions on the number line” and “move the orange dot to 7/4” and I thought of Paul J. Cohen and the continuum hypothesis and whether Cohen Academy by SAG Actors and former Gunn athletes and 200-lb bench press club members Steve and Eric Cohen (sons of Paul), could do a better job ‘splaining. Is it only ironic that the number line actually has infinitely more irrationals than rationals between say -3 and 3 so is it a disservice to use the magic powers of computers to lie to kids about how the universe actually is? Could you or Sal Khan do a better job of explaining the number line now thanks to computers? Or is it just that his existence and his millions of followers really just helps the tech bubble from popping so that Gates and Schmidt and their ilk can withdraw their millions and billions (and trade that for bullion and guns, I guess), or am I just a tech hater on top of being a Harbaugh-hater? It probably does Cohen a disservice to fixate on the infinite space between -3 and 3 and not the more relevant infinities of infinities passed the easily countable numbers. I’d like to see Jim Harbaugh standing behind center and reeling off a long list of primes and flipping the script on his dad finally yelling “Hike the fucking ball, Harbaugh!” He could, like Rupert Pipkin or George Plimpton, yell back, “Dad! I’m working on the Riemann Hypothesis! This is not just the Red Zone it’s the Zeta Landscape!”

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Go see Cal, in heaven

Posted on September 10, 2013 by markweiss86

Cal Worthington was an American legend, a car dealer, country music promoter and friend of critters large and small.

He bought Key Chevrolet in Cupertino, in 1988, then sold it to Jerry Davidson in the early nineties. It was his first Bay Area dealership, but reportedly one of his few disappointments in that business.

The video above is from his Sacramento store from the same era.

The New York Times reported his passing Sunday at age 92.

As someone who has worked in advertising, music and the car business, I must surely acknowledge the anxiety of his influence.

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The New York Times has been charging me $15 per month since April yet I actually have not been on their site for about six months. I thought of calling the 800 number on my credit card bill to ask them to rebate me for the months that I did not visit them — they know that I know that they know this; that’s how they thought to ask me to subscribe in the first place.

Payback comes in the form of the print copy of today’s Times an anonymous stranger left for me at Peet’s today. Putting off what I actually intend to do — and laundry — I skimmed but did not read the following 16 articles:

1. “Pixies Motor on with New Bassist” by Ben Sisario;

2. review of “Five Days at Memorial” a book about medical response to Hurrican Katrina by Dr. Sheri Fink;

(add on C6 about Seamus Haney 1939-2013 — thanks to Aleta Hayes for bringing the sad news to my attention; another title or set of titles to the reading list — call this 2.1)

3. Repositioning Bar Mitzvahs To End Drain, A1 story on the assimilation of Jews, on erev Rosh Hashanah; here, notice the variation in headline; today I am a fountain pen I mean blogger Macbook.

4. Something else on A1 about leaving tips in restaurants, by Pete Wells, Critics Notebook, which reminds of a KQED Krasny Forum piece I heard yesterday about a Berkeley-based food-labor research center, and a consortium of industry-bucking well-paying group of about 700 nationwide restaurants; Is Sushi Yasuda a character in an Ian Fleming novel? The name or meme I heard on Forum but could not quite capture was Saru Rayajaman, no,  Saru Jayaraman.

5. Dennis Rodman in North Korea(A7), which is my note to self to read Adam Johnson; by Gery Mullany.

6. Names of the Dead including number 2,253 Joshua J. Bowden, 28, of Villa Rica, Georgia, the Afghan War. There is a “28” theme here, sadly.

7. “California Memorial Names Crash’s Forgotten Victims”, Malia Wollan reporting from Fresno, about a Jan. 28, 1948 event that killed 28 people, the subject of a Woody Guthrie, “Deportee — budding author Tim Z. Hernandez sussed this out, and reminds me that I could announce to my numerous “Plastic Alto” readers that during this two-month silent period I was researching a new blog called “Frisco Enamel” that would cover nothing but memorials, monuments, public art and sculpture, the shape of things to come, if you will, and sometimes the color.

Here is the link to the Times article and some decent reporting by Erika Doss, a title I picked up at Dartmouth bookstore at my reunion in 2011 which is yikes two years ago already. “Frisco Enamel” is also an Oldenburg reference. Actually “Plastic Alto” whether I kill it off or remount it, is not just an Ornette reference in that when Palo Alto added a plastic soccer field I wanted to hire Ornette to play there, and was imagining the field seen as the path of the little black faux-pebbles which bounce and dance around as the balls or feet hit, get it? That is, in “Plastic Alto” at least, the fake soccer field is also a sculptural object and plastic arts.

Here is Doss, now in paper, duly noted:

8. Business page B1 column but not David Carr on “Citizens United” by Eduardo Porter; which is note to self to read Jeffrey Clements.

9. An incubator in SF called RocketSpace; the article says that 70 percent of new office space leases are for high tech, compared to a historic 30 percent share; not to be confused with NPR “Tiny Desk concerts” or link #16 below, something about “tiny” China, and pop culture, and friction.

10. I mentioned aloud the Nokia-Microsoft deal to the fantasy football league guys Monday night — it popped up on Yahoo news as I was sussing out Martellus Bennett the brain-traumatized Bear tight-end, and Todd Kjos, a former HP guy turned Facebook guy — who hit three consecutive homers for Gunn Titans varsity in 1982, which may be a record — commented “what do they have left?” to which I, not actually a tech pundit, quipped “a ski jump team?” which is an inside joke. Kjos is rejoining our league after 25 years and calling his team “Thunder Chickens” which is a Stanford football reference but notably the etymology of ‘thunder” is “Thor’s din”, I digressed from Bennett and Giovanni Something short-yardage guy for the Brown Bengals to glean; for what it worth, retrieved the thunder link from Monday’s history.

Ok, this gives me Nick Wingfield not Quentin Hardy, Mark Scott or Brian X. Chen: here.

11. Stuart Elliot on new Mentos song and campaign, reminds me of the AmRep band that played Cub back in the day, Supernova, covered the old cheesy, chevy chestnut.

(so I think that is three music references: Pixies, Guthrie and Supernova — Plastic Alto is still ostensibly, if anything — see also “nothing but” above — an arts column;

12. I was trying to just read headlines but skimmed thru this article by a professor of finance, that mentioned Sean Parker in Ariondell and Marissa Mayer in a bathing suit;

13. this was not in my original list but who could resist a 15-year-old Egyptian tennis player named Sandra Samir, in a short black skirt?

14. Obit for Pele’s goalie, Gilmar; which is note to self to finish the last 10 percent of capture of “City of God” on DVR. And seeing not meeting samba queens of SF at Nancy Charraga’s Casa Bonampak Saturday. Charraga is a Brazil-loving Chiapasian (from Chiapas) but is also a Gunn graduate, was pleased to learn, if you permit the distinction but Times and chismes.

15. obit or cutline of for Frederik Pohl “an author who in the early 1950s foresaw a society dominated by marketing executives.

It took me 24 minutes to write and publish the first version of this, minus a 90 second interruption from my Dad about HIgh Holy Days logistics, and sans the actual links, which will have me raising my battery to finish this.

16 is actually an edita and now I am 45 minutes into this with 34 minutes left on the battery: “A Film-Fueled Culture Clash Over Values in China” by Sheila Melvin, and “tiny Times 2” not to be confused with “online times 15 dollars”. The online version is notable for color version of photo and use of work “tsking” a verb-tense not proper noun. Quick detour to search-injun “gerund” sking? more legwork avoids being ask-king.

Second edita, at 1:05 on Wedndesday, September 4, 2013: my battery is down to :10 so I am going to stop here, even if I failed to link to all 16 times articles (I threw in some bonus links, maybe 25 total?) and 85 or 86 minutes for the entire enchilada or whole farrago. I will leave the Times (but take the cannoli I mean raspberry scone) and if only there were world enough and Times to actually read all of above…let alone do my actual work…

edit to add, June 1, 2014: Ten months in, and approximately $150 sunk, I am still iffy on this concept. I doubt that I get my 50 cents worth per day of peeking at the New York Times webpages, let alone digging in to the sand and the waves, or paddling out to catch the information-society equivalent of a Mavericks, for hours on end — rarely. Yet I consider myself the type of person who would spend $15 per month to access the times, on a continuum up to Jill Abramson who was paid $500,000 per year, which is what, $40,000 per month — which is like the Woody Allen bit in the movie about the guy who pays to work backstage and help the actresses change costumes. But the weirder thing is that I am  now paying $8 a month or maybe $15 — it was $1 the first month — to read the Worcester Telegram and Gazette online. I am trying to write an essay or memoir about my Times there, in 1985. Charlie Rose had Jill (on tape) last week. And Good Luck to New Guy, at $525,000 David Bake or whatever. And how many steps from the top spot is Jim Yardley?

Posted on September 4, 2013 by markweiss86 | 1 Comment

LevitaTVed Mass

Posted on July 2, 2013 by markweiss86

It took me 342 days to transport Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass” from LACMA to my living room, with help from corporate sponsors Samsung(stupid cell phone), Samsung(flat screen tv, actually belongs to Terry), Apple(laptop computer, actually belongs to Terry), Yahoo(email service, I pay $10 per year for), and most especially “Art and Soul” a public television magazine out of Minnesota, that airs locally on KQED.

From July 25, 2012:

HeizerView6

From July 2, 2o13:

screen capture of "Art and Soul" segment on Heizer piece

screen capture of “Art and Soul” segment on Heizer piece

edit to add, moments later: in a related dealio, I saw James Turrell on Charlie Rose, re-read the relevant section in Kimmelman, and noticed a piece on Turrell last week in Time: note distinction between Rodin (French sculptor), Rodan (from Japanese sci-fi films) and Roden the crater earthwork by Turrell, not far, conceptually or geographically, from Heizer’s piece. (The distance from Turrell “Roden Crater” to Heizer “City” is about 408 miles, I got from this website).

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My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89, Less Than What I Make From a Single T-Shirt Sale!

Posted on June 25, 2013 by markweiss86

I ran into David Lowery at the Santa Fe Bandshell a couple years ago and would have gladly paid twenty bucks for that free show.
Here he talks about Pandora, who I despise:

Dr. David C Lowery's avatarThe Trichordist

Pandora less than t-shirt sale

As a songwriter Pandora paid me $16.89* for 1,159,000 play of “Low” last quarter.  Less than I make from a single T-shirt sale.  Okay that’s a slight  exaggeration.  That’s only the premium multi-color long sleeve shirts and that’s only at venues that don’t take commission.  But still.

Soon you will be hearing from Pandora how they need Congress to change the way royalties are calculated so that they can pay much much less to songwriters and performers. For you civilians webcasting rates are “compulsory” rates. They are set by the government (crazy, right?). Further since they are compulsory royalties, artists can not “opt out” of a service like Pandora even if they think Pandora doesn’t pay them enough. The majority of songwriters have their rates set by the government, too, in the form of the ASCAP and BMI rate courts–a single judge gets to decide the fate of songwriters (technically not…

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Baby what’s new to me

Posted on June 25, 2013 by markweiss86

Researching vintage posters, I came across Bill Quarry who booked shows into the East Bay. Peter Wheat and the Breadmen, Barry M. Carlos, one of the Teens and Twenties bread-and-butter acts, recently corresponded with Elinor Blake pka April March, who as The Shitbirds, covered their underground classic “Baby What’s New”. To wit:

Here’s the original, which was on a compilation called Pebbles:

I am meaning to pull from storage and then swede in my April March poster, designed by Meredith Megadeath (and then someday I will correct her name — came to SF from Chapel Hill, worked for the Bay Guardian…)

Bill Quarry’s website, http://www.teensntwenties.com/Photos.html, among other wonders, has a gallery of about 100 vintage posters. Another good article on Mr. Quarry, who still runs Minit Printing in San Leandro, at Collectors Weekly.

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Sharon Washington and Colman Domingo in Palo Alto

Posted on June 13, 2013 by markweiss86

sharonwashington81
The Dartmouth Alumni group sends me a note that a group of alumni will check out the Theatreworks show “Wild With Happy” based on the fact that a featured performer is Sharon Washington, who is a Dartmouth alumna, class of 1981 (to my 1986 — i.e. she is five years ahead of me, we missed each other by two years, or she was a classmate of the famous Kemp to Shula combination).

I was planning on, in my head, not quite in “Plastic Alto”, to interview the show’s creator and co-star Colman Domingo, on the strength of having seen him at Berkeley Rep’s version of “Passing Strange” which was created by my former client Stew. I met Colman briefly backstage  there.

I sent a little note to the Theatreworks publicist, although it might have gone into their spam file, since all I did was reply to a group email about the show.

I said somewhere else in here that I also left a note on Leah Garchik’s voice mail about Colman Domingo and his connection to “Passing Strange” — Garchik’s son, the trombonist Jacob Garchik — had played with Stew at times.

“Passing Strange” featured another Big Green alum, Chad Goodridge ’87.

Colman also appears in the opening scene of “Lincoln” the movie although I didn’t realize that at the time. Perhaps reason enough to rent the film.

He also appeared in a production of “Blood Knot” by Athol Fugard, a version of which I caught and liked at ACT. And “Scottsboro Boys” a big deal.

Colman is a rising star and maybe too busy to talk to little old “Plastic Alto”.

The Chron and the Merc had favorable notices of the production, which also played at Public Theatre of New York.

I recall seeing notice in The New York Times about an earlier Colman Domingo show, and called the theatre (off Broadway, or off-off) and maybe was put through to his producing partner  Tony Kelley). I think I have the clip and my notes somewhere.

Anyhow, this is the best I can probably do. There are 22 shows left, including tonight’s.

Break some legs, yo!

DARTMOUTH NIGHT PERFORMANCE OF WILD WITH HAPPY FEATURING SHARON WASHINGTON ‘81
Center for the Performing Arts, Mt View
Tuesday, June 18th at 7:00pm
Join the Dartmouth Class of 1981, the Black Alumni of Dartmouth Association, and the Dartmouth Alumni Association of Silicon Valley for a special performance by Sharon Washington ’81 in Wild With Happy, an absurdist-flavored new play about family, death, and healing. Read more | iCal

 

edit to add: big print say “in Palo Alto” small print say “in Mountain View”; all good in “Plastic Alto”. (show is actually at Mountain View Center for Performance Art, on Castro)
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San Ho

Posted on June 13, 2013 by markweiss86

HoRun

Brian Ho is playing tonight in San Jo, at Hotel De Anza but I hope to trek only as far as Los Altos to check out Foreverland, a Michael Jackson tribute featuring Morty Okin (of Morty and Connie fame).

I saw Ho, on organ, with Lorca Hart on drums and a cool sax player whose name I am spacing right now. Tall handsome maybe brozillian dude, Oscar? Oscar Pangilinan, I mean. (And he mean; he play a mean sax).

I booked Ho with Akira Tana trio some time ago at Santa Clara University party for tattoo art show, via Smith Andersen (Ho site says he and Tana-san also recently played World Baseball Classic).

Ho site says this is his 57th gig of the year, not too shabby!

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Yellowman “Zungguzeng” for blogger A.B.

Posted on May 11, 2013 by markweiss86

I’ve been researching various “world music” threads and found myself in Jamaica, although I thought I was in Brazil or Tanzania — the internet can be dizzying, like a caravan. Or a night in tunisia.

Seh if yuh have a paper, yuh must have a pen
And if yuh have a start, yuh must have a end
Seh five plus five, it equal to ten
And if yuh have goat, yuh put dem in a pen
And if yuh have a rooster, yuh must have a hen, now

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This way for bike signage reflectivity clue

Posted on May 7, 2013 by markweiss86

NewBikeSignsRushing home, at my customary 22 mph, to water the aging Cocker Spaniel — my mother’s euphemism for letting the dog out to make water, I stopped for a moment to shoot the new signage at Bryant and Everett, along the Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard in Palo Alto.

After parking the car — the gardener was in the driveway — closer to Poe, a half-block up, I took a closer look at our new little (metallic, reflective, bureaucratic, semiotic) babies, delaying checking on the aging but still loveable pet just long enough to for her to test me, or so it appears —

file photo of the Cocker

file photo of the Cocker

she was still sleeping by the door. I meant to only plug in the battery-dead laptop, but it sucked me in for about 10 minutes before poochie’s bad dream awakened me from my spell.

Bryant

Any hoo, I found time in my busy afternoon to suss through the search-engine long enough to ask and hopefully direct these quick three (actually seven) questions (to a website run by either the City or a vendor called Alta) and post in kind:

Three quick questions:
1) how much did we spend on the study (i.e. to Alta)?
2) how much is the total budget for the bicycle improvements, according to this site or report or initiative?
2.a does that include the $10 million bike bridge over 101 that County is paying for?
3. I notice some new signage (blue not white, lowercase, more reflective, conforming, with a bike logo) on Bryant near our home — how many of these are there? a. what is the total cost for this exact type of signage? b. what is the total cost of signage, or as percentage of the total in 2), above? c) how much per sign, i.e. like the one I photographed at NE corner of Poe/Bryant?

Mark Weiss
resident
(650) 305-XXXX

ok, I admit that is actually 7 questions — could not find answers in your 128 page document…

edit to add, a few minutes later, an hour all-in, and I really should be doing my workout and still bothers me to think I might have saved poor aging ward from her embarrassment if I and not she had just “let it go”: Palo Alto Weekly had this on-point from two years ago, by G. Sheyner.

By my quick reckoning (distinct from, for example, reflection) the chief difference in the signage is that it is reflective and incorporates the bike logo, as you approach Bryant, and apparently have no clue. I also notice the sign is blue not white, is “upstyle” but not all-caps, indicates “street” as opposed to “avenue” and points in the direction of ascending numbers, if that matters. Ok, but at what cost?

Seems to me there is a dissonance between the fact that we like to bike to work and we are part of this work culture that is so obsessive about outcomes. But of course I am also curious about the bureaucratic response to this and its effect on the semiotics. (My hypothesis, albeit cynical and only semi-informed, is that somehow the obsessive work culture undermines “we the people” from self-governing to our highest standards; that is, there are factors that seem to obscure our ability to be more bike-friendly — but I am willing to hear the counter-arguments and admit where I am clueless; like truing a wheel, our process can be improved).

I have a mental list of people I know who track this more closely.

See also, the improvements at Stanford Avenue and El Camino. (I went to a party for, and recall we spend $1 million or so to improve the crosswalks and what-not; one friend, SR, felt it was well-worth-it in terms of safe-to-school, i.e near or towards Escondido from Evergreen Park area.

The difference between this and reporting (and recall I went thru training program at Times Tribune in 1984) is that I am putting online the first three (seven) questions that pop up in my notebook.

coda: a couple weeks ago, I drove, as typical, from Palo Alto North towards Downtown per se, and when I got to the light at Lytton, a guy in bike get-up passes me on right and stops in front of me, but then turns around and glares at me and I think I can hear him thinking “you dirty rat”. What I assume happened is that, Joe Biker He, was either drafting me or riding in my blind spot on the right for a spell, completely unobserved, and maybe as I veered right to give room for an oncoming bike — a mom, or a lady on a commute bike — maybe he had to correct to avoid me. I think he was of the mind that cars should stay off Bryant even around downtown. I am sure I was going a bike-speed — my usual 22 mph hereabouts. I am thinking, if I get his drift, that he should take the middle of the road, in this case behind me directly, rather than pass me on the right, even if he can.  One point is that Bike Boulevards, in this case Bryant, probably work better outside of Downtown, and maybe two, it is more geared for a commuter than a racer. Three, and this is my bad in this case, it is hard to communicate your point if one or both is behind a wind-shield. And, finally, not sure how these new signs help in this case, but I feel him. Lo siento.

edit to add, a few minutes later: Actually, GS has two stories on this, one from July, 2011, I linked above and a second from July, 2012, that I found from link from Alta site. Alta is a bike-advocacy consulting group with offices in Portland, Berkeley and about 10 other places, and about 100 staff. Again, not to be too cynical, but there is a distinction between what is good for an abstract like “bicycling” — for instance, good for environment, good for our health — and the real world, what we get, institutions that feed off other institutions — to what extent does the bike lobby have its own agenda, or has been compromised, for example, hypothetically, by the Reflective-Sign-Mongers (friends of the Ten-Million-Dollar-Bike Bridge-Backers)? Also, in glancing at the comments feed of the second cite from the Weekly, I think it is Doug Moran who uses the term “spandex bikers” which is the shibboleth for people like the Joe Biker He, I described. I bike mostly as a commuter — although I am self-employed — and wear mostly cotton shorts not spandex.

edit to add, the next morning: I ran into my friend B.K. an avidly self-powered Palo Altan, and asked him if he had noticed the new signs on the Bryant Street Bike Boulevard. He said no, but that he had noticed that the awkward bike lane on Park, over Oregon, between Sheridan and the AOL Complex on Page Mill, had been improved some with a green painting fill-in. On his suggestion, I circled Ventura neighborhood via Park and side-streets to find that the Bike-friendly sections of Park now featured these same style of new signage, the blue reflective signs with the bike logo — I counted six of them, up past Gryphon and one block into the residential section, or 3300 Park, but no further. Similarly, after posting above last night, I drove — : ( — Bryant from Embarcadero to the creek and counted a total of 17 of the new signs, including two each at Lytton and Uni.

Pedaling on, up this hill of information, I found this comment by City consultant Jaime Rodriguez, posted on Quora, from October, 2011:

Great responses so far.  Any Bike Boulevard prioritizes bicycle use on a corridor over vehicles through traffic calming measures as noted by other responders.  In Palo Alto, we will begin branding of bike boulevards through new signage and roadway markings treatments as well as aggressively expanding our bicycle boulevard network. New purple brand signs will be installed at each intersection and gateway signs at major intersections.  The City’s first green bicycle lanes will be installed on Channing Avenue between Newell Avenue and Lincoln Avenue. A similar concept for Bike Boulevards will be used called Super Sharrows.  Please be sure to check out the City’s DRAFT Bicycle & Pedestrian Transportation Plan 2011 at: www.cityofpaloalto.org/bike

A “sharrows” is a symbol that tells motorists to share the road with bikes. (“share” plus “arrow” as in merge, I guess) BK made a morbid joke about their utility.

The Barron Park neighborhood website covers this topic, including a post from my former neighbor Art Liberman, who I think of as an avid runner, and also a leader in terms of the discussion of the risk of toxics exposure from nearby BPI; in Barron Park, they are inputting to leadership’s treatment of proposed expansion of the bike plan to include Matadero connecting to Margarita — sounds iffy, due to its narrowness; it travels along the creek and has no bike lane per se.

As B.K. and I finished our discussion of the topic, I turned around to notice our current mayor Greg Scharff meeting with the Weekly’s Gennady Sheyner but held back from approachig them with this topic.

I also found coverage in the recent couple of years from Patch and Bay Citizen.

To oversimplify my point, or my question: once we have established, forty years ago, Bryant Street as a “Bike Boulevard” meaning bikes sharing the road with cars, and removing stop signs for bikes, while adding some obstacles for cars, how does signage per se augment that, and at what cost?

There’s also a somewhat recent document apropos of using county funds to create a Palo Alto w. Stanford Bay to Skyline bike path that quotes from the 128 page Palo Alto bike plan but is itself only 10 pages. And a 6-page one.

There is also a Palo Alto Bicycle Advisory Committee (PABAC), chaired by Robert Neff and Eric Nordman that met last night at Cubberley as I was writing this.

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