Posts Tagged: albany
Found Rant
"Shopping Cart" / © Neo Serafimidis 2009
Here’s a funny idea: what if took my ranty responses to stories and reader comments on albany.patch that I wrote and never posted, and instead posted them as out-of-any-context blog entries?
“Come on. I don’t believe for a freaking second we have a “unique 50’s street ambiance” on San Pablo. The “main street ambiance,” such as it is, is dingy and uninteresting–a retarded mess of new and old architecture, endless hair and nail salons, mediocre restaurants that last a few months, car repair shops, some old storefront buildings too small and moldy to hold a sustainable business of any kind, and a couple bars that we seem to be trying to drive out of business. And shockingly few actual pedestrians. From Livermore to Santa Rosa, other cities have much, much nicer and more vibrant “1950’s” main streets, including Solano. If you think this shit is special, I feel sorry for you. You need to get out of town more.
If one is so deluded about how precious Albany’s commercial street-scape is, I suppose it is easy to put down Bay Street as being a grotesquely inferior fake. I thought of it as corporate and fake too. But quite honestly, I was at Bay Street a couple times recently and had a realization. Each time, there was a band playing in the courtyard area, lots of people sitting around listening and enjoying the sun, eating ice cream or food, children running around playing, shoppers shopping. It was like a community of people congregated and enjoying the public square. Is it fake? What’s fake about it? IT WORKS.
And then we came home to Albany through the Solano-San Pablo intersection. There was a boarded up cafe on the corner, no one really hanging around except the angry homeless guy with the dog, a big ugly billboard peeling off, and a bunch of passing-through traffic. I had to admit to myself that the corporate fake was actually infinitely more attractive and functioning far better as a gathering place for people than anything in Albany. I’d trade a couple blocks of San Pablo for a couple blocks of Bay Street in a heartbeat. I’ll bet the City budget would, too.
Three years spent balancing quality of life with attracting development? What development has occurred? Another doomed restaurant went in next to Ivy Room? How many businesses have closed and not been replaced in that time?
I don’t blame the Adams/Kains neighbors one bit for opposing rezoning. I did too at the time. But if every proposal is successfully put down by those who don’t want it in their backyard, then we will have what we have now, family-oriented stagnation.”
Do I hold to all this? Maybe not all. But it does suggest a photo essay on Albany’s commercial street-scape. I’ll get right on that.
Location, Location, Location
"XXX" From the "Where in Albany" series. Albany CA. January, 2011
It was a spooky evening for photography in Eastbania last night when I went out to shoot for the “Where in Albany” game feature on albany.patch.com.
The current obsession in Albany is the locating of a marijuana dispensary somewhere in our little town. The current application to open a dispensary was coming before the City Council again tonight, and it was expected that the applicants’ appeal would be rejected. It would locate it in a largely residential neighborhood on Solano Ave. But there is another application right behind that one that locates a dispensary down in the light industrial edge of town next to the train tracks.
With all that in mind last night, I set out to photograph the locations under consideration. The Solano location results weren’t all that interesting. But the fog helped produce something of interest down by the tracks.
"Light Silhouette" / © 2011 Neo Serafimidis
I suppose that all in all, this looks more like where expects to find one’s pot than a row of quaint storefronts surrounded by suburban-style homes.
New Street Light
Albany CA. 2010
I just noticed tonight that the street light right outside our house is different. It is is very white, almost blue light, and almost looks like LED. Then I noticed that several, but not all, of the street lights in the neighborhood have been replaced. It is easy to tell, because the contrast with the old yellowish sodium lights is striking.
I thought a web search was in order to see if this was part of something significant. Sure enough, I found the following information in this PDF:
The City will be replacing all “cobra head” street lights in Albany from High‐pressure sodium vapor (HPSV) to LED. Approximately $400,000 in Federal Stimulus Funds (ARRA funds) for energy efficiency will be utilized for this project. This project has many “green” benefits including:
- CO2 reduction: 170,042 Kg/year
- Energy savings: 324,506 kWh/year
- First Year Cost savings: $28,374
They will be replacing over 600 of the old sodium lights. There’s also a lot said about improved visibility. It definitely seems much brighter out there. I hope it is not too much, since our bedroom window faces the street. On the other hand, I do like the quality of light much better than those terrible orangey sodium-vapor lights. It’ll make mundane neighborhood night photography much more fun.
Brighton Ave, Albany CA, 2010.
Chimneys of Albany
Albany Chimney #8
The leaning, the straight. The clean and symmetrical, the organic mess. Squared, rounded, rock, brick, plastered. These are the fireplace chimneys of Albany.
I would hate to apply a misleading name to something. Looking on the web and within Flickr, “fireplace” seemed like it would be more misleading than “chimney” which is also a little snappier. If there is a better word for referring to the exterior structure of the fireplace and chimney on a residential home, please let me know.
In any case, it seems that these houses, like most of the houses in Albany, were built by a builder named Charles M. MacGregor. Around here, a necessary and sufficient condition for dubbing a house “a MacGregor” is that it has the following floor plan: split level with garage at grade, main living area up about 8 steps, and two bedrooms and a bath above the garage. The master bedroom is right over the garage looking out towards the street, followed by a bathroom , followed by another bedroom overlooking the back. I suspect this can’t be a correct definition, but it works well with the rest of the local MacGregor mythology. Me, I look for whimsical chimneys.
I’ll try to dig more on the man and the myth soon.
Stream of consciousness: Scenic photos
Climbing up on Albany Hill
San Francico Bay from Albany Hill, Sept. 19, 2009 #2
I’m not sure what to call the kind of photography I have been primarily engaged in since getting back into it over the last two years. I just know it hasn’t been landscapes and scenic photography. Indeed, I have not been trying to make images that are overtly beautiful or aesthetically pleasing at all.
Yet, there is something irresistible about nature. Often, it is awe-inspiring. And as we all know, sensations of pleasure, well-being, and the loss of self in the one-ness of the creation often lead to addiction. Gotta get that fix again and again. That leads to wanting it for oneself, even in a puny way like making a picture of it.
That’s not to denigrate scenic photography. I find a lot of it pretty wonderful. I just also see the production of it as beyond my ken–not to mention my lacking the wherewithal to afford the gear and the travel to seriously pursue and produce beautiful scenic photography.
All that said, I’ve had fun working with some shots of San Francisco Bay taken mostly as an afterthought–or just because I always have my camera with me, so why not? And the other night I was at a friend’s home that is on Albany Hill and overlooks almost the whole bay. After taking a couple shots from the deck, someone showed me the Richard Misrach book of the Golden Gate. It was inspiring. I came to see the intrinsic interest of a series of photographs of one thing taken over all the different conditions to which it may be subject. I think I may try my own little series from a given vantage point and see what happens. If only I could get a neon martini glass, or rusted car, or dead cow or something in there…
The first time I told this story
this is what I said:
“We were getting into our bunks when this strange light seemed to come down from the sky, and there was this rumbling noise and the camper swayed a little. It got really loud, then suddenly–very quiet. And we felt this pressure, and then I blacked out. When I woke up, I was alone.”
Small Town Centennial
When we first moved to Albany, I thought of it as a decent, reasonably safe place in the east bay that’s close enough to SF, which is, of course, the center of the universe. There is plenty of stuff within walking distance, including Solano Ave shopping and dining. Berkeley culture is just a few blocks away. And I could garden to my heart’s content.
But after being here for a couple years, it came to seem a little too sleepy, a little too cool and foggy for kick-ass tomatoes (and other fruits), a bit too far away for genuinely impromptu trips into the City, and at the back end of the some of the worst traffic in the Bay Area. Not only that, but most of the shops and restaurants seemed a far cry from the hip joints found in neighborhoods like Rockridge, Elmwood, and even 4th St, much less places in the City. It seemed like a sort of overpriced suburb.
Maybe it just takes time, maybe it takes having a kid, or maybe it just takes a change of perspective, but I think I have come to see that the most valuable quality of this place is the sense of community, and in fact, the actual community. It sounds kinda hokey, but going to community events and seeing so many friendly faces really gives one a sense of place and stability. There is always something going on, like July 4th pancake breakfasts at the Veterans Memorial Building, parades of soccer kids and high school bands, Santa Claus visiting on a fire engine, a month of music in the park, and on and on. The latest event to bring everyone together was a dinner to celebrate Albany’s centennial. The entire town was invited to come down to Solano Ave for dinner, music and dancing in the street. It was an absolute blast. And there are not too many places around here where you can put a couple thousand people together in the street with loud music and alcohol and have it all come off without trouble.
Before it starts to sound too much like a Norman Rockwell cover, consider that many of the everyday folks who live here are recent transplants from the SF or other nearby cities looking for a safe place to raise their kids. The place is chock full of interesting people. So it turns out the likelihood of meeting a parent who is either a punk musician, artist, surgeon, web programmer, scientist, landscape architect, or [fill in the blank] ready to pound a few beers and dance in the street is really very high. A conversation ranges from avant garde music to research on climate change, to bluegrass, to growing apricots, and of course to progressive politics. So, I am loving my community. I am sorry I doubted you.
Indulgent Parent or Crafty Photographer?
Caleb, House and Topiary, originally uploaded by neocles.
Saturday was a long day. It started by my rushing around trying to get various domestic chores and to-do’s done before helping good neighbor friends the Fosters with day two of their move to a new place. Dig the topiary.
So after grocery shopping, collecting up mom’s laundry, getting a hair cut, last minute trip to the drug store for more allergy drugs–damn! The decongestant-antihistamine-pain reliever combo drug is TWICE as expensive with real pseudo-ephedrine in it!–I arrived to help with the move. I’m sure glad my neighborly friends and pillars of civic life in Albany, CA found a place in town to hatch the next one, and didn’t have to move to, say, Albany NY. Housing prices have managed to stand pat around here. They say it’s the schools.
Meanwhile, we had strongly intimated to, if not outright promised, Theo that we would go check out the free telescope viewing at Chabot Space and Science Center. Well, by the time the packing, loading, unloading, organizing, pizza, and beer was done and we got home, it was durn near 9 p.m. That’s pretty late for chilluns to be heading out to party.
But a promise is a promise, as we were repeatedly, like a skipping CD, reminded. Indulgent parent that I am, I agreed to take him up there to see what we could see. Theo had a disco nap in the car on the way there, and I had to wake his ass up upon arrival.
It was a good night for viewing. We saw the Beehive Cluster, M3 Globular Cluster, Capella binary star system (I think), and Saturn with four of its moons! Seeing Saturn through a big telescope is pretty awesome. Theo is totally into it; looks like we’ll be coming back often. And since we were going anyway, I took camera and tripod along for the heck of it. Results below.
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