The twittersphere is buzzing about Actual Cafe at San Pablo and Alcatraz in North Oakland. The cafe is a hopping spot for bicyclists — it has an indoor rack for hanging your ride while you sip java. It features a long communal table next to the bike rack, a couple of couches, several seats at a high-top bar and a couple of booths. There were at least a dozen patrons when I dropped in at around 12:30 on Saturday, and several bikes hanging on the rack. It was an eclectic clientele, representative of the neighborhood. Some students, some middle aged and older adults, some youngish hipsters. The address situates the cafe in a little sliver of Oakland which cuts between Berkeley and Emeryville.

The coffee was good. (I ordered a shot of espresso.) It wasn’t as fruity as the shot of Verve Streetlevel which I drank at Modern Coffee on Friday, but it was well pulled and featured a nice crema. I didn’t ask what beans they were using, so I’ll need to revisit for more info.

My favorite part of the place is the big table. The bike rack is a fun novelty, but it’s a little awkward. There’s a dedicated door for bikes that is well marked which makes getting into the building easy, but while I sat at the big community table sipping my coffee I watched three people struggle to get bikes in and out. It didn’t help that some people just rested their bikes against the railing that separates the rack from the cafe — that just made it harder to slip through the already limited space. The table, though, is really great. It reminded me of a great cafe Anna and the boys and I visited in New York several years ago. It’s just more fun to sit at a big table and engage with those around you. Even if you don’t have much to say, it’s nice to make eye contact, share a smile, and acknowledge a common appreciation for a good cup of coffee.

It’s a bit of a hike from our neighborhood to the cafe — a shade over 3 and a half miles. I don’t know enough about the side streets between here and there yet to know if there’s a nice, quiet route, so I rode along Grand to San Pablo and then straight up to Alcatraz. San Pablo has no bike lanes so I’d hesitate to take Anna that way. And with other locations within easy striking distance of our place, I can’t see myself riding over to Actual Cafe more than once a month, but it is a fun place. Definitely worth a visit.

Just a few days ago I rode around Lake Merritt and noted the lack of adequate bike lanes on one small section of the ride. The marked bike lane currently ends at the curve at One Lakeside Drive and restarts on Harrison just before Grand Avenue. Imagine my glee when I rode around the lake yesterday and noticed that there are now preliminary markings on the roadway for bike lanes on part of that previously unmarked route. Nice.

FURTHER UPDATE: 18 Jan 2010 | When I walked around the lake on Saturday (Jan. 16) I noticed that the preliminary markings had been made permanent.

News is spreading about a renewed attempt by Fremont to lure the A’s out of Oakland. They’re proposing a site on the property behind the New United Motors Manufacturing, Inc. plant. This site could be called the anti-walking site. It’s surrounded by industrial buildings and located at the far southern tip of the East Bay. This proposed site is as remote from the center of the community as it could be.

According to the Oakland Tribune article, the A’s are not directly engaged in negotiations with Fremont. Major League Baseball has to give its blessing first to any alternate site for the team. I hope MLB has the good sense to see that this Fremont site would not be beneficial to the A’s chances of drawing a crowd. It’s not a site that serves the best interests of fans or the league.

The beauty of the proposed downtown Oakland locations is that they would put the stadium within walking distance of a large, urban population, like Wrigley Field in Chicago or AT&T Park in the West Bay. The businesses and restaurants in China Basin and Wrigleyville have a good chance of surviving because there is a community that lives nearby and can support those businesses even when the Cubs or Giants aren’t playing. Fremont thinks that putting a baseball stadium in the middle of an industrial neighborhood will help them redevelop that area more quickly than allowing growth to happen organically. But that’s false hope. If I’m thinking about opening a business to cater to people going to a baseball game, I need to think about how I’m going to attract people on the other 240 days of the year when there’s no game in the stadium. I’d be smarter to choose a location where there’s a pool of potential customers 365 days a year.

MLB should be thinking about the stadium location in terms of how it would benefit the A’s, the league, and the community. Those interests dovetail nicely when the stadium is located in an area like downtown Oakland. It’s like planting a seed — you want to drop your seed in fertile soil, in good light, with steady access to water. You don’t plant your seed on rocky soil and say “hopefully we can attract some sunlight and water to this desolate wasteland.”

Last night Modern Coffee added me as a twitter friend. This morning I decided to ride downtown and check ‘em out. The cafe is on the ground floor of the Tribune Tower (no longer home to the Oakland Tribune). It’s a tiny place, but just right for a 20-30 minute respite from the demands of the day. While sitting there I enjoyed catching snippets of conversation on the politics of the day (local and national). The copper topped table signaled the kind of attention to detail that I appreciate in a small cafe.

I ordered a double shot and asked the barista/owners if this was going to be a third wave influenced drink. The gentleman said he and his partner were former Peet’s workers and appreciated the dark roast school but thought there were few coffee roasters that could manage a dark roast (Peet’s being one). They are featuring beans from a variety of roasters at Modern Coffee — they describe themselves as a “coffee taproom” — and today’s beans were from Verve in Santa Cruz. Definitely a lighter roast, and my espresso was perfectly pulled. A nice crema on top of a tart, fruity coffee. It seemed to get tarter and the fruit came forward as the coffee cooled off.

It’s fantastic to have access to a place within a 10 minute bike ride from the house where I can sip the tasty java. There are many more places to explore, but Modern Coffee is going to be a yardstick by which I measure future experiences.

UPDATE: 13 Jan 2010 | I stopped back for another cup this morning. Tried an Americano instead of espresso. MMMmmm good. It was the Verve Streetlevel, but in the Americano I picked up more of a chocolate flavor than the tart, grapefruit flavor I tasted in the espresso last week. I asked about that, and it turns out several factors can alter the overtones in the coffee. The addition of water to make the Americano can be a factor. The time-since-roasting age of the beans is also a factor. And how much time it takes to pull the shot is also a factor. Robert and Kristen were very happy to take a few minutes and explain all of this to me.

I didn’t fully understand my brother’s preoccupation with this level of detail when it came to making coffee, so it’s nice to get some third party education. I have a new appreciation for what Jon’s trying to do with his espresso machine in Moline.

I added a photo of the new diner mugs that Modern Coffee has purchased for serving coffee in house. You can buy these mugs to enjoy coffee at home. They are heavy mugs with a great feel in your hand. (A friend, Troy Evans, once told me that the key to feeling quality in small products was weight.)

The USGS doesn’t know the magnitude yet, but Anna and I just felt a little earthquake this morning. We’re on the third floor of our building, so there would be a little magnification effect, but I think the quake was pretty small. I’m guessing somewhere in the 2.5 to 3.0 range. Maybe a little smaller.

Take a peek at the USGS data for this quake.

UPDATE: Looks like the USGS won’t want me as a magnitude estimator. They’re putting the quake at 4.1. I was off by a long shot.

There is something about the Lake Chalet restaurant that makes me a little uneasy. My parents flew back into town this afternoon and they took me there for an early dinner tonight. Don’t get me wrong. The food was good. The atmosphere was pleasant. The view of Lake Merritt from the dining room is really nice. The service was friendly and professional. The dining experience was almost all a person could want. Even the beer, which is brewed by the Lake Chalet’s sister establishment on the west side of the bay, is pretty darned tasty.

The restaurant is housed in the old Lake Merritt Boat House, which is a decent building, if a little overscale when you consider the size of the lake. Major renovations have converted the Lakeside Drive site into a very impressive venue, featuring a very long bar. The actual bartop may be well over 100 feet long. (I’m just guessing.) I can foresee incredible people watching opportunities at that bar.

Still, there’s something about the place that seems wrong. This place doesn’t feel like an Oakland place to me. It feels like it belongs on the San Francisco waterfront, not on the shore of Lake Merritt. As I said, there was nothing pretentious about the staff, or the service, or the way that we were treated that seemed inappropriate. It’s just that the place seemed to lack something that would make it feel like a real Oakland place. Maybe it’s my own self consciousness, my sense of being an outsider trying to find my way back to being a local, that makes me alert to it, but there is a palpable lack of the “we just belong here” sensibility in the place.

There are a ton of new eating places in town that I have yet to visit, so maybe I’m missing something about the new Oakland restaurant aesthetic, but the Lake Chalet didn’t speak to me in a way that said, “welcome to Oakland.” I feel like I need to go back during the warmer weather for the Tuesday evening Taco night on the boat dock—that may give me a better feel for what the place has to offer. And I wouldn’t dare to criticize the food after only a single visit, so my current thought about the place is based only on the hit I got after one visit.

It may take me some time to identify the missing ingredient in the Lake Chalet. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t name it just yet.

Anna and I rode our bikes up Grand Avenue today to visit the Rose Garden. Many of the roses have been pruned for the winter but there were still a few plants with some roses hanging on. The garden is quite an oasis, and the neighborhood surrounding the garden is nice — sweet looking, well tended houses and apartment buildings.

The rose garden grounds were being tended by a couple of guys from the Oakland Parks department but it was clear that they wouldn’t be able to handle all the pruning and weeding themselves. This is a big rose garden. If you have time today (January 5, 2009) the friends of the Rose Garden are having a volunteer work party where you can help with the pruning, weeding, soil amending, and such. There are also events on Saturday the 9th and a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. on the 18th.

This garden looks like it’s the place to be in the spring, and we’ll definitely be heading back later this year. There’s another rose garden over in the Berkeley hills were we spent a bit more time when we lived here before. It’s across the street from Codornices Park where there’s a big cement slide that snakes down the hillside. We went there with my parents when we were kids and took our boys there when they were little. What a great slide.

Since coming back to Oakland I’ve been trying to tease out what kind of relationship I have with my old town. I spent some very formative years here. My folks moved us to Oakland from Santa Barbara in 1968. I remember sitting in the back of our station wagon as we drove north on US 101 that September and wondered what my parents were thinking. We had it all. Santa Barbara had beaches. The weather was perfect. I loved my school. And there was Karen Calene. I was just starting 6th grade and my love life was being interrupted by a senseless change of venue.

Settling into our new town was slow. Our new next door neighbors were eccentric. It was foggy. Even though our new school was just a short distance from home it was a scary walk. Instead of the flat streets of our Santa Barbara subdivision, our new home sat on a curvy, hilly road. There were no sidewalks and splitting the distance between a deep ravine and the rushing cars was a little unnerving. And while there were some nice kids at Joaquin Miller Elementary, I still missed Karen Calene.

It took me well into the 7th grade to really begin to like living in Montclair. My homeroom teacher during my 3 years at Montera (a fun-loving German teacher named Mrs. Mahabir) helped me gain my legs with the ladies, introducing me to a pair of beauties in German class. “Wie geht es dir?” Sue and Sylvia helped make Karen Calene a fading memory. Oakland was turning out to be a pretty nice place to live.

High school was really fun. I met other girls, I learned to speak better German, and Santa Barbara became a place where one might go on vacation, but who’d want to live there? The late 60s and early 70s in the Bay Area were groovy. My parents would take us down to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. In our early days we’d drive down the street and stare at National Guardsmen who were looking warily at hippies dressed in colorful rags. Eventually the Guard disappeared and the street was walkable. I bought my first suit when I was a senior in high school at a store on Telegraph — it was a white linen suit. French cut and altered to fit just right. I wore it on graduation night and when Jon and I took dates to a Stevie Wonder concert at the Cow Palace.

Oakland was the center of our universe. We were perfectly situated — close enough to San Francisco to enjoy the theatre and urban culture, but we lived on the warmer, sunnier side of the bay. Close enough to the colorful culture of Berkeley to visit on occasion. At one point my dad was considering a call to a church on the far western side of San Francisco, the foggier side. We kids were against it.

High school gave way to Summer theatre at Woodminster, some classes at UC Berkeley, and a fun job teaching motor development at Thornhill Elementary School. “Motor” (as we called it) was built around the theory that kids learned to read more easily if they developed good physical agility and used gross, oppositional locomotive skills on a regular basis. This is where I officially met the woman who would later become my wife. She taught motor, too.

Anna and I married. We had a son. We moved to Los Angeles (there were reasons) but we missed Oakland. We moved back and had another son. Our boys attended Joaquin Miller Elementary School. We had been here for a few years when things started to feel crumbly. Teachers went on strike. The school district felt kind of iffy. We were not in a financial position to send the boys to a private school. Most of my work was starting to be in Silicon Valley. I had an aunt and uncle living in Palo Alto who called us one day to say they had seen a really great house for rent very near where they lived. We bit the bullet and pulled up stakes and headed to the Peninsula.

It was more costly to live there, but I was much closer to my clients, and the school district didn’t feel so iffy. Moving to Palo Alto was a little cheaper than paying private school tuition. We liked a lot about Palo Alto, but there was also something off-putting about the conspicuous display of materialism during the internet bubble. That bubble burst for us in the end of 2001 and we decided to head east. We drove out across the plains to the bluffs of the Mississippi river, settling in Moline near my brother Jon and his family. The towns of Rock Island and Moline were places with significant family heritage, and we lived there in relative contentment for 7 years.

Now we’re back in Oakland. And it seems right that we would want to love our new/old hometown. But years of separation have not totally erased the memory of why we left. We’re not coming here as complete strangers. We see a town that is still struggling to find its footing. A place where there is still a big gap between those who are well off and those who don’t have enough. It’s a town with many faces and a place that refuses to be defined in simple terms. Oakland is a place with tremendous opportunity, and that opportunity exists because Oakland is a struggling city, a place with tremendous challenges.

You don’t love this place like a fifth grader loves the cute girl down the street. You love this town because it’s complex. This is a town that makes you mad. It gets you riled up because the people who are supposed to keep the town safe have frequently been part of the force that knocks the town off balance. You love this town because it needs to be loved. It needs that mature kind of love that us older folks feel for the people that we’ve lived with all our lives. I know my breath is bad in the morning, and I know I snore most of the night, but Anna still loves me. I’m barely recognizable as the handsome young man, full of promise and hope that she married. That young man was easy to love. Loving me today is hard work. But Anna does it because it needs to be done. Her love is what keeps me from turning into a cranky old man.

There are a lot of pleasant things about the town, easy reasons to love Oakland. There are great restaurants, and the weather is nearly perfect all year round. There are nice places to walk and interesting places to drink coffee. But there is also devastating poverty. There is violent crime. Our school district is struggling to give every kid in town a decent education (and the kids deserve better than just “decent”). There is hatred and mistrust. There is fear.

Loving a city means finding ways to work for justice. Finding ways to overcome racism, to overcome fear, to make peace. We need to confront our city’s problems with creativity and thoughtfulness. This city needs our love. It needs a positive, unconditional, paradigm shifting kind of love.

I’m finding it hard to love some of the things I’ve seen and read about Oakland, but this is the place I’ve chosen to live. Hating and fearing this town won’t make it better. I’ve only got one choice for being happy and fulfilled in my new life here. I’ve got to love this town.

I have been walking past the Coffee With a Beat coffee house for several years but never had an occasion to stop in. When my folks, Kathleen and Dave, moved back to Oakland several years ago and we started visiting this new neighborhood more frequently we’d walk by and say that we needed to stop in and check the beat. This morning I decided I’d rather grab a cappucino than brew a whole pot of coffee at home.

The coffee is not-great-but-drinkable, my bagel was over toasted, the place is a bit noisy, the CD player was skipping and no one seemed to notice. I love it. The woman behind the counter was cheerful. The place has about 10 people sitting at tables inside and a few sitting outside (so they can smoke). There’s a lack of pretense that is refreshing. I couldn’t work here for hours at a stretch (too noisy) or drink the coffee every day, but I heartily recommend this place. It’s half a block from our apartment, so the convenience factor is a plus.

Call me spoiled. During the past seven years, when we wanted to go to a movie, we looked at what was playing (thanks, Google) chose something that looked good and if it was starting in less than 10 minutes, we got in the car and drove to the theatre to see the show. We needed an extra two minutes if we wanted popcorn. In the Quad Cities, movies didn’t sell out, rarely were there lines of more than 4 or 5 people at the box office, and parking at the theatre was ample and free.

Last week we went to see Invictus at Oakland’s famed Grand Lake Theater. We walked to the theatre, which took just a shade over 10 minutes. There was no one in line in front of us. We bought our tickets, and since we were seeing the show on a weeknight, the popcorn was free. We found seats in the auditorium, enjoyed the lovely decor, and when the movie was over a couple hours later, we enjoyed a leisurely walk home. We could have stopped for a nightcap at Sidebar but we decided to leave that for another night.

Considering those two experiences, a movie in Oakland had a slight edge over going to a movie in Moline. Being able to walk was the best part, and the free popcorn was a nice bonus. (To be fair, there was a theatre within walking distance of our house in Moline. It also offered free popcorn. But it only showed second run pictures, the theatres were small, the seats uncomfortable, the projectors had underpowered bulbs, and walking was only possible at certain times of the year—sometimes it was too hot and sometimes too cold.)

All in all, if the movie we want to see is showing at the Grand Lake, we’re sitting pretty. Last night, though, we wanted to see a film that was showing at the AMC Theatre in Emeryville. We knew, because we had tried to see a movie there last week, that we needed to allow a little extra time to get to the theatre because parking in the Emeryville area is problematic. Naively, we figured half an hour might be enough time. We hopped in the car, drove down to the theatre, which is next to IKEA. It takes about 10 minutes to get to IKEA, and it takes an additional 25 minutes to park in the garage next door. We might have just made it to the movie, but once we got to the front of the theatre there was a long line for tickets snaking away from the box office. All the self service kiosks that were operating also had lines several patrons long. We checked the time and realized there was no chance we’d make it into the theatre before the feature started. Bummer. (Well, not a complete bummer…we came home, heated up the leftover ginger soup, grilled a slice of Afghan spinach bread we bought at the farmers market this morning, opened a bottle of 2 Buck Chuck Sauvignon Blanc, and engaged in a delightful conversation.)

It’s nice to have a full array of films to choose from—it seems everything you might want to see is playing somewhere around here—and I’m not sure we couldn’t have made it in time to the theatre if we’d decided to ride our bikes. I estimate it would take just about 25 minutes to ride to the theatre from our house, and parking a bike should be much quicker than trying to park a car in the big parking lot next to the theatre. Maybe I should dig up all the flashers and headlights that we need so that we can ride over next time the we get the itch to see a movie on short notice. Or, if we drive, I think we’ll allow an hour to get to the theatre.

Anna’s cousin came over to stroll around the lake with us this afternoon. We’re really happy she lives close by. She broke an ankle last year so she’s working at rehabbing and wears these cool shoes that approximate walking in sand. Since we were going kind of slow, it gave us a chance to take a closer look at what the birds were doing as we walked. We encountered dozens of seagulls that had pulled mussels out of the lake and were breaking them open on the path. We saw a couple baby pin ducks and a couple of pelicans, along with all the other birds we’re getting used to encountering on this walk.

One thing I noticed (both this morning as we rode around the lake and this afternoon as we walked) was how many people were out enjoying the day. I know we’re still getting adjusted to the general idea of being outside during the winter, but I don’t recall that we would have seen as many people walking the lake when we lived here before. One thing is certain – the pathway along Lakeshore is much improved. We’re really lucky to have this space available so close to our front door. Just after we arrived home Nate’s pal Zach came by and the two of them went down to Lakeside park to toss a ball with their lacrosse sticks.

Twenty-Ten is off to an auspicious start. The nasty head cold that had threatened to ruin my weekend has abated and I felt pretty good, so this morning Anna and I rode our bikes up to Splash Pad Park to pick up some fresh veggies at the farmer’s market. Then, for a little extra exercise, we rode the long way around Lake Merritt to get back home. The footpath around the lake was teeming with walkers, joggers, and birds. Just past the Lake Chalet Restaurant I saw a handful of seagulls trying to chase a couple of walkers off their path. (The couple looked like Nancy and Bill — Nancy was a high school classmate of mine — but because the traffic was a little hectic at the moment I couldn’t look closely enough to be sure.)

We rounded the corner onto Harrison street, just as the sun was breaking through the clouds. Straight ahead was the newish Oakland Cathedral of Light. It’s a striking building. I can’t remember what used to be at that corner when we lived here before, but I don’t think it was as nice a visual anchor for that corner of the lake as the Cathedral.

Turning on to Grand, Anna decided she needed another lap around the lake to really get her heart pumping so she kept pedaling while I came upstairs to unload our bounty from the market. (I was riding my old one-speed cruiser, so I think I may have been going to slow for her on the first lap.)

It was a nice start to the new year. 55 degrees, broken clouds, a bustling farmer’s market, squawking birds, a nice bike ride, and a good cup of coffee. Cheers!

I just heard that the Daytrotter iPhone app was named App of the Week by the New York Times. That is sweet. If you haven’t already experienced Daytrotter, you might as well skip the rest of this article and head over there for the full experience. Or download the Daytrotter App for your iPhone, pick a session, and listen while you read. This story has an Oakland connection at the end, so bear with me.

When I lived in the Quad Cities I met Sean Moeller. He sang in a band and he loved the indie music. He had an idea that he floated to another guy I was working with: as indie bands in their beater vans were traveling across the country on I-80 they needed to stop for a break somewhere between Des Moines and Chicago. Why not Rock Island? It’s near the intersection of I-80 and Highway 61 (for you Bob Dylan fans). Sean had a friend who had a sweet analog recording studio and a collection of vintage rock and roll musical instruments. Sean figured he could entice a few of these bands to stop in Rock Island, lay down some live recordings of five of their favorite songs, they could play on the cool instruments in the studio, and then they’d pack up and be on their way. We figured we might be able to attract enough page views to sell some ads. We also toyed with selling subscriptions to the site, but eventually Sean and I convinced the business guy that the best shot we had would be to offer the songs as free downloads.

We started small – one band, four songs (which we called a “daytrotter session” — an homage to the Peel Sessions made by the famous British DJ John Peel) per week. Then two bands a week. Then Sean went down to SXSW and did some recordings and we started posting three sessions a week. Eventually, so many bands were stopping into the Rock Island studio that we were posting a new session every day. There are some great bands featured on the site and if you appreciate indie music, you will not be disappointed spending a few hours browsing through the site. My job was to design and operate the website and manage the digital library. It was a lot of fun. Eventually our business backer decided to sell the property to the guys who own Bill Graham’s archives – Wolfgang’s Vault. I worked for them for another year or so while they transitioned the site to their empire.

Here’s the Oakland connection. Tonight there’s a new years eve party at The Uptown nightclub featuring Audrye Sessions, one of the long list of bands (and not the only Oakland based band) to record live tracks for Daytrotter. Backing up Audrye Sessions tonight at the Uptown are the bands Hottub, Soft White Sixties, and Manatee. If you have nothing else planned for tonight, you might head over to for a little indie goodness. And ask the band about their Daytrotter session.

Bonus Oakland/Daytrotter connection: Joey Sayers is an Oakland artist who draws the weekly cartoon strip thingpart that has been a feature on the Daytrotter site since the very beginning.

Happy New Year!

I was reading the Living in the O blog and came across a delicious sounding recipe for ginger soup. It’s offered up as a way to fight off the flu or whatever might be draggin’ you down.

I love ginger. And Kale. And potatoes and beans. Get the recipe at Living in the O. This might find its way onto the menu for our New Years Eve dinner.