Truth-Seeker, Paradigm-Shifter, Raging Always Against the Dying of the Light, Creative Problem-Solver, Renegade With a Purpose.
That's me in 1988, ready to teach 2nd grade in South Central L.A.
31-year Public School Educator - led two arts high schools in SF Bay Area, worked for two governors as the Chair of the California Arts Council. I fought for freedom, creativity, spontaneity, authenticity, space for rebellion, risk-taking, breaking rules and kindness -- often in the corridors of places where these qualities were not welcome.
Been around the world, served the US Air Force for four years just after VietNam as an Air Traffic defense specialist, spending my final year in a remote corner of Iceland watching radar blips to keep NATO airspace safe. I worked a busy emergency room when the homeless crisis began in the early 80s. I taught myself Spanish, earned a Masters Degree in Theater Arts and as a theatrical director cut my teeth with plays like Cuckoo's Nest and Waiting for Godot.
In 2016, in my last major act as the Executive and Artistic Director of the Oakland School for the Arts, I was able to steer Andrew Lloyd Webber's School of Rock into our world for its West Coast premier - not as audience members but as performers, as the iconic musical theater composer wanted the West Coast premier to be done by a school, and we were it - the experience of a lifetime.
These days I'm a writer, wearing out keyboards trying to put the passion to words. I'm a super-fast whirlwind in everything, but in writing I take my time, weaving various strains through my narrative: reality and flights of fancy, the everyday and the eternal, the bizarre and the mundane, the heroic and the near-heroic and the noble failure that means so much to me. I write on topics as they grow in me, eclectic and irreverent but often returning to certain motifs that anchor my work: the analysis of Black Lives Matter incidents; the philosophy of fundamental meaning and removal of extraneous distortions and embedded reactivity from human interaction known as Quantumism; Speculative Sociology on subjects like Big Data, Office Wars and Bureaucratic Cruelty; Electoral Politics and Government with a twist, utilizing mathematical models and statistical innovation to turn conventional wisdom on its head; and Futurism, the extrapolation of 2025 into a world where parking lots are the most valuable economic resource on the planet, mystics team with businessmen to divine the feared unintended consequences of actions spun out of control, and the world's population of 11 billion in 2125 is such a threat to itself (water sources drying up) that only an elite class is allowed to have sex, granted by special permit. Right. See how that goes over.
You have to admit, an original viewpoint. Worth your time, I hope.
