I'm a very active and restless personality. I moved around a lot until about four and a half years ago when I realized I found a part of the world- the Bay Area and to some extent Northern California in general, that really felt like home. I've previously lived in Miami, LA, Boston, NYC and other places, and always felt like I was waiting to get to the next town till I came here. I visited Istanbul, a truly gorgeous city, in 2010 and could only think about the ways it made me think of San Francisco. (Incidentally, the media is saying the protests currently going on in Turkey are about construction over a city park. That's just the straw that broke the camel's back. The Turkish government has been okaying the demolition of entire working class neighborhoods, evicting entire populations, for commercial and luxury condo construction for a long time now.)
Until my 30s, I was hell-bent on a life in cloistered academia.
Although I did teach as an adjunct for a time, the academic life didn't really pan out for me. At this point in my life, I'm rather thankful that it did not as being outside the academy has prompted me to turn to community organizing, connecting with a broader strata of people than I think I knew I was capable of.

I really enjoy community activism, art, and using my mind. I write and publish a lot of radical journalism about events in the Bay Area, and I do a lot of other types of volunteer work for progressive organizations. This writing started off documenting street struggles during Occupy Oakland and San Francisco. Since then, I've been covering anti-police brutality activism in the East Bay, particularly the struggle of the Justice 4 Alan Blueford Coalition. I also cover the (horrifying, though also sometimes darkly hilarious) misadventures of the Oakland PD.
I read, walk, and explore museums voraciously. I've also been self publishing a lot of critical writing on-line and some friends have asked me to start writing on their web-sites about leftist political documentaries and avant-garde comic books.

Writing and public speaking. I'm proud of my ability to convey complex abstract concepts in a challenging yet accessible way. I used to teach as a university adjunct and got very flattering student reviews.
When I have a good cook-book, by someone like Alice Waters or Thomas Keller, I can cook some pretty memorable meals, but only by following the instructions of the masters.

You'd have to ask them...

Books: I read alot of continental philosophy and critical theory. I've been reading a lot of Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben recently. Heidegger and Althusser are my two fave philosophers, but I'm also really into Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, and Jacques Derrida. Martin Jay's histories of 20th century continental thought are great reads.

My two favorite contemporary novelists are Gou Xingxuan and Orhan Pamuk. Besides that, my taste in fiction is, I confess, a bit predictably canonical: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Dostoevsky...

Movies: Antonioni's "The Passenger" may be my all time favorite film. I devoted a long chapter of my Master's thesis to it. Chantal Akerman, Bela Tarr and Arichitapong Weerasthakul are among my fave contemporary filmmakers. Nuri Bilge Ceylan is pretty great too. Also a big Godard fan- and some of my favorite Godard films have come from the last 13 years- particularly "In Praise of Love." It wasn't widely seen in the U.S. so if your a JLG fan and haven't seen "In Praise of Love" then do your self a favor...

Music: I'm a free jazz guy- Charles Lloyd, Keith Jarrett, Albert Ayler, Peter Brotzman. Also like a lot of punk and indie rock. Favorite singer-songwriters are Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Richard Thompson, Tom Waits. Again, a bit predictable...

Food: Everything, but especially anything weird. Generally, I seek out the most exotic thing on the menu, and try to find the most exotic menus to boot. I'm also really into fine cheese. There's something about the way different milks can congeal into so many different textures and flavors that fascinates me.

Thinking. A city to live in and explore. Books. Movies. Museums. Struggle.

As a grad student, I studied film theory. I was particularly interested in the ways Hollywood cinema conditioned its audience as a willing subject of capitalism by feeding that audience a sense of empowerment just as they were being shown what and how to think. Kaja Silverman and Mary-Anne Doane were very influential thinkers regarding this line of inquiry.
I'm still interested in questions of how subjectivity is shaped under capitalism, and how and if such conditioning can be subverted, but I'm now less interested in pursuing such questions academically and more interested in seeing how such conditioning can be challenged when an individual, such as myself, experiences resistance directly.
Occupy was a hell of a thing here in the Bay...

...at a political meeting. If its a rare night off from that then at an art museum or bookstore.

Define "private". It's the internet. Nothing's private anymore.

...you choose to do so.