Fountain Garden restaurant, MacArthur Blvd, Oakland (home of the best sauteed prawn with scrambled egg in the SF Bay Area).

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This is Marcus. He was waiting to cross Clay street in downtown Oakland. I know that the background in this drawing depicts New York, not Oakland … but I really like New York, and so I took a few liberties in this portion of my picture.

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One of the things that I love about men’s clothing is how little it changes. Actually, I should revise that statement: One of the things that I love about adult men’s clothing is how little it changes. Drive through the business district of any American city and you’ll see what I mean. Sure, there are different kinds of suits–zoot suits, sharkskin suits, polyester leisure suits; but when it comes to the work environment, men’s suits rarely stray from the fundamentals. Take, for example, the guy in this picture. He was standing outside the Elihu Harris building on Clay Street in Oakland. Almost everything he was wearing would not be that out of place for a working man living (and dressing) in 1927. (I know this because one of my prized book possessions is a reproduction of the 1927 Sears Catalog.) More than the fashion turnstile that is youth fashion, the trends in working men’s suits can best be described as slight variations on a theme. One year pants will be cuffed, and a couple years later they won’t. Then, five or ten years later, cuffs will come back into vogue.

As someone whose fashion aesthetic was pretty firmly established by the time I was 15 (weird, I know), I can appreciate the consistency in the menswear realm. Although it has run off the rails a few times–most notably, during the 1970s–the matching pants and jacket thing remains a firm foundation.

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…Outside La Penca Azul, Alameda, CA.

A natty dresser always attracts my attention, and I really like cool color schemes. This guy was wearing green as an accent to his red hair and beard–I think–and it really worked for him. The big earrings had a retro feel that was just enough of a discordant note to create interest without disrupting the overall coherence of this updated preppy look.

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There’s a certain quality I’ve noticed in the faces of people who are seated in hospital waiting rooms. It’s kind of an irritated, frustrated, deflated look that would be anger if anger wasn’t a futile response to the situation.

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…another face from Kaiser Oakland.

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On Saturday night I walked into a tree. I was looking down at my phone to find to find the correct address of the holiday party in Bernal Heights, a neighborhood in San Francisco. I smacked into that tree hard, forehead and elbow first. The next morning my elbow was so sore I could hardly move my arm. That’s how I ended up in the radiology department at Kaiser Oakland. This a drawing of the guy who was sitting a couple seats away from me in the waiting room. The radiologists were actually moving fairly quickly through the list of patients, but that didn’t seem to matter to this guy. Every time another name was called that wasn’t his, his eyes got a little narrower and his nostrils flared a bit more. When they finally called his name, his broke into a grin, just for the slightest moment, and then he quickly returned to the icy stare I’ve captured in this picture.

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According to [the] leadership book Management by Chuck Williams, although only 14.5% of American men are six feet tall, 58% of male CEOs running the 500 largest U.S. companies stand six feet or taller—four times the average. —Forbes Magazine

I am a Fortune 500 company? I admit that I have a bias toward tall people, and not just men. For sure, when it comes to tall men, I do notice them more than I do guys of average height. Most of the men in my family are tall, as are a critical mass of my male friends. Consequently, tall guys feel familiar to me. But, when it comes to tall Black men–especially really tall, really big Black men, like the size of professional football players and MMA fighters–I also feel a little protective. Given the prevailing stereotypes of Black men–that they are violent, scary, intimidating–I can only imagine the types of reactions that particularly large brothers elicit from the people around them. A lot of the big guys I know are really, truly gentle men; and it hurts me to think of people responding to them with fear and distrust. Makes me wonder if the advantages experienced by tall white men in the corporate sphere extend to tall Black men, as well. Certainly, some of the same qualities that people admire in one group can appear distasteful in another. I guess that’s what people mean when they refer to a double standard.

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World Ground Cafe, MacArthur Blvd, Oakland, CA.

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World Ground Cafe, MacArthur Blvd, Oakland, CA.

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