It’s been an eventful last three weeks or so, and I haven’t had much time to add new posts. Even so, I’ve continued to create new drawings, and I have a bunch of new pieces to share.
Most of these new drawings were done while I was sitting by the window at Peet’s Coffee and Tea, on Fruitvale Avenue. Even though it’s been open for quite some time, I only started going there a couple months ago.
The staff is quite friendly, and the location is convenient to the local grocery store. My favorite place to sit is at the bar along the side window. It’s a great place for people watching, which also means it’s a perfect location for making drawings for this website. The crowd along this stretch of Fruitvale is wonderfully diverse. The brothers in and around this establishment are a true cross-section of Oakland men of African descent, from suits to saggers and beyond; and at a time when I’m feeling a little overwhelmed with stories of Black lives ended prematurely, I take great pleasure and hope from the sheer number and diversity of Black men I see going about their business in and outside of this coffee shop.
Three Comic-Con attendees conferring outside the Sails Pavilion, shortly before the beginning of the Masquerade Ball which, for the first time in five years, we chose to skip. Ajuan Mance
This guy with the amazing pharoah’s beard walked past me as I was finding a seat for the voice actors’ panel. Mad props to the brother for taking a style risk. He wasn’t even doing cosplay; he was rocking the Tutanankhamun beard for the simple sake of looking fly.
I created a special background pattern just for this year’s Comic-Con drawings. The background in this drawing is one of the variations.
I saw this brother in the audience at a very cool panel on the final day of Comic-Con. I don’t know the official topic or the title of the panel, but it featured Jeremy Love, the artist and writer of the graphic novel Bayou.
I was at the giant Safeway on Broadway doing some late night grocery shopping when I passed this brother doing some late night diaper shopping. If a 2 AM diaper run isn’t kind of a metaphor for what it means to be the dad of young kids, I don’t know what is.
We had a hot spell a couple weeks ago. (To be perfectly honest, we’re having a hot spell right now.) In mid July, though, the temperatures rose even higher than they are right now, and brothers all over the Bay Area shucked their shirts in an effort to beat the heat. Driving along Bancroft Avenue (in Oakland) on my way to Zocalo Cafe (in San Leandro), it seemed like there were shirtless men on every corner between Hegenberger and 98th. Oddly, though, they didn’t seem any more comfortable than the guys who were fully clothed. The placebo effective of removing one’s shirt was not working for them at all.
I passed this guy a few weeks ago, at the San Francisco Public Library. I’d gone over to pick up the three pieces of art I’d shown as part of The Black Woman is God exhibit, curated by Karen Seneferu. It was the second incarnation of an exhibit that was at the African American Art and Culture Complex last summer. Like me he was heading toward the African American Center at the library and I watched with a little bit of envy as he disappeared into the stacks near the exhibit area. This is the first summer in a long time that I haven’t had the time to truly immerse myself in my research and writing, and the sight of him turning down a row of books made me wistful for summers past, when I could spend uninterrupted weeks in the UCB library.
