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I'm not afraid to have the ratchet side because that's a part of me too. I like to turn up, I am from Oakland. But at the same time, there's still a classy side to me that I've seen in Oakland as well.
Oct 2, 2025
What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.
In L.A. like there's a lot of like materialism and, you know, people who think they're better than each other because of the clothes they wear or how they dress and in Oakland it's not like that.
My most prized possession was my library card from the Oakland Public Library.
The influence that Oakland has on my sound is about 90%. There's so many different elements to Oakland. Of course you have the street elements, but then you also have the culture and there's so much culture around. It's a competitive city, it's full of just great artists and talent. It gave me the confidence, the passion, the realness I try my hardest to portray, so it has had about 90% influence on me.
I think I just went into a system that was willing to utilize me and gave me opportunities and I felt fortunate to be able to go to Oakland and put the silver and black on. I wanted to prove to everybody that I could still play.
I was on a panel with light skinned Blacks and a famous gay science fiction writer, who were complaining about how Blacks are against gays and light skinned Blacks and how intolerant Blacks are of different groups. My position was that Blacks were among the most humanistic, tolerant groups in the country and that across the street from my house in Oakland was one inhabited by White gays.
We have always had great and loyal fans in Oakland.
What's going on with the Oakland Raiders? You know, I don't want to say the Raiders are bad, but you know, now, a lot of fans are painting their faces just so they won't be recognized.
I got a job as a dishwasher in Oakland, and I would draw all day. It was nice because the lady who ran the boardinghouse where I worked let me live there for nothing if I gave her some drawings every week - mostly park drawings of birds and such.
During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire.
In some circles, the Mint 400 is a far, far better thing than the Superbowl, the Kentucky Derby, and the lower Oakland roller derby finals all rolled into one. This race attracts a very special breed.
Occasionally I hear a band that blows me away. For instance, there's a musician in Oakland named Weasel Walter who has a band called the Flying Luttenbachers. Go see the Flying Luttenbachers when they're in your town. He's one of the greatest rock composers who ever lived, and he's struggling and living like a poverty-stricken hermit.
I like playing for Oakland, they have a very colorful uniform.
I had no idea how much the stuff I was doing was affecting people outside Oakland. At the time, also, hip hop wasn't able to tour because all these clubs that let hip hop come in now, they would never have let hip hop come in.
When I saw the sun bears at the Oakland Zoo, I immediately was drawn to them. Not to be ornery, but regarding what you said about the speaker identifying with the bear: I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that the speaker feels that the bear must share his sadness, or whatever else he is feeling. That would be classic pathetic fallacy, which is certainly generative for poetry, but here the speaker appears actually to be rejecting that idea.
The murder rate in Chicago is skyrocketing, and you see who's doing it and perpetrating it - they all look like Chief Keef. When it comes to the point that, you know, that kids who are doing the killings, and they're kids 13 to 19 years old, and you can replicate that in New Orleans, you can replicate that in Oakland. All the kids look the same.
The murder rate in Chicago is skyrocketing and you see who's doing it and perpetrating it, they all look like Chief Keef.
Why can't DFW compete like San Francisco does with Oakland, like Miami does with Fort Lauderdale, and like Chicago O'Hare does with Midway?
Randy Moss is not a leader. He doesn't deserve to be the captain of the Oakland Raiders. He's the one who said he wanted to be traded. He's not happy. His effort is lacking. That's a disgrace to the uniform. I don't care what uniform you have on.
My job is to file things! I'm not going to be like, "Mr. Jacobsen from Oakland, California" - just listing his problems, like a rap.
All the clothes in my closet are Oakland, California, clothes. You can't wear those anywhere else. The barometric pressure drops and then where are you?
Growing up in northern California has had a big influence on my love and respect for the outdoors. When I lived in Oakland, we would think nothing of driving to Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz one day and then driving to the foothills of the Sierras the next day.
A city suffering from chronic poverty, out-of-control crime, a $76 million budget deficit and a 15 percent unemployment rate (nearly 50 percent for Oakland's youth) can hardly afford such social justice follies. But a pushover Democratic mayor and an overwhelmed police force have left what's left of gainfully employed Oakland taxpayers at the mercy of professional freeloaders and anti-capitalism saboteurs.
I grew up in Oakland and Berkeley, California.
Up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman's North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco.
I remember facing him on opening day in 1987. It was Oakland at the Minnesota Twins, the first time I got him out on a breaking ball down-and-in and next at bat he hit the same pitch for a home run. I was telling my kids that story yesterday.
My dream was to play football for the Oakland Raiders. But my mother thought I would get hurt playing football, so she chose baseball for me. I guess moms do know best.
I love San Francisco so much. I call it the Emerald City and have been coming here since 1992. I have a few old friends that live here, and my aunt and uncle live in Oakland. I think it's a magical city - it's big, sexy and very 'cosmo' with a small-town feel.
I can accomplish all those. It's really awkward, kind of, for me coming out here and being in a competitive golf atmosphere. I don't get to do it but once a year, except my, like, local tournaments back home in Oakland.
Oakland revolved around Forbes Field. Nothing in the city could match that atmosphere.
In Indiana we had a queen we named Alice which lived to the ripe old age of eight years and two months and did excellent work in her seventh year. There can be no doubt about the authenticity of this statement. We sold her to John Chapel of Oakland City, Indiana, and she was the only queen in his yard with wings clipped. This, however is a rare exception. At the time I was experimenting with artificial combs with wooden cells in which the queen laid.
Oakland has now increased its payroll to the point that it now ranks third in the Bay Area among all McDonald's franchises.
I was born in Oakland and grew up, probably about five miles from Oakland, in Hayward. And Hayward was OK. Like, Hayward wasn't - very much a working-class area and had definitely went through a decline and is now, seemingly, coming back around, which is nice to see.
[Crack epidemic] definitely has impacted folks in my family, most definitely. I think that's true for most, if not all people, regardless of color, that grew up in and around areas that were closer to the nucleus of the crack epidemic.If you look at Baltimore or D.C., Detroit, Chicago, Oakland, like, Los Angeles.
Oh, my other goal was that I wanted to talk about this area and this time in history. I wanted to talk about growing up in Oakland, a white kid, from this kind of generation of broken homes and listening to hip-hop.
Al Davis is a legend and his contribution and influence on the game of football, the National Football League, and the Oakland Raiders has been profound for decades. To view his contribution and influence on a season-by-season basis does not make sense: he has dominated the industry for a lifetime. I can't tell you how he may have impacted or guided other individuals during their careers but I can speak from personal experience. He inspires me to be better every day than I was the day before.
In Oakland, Al Davis was a genius. We had Ron Wolff there, too, and he was a genius. There was no room for me to be a genius.
As long as each day comes with a nice fresh cup of Oakland Coffee then everything will be alright.
Teaching in Providence and Oakland, I realized that the first thing is that it wasn't good enough to come in and assume that I had what my students needed in terms of knowledge and skills. I also had to show them that I was their ally. I had to show them that I was concerned about them, wanted to relate to them, and that I was fundamentally on their side.
At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement's aims: They're anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life - just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth.
Fantasy sports went a long way toward developing the sabermetrics formulas used not only by oddsmakers but general managers in hiring players. So the amateur fantasists ended up creating some of the algorithms that Oakland GM Billy Bean's statisticians used to win games with less salary money available for star players.
It's been like that all spring. It's just that balls decided to hang up there. It's hard to catch it when you can't see it. But that's how it's going to be in Oakland in the afternoon anyway.
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
The loony tuners are at it again. The cost of doing business in Oakland is already about the highest in the state. Compared with other cities, adoption of the proposed
The first thing we should be concerned about the BLM movement should be the issues that the Black Lives Matter movement is bringing forward. There's no fundamental platform being brought by activists in Oakland, Baltimore, or New Jersey. The main issues that you see, the commonality between activists all around the country, are trying to deal with the challenges in the criminal justice system, something that is very much central to my work. So my hope is that people stay focused on the urgency to create justice here at home.
As I and the rest of my Pittsburgh Steelers teammates prepared that week in late December 1974, we knew one thing: The road to the Super Bowl in the AFC went through Oakland. To achieve your dreams as a team, you had to slay the Oakland Raiders. They were the barometer of what it took to be a championship team.
Night baseball isn't an aberration. What's an aberration is a team that hasn't won a World Series since 1908. They tend to think of themselves as a little Williamsburg, a cute little replica of a major league franchise. Give me the Oakland A's, thank you very much. People who do it right.
Abandoned by the existing political system, young people in Oakland, California, New York City, Quebec and numerous other cities throughout the globe have placed their bodies on the line, protesting peacefully while trying to produce a new language, politics, imagine long-term institutions, and support notions of community that manifest the values of equality and mutual respect that they see missing in a world that is structured by neoliberal principles.
Right after the 9/11 attacks I was living near Oakland in California with a buddy who had also grown up in the skate/punk scene of the 80s. We were so shell-shocked from the attacks that we sort of regressed into this childlike mode of filling our apartment with '80s memorabilia. We got all of our favorite skateboard decks off of eBay, bought a bunch of old independent trucks, we got a credit card so that we could buy 720 off of a videogame vendor, we sat around listening to T.S.O.L. and The Misfits playing 720 and pretending that we were still living in our childhood.