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Literature

Foxy lady

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A Hu-Li appears to be your run-of-the-mill lascivious 15-year-old prostitute in modern Russia. She does all the things professionals who cater to the discerning international pedophile do. What are those things? Well, she posts ads on the Internet that read:

"A FAIRY TALE CUM TRUE: Small breasts for big money. A little ginger kitten is waiting for a call from a well-to-do stranger. Classic sex and royal head, anal, petting, bondage, whipping (including the Russian knout), foot fetish, strap-on, sakura branch, lesbo, oral, anal stimulation, cunnilingus (including compulsory), role-swapping, two-way, gold and silver rain, fisting, piercing, catheter, copro, enema, gentle and heavy domination, Mistress and Slave girl services. Face control … Almost everything. Shag me and forget! If you can …

In other words, A Hu-Li flagellates the middle-aged intelligentsia who answer her siren’s call. She likes riding her bike, loves Nabokov, and is still a bit hung up about being a virgin. Pretty typical right?

How about this? A Hu Li is a 2,000-year-old, shape-shifting werefox from ancient China who uses her bushy tail to hypnotize men and absorb their life force. That grab ya? The title of Victor Pelevin’s latest is The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, the increasingly intriguing A-Hu Li is our narrator, and the book has little to do with anything I’ve just written. A Hu-Li is a member of a race of werefoxes who appear to be 15-year-old girls, when they are in fact neither. They cannot die; do not bathe; and never need to eat food, as long as they can feed on the sexual energy of the "naked apes" they have been doomed to interact with for seemingly all eternity. Their tails enable them to sap the energy of their prey while convincing them that they are fulfilling their greatest sexual fantasies. As such, they gravitate toward sex work, and have since time immemorial. Naturally, thousands of years doing the same thing as civilizations rise and fall can leave an immortal netherworld creature cynical and with a lot of time on her hands. Our narrator fills it by seeking enlightenment. Might as well.

Until she meets Alexander, that is, a Wagner-addicted werewolf who ranks high in the Russian Secret Service. What follows is one of the most hilarious and horrific courtships to come out of the former bloc. But guess what? The Sacred Book of the Werewolf isn’t about that, either.

Victor Pelevin may be a literary genius. He is definitely a tricky malcontent. He has written one of the most spiritually satisfying novels ever about wily werefoxes, interspecies sex, kleptocracy, and the joys of methamphetamines. In fewer than 400 pages, he manages touch on the finer points of sages from Nietzsche to Lao Tzu as A-Hu Li and Alexander seek the highest state of their kind … super werewolf. Sound silly? That’s because it is. It’s also pretentious, perverse, puerile, and exasperating. Yet none of that stops it from saving your sullied soul. Sticky fur and a dash of satori — what more could you ask for on Halloween … candy?

The Monster

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El Monstruo: Dread & Redemption In Mexico City is a perverse love letter to the most contaminated, crime-ridden, corrupt and conflictive urban stain on the western side of the planet, where I have been touched to live for the past quarter of a century. My life is now hopelessly entangled with the life of this monster of a megalopolis.

El Monstruo was indeed a monstrous book to write. The slagheap of materials that I sucked up — hundreds of volumes of history, slagheaps of newspapers, mountains of personal recollections — fill my threadbare room at the Hotel Isabel in the old quarter of this city from floor to ceiling. The narrative I have assembled spans 50,000,000 years give or take a few minutes, dating from the Paleocene to last spring’s Swine Flu panic with significant stops for the doomed Aztec empire, the war of liberation from Spain, the Mexican revolution of 1910-1919, the student massacres of the ’60s, the Great 1985 earthquake, and the erratic governance of the electoral left for the past 12 years.

It is a long story.

The Mexican Revolution was in many ways a war against Mexico City, a capital for which the rest of the country was named and from which all power continues to radiate. The great revolutionary leaders Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa viewed Mexico City as a Sodom & Gomorrah that had to be destroyed if the country was to be redeemed and they did their best to do so. The excerpt that follows speaks to the Monstruo on the eve of the downfall of dictator Porfirio Diaz and the inception of the first great revolution of the landless in the Americas.

WHAT THE LAND WAS LIKE

Back home in Morelos, Emiliano Zapata was elected village leader, entrusted to recover Anenecuilco’s lost lands, granted to the Indians by the Crown in the 17th century. The sugar planters, many of whom were foreigners, had gobbled up the Nahuas’ land and water without remorse.

“Land and Water” was in fact the slogan of Madero ally Vicente Leyva’s campaign for governor of Morelos in 1909 against Díaz’s gallo (rooster), Pablo Escandón, the scion of an immensely wealthy criollo family that had first struck it rich in real estate during Juárez’s Reform, and also a sugar planter who rarely bothered to visit the tiny state. Zapata aligned Anenecuilco’s fortunes with Leyva and Madero. Escandón won by a landslide of course, without ever having to leave El Monstruo. To Zapata, Escandón WAS El Monstruo.

By 1910, 2 percent of all Mexicans owned all the land—save for 70 million hectares held by foreigners with family names like Rockefeller and Hearst and Morgan. One hundred percent of the good farming land in Morelos was occupied by 17 haciendas operated by absentee patrones (bosses). The haciendas sucked up all the groundwater, leaving villages like Anenecuilco dry as a bone. The unequal distribution of water continues a century hence. Wealthy Chilangos have overrun Morelos with their golf courses and palatial second homes, leaving the villages just as thirsty as they were in 1910.

Years ago, I rented a large house in Olintepec, a colonia that shares ejido land (communal farmland) with Anenecuilco, and was able to see how the land must have looked to Zapata when he rode through these fields. I walked out through the tall sugar cane along the irrigation canals to the Caudillo’s humble adobe home, now a museum, on a back street in Anenecuilco, and each young horseman barreling down the country lanes could have been the Caudillo all over again.

But an hour and fifty-five minutes later, when I stepped down off a bus in the belly of the Monstruo, the urban hurly-burly swirling all around me, I always got a whiff of the profound culture shock Emiliano Zapata must have suffered when he was forced to visit this city he so detested.

MADERO’S REVOLUTION

Francisco Madero’s call for the revolution to commence November 20, 1910, stirred sparse response. Up in Puebla, Díaz’s agents murdered Madero’s lieutenant, the revolutionary shoemaker Aquiles Serdán, and his family, two nights before the festivities were slated to kick in. In Morelos, Zapata and the peasant army he had assembled bided their time, waiting to see who would make the first move first.

Mexicans are never on time. Finally, in January, Doroteo Arango AKA Francisco “Pancho” Villa, a popular Chihuahua desperado of Hobsbawmian proportions, and his ruthless cohort Pascual Orozco, declared themselves in revolt and were immediately joined by the Maderista governor of Coahuila, Venustiano Carranza and his “Constitutionalist” Army. Díaz’s Federales were beaten back at Ciudad Guerrero, Mal Paso, and Casas Grandes. Villa laid siege to Ciudad Juárez on the border, the vital railhead that linked Mexico City to the United States and was the lifeblood of the country’s commercial transactions.

By February 1911, with the synchronicity that sometimes made the Mexican Revolution work, the Zapatistas had advanced to Xochimilco. Workers in the heart of the city suffering from what the Porfirian rag El Imparcial tagged ”huelga-manía” or strike fever, declared seven major strikes that paralyzed the Monstruo in 1910–1911. Demonstrators were emboldened enough to assemble in the Zócalo and shout “Death to the Dictator!” beneath Don Porfirio’s balcony by spring. Others menaced his mansion on Cadena Street in the Centro Histórico and were repelled by the gendarmes.

Pablo Escandón fled Mexico for Europe, kvetching to the press that Mexico had fallen into “niggerdom.” Don Porfirio’s class of people was stunned by this threat to their carefree lives and comforts. Indeed, the leisure class had not changed all that much from when the criollos and Gachupines cowered inside the city as Hidalgo’s Indiada advanced on El Monstruo.

After three and a half decades in power, the Dictator remained a figure of adoration in the mansions of La Condesa. For the university students, largely the sons of the ruling class, Don Porfi was the epitome of modernity. To them, Villa and Orozco and Carranza were the Barbarians of the North, Zapata the Attila of the South, and they cast the Dictator as the savior of civilization as they knew it.

But the old man was 81, and it hurt just to keep a stiff upper lip. The medals weighed heavily on his chest. He knew in his heart of hearts what his adorers could not admit—the jig was really up. Ciudad Juárez was days away, even via the modern rail system he had built, and the army’s mobility to supply his troops was restricted. Don Porfiriopochtli, as political cartoonists were drawing him now, had, like the Aztecs, expanded his empire to a point where he could no longer defend it.

In May, the Dictator sent his vice president, Francisco León de la Barra, to the north to negotiate an easy exit to his 34 years on the throne of Mocuhtezuma, and on May 24, 1911, having brokered an agreement with Madero that León de la Barra would remain as provisional president for the next six months, the old man set sail from Puerto, México, for Paris, France, aboard the German steamer Ypringa with this famous caution: “The wild beasts have been loosed. Let us see who will cage them now.”

Wild celebrations broke out in Mexico City as if to underscore the old man’s dictum—15,000 workers invaded the Chamber of Deputies and marched on the National Palace, where the Dictator’s police opened fire, wounding scores. The offices of the Porfirian mouthpiece El Imparcial were set afire. By July, the Monstruo was shut down by a general strike. The wrath of the Mexicans had indeed been loosed, and Madero’s intentions to cage it up again would dictate the next phase of Mexico’s cannibal revolution.

THE GODS ARE SKEPTICAL

After a discreet pause to make sure the old man was really gone, Francisco Madero started off on the long train ride from Ciudad Juárez to Mexico City in early June. There were many treacheries up ahead and he had plenty of time to consider his options as the train lurched from state to state. As he passed through Zacatecas and Aguascalientes, jubilant mobs overran the train depots waving Mexican flags and shouting “¡Vivas!” until they were hoarse and Madero’s train long out of sight.

The presumptive president of Mexico arrived in the capital at Buenavista terminal, the great northern station, on the morning of June 9, and the tumult was overwhelming. Kandell compares it to Juárez’s return to rekindle the republic. I stare at the news photographs. People are excited, even exhilarated. They push and jostle for a view of the little Lenin look-alike. But some are more reserved. They stand back from the jubilant throng. They have come more out of curiosity than conviction. Their faces seem to ask, what next?

From Buenavista, Madero rode through the city in a Dupont motorcar, the sidewalks bursting with well-wishers and flag wavers. Many residents of the metropolis were relieved not so much because of the hope the little man brought with him as for the fact that this change of power had taken place with a minimum of damage to themselves and their city.

When Madero entered the old city for the final jog to the National Palace, he mounted a white horse. In the Palacio, he met with León de la Barra and they reaffirmed their bargain—Porfirio’s stooge would govern for the next six months while Madero campaigned for presidential elections set for November 2. The two emerged on the president’s balcony and “¡Vivas!” erupted from the joyous mob that filled the Zócalo below.

But the old Gods of Tenochtitlán were skeptical about Francisco Madero’s grasp on the presidency. At 6:00 that afternoon they rendered their verdict, upstaging his triumphal arrival in the capital with a deadly earthquake that surged out of the Pacific Ocean along the Jalisco coast and wrought havoc throughout that western state, killing 400 in Zapopan and setting off the Volcano of Colima before smashing into the north of Mexico City and leveling Santa María de la Ribera and San Cosme. There were no Richter scales in those days to measure the quake, but an uncounted number of lives were lost in the capital—perhaps hundreds, reported El Imparcial, which published three extras that day but paid scant attention to Madero’s arrival, burying the story beneath the fold.

Hear Ross read from El Monstruo and sign copies Nov. 18 at Modern Times, 888 Valencia, 7:30 p.m.

Word alive

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WRITERS The Eighth Annual Living Word Festival focuses on fresh young voices and includes readings, musical performances, art and fashion workshops, a youth town hall on healthcare reform, and live graffiti and B-boy battles. Below are two selections from the festival, which takes place Oct. 8-18 in San Francisco and Oakland.

UNTITLED


By Dennis Kim


… and I saw a shorty swimming in a white shirt baked brown by degrees and the air before him was bent by the lashes of the sun on the ground and there was no water to speak of. He was standing on a pile of crumpled mattresses behind our building. I recognized the bed on top, ravaged and stained by my childhood. Shorty wobbled with the thick air and he had no strength to jump. "Sun," I said, and he shielded his eyes. "Son, why are you standing there with no strength? Go inside." He lowered his hand and his eyes were like dried out lakes, gardens ground under the knees of a monstrous thirst, a treeless landscape, a toothless Eden. He said, "Water."

And my eyes died of thirst and I repented of my vengeance. I had made desolate the mansion and the alley and felled the seed for it laid in rotten fruit. The pure and the assassin stumble over the same stones and lie facedown in the same ditch.

I crave living water more than I do dead blood. Father above, let it rain.

Let it rain for the brother who cried facedown into the train platform, "Don’t shoot — "

And the ancestor who met the police with fingertips touching the sky and caught the bullets where he would carry a child …

Let it rain for soldiers draped on streetlamps and mailboxes, kicking at blank spaces the disappeared leave with curses that turn to dust in their mouths.

Let it rain for the thief and the man he robs when both discover they have nothing. They exchange greetings and go their way to new poverties.

Let it rain to wash the blood of the murdered into the gutters and the sea, where it meets the blood of ancestors turned to shark and anemone.

Let it rain to absolve all mothers …

Let it rain for the restless who twist into impossible signs on their beds, afflicted by the sickness of penitence …

But let it rain most of all for the child who opens his mouth to cry but cannot, for the city collapsing inside him. Let it rain because my children are thirsty and they can do nothing but cover their eyes.

Father above, break the sky in two.

Let it rain.

Dennis Kim at Living Water: Youth Speaks to Spirit (Oct. 18, 2 p.m., free. Glide Memorial Church Sanctuary, 300 Ellis, SF. www.youthspeaks.org).

PROLOGUE FROM MIRRORS IN EVERY CORNER: A PLAY


By Chinaka Hodge


I thought he was out of my league. Real tall, well put together. Big palms. Pretty, almost. This metered way with words. Had a steady job. Was wearing ties to work at the time. Built around rigor, and routine. That man loved to make a list. Checklists and to-do lists and have-done lists. Ought-to-do lists.

He sets the alarm for seven. Hits snooze once. Up for real at 7:30. Leans at the edge of the bed for two and a half minutes. Clears his throat through his nose. Turns the shower on. Forgets something in the bedroom. Back to the bathroom. Showers for ten minutes. Out the door by 8:13. Evening is the same. Asleep five nights a week by 10:56. Fifty-six. Clockwork with him.

And for him, there’s an honesty in that. To say I was drawn to that stability doesn’t really do the feeling justice. More like the compulsion we have as children to metronomes and see-saws. There is something absolutely mesmerizing about the rhythm of his predictability. Science. Like how you know how fast honey will dissolve in hot water. He sweetens me on time. Budgets the exact minutes it will take him to love me. Don’t know how he does that. Did that. When even I didn’t know what I needed.

Plus we were proportioned right. Nice heights for walking places, and for lying down inside each other. For talking copious amounts of shit. He was a good card partner. Conservative in his bids, leading with the suit he’d like me to return in. Not a stellar dancer, but better than me by far. And so we stuck fast to each other.

We had fun. Before Watts came and the wedding even, just sitting watching our shows. I remember the Cosby premiere with him. How on the weekends he’d stay up late late with me, cause I’d guilt him off his schedule, and he’d make jokes all in my hair. Push the laughs right through me. And I’d hug him in the mirror, make him watch how happy we were. To remind us both of the enchanted nature of what we were doing. In the time we were doing it. A fearless act: Black family in the middle of an epidemic. Intellectuals at play. The ease of our engagement.

So imagine our surprise when they told me the baby was white. White.

Whose child?

Chinaka Hodge and Universes at the Living Word Festival (Thurs/8-Fri/9, 8 p.m., $10–$20. CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF. www.counterpulse.org).

Fine quintet

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WRITERS Four provocative haiku and a tanka from the Haiku Poets of Northern California, who’ll be reading at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 17, at Anthony’s Cookies (1417 Valencia, SF) as part of LitQuake’s massive citywide Litcrawl. Check out www.litquake.com for more info, and www.hpnc.org for more on HPNC, including a contest.


——-

twilight

the poultry truck returns

with empty cages

— Carolyn Hall

——-

Evening fragrance

we walk among

the moonflowers

— Garry Gay

——-

water

clear enough

to hide all secrets

— David Grayson

——

Hiroshima day

multi-color threads

on the weaving machine

— Fay Aoyagi

——-

artichoke season

sharing my heart

I try

to slice it

evenly

— Susan Antolin

Bon Voyage!

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arts@sfbg.com

WRITERS Mired and I were off to a Bon Voyage! party for our friend, Shawna, who was moving to Cleveland. It might not be totally true to say that Shawna was our friend. Shawna was my friend. We’d worked together, years ago, at an auto parts store and had dated for a few months. Mired was a jealous person in the first place, and she was of the opinion that Shawna still had a crush on me, though I kept trying to tell her that there was nothing going on between us.

Once we arrived, Mired started drinking vodka tonics. Really drinking. Rock star drinking. She was mad because Sh Sawna pronounced Mired’s name wrong, calling her Meer-red.

"It’s pronounced like the verb," Mired said to her. "You know: mired in depression, mired in immense mental anguish."

"Got it," Shawna said.

"That’s what you said last time," Mired said, batting her eyes like a sly homecoming queen.

While the other twenty guests and I were in the living room, talking about Shawna, and Cleveland, and all the opportunities that awaited her there, Mired sat alone in the kitchen. Every once in a while she’d yell, "I’m sure going to miss you, Shawna," and she’d laugh and I’d deflect by droning on about Cleveland being the best city splattered on our continent.

You see, these other guests weren’t just learning that Mired drank too much and had a sailor’s mouth and didn’t like Shawna. No, they soaked up the fact that there was barely trust between Mired and me, and the trust we did have was heavy and rundown, a burden we lugged behind us like concrete shadows.

After an hour or so, and probably seven drinks, Mired blurted, "Derek, maybe as a going away gift, you should have sex with Shawna."

Forty humungous eyes and twenty tongue-tied guests. Shawna looked at me. I was supposed to do something, this was clearly supposed to be handled by me, but I didn’t know what to say, so I tried to change the subject, asking, "Does anyone know the average rainfall in Cleveland?"

Guests reluctantly nibbled on chips and slurped the bottoms of their empty cocktails, chewing ice cubes, everyone too uneasy to replenish supplies.

Then Mired slurred, "Shawna, are you sure you wouldn’t like to give Derek a blowjob for old time’s sake?"

All astonished, riveted eyes fixed on her.

"We’ll all watch," Mired said.

Twenty other guests and forty scathing eyes, their naked disgust, all staring at Mired as she embarrassed herself, embarrassed us, me. Their awed eyes ricocheted from Mired to Shawna to me and back around, a vicious carousel, all these gazes grazing each of us.

Mired aimed another homecoming smile toward Shawna, who said, "Out of my house!" and she hopped up and ran toward the kitchen, but some of the guests got in her way. Shawna turned to me and said, "Get her out of here," and I said, "Fine, fine," and didn’t even get a chance to say Bon Voyage! Instead, I helped Mired stagger to the door and stagger down the stairs, almost falling twice, and I put her in the passenger seat and drove us home.

The whole ride she kept saying, "Drop me off and go give it to her."

"Shut up!"

Our conversation vanished, though, as Mired passed out right in the middle of our latest screaming match. I pulled up to our lousy apartment building, and she was out cold. I shook her, said, "Get up," but she didn’t move or say anything. The key was still in the ignition so I turned the car on and found a radio station playing Lynyrd Skynyrd because Mired hated that hillbilly shit. I made the music blare and gave her a few shakes, but she didn’t move so I shut the car off and went to her side, opened her door and said, "Can you walk on your own?" but since her eyes had shut again and her head swiveled every direction like a broken compass, I knew she couldn’t.

I threw her arm around my shoulder and guided her. We only took two steps before her legs went boneless, flaccid, falling, but I was able to catch her, swooping her up in my arms, the way a groom carries a bride on their wedding night.

We lived on the second story, and I started struggling up the stairs, and she said, "Admit you want to have sex with her," and I didn’t say anything, concentrating on climbing those steps, tried pretending that my ears were locked like safes and her words didn’t know the combinations, but it didn’t work. I had no guard from anything that came out of her mouth. Mired said, "Go back and screw her," and I tried to cinch my ears closed. I said, "Shut up," and she said, "I deserve more than you," and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, couldn’t fathom how she figured she deserved more. It didn’t make any sense, since I was the one trying to do the right thing.

I was halfway there, only six steps left. My arms shaking. I looked at Mired’s face as she kept telling me how much better she deserved, which got me thinking about how much better I deserved, which led me to the very notion of love, and I remembered that old cliché: If you love something set it free.

I arched my back because she seemed to be getting heavier with every step—she’d been getting heavier for months now, every time she said mechanics don’t make enough money, every time we had our maintenance sex, something we did these days to avoid a breakdown, like getting an oil change.

I craned our combined weight up to the next stair, my biceps burning, arms unable to hold her as high, which put increased pressure on the small of my back. Mired said, "You should love me more, Derek," and I felt a puncturing, like a nail jammed into a tire, except there was no tire, just me. Like something had ripped into my skin and there I was, leaking affection and patience and resilience. Spilling love.

My feet worked their way around, doing a one-eighty on that thin step, and I faced the bottom, and I let my arms go limp and dropped her and she hit right at my feet and flipped backward and then bounced all the way to the bottom of the stairs and landed in a contorted heap, tangled like human laundry.

She didn’t make any noise, didn’t move.

I looked around to see if anyone was watching. There didn’t seem to be so I rushed down the stairs and crouched next to her mangled face.

I said, "Are you all right?"

I said, "Jesus, baby, you fell down the stairs!"

Excerpt from Joshua Mohr’s Termite Parade.

Bay writes

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culture@sfbg.com

WRITERS We asked Guardian readers to contribute stories or poems that reflected their Bay Area experiences. The catch? Each entry had to be exactly 123 words. So many excellent submissions poured in. Unfortunately, we could only pick 10 winners, which are printed below. The writers will receive a gift certificate to Books, Inc.

ECLIPSED

Her fantasy

revolved around how wonderful it would be to die in an

earthquake that killed her at the exact moment

she was looking up at the shelves in the Macy’s women’s department.

The handbags were being swept into the air and

were floating down towards her. A

set of Moschinos fell like giant colorful raindrops

and her hands were extended towards them, like a desiccated cave-woman about to

experience

the end of a drought. This moment

would be captured as her afterlife when a glass sliver

slipped between her eye and eyelid and gracefully penetrated her brain. She wanted the perfection

of the leather satchels, which she had no hope of ever owning, to eclipse all

the

other moments of her life.

— Hunter Stern

LESSON PLAN

i take the book you made out for coffee, walk along clay until it crests over hyde and i can smile again, weave past grace cathedral, 40s and shorts on the swing set and i fall in love with you at Front Porch drinking drinks with kumquats and rum, flicks of salt disappearing, lips pressed to mason jars, wrappers leftover from japanese candy, 111 minna, some girl’s gold necklace, lamp light reflecting, gray goose and art galleries, thick throated and insecure, while north beach vomits strip clubs and boutiques, scares away hipsters, and at 3am i make a home for you in the space between my breasts, mismatched fabrics hanging over head, cork board alley smiles and

what’s your name again?

— Gabrielle Toft

LABOR DAY 2009

I slip on my pants like a fireman, quick, with practiced determination. I careen my head toward the window. Watch daybreak bang the gray sky back. The closed Bay Bridge arches towards darkness, towards Frisco. I have never seen it without cars lights.

I shuck the sheets off you.

Up, I demand, a drill sergeant.

I snap my bra on, twist it around. I can smell myself, fecund, moist pits. Nervous like a mother. I hate myself.

I ball my shirt up; hurl it at you.

You look up.

What?

I’m going to be a mom, I spit. Taste the implication on my tongue.

You hoist yourself up.

Where you going?

To bike that bridge. What can they do? They can’t stop me

— Tomas Moniz

BEFORE LIGHT CHANGES

Pick a hill. Jump between vantage points. You can spring the entire city, like a kinged checker, or a queen. Morphing like Mad Magazine, folding corners B to A, bending time.

A pharmacy goes BBQ. Sushi boats drift through your unconscious. You got dragged aboard, then woke with a craving. Across, in that park: you’ve tasted heartbreak, and smelled funny dancing, and shot hoops with crumpled resumes, and been winded by a jog.

The city gasps for air just before rush hour, after running all day, breathing hard. Cue the fog. Now it’s dim: the ‘Sco does twister yoga, or the funky gargoyle, gone buck or cupcakin’. A sushi float parades the bay, always revolving, barely perceptible; you’re on board, and circling too.

— Joe Cervelin

TOOTH TALE

Mother wanted me to be the dentist to the stars. I wanted to be the next Hemingway. Mother insisted writers were alkies and wife abusers. I could write prescriptions. Graduated NYU Dental in 1959. Only mention that Al Pacino and John Travolta were patients because I’m a namedropper. For the next 20 years, I inhaled tons of toxic mercury vapors, was bombarded with enough stray radiation and nitrous oxide to turn my toenails and my mien black. After my second wife left me, I fled to San Francisco. Bought a restored Victorian at 164-166 Castro with my cousin, Hal Slate. Hal owned the Cauldron bathhouse and sang in the Gay Men’s Chorus. Hal lived upstairs and I was on the bottom.

— Dr. Stanley Finkelstein


THE SEAWALL

Just a cougar by the seawall. Summer, errr, autumn in the Sunset, she stole a boy from the surf shop. He literally lived in the surf shop.

Gawky girl, watched him get amateur tattoos. Watched him sell pot to Trouble. Bought him pizza. Bought a phone, learned to text.

Kisses and secrets pressed against the seawall. Realize: nothing is lost by getting older.

Ocean Beach is not made of fog, just ghost lovers and culture clashes. Wu Tang Clan and Elliott Smith. Office girls and Rastafarian skate rats. Wearing rings and gangsta players. Foodies and shysters.

She returns home with sand in her highlights and guilt on her sleeve. Then makes love with two men, one by the shore, one as a whore.

— Sadie Craft

NAILS

I always smell coffee when I cross the Bay Bridge.

Mom would point out the Hills Brothers building on the right. "Grandpa

used to work for them."

He kept nails in a red coffee tin. Every summer, my parents would send

me back to the city to live with my grandparents for a bit. He’d get me

to pull nails out of old planks and save the good ones.

Years later, my wife and I came to clear out their house. She rattled a

tin full of rusty nails.

"It’s a real mess. I guess people who lived through the Depression saved

everything."

The old factory is gone, but I still smell coffee on the Embarcadero.

And think of honest work.

— Dominic Dela Cruz

A PAINFUL CASE

Outside of a Shattuck Laundromat a form appeared and paused. I could see just above the pages of my book a squat mass.

You like Joyce?

There waited a gray-haired wheelchairbound woman, her thin puppetlegs below a square, dense torso.

Yes.

She spoke about Finnegan’s Wake, about her triptoirelandfathersdeathlovers53disabledlesbianconvertedjewsuicide

life —

conjuring Linnaeus to lift herself from the gelid human sea.

I politely cut her off.

There were three women alongside me folding laundry. A man watching clothes tumble behind a porthole. Two coeds umlike trying to use a machine. The TVfixed attendant stood folding underwear. Eight people in a small room and no one spoke to the other.

I turned my gaze toward the street vainly hoping to tell Shewhospoke

Iamalmostthirtyunemployeduneducatedconfused

my life.

— Carolyn Rae Allen

UNTITLED

Ice cream is my observation food.

I’m sitting on the curb by the Castro Station, watching a nighttime exodus of dapper gay couples and catching snatches of passerby dialogue between bites of an It’s-It.

I listen to them talk about things I know nothing of, though I still strain to hear. Each person walking by, I realize as I munch, is their own story, their own person, and I feel a strange urge to follow them around.

Instead, I look up at the city lights and semi-starry sky, both of which frame a giant flapping flag, whose wind-aided whipping is just audible above the sounds of cars and people.

My snack drips, I wolf it down, and then descend into the station’s glow. — — arim Quesada-Khoury

AN UPLIFT

There are people in this city whom even God does not love. I have spoken to many of them (phoning from the safety of my SOMA office) about diminished social services and life’s decline. The most wretched of San Francisco’s sick, discouraged, and deprived tell me they keep living for one reason alone: their pets. When every last lover’s tolerant embrace has turned cold, dogs and cats do not waiver in their devotion. I only remember to feed myself because Josie needs to be fed, too. She knows I’m sick and ugly, but she loves me nonetheless. Oh Lord, because your charitable light sometimes eludes man through the Bay’s perpetual fog, please lift up this city’s pets and help them do your work.

— Ryan Goldman

Higher ground

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LIT What Susan Sontag wrote about illness in 1978’s Illness as Metaphor and 1989’s AIDS and Its Metaphors holds for disaster as well: all too often, widespread devastation is made to serve moralistic meanings. Perhaps the primary virtue of Rebecca Solnit’s clear-headed new book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Viking, 353 pages, $27.95), is that it does not simply swap one interpretation of disaster — as anticonsumerist reckoning, for instance — for another, such as Jerry Falwell-style damnation. Solnit is interested in how people act in the aftermath, for better and for worse.

By tallying stories from a century’s worth of disasters, Solnit mounts a passionate argument that altruism and solidarity are the norm, no matter what the media or authorities might report. Early in A Paradise Built in Hell, she reflects on the unexpected joy found in the wake of the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989: "We don’t even have a language for this emotion in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological."

Solnit collects evidence of commonplace resilience from bottom-up accounts of earthquakes in San Francisco and Mexico City, the London Blitz, 9/11, Katrina, and the Halifax Explosion of 1917. She marshals these anecdotes against the Hobbesian view, often taken by those in power, that ordinary people will backslide into chaotic violence without strict social controls. A ruling class’s authority is disrupted in disaster, and this tends to put them in a preemptive, paranoid mood. The helpful term for this displacement is "elite panic." The predictability of warrantless crackdowns is depressing. In Solnit’s history, we see Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco ("These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will") echoing the brutal edict issued by San Francisco’s mayor, Eugene Schmitz, in 1906 ("The Federal Troops, the members of the Regular Police Force, and all Special Police Officers have been authorized by me to KILL any and all persons engaged in looting"). People matter more than property, except when they don’t.

It’s to Solnit’s credit as a journalist that she departs from her script in New Orleans for a harrowing account (with an assist from former Guardian reporter A.C. Thompson) of the murder of several black men by heavily armed white vigilante groups. One wonders, however, if these ragtag brigades—which certainly cannot be called "elite" — aren’t filling a similar vacuum, in their way, as the informal groups that set to feeding the hungry. How does Solnit’s goodness match up with the mass-complicity required of genocide? It’s telling, after all, that Jan T. Gross’ 2001 book about a massacre of Jews in World War II was titled Neighbors.

A Paradise Built in Hell is a little didactic and a lot repetitious in the typical nonfiction style, and for someone obviously concerned with the impact of words, Solnit never really explains the Christian tuning of her title. But these are only chinks in the book’s broad spirit of inquiry. Solnit’s sources include Carnival, Russian anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin, the reactionary politics of disaster movies like Dante’s Peak (1997), and William James, who was visiting Stanford during the ’06 quake. Her most intriguing proposition is that the civic temper — James’ phrase — loosed by disaster represents a kind of desire. We’re so used to thinking of desires, both as they’re expressed and repressed, as a private matter of sexuality and identity that it’s almost shocking to hear the word in this social context.

One can easily think of Solnit’s look at hope regained as a kind of parable of the Bush-Obama transition, but if A Paradise Built in Hell is a product of its time, it’s not because it channels our new president’s good tidings. Instead, Solnit’s work is best read as a sustained critique of the degraded view of ordinary citizens taken by the Bush administration: in its eyes we were craven, greedy, vindictive, and worse. Solnit says no, not when it counts. It takes real imagination to answer the intellectual crisis provoked by the reign of W with a study in altruism. What’s even more surprising, she succeeds.

Creamin’ for comics

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Erotic comics are a special breed of porn. Unlike prose, they can show as well as describe. Unlike photos, they’re narrative. Unlike film, they have a limitless special effects budget. Comics are capable of everything from gritty, realistic detail to "yowza!" flights of fancy — perfect for the demands of erotica.

And yet good erotic comics seem in short supply. Despite a venerable history that stretches from the Tijuana Bibles of the 1920s to the wild antics of the underground comix movement in the ’60s and ’70s, porn comics have languished of late. Alternative and independent comics have been trending more toward asexuality. And gay male erotic cartoonists are only now struggling out of the shadow of Tom of Finland, whose comics of square-jawed, fascist-reminiscent leathermen and bikers have dominated gay erotic art in the same way that Tolkien’s imagination bound and gagged fantasy writers for generations.

Once you start digging, however, it’s remarkable the gems you can find. The fact that comics are so marginalized creates a kind of purity to the art form. Cartoonists aren’t motivated by fame and fortune, but rather by their passion for their stories and their art. The same is doubly true for erotic cartoonists, whose work is often an evolution of the naughty pictures they drew compulsively while growing up.

Here are a few of the most unusual, hot, and fun recent erotic comics collections to get your juices flowing.

BEST EROTIC COMICS 2009

Greta Christina, Editor

(Last Gasp)

www.lastgasp.com

A man stimulates the orifice of a bound mermaid with a twig, an infertile professor convinces a student to impregnate his wife, a dominatrix hires a gay masseur to fuck her boyfriend, a sadistic dom pisses all over her girlfriend, King Kong and Godzilla have hot sex in the ruins of Tokyo.

Best Erotic Comics, an annual collection of the best and brightest of kinky comics, is yet another reason to be proud of our sexy Bay Area, published as it is by legendary, local institution Last Gasp. Editor Greta Christina has assembled an impressive collection of literary smut comics that run the full gamut of sexual interests, from octopus sex to airplane sex. It’s especially refreshing to see straight porn side by side with gay and lesbian imagery — it allows the reader to understand sexuality as a spectrum of possibilities, and to see how hot the fantasies of others can be.

PRIDE

Gengoroh Tagame

(G-Project, 2007)

www.tagame.org

Odd as it may seem, the best bear comics porn in the world is coming out of Japan, a country with a noticeable lack of big, hairy men. Clearly the exotic has its erotic charms. Unlike yaoi — the popular manga genre in which female cartoonists create stories of gay male romance and sex for an audience of girls and women — bara is gay manga created by actual gay male creators and usually does not feature the yaoi breed of androgynous boys with big eyes and floppy hairdos, but rather burly, hypermasculine men.

No one is better at portraying these than Gengoroh Tagame, arguably the world’s greatest, living erotic cartoonist. His universe is populated with the hottest muscle bears outside of the Lone Star’s patio during Folsom Street Fair weekend, and they have a tendency to be tied up, humiliated, and fucked senseless. Pride is a recent trilogy of books from the master, detailing the gradual transformation of a cocky, hirsute hunk into an obedient slave by a buff, bearded professor. The books are full of all sorts of S-M shenanigans, with our hero being put through the paces, from extreme bondage and piercings to fistings and scat play. Tagame has yet to be translated into English, but he’s such an accomplished cartoonist that his work can still be thoroughly enjoyed.

SMALL FAVORS

Colleen Coover

(Eros Comix, 2002)

www.eroscomix.com

While lesbian imagery exists in various straight publications, there is an unfortunate dearth of true lesbian erotic comics. Colleen Coover’s Small Favors is a notable exception. Coover is an excellent cartoonist and clearly has a great time illustrating her two heroines, Annie and Nibbil, having wild, fun, and juicy sex.

Annie is accused of masturbating too much by her own conscience and is assigned a finger-tall guardian to stop her from getting jiggy with it too often. Fortunately, this tiny watcher winds up being a nympho herself, and jumps Annie at her first opportunity, leading to comics’ best introduction line ever: "Ummm … Hi, Annie! My name’s Nibbil! Gosh, I hope you don’t mind me fucking myself on your nipple!"

WANKY COMICS

BiL Sherman

(Self-published)

www.wankycomics.com

Occasionally you’ll stumble across some underground, barely-distributed mini-comic, put together by the creator with a photocopier and a stapler, that will take your breath away. BiL Sherman’s Wanky Comics is bizarrely brilliant, completely original, and about as underground as you can get.

While the subject matter of the stories in WC ranges wildly from horny unicorns and space-age sex clones to an inexplicably naked superhero and his quest for love, Sherman has a distinctive style that unifies the series. He draws like a thirteen-year-old with OCD and a hard-on, filling his pages with burly, hairy men. Each chest hair is lovingly and obsessively drawn, and the faces are rugged and expressive.

Sherman is unafraid to get both funny and surreal, a refreshing trait in porn comics. The "Mike Thorn and the Nine Satanic Statements," episode, for example, is a blow-by-blow illustration of a scene on a porn set, while the text underneath the images is taken directly from Anton Levey’s Satanic Bible, creating a strangely disconnected, campy, yet beautiful juxtaposition.

BIRDLAND

Gilbert Hernandez

(Eros Comix, 1992)

www.eroscomix.com

Hernandez is one of the creators, along with brothers Jaime and Mario, of Love and Rockets, arguably the single greatest American comic book. Rarely does such a world-class, literary cartoonist turn his talents to porn. Luckily, however, the highly prolific Hernandez created Birdland, a voyeuristic foray into the lives of strippers, bodybuilders, and horny aliens — and one of the classics of erotic comics.

Birdland introduces characters such as Fritz, the large-breasted, brainy psychiatrist with a lisp and a passion for guns, which Hernandez later incorporated into L&R. But while L&R certainly never shies away from sexual material, Birdland is unabashedly erotica, with copious cum shots filling the pages.

Though Hernandez identifies as straight, Birdland is in many ways pansexual erotica, with every type of coupling depicted. The final scene, in which the characters have a giant orgy in a spaceship, is one of the most oddly liberating and transcendent sex sequences ever conceived. After reading it, anything seems possible.

————-

A GUIDE TO PORN CARTOONISTS AT THIS YEAR’S FOLSOM STREET FAIR

The Folsom Street Fair on Sun/27 is all about community, and one of the ways it demonstrates this is by donating a block of booth space to queer erotic artists, many cartoonists. This year’s little section of the Fair, at 11th Street and Folsom, is very exciting. Here’s some highlights.

Chuck Connor and Sean Platter: the duo’s Demonic Sex series pulls no punches with its depictions of satanic transformations and sexual hells. www.triplesixcomics.com

Dave Davenport and Justin Hall: An accomplished tattoo artist, Davenport uses his illustration chops to create horny werewolves, skate punk ghosts, and other wholesome characters in Hard To Swallow, co-created with Justin Hall (that’s me!). www.hardtoswallowcomics.com

Steve MacIsaac: As the co-creator (along with Dale Lazarov) of Sticky, MacIsaac offers sex-positive stories instead of the rape fantasies that often dominate gay porn. www.stevemacisaac.com

Bradley Rader: Harry and Dickless Tom is the story of two homophobic truckers who screw and then beat up fags. It turns surreal when one wakes up with a vagina. www.flamingartist.com

Sean Z: Sean’s Myth is a superb fantasy comic with complex plots, gorgeous color work, and big-dicked vampires. www.sean-z.com

See www.folsomstreetfair.org/art for more kinky artists.

Unbuckling the swashbuckler

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REVIEW Given the phenomenal success of Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, a revival of appreciation for the granddaddy of all cinematic swashbucklers, Douglas Fairbanks, is long overdue. Perfect accompaniment for home entertainment viewing of the silent film star arrives in the form of film historian Jeffrey Vance’s gorgeously laid out biography Douglas Fairbanks (University of California Press, 376 pages, $45).

Douglas Fairbanks was published with the assistance of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, so perhaps it’s to be expected that the prose sometimes skirts close to hagiography. But Vance, who has authored studies of Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd, knows his silent film history. He provides a wealth of information about the productions of Fairbanks’ major pictures (including 1920’s The Mark of Zorro, 1921’s The Three Musketeers, 1922’s Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, 1924’s The Thief of Bagdad, and 1926’s The Black Pirate). The chapters about the big costume epics are bracketed by discussions of the earlier non-costume silents and the few sound projects Fairbanks worked on. Throughout, the text is complemented by beautiful reproductions of photos of Fairbanks and his friends and family on and off set.

Audiences came to expect incredible displays of acrobatic athleticism from the one-time stage actor. "There was no living man as graceful," says Allan Dwan, who directed several Fairbanks pictures. Upon scouting locations at the Grand Canyon for A Modern Musketeer (1917), Fairbanks commented that he was disappointed because "I couldn’t jump it."

Vance argues that Fairbanks was instrumental in shaping most aspects of his productions, which wielded a major influence on 20th century pop culture. Errol Flynn grew up worshipping Fairbanks and saluted his hero by starring in his own version of the Robin Hood story (1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood). Bob Kane, creator of Batman, tells Vance that Fairbanks’s depiction of Zorro ("a fop by day and a crusader at night") inspired the caped crusader’s costume, secret lair, and dual identity. Vance argues that Superman bore a heavy Fairbanks influence. Fairbanks also receives credit for popularizing the dark suntan, leaving us to wonder where George Hamilton or the Sonny Bono Cocoa Butter Open would have been without the great man’s example.

After he left his first wife for Mary Pickford, the actress dubbed "America’s sweetheart," Fairbanks climbed to heights of celebrity rarely attained by movie actors in the 1920s. Perhaps only Chaplin rivaled his peak fame. When Pickford and Fairbanks arrived in London in 1920, their entourage was mobbed, leaving Pickford briefly in fear for her life. From all indications they adjusted fairly well to this state of affairs, since both relished the limelight (Alexander Woolcott describes their post-marital jaunt as "the most exhausting and conspicuous honeymoon in the history of the marriage institution"). In order to gain more creative and financial control over their work, the couple used their new clout to join Chaplin and D.W. Griffith in founding United Artists.

Eighty-plus years on, the Fairbanks charisma can still wow an audience. And, at the risk of stressing the deadly obvious, DVD viewing really cannot do full justice to spectaculars made for the silver screen. At this year’s Silent Film Festival at the Castro Theatre, I had the privilege of taking in the 1927 feature Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho, which included plenty of leaping — and some tremendous vine-swinging which had the packed house screaming with pleasure. By that point well into his 40s and seemingly attempting to set a record for cinematic chain-smoking, Fairbanks was still near the acme of his physical powers. Portraying a more complex, jaded hero than in his earlier movies, he had put aside his discomfort with love scenes, thanks partly to co-star Lupe Velez, with whom he was having an affair. Ironically, Pickford appears in the film as an apparition of the Virgin Mary.

A dear friend who attended all of the Silent Film Festival responded to a questionnaire asking her to name the highlight of the weekend by writing "Douglas Fairbanks’ ass." Clearly, though he is dead and gone, his star shines on.

See monsters

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REVIEW Naomi Ophelia Lamar was my cousin, but my big sister. Six years older than me, she ran away from home at 16. Though we stayed in touch, too many years of no contact had changed us both. We tried but could never close the distance. Last year, they found her body in a Dumpster in Birmingham, Ala. She’d been stabbed over 30 times. Her husband had done it. Afterward, he drove to the nearest bridge and threw himself off. She was the grandmother of three. I sat in the bathroom screaming, "We are not garbage!"

Bizarre and horrible things happen. They just do. They happen to us, around us, and because of us. Sometimes the horrible things only become horrible on reflection. We liked them at the time. Sometimes the bizarre things become so commonplace that they stop being bizarre. Both bizarre and horrible things become badges of distinction and honor when we survive. When we answer the call and stagger to daylight.

This is the general premise of Victor LaValle’s Big Machine (Spiegel & Grau, 284 pages, $25), which opens with a look at Ricky Rice, a middle-aged porter in a bus depot in Utica, N.Y. It’s 2005, and the world is about to go broke. Ricky’s a downtrodden sanitation worker with a shady past. He’s never seen better days, and none seem to be forthcoming. That is, until he receives a mysterious note reminding him of The Promise he made: a one-way bus ticket to Vermont’s northeast kingdom. On the bus to the frigid north, we hear LaValle’s refrain from an alcoholic goblin on a tear to his captive audience: "Human beings are no damn good. We even worse than animals. We like …"

The ellipsis just dangles, from the book’s first section on. As the events of Big Machine unfolded, I realized that that very phrase, and that very ellipsis, had been hanging from my lips since last year. It is the jump-off point for Lavalle’s book, and as we travel with Ricky Rice — alongside him, but also inside his mind as it seeks justification and reason — we begin to understand why.

Big Machine is a crafty book. Every page is a precise and illuminating reveal — a large veil playfully lifted from the reader’s initial conceptions of black/white, good/evil, and ultimately, salvation. Each chapter is a possible spoiler. A tough job for the reviewer, to be sure. Especially one who has been anticipating such a novel (and working on such a novel) for years.

Behold the invisible! You shall see unknown worlds: Ricky is recruited, along with six other recovering addicts and petty criminals to become a paranormal investigator. All of them have heard The Voice at the deep bottom of their shoddy existences and answered it with The Promise. Like generations of wretched of the earth before them, they are inducted into a secret society of "negros" ("I won’t say African Americans," says Rice, "it’s too damn long") to find The Voice and figure out what it wants.

From cleaning out bathroom stalls in work boots and T-shirts, Ricky becomes a dandy, wearing the finest clothes that the 1940s and 1950s could provide. Fitted in the best vines, he makes his way to (where else?) the Bay Area to confront a murder-suicide cult, and his own monstrous past.

Far from a standard dry examination of doubt and faith, Lavalle’s allegorical approach is sweeping and swashbuckling. Big Machine takes us from Ricky’s idyllic childhood — sweet as saccharine, with a black tar of burn — to his romantic nadir, dying in a puddle of piss and shit in the basement of a house owned by a man named Murder.

LaValle has named Shirley Jackson and Ambrose Pierce as influences, along with those he calls "the Black Eccentrics": Ishmael Reed, Gayle Jones, Darth Vader. His approach to gothic horror adds black Black humor and a new element of ferocity to the AfroSurreal aesthetic.

There’s a lot of tearing in this book. Flesh is peeled, pried, burned, punctured. Torture plays a prominent role. Children are exploited, souls are gnawed away, and spirits are broken. Bullets fly, bodies are wrenched, mauled, mutilated and discarded — so much so that Lavalle’s main refrain takes on greater weight when it reappears, in extended form, from the mouth of one of Big Machine‘s main characters. "Human beings are no damn good!," the character says. "The despised become the despicable. God Damn! We worse than animals! We’re like monsters."

Monsters. Big Machine has those too. Some wear suits, some wear shawls, some move between the shadows with vise-grip hands. The story is neither miserable nor grotesque, and it is proof of LaValle’s genius that sympathy and forgiveness extends to the whole pitiful lot.

I’ve been following LaValle since I read his 1999 short story collection Slapboxing With Jesus (which takes its title from a Ghostface Killah quote), and followed it up by reading 2003’s The Ecstatic (which in turn inspired Mos Def to title his latest album the same). Mos Def contributed a blurb to Big Machine, and the book’s blurbs are telling: according to them, LaValle is Marquez mixed with Poe, or Marakami mixed with Ellison, or Bosch having a baby with Lenny Bruce. But I feel they all miss the mark — I’m here to tell you that Victor LaValle is a believer in the unseen world. He has been there, and what he has brought back has affirmed my belief too. Yes, there are monsters out there, and what’s an AfroSurrealist supposed to do?

"I guess we could lock ourselves in the bathroom and hide. Let someone else face the fight," says Ricky. "But we’re not going to do that."

‘The Adderall Diaries’

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EXCERPT My psychiatrist lives just down the street from me. I can walk there. I see her once a month, or once every three months, and she prescribes my pills. The pills make me crazy, I know that, but I don’t see the alternative. It’s really just speed, no different from the original amphetamine salts Gordon Alles injected in June, 1929, and almost identical to the Pervitin used by German paratroopers in World War II as they dropped behind enemy lines in a state the British newspapers described as "heavily drugged, fearless, and berserk." It’s the same stuff injected in high doses in the Haight Ashbury that Allen Ginsburg was talking about in 1965 saying, "Speed is antisocial, paranoid-making, it’s a drag, bad for your body, bad for your mind."

Without the Adderall I have a hard time following through on a thought. My mind is like a man pacing between the kitchen and the living room, always planning something in one room then leaving as soon as he arrives in the other. Adderall is a compound of four amphetamine salts. The salts metabolize at different rates with diverse half lives, so the amphetamine uptake is smoother and the come down lighter. And I wonder if I’m not still walking back and forth in my head, just faster, so fast it’s as if I’m not walking at all.

My psychiatrist is tall and thin and her skin hangs loosely around her face. I like her quite a bit though I’ve never spent more than 15 minutes with her. She works from her home and a small waiting room is always open on the side of her house. There are magazines there, one in particular ADD Magazine. The magazine is full of tips for organizing your life. There’s even an article suggesting that maybe too much organization is not a good thing. Mostly though, it’s about children. How to deal with your attention deficit child and the child’s teacher, who might be skeptical.

In the writing class I teach, a woman recently turned in an essay about her son who suffers from attention deficit. Her essay was written as a love letter and was completely absent of hate or envy or any of the things that make us human. It was missing everything we try to hide.

"How are you feeling?" my psychiatrist asks.

"Better," I reply.

I had stopped taking the pills for a year, maybe more. Three weeks ago I started taking them again. When I quit taking Adderall I was still dating Lissette. I would go to her house in Berkeley during the day while her husband was gone, and wrap myself around her feet while she worked. Or I would visit her at the dungeon she worked at on the weekends as a professional dominatrix. I would sit in the dressing room with the women and we would watch television. Lissette was the most popular and she would be off with the clients most of the day. She would leave them in the rooms to undress. When she returned they would be kneeling on the floor, their naked backs facing her. She might walk carefully toward them, sliding the toe of her boot across the carpet. Or she might stand away from them, letting their anticipation build, as she pulled a single-tail from the rack. She loved to be adored and the best clients made her feel happy and complete. The walls were thin and I could hear the paddles landing on the client’s back with a thud sometimes followed by a scream. When she was done she might come downstairs and sit on my lap for a while, and then we would go.

I have a memory of Lissette in the dungeon, which was really just a four-bedroom basic Californian with a driveway and a yard in a quiet town north of Berkeley, near the highway. She’s standing on the back of a couch, grabbing a toy from above a row of lockers. She’s wearing panties with lace along the bottom and high heels and we’re all staring at the back of her thighs, amazed.

When I was taking Adderall all I thought about was Lissette and when I stopped taking the Adderall I started thinking about other things. Lissette noticed and we broke up. Then we got back together, then we broke up again. Over the course of last year, after I had stopped, I often felt suicidal. I had time, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I was a writer but I had forgotten how to write so I sat with my computer. I sat in coffeeshops or I sat at home or I sat at the Writer’s Grotto, an old building near the ballpark where a group of authors share office space. I still had a bunch of pills left and occasionally I would take one, just to know the writer’s block was real. Then I lost all the pills when my bag was stolen at a bar on 22nd Street six months ago, and that was the end of that.

If you asked me what happened this past year I’m not sure I could tell you. I could say I moved into this apartment on the edge of the city where I can hear children and dogs in the morning and I despise it. I could say I was with and not with Lissette, getting together and breaking up every couple of months. At one point I called her the love of my life. I could say honestly I started to write a novel every day. I could say I went on tour for six weeks with the Sex Workers Art Show and that a compilation of previously written essays and stories about my predilection for — my addiction to — violent sex was released to silent reviews.

I could say I watched the first three seasons of The Wire on DVD and on Sunday nights I went to a friend’s house nearby and ate dinner and watched HBO.

I ran a reading series in the same bar where my bag was stolen. It was part of a literary organization I founded to raise money for progressive candidates running for congress in 2006.

I edited an anthology of political erotica.

I could say I did all these things and if it sounds like a lot I can assure you it isn’t. I’m not married and I have no children. I have friends but they don’t know where I am most of the time. I don’t work. I live on money I made before, money that is almost gone.

Last year I made $10,000.

I live in San Francisco. Rents are going up.

I’m teaching a couple of classes to get by. I know I should get a job, but it’s hard to do that after a while.

From The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder (Graywolf Press, 212 pages, $23), published in September.

STEPHEN ELLIOTT With Tobias Wolff and Bucky Sinister. Thurs/27, 7 p.m., $20 (free copy of The Adderall Diaries for attendees). Amnesia, 853 Valencia, SF. (415) 970-0012. www.amnesiathebar.com

Made in USA

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DRUG LIT You can go to these places. Reading Righteous Dopefiend (University of California, 392 pages, $24.95), I kept trying to pinpoint, via clues in the text, where on "Edgewater Blvd." — Bayshore — the homeless heroin addicts whose lives the book chronicles were encamped. You want to know if you’ve walked by them. Because what pulls you through this often dense ethnography are finely drawn portraits of the brutal lives of individuals.

Philippe Bourgois, a professor of anthropology and medicine who taught for a while at UCSF (he’s now at the University of Pennsylvania) and Jeff Schonberg, a photographer, spent nearly 12 years with a core group of 10 homeless drug addicts in and around the Bayshore area. In Righteous Dopefiend they’ve created a devastating, blow-by-blow indictment of the countervailing forces that conspire to keep these people — Hank, Petey, Tina, Carter, Felix — on the margins.

Of course, the authors recognize that the members of the group they’re following bear some responsibility for the day-to-day atrocity their lives have become. But they track these lines back carefully, conducting extensive interviews with family members, former employers, and ex-spouses who live more (or at least much less precariously) in the "mainstream." Part of what’s revealed in these back stories reminded me of William T. Vollmann’s argument, in his book Poor People (Ecco, 2007), about "accident prone-ness": that the cultures of poverty, addiction and marginalization have a snowball effect within individual lives. Meeting medical — or court — appointments becomes impossible without transportation; sores and open-container tickets turn into abscesses and bench warrants.

The book is divided into nine parts, each detailing an aspect of the everyday lives of the homeless addicts. In "Falling in Love," over the course of interviews, monologues, and Schonberg’s overwhelming black and white photographs, we watch the trajectory of Tina and Carter’s on-again, off-again romance. The chapter is bracketed by "Intimate Apartheid" and "A Community of Addicted Bodies," which illustrate the particulars of the group’s estrangements (from within and without) and its focal, primary romance — with heroin, crack, and alcohol.

In "Making Money," the few legal, and many more illegal, means of getting enough cash to fix are catalogued and considered. Bourgois considers the obsolescence of blue-collar manufacturing jobs, nationally and particularly in rapidly gentrifying cities like San Francisco. What interests the authors here, as elsewhere, are the ambiguously symbiotic, even parasitic relationships employers have with the homeless. One boss who relies on a member of the group pays him exactly enough for a bag of heroin, ensuring that he’ll be at work again first thing the next day.

Throughout the first-person narratives, Bourgois threads his argument: that the institutions, ostensibly set up to serve this body of addicts (from the police-state to community clinics) are, like the employers, both dependent on them (for government funding, menial labor, etc.) and ultimately at cross-purposes with them. The services senselessly undercut one another, forming a no-place for the homeless to barely survive in, characterized by the either/or of living purely by chance, in extreme squalor, or in a permanent maze of bureaucracy. So the Edgewater homeless carve out a life in between, under the freeways but with methadone treatment or an SRO perpetually on the horizon. It’s a shell game where the addict always loses.

There are plenty of good reasons to get this book and read it. If you’re interested in homelessness, addiction, or in the public health issues surrounding IV drug use, this is an excellent source of information. The authors treat their subject brilliantly and with great compassion. It is also a hell of a story, and it’s local. These people walk by you every day and should not remain invisible.

This land is ‘Methland’

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DRUG LIT Books claiming to be about drugs in some way — whether nominally fiction or nonfiction — all run up against the same problem: pharmacodependency is already culture. Or, as the literary theorist and academic Avital Ronell puts it in her brilliant, uncategorizable tract, Crack Wars (University of Illinois Press, 1993), drugs articulate "a quiver between history and ontology."

Put another way, drugs aren’t everything, but rituals of self-maintenance and care, from vitamins to exercise and so on, are built on addictive structures. Isoutf8g a drug as a singularity — as Nick Reding only apparently does in Methland (Bloomsbury USA, 272 pages, $24.95), a sort of informal case study of the effects and causes of the meth epidemic in the Iowa town of Oelwein — is a dicey proposition. It calls for a kind of Puritan monomania that might capture some of the lucidity of being on drugs but does so at the price of insight, a deductive rather than inductive logic.

It’s easy to claim that drugs are culture if we limit ourselves to the black-light poster canon of drug lit from Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels (1860) to Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) and Bret Easton Ellis’ coke-benumbed Less Than Zero (1985). In their time, those books appeared as threatening as their subject matter because they revealed associations between addiction and literature — a notion that seems rather quaint now. Nobody’s launching hysterical campaigns against toxic literature. Today, video games are the new objects of moral panic. Perhaps as books quietly got subsumed into the category of self-improvement, video games took on the cast of a potentially ruinous pursuit of unproductive labor.

In this context, meth is an oddly positioned drug: since its first large-scale use among soldiers on both sides during World War II, speed has been associated with hard work, endurance, and elevated mood over more abstract qualities. Whether prescribed for slimming down or perking up during its brief tenure as a licit drug, amphetamines have always tended to banal, everyday worry. As Reding writes in his book’s introduction, the U.S. meth epidemic is set apart not only because meth can be synthesized cheaply and discreetly at home, but because the drug’s main constituency is working-class, rural whites. Reding’s take on his subjects is compassionate but not treacly: a significant portion of the book links increased meth use with the effects of globalization upon the blue-collar job markets in small towns.

One of the Oelwein residents Reding profiles, a notorious crank addict named Roland Jarvis, went from earning $18 an hour with full union membership and benefits to $6.20 an hour without benefits or union membership after Gillette and later Tyson took over the company where he worked, Iowa Ham. Jarvis used meth to help pick up extra shifts even in the halcyon days of a livable wage, but it’s difficult to imagine how one could make do on $6.20 an hour without tweeking — Reding claims local meth production increased by 400 percent around the same time. Jarvis’ narrative arc culminates when his home explodes as he attempting to dismantle his basement meth lab. The descriptions that Reding shares — of how Jarvis’ skin proceeded to slough off in sheets, revealing the muscle below, for example — make for a kind of rural Grand Guignol, otherwise held in check by structural explanations.

The author gives the sense of a slightly distracted but pleasant dinner party host — wary of lingering on any subject too long, he returns cyclically to the nonaddicts who form the moral core of the story. Clay Hallberg, Oelwein’s high-strung general practitioner, and Nathan Lein, the assistant Fayette County prosecutor, are the book’s through-lines: their tentative redemption is the town’s, and the book’s conclusion plays out with a Midwestern brand of reticence. But Reding’s attempts to connect Oelwein’s story with his own family history cause the book to lose focus, particularly as it concludes. To his credit, this feels like the result of keeping an over-cautious distance from mom-baiting newsmagazine templates. Ironically, though, some of Methland‘s descriptions of meth-fueled psychosis — an elaborate fetish for enemas; frozen pigs in a blanket used as butt plugs — are far-out enough to be at home in the "Drugs" episode of Channel 4’s satirical documentary program Brass Eye.

Methland also tracks the paths of the meth trade, illustrating how early routes were established by out-migration from the corn belt to labor markets in Southern California, then were consolidated into an empire by Lori Arnold, and finally transformed into a decentralized system in which Mexican traffickers use illegal immigrants employed in the meatpacking industry as mules. By following both federal meth legislation and news coverage of the epidemic, Reding emphasizes meth’s functions and reputation within society. He links the drug to an incredible depression of wages and standard of living by corporations threatening to move operations offshore should they be forced to enact worker protections.

Meth is a drug with no celebrities, and Reding treats his subjects with respect, despite close calls with former addicts who play disc golf with him one minute and threaten his life the next. But even beyond a standard litany of reservations about nonfiction — that the author’s voice is too intrusive or not intrusive enough, that there are chunks of undigested research — Methland’s attempt to combine personal reflections on identity and place with an examination of the drug’s role in a small town’s economic struggles seems formally stale.

Perhaps this approach is more truthful, though: meth in Oelwein offers little in the way of rausch, which Ronell defines as the "ecstasy of intoxication," but can be everything when it comes to making do as agribusiness exerts its downward pressure on communities that had previously survived on small-scale farming and small business. Though he might not be able to keep his readers fully invested in his book’s characters, Reding illuminates how meth flows along the same lopsided trajectory of so-called development for which globalization is a handy catch-all. Meth lit is a distant prospect, and as Ronell reminds us with respect to crack, it’s because these drugs don’t have the veneer of moral defensibility. A writing more appropriate to the subject might put forth a louder call for justice for the future. Methland does an able job for now.

The elephant in the shroom

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

DRUG LIT The psychedelic experience is perfectly, if unintentionally, expressed in a poetry collection: Too long I took clockwork as a model instead of following the angle my inclinations make with the ground. So writes Rosmarie Waldrop in A Key into the Language of America (New Directions, 1994), a book based on Rhode Island founder Roger Williams’s 1643 guide of the same name. The most "meditative" poets, from Milton and Blake to James Merrill and Denise Levertov, are often those who have reworked historical texts. The same could be said about scholars of psychedelics. Forget about Aldous Huxley’s exaggerated diatribes and everything by Carlos Castenada. The "doors of perception" aren’t opened by self-indulgent rambles of the "I’m a spiritual person" variety.

In 2007, sick of the ingrained pop mythologies surrounding psychedelics (and realizing, it seems, that such pseudoscience isn’t helping make the case for legalization), British scholar Andy Letcher published Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom (Harper Perennial, 384 pages, $14.99). Though he spends quite a bit of time debunking myco-myths that I’d imagine are only actually believed by people while tripping — Santa Claus is a giant, speckled variety of the Amanita genus; Stonehenge was like a Dead show without the music — the double-PHD Letcher gives a solid sense of magic mushrooms as they moved through history, and we moved with or tripped over them. Letcher uncovers how little we can possibly know.

Because mushrooms can "simply be picked and eaten," Letcher explains, there is "not a single instance of a magic mushroom being preserved in the archaeological record anywhere." Drugs and apparent representations of magic mushrooms that have been found have had other, nonintoxicating uses, from food to insulation, or have been doctored up to appear trippy, as with one example of Neolithic rock art widely distributed through self-declared visionary Terence McKenna’s books — McKenna’s then-wife, Kat Harrison, actually made the drawing from a photo, adding her own interpretation.

I once heard prankster Paul Krassner relate the tale of his first psychedelic escapade. After his mind returned, he said, it seemed like a good idea to call his mother and express his elation (the rational part of his mind must have still been distracted). Her hilarious response was perhaps culled from the jumbled logic of the war on drugs: "Watch out," she pined into the phone. "I’ve heard that LSD can be a gateway drug to … marijuana!"

Letcher shares this realistic sense of humor about the life of drugs. Before picking apart proponents of the otherworldly "ancient mushrooming thesis," he offers them room to breathe. He is ultimately interested in the cultural evolution of the West’s "yearning for enchantment" in response to changes that have occurred since the industrial revolution. "That we in the West have found value in those remarkable mushroom experiences, where almost all others before us have regarded them as worthless," he notes, "means that in a very real sense we could claim to be living in the Mushroom Age." He explores how McKenna’s death in 2000 left the psychedelic movement without an "obvious figurehead" and how the need to paste our modern sensibilities onto "a pre-historic religion or tabu" (as shroom-popularizer Gordon Wasson wrote in a letter to Robert Graves in 1950), is just an urge.

Post-McKenna, what is the destination of the psychedelic movement’s next trip? A new book, Mushroom Magick (Abrams, 144 pages, $19.95), is respectable for its clear motivations and gorgeous, thorough design. It’s a little too much fun, consisting of over 100 lush, full-page watercolors by Arik Roper, whose shrooms "grow from the tip of my pen without much effort." Incomplete but clear field notes by Gary H. Lincoff and an essay by Erik Davis offer tasty morsels, and the short bibliography points to useful resources such as Paul Stamets’ field guides. But Daniel Pinchbeck’s foreword follows the same trajectory that Letcher so carefully deconstructs. I’m afraid that Mushroom Magick ultimately presents as recreational something that, with or without New Age revisionism, clearly has a deeper, revelatory role to play in human affairs. And that’s not furthering the discussion, that’s a little irresponsible.

Drunk on words

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12 HALLUCINOGENIC NOVELS

1. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon, 1973. When jazz singer Anita O’Day found herself stuck with an odd group of musicians who weren’t drinking alcohol or smoking anything between sets — they were reading books — she considered such behavior the other side of life. A very Pynchonian phrase. I know more people (two) who claim to have read this novel on acid than any other — the writer Kevin Killian and the poet Joshua Clover.

2. The Soft Machine, William Burroughs, 1962. A whole cosmology, and an antidote to the hideous language virus from outer space.

3. Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Philip K. Dick, 1974. In a future where manufactured drugs bend the parameters of space and time, our characters are still also dropping mescaline.

4. How I Became a Nun, César Aira, 1993. Poisonous ice cream is the agent that instigates a trip coextensive with the mysteriously-gendered childhood of poor little César Aira. Part Alice in Wonderland, part Genet.

5. Any book by Wilson Harris. Really. They all blur together. Staring at most any page of Harris is like staring at a painting by Rufino Tamayo, Anselm Kiefer, Charles Burchfield, or Wilfredo Lam.

6. The Book of Lazarus, Richard Grossman, 1978. Dropped into the middle of this collage-novel, with its sophomoric poetry, cartoons of crossing guards, and plot about kidnapping a mobster’s daughter, is a fragment from an eternal sentence. Seventy single-spaced pages of psychedelic cartoon as cosmically weird as Tamala 2010.

7. Guide, Dennis Cooper, 1998. Once, when I was 19 and tripping, I wandered into a room full of cadavers. Whoa, I said. Later that night, I glimpsed the secret structure of the universe. Guide is kind of like that. "Dennis" struggles to convey the unpleasant insights from a bad trip.

8. Ice, Anna Kavan, 1967. Born Helen Ferguson, Kavan named herself after one of her own fictional characters. In and out of mental institutions. On and off heroin. Devoted to gay men. Found dead with lots of heroin and lipstick in her room. In this novel the world is freezing over and a poor thin girl is always getting tormented. Or is she?

9. Gone Tomorrow, Gary Indiana, 1993. For just one scene — a gay sex acid trip at Dachau. Burroughsian flesh-melds, fairy tales bubbling into reality, and the discovery that the Holocaust has been reduced to kitsch.

10. Dream Jungle, Jessica Hagedorn, 2003. Another one-scene wonder — an acid trip on a Manila-bound airplane. Yikes.

11. Already Dead, Denis Johnson, 1998. Starring a toad whose secretions contain DMT.

12. On Heroes and Tombs, Ernesto Sabato, 1961. Three-quarters of this is just okay, but "The Report on the Blind" makes it worth the price of admission. A paranoid misanthrope explores the sect of the blind which he believes secretly rules the world. Does for the visually impaired what The Orphan does for foreign adoptees.

EIGHT GREAT INEBRIATED MEMORY PIECES

1. Cool For You, Eileen Myles, 2000. Introducing his latest, prescription drug-addicted memoir The Adderall Diaries, Stephen Elliott writes that "… only a fool mistakes memory for fact." Chris Kraus, as quoted by Myles: "Because capitalism’s insincere, it demands sincerity from its art."

2. Mama Black Widow, Iceberg Slim, 1969. "Under the crazy hypnosis of pills and alcohol I had the strange feeling I was in a fantastic flower garden, hearing the hum and buzz of insects …" Sounds like a sentence from —

3. Discovery of the World, Clarice Lispector, 1984. Except Clarice wouldn’t mention the pills and alcohol. It’s all subtext. Who’d have guessed she was addicted to sleeping pills the whole time?

4. Good Times: Bad Trips, Cliff Hengst and Scott Hewicker, 2007. Lit and art world luminaries describe their experiences, with illustrations.

5. A Voice Through a Cloud, Denton Welch, 1950. Excruciating pain is hallucinatory, and painkillers, too. "I was exquisitely conscious of the texture of things. There was torture in the smooth sheets, in the hair of the mattress and the weight of the blankets …"

6. Valencia, Michelle Tea, 2000. You can call it fiction, but I’ve been involved in illicit transactions with one of the characters.

7. The Peyote Dance, Antonin Artaud, 1976. A French Nobel Prize winner thinks Artaud didn’t even take that trip in the 1930s. Maybe not, but this book still gives me mescaline flashbacks — like the peyote trip in Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996).

8. Go Ask Alice, Anonymous, 1971. I haven’t read it, but my partner Jonathan says our teen heroine’s (to quote the cover text) "harrowing descent into the nightmarish world of drugs" — acid trips and gay sex — convinced him to follow her path.

Capitalmania

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a&eletters@sfg.com

REVIEW UC Santa Barbara sociology professor William I. Robinson was recently in the news for having the temerity to criticize the Israeli military’s assault on Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Right-wing groups including the ADL orchestrated a campaign attacking Robinson with the implication that any criticism of Israel’s military abuses in the occupied territories somehow equates to anti-Semitism.

It would be nice if Robinson also received some press for the incredibly rich body of work he has produced in his career. His current volume Latin America and Global Capitalism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 440 pages, $55) is an important book for anyone interested in where our imperiled planet is headed. Robinson, author of the brilliant 1996 study of U.S. foreign aid Promoting Polyarchy, is admirably thorough in his overview of the direction capitalism has taken in Latin America since the 1970s. Robinson uses research from years of on-the-ground work, and sifts through rafts of data to map out how neoliberal trade agreements and other mechanisms for greasing the machine of global commerce have increased profits for global elites while deeply disrupting traditional patterns of life and balance with the natural world.

One glaring example Robinson focuses on is the shift toward intensive farming of soy, which has massively displaced small farmers and production of dairy, fruit trees, horticulture, and other grains. Soy production is now much more profitable than food production for local consumption — hence malnutrition is on the rise in soy producing areas.

Plans for expansion of biofuel production, Robinson writes, "could well obliterate small and medium producers and consolidate a new empire of corporate agribusiness, biotechnology, chemical and pharmaceutical TNCs [transnational corporations] in South America. The ecological devastation would undermine any gains in terms of a reduction in carbon-based fuels, and we would face a situation — absolutely absurd from any social logic yet consistent with the logic of capital — in which cars would replace human beings as the main consumers of world cereal output."

In addition to these new agro-exports, Latin America and Global Capitalism analyzes the spread of maquiladoras, the transnational tourist industry, exported labor, and remittances from abroad sent home. Robinson makes no bones about being a politically engaged academic, or of shaping his thorough, rigorous work with the intent of it being useful for popular progressive struggles. His sentiments are clearly with the indigenous resistance movements he chronicles in Latin America, as well as the immigrants’ rights movement in the United States and the continuing Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. The ruling elites have their well-funded, right-marching think tanks churning out public intellectuals cultivated to defend the status quo. Grassroots radicals need more like William Robinson.

Zine it like you mean it

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johnny@sfbg.com

INTERVIEW Nestled in the corner of the old New College building, true seekers will find Goteblüd. Matt Wobensmith’s zine emporium keeps the building’s dedication to countercultural self-publishing alive. As characterful as it is small, Goteblüd places shelves of photocopied DIY writings amid a brown shag paneling motif that wittily references the cat-scratch antics found within Ed Luce’s comic Wuvable Oaf, the store’s main link to contemporary publications. Currently the space also hosts "Yes I Am, But Who Am I Really?," a showcase of queer zine and queer punk memorabilia: zines, photos, and letters (including a pissy postcard from Henry Rollins) create a terrific one-of-a-kind wallpaper, while t-shirts for bands hang from the ceiling, as if asking to be filled by new rebellious bodies. After scoping out the show, I recently asked Wobensmith about Goteblüd’s origins, its contents, and its future plans.

SFBG How did Goteblüd come about?

MATT WOBENSMITH I’ve been collecting zines since I was a teen. In the past few years, I’ve heard people say things like "I just threw out four boxes of zines," and I say to myself: That is wrong! Why do people think old zines are worthless? They’re priceless. So I began to take zines off peoples’ hands, and started putting them in storage boxes. After a while, this pastime became more of an obsession as I tried to fill gaps in the collections by actively buying from people. When I found the space, I knew it was time to launch a vintage zine store.

SFBG A book titled Queer Zines (Printed Matter, 180 pages, $25) was recently published. As someone who played a major role in an important period of the queer zine and queer punk movements, what did you think of it?

MW I was active in the queer punk and then homohop music scenes for a while, but that’s kind of history. It’s through this weird zine collecting thing that I find myself faced with my past again.

I saw the Queer Zines book that accompanied the show Printed Matter did in New York City last year. It was inspiring and also satisfying that this era of self-publishing was finally getting more exposure. I don’t know who I’d be without some of those zines!

At the same time, I felt that the queercore phenomenon was different from the larger queer zine genre. It’s focused around music and music culture, had lots of young people, and was connected to a radical subculture loosely based on punk rock. The name of the show is paraphrased from a Team Dresch song: "Yes I Am, But Who Am I Really?" It’s a slight dig at Melissa Etheridge, but ultimately sums up the struggle for identity and purpose and survival.

Also, it’s a scene where women played an enormous role in shaping the dialog and aesthetics. The influence of the riot grrrl movement was not insignificant, either. Some people attribute queer zines to things like Straight to Hell or [William S.] Burroughs, but these zines are far more likely to have been inspired by radical music figures: Black Flag, Throbbing Gristle, the Shaggs, Yoko Ono, female rockers, as well as good old 1980s hardcore. In many ways, queercore was an alternative to an alternative. And it had a soundtrack.

SFBG Looking back at the materials in the current show, what surprises you — what do you see anew now, years later, or wish was more present in current society or social currents?

MW What I really value in old zines is this incredible sense of urgency. There’s some insane, obsessive person trying to reach out and find like-minded people, so they make a zine. It’s a search for kindred souls, and an almost desperate bid for creative and intellectual validation. It can be fun, but is ultimately quite serious. It has a lot of integrity. I love that spirit and dedication.

That same feeling is totally lacking in today’s culture. The Internet has released much of the pent-up need to connect, to find information, to really put effort into communication. Today’s pop culture is also highly self-aware and navel-gazing, and people seem more obsessed with mundane actions of others — via tweets, social networking, whatever — than creating original ideas and taking risks. Old zines have original ideas and risks in spades.

SFBG What kinds of zines will people find in Goteblüd?

MW We try to carry a wide assortment of popular and unknown zines; the more DIY, the better. Though we do have some indie glossies, we carry tons of underground music, pop culture, art, skateboarding, graffiti, lowrider, comic, and experimental zines from the past four decades. We try to focus on older stuff because it’s harder to find and it gets people excited. We are always buying and trading too. I love when people challenge me to find a certain zine for them, and I have it!

SFBG One section of Goteblüd is devoted to Ed Luce’s Wuvable Oaf comics and paraphernalia. What do you like about Wuvable Oaf, and what plans do you have in connection with the comic?

MW Ed’s work, in one word, is fun. It’s also really smart and has no small amount of sharp observations on human behaviors and interactions. It’s a "post-bear" comic, but we hate the b-word. It’s set in a city that looks suspiciously like San Francisco and we all write the stories together. We try to juxtapose big and small, human and animal, and we love to show people in awkward situations. It’s not ironic; it’s loving and earnest.

The comic fits into the store — oddly — as it is an encapsulation of so many different sensibilities. Ed’s constantly referencing his icons of fashion, bad horror movies, and music — particularly Morrissey. I think it’s like a gayer Love and Rockets but that doesn’t begin to do it justice. Our next issue will spotlight our house cartoon band, Ejaculoid, and we’ll be releasing a limited edition record of their music — which is "disco grindcore."

GOTEBLÜD is at 766 Valencia in SF and is open weekends only from noon–5 p.m.

Paging all freaks

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johnny@sfbg.com

QUEER ISSUE As May gave way to June, news arrived that a veteran gang of gay magazines — Honcho, Inches, Mandate, Playguy, and Torso — were printing their last glossy naked pages, no thanks to the unending onslaught of Internet porn and hookup sites. For print fetishists of the queer variety, this would seem like a sign of the gloomy end times. But signs can be wrong. In fact, a teeming variety of small publishers are bringing a mix of sex and sensibility to those underground seekers who revel and rebel outside the eye of the computer monitor. Here’s a brief, far from complete, guide to the action.

BAITLINE

In a recent interview on the Guardian‘s Pixel Vision blog, the artist Matt Keegan talks about the subversive social potential of gay calendars and magazines during past eras. You could say Baitline revives this potential. It’s the anti-Craigslist. Hallelujah! Hand-drawn and stapled, this local community resource can help you find your next pervy playmate or like-minded roommate, or assist you in stoking an artistic project and finding a job.

70 Richland Ave, San Francisco, CA, 94110. sywagon@gmail.com

BUTT

Not-so-straight from the Netherlands comes the gay version of Playboy for the 21st century to tease your nether lands even though you buy it to read the interviews. BUTT’s been around long enough to be anthologized as a book. The latest issue is SF-centric, with appearances by Hunx from Hunx and his Punx, and Hunx’s sometime partner in crime, Brontez.

Klein-Gartmanplantsoen 21-I, 1017 RP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. www.buttmagazine.com

CHECK OUT THESE GUNS

Artist Nathaniel Fink is interested in documenting male body types. This simple and cute little zine finds a shirtless and slim subject flexing against a big blue sky.

nathanieljfink@gmail.com; www.morephotosaboutbuildingsandfood.blogspot.com

FAG SCHOOL

Your teacher at Fag School is the one and only Brontez of Younger Lovers and Gravy Train!!! fame. Brontez knows how to turn funny anecdotes and sexy pics into an old-school queer zine for our ADD moment. Not as simple as it sounds. He’s also good at making straight guys takes off their clothes and model.

www.myspace.com/1256201

FOR LONELY ADULTS ONLY

The most recent example of Regis Trigano’s photo zine presents a man alone in bed having some fun. Well shot.

www.proun.us

GOTEBLUD

This isn’t a zine, but instead a zine store run by Matt Wobensmith, the queer punk stalwart behind Outpunk Records and the zine of the same name in the 1990s. Opening night last month revealed a small emporium of countercultural wonders — queer stuff is just one facet. Just try to resist the Wuvable Oaf memorabilia.

Sat–Sun, noon–5 p.m. 766 Valencia, SF. www.goteblud.livejournal.com

HANDBOOK

Men, oft-scruffy, sometimes tattooed, taking care of themselves — based in San Francisco, this publication reaches all over the country to create images that owe a debt to old amateur raunch hands such as Old Reliable.

handbooksf@yahoo.com; www.hanbookmen.com

PINUPS

Christopher Schulz’s three-times-a-year publication featuring one or two models is bearish and cuddly, whether depicting a light wrestling bout or a sandy frolic with a beach ball.

contact@pinupsmag.com; www.pinupsmag.com; www.myspace.com/pinupsmag

QUEER ZINES

This book lists and shares samples from the ever-expansive realm of queer zines. As a zinester from the early days who attended the Chicago SPEW conference decades ago, I can say it isn’t definitive — but it is wonderfully, revealingly comprehensive.

Printed Matter, 195 10th Ave., New York, NY, 10011. aabronson@printedmatter.org. www.printedmatter.org

SPANK

I’d call this the My Comrade of today, replacing that primarily 20th century zine’s drag comedy with boyishness. In other words, here’s a rag for partying NYC art fags.

www.spankzine.wordpress.com

STRAIGHT TO HELL

Still raunchy at 66 issues old, this is a classic, the daddy of them all, the one that exposes Penthouse Forum as boredom. Images by the late, great photographer Al Baltrop appear in the latest edition along with stories bearing titles like "Jockey Rides Teen’s Face — Wins Race" and "Appaloosa Stud with ‘Epic Torso’ Overwhelms Startled Shutterbug."

S.T.H., Box 20424, NYC, 10023. sth@straight-to-hell.net; www-straight-to-hell.net

A distant memory

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW I was cautious when I got the galley for Attica Locke’s first novel Black Water Rising (Harper, 448 pages, $25.99). I’d been intrigued before by beguiling plots of intrigue and suspense, only to find myself in the middle of a tepid affair with no way out except for closing the damn thing and chalking it up to yet another life lesson. All the warning signs were there.

The book’s protagonist, Jay Porter, is an attorney operating out of a Houston strip mall in 1981. His only client is a shady prostitute, who may or may not pay him. His wife, Bernie, is pregnant and he’s barely making ends meet to feed them, much less the baby who’s on the way. Though not happy with his mediocre existence, he’s content enough with his lot to be strong-willed and determined to make it.

Jay has a terrible secret, of course, that threatens to tear the world he has meticulously built asunder. And one fateful night, something happens that sets the unraveling in motion. He saves a mysterious woman’s life and places himself in the middle of a plot rife with sex, backroom deals, and dirty cash that will determine his fate and that of Houston, Texas, and eventually, the world!

"Easy, big fella. Easy," I told myself. "You’ve been hurt before." I saw the signs, as much as any reader would. I saw a Grisham story. I saw a Leonard tale. I knew I was being seduced, but I couldn’t put the book down. The first chapters hooked me like classic mid-list pulp — a phenomenon I miss like pay phones — and it took a minute to realize what Attica Locke was doing.

It wouldn’t be a spoiler to tell Jay Porter’s secret. He did time for running guns during the Black Power movement. This was during the days of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program, when black dissidents’ phones were tapped, dossiers were amassed, and organizations were infiltrated. Jay Porter the strip mall lawyer has a legitimate cause to be paranoid. This kind of justified paranoia plagues many of the resisters who managed to survive the bloodbaths of the 1960s and 1970s social movements. Lensed through Porter’s claustrophobia, grandiosity, and self-deprecation, demons lurk in every dark corner. As the plot unfolds, the first thing that disappears from view is a tangible reality, one free from dark fantasy and delusion. Jay Porter may be nuts. Then again, maybe not.

Locke, a veteran screenwriter, has an almost supernatural understanding of pacing. This aids her well in storytelling, but even more so in figuring out where to work her magic. Her early 1980s Houston is a city on the verge of Texas-sized change. Porter is asked by his preacher father-in-law to work with the dockworkers union that meets in his church. The black dockworkers are being paid less than the white workers who do the same job. A split in the union along race lines is imminent. A battle between the warring workers breaks out after a young man is beaten. A greater impetus is revealed: the arrival of containers. These containers, it is threatened, will be used on barge, train, and truck, nearly rendering dockworkers obsolete. Jay Porter is asked to speak to the mayor — a "friend" from his revolutionary past — on behalf of the workers. Simultaneously he tries to uncover the identity of the mysterious woman he saved.

This is the one drawback in an otherwise stellar debut. Jay Porter has too much going on. So much that suspension of belief is pulled to the breaking point. So much that many characters who are vital to the plot get unbelievably overlooked. When the Porters’ home is burglarized, for example, Jay leaves his pregnant wife in the house to pursue a lead on one of his cases. When a tough offers Porter money to not pursue another lead, he does it anyway — out of, what, morbid curiosity? The mayor of Houston and many of the other characters are so full, rich, and singular that it is baffling and frustrating when someone as essential as Bernie becomes a bit player in Jay’s solipsistic pursuit. Is Jay Porter crazy, or just an asshole?

Black Water Rising reads like a hard-boiled thriller, but the real trick resides in Locke’s ability to personalize an overlooked part of American history and show how far-reaching, how entrenched, it is in today’s social, political, and cultural fabric. From running the voodoo down on the Weather Underground to using 1980s Houston as a backdrop, he wraps a People’s History of America in a digestible, entertaining package. There are whiffs of Chinatown and White Butterfly, sure, but Locke’s attention to the details between the action makes the novel, and turns every reader into an oracle.

As Jay solves this book’s mysteries, we see pre-Dubya America getting dubbed. We see the sprawl that is yet to be. We see the unions breaking, the factories shutting down, the diners, bars, and cafes closing. We see the Black Water Rising. I may not want to see too much more of Jay Porter, but I better see more of Attica Locke.

Dystopian enterprise

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Best-selling author Richard North Patterson stays out of the local limelight, but he’s a San Francisco resident — and we caught up with him May 21st to talk about his new book, Eclipse, and the role that U.S. oil companies play in Nigeria.

Before Nigerian environmental activist (and Goldman Environmental Prize winner) Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged in 1995, PEN, the international writers’ group, wrote letters and organized protests against the execution. "I was very impressed by Saro-Wiwa," says Patterson, who was on the board of PEN at the time. He notes that Saro-Wiwa was a nonviolence advocate who succeeded in building a grassroots movement among the Ogoni in the Nigerian delta — all in the face of a ruthless dictator, and at great risk to his wife.

As Patterson recalls, despite the protests, several Western governments voicing their concerns, and then-President Bill Clinton’s hour-long conversation with Nigeria’s military dictator Gen. Sani Abacha, "They unceremoniously hung Saro-Wiwa. It was a lesson in a number of things, beginning with the degree to which oil makes autocrats feel impervious."

Post- 9/11, oil "security" became a bigger concern. Patterson began to realize that amid the U.S. failures in the Middle East, the disaster in Iraq, and the growing fear of al Qaeda, everyone was looking at Nigeria as an even more important source of oil.

"Meanwhile Nigeria’s environment was that much more ruined, its political leadership hopelessly corrupt, a semi-official militia that claimed to be acting in Saro-Wiwa’s name was killing each other and stealing oil, and everyone had a fee," says Patterson. "It was a classic example of how a natural resource makes its extractors and the rulers rich, but only serves as a source of misery for people standing on the ground. I already felt that Saro-Wiwa was a remarkable man who should be remembered. But now he was becoming even more relevant."

Patterson began researching Saro-Wiwa’s life, a quest that involved one trip to Nigeria and many conversations with lots of related experts. "Nigeria is not a place to go back and forth to — you’d think I was trying to break into Las Vegas," he says, noting that he hired security during his trip. "I’m not unknown, so there was a concern I’d be a high-value target. But I loved the Nigerians I met. They were a bright enterprising bunch in a dystopian setting, and to the extent I couldn’t go places, I did all I could by talking to people, reading articles, and watching films."

The name of Eclipse‘s protagonist is Bobby Okari. Was Patterson making reference to President Barack Obama? "If I was, it was subliminal," he says.

So what can Americans do to improve the plight of everyday Nigerians? "Increasing our independence from oil and increasing our foreign aid to Nigeria would be helpful," Patterson says. "The real problem is the extent to which human rights are trumped by self-interest. When we fill up our tanks, half of us don’t know that there’s oil in Nigeria. So first we need to become aware of the impact of the commodities we need. But I’m not sanguine about how easy this is. Saro-Wiwa was hung and 14 years later, where are we? The same place, and that’s a disgrace."

While Patterson does not excuse what he calls "the callousness of the U.S. oil companies," he believes that first we must address the Nigerian government.

"The history of the oil industry in Nigeria is pretty ignoble, but [without the industry] they can’t maintain the schools, roads, hospitals, and clinics," he says. "If the government doesn’t give a damn, it’s hard to make a quasi-government out of an oil company. When we get angry at the oil companies, it begs the question, What is the government doing? If it isn’t encouraging economic development and environmental protection, how can the oil companies? Shell and Chevron didn’t invent corruption. This is in no way to defend them. [But] there is a disconnect between Nigeria’s miserable government and its citizens. One of my central aspirations is to tell an entertaining story — and also to convey an awareness of a real problem."

Total ‘Eclipse’

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Tredmond@sfbg.com

REVIEW Mass market novels of the mystery and thriller kind are not known for their progressive politics. The most popular authors of the political adventure set are the likes of Tom Clancy, who thinks we’re still at war with Japan and ought to be at war with China. The detective novelists tend to glorify law enforcement and disparage those weak-willed sorts who would rein in the mighty and righteous gun-wielding police. My favorite new character, Jack Reacher, who has made Lee Child a massive international best-selling writer, is a former military cop with a taste for violent vengeance.

But of course I read this stuff. It’s my guilty pleasure, what I do to relax over with my whiskey before bed, while my beloved partner is watching Super Nanny. As Pete Townshend used to say, each to his own sewage.

I’ve read almost everything San Francisco resident Richard North Patterson has written, and he’s a rarity. His stuff tends to go in a more liberal direction. (It also tends to have a subplot involving teenage sex.) He’s written about the death penalty and the criminal justice system and American politics, and his characters have more depth than John Grisham’s. I like him, but I’ve never raved.

But I do want to recommend Patterson’s latest book, Eclipse (Henry Holt and Co., 384 pages, $26). Not because it’s the most brilliant writing he’s ever written, but because it’s a real-life political novel that reveals, in graphic detail, the impact oil companies like Chevron Corp. have on the Niger River delta. Eclipse is a fictionalized account of the life of Ken Saro-Wiwa, an eloquent and charismatic environmentalist who tried desperately to tell the world how oil money had corrupted Nigeria and how the Western oil companies were conspiring with the brutal dictatorship of Gen. Sani Abacha to stifle dissent. He was hanged 15 years ago by Abacha; his legacy drives the protest movement that is still trying to force the petrolords to take responsibility for what they have done to the delta environment, its tribal residents, and the Nigerian people. Eclipse didn’t put me to sleep — it made me mad. It reminded me of what American companies are allowed to do to the rest of the world, with impunity. It’s a story, with Patterson’s typical devices (for example, I don’t have any reason to believe Saro-Wiwa’s wife had an affair with his lawyer). But there’s enough truth in it to make you think. And that makes Patterson’s novel, in a unique and surprising way, an important political book.

Born to be wildly visionary

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AFRO-SURREAL Living in black America means you’re already living "science fiction" — already born to be wildly visionary and future- bent in form, function, context, and appearance. No choice, really.

History cast your ancestors in the real-world version of the genre’s defining, overarching anxiety-ridden trope — the Earthly-and-Earthy- Beings-Overcoming-Enslavement-and-Genocide-by-Evil-Aliens story.

Black America is clearly the result of Africans surviving an evil alien abduction to an evil alien slave planet where our ancestors, nearly transformed into automatons, came to develop sonically-induced counteracting powers of telekinesis, time travel, teleportation, telepathy, and "trickster-knowlogy" to combat invading alien armies who had us beat when it came to more bluntly ballistic technology. To those African spirit combatants we owe the advent of such dark avatars of symbolic, sonic, and psychic African weaponry as Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Romare Bearden, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrix, De La Soul, Ramm El Zee, Jean Michel Basquiat, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, whose battle cry "Great Black Music Ancient and to the Future" is as succinct a manifesto for the black SF movement as has ever been written.

But now let’s get really real up in this piece: the terms black science fiction, Afro-Futurism, Afro-Punk, post-blackness, Black Surrealism, Black Dada Nihilismus, etc., are all born of attempts to accommodate and simulate the strange reality of being black (and "black being and nothingness") in the not-so New World in ways not seen on BET. Yet all these terms are actually redundant — black in America by itself already signifying the ultimate in Weird Tales.

They’re also just a tad elitist and academic — at times intended to suggest that some blacks, usually college miseducated, are more modern, avant-garde, and outside the black box than others. The world that most black working-class people live in here in these United States is already as freaking strange twisted and bizarre as any space opera. The self-taught artists that have come from African American working class communities — Ra, Thornton Dial, Bessie Smith, Thelonious Monk, Simone, Hendrix, David Hammons, George Clinton, Wu-Tang Clan to name a few — are all more "out of this world" than their merely grad school-sanctioned brethren and sistren. No surprise.

After all, who needs to dream bigger than folk trying to escape from America’s urban behavioral modification concentration camps? Furthermore, anybody who thinks the extraterrestrial African imagination needs anything but a daily reality check to get fired up needs to come spend a day in Harlem.

From my bedroom window nested high up on uptown’s Sugar Hill — blocks from the old cribs of Ellington, Robeson, Hughes, and Basie — I can see a shimmering forest of spring green trees being stalked and hovered over by a four-building complex of high-rise public housing projects known as the Polo Grounds towers. Each is 30 stories; the combined 1,616 units hold an estimated 4,200 residents of primarily African descent on a 15-acre property that defines Harlem’s eastern edge. At night these towers are illuminated by an artificial, man-made double moon: one brand new, one still to be demolished — the side-by-side circular monstrosities known to us natives as Yankee Stadiums I and II.

If that’s not odd enough, check this out: If you call up Harlem’s 155th Street corridor on Google maps, you will not find any evidence of these gargantuan buildings when you zoom in. What you will see instead is a huge empty white space marked "Polo Grounds." The online information readily available about the Polo Grounds says nothing about those four Tolkienesque towers, or the folk who live there.

Instead, it blathers on about the forgotten baseball stadiums, long demolished, that once stood there for the New York Giants, the Yankees, and the Mets. Think about it — 4,200 folk of color vertically stacked in their own Babel but erased from human consideration on the virtual map of the world and replaced by fanboy baseball lore. If that’s not black science fiction, I don’t know what qualifies.

Devil’s poetry

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AFRO-SURREAL Sadly, the mythology of poet Bob Kaufman almost rivals all we have left of his poetry. However, to place Kaufman within a mere "cult of personality" (along the lines of some of his contemporaries) undermines the innovation of his process and what it brings to the tapestry of American poetics and the complicated and surreal orality of his poems.

Called "the American Rimbaud" by the French, Kaufman lived as a poetic assassin. A frequently arrested union organizer, like Stagger Lee wielding a .44 of devil’s poetry, Kaufman assaulted the willing and unwilling (even white police officers) with verse. If you were cool, you knew his assault was meant as a cipher, a juxtaposition of rhythm, image, and sound meant to invite the listener into a dialectical examination of identity, even the identity obtained from syntax: "I went to a masquerade<0x2009>/ Disguised as myself<0x2009>/ Not one of my friends recognized."

Kaufman’s poetics were Kerouac’s spontaneous prose without the notebook, taken literally. Think an un-choreographed version of "Amethyst Rocks," the prison yard scene in Slam (1998) where Saul Williams stops a would-be beatdown with poetry. Except for Kaufman the beatdown was always real, inevitable, and though sometimes provoked, never for the camera.

Kaufman was the spirit of true North Beach bohemia: the street poet who stood "on yardbird corners of embryonic hopes drowned in a heroin tear," panhandling "with moist prophet eyes" free styles of surrealism, the blues and duende, meant to disturb, disrupt, and ultimately liberate.

Kaufman’s "crackling blueness" is distinctly Californian. In poems like "Carl Chaessman Interviews the PTA," Kaufman filters the "west of the west" through absurdist reflections that juxtapose outlaw figures such as Chessman (a 1960s serial killer on San Quentin’s Death Row) with figures from California’s mythology, all to the rhythms of a radio announcer calling a ballgame: Carl Chessman is in sickly California writing death threats to the Wizard of Oz, his trial is being held in the stomach of Junipero Serra, at last the game starts, Chessman steals all the bases & returns to his tomb to receive the last sacraments from Shirley Temple.

Ultimately, according to poet and scholar Nathaniel Mackey, what Kaufman creates is a cross-cultural poetics difficult to categorize. Though he lived in North Beach and is credited with coining the phrase "beatnik" — and infused his poetry with jazz and Eastern religious influence — Kaufman transcends the singular categorization of "Beat poet." By aligning himself with the pain of "all losers, brown, red, black, and white; the colors from the Master Palette," Kaufman creates a new American poetics — a hybrid poetics of projective California duende blues, an examination of the exhaustion that comes from the persistence of breath.

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PIXEL VISION: Bob Kaufman’s poem "Heavy Water Blues"