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"content": "\u003cp>Farmers are hot. Hot the way that Native Americans used to be a few decades back, when everyone and their dog wanted a buckskin jacket. The small time farmers is the new “other:” that cool and mysterious kid in the back of the class, the repository of some secret earthy knowledge…perhaps a glowing dirt clod passed down from generation to generation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not surprising to find more and more farm literature of the large and illuminated variety. Food and where it comes from has become a coffee-table book concern. Like penguins. Or giant Olmec heads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But \u003cb>Edges of Bounty\u003c/b> transcends easy classification as coffee table food porn. For all that Emery’s writing can be a bit flowery and over-the-top (“The flavor was a cathedral of liquor”) it offers surprising insights (“What is a skunk but a tiny bear with a chemical warhead strapped to its ass?”) and useful historical detail (Folsom Prison used to raise its own cattle, until prisoners stabbing each other with shivs made out of cow bone got to be too much of a problem.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California’s Central Valley is one of the most productive landscapes in the world (Emery describes it as “the factory floor”), and Emery and Squire are determined to leave an impression of its less industrial qualities. There’s Ramon Cardera, who grows gorgeous organic produce in fields mixed with weeds, rusted tools, and discarded soda cans. There’s the woman who went into beekeeping only after her family balked at her stated life plan of squatting in state parks and living off of roots, berries, and the occasional wild boar. There are Hmong and Mien farmers growing seeds given to them by Sikh immigrants from Yuba City, and tales of a burgeoning strawberry industry in Thailand because of migrant farm workers retiring to their homeland with pockets filled with seeds from the Central Valley. Also included are ranchers, fruit stand operators, artisan popsicle makers, and so on, and so forth, to the point where a larger sense of place does begin to emerge out of the flurry of impressionistic essays.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More perplexing is the decision, in a coffee-table book, to not picture most of the aforementioned people. Emery describes this choice as the desire to not drug the reader with “the ecstascy of the human face.” Hm. One soft-focus picture of a melon is pretty much like another soft-focus picture of a melon, and the cumulative effect becomes ultimately more \u003ci>Martha Stewart Living\u003c/i> than documentary. Maybe there’s no getting around the appeal of the human face: the best photos are indeed not piles of peaches, but of people fishing in the Sacramento Delta, (which, but for the captions, could easily pass for the Mississippi Delta. Interesting, that.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s only appropriate that \u003cb>Edges of Bounty\u003c/b> ends with Emery pounding acorns at the Sierra Mono museum, effectively bringing cultural obsessions with farmers and Native Americans full circle. It’s easy, he reports, once you find the right rock to bash the acorns with and the right hollow to put them in while doing it. Less easy is waiting around to eat the results — Emery is gone before it is even finished cooking.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Farmers are hot. Hot the way that Native Americans used to be a few decades back, when everyone and their dog wanted a buckskin jacket. The small time farmers is the new “other:” that cool and mysterious kid in the back of the class, the repository of some secret earthy knowledge…perhaps a glowing dirt clod passed down from generation to generation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not surprising to find more and more farm literature of the large and illuminated variety. Food and where it comes from has become a coffee-table book concern. Like penguins. Or giant Olmec heads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But \u003cb>Edges of Bounty\u003c/b> transcends easy classification as coffee table food porn. For all that Emery’s writing can be a bit flowery and over-the-top (“The flavor was a cathedral of liquor”) it offers surprising insights (“What is a skunk but a tiny bear with a chemical warhead strapped to its ass?”) and useful historical detail (Folsom Prison used to raise its own cattle, until prisoners stabbing each other with shivs made out of cow bone got to be too much of a problem.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California’s Central Valley is one of the most productive landscapes in the world (Emery describes it as “the factory floor”), and Emery and Squire are determined to leave an impression of its less industrial qualities. There’s Ramon Cardera, who grows gorgeous organic produce in fields mixed with weeds, rusted tools, and discarded soda cans. There’s the woman who went into beekeeping only after her family balked at her stated life plan of squatting in state parks and living off of roots, berries, and the occasional wild boar. There are Hmong and Mien farmers growing seeds given to them by Sikh immigrants from Yuba City, and tales of a burgeoning strawberry industry in Thailand because of migrant farm workers retiring to their homeland with pockets filled with seeds from the Central Valley. Also included are ranchers, fruit stand operators, artisan popsicle makers, and so on, and so forth, to the point where a larger sense of place does begin to emerge out of the flurry of impressionistic essays.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More perplexing is the decision, in a coffee-table book, to not picture most of the aforementioned people. Emery describes this choice as the desire to not drug the reader with “the ecstascy of the human face.” Hm. One soft-focus picture of a melon is pretty much like another soft-focus picture of a melon, and the cumulative effect becomes ultimately more \u003ci>Martha Stewart Living\u003c/i> than documentary. Maybe there’s no getting around the appeal of the human face: the best photos are indeed not piles of peaches, but of people fishing in the Sacramento Delta, (which, but for the captions, could easily pass for the Mississippi Delta. Interesting, that.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s only appropriate that \u003cb>Edges of Bounty\u003c/b> ends with Emery pounding acorns at the Sierra Mono museum, effectively bringing cultural obsessions with farmers and Native Americans full circle. It’s easy, he reports, once you find the right rock to bash the acorns with and the right hollow to put them in while doing it. Less easy is waiting around to eat the results — Emery is gone before it is even finished cooking.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Thomas Beatie has been, at various times, a Miss Teen America contestant, a lesbian bodybuilder, just another clean-cut man in polar fleece in Bend, Oregon, and, most recently, that pregnant guy on \u003cb>Oprah\u003c/b>. You remember. It was one of the most viewed episodes in the show’s history, and Oprah asked Beatie if he had testicles, which made your reader wonder if she’d ever asked any other guest that before, and also if Oprah was aware that might be considered an impolite question in most circles. Beatie just smiled adorably and said no.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was an interesting moment. The act of becoming something other than what you were is the underpinning of American identity and literature. It’s the sinew that binds \u003cb>The Great Gatsby\u003c/b> to \u003cb>The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin\u003c/b> to, well… Oprah. And someone who’s crossed so many social boundaries, you would think, might have some interesting things to say about class and gender, in the way that Pagan Kennedy’s excellent \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/writersblock/episode.jsp?essid=16545\">The First Man-Made Man\u003c/a> was as much about the way men and women treated each other as it was about the man who was possibly the first female to male transsexual. But \u003cb>Labor of Love\u003c/b> is interesting largely in its supreme non-interestingness. It’s stubbornly determined to be treacle. It’s as sentimental as any glitter-encrusted card at the local drugstore, and about as believable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Do people really feel this way? Do people really refer to their child as “an angel sent straight from heaven?” They must, but your reader is jaded, and drawn more to moments in the narrative when Beatie is mocked by his wife for laying around the house while pregnant, or to Beatie’s description of a former lover, a karate champion who compulsively ate mini Chips Ahoy with chopsticks and then used liposuction to cover up the results. They’re details that break through the smooth, unvariegated surface of the story and hint at something sharper and more complicated beneath.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mostly, though, \u003cb>Labor of Love\u003c/b> is a schmaltzy and surprisingly Oprah-esque tale of a traumatic childhood overcome and transformed into a stable, self-actualized, and (above all) normal life through the crucibles of love and family. It’s difficult to tell how much of this is Beatie and how much of it is his co-writer, Alex Tresniowski, a senior writer for \u003ci>People\u003c/i> magazine and the author of, among others, \u003cb>Boy Next Door: The James Van Der Beek Story\u003c/b>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What is undoubtably Beatie is his mysterious insistence on being referred to as the “first” pregnant man, despite the glaring evidence that he isn’t. Eight years ago Patrick Califa wrote \u003ca href=\"http://www.villagevoice.com/2000-06-20/news/family-values/\">an article in the \u003ci>Village Voice\u003c/i>\u003c/a> about how his FTM partner, Matt Rice, carried and delivered their child in 1999. Other, \u003ca href=\"http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/81791/\">anecdotal evidence\u003c/a> suggests the existence of several other female-to-male transsexuals out there making the decision to discreetly go off of testosterone, get pregnant, and do their best to not be interviewed by Barbara Walters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beatie’s claim to firstness is entirely a function of paperwork: he was legally a male in the state of Oregon at the time his daughter was born, and his medical bracelet read “M” instead of “F.” But Matt Rice was taking testosterone, living full-time as a guy and working at a Bear Bar in SOMA before he got knocked up. That’s some serious man credential, paperwork or no paperwork. And when Beatie grouses about how \u003ci>The Advocate\u003c/i> changed the subtitle of an op-ed that he wrote from “Is Society Ready for the First Pregnant Man?” to “Is Society Ready for \u003ci>This\u003c/i> Pregnant Man?” or complains at length about people who claim that he was paid for his appearance on \u003cb>Oprah\u003c/b> or his interview with \u003ci>People\u003c/i>, he comes across as less of a selfless, family-minded guy and more like a jock with an ax to grind against a particular referee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, dude, why not get paid? It’s not like \u003ci>People\u003c/i> or \u003cb>Oprah\u003c/b> are charitable enterprises. And Beatie mentions at the end of the book that his insurance company wiggled out of covering his pregnancy, despite his going to the trouble of working out a “special policy” that would cover maternity if he decided to get pregnant. Forgive your reader her working-class preoccupations, but for all of the emotional sturm und drang of the book — the abusive childhood, the jerk boyfriends, the mean dad — nothing compares to the stories of Beatie trying to finesse the healthcare system. This will probably be the only time in your reader’s life when she closes the covers of a book to find that the burning questions remaining in her heart have to do not with art, truth, and beauty, but with medical billing. \u003cb>Labor of Love\u003c/b> may be the first pregnant man bildungsroman, but the definitive one has yet to be written.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Thomas Beatie has been, at various times, a Miss Teen America contestant, a lesbian bodybuilder, just another clean-cut man in polar fleece in Bend, Oregon, and, most recently, that pregnant guy on \u003cb>Oprah\u003c/b>. You remember. It was one of the most viewed episodes in the show’s history, and Oprah asked Beatie if he had testicles, which made your reader wonder if she’d ever asked any other guest that before, and also if Oprah was aware that might be considered an impolite question in most circles. Beatie just smiled adorably and said no.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was an interesting moment. The act of becoming something other than what you were is the underpinning of American identity and literature. It’s the sinew that binds \u003cb>The Great Gatsby\u003c/b> to \u003cb>The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin\u003c/b> to, well… Oprah. And someone who’s crossed so many social boundaries, you would think, might have some interesting things to say about class and gender, in the way that Pagan Kennedy’s excellent \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/writersblock/episode.jsp?essid=16545\">The First Man-Made Man\u003c/a> was as much about the way men and women treated each other as it was about the man who was possibly the first female to male transsexual. But \u003cb>Labor of Love\u003c/b> is interesting largely in its supreme non-interestingness. It’s stubbornly determined to be treacle. It’s as sentimental as any glitter-encrusted card at the local drugstore, and about as believable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Do people really feel this way? Do people really refer to their child as “an angel sent straight from heaven?” They must, but your reader is jaded, and drawn more to moments in the narrative when Beatie is mocked by his wife for laying around the house while pregnant, or to Beatie’s description of a former lover, a karate champion who compulsively ate mini Chips Ahoy with chopsticks and then used liposuction to cover up the results. They’re details that break through the smooth, unvariegated surface of the story and hint at something sharper and more complicated beneath.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mostly, though, \u003cb>Labor of Love\u003c/b> is a schmaltzy and surprisingly Oprah-esque tale of a traumatic childhood overcome and transformed into a stable, self-actualized, and (above all) normal life through the crucibles of love and family. It’s difficult to tell how much of this is Beatie and how much of it is his co-writer, Alex Tresniowski, a senior writer for \u003ci>People\u003c/i> magazine and the author of, among others, \u003cb>Boy Next Door: The James Van Der Beek Story\u003c/b>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What is undoubtably Beatie is his mysterious insistence on being referred to as the “first” pregnant man, despite the glaring evidence that he isn’t. Eight years ago Patrick Califa wrote \u003ca href=\"http://www.villagevoice.com/2000-06-20/news/family-values/\">an article in the \u003ci>Village Voice\u003c/i>\u003c/a> about how his FTM partner, Matt Rice, carried and delivered their child in 1999. Other, \u003ca href=\"http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/81791/\">anecdotal evidence\u003c/a> suggests the existence of several other female-to-male transsexuals out there making the decision to discreetly go off of testosterone, get pregnant, and do their best to not be interviewed by Barbara Walters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beatie’s claim to firstness is entirely a function of paperwork: he was legally a male in the state of Oregon at the time his daughter was born, and his medical bracelet read “M” instead of “F.” But Matt Rice was taking testosterone, living full-time as a guy and working at a Bear Bar in SOMA before he got knocked up. That’s some serious man credential, paperwork or no paperwork. And when Beatie grouses about how \u003ci>The Advocate\u003c/i> changed the subtitle of an op-ed that he wrote from “Is Society Ready for the First Pregnant Man?” to “Is Society Ready for \u003ci>This\u003c/i> Pregnant Man?” or complains at length about people who claim that he was paid for his appearance on \u003cb>Oprah\u003c/b> or his interview with \u003ci>People\u003c/i>, he comes across as less of a selfless, family-minded guy and more like a jock with an ax to grind against a particular referee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, dude, why not get paid? It’s not like \u003ci>People\u003c/i> or \u003cb>Oprah\u003c/b> are charitable enterprises. And Beatie mentions at the end of the book that his insurance company wiggled out of covering his pregnancy, despite his going to the trouble of working out a “special policy” that would cover maternity if he decided to get pregnant. Forgive your reader her working-class preoccupations, but for all of the emotional sturm und drang of the book — the abusive childhood, the jerk boyfriends, the mean dad — nothing compares to the stories of Beatie trying to finesse the healthcare system. This will probably be the only time in your reader’s life when she closes the covers of a book to find that the burning questions remaining in her heart have to do not with art, truth, and beauty, but with medical billing. \u003cb>Labor of Love\u003c/b> may be the first pregnant man bildungsroman, but the definitive one has yet to be written.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Early on in \u003cb>The Wordy Shipmates\u003c/b>, Sarah Vowell breaks out a telling party anecdote. “Once I decided to devote years of my life,” she writes,”to deciphering the thoughts and feelings of the dreary religious fanatics who founded New England nearly four hundred years ago, I was often asked at parties by my fellow New Yorkers the obvious question, ‘What are you working on?’ When I would tell them a book about Puritans, they would often take a swig of the beer or bourbon in their hands and reply with either a sarcastic, ‘Fun!’ or a disdainful ‘Why?’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Precisely. During the last few weeks, I often found myself snugly ensconced on the sofa with \u003cb>The Wordy Shipmates\u003c/b> and a cup of tea, reading about yet another doctrinal squabble and religious misunderstanding among the inhabitants of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and find myself wondering, “Why exactly am I reading this?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well, for one, the Puritans are as hot of a property as they’re ever likely to be again — shaken out of the dustbin of history and revised into an actual, for real, Al Qaeda in America. And not without some reason: in England, once the Puritans got a little power, they dissolved Parliament, closed theaters, and banned makeup and Christmas. In America, as Vowell describes, they cut the ears off of religious dissenters, and set Indian villages on fire. As the British journalist Jon Ronson put it, “I know you Americans see Puritans as kindly settlers constantly sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner. We see them as bastards.” Fair enough. There are parts of this book that would not be adverse to being turned into a Tarantino movie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another reason: Sarah Vowell is like drug-resistant malaria. Some writers are like that. They show up again and again on your bookshelf, even if they don’t write in a particularly addiction-inducing genre, like series fiction about cats that solve mysteries. Usually, like Vowell, they have a very distinctive, friendly writing style that makes reading their book feel somewhat like going out to lunch with a very clever and witty friend who is also rectangular and easily stuffed into a handbag. Put another way, Vowell is what cigarettes are to working in the restaurant industry: not necessary, but so much more pleasant if you just give in and go have one behind the dumpster.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s not much history here that feels especially new — anyone who has read \u003cb>Lies My Teacher Told Me\u003c/b>, or \u003cb>A People’s History of the United States\u003c/b>, or \u003cb>1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus\u003c/b> is going to pretty much know what’s up with Squanto before he’s even introduced. But it’s also clear that Vowell isn’t trying to write a formal history. She’s using the Puritans and their squabbling, and America’s contemporary sterotypes about them as a way to explore what it means to be American.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cp>A friend reminded me recently of the theory that science fiction sales are supposed to skyrocket during times of political malaise or frustration. While this may be the stuff of legend (if the last decade is any indicator, fantasy sales have actually outpaced science fiction), I chose to celebrate election month by asking the staff at \u003ca href=\"http://www.borderlands-books.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Borderlands\u003c/a>, a genre fiction bookstore in the Mission district, to fill me in on the most popular sci-fi novels and trends of the last year in the Bay Area. I figured that regardless of the election results, some KQED readers would be as curious as I have been about what types of alternate realities Bay Area residents are interested in. So here it is, short and sweet, a brief synopsis of three of the bigger sellers in the Bay Area over the last year, including \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b>, by Max Brooks, \u003cb>Little Brother\u003c/b>, by Cory Doctorow, and a re-issue of \u003cb>Altered Carbon\u003c/b>, by Richard K. Morgan, with illustrations by Vincent Chong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s easy to read our fascination with zombies as a sublimated fear of assimilation and conformity, and Max Brooks’s \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b> (2006) doesn’t cover any new ground on this front, but what it does offer is a unique post-\u003cb>World is Flat\u003c/b> take on the genre. \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b> is an oral-history, a sort of a subjective 9/11 report that tells the story of a global zombie war from the moment of its denouement, instead of in the midst of the action. In some ways, it’s a post-apocalyptic novel, except that instead of collapsing into a world of Thunderdome-style, warring groups, political boundaries stay largely intact and big government triumphs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The plot is communicated through interviews with characters all over the globe. We learn that there are strict rules and patterns to zombie behavior and destruction. What Brooks does best is describe the variety of individual and governmental responses to these behaviors and patterns, all based on psychology and political history. It’s this type of detail that makes the novel stand out: in many ways, I’m counting \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b> as my first truly globalized science-fiction experience. My guess, however, is that the general popularity of \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b> has more to do with the satisfaction of watching the world triumph over a mindless, fearless enemy, in combination with a nostalgic craving for an obvious Bad Guy. And there is clearly a Bad Guy in \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b>, even if the morals of some of the supposed good guys are more ambiguous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cory Doctorow’s novel \u003cb>Little Brother\u003c/b> (2008) has a definite Bad Guy too, although in this case it is the United States Department of Homeland Security. This is a book about teenage systems nerds (hackers) who fall under the suspicion of the DHS after a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge. \u003cb>Little Brother\u003c/b> attempts to turn the tables on its readers and to force us to see from the perspective of a private citizen attacked by his own government, while at the same time making a case for the danger inherent in giving up our privacy (both online and off). Of the three books that I read for this posting, it’s the most blatant: most blatantly influenced by the political events of the last decade, most blatant in its opinion about the use of technology in relation to these events, and most blatant in its handling of characters as vehicles to deliver a limited variety of opinions on the above.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book is teen fiction, and unfortunately the dialogue and lack of complexity in the characters do the genre wrong. Doctorow, however, who writes about technology for both \u003ci>Wired\u003c/i> and \u003ca href=\"http://boingboing.net/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Boing Boing\u003c/a>, excels in his synopses of everything from computer networking and security to the type of twisted legalese that has allowed America to maintain prisoners at places like Guantanamo. Put another way, the information and research that \u003cb>Little Brother\u003c/b> contains kept me reading, even when the lack of any nuance in the plot or characters had me frustrated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nuance, however, is where Richard Morgan excels, and this is at least part of the reason that \u003cb>Altered Carbon\u003c/b> (2002), a Takeshi Kovacs novel, continues not just to endure, but to get better with age. I read the book for the first time just after it came out, and its concerns have weathered well: issues of embodiment and the location of intelligence, as well as of class, morality and the right to live or die. These are the peripheral conditions in Kovac’s world, where your intelligence is stored on a chip in your cortex and your consciousness can be re-sleeved — placed in a new body — after the first one has worn out. Because of this, death is an impermanent state, depending on whether or not your relatives want to access you (or can afford to).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Takeshi Kovacs is a detective for hire, a former member of the elite UN Protectorate’s Envoy Corps. At the beginning of the novel he is graphically gunned down with his girlfriend, only to be re-sleeved by a Meth, \u003cb>Altered Carbon\u003c/b>‘s version of aristocracy. Meths are both socially and psychologically untouchable due to their wealth and the fact that they have lived as the same intelligence for centuries. This particular Meth, Laurens Bancroft, was also recently murdered, and he wants Kovacs to prove it (the police have written it off as suicide). In keeping with much of adult noir-oriented science fiction, the heroes are ethically ambiguous and full of flaws similar to those they are pitted against. There are still Bad Guys in \u003cb>Altered Carbon\u003c/b>, but it might be more apt to just call them “worse,” as the majority of characters in the novel exist in a grey zone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two of the three books that the Borderlands staff recommended take place in an alternate version of the Bay Area (\u003cb>Little Brother\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Altered Carbon\u003c/b>), which I’m sure accounts for some of their popularity, but on the whole it looks like San Franciscans (or those who buy their science fiction at Borderlands, in any case), are less interested in escape and new domains as they are in reworkings of current political situations, especially in the case of \u003cb>Little Brother\u003c/b> and \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b>. I only wish I could have read more of the recommended titles (particularly \u003cb>Use of Weapons\u003c/b>, by Ian Banks), but if you’re interested in catching up on the state of the genre, any one of these titles will do.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A friend reminded me recently of the theory that science fiction sales are supposed to skyrocket during times of political malaise or frustration. While this may be the stuff of legend (if the last decade is any indicator, fantasy sales have actually outpaced science fiction), I chose to celebrate election month by asking the staff at \u003ca href=\"http://www.borderlands-books.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Borderlands\u003c/a>, a genre fiction bookstore in the Mission district, to fill me in on the most popular sci-fi novels and trends of the last year in the Bay Area. I figured that regardless of the election results, some KQED readers would be as curious as I have been about what types of alternate realities Bay Area residents are interested in. So here it is, short and sweet, a brief synopsis of three of the bigger sellers in the Bay Area over the last year, including \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b>, by Max Brooks, \u003cb>Little Brother\u003c/b>, by Cory Doctorow, and a re-issue of \u003cb>Altered Carbon\u003c/b>, by Richard K. Morgan, with illustrations by Vincent Chong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s easy to read our fascination with zombies as a sublimated fear of assimilation and conformity, and Max Brooks’s \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b> (2006) doesn’t cover any new ground on this front, but what it does offer is a unique post-\u003cb>World is Flat\u003c/b> take on the genre. \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b> is an oral-history, a sort of a subjective 9/11 report that tells the story of a global zombie war from the moment of its denouement, instead of in the midst of the action. In some ways, it’s a post-apocalyptic novel, except that instead of collapsing into a world of Thunderdome-style, warring groups, political boundaries stay largely intact and big government triumphs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The plot is communicated through interviews with characters all over the globe. We learn that there are strict rules and patterns to zombie behavior and destruction. What Brooks does best is describe the variety of individual and governmental responses to these behaviors and patterns, all based on psychology and political history. It’s this type of detail that makes the novel stand out: in many ways, I’m counting \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b> as my first truly globalized science-fiction experience. My guess, however, is that the general popularity of \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b> has more to do with the satisfaction of watching the world triumph over a mindless, fearless enemy, in combination with a nostalgic craving for an obvious Bad Guy. And there is clearly a Bad Guy in \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b>, even if the morals of some of the supposed good guys are more ambiguous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cory Doctorow’s novel \u003cb>Little Brother\u003c/b> (2008) has a definite Bad Guy too, although in this case it is the United States Department of Homeland Security. This is a book about teenage systems nerds (hackers) who fall under the suspicion of the DHS after a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge. \u003cb>Little Brother\u003c/b> attempts to turn the tables on its readers and to force us to see from the perspective of a private citizen attacked by his own government, while at the same time making a case for the danger inherent in giving up our privacy (both online and off). Of the three books that I read for this posting, it’s the most blatant: most blatantly influenced by the political events of the last decade, most blatant in its opinion about the use of technology in relation to these events, and most blatant in its handling of characters as vehicles to deliver a limited variety of opinions on the above.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book is teen fiction, and unfortunately the dialogue and lack of complexity in the characters do the genre wrong. Doctorow, however, who writes about technology for both \u003ci>Wired\u003c/i> and \u003ca href=\"http://boingboing.net/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Boing Boing\u003c/a>, excels in his synopses of everything from computer networking and security to the type of twisted legalese that has allowed America to maintain prisoners at places like Guantanamo. Put another way, the information and research that \u003cb>Little Brother\u003c/b> contains kept me reading, even when the lack of any nuance in the plot or characters had me frustrated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nuance, however, is where Richard Morgan excels, and this is at least part of the reason that \u003cb>Altered Carbon\u003c/b> (2002), a Takeshi Kovacs novel, continues not just to endure, but to get better with age. I read the book for the first time just after it came out, and its concerns have weathered well: issues of embodiment and the location of intelligence, as well as of class, morality and the right to live or die. These are the peripheral conditions in Kovac’s world, where your intelligence is stored on a chip in your cortex and your consciousness can be re-sleeved — placed in a new body — after the first one has worn out. Because of this, death is an impermanent state, depending on whether or not your relatives want to access you (or can afford to).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Takeshi Kovacs is a detective for hire, a former member of the elite UN Protectorate’s Envoy Corps. At the beginning of the novel he is graphically gunned down with his girlfriend, only to be re-sleeved by a Meth, \u003cb>Altered Carbon\u003c/b>‘s version of aristocracy. Meths are both socially and psychologically untouchable due to their wealth and the fact that they have lived as the same intelligence for centuries. This particular Meth, Laurens Bancroft, was also recently murdered, and he wants Kovacs to prove it (the police have written it off as suicide). In keeping with much of adult noir-oriented science fiction, the heroes are ethically ambiguous and full of flaws similar to those they are pitted against. There are still Bad Guys in \u003cb>Altered Carbon\u003c/b>, but it might be more apt to just call them “worse,” as the majority of characters in the novel exist in a grey zone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two of the three books that the Borderlands staff recommended take place in an alternate version of the Bay Area (\u003cb>Little Brother\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Altered Carbon\u003c/b>), which I’m sure accounts for some of their popularity, but on the whole it looks like San Franciscans (or those who buy their science fiction at Borderlands, in any case), are less interested in escape and new domains as they are in reworkings of current political situations, especially in the case of \u003cb>Little Brother\u003c/b> and \u003cb>World War Z\u003c/b>. I only wish I could have read more of the recommended titles (particularly \u003cb>Use of Weapons\u003c/b>, by Ian Banks), but if you’re interested in catching up on the state of the genre, any one of these titles will do.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The origin story goes something like this: Once upon a time there were two brothers in Southern California. They lived with their mother, their father, and their mother’s prodigious comic book collection. In the late ’70s, the brothers collided with the Los Angeles punk scene, and, swept up in punk’s do-it-yourself ethic, began making and selling their own comics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those comics, known as \u003cb>Love and Rockets\u003c/b>, are perhaps the only fusion of punk, late-night monster movies, Archie Comics, and Mexican folktales in existence. They are certainly the only great one. In an era where most independent comics, however good, often had a sterile, misanthropic, shut-in quality, \u003cb>Love and Rockets\u003c/b> were sprawling and lurid and hyper-oxygenated. One got the feeling that the Hernandez brothers actually left the house occasionally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both of them wrote complex stories that featured dozens of characters — Jaime’s set in a mythical town in Ventura County called Hoppers, and Gilbert’s in an equally imaginary town in Central America called Palomar. Characters squabbled, fell in love, crossed the border, had gay sex without necessarily thinking of themselves as gay, danced around in combat boots, had children and then proved to be kind of bad parents, and generally behaved the way that real people do, but in convenient, portable, two-dimensional, black and white form.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>New Stories: Vol.1\u003c/b> is the most recent collection of \u003cb>Love and Rockets\u003c/b> comics, and it’s most interesting to read it with this question in mind: “What is it like to write about the same characters for twenty-eight years?” Jaime seems to be fine with it. His stories in the collection are deft and funny and class-conscious and not unlike the stories that he wrote in his twenties. They hit their familiar marks like a practiced vaudeville act, and the entire experience is not unlike that of slipping into a tub of warm bathwater.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then there’s the matter of Gilbert, who is deep into a new authorial persona that is 1/3 R. Crumb in his acid days, 1/3 Chris Ware in his “all human life is a miserable failure at something” mode, and 1/3 the guy who used to be Gilbert Hernandez, before he moved to Bummertown and set up residence in a lean-to shanty made entirely out of LSD blotter paper. Reading his sections of \u003cb>New Stories\u003c/b> is like settling in to watch a new episode of one of your favorite television shows, only to discover that the title sequence is gone, all of your favorite characters are gone, and actually, the show now consists of nothing but oboe noises and colored dots moving slowly across the screen. Or, to use a specific example from the book, by a cartoon squirrel looking for the enormous penis who gave him a coin to play the slot machines. Or by a character with colander-like holes in his forehead experiencing Old Testament-level suffering (worms, bleeding from eyes, mudslides, eccentric hospitality) as he attempts to get home to a wife who may or may not have poisoned his bean tacos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gilbert Hernandez, after twenty-eight years of writing and drawing long, character-driven sagas that have been compared to the best of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is now doing work that is experimental and almost narrative-less. It looks good enough. In fact, most of the individual panels look like they could easily be selling for thousands of dollars in a gallery in Chelsea. But the stories, as much as they can be called that, are atrophied to the point of nonsensicality, and weirdly alienated and bitter compared to the occasionally cruel but ultimately close-knit universe that was his earlier work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What could have brought about this change? Could the sheer experience of chronicling so many characters for so long have had something to do with it? Only one character recurs from story to story — first as a cheerful village kid, then as bitter, wizened old creature on a snow-covered mountain. “I was going off to see the world,” he says, “I did that for many years, and wound up here alone. After eighty years of meeting so many different people, I had enough. I wasted my life by not having one of my own.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The origin story goes something like this: Once upon a time there were two brothers in Southern California. They lived with their mother, their father, and their mother’s prodigious comic book collection. In the late ’70s, the brothers collided with the Los Angeles punk scene, and, swept up in punk’s do-it-yourself ethic, began making and selling their own comics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those comics, known as \u003cb>Love and Rockets\u003c/b>, are perhaps the only fusion of punk, late-night monster movies, Archie Comics, and Mexican folktales in existence. They are certainly the only great one. In an era where most independent comics, however good, often had a sterile, misanthropic, shut-in quality, \u003cb>Love and Rockets\u003c/b> were sprawling and lurid and hyper-oxygenated. One got the feeling that the Hernandez brothers actually left the house occasionally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both of them wrote complex stories that featured dozens of characters — Jaime’s set in a mythical town in Ventura County called Hoppers, and Gilbert’s in an equally imaginary town in Central America called Palomar. Characters squabbled, fell in love, crossed the border, had gay sex without necessarily thinking of themselves as gay, danced around in combat boots, had children and then proved to be kind of bad parents, and generally behaved the way that real people do, but in convenient, portable, two-dimensional, black and white form.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>New Stories: Vol.1\u003c/b> is the most recent collection of \u003cb>Love and Rockets\u003c/b> comics, and it’s most interesting to read it with this question in mind: “What is it like to write about the same characters for twenty-eight years?” Jaime seems to be fine with it. His stories in the collection are deft and funny and class-conscious and not unlike the stories that he wrote in his twenties. They hit their familiar marks like a practiced vaudeville act, and the entire experience is not unlike that of slipping into a tub of warm bathwater.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then there’s the matter of Gilbert, who is deep into a new authorial persona that is 1/3 R. Crumb in his acid days, 1/3 Chris Ware in his “all human life is a miserable failure at something” mode, and 1/3 the guy who used to be Gilbert Hernandez, before he moved to Bummertown and set up residence in a lean-to shanty made entirely out of LSD blotter paper. Reading his sections of \u003cb>New Stories\u003c/b> is like settling in to watch a new episode of one of your favorite television shows, only to discover that the title sequence is gone, all of your favorite characters are gone, and actually, the show now consists of nothing but oboe noises and colored dots moving slowly across the screen. Or, to use a specific example from the book, by a cartoon squirrel looking for the enormous penis who gave him a coin to play the slot machines. Or by a character with colander-like holes in his forehead experiencing Old Testament-level suffering (worms, bleeding from eyes, mudslides, eccentric hospitality) as he attempts to get home to a wife who may or may not have poisoned his bean tacos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Why is it that \u003cb>You Can’t Be President\u003c/b> feels about as fresh as a 4,000 year-old tin of fruit cocktail? In this hyper-oxygenated post-electoral moment, I was looking for something to acidify an overwhelming sparkles, hearts, and rainbows feeling. I needed someone to tell me something bad about America, before unicorns began grazing in Dolores Park and bluebirds stopped by and offered to clean my apartment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, reading it is like taking a rocket ship back… back in time, to that brief window between September 11, 2001 and Bush’s second term. It was perhaps the only moment in the history of the world that bookshops couldn’t get enough of Tariq Ali. I would look up while riding MUNI, and everyone would be reading \u003cb>Don’t Think of an Elephant\u003c/b> by the Berkeley linguist George Lakoff. I would then look down and realize that I was also reading it. It felt like we were all cramming for a final examination that we would never be fully prepared for.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If only we educated people about Middle Eastern geopolitics. If only we matched conservative buzzwords like “strong defense” (bombing other countries to make them feel impressed by us is the “authoritarian parent” model, which is NOT our demographic) with ones like “strong America” (maintaining our levee system is the “nurturant parent” model, which IS our demographic). If only we convinced people how bad everything was, then we would have a chance at changing the way that the country and its foreign policy were being run. Perhaps that’s why \u003cb>You Can’t Be President\u003c/b> feels like a message from the past. At some point in the last year, someone found the last person in America who didn’t realize that things weren’t going very well, and told them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>You Can’t Be President\u003c/b> is best when it lives up to its title, dwelling on the impressive divide between how politics play out in elementary school textbooks and how they play out in the real world. Candidates with genuinely populist views are often blocked by the existing power structure of both parties — a “professional political class” that will pass over an electable candidate for one with fundraising prowess or favors to cash in. Howard Dean might have won the presidency in 2004 if not for his own party, in much the same way that another anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy was maneuvered out of the Democratic nomination, despite his being a more saleable candidate than their eventual choice, Hubert Humphrey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The history scattered throughout the book is interesting too. The word “republic,” author John R. MacArthur writes, meant different things to different founders. To some, like Samuel Adams, it meant that the dialogue between a candidate and their elected official never ended, and to others, like James Madison, it meant that dialogue ended the minute a politician was elected — the electorate was to politely shut up and not ask for anything until the next round of campaigning. Most curiously, Abraham Lincoln almost did in his career as a Congressman by taking a stand against going to war with Mexico in 1846. 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Let’s be honest: anyone who picks up this book is going to already be aware that there are problems with all of the above (the last being a possible exception, but Steve Almond’s \u003cb>Candyfreak\u003c/b> makes such a passionate case for candy diversity in America that MacArthur’s brief rant pales in comparison.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even pessimists, like your reviewer here, appreciate fresh things to be discouraged by. Especially in these strange new times of outright giddiness and…dare I say it…hope. Even if I’m looking for a little salt to sprinkle on my post-electoral cupcake, I’m looking for solutions, as well as problems. Especially solutions that might one day turn into problems. Like turning the Clintons and Wal-Mart into the fourth and fifth members of NAFTA. Or turning our under-funded schools into candy factories. Or establishing an affirmative action based program for building a life-sized statue of the mayor of Chicago out of nougat. These are the kinds of problems your reviewer can get behind.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Why is it that \u003cb>You Can’t Be President\u003c/b> feels about as fresh as a 4,000 year-old tin of fruit cocktail? In this hyper-oxygenated post-electoral moment, I was looking for something to acidify an overwhelming sparkles, hearts, and rainbows feeling. I needed someone to tell me something bad about America, before unicorns began grazing in Dolores Park and bluebirds stopped by and offered to clean my apartment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, reading it is like taking a rocket ship back… back in time, to that brief window between September 11, 2001 and Bush’s second term. It was perhaps the only moment in the history of the world that bookshops couldn’t get enough of Tariq Ali. I would look up while riding MUNI, and everyone would be reading \u003cb>Don’t Think of an Elephant\u003c/b> by the Berkeley linguist George Lakoff. I would then look down and realize that I was also reading it. It felt like we were all cramming for a final examination that we would never be fully prepared for.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If only we educated people about Middle Eastern geopolitics. If only we matched conservative buzzwords like “strong defense” (bombing other countries to make them feel impressed by us is the “authoritarian parent” model, which is NOT our demographic) with ones like “strong America” (maintaining our levee system is the “nurturant parent” model, which IS our demographic). If only we convinced people how bad everything was, then we would have a chance at changing the way that the country and its foreign policy were being run. Perhaps that’s why \u003cb>You Can’t Be President\u003c/b> feels like a message from the past. At some point in the last year, someone found the last person in America who didn’t realize that things weren’t going very well, and told them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>You Can’t Be President\u003c/b> is best when it lives up to its title, dwelling on the impressive divide between how politics play out in elementary school textbooks and how they play out in the real world. Candidates with genuinely populist views are often blocked by the existing power structure of both parties — a “professional political class” that will pass over an electable candidate for one with fundraising prowess or favors to cash in. Howard Dean might have won the presidency in 2004 if not for his own party, in much the same way that another anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy was maneuvered out of the Democratic nomination, despite his being a more saleable candidate than their eventual choice, Hubert Humphrey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The history scattered throughout the book is interesting too. The word “republic,” author John R. MacArthur writes, meant different things to different founders. To some, like Samuel Adams, it meant that the dialogue between a candidate and their elected official never ended, and to others, like James Madison, it meant that dialogue ended the minute a politician was elected — the electorate was to politely shut up and not ask for anything until the next round of campaigning. Most curiously, Abraham Lincoln almost did in his career as a Congressman by taking a stand against going to war with Mexico in 1846. Lincoln pointedly described it as “trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory — that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood.” He advised instead the very Alice Waters-y policy of “keeping our fences where they are, and cultivating our present possession, making it a garden.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unfortunately, most of the book is not devoted to political analysis or historical insight, but instead to the author whinging about Wal-Mart, the state of American journalism, the lack of good independent pharmacies around the country, the Espionage Acts of 1917 (and 1918), the electoral college, the Clintons (Bill and Hillary), the North American Free Trade Agreement, the mayor of Chicago, campaign financing, under funding in the public school system, the rolling back of affirmative action laws, and the diminishing variety of candies available for purchase at chain-owned retail outlets. Let’s be honest: anyone who picks up this book is going to already be aware that there are problems with all of the above (the last being a possible exception, but Steve Almond’s \u003cb>Candyfreak\u003c/b> makes such a passionate case for candy diversity in America that MacArthur’s brief rant pales in comparison.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even pessimists, like your reviewer here, appreciate fresh things to be discouraged by. Especially in these strange new times of outright giddiness and…dare I say it…hope. Even if I’m looking for a little salt to sprinkle on my post-electoral cupcake, I’m looking for solutions, as well as problems. Especially solutions that might one day turn into problems. Like turning the Clintons and Wal-Mart into the fourth and fifth members of NAFTA. Or turning our under-funded schools into candy factories. Or establishing an affirmative action based program for building a life-sized statue of the mayor of Chicago out of nougat. These are the kinds of problems your reviewer can get behind.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Last Friday, amongst brown paper boxes and piles of tissue paper, I helped San Francisco’s \u003ci>The Thing Quarterly\u003c/i> celebrate its one year anniversary by wrapping Issue 5, the first issue of their second subscription cycle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So far it’s been one success after another for \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i>, starting with a residency at Southern Exposure and a profile in \u003ca href=\"http://www.frieze.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Frieze\u003c/a> magazine. Over the course of the last year, the periodical has been able to fully cover production costs via subscription sales, provide comparatively decent compensation to its contributors, and garner positive press from a diversity of publications, including \u003ci>The San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Marie Claire\u003c/i>, NPR’s \u003cb>Marketplace\u003c/b> and \u003ci>Design Observer\u003c/i>. 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Even though Herschend and Rogan don’t consider the issues to be limited editions, once an issue is sold out, anyone interested in acquiring old stock is at the mercy of eBay and the cultural capital market. Buying at the current subscription rate ($35 a thing) is an incredibly good deal, considering the quality of the artists and writers involved. The current subscription cycle, for example, includes Lucy Pullen, Trevor Paglen, Jonathan Lethem, and the collaborative Allora & Calzadilla, as well as a few surprise projects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beyond the collectibility of the contributors, however, \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i> rolls into one all of the trends that I see flourishing in independent publishing right now: good design, specialty-packaging, and quality craftsmanship. In other words, the most successful offline publishing projects over the last decade have paid as much attention to their own object-hood as they have their content (San Francisco’s \u003ci>McSweeney’s\u003c/i> being a prime example, as well as magazines like \u003ci>Cabinet\u003c/i>, which is offset-printed in Belgium at a shop that still feeds its sheets by hand).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Take Issue 5, by artist Lucy Pullen. While I don’t want to give away what Pullen’s thing actually is, I will say that special knives had to be made at the Westwind Hardwood factory in British Columbia in order for Travis Hebert to manufacture it, that the text had to be applied “just so” by Val Kasvin at Sputnik Models, and that a special box had to be created by Julian at Arrow Paper to shield it from the US Postal Service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of this is actually the norm in the world of consumer-thing-making. What is not normal are small runs (less than 1000) and end credits. Each thing comes with an insert that describes the production process in detail, narrating every company and person involved and blurring the lines between mass-produced consumer product and hand-crafted art object.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i>‘s packaging process functions in the same way. So far, all its issues have been communally launched via a series of wrapping parties held at locations on both the west and east coasts, including galleries, book publishing houses, museums, and at least one art book fair. That is, an email is sent out, or notice is posted in the blogosphere, and people (mostly art people) show up, fold boxes, stamp logos, and stuff tissue. Tens, if not hundreds of hands, put each issue to bed. Plus eat pizza. Which is what I was doing on Friday night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Contrary to what you might be thinking, it actually costs \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i> money to do its packaging this way. These wrapping parties however, along with \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i>‘s predilection for detailing everyone and everything involved in the production, are the final part of the formula.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not just the collectibility of the artists involved, or an awareness of quality craftsmanship, or incredible identity design, or even the accrual of lots of personalized hands. What publications like \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i> and \u003ci>McSweeney’s\u003c/i> offer is something I’m beginning to think of as the patina of language, if you will: all the ways in which a narrative or back story can affect an object (even another text) and give it value. In my mind, \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i> manages to succeed so beautifully because they have merged this concept with their format through every step of their process, down to the things themselves. Even a single piece of text can serve as a suggestive pointer towards a different understanding of an everyday object. Which is the whole point.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Last Friday, amongst brown paper boxes and piles of tissue paper, I helped San Francisco’s \u003ci>The Thing Quarterly\u003c/i> celebrate its one year anniversary by wrapping Issue 5, the first issue of their second subscription cycle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So far it’s been one success after another for \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i>, starting with a residency at Southern Exposure and a profile in \u003ca href=\"http://www.frieze.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Frieze\u003c/a> magazine. Over the course of the last year, the periodical has been able to fully cover production costs via subscription sales, provide comparatively decent compensation to its contributors, and garner positive press from a diversity of publications, including \u003ci>The San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Marie Claire\u003c/i>, NPR’s \u003cb>Marketplace\u003c/b> and \u003ci>Design Observer\u003c/i>. Given the difficulties inherent in independent publishing, all of this left yours truly very curious as to what magic formula they happened to be following.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>First and foremost, it’s obvious that \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i> offers a unique product. Its founders and editors, John Herschend and Will Rogan, invite four guest artists a year to design an issue, which takes the form of an everyday object — coaster, baseball hat, doorstop — that somehow incorporates text. Issue One, for example, featured a vinyl window shade designed by the artist Miranda July with the text “If this shade is down I’m not who you think I am” screenprinted in July’s recognizable black handwriting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is definitely part of the formula: \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i> offers collectibility. Even though Herschend and Rogan don’t consider the issues to be limited editions, once an issue is sold out, anyone interested in acquiring old stock is at the mercy of eBay and the cultural capital market. Buying at the current subscription rate ($35 a thing) is an incredibly good deal, considering the quality of the artists and writers involved. The current subscription cycle, for example, includes Lucy Pullen, Trevor Paglen, Jonathan Lethem, and the collaborative Allora & Calzadilla, as well as a few surprise projects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beyond the collectibility of the contributors, however, \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i> rolls into one all of the trends that I see flourishing in independent publishing right now: good design, specialty-packaging, and quality craftsmanship. In other words, the most successful offline publishing projects over the last decade have paid as much attention to their own object-hood as they have their content (San Francisco’s \u003ci>McSweeney’s\u003c/i> being a prime example, as well as magazines like \u003ci>Cabinet\u003c/i>, which is offset-printed in Belgium at a shop that still feeds its sheets by hand).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Take Issue 5, by artist Lucy Pullen. While I don’t want to give away what Pullen’s thing actually is, I will say that special knives had to be made at the Westwind Hardwood factory in British Columbia in order for Travis Hebert to manufacture it, that the text had to be applied “just so” by Val Kasvin at Sputnik Models, and that a special box had to be created by Julian at Arrow Paper to shield it from the US Postal Service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of this is actually the norm in the world of consumer-thing-making. What is not normal are small runs (less than 1000) and end credits. Each thing comes with an insert that describes the production process in detail, narrating every company and person involved and blurring the lines between mass-produced consumer product and hand-crafted art object.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i>‘s packaging process functions in the same way. So far, all its issues have been communally launched via a series of wrapping parties held at locations on both the west and east coasts, including galleries, book publishing houses, museums, and at least one art book fair. That is, an email is sent out, or notice is posted in the blogosphere, and people (mostly art people) show up, fold boxes, stamp logos, and stuff tissue. Tens, if not hundreds of hands, put each issue to bed. Plus eat pizza. Which is what I was doing on Friday night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Contrary to what you might be thinking, it actually costs \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i> money to do its packaging this way. These wrapping parties however, along with \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i>‘s predilection for detailing everyone and everything involved in the production, are the final part of the formula.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not just the collectibility of the artists involved, or an awareness of quality craftsmanship, or incredible identity design, or even the accrual of lots of personalized hands. What publications like \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i> and \u003ci>McSweeney’s\u003c/i> offer is something I’m beginning to think of as the patina of language, if you will: all the ways in which a narrative or back story can affect an object (even another text) and give it value. In my mind, \u003ci>The Thing\u003c/i> manages to succeed so beautifully because they have merged this concept with their format through every step of their process, down to the things themselves. Even a single piece of text can serve as a suggestive pointer towards a different understanding of an everyday object. Which is the whole point.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Ever since the archaic Production Code crumbled 40 years ago, and screen sex and nudity became staples of the American cinema, audiences have taken enormous pleasure in watching movie stars disrobe. In the Internet age, the nude bodies viewed most frequently belong to ordinary people. These different acts of voyeurism trigger dissimilar fantasies, raising a question: What do amateurs have that stars don’t?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This rumination on the implications of on-camera sex is inspired by the return of Jack Stevenson, a collector, curator and writer (\u003cb>Land of a Thousand Balconies\u003c/b>) who launched his career in San Francisco before moving to Denmark in the ’90s. His biannual visit to Yerba Beuna Center For the Arts this weekend includes three programs of vintage skin and salaciousness under the banner \u003cb>The Superstars Next Door: A Celebration of San Francisco Amateur Sex Cinema From the ’60s\u003c/b>. For all the lust and lasciviousness on display, though, it’s Peoria-innocent compared to the stuff you can watch today with the right URL and a couple of mouse clicks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first half of tonight’s double bill is entitled “Home Movies,” and comprises four short 16mm films made in 1968 with nonprofessionals. (In every sense of the word, presumably, though one wonders.) The one previewed for the press, the playful, awkward \u003cb>His Father’s Call-Girl\u003c/b>, unspools inside the long-gone Green Door Books on Sixth Street, a no-frills shop that sold a variety of porn mags. Larry and his hot date Lola drop in to browse and, in short order, the dirty old man behind the counter is filming them having sex in the back room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>The tawdriness of \u003cb>His Father’s Call-Girl\u003c/b> has been diluted by the passage of time, or perhaps we are charmed at the thought that this otherwise unremarkable movie immortalizes the firmness and flexibility of its now-septuagenarian stars. Lola’s big hair, frosted to a fare-thee-well, provides another time-stamp, as well as a useful historical corrective to the perception that every San Francisco gal in those days was an Herbal Essence-scented hippie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s truly surprising about this particular relic is the absence of swear words, dirty talk and sexual technique. The actors, though enthusiastic, rely on a pretty limited (and only partly visible) bedroom repertoire. The Sexual Revolution may have removed the stigma of multiple partners, but it took another couple decades before the average American was comfortable experimenting with a broader range of, um, activities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second show, “Underground,” unearths a 65-minute feature from 1968, \u003cb>The Meatrack\u003c/b>. A monotone, cold-hearted hunk doesn’t just propel the flick; he gives it its name. Everybody wants a piece of the studly J.C., from horny housewives to male drivers who know what kind of ride a hitchhiker in a faded jean jacket is seeking. Since the soft-core sex is just as obscured as that in \u003cb>His Father’s Call-Girl\u003c/b>, the film’s most interesting aspect is the artsy flashbacks to J.C.’s childhood and adolescence, which etch a psychological profile. “You just take account of what you got,” his bitter mother lectures him, “and use it for all it’s worth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>J.C.’s bisexuality doesn’t feel like a political statement so much as a business decision. Director Richard Stockton is an equal-opportunity titillator, just as J.C. is an opportunist open to any offer. (The film boasts precious few exterior shots, but there’s a brief sequence in Union Square that includes glimpses of no less than five airline offices. These few seconds assure the film’s historical value.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jack Stevenson’s residency concludes Saturday night with “Flaming Striptease ? A History of Live Sex Performance.” As you’d expect, the Condor Club, made internationally famous by Carol Doda, makes a couple of appearances in this 90-minute collection of clips covering the entire range from burlesque to topless dancing to live sex acts. My favorite bit consisted of a Latino rock band, not untalented but way too much in thrall to Carlos Santana, playing behind a couple of girls dancing in g-strings. It’s entertainment, it’s art and it’s commerce, all wrapped up in one happy sliver of ’60s nightlife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Superstars Next Door: A Celebration of San Francisco Amateur Sex Cinema From the ’60s\u003c/b> screens October 9 and 11, 2008 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.ybca.org\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">more information\u003c/a>, visit ybca.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Ever since the archaic Production Code crumbled 40 years ago, and screen sex and nudity became staples of the American cinema, audiences have taken enormous pleasure in watching movie stars disrobe. In the Internet age, the nude bodies viewed most frequently belong to ordinary people. These different acts of voyeurism trigger dissimilar fantasies, raising a question: What do amateurs have that stars don’t?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This rumination on the implications of on-camera sex is inspired by the return of Jack Stevenson, a collector, curator and writer (\u003cb>Land of a Thousand Balconies\u003c/b>) who launched his career in San Francisco before moving to Denmark in the ’90s. His biannual visit to Yerba Beuna Center For the Arts this weekend includes three programs of vintage skin and salaciousness under the banner \u003cb>The Superstars Next Door: A Celebration of San Francisco Amateur Sex Cinema From the ’60s\u003c/b>. For all the lust and lasciviousness on display, though, it’s Peoria-innocent compared to the stuff you can watch today with the right URL and a couple of mouse clicks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first half of tonight’s double bill is entitled “Home Movies,” and comprises four short 16mm films made in 1968 with nonprofessionals. (In every sense of the word, presumably, though one wonders.) The one previewed for the press, the playful, awkward \u003cb>His Father’s Call-Girl\u003c/b>, unspools inside the long-gone Green Door Books on Sixth Street, a no-frills shop that sold a variety of porn mags. Larry and his hot date Lola drop in to browse and, in short order, the dirty old man behind the counter is filming them having sex in the back room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>The tawdriness of \u003cb>His Father’s Call-Girl\u003c/b> has been diluted by the passage of time, or perhaps we are charmed at the thought that this otherwise unremarkable movie immortalizes the firmness and flexibility of its now-septuagenarian stars. Lola’s big hair, frosted to a fare-thee-well, provides another time-stamp, as well as a useful historical corrective to the perception that every San Francisco gal in those days was an Herbal Essence-scented hippie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s truly surprising about this particular relic is the absence of swear words, dirty talk and sexual technique. The actors, though enthusiastic, rely on a pretty limited (and only partly visible) bedroom repertoire. The Sexual Revolution may have removed the stigma of multiple partners, but it took another couple decades before the average American was comfortable experimenting with a broader range of, um, activities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second show, “Underground,” unearths a 65-minute feature from 1968, \u003cb>The Meatrack\u003c/b>. A monotone, cold-hearted hunk doesn’t just propel the flick; he gives it its name. Everybody wants a piece of the studly J.C., from horny housewives to male drivers who know what kind of ride a hitchhiker in a faded jean jacket is seeking. Since the soft-core sex is just as obscured as that in \u003cb>His Father’s Call-Girl\u003c/b>, the film’s most interesting aspect is the artsy flashbacks to J.C.’s childhood and adolescence, which etch a psychological profile. “You just take account of what you got,” his bitter mother lectures him, “and use it for all it’s worth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>J.C.’s bisexuality doesn’t feel like a political statement so much as a business decision. Director Richard Stockton is an equal-opportunity titillator, just as J.C. is an opportunist open to any offer. (The film boasts precious few exterior shots, but there’s a brief sequence in Union Square that includes glimpses of no less than five airline offices. These few seconds assure the film’s historical value.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jack Stevenson’s residency concludes Saturday night with “Flaming Striptease ? A History of Live Sex Performance.” As you’d expect, the Condor Club, made internationally famous by Carol Doda, makes a couple of appearances in this 90-minute collection of clips covering the entire range from burlesque to topless dancing to live sex acts. My favorite bit consisted of a Latino rock band, not untalented but way too much in thrall to Carlos Santana, playing behind a couple of girls dancing in g-strings. It’s entertainment, it’s art and it’s commerce, all wrapped up in one happy sliver of ’60s nightlife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Superstars Next Door: A Celebration of San Francisco Amateur Sex Cinema From the ’60s\u003c/b> screens October 9 and 11, 2008 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.ybca.org\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">more information\u003c/a>, visit ybca.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Once in a while I stumble upon a novel that’s so honest and has a structure that’s so original, it feels like the author poured the words directly out of his or her head. Deb Olin Unferth’s first novel \u003cb>Vacation\u003c/b> is one of these. It combines an experimental style and a heartbreaking plot to shake readers awake and then force us to care for her characters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Vacation\u003c/b>‘s plot is so tangled that it takes an attentive reader to unravel it. It’s about a man (Myers) following his wife who is in turn stalking Myers’s college friend (Gray). It’s also about a woman (Claire) who follows Myers thinking he looks like her father who’s a dolphin un-trainer. (If there are dolphin trainers, why couldn’t there be un-trainers? This is how Unferth’s mind works.) There are more characters and narrative streams in \u003cb>Vacation\u003c/b> than in a room full of schizophrenics watching \u003cb>Lost\u003c/b>. If this sounds too complicated, then this book is not for you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only Myers and Gray receive the privilege of third-person narration, while every other character (and there are plenty) tell their stories in diary form. The third-person narration doesn’t even flow according to convention. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a novel in which a narrator argues with herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Vacation\u003c/b> was much darker than I expected. Every character is disturbed and isolated in his or her own way. It’s not that any of them are bad or depressing people, but rather it’s their relationships that make the novel bleak. Few human relations are simple, but none of Unferth’s characters have tragedy-free interactions. The story lines (Gray’s schism with his wife, Claire’s search for her father, Claire’s father’s quest to save the dolphins, a former Nicaraguan soldier’s homecoming) weigh the plot down and Unferth seems unwilling to commit to following them through to the end. To fulfill the premise of the story, Unferth would’ve needed access to Pynchon’s personal stock of blank paper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the end, it seems like Unferth chose to call her book “Vacation” because “Heart of Darkness” was taken. This title is redefined often. When Myers chases Gray to Nicaragua in order to find out about his wife’s stalking habits, he abandons everything, including his marriage and his job (his boss’s attempt to remain understanding is one of the most comedic moments in the novel). Myers’s debate with his wife over whether or not divorce could be considered a vacation is shattering.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unferth’s style is unlike anything I’ve ever read and yet feels surprisingly familiar. Dave Eggers readers will feel comfortable with her conversational tone, but it’s her attention to detail that makes the novel. The author blows up words like balloons and then twists them together to form intricate balloon animal sentences — balloon animals of pain and sorrow. It took me two or three reads of “Just a piece of cloth, cut, dyed, arranged, and sealed together with thread to approximate the shape of his body,” to realize Unferth was writing about clothes and not some sort of flannel body bag. But what are clothes but that? Unferth examines the meaning of words that we take for granted by pushing their definitions to the limits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Vacation\u003c/b> is a thrilling novel packed into just over 200 pages. Although it can’t quite live up to its ambitious foundation, it’s definitely a worthwhile read. Anyone who enjoys the dark quirk of McSweeney’s books will love \u003cb>Vacation\u003c/b> and anyone who hasn’t tried them out should. Unferth’s first novel certainly shows a lot of promise. I’m not sure if next time she’ll tighten the scope or increase the page count, but if she sticks to her style she’ll have more good material to come.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Once in a while I stumble upon a novel that’s so honest and has a structure that’s so original, it feels like the author poured the words directly out of his or her head. Deb Olin Unferth’s first novel \u003cb>Vacation\u003c/b> is one of these. It combines an experimental style and a heartbreaking plot to shake readers awake and then force us to care for her characters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Vacation\u003c/b>‘s plot is so tangled that it takes an attentive reader to unravel it. It’s about a man (Myers) following his wife who is in turn stalking Myers’s college friend (Gray). It’s also about a woman (Claire) who follows Myers thinking he looks like her father who’s a dolphin un-trainer. (If there are dolphin trainers, why couldn’t there be un-trainers? This is how Unferth’s mind works.) There are more characters and narrative streams in \u003cb>Vacation\u003c/b> than in a room full of schizophrenics watching \u003cb>Lost\u003c/b>. If this sounds too complicated, then this book is not for you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only Myers and Gray receive the privilege of third-person narration, while every other character (and there are plenty) tell their stories in diary form. The third-person narration doesn’t even flow according to convention. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a novel in which a narrator argues with herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Vacation\u003c/b> was much darker than I expected. Every character is disturbed and isolated in his or her own way. It’s not that any of them are bad or depressing people, but rather it’s their relationships that make the novel bleak. Few human relations are simple, but none of Unferth’s characters have tragedy-free interactions. The story lines (Gray’s schism with his wife, Claire’s search for her father, Claire’s father’s quest to save the dolphins, a former Nicaraguan soldier’s homecoming) weigh the plot down and Unferth seems unwilling to commit to following them through to the end. To fulfill the premise of the story, Unferth would’ve needed access to Pynchon’s personal stock of blank paper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the end, it seems like Unferth chose to call her book “Vacation” because “Heart of Darkness” was taken. This title is redefined often. When Myers chases Gray to Nicaragua in order to find out about his wife’s stalking habits, he abandons everything, including his marriage and his job (his boss’s attempt to remain understanding is one of the most comedic moments in the novel). Myers’s debate with his wife over whether or not divorce could be considered a vacation is shattering.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unferth’s style is unlike anything I’ve ever read and yet feels surprisingly familiar. Dave Eggers readers will feel comfortable with her conversational tone, but it’s her attention to detail that makes the novel. The author blows up words like balloons and then twists them together to form intricate balloon animal sentences — balloon animals of pain and sorrow. It took me two or three reads of “Just a piece of cloth, cut, dyed, arranged, and sealed together with thread to approximate the shape of his body,” to realize Unferth was writing about clothes and not some sort of flannel body bag. But what are clothes but that? Unferth examines the meaning of words that we take for granted by pushing their definitions to the limits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Vacation\u003c/b> is a thrilling novel packed into just over 200 pages. Although it can’t quite live up to its ambitious foundation, it’s definitely a worthwhile read. Anyone who enjoys the dark quirk of McSweeney’s books will love \u003cb>Vacation\u003c/b> and anyone who hasn’t tried them out should. Unferth’s first novel certainly shows a lot of promise. I’m not sure if next time she’ll tighten the scope or increase the page count, but if she sticks to her style she’ll have more good material to come.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Truong Tran: four letter words",
"headTitle": "Truong Tran: four letter words | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>While books are usually presented as stand alone objects, having a long-term relationship with a contemporary poet or writer — reading his books as they come out and observing the development of his practice — can be much more satisfying. Thus, failures and mitigated successes are often more exciting than the glories of a squarely hit bullseye; you learn to recognize the signs of an artist in transition to a new phase. These transitions signal that the genuinely hard and lonely work of making art is happening right now in someone’s head, heart or soul.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is how I’m thinking of Truong Tran’s fifth book of poetry \u003cb>four letter words\u003c/b>. I’ve known Tran for close to a decade, since my employer at the time, Kearny Street Workshop, published his first book, \u003cb>The Book of Perceptions\u003c/b>. Tran’s debut publication, an anomaly in many ways, is a self-contained, collaborative project between Tran the poet, a photographer, and a designer — all Vietnamese American — who combine their perceptions of contemporary Vietnam in print. A collection of his earlier work, \u003cb>Placing the Accents\u003c/b>, mostly comprised of line-broken academic poetry about personal things and identity, ended up being published second.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was only after shucking his collection of learning poetry and taking up a one-punch project like \u003cb>Perceptions\u003c/b> that Tran really revealed his visual and rhythmic language. \u003cb>Perceptions\u003c/b> piloted what Tran calls the “brick,” a solid, left and right justified margin block of text with no capitalization and no punctuation which strikes the eye like a brick through a window, and has become Tran’s default format. In his third book, \u003cb>dust and conscience\u003c/b>, Tran rewrote and expanded upon the material in \u003cb>Perceptions\u003c/b>. The brick began to yield more than just visual density from essentially prose-poetry. That density allows lines to run together into a new rhythm accented by hinge words and also protects currents that even picked-out verse can’t reveal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tran had no sooner demonstrated the utility of the “brick” than he unraveled it again, quite literally and visually. \u003cb>within the margin\u003c/b>, his fourth book, is a single, book-length poem, told off in a single line, from margin to margin, across each page of the book; an exceptionally long “brick” pulled out into yarn. Occasionally the yarn breaks into zig-zag tangles of adverse thought. The line shades and tints from one idea to the next reiterating the colors in different hues. It is symmetrical, and what the Germans would call \u003ci>vollkommen\u003c/i>: not perfect, but entire unto itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I run through this history because \u003cb>four letter words\u003c/b> is not entire unto itself. While drawing in elements — topics, ideas, tactics — of all four previous books, \u003cb>four letter words\u003c/b> does not, as you might expect, serve as a good introduction to Truong Tran. It is the worst of both worlds: a piece that assumes you know what came before and yet doesn’t carry the story forward.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book contains a profusion of ideas and concerns not found in all of the previous four combined, yet displays no joy of discovery. Tran returns to the default “brick” seeking new topics and new ways of approaching old topics; the search is feverish and driven, yet in the first two “books” or sections, there is no through-line, no unity of purpose or inquiry. The book only begins to take on weight in the third section (the lost book) when an earlier piece — a description of a home invasion that turns into gang-rape — begins to echo, especially in a three-page reiteration of “i wish that this had never happened.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, Tran reveals a slyness that is the bitter successor of the humor and imagination he brought to his earlier work. The narrator’s self-accusation of lying, deliberate obfuscations, and episodes of gender and sexuality-bending, say directly: you don’t know what’s true so don’t assume. All you can know here is that — whether on the street, in the body, on the page, or in his practice — something terrible has happened to the narrator — perhaps even to the poet — and he is writing an entire book to avoid talking about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>four letter words\u003c/b> is the most resoundingly accomplished of all of Tran’s books; every piece is a new effort, every page offers a new angle. Tran is too skilled and experienced by now not to know how to shape a book, draw its threads together, make its themes peek out and tantalize. But the theme of the poet trapped in his poetry, not enabled by it, is not just topic or modus, it’s the actual feel: we are trapped in there, too, and it’s pretty airless. The profusion is less artistic experimentation than a repeated trying of locked door handles. Perhaps this is entirely the poet’s intention, but it does seem to be a lot of effort for a flat purpose, and I imagine it’s more a reflection of the poet’s status than anything else.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Near the end, Tran lets go of his strangle-hold on the format — his insistence on experimentation — and the “bricks” begin to lighten. He’s gotten it off his chest, he’s tried all the buttons, he’s eaten the leftovers, he’s cleaned his slate. What comes now? What’s next?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Truong Tran’s \u003cb>four letter words\u003c/b> is available from \u003ca href=\"http://spdbooks.org/details.asp?BookID=0978766733\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Small Press Distribution\u003c/a>. Strangely, the publisher’s, \u003ca href=\"http://apogeepress.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Apogee Press’s\u003c/a>, site has no information for the book.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>While books are usually presented as stand alone objects, having a long-term relationship with a contemporary poet or writer — reading his books as they come out and observing the development of his practice — can be much more satisfying. Thus, failures and mitigated successes are often more exciting than the glories of a squarely hit bullseye; you learn to recognize the signs of an artist in transition to a new phase. These transitions signal that the genuinely hard and lonely work of making art is happening right now in someone’s head, heart or soul.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is how I’m thinking of Truong Tran’s fifth book of poetry \u003cb>four letter words\u003c/b>. I’ve known Tran for close to a decade, since my employer at the time, Kearny Street Workshop, published his first book, \u003cb>The Book of Perceptions\u003c/b>. Tran’s debut publication, an anomaly in many ways, is a self-contained, collaborative project between Tran the poet, a photographer, and a designer — all Vietnamese American — who combine their perceptions of contemporary Vietnam in print. A collection of his earlier work, \u003cb>Placing the Accents\u003c/b>, mostly comprised of line-broken academic poetry about personal things and identity, ended up being published second.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was only after shucking his collection of learning poetry and taking up a one-punch project like \u003cb>Perceptions\u003c/b> that Tran really revealed his visual and rhythmic language. \u003cb>Perceptions\u003c/b> piloted what Tran calls the “brick,” a solid, left and right justified margin block of text with no capitalization and no punctuation which strikes the eye like a brick through a window, and has become Tran’s default format. In his third book, \u003cb>dust and conscience\u003c/b>, Tran rewrote and expanded upon the material in \u003cb>Perceptions\u003c/b>. The brick began to yield more than just visual density from essentially prose-poetry. That density allows lines to run together into a new rhythm accented by hinge words and also protects currents that even picked-out verse can’t reveal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tran had no sooner demonstrated the utility of the “brick” than he unraveled it again, quite literally and visually. \u003cb>within the margin\u003c/b>, his fourth book, is a single, book-length poem, told off in a single line, from margin to margin, across each page of the book; an exceptionally long “brick” pulled out into yarn. Occasionally the yarn breaks into zig-zag tangles of adverse thought. The line shades and tints from one idea to the next reiterating the colors in different hues. It is symmetrical, and what the Germans would call \u003ci>vollkommen\u003c/i>: not perfect, but entire unto itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I run through this history because \u003cb>four letter words\u003c/b> is not entire unto itself. While drawing in elements — topics, ideas, tactics — of all four previous books, \u003cb>four letter words\u003c/b> does not, as you might expect, serve as a good introduction to Truong Tran. It is the worst of both worlds: a piece that assumes you know what came before and yet doesn’t carry the story forward.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book contains a profusion of ideas and concerns not found in all of the previous four combined, yet displays no joy of discovery. Tran returns to the default “brick” seeking new topics and new ways of approaching old topics; the search is feverish and driven, yet in the first two “books” or sections, there is no through-line, no unity of purpose or inquiry. The book only begins to take on weight in the third section (the lost book) when an earlier piece — a description of a home invasion that turns into gang-rape — begins to echo, especially in a three-page reiteration of “i wish that this had never happened.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, Tran reveals a slyness that is the bitter successor of the humor and imagination he brought to his earlier work. The narrator’s self-accusation of lying, deliberate obfuscations, and episodes of gender and sexuality-bending, say directly: you don’t know what’s true so don’t assume. All you can know here is that — whether on the street, in the body, on the page, or in his practice — something terrible has happened to the narrator — perhaps even to the poet — and he is writing an entire book to avoid talking about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>four letter words\u003c/b> is the most resoundingly accomplished of all of Tran’s books; every piece is a new effort, every page offers a new angle. Tran is too skilled and experienced by now not to know how to shape a book, draw its threads together, make its themes peek out and tantalize. But the theme of the poet trapped in his poetry, not enabled by it, is not just topic or modus, it’s the actual feel: we are trapped in there, too, and it’s pretty airless. The profusion is less artistic experimentation than a repeated trying of locked door handles. Perhaps this is entirely the poet’s intention, but it does seem to be a lot of effort for a flat purpose, and I imagine it’s more a reflection of the poet’s status than anything else.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Near the end, Tran lets go of his strangle-hold on the format — his insistence on experimentation — and the “bricks” begin to lighten. He’s gotten it off his chest, he’s tried all the buttons, he’s eaten the leftovers, he’s cleaned his slate. What comes now? What’s next?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Truong Tran’s \u003cb>four letter words\u003c/b> is available from \u003ca href=\"http://spdbooks.org/details.asp?BookID=0978766733\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Small Press Distribution\u003c/a>. Strangely, the publisher’s, \u003ca href=\"http://apogeepress.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Apogee Press’s\u003c/a>, site has no information for the book.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Los Angeles residents: they really are different than you and me. If you’ve ever had to choose a surgeon to repair a botched rhinoplasty, and you settle on one because you did a visualization exercise in which one surgeon appeared as “light and the other man was a shadow” — please take a vacation outside the Thirty Mile Zone for a little while. Same goes if you’ve come to believe that you have the ability to enter a Shoe Pavilion and “manifest” the shoes you want. \u003cb>Quakeland\u003c/b>, the first grownups’ novel by beloved Young Adult author Francesca Lia Block, contains characters who do both of these things. The fact that Block is able to render these women without irony, and with great compassion, means she’s a bigger person than I will ever be. Either that, or she’s been breathing a little too much smog herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Block has a generation of fans who have followed her work for over a decade. Her books for teenagers, including the \u003cb>Weetzie Bat\u003c/b> series, are full of darkness and magic, references to sex and death, and altogether treat the young audience like they have some intelligence. (Which is probably why Weetzie Bat and her friends are so often banned from school libraries.) In the majority of Block’s books, the characters live in a heightened world that resembles a fairy-tale, magical-realist Los Angeles, where dreams can come literally true, for good and for ill. Not so in \u003cb>Quakeland\u003c/b>. Published by San Francisco’s own small and risk-taking Manic D Press after her regular publisher declined it, this book will come as a big surprise to longtime Francesca Lia Block fans. It takes place in the real Los Angeles, where enlightenment and contentment are hard to come by — even for someone who can shop psychically for nose job surgeons and strappy sandals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The characters that inhabit \u003cb>Quakeland\u003c/b> reside in Venice and Culver City, but they actually live on the astral plane. In the book’s first half, the protagonist is Katrina, a depressed, lonely preschool teacher who idolizes her best friend Grace and her yoga teacher Kali. Both of those women appear centered, loving, and model-beautiful, whereas Katrina is often a chubby, needy mess. “Vitamin Z” — Zoloft — makes her life somewhat tolerable. But then she meets a man named Jasper in her Contact Dance class, and her fragile world falls apart. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Contact is an improvised style of modern dance that allows for lots of soulful eye contact, rolling around on the floor, and sweaty, emotional embraces with strangers of all genders. One can understand why Katrina, so hungry for true connection, would seek out such a class. And one can also understand how she could mistake a sexy dance partner for a decent guy. In her characterization of Jasper, Block excels at fleshing out a certain California archetype: the Enlightened Asshole. Jasper, like all con artists and cult leaders, has a knack for locating, and then destroying, the woman in the room with the least self esteem. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Katrina, as her name suggests, is haunted by disasters. She dreams of the asian tsunami, the 9-11 attacks,and the London bombings before they happen. But no amount of Vitamin Z, yoga, past life regression, or mind-altering sex with Jasper can make her happy. Especially when Jasper’s every word, every action, seems calculated to make her feel like garbage. “Tell me you need me,” he says to her during sex. “Tell me like you mean it.” The following day, he says:\u003cbr>“You scared me when we were making love before.”\u003cbr>“What? I scared you?”\u003cbr>“You sounded so needy.”\u003cbr>“You told me to say I needed you.”\u003cbr>“Yes, but you said it so convincingly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Soon, Katrina gets some tragic news from her best friend Grace, and has to confront what she will do if the one person who she really does need, more than anyone, goes away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second half of the book changes things up. There is a monologue from the ever-watchful city of Los Angeles itself. Then we meet Angeli, the single mom and spiritual seeker who was the author of the book’s first half. Although far more stable than Katrina, Angeli makes her own series of boneheaded moves with inappropriate men, including going to bed with a guy she meets at a Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting. This was the point where I wanted to shake her by the shoulders and yell, “How exactly did you imagine that this was all going to END WELL!?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the book, the spectre of war, death, and world disaster are always lurking just offstage. On the subject of the 9-11 attacks, Katrina tells us: “Kali said that many psychics mentally visited the actual site, the ruins of the twin buildings, after it happened and comforted and guided all the desolate souls who weren’t able to leave it yet. It was like handing them a cell phone to make the last call, a piece of paper and a pen to write the last note, Kali said. Some resolution. Psychic triage. I don’t know how to do that. All I have is the vision, the apocalypse.” The characters are so upset by the evening news that it seems unsporting to point out: hey, that bombing/flood/plane crash didn’t actually happen to you — but it did just ruin the lives of some other people. How about, instead of performing a dance for World Peace on an “astrologically important day,” or doing “psychic triage,” you actually go and ease your worried soul by HELPING the people who are actually suffering? \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since this book is such a departure from the usual Francesca Lia Block universe and stable of characters, I can’t help but speculate on her reasons for writing it. Is \u003cb>Quakeland\u003c/b> a roman à clef? Is Block trying to settle some old scores with this tale of strong sad women undone, over and over again, by pathological narcissists? There’s no way to know, and it shouldn’t matter. As maddening as the book sometimes is (and I had to restrain myself from throwing it across the room when the words “yoni” and “lingam” were used one too many times), Block has captured something incredibly uncomfortable, and which is rarely shown so fully in fiction. That feeling, one that can’t be shaken with altars and rituals and sweat lodge chants, that without true love and connection, one’s life has been wasted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> It made me sad for Katrina, and exasperated, that she would think her problem is that she’s not trying hard enough to be enlightened, magical, and psychic — when her real problem is a simple one: a no-good boyfriend. I kept wanting her to leave yoga class behind and go settle down with a nice plumber, or accountant, anyone who lives with his feet planted on the ground instead of floating three feet above it. But maybe that’s too much to ask: this is Quakeland, after all. Even the plumbers probably have gurus, and spec scripts in development. This book annoyed me. It also kept me awake at night. To my mind, that makes it a success. \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Los Angeles residents: they really are different than you and me. If you’ve ever had to choose a surgeon to repair a botched rhinoplasty, and you settle on one because you did a visualization exercise in which one surgeon appeared as “light and the other man was a shadow” — please take a vacation outside the Thirty Mile Zone for a little while. Same goes if you’ve come to believe that you have the ability to enter a Shoe Pavilion and “manifest” the shoes you want. \u003cb>Quakeland\u003c/b>, the first grownups’ novel by beloved Young Adult author Francesca Lia Block, contains characters who do both of these things. The fact that Block is able to render these women without irony, and with great compassion, means she’s a bigger person than I will ever be. Either that, or she’s been breathing a little too much smog herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Block has a generation of fans who have followed her work for over a decade. Her books for teenagers, including the \u003cb>Weetzie Bat\u003c/b> series, are full of darkness and magic, references to sex and death, and altogether treat the young audience like they have some intelligence. (Which is probably why Weetzie Bat and her friends are so often banned from school libraries.) In the majority of Block’s books, the characters live in a heightened world that resembles a fairy-tale, magical-realist Los Angeles, where dreams can come literally true, for good and for ill. Not so in \u003cb>Quakeland\u003c/b>. Published by San Francisco’s own small and risk-taking Manic D Press after her regular publisher declined it, this book will come as a big surprise to longtime Francesca Lia Block fans. It takes place in the real Los Angeles, where enlightenment and contentment are hard to come by — even for someone who can shop psychically for nose job surgeons and strappy sandals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The characters that inhabit \u003cb>Quakeland\u003c/b> reside in Venice and Culver City, but they actually live on the astral plane. In the book’s first half, the protagonist is Katrina, a depressed, lonely preschool teacher who idolizes her best friend Grace and her yoga teacher Kali. Both of those women appear centered, loving, and model-beautiful, whereas Katrina is often a chubby, needy mess. “Vitamin Z” — Zoloft — makes her life somewhat tolerable. But then she meets a man named Jasper in her Contact Dance class, and her fragile world falls apart. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Contact is an improvised style of modern dance that allows for lots of soulful eye contact, rolling around on the floor, and sweaty, emotional embraces with strangers of all genders. One can understand why Katrina, so hungry for true connection, would seek out such a class. And one can also understand how she could mistake a sexy dance partner for a decent guy. In her characterization of Jasper, Block excels at fleshing out a certain California archetype: the Enlightened Asshole. Jasper, like all con artists and cult leaders, has a knack for locating, and then destroying, the woman in the room with the least self esteem. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Katrina, as her name suggests, is haunted by disasters. She dreams of the asian tsunami, the 9-11 attacks,and the London bombings before they happen. But no amount of Vitamin Z, yoga, past life regression, or mind-altering sex with Jasper can make her happy. Especially when Jasper’s every word, every action, seems calculated to make her feel like garbage. “Tell me you need me,” he says to her during sex. “Tell me like you mean it.” The following day, he says:\u003cbr>“You scared me when we were making love before.”\u003cbr>“What? I scared you?”\u003cbr>“You sounded so needy.”\u003cbr>“You told me to say I needed you.”\u003cbr>“Yes, but you said it so convincingly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Soon, Katrina gets some tragic news from her best friend Grace, and has to confront what she will do if the one person who she really does need, more than anyone, goes away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second half of the book changes things up. There is a monologue from the ever-watchful city of Los Angeles itself. Then we meet Angeli, the single mom and spiritual seeker who was the author of the book’s first half. Although far more stable than Katrina, Angeli makes her own series of boneheaded moves with inappropriate men, including going to bed with a guy she meets at a Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting. This was the point where I wanted to shake her by the shoulders and yell, “How exactly did you imagine that this was all going to END WELL!?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the book, the spectre of war, death, and world disaster are always lurking just offstage. On the subject of the 9-11 attacks, Katrina tells us: “Kali said that many psychics mentally visited the actual site, the ruins of the twin buildings, after it happened and comforted and guided all the desolate souls who weren’t able to leave it yet. It was like handing them a cell phone to make the last call, a piece of paper and a pen to write the last note, Kali said. Some resolution. Psychic triage. I don’t know how to do that. All I have is the vision, the apocalypse.” The characters are so upset by the evening news that it seems unsporting to point out: hey, that bombing/flood/plane crash didn’t actually happen to you — but it did just ruin the lives of some other people. How about, instead of performing a dance for World Peace on an “astrologically important day,” or doing “psychic triage,” you actually go and ease your worried soul by HELPING the people who are actually suffering? \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since this book is such a departure from the usual Francesca Lia Block universe and stable of characters, I can’t help but speculate on her reasons for writing it. Is \u003cb>Quakeland\u003c/b> a roman à clef? Is Block trying to settle some old scores with this tale of strong sad women undone, over and over again, by pathological narcissists? There’s no way to know, and it shouldn’t matter. As maddening as the book sometimes is (and I had to restrain myself from throwing it across the room when the words “yoni” and “lingam” were used one too many times), Block has captured something incredibly uncomfortable, and which is rarely shown so fully in fiction. That feeling, one that can’t be shaken with altars and rituals and sweat lodge chants, that without true love and connection, one’s life has been wasted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Most Bay Area residents will only ever encounter the underground world of the traveling punk in one way. When visiting San Francisco’s Haight Street or Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, you will likely step over at least one group of unwashed kids in black hoodies, usually with a dog, usually holding up a snarky cardboard sign requesting change for beer or a bus ticket. Most of Good Citizen America takes a brief glance at these kids and sees only urban blight. On the flipside, a recent \u003ci>Harper’s\u003c/i> magazine article by Matthew Power, “Mississippi Drift: River Vagrants In The Age of Wal-Mart” followed a group of punks on an abortive raft trip down the Mississippi. Many romantic references to Huck Finn are made therein. An article I vaguely remember reading when I was fourteen, about squatters in New York’s Alphabet City, made the kids seem like crafty urchins from a fairy tale. I was about ready to hop a freight and go find them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Romance and demonization aside, hidden from view is a thriving, fascinating, off-the-grid culture, and as San Franciscans we live in the middle of it without even knowing. All across America are young people living and eating where they can: scrounging free food from dumpsters, squatting in abandoned buildings, riding freight trains, and doing their best to avoid jail time for graffiti, open containers, shoplifting, trespassing. Done partly out of necessity and partly by choice, the Scam Punk life is all about gleaning a living off the ragged edges of capitalism. Starting in the mid-1990’s, Erick Lyle, calling himself “Iggy Scam,” documented the San Francisco branch of this scene. His illegally xeroxed communiqués from the Scam Punk underground have recently been collected into an honest-to-god book from Soft Skull Press. \u003cb>On The Lower Frequencies\u003c/b> had me so captivated that some strangers in a cafe, noting my completely absorbed state, came over to ask me what it was.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Erick Lyle/Iggy Scam has produced and written most of the content for two publications. The first was the \u003ci>Turd-Filled Donut\u003c/i>, a free paper distributed via a commandeered corner box, which documented daily life in and around the SROs of Sixth street, where Lyle was living on public assistance at the time. Some favorite articles from the \u003ci>TFD\u003c/i>, (which was popular among punks, other homeless, and outreach workers alike) are reproduced here. One is a fairly astonishing Q and A with then-mayor Willie Brown. When told that food stamps aren’t valid for precooked meals but SROs have no kitchens, Brown expresses ignorance and shock. He turns to a staffer and asks, “did you guys know about this?” (They did.) Then he gave a great quote, a classic let-them-eat-cake sentiment which, according to Lyle, ended up on Tom Ammiano’s mayoral campaign flyers. The other legendary \u003ci>Turd-Filled Donut\u003c/i> article was a “scavenger hunt for beer.” For those with the patience to go looking and solve all the clues, a six-pack of Tecate hidden in a floating suitcase tied to a pier was the reward. (The prize was found in two weeks.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the \u003ci>TFD\u003c/i> came to an end, Lyle began publishing \u003ci>SCAM\u003c/i>. Begun as a way to disseminate petty larceny tactics, \u003ci>SCAM\u003c/i> quickly evolved into a firsthand document of struggling to survive at the margins of dot-com and dot-bomb San Francisco. (See also Rebecca Solnit’s book \u003cb>Hollow City\u003c/b> and the documentary \u003cb>Boom: The Sound Of Eviction\u003c/b> for other dispatches from those times.) Eviction fights, protest marches, neighborhood meetings: Lyle was there for it all. Know those red and green paint blotches that appeared on the side of Mission Street’s Bay View Bank building, after all its tenants were evicted to make room from Bigstep.com, a startup that went kaput in less than six months? You can thank Lyle and a couple friends, who shot paint-filled balloons from a rooftop across the street. The dot-com crash was a fruitful time for the punks: so many abandoned lofts to squat in, so much material excess abandoned. Lyle even got a temporary job at a recyclery, sorting office supplies left behind by disgraced accounting firm Arthur Andersen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>On The Lower Frequencies\u003c/b> is worth the cover price simply for two of its longer pieces, each of which documents an aspect of San Francisco history you will never find elsewhere. “Hunt’s Donuts: The Epicenter Of Crime” began as a stapled pamphlet, SCAM number five and a half (I bought a copy in a comic book store several years ago, and it’s now a prized addition to my zine collection). Hunt’s, at the corner of 20th and Mission, best known for its mystifying “OPEN 25 HOURS” sign, ended its days as a notorious bazaar for stolen goods and as the dividing line between rival gang territories. A pharmacy now stands in its place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lyle writes, “In long nights at Hunt’s over the years I would, however, come to see that the 25th hour was not a time, but a PLACE. It was a destination that could only be reached after too much fluorescent light and coffee and donuts. Or heroin and meth and box wine. I made it to that lost continent that night for the first time, when “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra came on the old Hunt’s jukebox. Suddenly, all the sleeping men in the shop lifted their heads off the table to sing along…” He takes this metaphor of the mythical 25th hour and accompanies the reader on a tour of the old mission, detailing the wars between police and young Latino men that have been going on in and around Hunt’s since the 1970s. Ssee also “Elegy For The Old Hunt’s,” a poem by Bucky Sinister, about a guy who gets his heart stolen and has to go to the donut shop to buy it back.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just as astonishing is “949 Market,” Lyle’s record of a few magical months spent squatting in a huge boarded-up complex of buildings on Market Street. After years and years of protests and fights, Erick Lyle and his regular cohort (muralist Zara Thustra, longtime friend and fellow musician Ivy, and others) decided to make a space dedicated to to “What we’re for, not what we’re against.” “I’m just saying that I’m tired of being expected to self-identify as someone under attack, someone who is powerless and who is being forced out. We wanted to do shows that asked, ‘What do we WANT the city to look like? How can we make it happen? If we really had all the space everyone says they need to do stuff, what exactly WOULD we do with it?’ We wanted to do shows that remind people of the power that they actually DO have.” When they broke in and commandeered the building in the summer of 2001, it had been vacant for twelve years. They painted huge murals, hosted music events and cooked food for a free open-to-everyone cafe. They made the most of their time there, until the day that Lyle was awoken by the cops and led away in handcuffs, in his underwear. As of April 2008, 949 Market still stands vacant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>On The Lower Frequencies\u003c/b> is not a perfect book, by any means. I’m baffled by Soft Skull’s decision not to mention San Francisco anywhere on the front or back cover, even though nearly every page deals with the arcana of City politics. Certain passages are repetitive, covering the same material but written at different times. A little more troubling is Erick Lyle’s tendency to view a life of extreme poverty through rose-colored glasses. One could get the sense that the only downside to being homeless and drug-addicted is getting hassled by “Irish cops.” He doesn’t address the fact that many of the city’s homeless end up on the streets as the result of addiction and mental illness, and wouldn’t be living that way if they had any other choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the pain and degradation of life on the street is something that gets discussed in the media fairly often. What never gets discussed is the part of that life that Erick Lyle revels in, the beauty and grace, the moments of overwhelming kindness and surprising poetry. “I want to walk down the street and ponder the layers of history and the lives that came before…And, late at night, I like to think that somewhere out in those streets and alleys, the tunnels and doorways, and sleepless hotel walls, there is an idea that might save us all.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I hope he’s right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Drop by Erick Lyle’s book release party for \u003cb>On the Lower Frequencies\u003c/b> Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 6pm, Music at CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission Street, San Francisco, PH: 415.626.2060. \u003ca href=\"http://www.counterpulse.org/calendar.shtml\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Get full details\u003c/a> (at counterpulse.org).\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Most Bay Area residents will only ever encounter the underground world of the traveling punk in one way. When visiting San Francisco’s Haight Street or Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, you will likely step over at least one group of unwashed kids in black hoodies, usually with a dog, usually holding up a snarky cardboard sign requesting change for beer or a bus ticket. Most of Good Citizen America takes a brief glance at these kids and sees only urban blight. On the flipside, a recent \u003ci>Harper’s\u003c/i> magazine article by Matthew Power, “Mississippi Drift: River Vagrants In The Age of Wal-Mart” followed a group of punks on an abortive raft trip down the Mississippi. Many romantic references to Huck Finn are made therein. An article I vaguely remember reading when I was fourteen, about squatters in New York’s Alphabet City, made the kids seem like crafty urchins from a fairy tale. I was about ready to hop a freight and go find them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Romance and demonization aside, hidden from view is a thriving, fascinating, off-the-grid culture, and as San Franciscans we live in the middle of it without even knowing. All across America are young people living and eating where they can: scrounging free food from dumpsters, squatting in abandoned buildings, riding freight trains, and doing their best to avoid jail time for graffiti, open containers, shoplifting, trespassing. Done partly out of necessity and partly by choice, the Scam Punk life is all about gleaning a living off the ragged edges of capitalism. Starting in the mid-1990’s, Erick Lyle, calling himself “Iggy Scam,” documented the San Francisco branch of this scene. His illegally xeroxed communiqués from the Scam Punk underground have recently been collected into an honest-to-god book from Soft Skull Press. \u003cb>On The Lower Frequencies\u003c/b> had me so captivated that some strangers in a cafe, noting my completely absorbed state, came over to ask me what it was.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Erick Lyle/Iggy Scam has produced and written most of the content for two publications. The first was the \u003ci>Turd-Filled Donut\u003c/i>, a free paper distributed via a commandeered corner box, which documented daily life in and around the SROs of Sixth street, where Lyle was living on public assistance at the time. Some favorite articles from the \u003ci>TFD\u003c/i>, (which was popular among punks, other homeless, and outreach workers alike) are reproduced here. One is a fairly astonishing Q and A with then-mayor Willie Brown. When told that food stamps aren’t valid for precooked meals but SROs have no kitchens, Brown expresses ignorance and shock. He turns to a staffer and asks, “did you guys know about this?” (They did.) Then he gave a great quote, a classic let-them-eat-cake sentiment which, according to Lyle, ended up on Tom Ammiano’s mayoral campaign flyers. The other legendary \u003ci>Turd-Filled Donut\u003c/i> article was a “scavenger hunt for beer.” For those with the patience to go looking and solve all the clues, a six-pack of Tecate hidden in a floating suitcase tied to a pier was the reward. (The prize was found in two weeks.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the \u003ci>TFD\u003c/i> came to an end, Lyle began publishing \u003ci>SCAM\u003c/i>. Begun as a way to disseminate petty larceny tactics, \u003ci>SCAM\u003c/i> quickly evolved into a firsthand document of struggling to survive at the margins of dot-com and dot-bomb San Francisco. (See also Rebecca Solnit’s book \u003cb>Hollow City\u003c/b> and the documentary \u003cb>Boom: The Sound Of Eviction\u003c/b> for other dispatches from those times.) Eviction fights, protest marches, neighborhood meetings: Lyle was there for it all. Know those red and green paint blotches that appeared on the side of Mission Street’s Bay View Bank building, after all its tenants were evicted to make room from Bigstep.com, a startup that went kaput in less than six months? You can thank Lyle and a couple friends, who shot paint-filled balloons from a rooftop across the street. The dot-com crash was a fruitful time for the punks: so many abandoned lofts to squat in, so much material excess abandoned. Lyle even got a temporary job at a recyclery, sorting office supplies left behind by disgraced accounting firm Arthur Andersen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>On The Lower Frequencies\u003c/b> is worth the cover price simply for two of its longer pieces, each of which documents an aspect of San Francisco history you will never find elsewhere. “Hunt’s Donuts: The Epicenter Of Crime” began as a stapled pamphlet, SCAM number five and a half (I bought a copy in a comic book store several years ago, and it’s now a prized addition to my zine collection). Hunt’s, at the corner of 20th and Mission, best known for its mystifying “OPEN 25 HOURS” sign, ended its days as a notorious bazaar for stolen goods and as the dividing line between rival gang territories. A pharmacy now stands in its place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lyle writes, “In long nights at Hunt’s over the years I would, however, come to see that the 25th hour was not a time, but a PLACE. It was a destination that could only be reached after too much fluorescent light and coffee and donuts. Or heroin and meth and box wine. I made it to that lost continent that night for the first time, when “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra came on the old Hunt’s jukebox. Suddenly, all the sleeping men in the shop lifted their heads off the table to sing along…” He takes this metaphor of the mythical 25th hour and accompanies the reader on a tour of the old mission, detailing the wars between police and young Latino men that have been going on in and around Hunt’s since the 1970s. Ssee also “Elegy For The Old Hunt’s,” a poem by Bucky Sinister, about a guy who gets his heart stolen and has to go to the donut shop to buy it back.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just as astonishing is “949 Market,” Lyle’s record of a few magical months spent squatting in a huge boarded-up complex of buildings on Market Street. After years and years of protests and fights, Erick Lyle and his regular cohort (muralist Zara Thustra, longtime friend and fellow musician Ivy, and others) decided to make a space dedicated to to “What we’re for, not what we’re against.” “I’m just saying that I’m tired of being expected to self-identify as someone under attack, someone who is powerless and who is being forced out. We wanted to do shows that asked, ‘What do we WANT the city to look like? How can we make it happen? If we really had all the space everyone says they need to do stuff, what exactly WOULD we do with it?’ We wanted to do shows that remind people of the power that they actually DO have.” When they broke in and commandeered the building in the summer of 2001, it had been vacant for twelve years. They painted huge murals, hosted music events and cooked food for a free open-to-everyone cafe. They made the most of their time there, until the day that Lyle was awoken by the cops and led away in handcuffs, in his underwear. As of April 2008, 949 Market still stands vacant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>On The Lower Frequencies\u003c/b> is not a perfect book, by any means. I’m baffled by Soft Skull’s decision not to mention San Francisco anywhere on the front or back cover, even though nearly every page deals with the arcana of City politics. Certain passages are repetitive, covering the same material but written at different times. A little more troubling is Erick Lyle’s tendency to view a life of extreme poverty through rose-colored glasses. One could get the sense that the only downside to being homeless and drug-addicted is getting hassled by “Irish cops.” He doesn’t address the fact that many of the city’s homeless end up on the streets as the result of addiction and mental illness, and wouldn’t be living that way if they had any other choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the pain and degradation of life on the street is something that gets discussed in the media fairly often. What never gets discussed is the part of that life that Erick Lyle revels in, the beauty and grace, the moments of overwhelming kindness and surprising poetry. “I want to walk down the street and ponder the layers of history and the lives that came before…And, late at night, I like to think that somewhere out in those streets and alleys, the tunnels and doorways, and sleepless hotel walls, there is an idea that might save us all.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I hope he’s right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Drop by Erick Lyle’s book release party for \u003cb>On the Lower Frequencies\u003c/b> Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 6pm, Music at CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission Street, San Francisco, PH: 415.626.2060. \u003ca href=\"http://www.counterpulse.org/calendar.shtml\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Get full details\u003c/a> (at counterpulse.org).\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"city-arts": {
"id": "city-arts",
"title": "City Arts & Lectures",
"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/cityartsandlecture-300x300.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.cityarts.net/",
"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
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"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
"id": "closealltabs",
"title": "Close All Tabs",
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"info": "Close All Tabs breaks down how digital culture shapes our world through thoughtful insights and irreverent humor.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"order": 1
},
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"id": "code-switch-life-kit",
"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"meta": {
"site": "radio",
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},
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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}
},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"freakonomics-radio": {
"id": "freakonomics-radio",
"title": "Freakonomics Radio",
"info": "Freakonomics Radio is a one-hour award-winning podcast and public-radio project hosted by Stephen Dubner, with co-author Steve Levitt as a regular guest. It is produced in partnership with WNYC.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
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},
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"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
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"link": "/radio/program/fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/381444908/podcast.xml"
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
"title": "Hidden Brain",
"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain",
"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
"id": "how-i-built-this",
"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
"meta": {
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6c3dd23c-93fb-4aab-97ba-1725fa6315f1/hyphenaci%C3%B3n",
"rss": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/KQINC2275451163"
}
},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Masters-of-Scale-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/464615685/mind-shift-podcast",
"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
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"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
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"source": "pbs"
},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
"title": "Perspectives",
"tagline": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991",
"info": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Perspectives_Tile_Final.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Perspectives",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/perspectives/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 14
},
"link": "/perspectives",
"subscribe": {
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"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/432309616/perspectives",
"rss": "https://ww2.kqed.org/perspectives/category/perspectives/feed/",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93dzIua3FlZC5vcmcvcGVyc3BlY3RpdmVzL2NhdGVnb3J5L3BlcnNwZWN0aXZlcy9mZWVkLw"
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},
"planet-money": {
"id": "planet-money",
"title": "Planet Money",
"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
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