Here’s the recent sfbg cover story on freight hopping writers and photographers…
Outside of a small Central Florida town, I hopped my first freight train in spring 1993, in a place that seemed even then to be somehow outside of time. My first train sat on a siding behind a drive-in theater along old Highway [...]
This little blurb for Josh’s book made it into sfbg just after the RNC…
“There is no question in my mind that corporations are fighting to control every square inch of public landscape,” writes author Macphee in this impressive and handsome new book. Equal parts stencil art gallery, movement history and public art manifesto, Stencil Pirates [...]
I was proud to get this story of greedy, evicting landlords in the Mission on the air during the dot-com era in SF. I have a great photo of friends listening to this show in the 949 Market squat. This is the piece that opens On The Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of The City.
Last goodbye to Miami from TAL’s 100th show, all about radio.
Listen here: http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=712
This is my oft-rebroadcast Urban Fishermen piece from TAL. Hoping to get this one in a book soon, too… Its the audio of the entire show and my piece is near the end so skip ahead if that’s what you’re looking for..
This is from Nate Johnson’s Artery show on KALW radio and ran the week of the building’s “opening” — an exclusive event that the public was not invited to attend (I did see good ole Willie Brown out front, though, making his first visit back to my neighborhood in some years, I imagine…) The piece [...]
Charles Willeford lives!
In San Francisco today, we have pot clubs, gay marriage, protesters that occasionally shut down the entire city, and a rich-kid, gelled-hair mayor straight off a TV screen who has been known to wash homeless people’s feet. Is it not fair to ask where, in all this, is the Great San Francisco Novel [...]
This ran in SFBG last spring. I wanted to write about the Wojnarowicz book, cuz its THE SHIT!
A lost bit of San Francisco’s secret history involves how Food Not Bombs may have made the old fountain at Civic Center disappear. During the mid-’90s, when the SFPD showed up daily at Civic Center to arrest members [...]
This ran in the SF Bay Guardian last summer. I still don’t like those Arcadia books, but I got to talk about some cool lost history in this piece…
Amid the pages of San Francisco’s Chinatown, a 2006 entry in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, is a 1968 photo from what we are told [...]
This piece came out this April, written ostensibly to celebrate the release of Chris Carlsson’s new book, Nowtopia. I read about 30 Utopian and Dystopian books for it — pretty fun.
After the ruins
SF’s pasts and futures — and Chris Carlsson’s Nowtopia
In a journal entry dated December 27, 1835 from his 1840 book Two Years Before [...]