read it here

http://www.sfbg.com/2011/02/23/back-streets

For the San Francisco Bay Guardian, I wrote a celebration of the life’s work of San Francisco noir novelist Peter Plate that can be found online here.

http://www.sfbg.com/2010/10/12/lost-city

Due to what I will generously term “the vagaries and difficulties of publishing a newspaper in a world where papers are dying”, the Guardian ran in print the wrong draft of the story I wrote but the online version is the corrected draft.

For my appearance at the annual Lit Crawl event for Lit Quake on Saturday, October 9th, I wrote a brand new piece in which I proposed noir and other genre fiction scenarios for a completely gentrified San Francisco. You can read below the piece I read out loud at the event…

Scenario 1:

A self-satisfied young biotech exec comes home to his Townsend Street condo late at night only to find the electronic key fob that allows him entry to his building doesn’t work.  He is unable to enter his building and remembers his cell phone battery died at the party. He realizes too late he has also  left his wallet in the cab, and now he is out on the streets at night with no money or ID, as suddenly stripped of identity as the city around him.  The everyman-for-himself ethos of the new San Francisco is put to the test as the newly homeless exec battles cops, garbage men, graffiti artists, and donut shop employees in a series of humiliating defeats that leave him close to insanity.  Near dawn, he finds himself at a trash can fire near the CalTrain tracks, huddling up for warmth with the homeless he so despises… until he realizes too late that the homeless men are preparing a dinner, and he is the main course!

2. Title: No Strings Attached, straight Mission noir ala Charles Willeford…

The year is 1999. A young, attractive and upwardly mobile husband and wife from the Silicon Valley buy a house in the Mission, seeking closer proximity to the area’s gritty and exciting urban vibe.  The husband develops a persistent fascination with the young punk rock stripper girl who they evicted when they moved into the house.  He sits at home, reading about her band, online, and starts going to their shows, lurking in the back of Mission Records in a ratty leather jacket he bought in front of the Armory.  After a show, he approaches her and asks her to get him some heroin.  He starts using, working from home while high, programming code and obsessively stalking the evicted girl. In his search for her, he soon goes into the streets to buy his own drugs and starts hanging out with dealers at the plaza who fascinate him with stories about the people who used to live on his block but have now been displaced. Telling himself he is writing a novel, he starts obsessively scouring craigslist casual encounter ads, arranging meetings with prostitutes. He finds the girl he once evicted who he now pays to enact more and more elaborate sexual fantasy scenarios. As the novel ends, he answers a craigslist ad only to meet his own wife, herself now hooked on drugs, too. In a last desperate attempt to fill the emptiness of their lives, they broadcast their own ritual murder suicide on the internet via webcam.

3. (Science Fiction proposal) AMNESIA: THE NOVEL

A genetically modified virus developed at the new Mission Bay biotech labs is accidently released into the city. The virus instantly spreads a disease that causes every single person in San Francisco to forget everything they know all at once.  The residents of the city wander the streets helplessly past the once trendy new chain stores and yuppie eateries, trying to remember who they are and where they live and doing clueless things like eating their cell phones. For some reason, Schlitz malt liquor is an antidote to the virus and a gang of crusty punks from Market Street have remained immune.  They roam the city, gleefully and drunkenly convincing straight citizens to dress in drag and take apart jails and do massive art projects on condos. This utopia is threatened however when a group of citizens discover the internet. They call the internet “God” and treat it as a bible.  They convince an ever growing group of followers that the citizens of what was once San Francisco can only reclaim their identity by recreating all of recorded history – from wars and famine to Madonna and the Cosby Show – all over again from the very beginning from the information found online.

4. (Young Adult) AMNESIA: THE NOVEL pt2

Tony, a 19 year old white hipster new to the Mission, wrecks on his track bike while unable to stop at a traffic light at 24^th and Mission. In the wreck, he bumps his head and loses his identity. He wanders into El Farolito seeking clues about who he really is. A taqueria worker, Jose, takes pity on Tony and brings him home to live and recuperate in the tiny flat he shares ­with 15 members of his extended family on 26^th Street. Jose’s family raises Tony as if he was one of their own children. Jose even gets Tony a job at El Farolito. At first, customers are shocked and appalled at Tony’s appearance behind the counter with his scraggly beard, stick and poke tattoos, and askew Giants cap. But within a year he has won everyone over with his flawless Spanish and his marvelous dancing in the parade at Carnival.

Meanwhile, Tony’s father, the governor of Indiana, is running for president. He loves Tony, too, and misses him a great deal. He is accidently reunited with Tony at a campaign stop in the Mission. In a heartwarming finale, Tony is forced to choose between his loving new family in La Mision and his rightful inheritance — the power to lead the free world.

5. Surrealist Roman Noir, Proustian in scope but experimental in style…

The year is 1992. The setting is a sex toy shop in the Mission. As the novel opens, two dildos fall in love.  They are young and excited. They read each other poetry and plan for their future together, day in and day out on their shelf in the fluorescent lit netherworld of the shop.  Without explanation, the dildos are transported to a rocky, foggy beach where they smoke and stare at the cold surf. They talk to each other in mumbled French about the ultimate impossibility of their union.  The beach recedes and they are at a bus stop on Mission Street, saying goodbye. Time passes.  On a cold August day in 2010, the dildos are at last reunited on a grubby blanket at a sidewalk sale at 16^th and Mission BART. After a silence that lasts for centuries, one dildo says to the other at last, “Is it really you?”

6. Borges in SF

A construction worker building a luxury condo at the site of the demolition of the Transbay Terminal finds in the haunted area where the waiting room once stood, a magic turd.  Lifting the petrified turd and looking into it, he realizes that in the turd he sees as if looking through a portal a vision of the lost skid row Greyhound waiting room.  He sees the late night bus rides to nowhere, the men arriving to the city, out of the military, out of San Quentin, men drinking short dogs, men looking for work, bathroom blowjobs and shellgames. He turns the turd over and the vision shifts to another skidrow scene, hobos shivering at dawn in the old SP train yards South of Market, men on the nod in SRO hotel rooms of old third street. As he stares, he suddenly understands that in its fecal dust the turd contains the preserved DNA of all skidrows everywhere throughout recorded history. In quick succession he sees the Bowery soup lines, a newsreel of Depression era farmhands, a plasma center in Baltimore in 1975.  He sees at once West Lake Street in Nelson Algren’s Chicago under the El tracks, and a man smoking crack in front of the Pyramids in Egypt.

But also the skidrows of the future: A man in a massage parlor in Saigon in 2040, a spaceship full of methadone addicts going nowhere, a procuress in a bad neighborhood on the moon. The man stares into the turd for only a minute or so but he is blinded by the vision of man’s infinite seediness and he goes completely insane. The construction worker remains, homeless and insane, wandering forever in front of the building down an endless skidrow in time and space in his mind. The turd, however, is lost for the time being, hermetically sealed up in the wall of the luxury condo to be found someday by unsuspecting future generations…

7.  A Confederacy of Turds

One Sunday morning Juanita Teresa Herrera, age 72, is comes home from church to her flat on San Carlos Street. When she approaches her garage door, she drops to her knees, praying and genuflecting at what she sees there: The face of the virgin Mary has appeared in a splattered turd on the door.  By the next morning, news of the fecal miracle has spread and devout worshippers from around California have flocked to the Mission, lining up around the block to pay their respects and ask the Turd Virgin for blessings.  Within a week, news has spread worldwide and to the Vatican. Religious and political leaders debate the significance of the Virgin’s appearance in the alley. The pope visits the turd and after an audience with the virgin, claims the turd has come out against gay marriage.  Mayor Gavin Newsom, on the other hand, insists the turd, like San Francisco, is a beacon of tolerance and love to the entire planet Earth.  The SF Bay Guardian maintains that the turd proves the necessity of public power.

Meanwhile, a curator at the DeYoung Museum insists that the turd is actually the master work of an unknown street artist. The curator sites similar turd paintings all up and down San Carlos Street. An art critic from the New York Times hails the turd as the latest bold statement from “The Mission School” of artists and the turd appears on the cover of an expensive art book about Mission murals. A frequently homeless man with a heavy black beard who haunts the area around 20^th and San Carlos is identified as the artists and brought to the DeYoung where he executes several more powerful works in quick succession, all of which are instantly bought for the museums permanent collection.

Ironically, the presence of the original art work on the old Victorian causes the house’s value to skyrocket and Jaunita is evicted. The house’s new owner, a builder of green, sustainable buildings from San Jose, announces plans to renovate the house, turning the garage door where the turd appeared into a scruffy patch of native weeds.  The community is outraged and protests for months.  A protester appears on the front page of the New York Times, kryptonite locked to the turd.  A group calling itself “Yoga for Mary” demonstrates daily at dawn in front of the turd. But the owner is unmoved. “I thought this was America!” he says., “where you can do whatever you want with your own property.”

The proposed destruction of the turd becomes a symbol for the battle over the direction of the city’s future. Progressives are emboldened when the turd places a strong third in a write-in candidacy for mayor.  The book’s nihilistic conclusion takes place on Halloween in the Castro, with a phalanx of riot cops firing tear gas canisters into a crowd of hundreds of angry queers, all dressed up as the Virgin Turd.

8. ordinary police thriller…

In this, the final installment of a popular crime thriller series, we once again meet hardboiled and hard drinking, ace SFPD detective, Jack Brick. Haunted by the wreckage of his marriage, Brick loses himself in drink and in his voracious appetite for police work in the seedy streets of the Mission District. In this episode, Brick is sent to spy on a curious radical commune who are attracting hordes of young followers to their compound in an old Victorian mansion on South Van Ness.  Members of the commune worship spiritual deities who they claim live inside of Bernal Hill. The group gives away meals everyday in Dolores Park. They believe all property is theft and, practicing a radical philosophy they call “Forced Sharing”, they establish a series of Free Stores throughout the neighborhood where they freely distribute necessary items they have simply removed from the shelves at other stores.  As the cop infiltrates the group, he learns of the group’s latest sinister plot: they are trying to develop a spiritual ray gun that will turn policemen into flowers.

As he works alongside the group in his role as a spy, he finds that he has, against his will, developed a powerful attraction for the group’s charismatic female leader. Despite falling in love, Brick arranges for a raid on a free store, but when he sees his estranged hippy daughter working at there, he is forced to choose sides. The novel ends with Jack Brick on his knees, weeping before her, begging her to turn him into a flower.

Buy the latest Scam now from Needles and Pens, Last Gasp, or Microcosm distributors!

The story was quite long and ran over two weeks in the paper.

http://www.sfbg.com/2010/01/20/clouds-and-mirrors

There is a wry but hilarious scene near the very end of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 912 pages; $30), in which a French literary critic finds a German writer, Archimboldi, lodging at what the critic calls “a home for vanished writers.” After checking into a room at the large estate, the elderly vanished writer wanders the grounds, meeting with the other vanished authors, residents whom Archimboldi finds friendly but increasingly eccentric. Gradually it dawns on Archimboldi that all is not as it seems. Walking back to the entrance gate, he sees, without surprise, a sign announcing that the estate is the “Mercier Clinic and Rest Home – Neurological Center.” The home for vanished writers is an insane asylum.

As we enter the Obama era, with all of its promise of “change,” I’ve found it impossible to read 2666 without being haunted by the memory of those who vanished into the lunatic asylum of the long George W. Bush years – not just the nameless and unlucky left to rot in the Bush administration’s secret torture cells throughout the world, but also those who disappeared right here at home. For instance, a guy I worked with a couple of years ago. One day he was training me on the job, and a week or so later he was in a federal prison, labeled a “terrorist” – which in his case meant that he edited a website called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty.

There were other ghosts, those who vanished after refusing to speak to grand juries. They were rumored to have gone over the border, or back to the land, or who knows where, their very names now superstitiously verboten to speak out loud, lest we bring the heat down on ourselves. Now that Obama is here and everybody is eager for “change,” who will remember the once-bright hopes and dreams of the generation that beat the WTO in Seattle at the dawn of this decade — the hopes that would later be chased down and gassed and beaten by riot police under cover of media blackout in the streets of Miami, FL, or St. Paul, MN, or countless other cities? Of course, there were the suicides and overdoses, and other kinds of disappearances, different but related, too: the abandoned novels, or the guitars taken to the pawnshop. Three people in my community jumped off of bridges. Only one survived. The human toll of the Bush years in my life has been enormous.

Watching the celebrations in the streets of the Mission District on election night in November, I could tell all of this was soon to be trivia. I saw a virtually all-white crowd of completely wasted people take over the intersection at 19th and Valencia, shouting “Obama!” and dancing in the street. In one way, this scene was touching: the spontaneous gathering was a product of the true feelings of human hope that people have for a better world. Yet the moment already had the scripted feel of something self-conscious or mediated, like the Pepsi ad campaign it would soon become. I had a sinking realization: those of us who have spent eight years battling the post-9/11 mantra of Everything Is Different Now were now going to soon be up against a new era of, well, Everything Is Different Now.

The narratives we tell ourselves about our country are important. Just when a Truth and Reconciliation Committee is most needed to write a detailed narrative of the Bush era’s torture, spying, illegal war, and swindling, I could already see the opportunity for that kind of change slipping away into the blackout amnesia aftermaths of the street parties taking place all across the nation. The election of a President of the United States from among the ranks of the nation’s most oppressed minorities has offered the country a new triumphant storyline. We have symbolically redeemed our sins against civilian casualties and 3rd world workers, without too much painful self-examination. I could see that Obama’s brand of change was really so seductive because it offered a chance to change the subject.

Like Ronald Reagan, elected while the US was mired in recession and post-Vietnam soul-searching, Barack Obama developed campaign narratives designed to make the US feel good about itself again. Obama guessed correctly that national morale is low partially because we don’t want to deal with the nameless guilt we feel from the atrocities Bush and company committed in our names. Accordingly, he stated during his campaign that he would not pursue criminal prosecution of members of the Bush administration. Nor has Obama questioned the preposterous idea that we can win either a War on Terror or the war in Afghanistan. If you think about it, “Yes We Can” – his campaign’s appeal to good old American can-do spirit — isn’t far off in substance from Bush’s faith-based convictions about US power. Both Bush’s crusade to make democracy flower in the desert of Iraq and Obama’s notion that the auto industry could save itself – and the planet at the same time! –with electric cars are fantasies that appeal to our sense of pride about being the richest and most powerful.

When a country that is owned by China and is getting its ass kicked simultaneously by ragged guerilla armies in two of the most impoverished and backward parts of the world keeps finding new ways to tell itself that it’s the richest and most powerful country, it is in deep trouble.

+++

When political leaders and journalists seek to generate false narratives for our consumption and comfort, the difficult task of remembering the truth falls to literature.

Roberto Bolaño completed 2666 in 2003, shortly before he died, too poor to receive a liver transplant, at the age of 50. Born in Chile, Bolano counted himself a member of “the generation who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell,” and was himself something of a vanished writer. Briefly jailed during the 1973 coup in which General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the popularly elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, Bolano wandered in exile from Mexico City to Spain, working variously as a janitor and a dishwasher, entering obscure literary competitions advertised on the backs of magazines, while his generation was consumed by Pinochet’s secret prisons and torture cells.

Fittingly, disappearance is perhaps the main action of characters in Bolano’s works, from the vanished fascist poet and skywriter in 1996’s Distant Star (published in English by New Directions in 2004) to the entire romantic generation of doomed Mexican poets and radicals followed across the span of decades and continents to its vanishing point in a desert of crushed hopes in 1998’s The Savage Detectives (published in English by Farra, Straus and Giroux in 2007). In 2666, the terminally ill Bolaño wrote as if in an urgent race against the moment of his own departure, unwilling to leave anything out, as if he wanted to save an entire lost underworld from banishment. Taking on every genre from detective noir to the war novel to romantic comedy in an exhilarating, nearly 1000-page race to the finish, the book is Bolaño’s epic of the disappeared.

The periphery of 2666 teems with Bolaño’s archetypal lost and doomed, a host of minor characters including a former Black Panther leader turned Bar-B-Q cook, various Russian writers purged by Stalin during World War II, a Spanish poet living out his days in an asylum, and an acclaimed British painter who cuts off his own hand. There are the usual obscure literary critics and lost novelists, and we even briefly meet an elderly African-American man who calls himself “the last Communist in Brooklyn.” This last communist could speak for all of Bolaño’s lost and departed when he explains why he presses on: “Someone has to keep the cell alive.”

The book’s action, however, centers upon the unsolved serial killings of hundreds of women in the fictional Mexican border city of Santa Teresa during the late 1990s, events based on real-life unsolved killings in Juarez, Mexico. The majority of the women murdered in Juarez were workers at the new factories along the border with the United States, the unregulated maquiladoras which have sprung up in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In the book’s longest section, “The Part about The Crimes,” we learn the names, one by one, of 111 of these murdered women. In terse, police-blotter language, Bolaño describes the crime scenes — the girls’ clothing, their disappearances, and the police investigators’ attempts to construct the last hours of their lives. Their bodies are discovered slashed, stabbed, bound, gagged and always raped, in ditches, landfills, alleys, or along the side of the highway. Seen from these vantage points, Bolaño’s Santa Teresa is a disjointed place, seemingly patched together from snatches of barely remembered nightmares. Shantytowns and illegal toxic dumps spring up everywhere in “the shadow of the horizon of the maquiladoras.” It is a city that is “endless,” “growing by the second,” a new type of urban zone in a Latin America that has become a laboratory for free trade policy experiments. It is a city made unmappable by globalization.

Bolaño clearly intends the reader to see the disappearances as the inevitable byproduct of the cheapness of life in the maquiladora economy, yet the killings also eerily evoke the disappearances in fascist 1970s Chile and Argentina. These murders are an open secret, virtually ignored by the media. Residents almost superstitiously refer to them only as “the crimes.” The Santa Teresa police respond to the killings with a staggering indifference and ineptitude that might suggest complicity. The maquiladoras are ominous, hulking windowless buildings often in the center of town, not unlike the torture cells once hidden in plain sight in Buenos Aires (Bolaño even names one of them EMSA, an obvious play on Argentina’s most notorious concentration camp, ESMA), and many of the women’s bodies are discovered in an illegal garbage dump called El Chile. 2666 suggests that the unrestrained capitalism of the free trade era is the ideological descendent of the 1970s South America state repression from which Bolaño fled, and that the killings in Santa Teresa are in part a recreation of the Pinochet-era disappearances.

While the scenes Bolaño describes are grisly, his language is clinical, the cold camera eye of the lone detective gathering evidence. The collective impact of story after story starts to accrue into its own profoundly moral force. By giving name and face to hundreds of disappeared women, Bolaño suggests that literature is a political response, a way to make wrongs right by bearing witness. While it would certainly be a mistake to read 2666 strictly as a political tract, Bolaño explicitly ties writing to justice in a rambling digression about the African slave trade. A Mexican investigator of the killings points out that it was not recorded into history if a slave ship’s human cargo perished on the way to Virginia, but that it would be huge news in colonial America if there was even a single killing in white society: “What happened to (the whites) was legible, you could say. It could be written.” For Bolano, the search for justice is partially about who can be seen in print.

At a literary conference in Seville six months before his death, Bolaño joked that his literary stock might rise posthumously. Sure enough, Bolaño the man has, ironically, vanished after his untimely death, lost in the fog of fame in the English-speaking world. Mainstream critics call his work “labyrinthine” – perhaps English-language critics’ stock adjective for Latin American writers – in a rush to “discover” a new Borges. Bolaño was a high-school dropout who bragged of discovering literature by shoplifting books. He claimed to be a former heroin addict who hung out with the FMLN in El Salvador. His genius deserves comparison to the great Borges, but it’s safe to say that, unlike Borges, a literary lapdog of Argentina’s generals, Bolaño would never have addressed the military leaders of the fascist Argentine coup as “gentlemen.” Bolaño wrote without a net, over the abyss of atrocity into which his generation vanished. He did so in an effort to make a literature that recorded for all time where the bodies were buried. As a female reporter in 2666 says, “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”

+++

The dangers of believing false narratives should be evident by now. In the wake of our current financial collapse, it is now widely understood that the US’s sense of itself as the richest and most powerful nation in the world in this past has been kept artificially afloat by the import of cheap goods and credit from China. These cheap goods are manufactured under labor and environmental conditions much like those of Bolaño’s maquiladoras – conditions we tell ourselves we would never allow here at home, yet which are vital to our economic survival. Dealings with China have, instead, spread repressive tactics in reverse back to corporations from the United States, such as when Google memorably agreed to remove all reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from its Google China site.

There is a crucial difference between hope and self-delusion. In its dogged search for uncomfortable truth, 2066 creates a hard-won hope that is different from the way in which that word manifests on the campaign trail. It respects the hope that truth matters, that staring it down can provide the shock of self-awareness that makes real change possible.

In the meantime, there is the hope of literature itself. In 2666, Bolaño devotes a scene to one of his disappeared characters, a Spanish poet who lives out his days in an insane asylum in the countryside. The poet’s doctor – who in a classically deadpan Bolaño twist tells us he is also the poet’s biographer – reflects on the asylum into which the poet has vanished. “Someday we will all finally leave (the asylum) and this noble institution will stand abandoned,” he says. “But in the meantime, it is my duty to collect information, dates, names. To confirm stories.”

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 301, among the pines of old black and white photos of turpentine camps and prison work crews. Under a southern moon, I battled mosquitos and listened to a chorus of frogs in the swamp that must have once been heard by the very men who built the railroad and I waited there so impatiently on the porch of a grainer car, as if on the threshold of adulthood itself, for the train to carry me to somewhere else.
As the 90’s ushered in a new era of gentrified, cookie-cutter, chain store cities, I continued looking for authenticity wherever I could find it, criss-crossing the country several times on hundreds of freight trains. Today, I still think about that place out of time, and when I’m sick of computers and phones and NPR news and everything else, I find myself heading to the train yard. In new works that seem eerily timed to headlines announcing impending US financial collapse, prolific writer William T. Vollmann and photographer, Mike Brodie have headed there, too, suggesting that a resurgence of popular culture interest in train hopping stories is somehow a barometer of public dissatisfaction as well.
The “somewhere else” I thought I wanted to go on that first train ride probably looked a lot like the romantic universe encapsulated in the Polaroid photos of his train-hopping friends that Mike Brodie, aka The Polaroid Kidd takes. Brodie’s photos, posted on his website Ridin’ Dirty Face.com, depict a sort-of hobo-topia where packs of grubby kids (and dogs!) play music, share food, and forage in the ruins of post-industrial America together, while traveling together from town to town on freight trains and homemade river rafts. Everyone’s young and good-looking and, conspicuously, there is no one around who appears to be over 25. As my first train left the yard that long ago day, I sang Johnny Cash songs out loud, because, at 19, I wished my life was an epic country song. Similarly, the subjects of Brodie’s pictures wear suspenders and fedoras and patched-up, oversize suit coats, as if they walked out of newsreels from the Great Depression. In Brodie’s “somewhere else”, though, the Depression is glamorous. In one of the most charming – and possibly most emblematic – photos in Brodie’s show at SF Cameraworks, a young woman stands in the doorway of a rickety shack with a yard full of chickens pecking at her feet. The image at first glance seems almost lifted straight from Walker Evans’ classic photos of 1930’s austerity in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Except in Brodie’s photo, the light is sensual, the mood somehow humid –summertime — and the woman is, incongruously, wearing a beaded ballroom gown.
Brodie’s photos, in fact, seem to depict a longing for a world uncomplicated by money or its absence – an aesthetic nostalgia for a time when no one had any money – and had, perhaps, more integrity without it. Yet Brodie’s images of romanticized destitution have, quite ironically, found their way to the Louvre and become high priced art objects themselves. Frankly, I find it creepy that art collectors will pay top dollar for highly aesthetic portraits of cute – and apparently penniless – teenage, punk waifs, staring guilelessly with wide eyes our of dirt-smudged faces into the camera. Yet, curiously, Brodie’s photos have become so valuable just as the country stands on the edge of the kind of Great Depression they romanticize. While Brodie – the winner at age 22 of the 2008 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers – is highly talented and his photos are certainly collectable for their own sake, the buzz about Brodie’s subjects suggests that the art world is weary of itself and willing to go to as great lengths as the trainhopping kids themselves in its own search for authenticity. The Great Depression to come is, on some level, longed for.
Despite sudden popularity, Brodie’s own motives for his work seem to be a sincere effort to celebrate his community. “I just want to spend the next couple of years traveling around, following the warm weather and documenting the train-hopping youth of America,” says Brodie in a recent interview, and that joy of young friendships and the camaraderie of the road come through in his work. In one soon-to-be classic photo, three train hoppers are shot from the waist down on a moving train, three sets of rolled up trousers exposing dirty legs hanging off the train with the gravel railbed and tracks a blur below. In the center of the photo a can of beans with a spoon sticking out of it is being handed up from the left of the photo to another hand reaching down from the upper right. The motion evokes a sort-of tramp reenactment of The Creation of Adam and the meeting of the hands on the can of beans gives the photo its emotional punch. Though the young legs look straight out of Little Rascals, the image is timeless, as poignant and enduring as summer itself. When Brodie’s photos, like this one, escape from the self-consciousness of his staged portraits, they seem to effortlessly capture the exhilaration of being young and on a freight train with your whole life seemingly ahead of you. The picture in this show of the kid hanging off the back of a moving train by one tattooed arm may be bought, but the middle finger salute the kid triumphantly gives to the camera says the joke is on the collector who has to pay for it.
That the kid giving the finger will likely one day resemble William T. Vollmann in Vollmann’s new train hopping memoir, Riding Toward Everywhere, is a joke played by time on all of us. As the book begins, Vollmann finds himself nearing 50, recovering from a broken pelvis, and too hobbled to any longer catch moving freights. Without even a fedora, Vollmann’s humbly cowers around the perimeter of the train yard carrying his only fashion accessory, his trusty orange bucket (“One could sit on it, carry things in it and piss into it”), while contemplating his own life’s narrowing options. “I hope that as what I get diminishes thanks to old-age, erotic rejection, financial loss, or authority’s love taps, I will continue to receive it gratefully.” Like a veteran pitcher who has lost some zip on his fastball, though, Vollmann gets by on guts, his vitality seeming to flow from an ornery and uncompromising hatred of authority unmatched by young Brodie. “The activities described in this book are criminally American,” Vollmann states in a disclaimer. In an increasingly controlled and uptight America where “year by year the Good Germans march deeper into (your) life” Vollmann holds onto the hope that the freight train can still help him find a hole in the net.
Vollmann includes 20 or so pages of his own photos, but, in sharp contrast to Brodie’s photos, none of them feature anything you could really call pretty – except perhaps the snapshot of a friendly waitress in Wyoming, whose inclusion here only underscores the loneliness and desperation Vollmann finds on the rails. Vollmann’s camera finds cardboard camps in the weeds and toothless tramps, stern rail cops and racist graffiti under rail bridges. For Vollmann, the train yard represents a collection of failed possibilities. In a boxcar heading from Salinas to Oakland, Vollmann finds an old hobo moniker from La Grande, OR written on the wall and he spends the long boxcar night, contemplating a woman he once loved who lived in La Grande and what might have been if they’d stayed together. In the morning light through the boxcar doors, looking out over “cornfields and the half-constructed houses of our ever-swarming California,” Vollmann mourns “not merely my past but the vanished American West itself where I would have homesteaded with my pioneer bride.”
Well-versed in the lore of rail hopping, Vollmann goes to places like Spokane, WA and Laramie, Wyoming in search of the hobo jungles of today’s American West. However, where proud Wobblies and tramps once cooked up a mulligan stew and waited to catch out, Vollmann today finds only a police lineup of blown out drunks and SSI recipients. Free to roam the rails under that big Western sky, they still seem as herded and docile as those last few sad buffalo now living out their days at the end of Golden Gate Park.
As in his last book, Poor People, the somewhat incoherent interviews Vollmann records with these subjects seem meant to stand in for real sociology. While the elliptical conversations do give a somewhat impressionistic take on what life on the rails is like, Vollmann’s subjects are hardly representative. Like Brodie, Vollmann is in thrall to a particular aesthetic, but Vollmann seems committed to sensationalizing the ugliest aspects of the rails, obsessing over swastika tags and crude drawings of women’s genitalia scrawled by bums on boxcar walls. While spending much of the book looking for the FTRA, a half-mythical hobo gang whose members supposedly will “kill you for $5 in foodstamps”, Vollmann conspicuously fails to mention possibly the largest population on the West Coast train lines — undocumented Latino farm workers. In my own experience hopping trains, I’ve shared food, water, and a sweet sense of humanity beyond language with such laborers many times. (Just last October, when I got off a train that stopped at the bridge over the American River in Vollmann’s hometown, Sacramento, I looked back to see five Latino guys carrying their belongings in Safeway plastic bags, scurrying up the embankment to get on the train before it started moving again toward Stockton.) Their presence on the rails is so great that I’d venture to say that if train cops actually tried to stop them from riding, an apple would cost five bucks, because there’d be no one to pick them.
Still, despite self-consciously labeling himself a “fauxbeaux”, the National Book Award winner gets most details of train hopping right. Insider safety tips – don’t forget to put a rail spike in the boxcar door so it can’t slam shut on you! – are well-represented and Vollmann is especially good on the sights, sounds, and feelings of actually being on the train. He captures perfectly that indescribably victorious moment when your train is finally leaving the yard and it starts to accelerate just as you pass the cursed patch of weeds and litter where you’ve been hiding from the yard bull for 24 hours. The book is exhilarating when Vollmann, the old pro, simply lays back and describes what he sees out of his boxcar door.
Unfortunately, Vollmann, it turns out, doesn’t really have even a relatively short book’s worth of train hopping stories. After the excitement of the handful of train rides described early in the book, Vollmann starts to pad the book’s page count by dusting off other writers from the past and their takes on The Road. Jack Kerouac, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway are, predictably, quoted at length here and Mark Twain’s raft on the Mississippi, of course, makes a guest appearance. Vollmann’s book, it turns out, is a lot like a freight train ride itself: in the beginning its really exciting and seems like it could be going anywhere, but after awhile it starts moving so slowly that you can’t wait to get off!
Yet, Vollmann’s book still has something to say about the search for real freedom — about its elusiveness and the price of searching for it. “And we flee in search of last summer or next summer, but there’s no harm in it if we know all the time it’s only a shadow show.” Somewhere between the eternal search for next summer and the eternal search for last summer is found the ache that Vollmann feels in his bones as he struggles to climb aboard a boxcar. In the years between the kid that Brodie photographs hanging off the back of speeding freight train and the incoherent drunk living by the tracks that Vollmann interviews there are the cherished bits of freedom snatched from razor-wired trainyards and robot train cops — the view through the boxcar door of elk at sunrise or the cold water in the trackside creek in the middle of nowhere Montana; the experiences so rare and true that mere images of them are worth thousands in galleries. The holes in the net are rare these days. I think often of that long ago first train ride and I think about that place out of time. It is a place seen in my favorite photo in Brodie’s exhibition at SF Cameraworks. In the picture, there are seven kids photographed out of the rear window in the back of a pickup truck, rolling down a flat, prairie, Middle-American road at dusk. Hair is blowing all around in the wind, but one guy on the left of the photo is bent over in cool concentration, rolling a smoke, as a warm yellow sunlight, the very color of nostalgia floods everything in the photo. Whether you’re Mike Brodie, 22, or William Vollmann, 48, or myself, just now at 35, you can’t help it; you want to live in this photo forever.

“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 is a rich, underground history of “all those who’ve ever felt like they have no control of their environment” using art to make their voices heard. There are hundreds of photos – many in full color – of stencils painted illegally in the streets of cities throughout the world, and a straight forward text that chronicles stenciling’s rise as an art movement. Macphee follows stencils from the streets of Sandinista- controlled Nicaragua, to the squatter scene of the Lower East Side in the 80′s to today’s worker uprisings in Argentina and the global public art uprising against Bush and the war in Iraq (there are 8 pages of this, from 6 countries), providing art critique along the way.
The joy of Stencil Pirates, however, lies in its vast collection of non-political art that show artists pushing the boundaries of what you would think possible with spray paint and forms cut out of cardboard. There are elaborate, multi-colored stencil murals of children playing, people kissing, or riding bikes. There are pages and pages of stenciled faces, robots, astronauts, guns, gardens – the kind of anonymous art for art’s sake that you sometimes see popping up everywhere at once in The Mission when the real estate conditions are right. San Francisco is heavily represented and local readers are sure to recognize the works of local artists Scott Williams, HEART 101, SHY GIRL, GRACE, Claude Moller, Ivy McClelland and more.
Macphee extends his faith in Free Art For The People to the reader, packing the book with pages of How-To advice on making and painting stencils, as well as including ready made stencils that the reader can cut out of the book and use on their own. Reading Stencil Pirates makes you want to dust off your Exact-o-knife and be part of the conversation that is going on all around you on the sidewalks and walls of the City.

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=873

Listen here: http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=712

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=797