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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Chief Norm Stamper’s memoir attempts to remake the man who ordered the gassing of nonviolent protesters at the WTO protests in Seattle 11/99 into a progressive hero. I called him on it in the sfbg, while admitting that I somewhat enjoyed his entertaining book… REVIEW “If you can’t beat [...]