Walking down San Francisco's Eddy Street is a bad idea. Don't do it. But if you do—please don't—keep an eye out for the star of my new iPhone 3GS production. Also take a minute to explore buddythebestcat, whose cat-impersonating-a-cop updates are reason enough to join Twitter.
ONE: I'm in the process of reviewing another book for the San Francisco Chronicle: Jessica Anthony's "The Convalescent1," published by McSweeney's and currently living on my bookshelf next to a book written by—excuse me while I throw-up in my mouth—Nicholas Sparks, whose website also makes me gag. Yes, I will read "The Wedding." No, I am not excited about it. No, I did not buy the book. No, it does not belong to me. Yes, I will put it off for as long as possible. No, it was not my idea to read the book. No, I am not embarrassed. Well, maybe a little. I probably won't read it on BART.
TWO: Today I'm gonna head to the Asian Art Museum for its Lords of the Samurai exhibit. Samurais are by default kinda awesome plus it's free plus I plan to read Shōgun in the Fall plus the Asian Art Museum is a 10-minute walk from my apartment plus I'm hoping the gift shop sells swords so that when crackheads in the Tenderloin3 fuck with me, I can stab them in the eye. Seriously, I will stab you in the eye, crackheads.
THREE: I've been volunteering at 826 Valencia in the Mission. I help kids with their creative writing. If you like fictional pirates and children who are smarter than your kids—seriously, your kids are dumb!—check out 826.
FOUR: I'm one of the judges for Casilda's Hat Contest. It's unrelated to 826 but it also involves kids and creative writing. There are about 20 finalists whose stories I'll read. Kids wrote stories using this video as a prompt. I'm not really into cartoons but the video is impressive work. Casilda is a scary little girl with supernatural powers who wears a black hat with three bloody human teeth on its side. The winner of the contest is the kid who tells the best story of how Casilda came into possession of the hat.
FIVE: Yesterday on my way to the Dolores Park3 in the Mission I walked down Langton Alley, where you can find the Mac Dre Memorial. If you're not familiar with Mac Dre—and unless you're from the Bay Area you're probably not—he's a legendary Bay Area rapper ("Feelin' Myself") who was murdered in 2004. He basically invented the culture that led to the Hyphy movement, and he definitely invented the Thizzle Dance. He was a weird dude whose music I don't always enjoy, but I do appreciate weird people. Unless it's crack that's making you weird. If that's the case, then I will stab you in the eye. We've been over this already.
1: Publisher's note: The Convalescent is the story of a small, bearded man selling meat out of a bus parked next to a stream in suburban Virginia... and also, somehow, the story of 10,000 years of Hungarian history.
2: (1:36-1:42) Get back motherfucker, y'all don't know me like that!
3: SETTING OFF ILLEGAL FIREWORKS IN A CROWDED PUBLIC PARK IS NOT COOL. Seriously, what is the appeal of M-80s? All they do is make a loud noise and introduce to the party the risk that someone might lose a hand. Please explain to me why this is fun.
Cobra Deez rocks the Stanky Legg1 while helping me test video2 on the new iPhone 3GS.
1: Stanky Legg pro-fessionals.
2: Recorded and uploaded using nothing but the iPhone. No laptops necessary. Way too solid.
Last night I kicked it with my homegirl Lace. I hadn't seen Lace in a minute—not since waaaay back in May1—and being with her puts me in a good mood. She keeps things in perspective. Earlier this year, I got jumped by two guys who snapped my ring-finger at the joint, after which, jacked-up on adrenaline and not feeling a thing, I further destroyed the bones in my hand by punching one of the guys a few times, and I needed surgery and then surgery again2 and it was my boy Andrew Machado who helped me keep my head on straight, helped me keep things in perspective. Kinda like Lace. Anyway, today Andrew (aka Pelechati aka Bald Beauty aka Shadow Machado aka Mr. Mortgage) started his new job at Apture. Big ups to Andrew. I'm not sure I've ever worked with someone who works harder than him. His work ethic is ridiculous.
Also ridiculous?
The fact that a pitchman dies—basically nothing more than a lackey to consumerism—and it's the top story on CNN.com not once but twice over the course of three days. Don't get me wrong. It's sad when most anyone3 dies. But it's not newsworthy unless we as a culture allow it to be newsworthy, and that's what I think is ridiculous—pathetic even—that consumerism is such an overwhelming force in America that it overshadows, um, important things.
Stay tuned for the Hypocrite Alert.
Today I bought the video-capable iPhone (16 GB white) and Beats By Dre earbuds. The Beats By Dre sound is great and I love that the wires are tangle-free. They're 100% Beast Mode.
Ed. note: I can't wait to rock my new theme song on Beats By Dre. Big ups Cobra Deezy on the find.
1: Completely random side note—for real, super super super random and tangential: One of my favorite literary characters in recent memory is named May. May Kasahara from the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami). Is it possible to develop a crush on a fictional character? Rhetorical question. Because I did. I kinda developed a crush on May. Of course nothing happened—she is only 16 years old in the book—plus there's that whole not-really-existing thing. I know what you're thinking: "Sixteen? That's creepy." But keep in mind what my boy Cobra Deezy pointed out: "Murakami wrote the book fifteen years ago, when [you were] only fifteen, so in a way it's like you fell for an older woman," and strangely enough the whole awkward concept of falling for someone who exists in a different time period, that actually plays itself out in a separate Murakami book, Kafka on the Shore, which has nothing to do with Frank Kafka but which does feature a main character named Kafka, who falls in love with the 15-year-old version of a 50-year-old woman who he meets in quote-unquote real life. He meets the 15-year-old version of her in dreams and/or visions. Is the 15-year-old version of the older woman a living-spirit, a la Tale of Genji? I don't know. It's confusing. But if you find it at all interesting, check out Márquezakami, which is a book club Cobra Deezy and I started. We meet in San Francisco monthly to discuss Murakami and also Gabriel García Márquez. Our next meeting is July 26: One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez (432 pages). Oh, and the whole crush-on-a-literary-character thing? That was basically a thinly velied excuse to segue-to and hype the book club. Or maybe the book club and living-spirit talk was a thinly veiled excuse to distract y'all from the fact that I developed a crush on a 16-year-old fictional character? Seriously, though, read the book. May Kasahar is 100% Beast Mode.
2: Don't click the link if you're not prepared to see a few "awful" post-op photos.
3: Cough-cough Bernie.
Cop a pair of New Balance 574 with 45-inch fat laces1 double-knotted up top and you'll never have to tie your shoes again. I got four pairs of fresh sneaks today: three pairs of New Balance and a pair of ALIFE hightops. Super cheap via the Internet. You ever heard of the Internet? It's on computers now.
1: 574s + 45-inch laces is an exact recipe. Tried. Tested. Not to be altered. This isn't stir-fry, son. You can't just go around substituting ingredients all willy-nilly like there won't be consequences. Serious ones.
It's been a minute1 or more.
Two things you should know about me you definitely don't need to know but are true anyway: I love to read and I love to walk around the City. I walk basically everywhere. Unless it's more than an hour on foot. If it's more than an hour, chances are more than decent I'll just go somewhere else instead. But yesterday my two loves did not play together nicely in the sandbox.
Why not?
It's a mystery! Stay tuned!
The San Francisco Public Library is holding an awesome book sale down in the Mission2 this weekend. I definitely don't need any more books. Not a single one. If you waste 15 seconds of your life and visit my Goodreads page, you'll see there are 101 books on my to-read shelf. These aren't just books pulled out of thin air. These are books already sitting on my bookshelf3 and waiting to be read.
Yesterday I made the mistake of buying 16 books3A at once: Thomas Pynchon (x2), Frank Kafka, Don DeLillo, James Clavell (x5), Yukio Mishima, Gregory David Roberts, Colson Whitehead, Joseph Heller, Peter Carey, Yasunari Kawabata and Philip Roth. Actually, that wasn't my mistake. All 16 books together cost only $24, and because the San Francisco Public Library is a non-profit, you don't even have to pay tax. My mistake4 was buying too many hardcovers, which are noticeably heavier, particularly those of Clavell and Pynchon, both of whom think 400-page books are for babies, so why not tack on a few hundred more pages, all of which is to say (drumroll): I bought so many books I couldn't even walk home. I had to take BART. Hence the escalator. How many of you figured out that mystery ahead of time? What a terrible story, right?
1: I was in D.C. for two weeks taking pictures of gay stuffed-animal horses (etc.) and hanging out with my brother plus a couple of Brazilian women who made it quite clear that I am light years away from being able to speak properly even a single sentence of Portuguese. One of the Brazilians is my brother's wife, Nara, who also speaks Japanese. If you've always assumed Portuguese is like Spanish but a little more difficult, you're wrong. It's like Spanish, but instead of being manageable, it's fucking impossible. I didn't even bother trying to speak anything in Japanese. My intellectual self-esteem was already rock bottom and ready for recovery.
2: Mission & 20th or thereabouts. Actually it's on 20th about three blocks east of Mission. Maybe Harrison? I don't remember exactly. It's huge and you can't miss it, and although I'm certainly able to look it up real quick and find the exact address for you, do it yourself and take pride in the fact that you're not a lazy bum like me.
3: One of the side effects from my hand surgery. While I was out of work and recovering, I had too much time on my hands—I'm clever with puns!—and I visited used bookstores four or five times a week, walking all over the City and usually buying two or three books per visit. Now I can't stop. Fortunately my boy Davy is equally addicted: Yesterday alone he bought 24 books.
3A [Ed. note]: Two days later I returned and bought 35 more books. For real, I have a problem. But what was I supposed to do? On Sunday every single book was a dollar, and they had tons of Updike and Roth and Pynchon and Smiley and McEwan and two or three noteworthy Japanese authors whose names I won't attempt but if you scroll through my Goodreads bookshelf you'll find 'em.
4: My second mistake was wearing my ugly purple sneakers, but that was more of a personal shout-out and inside joke between me and Davy.
Less than three months ago I finished David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" in only three weeks. Reading this book was like a full-time job. For reals. That's the only way I was able to finish it so quickly. Some days I read for six or eight hours. Hundreds of thousands of words and nearly 1,100 large pages painted with tiny font. The book is amazing. No description does it justice.
Two days ago I discovered Infinite Summer. So here I am. Committed to reading "Infinite Jest" again.1 This time I'm giving myself three months. The entire summer. Hence the name. Infinite Summer.
It's all making sense now, isn't it?
Find "Infinite Summer" on Facebook and Twitter and the old-fashioned Internet. Don't kid yourself that 75 pages/week will always be easy. Sometimes I'd make it through only 10 pages an hour.
This isn't Hop on Pop, yo!
1: I probably wouldn't be doing it except I want my boy Davy to experience "Infinite Jest," and I don't think he'd do it without me. Normally he's into really short books. Like 300-pages-is-too-long short. All of this is similar to the reason I'll be reading "East of Eden" and "Grapes of Wrath" before the end of the year, because those are Davy's conditions for joining me on the nearly 1,200-page "Shōgun," and although I'm sure Steinbeck is worthwhile on his own, he isn't exactly my first choice, because I wasn't a huge fan of "Cannery Row," and also because samurais are cooler than sardines, and that's not even close, and this is definitely a run-on sentence.
Ed. note: "East of Eden" was incredible and "Grapes of Wrath" was pretty bomb also.
It's not often that books make me laugh out loud. Probably because I hate laughing. I definitely don't like jokes. I'm, like, totally serious all the time. For real. I dare you. Try to make me laugh.
Wuh-what?! You don't believe in equal rights for gay people? Ha! You got me! That's hilarious! Kudos to you, my friend. Well played. I'm totally laughing. I'm sure our Heavenly Father is proud of you and the example you set. Maybe next we can eliminate women's suffrage and re-enslave American Negroes?!
Today I finished reading Philip Roth's, "Sabbath's Theater," which in 1995 received the National Book Award. The novel includes a scene (p. 277) that reminded me of California's bigotry1 with regard to same-sex marriage. Protagonist Mickey Sabbath2 visits his wife in rehab and meets Donald, who is upset that his wife left him for another woman, and also that a Jewish rabbi married the pair. Sabbath is a genius at pushing buttons.
Donald: "Fuck that. I'm Jewish. What the fuck is a rabbi doing marrying two lesbos? You think in Israel a rabbit would do it? No, only in Ithaca, New York!" He then proceeds to ask whether or not the rabbi would "have married her to a zebra," to which Sabbath replies:
"Well, I think not. A rabbi wouldn't touch a zebra. Can't. They don't have cloven hooves. For a rabbi to officiate at the marriage of a person to an animal, the animal has to chew its cud and have a cloven hoof. A camel. A rabbi can marry a person to a camel. A cow. Any kind of cattle. Sheep. Can't marry someone to a rabbit, however, because even though a rabbit chews its cud, it doesn't have a cloven hoof. They also eat their own shit, which, on the face of it, you might think a point in their favor: chew their food three times. But what is required is twice. That's why a rabbi can't marry a person to a pig. Not that the pig is unclean. That's not the problem, never has been. The problem with the pig is, though it has a cloven hoof, it doesn't chew its cud. A zebra may or may not chew its cud—I don't know. But it doesn't have a cloven hoof, and with the rabbis, one strike and you're out."1: Don't think gay people should be allowed to get married? Great! I totally encourage you to have an opinion, and I also encourage you to share your opinion openly, that way your kids and their kids and their kids and everyone else in the future will know you're a fucking bigot.
I recently finished "The Stand," by Stephen King, "The Complete & Unabridged Edition," a.k.a. This Monster Should Really Be Abridged. Whenever I got bored1 with the book, which basically happened whenever it was in my hands, I'd typically start daydreaming about what I could read next, and then I'd go for a walk. Inevitably I'd end up wandering the aisles of used bookstores2 and buying more books than I need, especially considering that I already owned 40+ books waiting to be read. But whatever. Some people buy too many shoes. Others buy too many drugs. I buy too many books. I don't really care.
[I'll get to Haruki Murakami & Gabriel García Márquez in a minute. Bear with me. Or don't.]
I was amazed and also kinda embarrassed3 when I counted my fresh pile after finally finishing King's quote-unquote masterpiece: 27 new4 books. That's how many I bought from my start of "The Stand" until its finish. For reals, that is a serious amount of bored wandering.
Ok. You've been patient. Thank you. Now it's time for Haruki Murakami & Gabriel García Márquez. I wish my name had an accent. Anyway, my boy Davy and I5 started the hottest San Francisco book club, son.
Márquezakami!
Hit-up the above Facebook link for more details (and to join the group, yo):
Book club that reads Haruki Murakami and Gabriel García Márquez. Bring your own beer and books. Murakami and Márquez have been described as "kinda strange" and "like candy" and "WTF?" and "fucking awesome" and you should join us once a month on Sundays at 2:00 p.m.
This originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on May 10, 2009.
"Pop Apocalypse," by Lee Konstantinou
Reviewed by Dewey Hammond
The year is 2029. The British prime minister's son, William Pearson, prepares to rape two young women on the reality show "That's So Fucked Up." But Eliot R. Vanderthorpe Jr., his co-star, experiences a "curious revelation," and the 27-year-old hero of "Pop Apocalypse" smashes a bottle of Dom Pérignon against Pearson's head.
So begins the debut novel from San Francisco writer Lee Konstantinou, whose first effort feels like driving through an art museum at 60 miles per hour. There is plenty to catch your attention, but you'll remember little of the adventure next week, tomorrow or even five minutes from now.
The landscape is littered with cultural references that offer little in the way of characterization or context: OutKast and iPhones and "a vintage 2000s-era Mini Cooper" and "an old-school 2000s-era cell phone" and "his vintage 2000s-era Converse All Star high-tops."
The subverted rape is followed by eight pages of unnecessary action, none of which explains Eliot's sudden change of heart, the personal transformation ostensibly at the root of his quest to prevent a global apocalypse in Konstantinou's satire, which mocks commercialism, religion and society's self-destructive nature.
As the third decade of the millennium comes to a close, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are at continued odds with one another. Evangelicals masquerading as tourists have launched a terrorist attack against a holy temple. Nobody is happy. Global conflict is a near certainty. All of it can be monitored live on the Holy Land Channel. "Today's Terror Forecast has predicted a day of low-to-moderate unrest for East Jerusalem with mild political pressure moving inward from the west."
The United Nations no longer includes the United States and Western Europe, both of which now fall under the umbrella of the Freedom Coalition, the mission of which is the spread of capitalism at the expense of terror. Ironically and by default, terrorists own copyrights and distribution rights for images of their crimes. Dollars and cents trump all else. Entertainment is an acceptable, preferred even, substitute for spirituality and common sense.
Personal reputations are bought and sold, quite literally. Even the hero sells his reputation in an effort to repair damage done to his revered family name following his Champagne-bottle attack. Surrounded by greedy advisers and family, Eliot takes his reputation public with an initial public offering on the New York Reputations Exchange (NYRE). He settles on the personal slogan "Be excellent," lifted from the 1989 movie "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure."
The characters are not dynamic and the plot is tenuous, strung together in a way that leaves you not caring about the people, places or plotlines, and wanting more depth from all of the above. The opening scene is the last you'll see of the wannabe rapist, the first in a long line of people and things that come and go too quickly.
Even those characters with more than just a cameo are not especially dynamic, and this includes Eliot. Sure, he has his "revelation," but it doesn't unfold naturally in the narrative in a way that even satires deserve. Even if it did, it's not clear that's his motivation to save the world is even partly altruistic, because there is an evil look-alike who stole his identity and has plans to murder a prominent religious leader, so personal transformation or not, Eliot really has no choice but to step in and put a stop to this apocalypse nonsense. The evil look-alike even duped his girlfriend.
With the help of Internet fan boys, Eliot escapes anonymity and makes a dramatic entrance, confronting the troublemaker, whom he has dubbed Aliot. "Under the careful supervision of Secret Service gun muzzles, Eliot pulls off his parachute and flight suit" and shortly thereafter regains his identity, with one notable exception: His girlfriend falls in love with Aliot, the man who shot her boyfriend in the chest with a dart gun.
But the threat to world peace is quelled, if only temporarily. Ultimately, the destiny of humankind is put in the hands of consumers, in the form of a phone poll, a fitting end for a world whose characters are as shallow as the entertainment.
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