THE COMPUTER AT THE JAMAICA PLAIN LIBRARY
★★★★★ (3 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the computer at the Jamaica Plain Library. …more

SCRATCH AND SNIFF
★★★★★ (3 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing Scratch and Sniff. …more

At the Jackson Arms shooting range in South San Francisco, we were issued earmuffs so tight I felt the beginnings of a headache …more

Dear L.,

You started walking about a month ago. At first, you could only make it five or six steps before losing your footing—before dropping, a bit violently, into a sitting position on the floor. …more

THE RAPTURE
★★★★★ (1 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the Rapture. …more

HP CUSTOMER SERVICE
★★★★★ (4 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing HP customer service. …more

In July, two nights after my daughter was born, I took the subway home from the hospital in the very early morning and spilled water all over the floor of the N train. The water poured out of a vase of celebratory roses sent by my parents, which I had put in a paper bag and nestled between my tired feet; when I fell asleep the vase toppled over in the bag and slowly seeped its lifeblood out through the brown paper. …more

In March, Soft Skull Press released For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question, Mac McClelland’s memoir of the six weeks she spent in Thailand, helping refugees from Burma living illegally in a border city. …more

It’s so pretty in San Francisco right now. All the clouds coming in above the blue and pink lights of the 500 Club. There’s the tattoo parlor and the laundrette and close by the bar with the bike rack and Adobe Books where they once organized all the books by color.

It’s cold and blowing and someone in Los Angeles said San Francisco is a city that doesn’t want to admit it’s cold. Others talk about the lack of seasons, how time passes, the summer of love, the speed addicts, Altamont, the sexual revolution, the pro-sex feminists. Lots of people have said San Francisco will make you soft and nobody ever disagreed with that. It’s a gentrified city, the city of Vesuvio and City Lights, though North Beach has become touristy and overpriced. It’s a white city with a huge Chinatown, a one time banking capital, the tip of the dot-com needle. See Leland Stanford’s orange bricks, the Southwest architectural style, the Mavericks looming over Half Moon Bay. All the parks and pastels. Whatever happened here? Everything and nothing. It’s a quiet town at night. The “hipsters” ride up and down the Mission on fixed speed bicycles. People drink single origin medium roasted coffee brewed by the cup. There are mid-priced restaurants that don’t serve anything not grown within thirty miles. The personal is political, gay marriage is a given, relationships have rules but they’re never what you expect. People celebrate naked and don’t wear much makeup. The clubs don’t make you wait to get in.

It’s a colder city than we care to admit. Soon they’ll close down all or some of Dolores Park for renovations. It’s a small place, seven by seven miles, made larger by the hills, but easy to bicycle because every hill has a valley. Only 800,000 people live here but the population density is high. It’s the center of the fifth largest metropolitan area in the country.

I’ve been here 12 years but have only ever gone to one museum. I was fighting with my girlfriend at the time and she asked me not to say anything so we walked around the de Young holding hands, looking at paintings without speaking.

Once the cloud cover’s complete the rain comes. It’s a city with high rents and small apartments. The population is over-educated, teaching jobs are hard to come by. The major newspaper is said to be on the verge of bankruptcy. There are perhaps more well known writers than any city other than New York. It’s a literary town, an art film town. They play a Wurlitzer pipe organ before showings at the Castro Theater. There are hundreds, thousands of places in city limits with views so stunning they steal your breath. The weather is worse than we think but the public transportation is better than we give it credit for. The food is generally good.

When the rain stops the sun comes out glaring across the wet streets. Sometimes I forget we’re on the edge of the country, or why I came here. I remember the first time, when I ended up buying a slice of pie on Union Street and noticing how clean the air was blowing in off the ocean. And the second time with my fiance when the car ran out of gas on the Oakland Bay Bridge. And the third time when I didn’t leave and parked above the Castro wandering down to 18th to hustle drinks. It could have worked out differently, but I didn’t have anywhere better to go at the time.

San Francisco recycles more than any other city in America. The grocery near my house charges upward of $2 an apple. There’s a lot of art and a lot of galleries. It’s expensive, and hard to find an apartment, but it’s an easy city to live in. You don’t need a car, everything’s close by. It’s the birthplace of Burning Man and burner culture and the Folsom Street Fair. Perhaps where I’m going with this is obvious, but not to me. There’s only the east end of the city, below the ball park, the last place left for any real development. It’s the times. They’ve added a muni track and passed propositions and sold off the land. There’s always provisions for below market rate housing, but it doesn’t work so well, though we probably try harder than most other cities would. It’s almost beside the point. Anyway, over time, if you allow yourself to forget, you can stop noticing how beautiful the city is. And it’s so easy to forget in San Francisco, because there are no seasons. If there’s no revolutions or earthquakes and if nobody burns down your apartment, and even then, time just passes without markers. I guess what I’m saying is it’s hard to keep track.

THAT PICTURE FRAME MODEL
★★★★★ (2 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing that picture frame model. …more

PONZANI BROS. APPLIANCE REPAIR
★★★★★ (1 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing Ponzani Bros. Appliance Repair. …more

FAKING AN ILLNESS FOR SYMPATHY
★★★★★ (4 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing faking an illness for sympathy. …more

THE FOR SALE SIGN PLACED IN MY YARD
★★★★★ (5 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the ‘for sale’ sign placed in my yard. …more

The night my father lost his left eye to a rare disease, my parents and I were playing a game we called The Memory Game. The goal was to find among sixty-eight cards in all two that matched. …more

A HAT MY NEPHEW FOUND ON THE BUS
★★★★★ (1 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing a hat my nephew found on the bus. …more

Writing by hand does remind you, primally, of what this crazy thing we do is made of. The careful spilling of ink on paper, the joints and girders of letters. Paragraphs as immovable as cornerstones and the proud stab of a punctuation mark. The occupational hazards of a rip in the paper’s membrane or a smear on your shirt sleeve. Cluttered, imperfect business. Like life. …more

“I really had nothing left in my life when I came to trucking, just the clothes on my back.” …more

Incapable of making a good cup of tea, Barbara Gupta asks her colleague Meena Patel to teach her how to make Chai, not the pre-sweetened Starbucks kind that she loves so much, but the real thing, like the Chai that was served to her when buying overpriced textiles while vacationing in Coldcutta, I mean Calcutta, I mean Kolkata. …more

There’s Something Wrong with Sven combines imaginative leaps worthy of Calvino and Vonnegut with tragicomic irreverence of the George Saunders variety. …more

“Hey, kid, what’s the perfect murder weapon?”

George Covaleski used to ask me this question every time I went to see him. No matter how hard I tried, I could never come up with the right answer.

George knew a lot about murder weapons and the many ways people could get killed. …more

Last week, D.H. Lawrence wasn’t mentioned by name in any sports sections, and no professional athletes cited The Rainbow in their postgame interviews. But there were intriguing baseball- and football-related stories about the line between violence and love, anger and passion, manhood and mania—and what could be more Lawrentian than that? …more

“Why are you doing these interviews?”

Wendi – Writer

We first met at a party at Lauren’s house. Pat brought you. I think you were in sixth grade, I was in seventh, he was in eighth. You were looking around the room, like your head was spinning, trying to take it all in, and there really wasn’t much to take in, just bowls of potato chips, nothing on TV. Pat said you were a good guy and if he vouched for someone that was fine. Because when Pat said someone wasn’t a good guy, that guy would walk off with my purse.

I tried to talk to you and you looked at me and said, “Why are we here? There’s so many better places to be right now.”

Pat was like, “Yeah, we could go get high somewhere.” I don’t really remember much of that particular night.

The next time I ran into you was at Pat’s. He was with Nicko and you and Nicko didn’t seem to get along. Nicko was acting like the pompous jerk he was and you were digging through this milk-crate full of books. You pulled something out and I said, “Oh yeah, that’s good.” You were like, “You read this?” We started talking about books and then you left. I said to Pat, “You have a smart friend?” He said, “One or two.” He told me you wrote poetry and I was impressed by that. He said I should hang out with you more. Pat said, “You’ve got a fucked up life and he’s got a fucked up life. You guys are the gold standard of fucked up lives.”

I started heroin really young. Because of my youth I didn’t have the big obvious tracks. I would use my knees and legs. Nicko was the one who caught me. I was in Brian’s room and Nicko came in and went running for Pat. Pat came and stood there and watched. He didn’t say a word. I finished, untied my arm, put everything away. He turned and walked out and the next time I saw him it was like nothing had ever happened. But all of a sudden everybody knew about it, which I think came from Nicko.

I heard stories about things you did. About you slitting your wrists. When your dad shaved your head everyone was talking about it. That was horrible. All the people we hung out with had long hair and getting your head shaved seemed like a way to cut you out of every group. Everyone was so proud of their hair. Fat Mike used to shoplift conditioner on a regular basis. Who shoplifts conditioner? Every guy got to hide behind his hair. You had to wear your troubles on the outside and that bothered me.

I was always hearing that you had killed yourself, then we had to call around to find out if it was true. I was fifteen and Iggy was living with me. He came home crying hysterically. He said, “Steve’s dead. He set himself on fire.” I called Brian and asked about you. “Steve’s in Pat’s room. You want to talk to him?” I told Iggy you were fine. But people were waiting for it.

Once my heroin use became known I was running on the death pool right along with you.

I took a lot of shit because of you. You didn’t have a place to stay and Iggy said I should let you stay at my house because I had the “cool” mom. But my mom was running a crack house and I didn’t want to take a chance, if the police came, of you getting caught.

I don’t think my mom called it a crack house. She said, “There were all kinds of drugs there.” It was a one bedroom on Sheridan and Thorndale.

None of us knew how to handle anything. No one could handle the stuff with me and the kiddie porn. No one could handle the stuff with you. We all ignored what happened to Brian and what was happening to Pat. It was so over all our heads, we just had no idea. Everybody wanted to come over to my house because there were all these drugs lying around. Iggy was there, Albert was there, Joe was there. I wouldn’t let Aaron and Kenwood over because they robbed housees. Tim slept with my mother, which was kind of strange. She would tell me about his curved penis. It used to drive me crazy that my friends would come over and get high with my mom. So I stopped being there. I stayed out as much as I could, spent my time in Albert’s garage, the kelly house, the laundromat.

My drug of choice was heroin and there wasn’t any heroin at my house so there wasn’t really any reason to stay there.

You were noticed. People would talk about you. People were interested. You were the walking freak show who was going to kill himself or this really smart guy who was throwing everything away. If you weren’t around people were upset and worried. They would look for you. It was one hell of a support system. You had people who cared about you but nobody knew how to show it. Also, people thought you were going to hurt them. Not in a violent way, but that you would say something. They were afraid you were going to insult them. You were great at that.

One night we were in the laundromat. I was the most desired female in the laundromat because my hands were small enough to reach inside the machines and pull things out. Brian was asleep on a bunch of washers. Iggy and Fat Mike were doing God knows what. Lynn asked me if you liked women. I said, “You’re asking me if he’s gay, or too self-absorbed to like women?” I said I thought you liked women.

“Do you think he’d like me?”
“Has he said anything?”
“He scares me.” She said Brian would hate her dating you.

A week later we were all hanging out at Boone and you showed up and Lynn just gawked at you. I think she thought you could protect her. But you were living on top of Quick Stop, so I’m not exactly sure what you could have protected her from.

All the girls were looking for someone to take care of them and the guys were looking for the same thing. All Pat wanted was someone who wasn’t going to throw shit at his head every ten minutes. All Brian wanted was someone to mother him and have sex with him. A whole group of people that wanted people to take care of them, I don’t know how any of us got through it. All anybody thought of was getting high. We tried to cover for each other but we never tried to help each other. Instead of saying something nice to someone we would just hand them a bottle or a joint.

When I was 17 I was dating a guy and he was 24 or 25. He was an amazing drunk and pill head and his idol was GG Allin. We were at a Ramones show at the Aragon and someone walked past wearing a Charles Manson jacket. I loved the jacket because I have a serial killer obsession and I walked over and said so. It was GG. He took off the jacket and let me wear it.

GG would just come in and out of my life. He’d send me articles on Joey Ramone, or things he thought I would like. I still have all these trinkets sitting in a box that GG sent me. When GG died in his video tape will he left me the Manson jacket. His brother tried to give it to me. I was like, “Bury him in it.”

I stopped doing heroin 11 years ago because I woke up and looked in the mirror and hated the way I looked. I had just split my first marriage. It took about a month and a half to kick the heroin. Worst time of my entire life. Then I started doing what I was comfortable with, which was writing and all that crap. And somehow it all worked out. I’m concentrating on writing. I had something in Cosmo but it was under a fake name.

My mom and I talk almost every day. We talk about the crack house. She thinks it’s all so funny, part of a great rich past. My dad is dead and I’m happy about it.

My husband and I have been together about seven years. I met him through work. Everybody was like, “Oh my God, he’s such a bad guy!” He was a drunk and I was psychotic and I got on Zoloft and he cut down on the alcohol and we haven’t had a fight in a long time. We haven’t had sex in a long time either.

I don’t freak out anymore. There used to be a whole bunch of violence. I whipped a phone through the third floor window, then I put my arm through it. Finally they just replaced it with plexiglass.

I have a very large pentagram tattooed on my back and I have a couple of God fearing friends who say the Lukemia is because of the whole devil thing. I became a Satanist because God didn’t help me. Satanism is run on the basic tenet that you are your own god.

I haven’t talked about a lot of this stuff in twenty years. My husband doesn’t know three quarters of this stuff. I remember people saying, “I don’t want to remember.” When you spend your life like most of us did the last thing you want is for someone to remind you what it’s like. Part of me feels the same weird responsibility I felt back then which is, ‘don’t tell.’ Everybody was hiding something. Hiding from the cops or robbing houses. Not one of us was doing anything particularly legal. We all had to keep secrets. Nobody cares anymore.

I had to deal with your book, A Life Without Consequences. Normally I would read it in a night, but it took me five days. You never came off to me as mean. You were always polite. You were smart and you used big words. But sometimes you would get these sad clouds. Lynn used to call it the Charlie Brown. All of a sudden you were sad about something. I would see Lynn and she would say, “Steve was so sad today.” I saw it a few times. It never seemed permanent. You wanted to do stuff. You wanted to learn stuff. You seemed like you were in a rush, a rush to get past everything and get to where you are now.

**

photo of Bryn Mawr and Ashland from Chicago Milexmile

Read the rest of the interviews here.

I’m a congenital traveler, had been long before I wrote my first book. I took my first plane ride when I was two weeks old (taught me to travel light) and haven’t slowed since. Other than the frequency of travel (you want me to come to China and you’ll pay for it? Granada and Madrid, really?) what has changed since I’ve officially become a writer is that I’m now given social license to do what I’ve always done. I’m no longer stupid and slightly insane; I’m eccentric and dedicated to collecting stories, compulsive even. …more

As a society, there are specific fashion trends we all look back on and can pretty much agree were horrible mistakes. …more

My high school soccer coach was a Guatemalan immigrant who had made his way to the States when he was in his twenties. At first he’d earned his living as an Arthur Murray dance instructor, but that phase of his life, at least to those of us he coached, had faded into an unlikely myth. …more

I put myself in the group home. I was in the therapist office with my mom and I said, “I give up. I’m not going to try anymore,” meaning getting along with my mom, and he suggested the group home. To me it was a terrific idea. …more

Jenni – Patient Account Representative

I treat people the way I’m treated, with the same respect. I’m not worried about your feelings. …more

The e-ticket I held in my hand entitled me to board two airplanes, which I did.  I flew all the way from Cairo International Airport to the glitzy city of Dubai with its innumerable skyscrapers jutting up out of the pastel-pink sands of that part of Arabia. …more

A group of Mexican teenagers encounters a bizarre America in Luis Alberto Urrea’s latest novel. …more

During an assembly-line interview process last week, I sat with writer and director Carlos Cuarón to talk about his new film, Rudo y Cursi. We met up at a self-described rock-and-roll hotel suite in downtown San Francisco. With his rat’s tail haircut and unwillingness to smile on demand, he reminded me of the kid I sat next to in eighth grade art class.

Carlos explained how Rudo y Cursi is a departure from his first writing credit, the foreign art-house classic, Y tu mamá también, although it is still a meditation on male bonding. After he got talking about the film, I asked Carlos to discuss his artistic influences. …more