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Literary Arts
Falling In and Out, Together
Often times, young characters in novels are given one of two voices: the voice of a smart-mouthed comedian or the voice of a wise, pure and enlightened young adult. Either way, these characters usually serve to discredit or make a fool of bad acting grown-ups. Yannick Murphy’s characters in Here They Come thankfully do not fall in either of these traps. This is a tight, fast-moving story, almost wholly devoid of judgmental narration or overtly sensitive treatment of the behavior of children. More
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Restaurants
Il Mare alla Chiesa
If the light falls just right and one is properly sated and besotted by halibut, polenta and the requisite number of Campari-and-gin's, the southern end of Church street may be magically transmuted into a northern Italian coastal village.
Pescheria, an old Italian noun meaning expensive fish served in relatively unpretentious environments, lives up to expectations. Accordingly, one should come in search of charmingly simple, rather than elaborately haute, cuisine. More
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Literary Arts
Barry Gifford's Do the Blind Dream?
Bay Area writer Barry Gifford has long straddled the line between literature and cinema, writing screenplays as well as fiction that others have turned into film. He's perhaps best known for his association with filmmaker David Lynch. Lynch turned Gifford's characters Sailor and Lulu into the 1990 Palme D'Or winner Wild at Heart. Seven years later the two co-wrote the heavily underrated Lost Highway. More
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Literary Arts
San Francisco's annual lit festival has gotten big, fast. Now a week long, it's filled with sponsors, panels, booze, music, film, and, oh yeah, lots of author readings.
A good friend of mine has on his refrigerator door cartoonist Ted Rall's classic "Everybody's Happy Nowadays," in which young, healthy, cheerful, culturally sensitive San Franciscans browbeat a skeptic until he caves in and says, yes, he also loves The City. Stories about San Francisco's Litquake festival in the local press often remind me of the Rall cartoon, with breathless writers on the verge of exhorting us, too, to say it: "We're literary! We're literary! We're splendidly literary!" More
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Theater
San Francisco's annual lit festival has gotten big, fast. Now a week long, it's filled with sponsors, panels, booze, music, film, and, oh yeah, lots of author readings.
A good friend of mine has on his refrigerator door cartoonist Ted Rall's classic "Everybody's Happy Nowadays," in which young, healthy, cheerful, culturally sensitive San Franciscans browbeat a skeptic until he caves in and says, yes, he also loves The City. Stories about San Francisco's Litquake festival in the local press often remind me of the Rall cartoon, with breathless writers on the verge of exhorting us, too, to say it: "We're literary! We're literary! We're splendidly literary!" More
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Literary Arts
David Ulin's The Myth of Solid Ground
Los Angeles writer David Ulin understands that earthquakes, like hurricanes in the Caribbean and the midnight sun in the Arctic, are not just external phenomena but live deep within the bones of Californians. More
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Literary Arts
Already made up your mind how to vote in next month's election? These titles are still worth reading for the next four years, and beyond.
By the time you read this, all three presidential debates will be history and the 2004 election will be two weeks away. It's probably too late to change your mind about your choice for president, but it's never too late to broaden your political horizons. More
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Literary Arts
San Francisco-based Morbid Curiosity lets average folks tell their own true twisted tales.
Loren Rhoads, a new mother at 41, doesn't look very morbid. With perky, fifties-era glasses and neat silver hair cut short, Rhoads is publisher and editor of the annual review Morbid Curiosity. Entering its ninth year (and ninth issue), the magazine hews true to its title: anything that's weird, sick, scary, inexplicable or macabre is fair game for its writers, all who tell true first-person tales. More
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Literary Arts
Why do so many California kids love poetry? Perhaps it's CPITS, the nation's largest poets-in-the-schools program.
The last twelve months have marked major anniversaries in the Bay Area's poetry community. City Lights Bookstore turned 50 last year, and San Francisco State University's Poetry Center reached that milestone just recently. Nearly as old but less internationally celebrated is California Poets in the Schools, a 40-year-old program that arguably has done more than City Lights and the Poetry Center combined to bring poetry to the people, namely to an estimated half a million California schoolkids. More
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Literary Arts
The main media advocate for San Francisco's homeless and poor has been raising hell and making poetry for 15 years.
San Francisco's Street Sheet, a monthly newspaper about the homeless, often written by the homeless, and available from homeless vendors on street corners, is turning 15 this year.
For a street paper, it's a graybeard that has spawned dozens of imitators. Its message is unfiltered and unflinching: homeless people deserve dignity, civil rights and shelter, and anything or anyone seen working at cross purposes to that agenda suffers the paper's wrath. More
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