I walked in and spotted an empty space two-thirds of the way towards the front. Never afraid to be opportunistic, I dashed in and stepped all over some broken glass. Apparently the two drunk girls next to me had dropped a bottle of beer a few minutes earlier. They apologized, but hey, I was pretty close to the stage now.

Opening for Jens was a comedian with the similarly awkward name of Tig Notaro. I know the whole “comedians opening for musicians” thing is kind of a big deal now, but I’ve also managed to miss most of those shows. So this was really the first time I’ve seen live stand-up since a terrible performance by Steven Wright five years ago. I was glad to discover that it really can be funny. I wonder if being a stand-up in a small music venue is a lot harder than a comedy club. There’s no distance separating you from your crowd. She was subjected to an almost non-stop barrage of shouted comments from the audience. People were generally playing along, but they kept interrupting her flow in ways that I suspect people at a comedy club wouldn’t. She handled it amazingly, though, never short of a witty, mocking reply.

Anyway, getting back to the two drunk girls. At one point they decided they were annoyed that they couldn’t see. I can understand and sympathize with this somewhat. But these girls were sitting down on a ledge. If they wanted to see better, standing up would have been the most obvious option. Instead, they opted to ask the man in front of them if he would crouch down a little bit. No, seriously, they asked him that. And guess what happened then? Not only did he manage to avoid rolling his eyes, but he actually spent the next ten minutes crouching down, until he got tired and just moved to the side. The girls were clearly appreciative. I know this because they spent most of the next ten minutes talking about how awesome it was that he was crouching down and how awesome Tig was and how awesome it was to have a comedian open for a musician and how awesome stand-up comedy was. Almost none of those ten minutes were spent actually listening to the awesome comedy. But the guy dutifully knelt down regardless, like a champ. I mean, a sucker. But also, a champ.

Oh, then Jens played. He was adorable, but duh. He kept saying all these anachronistically earnest things like “see this feather? I want you to keep this feather in the air for the entire next song.” Then he blew it into the crowd. Also “hey, I see some of you are recording this. And that’s great, and I’m glad you want to save this memory and I’d even love it if you sent the video to me. But please don’t post it on the Internet. I want this night to be magical and I want it to be just between me and you.” He’s so adorable! And so naïve! I hope someone was recording that charming little speech so that I can find it on YouTube later. It was all very cute, but my modern-day appropriately-jaded brain kept laughing along with everyone else, assuming he was being ironic. Didn’t he get the memo? Is sincerity still alive and well in Sweden? I don’t know if I could handle it there.

All this is very annoying. I definitely don’t want to testify in court against some kid who was spray painting on an abandoned brick wall. But the worst part? Court starts at 9am. Apparently realizing that a guy who busts taggers at 1am probably isn’t much of a morning person, they helpfully wrote “MUST APPEAR ON TIME” into a blank spot on the form. I’ll do my best, Ms. District Attorney, but I make no promises.

While I was on the phone with 911, the other man was watching the street, playing lookout. After about a minute he hopped the fence too. Both were now hidden from my view, but the rest of the fence was covered in barbed wire, so neither could leave without me seeing them. After another minute a cop car rolled by, but was apparently oblivious to my call. I saw one of them run up to the fence to make sure he didn’t stop (and he didn’t). Three more minutes and they were both back over the gate with the duffel bag and around the corner.

Just in time a cop car responding to my call made it to the intersection, but instructions traveled slowly through the chain: me to the 911 dispatcher to the cop dispatcher to the cops. Where they should have turned left they instead went straight and I was sure the two had gotten away. Fortunately I got a call a few minutes later and they had two suspects down the block. It was a slow night for the cops, by their own admission, so the manhunt and crime scene inspection involved at least 8 officers. When the cops surveyed the site, what they found was an empty parking lot next to E&E. There were no doors into the building. Apparently I had just inadvertently busted some taggers. I most certainly would not have called 911 on some taggers writing on a brick wall in an empty parking lot. If it was the front of a business or something more destructive, sure, but the wall they wrote on was pretty much an ideal spot for tagging. I was unsure what to do about the two suspects waiting for me down the street.

Fortunately my dilemma resolved itself because I honestly couldn’t positively ID either one of them. Both got taken into the station, however, because one fought with the police and the other admitted his tagging name which was then found on the wall. Had you kept it cool, kids, you would’ve walked away. Ah, well.

First, from the introduction:

[I]f you ask people about their greatest happiness in life, more than a third mention their children or grandchildren, but when they use a diary to record their happiness, it turns out that taking care of the kids is a downer—parenting ranks just a bit higher than housework, and falls below sex, socializing with friends, watching TV, praying, eating, and cooking.

And, more in depth:

[W]e are often mistaken about what makes us happy. Consider again what happens when we have children. Pretty much no matter how you test it, children make us less happy. The evidence isn’t just from diary studies; surveys of marital satisfaction show that couples tend to start off happy, get less happy when they have kids, and become happy again only once the kids leave the house. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert puts it, “Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of ‘empty-nest syndrome’ is increased smiling.” So why do people believe that children give them so much pleasure? Gilbert sees it as an illusion, a failure of affective forecasting. Society’s needs are served when people believe that having children is a good thing, so we are deluged with images and stories about how wonderful kids are. We think they make us happy, though they actually don’t.

I am fairly certain this means I win the debate.

Once I’d definitively decided to move here, about a year and a half ago, I started watching the well-known Sony Bravia commercial featuring José Gonzalez and dreamed of living here. (Seriously, I downloaded a high-res copy and I watched it before I went to sleep an embarrassing number of times.) Even now that I call this city my home, I still get sentimental watching that video, thinking about the time I just wished I could call it my home. A few months ago that I found this hilarious video clip of Star Wars invading San Francisco. As silly as it is, it once again made me feel great to live in a place so beautiful and so unmistakable.

And then yesterday I was fortunate enough to stumble across some amazing vignettes of San Francisco directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who apparently lives here. Actually, having just skimmed his Wikipedia entry, I now realize that I’ve eaten at the restaurant he owns, Cafe Zoetrope. Who knew? Anyway! He has short youtube-but-way-better movies for eight neighborhoods in San Francisco. Each area includes three videos: a short interview with Coppola, a more abstract video of the neighborhood, and and interview with someone who lives nearby.

The website involves all kinds of Flash weirdness, so I can’t link directly to it. If you want to watch, go to the Louis Vitton Journeys site, hover over FFC’s picture on the far left, and then select “San Francisco with Francis F. Coppola”. After watching a 20-second introductory clip, you can watch the segments about my neighborhood by clicking right smack-dab in the middle. Mission, represent!

If you want any of these books, let me know (except for The Corrections and The New Kings of Non-Fiction, which aren’t mine). First come, first serve, mmhmm.

On the Lower Frequences: A Secret History of the City by Erick Lyle

This is a history of San Francisco in a particularly weird decade: the mid-90s through the mid-00s. Which, in San Francisco more than anywhere, was shaped entirely by the dotcom boom and subsequent dotcom bust. The story, however, is told by someone who, in the “About the Author” describes himself as “proudly unemployed”. This is the story of the city’s most bizarre decade as seen through the eyes squatters and homeless, punks and anarchists.

About half the book is journalism. He published a DIY newspaper and much of the text of the book comes out of that. At one point, his paper gets an interview with Mayor Willie Brown in which the mayor suggests that poor people should all pack up and move somewhere cheaper. The quote becomes political fodder and is repeated over and over in flyers opposing his reelection. He interviews people setting up needle exchange clinics, free-food distributors, and the the guys who threw a pie in the face of Willie Brown. He also spends a lot of time documenting the changes that occur to the city with the influx of money and people, and specifically how all that gentrification directly affected him. This part of the book is particularly interesting if you’ve lived here since he talks a lot about the Mission, the Tenderloin, and SOMA.

But intermingled with the reporting is a memoir. Since the book is almost entirely reprinted writings of his past, you can, even when he doesn’t explicitly talk about his emotions, get a real sense for how he’s feeling at any given time. He spends a lot of time documenting his many enterprising punk-rock acts. His adventures vary mostly from the potentially illegal to the definitely illegal. They’re entertaining enough to make you want to throw everything away and join the squatters just so can have the fun they’re apparently having. For example, to distribute his newspaper, he would steal newspaper boxes, carry them home, repaint them, and then put them on the street. The cops would reclaim them and he would repeat the process, enough times that the cops eventually just gave up.

Many of his capers involve doing massive things in plain sight. His (apparently correct) assumption is everyone will think “no one could possibly be brazen enough to do that without permission.” For example, many of his friends painted gigantic anti-capitalist murals on the sides of buildings in the middle of the day. And, most notably, a large group of them broke in to a gigantic abandoned movie theater on Market Street (right smack dab in the middle of downtown, about a block from the famous cable car turnaround), cleaned it all out, and ran a free-food café, squat house, and music venue out of it for months.

All told, it’s a fascinating book, especially if you’re familiar with the city. It’s full of history and full of happenings and full of humanity. It made me in love with this city even more, despite the fact that the book is filled with pages and pages of angry rants against gentrifiers like myself. Sorry about that, Erick!

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Can you believe I’d never read anything by Vonnegut? Nothing. I probably still wouldn’t have if Carissa hadn’t loaned me this book last time I was in Portland. I mostly find scifi annoying, so I guess I had just steered clear. This book made me feel like an idiot for avoiding him all this time. (The feeling was compounded by an amazing list of “Best Kurt Vonnegut Quotes” from the 2008 Best American Non-Required Reading that I just read yesterday.) I’m sure there’s been enough said about this book that I don’t need to write any more. But anyway, you should probably read it.

Also, next time you’re in a bookstore, grab the Non-Required Reading book, and read the excerpts that start on page 26. So many wonderful things.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Again, this book has been so hyped that I scarcely think I need to add more. Just read it, yeah? It’s great.

The New Kings of Non-Fiction

I stole this book from Carissa who, in turn, had borrowed it from Abe. This casual misuse of property rights works both ways, though: she borrowed The Corrections from me, even though I was borrowing it from Emily. Anyway, this is a collection of (duh) non-fiction articles ripped by none other than Ira Glass from the usual list of publications (New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times, etc.). Ira, in the introduction, describes this as “an age of great nonfiction writing, in the same way that the 1920s and ’30s were a golden age for American popular song.” I have no way of evaluating this claim, but sure. He specifically talks a lot about his love for stories where the journalist isn’t afraid to insert herself into the story (e.g. Erick Lyle’s book I talked about above). Unsurprisingly, these are all stories that wouldn’t seem out of place on This American Life. Which is a good thing. There are several names you’d expect to see (specifically: DFW, Chuck Klosterman, Malcom Gladwell, Michael Pollan, and Susan Orlean) and at least one that I didn’t: Dan Savage, even though I’d read his article previously. Actually, I’d already read several of these articles before, but they were all good enough that I didn’t mind reading them again.

The Constant Rider Omnibus: Stories from the Public Transportation Front by Kate Lopresti

This book collects all the issues of The Constant Rider, a zine published (in seven issues) from 2000 to 2005 about the author’s experience on public transit, mostly in Portland. My friends in SF bought it for me because I’d fed them several great stories from my many bus trips in Portland. Have you heard about the woman who insisted I call the police on my own cell phone because she claimed I’d broken her foot? Or the man sitting next to me on an overcrowded bus who asked if he could buy my half-full Big Gulp and then proceeded to whip his dick out and pee in it? (Actually, that’s pretty much the whole story.) Aside from six months in which I bought a brand new Honda Civic and then totaled it, I haven’t had a car in 12 years, so I have some great stories. So, it seems, does Kate Lopresti. Her stories are funny and easy to read, especially after she learns to stop typesetting them in a sans-serif font. It was a quick read, but enjoyable.

The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen

I loved The Corrections, so when I saw another of Franzen’s books in the (very small) English-language section of an Israeli bookstore, I grabbed it immediately. It’s a memoir that he wrote, mostly about his tween to teenage years. It’s gotten great reviews, but it came off to me like a David Sedaris wannabe. Parts of it were great, but parts of it seemed incredibly tedious. I dunno. That’s about all I feel like writing. It’s still not a bad book, but all that sticks out in my mind at the moment are the boring parts. It’s definitely better than I’m making it out to be, but…

Crumbs 3

I don’t know much about this. I got it at Little Otsu. It’s just some small-press book of six or seven short stories. There’s no table of contents, and I’m too lazy to count. It’s put together in Toronto, but there’s no “about the author” paragraphs, so I have no idea who these people are. There’s an address for submissions, so probably the stories arrived like that. Some of them are pretty good, but the whole thing is dragged down by a story that takes up half(!!!) of the book which isn’t very good. I liked the first two Crumbs, but you’ll probably never find them anyway, so this is kinda a pointless “review”.

The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket by Trevor Corson

I think I first heard about this book on The Splendid Table. From the cover, it sounds like my favorite kind of book: the highly-specific single-subject non-fiction book. (One of my favorites, and a perfect example of the genre I have trouble naming, is John McPhee’s Oranges.) And about half the book was like that! It was filled with interesting details about the history and story of sushi, many of which were surprising and educational. But then he mixes it with my least favorite kind of writing: the faux-novel non-fiction, where somehow the author knows what every character is thinking at all times, even though that’s an impossibility in a non-fiction book. The book is intermingled with the story of several students attending a California sushi academy. I think he followed the Ira Glass school of journalism and felt compelled to insert some “human element”. Which is fine, but it just doesn’t seem to fit in this book. It’s almost two books in one. I wanted to skip over the sushi academy parts and just read about the history of the food.

I admit that I have a very specific grudge against what I call the “In Cold Blood-style of writing”: where an author writes non-fiction as though he were omnipotent. I don’t care how many interviews you’ve done; if you’re putting thoughts into someone else’s head without attributing a source in the same sentence, it just feels like lies to me. (”Laura said she was scared” vs. “Laura was scared”.) You can’t possibly know what they were actually thinking, only what they told you they were thinking. Um, maybe I’m being pedantic. If that sort of thing doesn’t bother you as much, maybe you’ll like this book.