Boots Riley's Anti-Capitalist Revolution Will Be Televised
Sorry to Bother You director, creator of surreal Amazon Prime series I'm a Virgo, and frontman of hip-hop group The Coup is here to fuck shit up
Hi there. I'm an award-winning culture journalist with nearly 20 years of experience in print and digital media. Born and raised in the Bay Area, I've worked as an editor at The San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, SF Weekly and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, with bylines in Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Pitchfork and more. I hold an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
As a freelance copywriter and consultant, I've crafted lively marketing, fundraising and educational materials for clients including the Exploratorium, the San Francisco Symphony, Fort Point Beer Company, and lots of bands.
This portfolio is for features, essays and reviews. Get in touch if you want to see examples of other stuff or discuss an assignment: [email protected]
Sorry to Bother You director, creator of surreal Amazon Prime series I'm a Virgo, and frontman of hip-hop group The Coup is here to fuck shit up
In an entertainment landscape dominated by Netflix and giant concert promoters, the independently owned 4 Star theater is a unique space for music lovers.
Thousands of San Franciscans exchange special-occasion attire for free in a dedicated Facebook group, where kindness is currency and sequins are plentiful.
On ‘Wake the Dead,’ the prolific San Francisco rocker grapples with cancer and falls in love with cumbia.
The only real witnesses were the chickens. Jon and Elizabeth Payne can guess how their home in Boulder Creek burned to the ground. How the fire might have spread through the house's three levels - perhaps starting at the top floor, with the view of Eagle Rock that made it feel like a tree house, through their bathroom with the claw-foot tub.
Teresa Conemac, a volunteer with the Christian anti-abortion organization 40 Days for Life, waits outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Napa on Nov. 4, 2022. She talks to people coming and going, shares widely debunked claims about the dangers of abortion and birth control, and refers people to the Napa Women's Center, a facility next door opened by faith-based nonprofit Napa Valley Culture of Life.
The pop star's captivating show at Chase Center careened through four decades of music and controversy.
America loves to watch a woman fall apart. The prettier she is, the more magnetic her presence, the less attainable her talents, the better. The swan dive from good graces is longer, then, and that much more satisfying.
The 21-year-old pop star channeled "Rebel Girl" energy to a new generation of unruly fans during her "Guts" tour stop at San Francisco's Chase Center.
About a week before Christmas, Matt Goff decided to call off his New Year's Eve plans. The Berkeley musician, who plays drums in the blues-folk group Marty O'Reilly and the Old Soul Orchestra, had been watching COVID case numbers climb in the Bay Area.
A new program at Berkeley-one of the first of its kind in the nation-examines Palestinian history and culture, beyond conflict.
The R&B star celebrated the 25th anniversary "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" with a show that also reunited the Fugees and highlighted Bay Area musicians.
In 2012, Amsterdam's nightlife was on the brink. As tourists poured in to partake of the region's after-hours pleasures, the city center saw massive overcrowding. Between noise and safety issues, friction had reached a combustion point between bar and nightclub owners, local government and residents who just wanted a good night's sleep.
This week, as we near the end of 2022, the writers and editors of KQED Arts & Culture are reflecting on One Beautiful Thing from the year. Here, in a very discouraging year for human rights and freedom of expression, editor Emma Silvers finds solace and hope in a Nixon-era TV special.
It's 2017 in San Francisco, a juicer valued at $120 million just turned out to be pointless, and I'm watching two twenty-somethings in startup hoodies making googly eyes at each other from the confines of a bean bag chair.
Beyoncé brought her highly-anticipated Renaissance World Tour to Santa Clara for one night - and it was a blowout party.
Mauri Luisa Skinfill started playing rock 'n' roll because a guy told her she couldn't. At UC Berkeley in the mid- '90s, she walked into her then-boyfriend's dorm to find him playing the Pixies song "Wave of Mutilation" on the guitar.
The director and composer reveal what goes into a breathtaking film score. The two appear in San Francisco April 14-15.
Let's start with this: I am not here to hate bluntly on Gwyneth Paltrow.
In March 2020, as news broke that Austin, Texas, had canceled the South by Southwest festival for the first time in its 33-year history, Jeremy Stith realized he might not play another live show for a while. He knew COVID-19 was bad, of course, but if he's honest, he was initially excited for the break.
On Valentine's Day in 2021, Baruch Porras-Hernandez stood in Kerouac Alley in North Beach and faced his first live audience in nearly a year. The San Francisco writer and comedian had grown accustomed to Zoom performances, but now people had gathered in person to see him, and the eyes staring at him over KN95 masks conveyed both excitement and deep fear.
Like all good debaucherous nights, it starts out tame. It's 6 p.m. on a foggy Saturday when Judy Tsang leans out the back window of her Hayes Valley apartment. "How was your week?" she calls to her neighbors a few windows over. Tom Broxton is busy pouring brandy, while Sarah Hingston arranges a platter of homemade bruschetta.
But In the Dark is deeper, more nuanced, more vulnerable, with good reason. These songs span a period of time in which Ali experienced seismic shift after shift. She became a parent. She went back to school to become a therapist. And then she came out as a transgender woman.
The first time Jacqualine Simpkins set foot in the Alley, she felt overcome, and not in a good way. It was 1995, and she was visiting Oakland from her home in Bellevue, Ohio, finally seeing the Prohibition-era piano bar owned by her uncle and his longtime girlfriend.
On a clear, chilly Sunday evening in January, Tia Cabral is leading a seance. Her performance at San Francisco rock club the Rickshaw Stop feels less like a typical show and more like something you might stumble upon in a wooded clearing, perhaps after receiving directions on a weathered scroll.
IT IS UNCLEAR WHEN AGNES EDWARDS slept. As a sophomore at Berkeley in the fall of 1918, she packed her schedule with social activities. In her letters home to her parents, movies, dances, and hikes with friends mingled with pep rallies and volunteer work at the newly opened Red Cross chapter on campus.
V. Vale has seen some wild stuff. The writer, publisher and self-described amateur anthropologist lived in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during the 1960s, after all. In the '70s, he documented the city's punk scene in Search and Destroy, a zine he launched with $200 from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg.
After a while, you barely remember what a Friday night in the Mission used to feel like. Two years after the coronavirus first sent civic life into a tailspin, some people are out - slowly, they emerged from their Zoom trivia nights and into the street, cautiously meeting up with one friend, two at most, and deciding on a bar for the evening.
It's Saturday night in the Bay Area, and for anyone with a WiFi connection, the social opportunities are dizzying: there are dances on TikTok, cocktail hours on Zoom and charades on Houseparty. On Instagram, you can stumble across Questlove DJing, or Chrissy Teigen cooking eggs.
Of the now-legendary performances at the Monterey International Pop Music Festival in 1967, perhaps none carried the social weight of Otis Redding's. In a sharply segregated music landscape, the young soul singer had been a staple on R&B charts since 1963. But backed by Stax Records' house band Booker T.
Downtown San Francisco at night is prettier the farther away you get from it, and the lights are looking positively cinematic on this particular Friday at 2 a.m.
Debbie Harry doesn't need to prove a damn thing. That much was obvious the evening of Thursday, Oct. 3, at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, as the 74-year-old frontwoman of Blondie - perhaps the defining act at the intersection of American punk and New Wave music - took the stage to a standing ovation to discuss her new memoir, "Face It."
It's a quarter past three on a sunny spring Thursday in Berkeley. After weeks of rain, People's Park is bursting with life: a sea of yellow, purple, and red flowers pours from the gardens on the west side of the 2.8-acre park, while the occasional gust of wind carries the scent of jasmine.
Chuck Berry, Billie Holiday, Marvin Gaye. B.B. King, Tina Turner, James Brown. It's Friday night at Club Waziema, and in a dimly lit room where these legends performed at all-night parties a mere half-century ago, a group of 20-something dudes is playing pool to the sounds of Incubus from a jukebox.
"How much caffeine is in this?" Boots Riley asks our waitress, gesturing toward his tea leaf salad, the specialty at this particular Burmese restaurant in Oakland. "Um, so the tea is in the dressing," she replies, caught a little off-guard. "Maybe three teabags' worth?" Riley nods and says "OK," sounding pleasantly surprised.
Was there a dive in your hometown whose mythology preceded it? Whose lore, before you...
The patrons are young, and they're descending from all angles. They traipse over from the 7-Eleven on Miller Avenue in Mill Valley, stopping to finish soda bottles with questionable contents. A group of three spills out of an idling Mercedes, thanking someone's older sister for the ride.
Near the end of the second week of Odell's book sitting on my shelf unopened, after a particularly unproductive day-the kind where the guilt over how little you've accomplished becomes an activity in and of itself-I went to a Mission District bar to see a friend's band play.
The Bay Area in 2019 is often described as a playground for the wealthy. In this occasional Style series, we interview the artists, service people and nonprofit workers who hustle to make it work here despite the realities of rent and real estate. Does your love for the Bay Area outweigh the struggle?
Jolene's on 16th and Harrison was never going to be just another bar. For that matter, it was never going to be just another gay bar. Instead, the owners envisioned an "evolved" queer bar that feels welcoming to all genders, with a special eye to marginalized groups - but without strict lines in the sand about target clientele.
When Jane Seabrook's daughter was 4 days old, in 1999, Seabrook and her then-husband, Mark Green, decided it was time for their infant's first outing. So they did what any other young Mission District family would do: They headed to the neighborhood bar.
I wish we got even 10 more minutes of Gilda in general. "There's truly a timeless, universal quality to what she did. Amy Poehler said she thinks of Gilda as a red-blue state: loved by all," says Lisa D'Apolito, the director of Love, Gilda, a new documentary about the late comedian that hits theaters Sept.
One year ago, Tom Shimura was camped out at a table in the back room of Au Coquelet, an unassuming Berkeley coffee shop. In front of the rapper, known as Lyrics Born, were drafts of the hardest three verses he'd ever had to write: a song about how, after more than a decade in remission, his wife Joyo Velarde's cancer had returned.
"We have a tradition of blowing the big ones," Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh recalls of the band's performance at the first Monterey Pop
Have you ever found yourself reading a page of such astoundingly negative Yelp reviews that it actually makes you want to visit the establishment in question? I'm talking "pushy crowds," " asshole bartenders," descriptors like "douchey" and "sweaty." (I do not pretend to understand my own penchant for masochism.)
"Here's this historic moment we're having, and I think we're seeing that there's a gravity to what we consume culturally-it affects our lives, it affects the decisions of people in power ... when we've all been listening to music and watching movies and working in institutions that reinforce that [things like sexual assault] are normal," says the songwriter.
Six months later, the Parkway closed for good. When is a movie theater more than just a movie theater? This question was on my mind this week, with the welcome news that Oakland's Grand Lake Theatre, the 1926 movie house near Lake Merritt, has been sold outright to its longtime leaseholder, Allen Michaan.
Editor's note: Drink Up, The Chronicle's guide to where you should be drinking in the Bay Area, is evolving into a column with multiple voices. Chronicle wine, beer and spirits writer Esther Mobley, who has written the column for the last three years, will continue to contribute reviews.
Liz Phair is getting into character. She's practicing her moves. She's doing vocal exercises every night. "You make these sounds for a really long time, like a monk, to try to get that lower register open," she says, demonstrating a long, low hum. "Because my range has gotten way higher as I've gotten older."
A buzzy energy emanated from the front door of the Ivy Room, a small bar and music venue in Albany, on the evening of Aug. 3, 2017. By 8 p.m., a horde of people, most of them in black hoodies and jeans, were standing around outside on San Pablo Avenue.
San Francisco's famed gay pride celebrations don't officially start until next weekend (concluding with the big Pride party and parade downtown Sunday, June 24). But in the thick of the sold-out crowd at the Masonic on Saturday, June 16, all that seemed like a formality.
Since 1969, Wally Heider Recording studios has served as home to multiple eras of Bay Area music, from the Grateful Dead to Tupac Shakur and beyond. Today, as Hyde Street Studios, it's still thriving -- in the unlikeliest of conditions.
"Whether you know it or not, if you're part of this world, you were affected by what happened in Monterey 50 years ago," Gary Clark Jr. told Rolling Stone this past Sunday, just moments after stepping off the stage at the Monterey International Pop Festival's 50th anniversary.
"Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell." This is how William Carlos Williams introduced "Howl," the landmark work by Allen Ginsberg, in its November 1956 printing by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights.
Cliche, perhaps, but it also feels true: Christmas comes earlier every year. Barely have...
Mike Deni still remembers his first open mic night at the Hotel Utah Saloon. It was 2006, and Deni - now better known by his musical moniker, Geographer - was a recent transplant from New Jersey, with little experience playing live.
As pop stars go, Katy Perry has always been a mortal: She's not a great dancer and she doesn't have a phenomenal voice. This was clear as ever during the pop star's "Witness" tour stop Tuesday, Nov. 14, at San Jose's SAP Center.
On Sept. 2, 2005, as the death toll from Hurricane Katrina climbed past 1,000, Mike Myers appeared next to a nervous-looking Kanye West on primetime network television. A few days prior, New Orleans native Harry Connick, Jr. had called NBC to propose a televised relief effort, and this was the result.
There was a moment last night, sometime around 11pm, when the view from sidestage at the sold-out Fox Theater was absolutely perfect.
It was a stormy evening on Thursday, April 6, but inside the lobby of the de Young Museum, a warm glow emanated from lava lamps propped on the makeshift bar.
The San Francisco Armory served as a set for BDSM pornography for about a decade. One week ago, it was reported that the historic Mission District building had sold for $65 million to a developer who plans to convert it into manufacturing and office space. But for two hours and 15 minutes on Wednesday, Feb.
Alexandra Jacopetti Hart remembers the moment she realized the '60s counterculture was bigger than just her and her friends. Alongside Ken Kesey, Bill Graham, and a handful of other hippie household names, Hart, then 25, had helped to organize the 1966 Trips Festival - the three-day music-and-LSD gathering that's widely regarded as the kickoff to the Haight-Ashbury's heyday.
It is 1997, I am 13 years old, and I have the house to myself. This is a situation people relish at any age - but when you are 13 years old and confused all the time and spend most of your days in seemingly vacuum-sealed rooms, occupying a series of plastic chairs lined up next to other plastic chairs containing other 13-year-olds who are seething with tumultuous home lives and hormones and unfortunate harbingers of facial hair, a house to yourself is a kingdom.
Earl Stevens, better known as E-40, the Vallejo-born rap ambassador, really needs no introduction. His inimitable flow set him apart from his contemporaries in the '90s; in the mid-aughts, he heralded the hyphy movement's arrival on the Billboard Hot 100, the Bay's all-too-short moment in the mainstream sun.
First off: There's really no such a thing as a casual Replacements fan. People either don't get what the big deal is or worship the Minneapolis rock forefathers, with that particular brand of emotional reverence reserved for music that has some kind of rarity, a precariousness to it.
With an audible sneer, the band whose bootprint outlined the sound of first-wave West Coast punk (for a nation that still thought of the genre as New York's, or D.C.'s) mapped out Los Angeles in disillusionment and defiance, cracked facades and gas tanks on empty.
The next time I hear someone suggest Beyoncé doesn't deserve to be taken seriously as an artist because she's a pop star, or because there are other writers credited on her new album, I'm going to punch them in the mouth.
There's no way around this: Media companies, in the year 2016, are rushed. If you're gonna get paid, you've gotta get clicks, and if you're gonna get clicks, you've gotta churn out content - quickly.
There is very little to say about Taylor Swift that has not already been said about Taylor Swift - in thinkpieces, in profiles, in the daily analysis of her Twitter feed that passes for "celebrity journalism" in 2015.
How do we love Jeff Goldblum? Let us count the ways. There was the time he stole our hearts as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, of course, and his equally charming scientist in Independence Day. The nervy, fast-talking journalist of The Big Chill; the physical comedy of Earth Girls Are Easy; the unsettling, animalistic energy at the center of The Fly.
Underground comics enjoyed a golden age in the late '60s and early '70s, and the heady, weed-scented thrum of San Francisco was its heartbeat. R. Crumb's gleefully filthy Zap Comix premiered in 1968 with a sensibility that worshiped free love, satire and irreverence, and cartoonists like The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers ' Gilbert Shelton decided to move west to join in on the fun.
I'm nearly a year behind on this, but I finally got around to watching I Am Chris Farley, the 2015 documentary about the late, insanely talented comedian whose appetites for food, booze and cocaine ended his life far too soon, at the age of 33. It was sweet, but it wasn't terribly illuminating.
Yesterday, several sources reported that the wildly commercially successful American band/coven of pop-rock vampires Maroon 5 has been in talks to play the 50th Annual Pepsi Nike Verizon Subway Viagra™ Super Bowl Halftime Show. That's the loud music and dancing and flashy-lights part of the big game with the padded men and the odd-shaped leather ball, as my lady brain understands it!
On May 23, 2000, the Smashing Pumpkins' frontman Billy Corgan, he of shiny bald head and unmistakable wail - veering, as it does, from sing-song falsetto to painful-sounding growl within a single, lyrical line - announced in a live interview on L.A.'s KROQ-FM that the band would be breaking up at the end of its current tour.
Hello, my Millennial brothers and sisters! How's your spring been thus far? How many weddings are on your plate for the next three months? Did you do your part to represent our generation during the annual Running of the Drunks?
[email protected] LEFT OF THE DIAL How do you address a woman who toured with the Rolling Stones as an opening act, while being chased after by a baby-faced John Lennon? Who had five singles in the Top 40 by the age of 21? Who perfected the beehive hairdo two decades before Amy Winehouse was even born?
Hey guys! Have you heard about Ebola? Did you know that Ebola is really, really bad? Did you know that the part of the world in which Ebola is a major crisis right now is one that doesn't have nearly enough treatment facilities, access to top-of-the-line medical equipment, or other resources that would help stop the spread of this deadly disease?
Long before Fat Mike - the mohawked, frequently bratty, always larger-than-life frontman of NOFX - ever set foot on a stage, he was just little Michael John Burkett, an 8-year-old boy with a flair for the dramatic.
Don't trust anyone over 30, goes the old adage. By that age, the thinking goes, people are settled in their ways, more prone to social conservatism, to convention, to the rat race, man. Nothing rock 'n' roll about that. Well, a certain black-and-white sticker turns 30 this week.
It's hardly a revelation to state that the music industry, with a few exceptions, has very little place for women over a certain age. In a youth-obsessed culture, we love ingenues. To break onto the national stage in music as a lady in America, you should try to be 24, though 19 is better if you can help it.
click to enlarge Rihanna J.Cole June 30, 2011 @ Oracle Arena [ Check out more photos from the show here.] Better than: Having an actual seizure. I think. There was very little doubt -- after watching a gaggle of high school girls in sequined tube tops and six-inch stilettos almost throw down in broad daylight inside the Oakland Coliseum BART station -- that the night would be an entertaining one.
Of all the sub-species of pseudo-journalism our current media landscape has birthed, the Blog Post Noting a Thing Happening On a Famous Person's Twitter Account is among my least favorite.
Literally half a mile away, there was another Oakland public school with twice the number of kids and no arts program at all. [...] Stoltzfus and her husband, writer-composer Albert Greenberg, who had recently left their positions with A Traveling Jewish Theatre, decided on a new labor of love: a nonprofit seeking to bridge the gap between "the haves and the have-nots" by bringing professional artists - actors, musicians, dancers and storytellers - into low-income schools.
It's a cliché because it's true: Life can change in an instant. Often, of course, we can't tell which choices will shape our lives until they're years away in the rearview mirror, given weight and color by the present.
Aesop Rock has had a lot of coffee today. At 5 p.m., he's halfway through another cup and has just launched into a description of the Rubik's cube championship he got stuck watching on YouTube last night when an old friend ambles over to say what's up.
The first time I saw Dave Chappelle perform live was 10 years and three months ago, in a large, echo-y gymnasium at UC San Diego. It was my 20th birthday and I was so excited.
[email protected] LEFT OF THE DIAL The first rule of interviewing former Pixies bassist Kim Deal is that you do not say the word "Pixies" while speaking to Kim Deal.
[email protected] FALL ARTS If you are a fan of hip-hop, you likely already know that 1993 was a very special year. Call it coincidence, call it fate, call it a combination of social, economic, and political factors projected through the kaleidoscopic lens of American pop culture and write your thesis about it (you wouldn't be the first).
December was a good month for the New Parish. With a capacity of 450, the downtown Oakland club normally fills its calendar with a steady stream of local and national acts, with an emphasis on hip-hop, soul, funk, reggae, and dancey blues-rock. But the end of 2014 saw a handful of bigger-than-usual names taking the stage.
[email protected] LEFT OF THE DIAL Stephen Malkmus' 17-year-old cat, Juanita, has been peeing outside the catbox lately. He's been assuming it's just stress from the new additions to the household - two kittens recently joined the Portland home Malkmus shares with his wife, artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and their two young daughters.
When news of the forthcoming Mountain Goats record hit the internet this past December, obsessive fans-which is to say, most Mountain Goats fans-flew into a re-tweeting frenzy. All Eternals Deck, out March 29 on Merge, is the North Carolina-based indie group's 13th studio album, yet front man John Darnielle-immortalized in 2005 by New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones as "America's best non-hip-hop lyricist"-still enjoys cult-favorite status.
It's Saturday afternoon in the Mission, and on Valencia, the strollers are out in full force. Young families linger in front of shiny store-window displays; manicured couples fill the tables outside every bustling cafe. On the corner of 21st and Valencia, through an unmarked wooden door, a black cat named Asha is ignoring it all from inside an antique clawfoot tub.
It's 7:30 pm on a mild evening in San Francisco's Mission District, and so far the soundtrack at Mission Bowling Club has been a steady stream of classic '60s soul tunes. But all of a sudden the opening drumbeats to Pharrell's "Happy" kick out over the speakers, and Amy Tan is feelin' it.
At the outset of 2012, the lead singer of Against Me! - the Florida anarcho-punk band that built a following throughout the aughts on raw, anthemic songs that were as emotional as they were political - should theoretically have been on top of the world.
click to enlarge It's probably no coincidence that it began two years ago, when I was living in New York and constantly homesick for the West Coast. Someone would put a Rancid song, generally "Roots Radicals" or "Time Bomb," on the odd punk-heavy bar jukebox, and a wave of pure, adolescent nostalgia would smack me upside the head.
If you want a good seat, or a prime spot in the costume contest, it's advisable to show up at the Castro Theatre a good hour before your cinematic sing-along experience. And by the Castro Theatre, I mean the four blocks of Market Street surrounding the Castro Theatre, onto which the line of Ariels, or Belles, or Elsas, depending on the Disney darling of the evening, will be waiting.
My earliest memories of Candlestick are formative ones. Like any Bay Area kid who cut her baseball teeth on Giants games at the notoriously frigid stadium, I thought every family prepared for sporting events by piling on 17 strategic layers and stuffing their car full of sleeping bags and other accoutrements that could double as equipment for scaling Mount Kilimanjaro.
Cult alt-rockers bring their latest album, Glean, to the Fillmore on two consecutive nights. The word "cultish" might not have the most positive connotations for most people.
click to enlarge It's been almost a decade since 9/11 -- which means (among other things) that it's been 10 years since Boots Riley was seemingly everywhere, coolly responding to outrage over some extremely ill-timed album art depicting explosions at World Trade Center.
San Francisco has always had its ghosts. There's the legacy left behind by family man Charles Manson, of course, and the Zodiac Killer.
SPOTLIGHT SERIES: Adrian Tomine Like most things I liked when I was 16, I first got into Adrian Tomine's comics because of my older sister, who let me borrow her early issues of Optic Nerve. The series began as a set of self-published mini-comics, Xeroxed and distributed by Tomine when he was a teenager in Sacramento.
[email protected] I was 12 years old in 1996, which is the year Jawbreaker , the punk band that's been (somewhat controversially) called "the sound of the Mission," disbanded for good.
Weird Al Yankovic, age 55, defies the rules of pop culture. His career in musical comedy now spans five decades; he's won three Grammys and sold more than 12 million records. He counts Lady Gaga and George Lucas among his fans, and he's feuded with Coolio.
It's 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon in East Oakland, and on stage in the amphitheater at Castlemont High School, Kev Choice is trying to keep a straight face.
"So there's this thing about being in a band that plays music from years and years ago," says Penelope Houston, singer-songwriter and frontwoman of The Avengers, arguably the most important San Francisco punk band of the '70s, in a tone that suggests she's about to tell it like it is.
In 1976, Steve Silberman, then a 19-year-old freshman at Oberlin College, took a bus to New York City to see Allen Ginsberg read. With Silberman was his first boyfriend. Silberman had been in the closet throughout high school, one of many reasons he drew inspiration from the outspokenly gay Ginsberg.
For someone who grew up dreaming of the day she could live on a street with sidewalks - a place where she could wear pretty shoes meant for girls, instead of thick boots for tromping around in hay and manure - Vivien Straus sure seems happy here on her farm.
A cover story for San Diego's beloved (now defunct) alt-weekly about New York literary icon Eileen Myles.
Halfway through a sleep-deprived week of final exams last June, UC San Diego students received what appeared to be a fairly uninteresting campus-wide e-mail from the university administration.
Each Fourth of July, as revelers celebrate liberation from colonial rule by firing up the barbecue, drinking light beer, and yelling at their kids to stop pointing the firecrackers directly at each other, 40,000 people descend on New York's Coney Island to witness the kind of patriotic feat our forefathers surely had in mind when they signed the Declaration of Independence: a long table of adults attempting to eat as many hot dogs as possible in 10 minutes.
Seated cross-legged in the sunny backyard of her north Oakland home, wearing loose, tie-dyed pants, beads around her neck, her hair in tousled braids and sipping kombucha tea - her drum is tucked away for now - Taya Shere brings a few different stereotypes to mind: Hippie. Earth mother. Hebrew priestess.