Hustler of Culture
I don’t know where I found it but I dig this essay Michael Chabon wrote about his adopted home of Berkeley. It’s almost like a a biography (or an obituary, gasp!) of a city which I think is a fine idea. I might do one about Ann Arbor someday.
Ishle Park rocked the muthafriggin’ house! MJM and Jason invited me at the last minute to see her read and sign books at Galeria De La Raza. She read maybe 8 poems of astounding beauty and literary zest and even sang a few Korean folk songs which worked with the poems instead of sounding like an I’m-the-evening’s-entertainment-so-I-can-do-what-I-want indulgence. The crowd there heavily drew from the sponsoring organizations, The Kearny Street Workshop and Locas Arts, revealing the considerable depth and power of the Asian-American arts community in San Francisco, something I knew existed but didn’t now to that impressive extent.
Man, I need to get back to writing poems.
So I only managed to do one of the activities I had in my sights this weekend and took in Nextfest with my buddy Bradley. 6 huge pavilions were packed rather snuggly into Fort Mason where I usually go to buy used books or the occassional piece of craft. Each exhibit section made a bold pronouncement: The Future of Design, The Future of Transportation, The Future of Health. After an hour of being wowed, Bradley and I came to the same conclusion…
The future is not for people like us.
Oh sure, we gawked at what NASA has in mind for the inexpensive robot explorer and were appropriately reverent at advances being made in heart transplants. But ya know what really got us?
Dodgeball.
On a far wall of the hall, some company had set up a wall which two teams stand on either side of. A projector allows you to see the other team on your side of the wall with a series of digitized glass panels over them. The object is to throw or kick a ball at those glass panels and “break” through to the other side. Whoever shatters more panels wins. It’s dodgeball where the target is pixels instead of flesh and bone.
What a wonderous place the future will be.
The $1,000 omelet. At that price, I’d want a foot rub with it. Toes too.
Three of my favorite things in the whole wide world are hiphop culture, documentary film and promulgating about the future. It stands to reason then that Nexthetics, The San Francisco Documentary Film Festival and NextFest are all this weekend and, last I looked, I can only be in one place at a time.
We should all have such problems.
My friend Pamie’s getting married. How cool!
I’m in this month’s issue of Readymade Magazine on page 73, a little ode to the sandwich.
Librarian.net links to an awesome list of 10 ways a library can effectively use technology without breaking their banks. Jeez, if SFPL got on these, I’d be there everyday.
Does anyone know of a good magazine about documentary film? Not just for the makers of but those who like to watch as well?
On a tip from Bookslut, I checked out the website of the Columbia Journalism Review and came across this amazing article by Brett Cunnigham about how the class bias effects journalistic coverage of working class communities and citizens. It is a gorgeously written, subtle, intelligent piece that avoids being shrill or preachy, or succumbing to precisely the slanted perspective it criticizes. I read it three times then marched into the living room and thrust it at Suzan.
“You MUST read this.”
If this is the level of work CJR does, I’m subscribing tomorrow.