[Click to visit site]

Instant City developed out of a conversation between co-editor Gravity Goldberg and myself, while I was working as webguy and book buyer at City Lights Books & Publishers, and Gravity was working part-time as a manager at the beloved, if occasionally unkept, Adobe Bookstore (and community institution) in San Francisco’s Mission District.

We were both seeing a tremendous amount of great writing and art coming out of our communities, and there seemed to be few outlet for publishing it all. We decided to publish a magazine that would be an exploration of San Francisco in writing, art, and all-around amateur urbanism. The stories Instant City publishes are all set within the city– all of them hopefully adding up to a specific, subjective vision of the city. We also made the decision not to make a distinction between fiction and non-fiction, historical fact and urban lore, believing that all of these various stories of San Francisco add up to the how the city is imagined by those who live here.

This iteration of the website is the 3rd we’ve created so far. I, along with a colleague from Jschool, Lisa Pickoff-White, adapted the design from the Mimbo theme in WordPress. I’m still busy putting up some of the older content, and working on a few multimedia programs that I hope will take form online.

The print edition of Instant City is going on its 7th issue. You can check out a PDF of the interior of Issue 2 (2004) here

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Click to view Live From City Lights website

Changes in the taxi cab industry may soon make it more difficult to earn a living as a cabbie in San Francisco. Mauro Saldanha, an independent San Francisco cab driver, takes us out for a shift and tells us how he feels these issues will effect him and his customers on a daily basis. Also, hear representatives from the San Francisco Taxi Commission, the United Taxi Cab Workers, and San Francisco’s largest cab company comment on the issues Mauro raises.

“Mauro’s Shift” was an attempt to use short clips of video nested in a basic Flash shell to elucidate some of the complex issues facing cab drivers in San Francisco. Amy and I spent a night out with 10-year veteran cab driver Mauro Saldanha, working the late shift and discussing some of the issues he’s been facing recently, as gas prices rise and the city re-negotiates how much cab companies can charge their drivers for cab rentals. Mauro also explained the city’s complex medallion system and the ongoing issues concerning health care. After, we met with representatives from San Francisco’s largest cab company, the Taxi Commission, and cab driver advocates for their thoughts.

Site Design: Eric Zassenhaus
Reporting & Editing: Eric Zassenhaus & Amy Jeffries

[Click to visit site]

Up until 1991, women convicted of a violent felony were not allowed to present evidence of prior physical abuse in court. Even after the criminal code was amended to allow this type of evidence to be admitted, it took over ten years – until 2002 – for the change to become retroactive, meaning that women who had previously been convicted without having a chance to present evidence of abuse to challenge their convictions were unable to do so in the interim. The Habeas Project is a consortium of lawyers and legal advocates who have gone back through these women’s cases and filed writs of habeas corpus, along with evidence of how the abuse may have impacted, in this case, the murders they committed.

For the project, two colleagues and I attempted to track down and speak with beneficiaries of the project and their lawyers, to get a sense, in their words, of their individual cases and the process of filing the writ, and being released.

Site Design: Brian Aguilar

The game allows users to wander in a virtual reconstruction of Oakland’s 7th Street – once a major center for the development of blues and jazz music and a locus of union organizing in the U.S. Over the years, 7th Street underwent several ill-conceived ‘development projects’ that displaced a good portion of its community, and nearly all of its thriving businesses and cultural institutions. The goal is to have young and old gamers explore the world and play the game together.

Altered Barbie Festival 2008

The San Francisco Bay Guardian

For the last couple months, I’ve been working to produce short videos of local events that appear on the home page for The San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Bay Area’s premier weekly. This sneek peak of the SF’s beloved Altered Barbie Show is the most recent edition:

Altered Barbie Show SF 2008 from SFBG Online on Vimeo.

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San Francisco Bicycle Music Festival 2008

The San Francisco Bay Guardian

Another on the 2008 Bicycle Music Festival proved popular:

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Open To Solutions Project: Mobile Homeless Outreach

The Oakland Tribune

For several months, I contributed to this joint project of the Oakland Tribune and UC Berkeley, investigating violence in the community. My “beat” for the project was on the homeless population in Oakland, who had recently sustained a slew of violent attacks, and who were the subject of a legislative drive to protect them. The final project, OpenToSolutions.com is an attempt to bridge the divide between Oakland’s journalists, service providers, and community. It’s a unique experiment, drawing on publicly available information on community violence and blogs from the journalists, providers, and activists who have been trying to get a handle on it for years.
Below are a sampling of videos I did as part of the project.

Open To Solutions Project: Michael Buttram

The Oakland Tribune

Open To Solutions Project: Tomika Perkins

The Oakland Tribune

Film Review | God Makes An Independent Film

ReligionDispatches.com

When an inexperienced Pentecostal pastor gets called by God to make a $50 million epic science-fiction film, is he a visionary, a prophet, or just another box office grifter? A new documentary tells the tale. (more)

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Book Review | You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother by Joyce Antler

Bitch Magazine

In You Never Call! You Never Write! Joyce Antler traces the origins and history of the Jewish mother from her arrival in New York’s Yiddish theaters and early American cinema to her present-day manifestations in the standup routines and television shows where she’s become a regular player. Along the way, Antler tells the story of Jewish acculturation and assimilation in modern America, as well as changing notions of motherhood in American feminist discourse. (more)

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Film Review | Colma: The Musical

KQED

Checking out the most recent indie film or a new play can be an uncomfortable experience, a little bit like watching a high-wire act at the circus. Will the rope-walker make it across? Will s/he stumble? Will we laugh or shrink in our seats when s/he hits the ground with an ugly thud? (more)

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Art Review | Hidden Histories

KQED

“All right. I’m walking south on Bryant, towards 19th again. Where is this place?”

My friend was calling a second time. She’d given up and had the cab drop her off up the street. Camouflaged by graffiti and vegetation, smack-dab in the middle of Bryant Street, Cell Space makes a fitting venue for Hidden Histories, a multifaceted, collaborative series of projects exploring the familiar but obscure in “San Francisco’s Eastern landscape.”(more)

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Music Review | The Monsters of Accordion at 21 Grand

KQED

There’s no lack of love for the accordion. From lilting French ditties to rowdy German polka, sober klezmer cryalongs to obstreperous mariachi blowouts — Italian jingles, Dutch clog stomps, cajun zydeco, Scottish ceilidhs, from the circus to the chapel, the accordion has always had a home among the much of the world’s folk music and tradition, seeming to define — musically, at least — the peculiar features unique to each culture. Part-piano, part-synthesizer, part-arachnid, the accordion may be one of the most versatile musicmakers around. In its relatively short history of just under two centuries, it has managed to define an impressive amount of styles and inspired a huge range of awkward dance moves.(more)

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Theater Review | Word for Word: Angel Face

KQED

As soon as the lights go down and the shadows come out, it’s clear that Word For Word’s adaptation of “Angel Face” intends to be loyal to the dark, pulpy genre its author helped to create.(more)

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Art Review | Jeannene Przyblyski: Comings and Goings

KQED

Time travel is a tricky business. The bane of scientists, artists and eccentrics for centuries, it’s one of those theories that you just can’t disprove. Yet, once you start trying to pry apart history’s past from its present and future, you have pretty good odds of becoming unglued. Just ask anyone who’s tried.(more)

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Book Review | Portraits of Israelis and Palestinians for My Parents

Tikkun Magazine

Most of us have become accustomed to seeing life in the middle east as a series of images, a parade of olive-clothed soldiers clutching M-16s and kaftan-clad children with stones, of mutilated architecture and crowd-surfing coffins. The images are as ubiquitous as they are sensational, and they usually serve to reduce the complexity of the middle east to a series of stereotypes: Palestinian children staring down a Abrams tank; Israeli civilians confronting the charred remains of a public bus. The images of course, follow logically from the conventional discourse surrounding Israeli-Palestinian politics, in which one side is portrayed as unquestionably Good, the other, irrevocably Evil. In this climate of visual and verbal oversimplification that a new genre of graphic novel has taken root recently. Its main arsenal, like that of Speigelman’s Maus, consists of a subjective approach, grand understatement, and a certain ironic charm. (more)

One of my earliest mentors once told me that any good article is, at its core, a good conversation. For years I’ve recorded and edited interviews with music icons and cultural pioneers for a whole slew of magazines and websites. Below are a few samples.

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Ian Mackaye: Elder Statesman of Punk

Clamor Magazine, Special Issue

Digging into Ian Mackaye’s history is somewhat like running through a chronology of punk music in America — with all its incarnations and factions, and its longstanding commitment to down-to-earth sound and attitude. From his beginnings in the early DC punk band The Teen Idles to the birth of the straightedge movement in Minor Threat, to the emergence of emocore, heavily influenced by his short-lived project, Embrance, Mackaye has been on the forefront of US indy music and culture. In more recent years, Fugazi – the band he began in 1987 – has set the standard for political bands the world over. With their considered lyrics and gritty, sophisticated sound, and their penchant to use their notoriety to benefit local charities and community efforts, they are one of the few bands of their era to replace angry invective with on-the-ground action. his most recent project with drummer and vocalist Amy Farina, The Evens, is yet another departure – a spare, sometimes narcotic collection of melodies that skirt the boundaries between punk and folk…

[Download .pdf]

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Growing Up An Outlaw Woman

Clamor Magazine, Issue 16

In her 1997 memoir, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz wrote about her difficult childhood in rural Oklahoma. Red Dirt was not only a telling of her own coming to political consciousness, but an insightful story of the radical left’s decline in the US and the rise of the extreme right in these areas. Dunbar Ortiz is familiar with the hopes and dreams of the mainly Scots-Irish settlers (“the footsoldiers of imperialism”) who crossed and conquered the US in search of inhabitable land, and the ways in which they were manipulated. Her new memoir, Outlaw Woman, is a continuation of her story, chronicling in detail her years on the West Coast coming to increasing political consciousness – organizing with the anti-war movement, her role in the gestation of radical feminism and the birth of the feminist group Cell 16, and her time organizing and assisting anti-imperialist movements in Cuba, in Nicaragua, in South Africa, and around the world… [Read More online]or [Download .pdf]

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Jack Hirschman: Poetry, Street Music, & Mystic Propaganda

Instant City, Issue 3

Jack Hirschman is a poet, painter, and activist with dozens of books of poetry under his belt and many hundreds of translations. His most recent book, Front Lines, was published by City Lights in 2002. In January 2006, Hirschman became San Francisco’s fourth Poet Laureate…. [More]

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V. Vale: Independent Publishing Pioneer

Clamor Magazine, Issue 8

V. Vale has been a voice in America’s cultural underground since pasting the first issue of Search and Destroy ‘zine in the late 70s – one of the first ‘zines to chronicle the artistic underground surrounding the punk movement. He has been tirelessly documenting and expanding on that underground ever since, with books that search out ignored, interesting communities and ideas on the periphery of American culture. Together with Andrea Juno, he created RE/Search Publications in the early ’80s, releasing books that explore unusual, creative individuals and cultures as well as innovative music, film and art… [Download]

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Charles Gatewood: Photographing the Margins

Clamor Magazine, Issue 4

Flipping through Badlands, Charles Gatewood’s most recent brick-like book of photography, once can’t help but be amazed by the diversity of subject matter and styles of the pictures inside. Comprised of hunderds of photographs taken over 35 years, Badlands features posed shots of fetish devotees in mid-play, gritty documentary photos of police clashing with protesters, intimate nude portraits of individuals and couples, candid pictures of Wall Street automatons on their way to and from work, alongside almost clinical shots of heavily-pierced and tattooed genitalia, torsos, backs, arms and faces. They’re pictures that inted to elicit a different reaction with each page turned – anger, desire, disgust, curiosity… [Download]

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The Pond Gallery, San Francisco

Punk Planet Magazine

Intent on displaying art that is at the crux of aesthetically unique and politically subversive thinking, the Pond Gallery has quickly developed a reputation as an essential neighborhood meeting place and cultural center in San Francisco. In addition to its monthly gallery shows, and its acting as a meeting space for a wide range of community groups, Pond has developed a fledgling zine resource center, a lecture series, and its own publishing imprint, Pondscum Press.. And, judging by the turnout for their last collaborative show opening, the community surrounding Pond continues to grow ever wider– spilling out of the doorway, off the sidewalk into the middle of Valencia Street… [Download]

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Ever since picking up Studs Terkel’s seminal book of interviews on the life of working Americans, aptly titled Working, I’ve been fascinated with oral histories. For several years, I contributed to the now defunct website word.com, and in particular to their section titled “work,” collecting oral histories of everyday Americans on their places of business, edited into short monologues. These included florists, psychics, pet groomers, etc. Several of these interviews were published in the subsequent anthology Gig, published by Crown Books. Drawing on this experience, and on the idea that often the best storytellers aren’t necessarily writers, each issue of Instant City has published short, edited interviews with cabbies, policemen, shoeshiners and more about their everyday experiences and stories, a few of which are below.

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Beat Cop: Officer Mark Alvarez

Instant City, Issue 4

I grew up in the Mission, and South of Market, but I didn’t hang out there. I hung out in North Beach. We used to cut school and come into North Beach. It used to rain a lot in San Francisco—at least I remember it being very rainy in the early 1970s when I was, you know, 12, 13, 14 years old. We’d cut school, we’d come up here, go to Chinatown. Hang out. Get cheap food. You’re not going to get any cheaper food than in Chinatown—get a couple pork buns, and then we’d make our way to the wharf. I was always kind of a weird kid anyhow…. [More]

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A Shoe’s A Shoe: San Francisco Shoe-Shiner

Instant City, Issue 2

I started shoe-shining when I was a youngster, about eleven or twelve years old. I guess it’s been more than twenty years. That’s incredible. How I started out: when Dad didn’t want to give me money for a Friday or Saturday night, it left me no choice but to get my little shoe shine box and go shoe shining around the neighborhood bars. Sometimes I would make more than my old man would, you know…. [More]

Site Design: Brian Aguilar

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The Columbarium: Ashes to Ampitheater

KALX

Managed by the Neptune Society, San Francisco’s Columbarium is one of the few remaining burial places in the city, having resisted relocation when the rest of the area’s graveyards were evicted from the city in 1914. A massive, awe-inspiring structure that could be mistaken for a movie theater or church, the Columbarium contains the ashes of many thousands of city residents. Punk diva Jennifer Blowdryer takes us on a tour of its facilities and tells us why the Columbarium maybe the hottest nightclub to arrive on the scene.

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KALX, AM580 WILL-Urbana, PRX podcast

“Merchandise-liberator” August Bleed gives us a few tips on the trade.

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KALX

The mayoral races in San Francisco have always included more than an element of political performance. In 2007, artist/ activist Chicken John threw his top hat into the ring, knowing full well he didn’t stand a chance, and I visited him to ask him why.

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The Mayor of St. Marys

KALX, WAMC Albany

Though they’re often overlooked, elderly homeless make up a large percentage of the Bay Area’s homeless population, many of whom were displaced by the 1989 Loma-Prieta earthquake. St. Mary’s Center in Oakland, CA is one of the few centers around assisting Oakland’s low-income and homeless seniors, one of the city’s most vulnerable populations.

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KALX

For a show on the sun, I did a Q & A with UC Berkeley’s resident astronomer, Dr. Alex Filippenko, on the dark future of our foremost star.

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The Bay Area By Night

KALX

At last I got a chance to produce and host a show of my own, keeping my stable of reporters up all night to report on the Bay Area after hours.