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.
———————————————————————————————————-
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…
———————————————————————————————————-
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]
———————————————————————————————————-
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]
———————————————————————————————————-
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]
———————————————————————————————————-
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]
———————————————————————————————————-
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]
———————————————————————————————————-
:: Oral History::
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.
———————————————————————————————————-
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]
———————————————————————————————————-
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]