San Francisco Bay Guardian

An evening of good vibrations at the Decameron

While there’s plenty of art created around post-apocalyptic themes, what frequently characterizes it is a sense of bleakness, struggle, and violence. Only rarely does the sheer resilience of the creative spirit get recognized, let alone celebrated by our visionary futurists.Read more »

Two cool, queer graphic surprises, just in time for Pride month. First, local comics hero, Califormia College of the Arts professor, and frequent SFBG contributor (not to mention out-of-the-closet Batman lover) Justin Hall took the 2013 Lambda Award for Best Anthology yesterday with his groundbreaking historical queer comics survey No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics (Fantagraphics Books).

This a huge deal, as this is the first time a comics anthology has won. (A graphic novel by Oakland's Jon Macy, Teleny and Camille, won for Best Erotic Novel in 2011, also a first.)

Hall told me right after his win:

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As of late, it seems as though the cries of anti-displacement activists and small business owners threatened with dramatic address changes have penetrated the city's consciousness: San Francisco has woken up to the fact that the town is changing, and how. But amid the smashing of Google bus piñatas and -- albeit hilarious -- echo chamber of bloggers placing and sloughing off blame from the young tech royalty, there are community-based, heartfelt attempts being made at contextualizing soaring rents and shifting cultural majorities.

There's two happening in the Mission, in fact. Regardless of your programming aptitude or discretionary budget, they'll both provide moments to learn about where San Francisco is coming from, and a moment to reflect on where it's going. Read more »

Gentrification-proof poetry

Although the ongoing eviction saga (and upcomng relocation!) of Adobe Books, “the living room” of the Mission, from its 16th Street digs dredges up memories of all the neighborhood bookstores that have closed/moved in recent years, it’s worth being reminded that the book trade has only ever had a limited impact on the persistence of the written (and spoken) word, particularly where poetry is concerned.

In fact, the more tenuous the economic climate, the more tenacious poetry becomes, pushing itself like a hungry weed through the unavoidable cracks left in the superficially smooth pavement of gentrification. That poets are themselves accustomed to staying hungry yet artistically fruitful is a condition immortalized in the famous Robert Graves quip that “there’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either.”

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