DFW, RIP.

I've been re-reading David Foster Wallace's essay on the Illinois State Fair, and then stumbled across this interview via Harpers.org.

Quoth DFW:

Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?... If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

I never managed to warm to DFW's fiction - but I think that his journalism did manage to pull this off. If you get a chance, I'd suggest picking up a copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Among other things, it contains the only two articles about tennis that I've ever read from start to finish.

More on the improbable rush for green fuel...

In the form of an article, Gut Reactions, in the Atlantic Monthly about the energetic promise of termite guts. It's by the very excellent Lisa Margonelli, who lets loose with an interesting bit of food history towards the end of the article:

Blanch has experienced the pitfalls of research driven by political goals. In the early 1970s, he worked on creating faux meat products from petroleum, which was then thought to be a cheap way to feed the world. For example, single-celled “chicken” proteins were produced by yeasts that fed on oil by-products, and then draped around plastic bones.

Mmmmm.... Oil-fed yeast chicken. If only that pesky oil crisis hadn't intervened.

A tiny glimpse into the occasional hell that is fact-checking...

Corrected on 4/2/08:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that General Mills had reduced the number of chocolate chips in its Turtle Cookies. The company said it had not reduced the number of chips, but changed how they were distributed in the cookie dough.

The more things change the more often you find yourself re-enacting Jonestown

When I first moved to San Francisco, six and a half years ago, I sought out experiences that felt as though they couldn't happen anywhere else. Trannyshack at the Stud were the apotheosis of that experience - a mutant lovechild of vaudeville, performance art, sincerity, punk, thrill-seeking and community. Also: manatee drag.

I was there to witness the nominal "end" of Trannyshack, though that ending is a very David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust thing - Trannyshack will still exist, it just won't occur every Tuesday, at the Stud. It will take place in more respectable venues, most likely large enough so that the whole experience will be less like spending two hours trapped in the business of a giant moist amoeba. Crowd-surfing drag queens will no longer be able to kick the ceiling with their stiletto boots. Peggy L'Eggs will probably still throw dead fish into the audience while lipsynching to the theme from Titanic, but she'll have to throw them farther. The audience will be less successful at throwing them back. Peggy will still vomit up seaweed, but not RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. There will be a demure buffer of space between you and the hacking.

Certain mysteries remain unresolved. Why are you so much less likely to be elbowed in the head if you're standing on the left side of the stage? How does the bar make any money if it's too crowded for people to actually make it to the bar and buy drinks? Why is theater better when you're dehydrated? Is what I think is happening on stage actually what is happening?

The final number? The Bowie song "Memories of a Free Festival" played over the loudspeakers. Hippie maidens on stage passed out flowers to the audience, then vanished and re-appeared in fatiques and plastic submachine guns.Every drag queen, drag king, faux queen, and so forth in the audience filed on stage and pantomimed drinking FlavorAid before collapsing into an ever-increasing pile. The death throes seemed to go on and on. Metal Patricia stood behind it all in Jim Jones drag, arms raised in front of a flickering electric cross. The pile got larger and larger.

I spent the past week interviewing people who were personally affected by Jonestown (it didn't happen that long ago, after all, and the People's Temple had close ties to local progressive movements and San Francisco's city government.)

It left me wondering what other events in San Francisco history might be turned into performance art. The 1906 earthquake? The filling of the bay? The dot-com boom?

(mantee drag photo by Heklina, Jonestown photo by StarrSF)

Dirt.

I've been shoveling dirt and gravel for the past few days, helping to put together a victory garden in front of San Francisco's City Hall. At one point we all looked up from our shoveling and shimmering there in the heat like some kind of vision was the mayor, in a gorgeous suit and equally gorgeous thin leather shoes.

One of the sweat-begrimed volunteers began telling him that the city should keep on funding the garden, rather than ripping it up and replacing it with sod once Slow Food Nation and Carlo Petrini are safely out of town. "You all might enjoy working on it now," the mayor said in a cautionary tone. "But eventually it'll get weedy and people will start to complain."

"Portland has a full-time victory garden" said the volunteer. "You don't want to be behind Portland, do you?"

And with that, the mayor was gone.

"He didn't even pick up a shovel and pose with it!" one of the volunteers wailed.

People kept on stopping by the garden, and asking when they could come by and plant things. You know, once all the dirt-shoveling was finished. Oddly enough, planting day was already over-subscribed with volunteers, something which had not occurred so far with any of our days of staking, raking, and shoveling. Which reminded me of how my friend Novella complains about how people are always trying to persuade her to let them plant things in her garden. To this she says (I am paraphrasing) "find a vacant lot and start your own garden, chump." Planting = the sexy part.

Civic Center in San Francisco is between the Tenderloin and SOMA, which a fair amount of shitting in public. We discussed this as we shoveled. One person said that Civic Center is only a popular spot for congregating during the day, so stealth shitting in the lettuce by night was unlikely to be an issue. Others demurred. A nearby fountain at UN Plaza had been shut down entirely several years ago because it had acquired Ganges-like qualities. We continued to discuss. Hepatitis? Hep A could be a problem.

I'm glad to live in a city where "Garden in front of City Hall! Cool!" outweighs "We could get sued! For serving hepatitis lettuce from our victory garden!"

The plaza in front of City Hall is normally so stark and boring and International Style in nature. What I wish the city would do is turn it into a bench-lined swath of greenery like Washington Square Park in Philadelphia. Or a Gaudi-in-Barcelona-like plaza made out of San Francisco's smashed crockery.

I realize this is completely out of keeping with any California asthetic traditions, other than the Hearst tradition where you steal anything from Europe that seems nifty and smoosh it all together. Nonetheless, I am endorsing it.

I feel like I read this fairytale once.

NY Times: Albanian Custom Fades, Woman as Family Man.

Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to avenge her father’s death.

In all of his books, Randy Shilts manages to write about history in the most sprawling, gossipy, harsh yet idealistic way. Its what I imagine Russian novels would be like, if I actually liked Russian novels. It's so interesting to be reading his last book and to see all the different social movements - civil rights, gay rights, women's rights - converge and both influence and perplex the lives of people in the military.

There's so much in here that I feel like I should have known about years ago. I remember being in high school, and the kids in my history class literally begging our AP History teacher to do a section on Vietnam. We were so earnest, and we totally got shot down. "It's too painful," said Ms Whatever-Her-Name-Was. "I'm not revisiting it." None of us even had the imagination then to ask for the first Gulf War. And none of us even knew there had been a Korean war.

Our history classes always ended with World War II. The Siege at Normandy. That guy kissing that girl in the middle of the ticker tape parade. We were so tired of World War II. Tired of the Nazis. Tired of Winston Churchill. Tired of France. Tired of the bomb, and Oppenheimer, and Stalin and of watching Empire of the Sun over and over again.

Is that how it was for everybody? History beginning with Egyptian Pharoahs, and ending with World War II?