Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Monday, October 12
KEVIN MEREDITH
Hot Shots: Tips and Tricks for Taking Better Pictures
7:30 PMToday more amateur photographers than ever before have the means to create incredible pictures. This hip primer proves that whether shooting with a film or digital camera, you don't need to invest in expensive photography equipment or have an art school degree to take amazing photographs. Whether readers are tired of disappointing snapshots or have just picked up a camera for the first time, Hot Shots teaches with a friendly tone, picture-perfect advice, fun tricks, and easy-to-understand text. Author, lomographer, and Flickr.com guru Kevin Meredith has created a must-have handbook for any aspiring photographer. The folks at Flickr will offer wine and cheese this evening.
Author and photographer Kevin Meredith is known for his award-winning lomography. He lives in Brighton, England. The foreword is provided by San Franciscans Heather Champ and Derek Powazek, who co-founded JPG magazine.
While in San Francisco, Kevin will be conducting photography workshops.
Tuesday, October 13
JACK BOULWARE and SILKE TUDOR with FRANK PORTMAN
Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day
7:30 PM"When punk broke in the Bay Area, with the clamor and the rage, the sex and the safety pins, the sound and the fury, you were either there or you weren’t. If you were there you’re probably in this book. If you weren’t you should read it." —Daniel Handler
Outside of New York and London, California’s Bay Area claims the oldest continuous punk rock scene in the world -- from the innovative late-70s art-damage of San Francisco’s Fab Mab in North Beach, to the still vibrant all-ages DIY ethos of Berkeley’s Gilman Street, where bands like Green Day, Rancid, and AFI got their start.
Gimme Something Better by Bay Area journalists Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor brings this outrageous and influential punk scene to life, straight from the mouths of the bands, roadies, record labels and fans.
Jack and Silke spent two years interviewing countless contributors across the Bay Area, the US and the globe. You will find first-hand accounts from Danny Furious and Penelope Houston of the Avengers, Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys, Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi, Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, Davey Havok of AFI, Larry Livermore of Lookout! Records, Fat Mike of NOFX, Tim Armstrong of Operation Ivy and Rancid, members of MDC and Flipper, and editors of Maximum RocknRoll magazine, among many others.
Gimme Something Better represents the definitive chronicle of Bay Area punk music, progressive politics, social consciousness, and divine decadence. The book features black and white photographs throughout, an exhaustive who’s-who list, and an introduction by Jesse Michaels, famed singer of Operation Ivy.
Jack Boulware is the author of Sex, American Style and San Francisco Bizarro. His freelance writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Playboy, Maxim, Salon, and San Francisco Chronicle, among others. For ten years he was a columnist and features writer for SF Weekly. He is co-founder of San Francisco’s annual Litquake literary festival. Silke Tudor is a San Francisco-born writer who has contributed to the Village Voice, Spin, and Tattoo Savage. For ten years she was a columnist and nightlife editor at SF Weekly, and produced the annual SF Weekly Music Awards. She recently moved to New York and toured the world with the Billy Nayer Show. Special guest Frank Portman aka Dr. Frank is involved with the Mr. T Experience, and is the author of the fabulous young adult novels, King Dork and Andromeda Klein.
Thursday, October 15
SARAH VOWELL
The Wordy Shipmates
7:30 PM (see seating note below)Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor for NPR’s This American Life, the voice of Violet Parr in Pixar’s The Incredibles, and a former columnist for Time, Salon.com, and SF Weekly; she has contributed to numerous publications, including Esquire, GQ, the Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Spin, The New York Times, and McSweeney’s, and is the author of Assassination Vacation, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Take the Cannoli, and Radio On. If that weren’t enough, she’s been called a “Madonna of Americana” (by the Los Angeles Times Book Review). Frankly, we think she’s simply one of the most fascinating, original, and perceptive storytellers we have.
What set Vowell on a journey back to our Puritan forefathers was when, in the dreadful weeks following the destruction of the World Trade Center, she found comfort in the words of the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop. In a sermon entitled “A Model of Christian Charity”, Winthrop had written what Vowell calls “one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language”: We must delight in one another, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.
Yet the Puritans’ most enduring bequest to the future United States, Vowell observes in The Wordy Shipmates, is their unshakable vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire. With sardonic humor, awed respect, and acute insight, Vowell examines the Puritans’ dual legacy of communitarian love and missionary ardor, which continues to shape America nearly four hundred years later. “Vowell likes to explode myths and reveal hypocrisy wherever she finds it,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution once noted. “She is somehow simultaneously patriot and rebel, cynic and dreamer, and an aching secularist in search of a higher ground.”
‡ Preferred seating vouchers for this event will be offered to those purchasing a copy of The Wordy Shipmates at The Booksmith, beginning October 8 and continuing until all available seat vouchers are distributed.
Friday, October 16
GREG KOT
Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music
7:30 PMIn the mid-nineties, advances in internet and digital technology made it incredibly easy to store, play and – most significantly – “rip” and share recorded music. But for all the benefits these new mediums brought, the music industry -- which included major corporations such as Viacom, Clear Channel, and Sony -- wasn’t prepared for this big change. Instead of finding innovative ways to utilize this new technology, they wasted time, their reputation, and resources in court crippling themselves while online music sharing continued to thrive.
Greg Kot is the Chicago Tribune’s acclaimed music critic and national radio show host of Sound Opinions (“the world’s only rock ‘n’ roll talk show”). He is well-known as a fans’ music critic who writes entertainingly about the intersection of music, technology, and business. In Ripped, Kot details how the new digital technology was bad news for major record executives and mega-selling recording artists who were capitalizing off significantly over-priced CDs, but how it was good news for fans of music and for independent promoters and artists who were struggling to be heard in the era of *NSYNC and Britney Spears. The music business was bloated, making more money than ever before, but many of its consumers felt like they weren't being served. Old school practices like payola combined with the consolidation of record companies and radio stations left the industry blissfully unaware and poised for disaster. Kot explains that the emergence of Napster was only the beginning of the fans taking control. As the web popularized bands and albums that previously would have been relegated to obscurity, forward-thinking artists such as Death Cab for Cutie and even Prince began creating alternative ways of getting their music out to fans. Kot says that “the internet provided bands an independence they never had: the ability to communicate directly with their fans in ways their predecessors never could have imagined.” Genre-bending and mash-ups caught on as never before, live music took on a more significant role and video games and commercials emerged as great places to hear new music.
Ripped is Kot’s masterful and passionate chronicle of how we went from $17.99 to $0.00 for the cost of an album in less than a decade. With first-hand access to some of the biggest artists out there – from Sheryl Crow to Metallica -- Kot tells the tale of backward thinking, forward thinking, and the significant power of music.
We’re delighted that KALW-FM is co-sponsoring, with support from Creative Commons, this evening’s talk and discussion!
A LOOSE TEETH PRESS SPECIAL EVENT!
Sunday, October 18
JOEY COMEAU
OverqualifiedZACH VANDEZANDE
Apathy and Paying the Rent
with The Loose Teeth Press publisher Mike Lecky
Please note early time: 4:30 PMWe’re delighted that Canadian writers Joey Comeau and Zach Vandezande will join us for a special reading and conversation while they’re in San Francisco for the Alternative Press Expo.
Joey Comeau:
“Overqualified's cover letters are like a slap in the face, but the slap is hilarious, and you can't stop laughing, and as soon as it’s over you want to tell all your friends about the slap. You know the kind?” -- Ryan North, Dinosaur Comics
“Joey Comeau’s Overqualified is Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? as chewed up and spit out by J. G. Ballard. . . . A book whose melancholy is leavened by a surprising hilarity.” -- Paul Di Filippo, author of The Steampunk Trilogy and Cosmocopia
Cover letters are all the same. They’re useless. You write the same lies over and over again, listing the store-bought parts of yourself that you respect the least. God knows how they tell anyone apart, but this is how it's done.
And then one day a car comes out of nowhere, and suddenly everything changes and you don’t know if he’ll ever wake up. You get out of bed in the morning, and when you sit down to write another paint-by-numbers cover letter, something entirely different comes out.
You start threatening instead of begging. You tell impolite jokes. You talk about your childhood and your sexual fantasies. You sign your real name and you put yourself honestly into letter after letter and there is no way you are ever going to get this job. Not with a letter like this.
And you send it anyway.
Joey Comeau writes the comic A Softer World, which has appeared recently in The Guardian and been profiled in Rolling Stone, and which Publishers Weekly called “subtle and dramatic.” His self-published first novel, Lockpick Pornography, sold out its print run of 1000 books in just three months. In 2007 he published It’s Too Late to Say I'm Sorry, a collection of short stories. The A Softer World website (asofterworld.com) has been online since 2003 and has an average daily readership of 70,000 people worldwide.
Zach VandeZande:
Some nights, he would go back and forth between the wall and stereo, plucking out this song or that and putting it on a blank tape. When he was finished, he would take the tape with him and listen to it a few times, then put it in the box with the others. He never touched them again. One day he would be satisfied. For now it was missing something.
Zach VandeZande was born in the same gray town as everybody else. For him it was Houston, Texas. He took his vitamins, went to college, started a band, got married, got a degree in Psychology (from Texas A&M if it matters), quit a band, and got a job. He did it all just like he was supposed to. One day he decided to stop striving for mediocrity, and so here we are. He learned to be kind of funny and he learned to write a book and he didn't learn to draw but he did it anyway, and he did these things and he'll probably do them again. Zach is currently pursuing a master's in English at Sam Houston State University, and currently losing sleep over this biography he's writing in the third person, wondering if it should be more specific or longer or something. In addition to Apathy, he’s the author of Legitimate Art: An Animals Have Problems Too Collection.