So yesterday I got a last-minute invitation to join my good friends Eve and Matt to talk about Muni in front of cameras. Naturally, I put on a suit and my new-to-me Cavali shirt ($7.99 plus tax at Thrift Town) because if you offer me an excuse to overdress, I will take it. But I biked there on a hot day (see: new cycling column), and there was no makeup trailer, so I was checking the footage today to see if I looked all sweaty and shiny and gross as un-powdered people on TV do, when I noticed the big World of Warcraft banner ad on the Appeal. Which stopped me dead in my vain tracks and made me post this. Because between hanging out with Eve and Matt, complaining about Muni, wearing my fancy but cheap thrift store outfits and slaying trashmobs with my undead rogue, this confluence of coincidence makes me happy. And a little scared at how well the Internet knows me.

If there was any question I’m an aging hipster, it should probably be settled now that I have a single-speed cafe bike from Valencia Cyclery, live in a room above the Zeitgeist, spent last night perusing the jukebox at the Phone Booth with someone I met on OkCupid and spent this morning riding around the Mission with stops at La Torta Gorda and an indie rock, crafts and food fair on Treat. I’m living the cliché dream, bitches!

Shit, I even have the now apparently fashionable paunch, though I was way ahead of the curve on that one. In fact, apparently my transformation may yet be complete as I was told in no uncertain terms by the Fahsionist herself Mai Le at yesterdays “street food” benefit for La Cocina that the fats don’t rate for her streetwear blog (granted, it’s apparently for their own protection from commenters). [Update: Mai sticks up for folks across the BMI spectrum!] Give me another twenty pounds shed while biking around the Mish and eating out of the mini-fridge in my SRO room, plenty of appetite-suppressing Four Barrell coffee and some shopping on my trip to New York next week and I will qualify yet!

All that said, I’m not really sure I care. In the counterintuitive conformity of “creative individualism,” only the other can be called a hipster. It’s rare the person who simply owns it, and can build any sort of collective identity around the themes and tropes, and through that build not conformity but community. So while I’m not sure I’m willing, or qualified, to say it loud and say it proud, I do seem to be a hipster on balance (read: art school kid yes, skinny jeans, no). Have been for about a decade.

And honestly, there’s not really anything wrong with that. So why fight it?

A couple of times in the last week I had to stop myself from posting a message to Twitter about how much fun I’m having, even though I’m only partly employed, have no fixed address and am still broke waiting for some invoices to come through so I can settle some debts and start looking for a new place. I’ve shed a lots of material baggage, lost weight, spent a bunch of quality time with loved ones, and been productive to spite myself.

Had I known being a hobo could be this fun, I would have done it a long time ago! (Mom, dad, I’m kidding, promise.)

For instance, there was the weekend my old friend Seth came up and we went fishing and hiking. Or the high school reunion picnic my friend Dustin reminded me of in the nick of time that awkwardly enough got me back in touch with people I did, eventually, recognize — and who seem to be doing quite well. And then there was the dinner my cousin Heinz cooked up that included some shrimp from Alaska that may have been the best I’ve ever eaten.

None of which is the kind of sad, underemployed life I have every reason to expect right now. Gloating over these moments is not the way to look like someone hungry for more paying work. But then again, I have it on good authority that I’ll soon have plenty of work and then some, which has served to reduce my stress level and freed me to start making plans even as I hibernate on the front porch of the family cabin in Silverton.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all fly fishing and video games and reading fiction. I’ve been posting four times a day, five days a week to NBC Bay Area, for instance. And before coming up here, I had the pleasure of helping some friends out by “interning” as a personal chef, which I thoroughly enjoyed and which improved and refined my capacity to maintain a kitchen and pantry. I’ve also had a couple more pieces published by PC World — “Digitize All of Your Old Media” and “Private P2P Networks Add Trust to File Sharing.” If that’s not your speed, I was also honored to be invited to a roundtable discussion of Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap by Ed Champion, and proceeded to (hopefully) amuse and (probably) bemuse when weighing in.

(That said, it’s a fun and interesting read that you should check out.)

I’ve also been pitching in to help some new sites that I think are already great and destined for better yet. For instance, Eve Batey at the San Francisco Appeal lets me indulge my skeptical side regarding the intersection of tech and politics in articles like “311 And Twitter: More Problems Than Solutions?” and “benefitsSF Benefits Who, Exactly?” More recently, a late-night email to The Awl resulted in “Gulnara Karimova: Uzbek Oligarch, Pop Musician, U.N. Representative,” with more to come. Neither pays, but I’m chalking it up as contributing to worthy causes while expanding my repertoire.

It’s enough to make me an optimist with a positive attitude! Okay, maybe that’s going a little too far. Still, a good summer so far and possibly better in store.

Nothing new under the sun, not even link roundups of the days top stories.

I’ve been a fan of Yahoo Pipes since it was first released to the public. I first used it to combine a number of feeds¹ from sites I contributed to so that my home page was constantly updated with recent work and personal updates. It allowed me to include only my just my posts from sites with multiple authors and to strip the boilerplate and ads tacked on to items. I’ve since used it to prune feeds from sites based on certain criteria or key words to reduce the noise in my feed reader and to experiment with ideas for mashing up or repurposing data from other services.

If you’re still reading, then you probably also know that Yahoo, the company, hasn’t exactly been operating smoothly of late. Many of my friends who once worked there have either quit or gotten pink slips, leading me to joke in an aside to an item about rumors of further layoffs that I would have confirmed the news with my contacts at the company, but I don’t have any left. I understand that new CEO Carol Bartz has her work cut out for her, but her stated mandate to slash parts of the business that aren’t turning a profit scares me.

Why? Because Pipes is free, and while I imagine it isn’t terribly expensive to operate, any costs it generates are strictly revenue-negative. Regardless, though I can’t say for certain there have been significant outages, neither would I assure anyone that it’s speedy or reliable². Nor can I think of any significant new features added, or any further development at all, since it’s been released. So my question is: If you use Pipes, what would you pay to keep it going, assure some degree of dependability, and even fund continued development?

My suggestion for a move to a pay model is based on my love of Flickr. While I often neglect to cough up the $24.95 yearly fee for the pro account thanks to laziness and poverty, I do pay for it, and have since before and after it was acquired by Yahoo. Not really for the features it affords paid users, really, but because it acts as a remote backup for hundreds of photos I’ve taken; was the first application I found, online or off, which made photo metadata so easy to add that it’s almost fun; and thanks to that metadata makes searching, browsing and publishing photos taken by thousands of people from around the world and up to the moment a magically useful experience.

To a certain set of power users, I feel Pipes could offer similar value.

While I have a passing acquaintance with Javascript, Perl and PHP, I’m not familiar enough with the chores like managing RSS feeds or parsing XML that real developers find second nature. But the graphical approach to connecting the input and output of basic data processing routines presented by Pipes was intuitive enough to pick up quite quickly. Even if I haven’t actually followed through, I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought or replied “you could use Pipes for that” when someone describe a publishing problem they were having or a little bit of functionality they wanted.

The only thing that’s stopped me from recommending Pipes or dreaming up innovative uses for it, frankly, is my trepidation that it may stop working or cease to exist entirely on any given day. Yahoo just shut down GeoCities, which after more than a decade as a free, online publishing platform was as hoary an institution as they come on the Internet. My hope is that Pipes is so miniscule, it won’t even register Bartz, the Yahoo board or the constantly re-orged execs as a line item on the budget. Even then, it’s only a matter of time until some consultant from the likes of McKinsey does notice it and sounds the “wasteful spending” alarm.

I’m writing this in the hopes of pre-empting that eventuality, maybe giving Pipes fans and afficionados a platform in the comments, and suggesting that I, at least, would be willing to pay a nominal fee for the peace of mind provided by the knowledge that Pipes would not only live but even thrive if administered a hot cash injection. I’m also writing this because after a splashy release with plenty of publicity from tech journalists, I haven’t seen it mentioned in months if not years.

I’m willing to start the bidding at $10 (Okay, $9.95) a year. What about you: Do you use Yahoo Pipes? Are the features you’d wish to see? Have you found the service spotty or even broken on occassion? How much would you pay for the current level of service and function to be maintained? And would you pay more if you knew Yahoo would actually devote some resources to improving it? Or am I just an idiot for not knowing a better solution offering similar utility, much less relying on a Yahoo product at all?

1. I was so proud of myself, I was about to send it as a suggestion to then Lifehacker editrix Gina Trapani only to find she’d already been there, done that and written the tutorial weeks before. I actually did end up writing for Lifehacker, albeit briefly. And of course Gina’s now beating me and many others to the good idea punch at Smarterware.

2. My pipes feed does go through Feedburner — which, like Flickr, was another great service that ended up devoured by a Valley monster. In this case, Google. I admit to having some trouble isolating the problem when updates to my personal site seemed delayed or don’t appear at all. Pipes, Feedburner, Flickr, Twitter or one of any number of CMS systems could be to blame in any given case.

Update: So, I got word from an unknown someone who claims familiarity with the project that it’s not only free from danger, but will see improvements sooner rather than later. Many thanks to said informer, and all due respect, but while I admit to shirking my tech-news reading duties, not to mention those related to further development of my own tools, I haven’t seen any movement. That said, no movement is essentially what I’m asking for here, so sally on, Pipes.

Hilarious advertising, via my old comrade Nicholas Carlson. I can’t count how many times the vagaries of Soviet toilet paper (or lack there of) have been cited as an example of why anything besides unfettered free markets are doomed to fail.

Anyway, have been quiet of late thanks to the collapse of said unfettered free markets indirectly leaving me hustling for work. Speaking of which, I’ve updated my home page and my about page to reflect some new publications and sites I can be found at.

And I promise even more soon, even though blogging is apparently killing the very business of writing I try to make a living in. Good times all around.

If Barack Obama is really a progressive candidate and not just the new face of the business interests that truly rule Washington, then together with the Democrats that now reign as a party there are some clear goals I’d like to see worked toward:

1. Stop the drug war: Obama can’t do anything about mandatory sentencing or funding drug treatment programs as opposed to incarceration — much of that is left up to the states. What he can do is stop funding intervention and eradication efforts in countries around the world, especially in Central and South America. No more crop-spraying, no more money for paramilitary juntas, no more federal funds for local police departments to pursue American citizens at home who are criminalized for using and abusing drugs and the expansion of the world’s largest prison system.
2. End the other wars (and don’t start any new ones): The war in Iraq was, from the start, an imperialist war of aggression and in no way any effort to liberate anyone from anything (except maybe the Iraqis from their oil). Afghanistan is a little more complicated, but again, why is the United States cleaning up the messes made by the British Empire? The thought of broadening that conflict to Waziristan, within the borders of a nuclear-armed Pakistan, scares the living shit out of me. Yet Obama has made it perfectly clear in his speeches that this is exactly what he plans to do.
3. Solve the deficit by reducing military spending: If you want to reduce taxes, increase spending on healthcare and education while reducing the budget deficit and not significantly increasing the tax burden, you’re going to have to cut the money spent on the military. The Keynesian spending of the New Deal never did end — the money just went into the defense industry instead of the WPA.
4. Do make war on corporate welfare and tax evasion:From $700 billion bailout packages to massive tax credits to offshore accounts, Obama can veto more handouts to large corporations and keep the income due to the treasury from flowing into offshore havens. The IRS and the DOJ need to lead the way, combined with a congressional rewrite of the tax code to excise loopholes, would do much to get the wealthy to pay what they owe. If they did, then you could probably reduce taxes in the long run for everybody.
5. Abide the rule of law: The Guantanamo Bay detention center needs to be shut down today. If there are actual concerns that detainees are threats to society, then they should be tried in the appropriate jurisdictions by applicable local laws and amongst their peers. Illegal extradition worldwide and the suspension of habeus corpus domestically needs to end now, along with wiretapping and the quixotic quest for an omniscient security state.
6. Prosecute war criminals and profiteers: Obama has an opportunity to appoint a new Attorney General, and that appointee should go after military leadership, independent contractors like Blackwater and White House officials who aided and abetted war crimes, from torture to the rape and murder of innocent civilians. Same goes for corruption in awarding defense contracts and prosecution of corporate collaborators in domestic spying programs. American exceptionalism when it comes to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in the Hague needs to end.
7. Roll back expansion of executive power and privilege: Stop the practice of “presidential signing statements” and stop claiming “national security” to cover up corruption and abuses of power. The expansion of executive power under the Bush administration severely damaged the system of checks-and-balances. The president’s role is to enforce the will of legislators elected by voters, not rule by fiat. My worry is that the Democratic party, once it inherits the powers the Republicans claimed for themselves in the last eight years, will be more than happy to run with it.
8. Keep corporate interests out of foreign policy: From demands for liberalized economies to demands for new intellectual property laws, not to mention ignoring human rights abuses in places like China and Russia to keep cheap goods flowing new markets open for exploitation, business interests need to take a back seat in diplomatic negotiations and let human rights, economic justice, environmental concerns and peaceful resolutions to international disputes lead.
9. Free Cuba from the embargo: It’s not helping us, and it’s actively hurting Cubans. The policy of containment was and is an ongoing joke. And the entire Monroe Doctrine that gives America the self-declared right to indirectly rule the entire Western Hemisphere should probably be put to bed (and the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war strangled in its crib). Meanwhile, the practice of supporting petty dictators through financial and military assistance, covertly or overtly, needs to stop if America wants to honestly have any pretension to “spreading democracy.”
10. Support education, healthcare, food security, transportation and affordable housing: These things need to be assured, if not guaranteed, for the American people. When possible, the new administration should throttle the flow of wanton privatization and stem the ebb of the public commons. The changing tide should lift all boats, not be another trickle-down tsunami swamping the smallest while the largest surf the crest.

If Obama and the Democratic majorities in the house and senate move to achieve these goals, then and only then will you find me dancing in the streets. Hell, just putting a national end to the barbarous nightmare of the death penalty would be enough to get me canvassing and phone-banking in 2012.

The numbers have certainly improved over the course of the night, but I have to say, I’m more than a little disappointed in the results for Proposition 8 in Los Angeles County. I mean, I’m really disappointed in Tulare county, yet that was to be expected — the Angelino vote was the heartbreaker. May your beaches be fouled by runoff until you amend your ways. (Map from the LA Times)

It’s been a month since journalist and author PJ Corkery died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, but somehow I just found out today. He was incredibly kind and generous to me when I was an upstart punk of a blogger trying to make a name for SFist — responding to my emails, mentioning our work in his San Francisco Examiner column, inviting me to a dine and dish at the legendary Washington Square Bar & Grill, showing up to the site’s anniversary party (where I was a little too star-struck to interrupt a conversation between him and Matt Gonzalez to say hello). Even after I left SFist and he left the Examiner, we stayed in touch, though most of it was me begging for a look at Basic Brown. My naive persistence paid off when he gifted me a graciously inscribed copy which I shall cherish. His erudite, precise and witty words of wisdom inspired me to press on as a writer, for which I thank him publicly and profusely. We are all the richer for his meritorious literary contributions.

I’ll miss you, Peej. Deeply.

Yes, all I did in the mountains was a minimal share of chores and maximized my time reading trash, cooking heavily and sleeping lightly. To all whom I made an oath of work ethic, I apologize. Meanwhile, I’ll try to share what I learned in terms of wonderfully lazy reading and deliciously cheap crime novels.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell: Again, I know that Nabokov in Lectures on Literature forbade me from considering my fellow feelings in relation to the character or characters in the estimation of a novel (and I’m sure Trilling would agree), I couldn’t help but salivate over the prose, presentation and personalities of this novel. Another must-read for armchair revolutionaries.

Made from Scratch, Jenna Woginrich: Speaking of must-reads, I’ve been dreaming of a goat farm in the northern climes for some time. Woginrich managed to cross the livestock boundary with just chickens and rabbits, harvesting eggs and hair as a vegetarian stuck in Idaho at that. So add chickens and rabbits to my dream of goats and greens in some similar region of rich topsoil revealed by global warming.

The Hard Way, Lee Childs: Embarrassingly enough, I had just enough of a moment with blue-eyed, sandy-haired bestseller Lee Childs at the last Book Expo in Los Angeles to insult him by pointing out that I could finish his novels in a few hours at the family cabin. “That’s what they’re meant for,” he replied, graciously. This after talking to a librarian ahead of me in line from Montana who could probably read not only faster, but more in depth, yet was more than a full measure less awed having seen Childs at innumerable book-pimping events over the years.

City of Tiny Lights, Patrick Neate: My dear Rachel mailed this directly to Silverton, Washington at my mother’s suggestion and I couldn’t be more pleased. Patrick Neate tells the story of antihero Tommy Akhtar in colloquial London slang beautifully, reminding me how respectable Graham Greene made genre fiction for ambitious (yet deserving) literary types. More Hammett than Chandler, never mind the blurbs.

Host, David Foster Wallace: And why did nobody point me to this richly-layered, hyper-textual essay long before I started at Giga Omnimedia, much less Valleywag? I’ve long ceded that blog writing was much like that of radio and television. It’s clear I didn’t truly appreciate or entirely understand the depth of that allusion.

George Orwell’s “blog,” the Orwell Diaries, is absolutely fascinating, even 70 years after the fact. I assume it’s because while it was written as a private diary, it was always presumed that it would eventually become public in one way or another. Either as anecdotes in an article, impressions and scenes for a novel or eventually post-humously. For all I know, he probably shared it with close associates or offered it to whomever asked to read it.

Unlike our own very public writing online, Orwell doesn’t indulge in privacy in his notes. There are no “overheards,” or gossip, or events and places aren’t treated as profound simply because they are personal. Today, I would treat a diary as somewhere to put what I couldn’t otherwise publish. This reads more like a reporter’s notebook — if that reporter was an amateur botanist, birder and socialist.

Point is, you’ll get days like this, when he offers fine details about the press, economics and living conditions while touring the streets of Marrakech in 1938. Ripe with detail and a certain self-awareness of being from the privileged class but unwilling to be of it. And then you’ll get an entry like this:

Distinctly cooler at night. Last night used blanket all night. Red hibiscus in flower.

Kind of sublime, really, especially as you realize just how long it will actually take for three years of such daily notes to unfurl, encompassing the early history of World War II. Makes for wonderful, and surprising, reading amidst much echo and blather in my RSS feeds.

I had the good fortune to spend some time with my old friend Hank Willis Thomas last weekend, and basically begged him for a free copy of his new monograph. As much as I’d like to give Hank millions of dollars to create great art, I can barely afford his coffee-table book. That said, I’ll have a copy by hook or by crook soon enough. Meanwhile, if you buy it, he can make his capitalist publishers happy, and there’s no shame in that.

Yes, I’m promoting a book that I’m not even mentioned or pictured in. I’m banking on the fact that I’m captured as a cute, young boy deep in Hank’s archives and will turn up when some equally deluded and enthusiastic young kid researches the collection some day, fulfilling my vain hope of being interred as even a fringe member of Manhattan’s downtown art scene.

I’ll be at Chelsea’s Rush Arts Gallery on Friday, September 19th from 6pm to 8pm to see a show co-curated by Hank and his cousin Kalia Brooks featuring art from fellow friend Bayete Ross-Smith — which completes a former roommate trifecta. Check out the show if you’re in town, buy Hank’s book if you aren’t, and save some money for the good work on the way.

My inability to bring any fish home over the years of holidays spent at the family cabin in Silverton, Washington has led some to doubt of my claims to having caught any fish at all. My first day out this weekend, I hooked two trout — one spit out the hook and the other snapped my line while I was trying to land him. My mother has been the biggest skeptic, so when I landed a keeper yesterday morning I ran straight home in order to make her a believer and get photographic evidence of the 12″, 12-ounce rainbow trout I pulled from the south fork of the Stilliguamish.

Of course, my mom immediately started complaining that she wanted to have fresh trout for dinner like her father, and my grandpa, Benny used to provide (I figured that one fish was at least enough for a trout-and-eggs breakfast). So I went out later in the day and caught three more — two barely legal rainbows and a fat, sassy brook trout which put up quite a fight and must have weighed at least a pound.

I was a little nervous that I’d mangle them when I cleaned and gutted the beauties, but they came out alright. A little salt, pepper and olive oil and the two biggest fish hit the grill (I left my mom the two smaller ones on ice in the cooler).

I must say, with a fresh salad and rice pilaf, it was a simple but delicious meal — fresh trout are damn tasty. Though with the license, lures and all they ended up costing $15 a pound. But hey, I got to demonstrate unequivocally my position at the top of the food chain and my ability to provide for my family, as it were.

For those who care about such things, I caught all four on a lightweight spincasting rig, using 1/16 oz. Rooster Tail lures — one in pink and green and the other brown (206RT and 206BR). Which felt a little like cheating, since I usually cast flies, but at least I wasn’t using bait. So to give the fish a fighting chance, I’ll go back to single, barbless hooks this weekend. Still, it was nice to put the doubt to rest once and for all.

I admit, I’m more than a bit of a reactionary when it comes to fashion, particularly menswear. I’m sure in some circles, once upon a time, my attitude that every man should tie their own tie and anyone over twenty five should have at least one good suit and a selection of sportcoats would probably get me labeled a “cryptofascist,” no matter if I could recite the chapter on “Fetishization of Commodities” from Capital verbatim. Moving on, I just like to look nice and maybe a little respectable — and it doesn’t cost me much to do it, thanks to being a lifelong thrift store shopper and a a one-time New Yorker who knows how to get tipped to sample sales and where to find the outlets where department stores and local designers unload their misfits at much less than retail. (My friends also organize a clothing swap, SwapSF, which I have yet to attend but imagine must be magic.)

The nice thing about menswear is that it’s not as seasonal as its more feminine counterpart. And old joke goes that a woman boasts of the most recent addition to her outfit, whereas a man shows off his oldest article. Me? I like to show off the best bargain. “Oh, this grey, wool felt jacket from Bertoli? $20 at the Salvation Army on West 8th.” God I love that.

That said, it’s nice to be up to date on what’s going on in Milan (which, along with London, is to menswear what Paris and New York are to couture) and, to an increasing degree, Tokyo. So I have a few menswear blogs I subscribe to. What’s nice is that not only do they point out the latest styles, but offer tips as to appropriate dress for different occassions, explanations of menswear lingo and remembrances of styles past.

The Sartorialist is photo-heavy, especially on a recent run through Florence and Milan. This Florentine does so many things right with such an ecclectic outfit, it’s a wonder — as does this Milanese gentleman. I would kill for a linen suit like that, not to mention the two-tone shoes.

“The Manolo” was an early shoeblogger who’s started something of a fasion blog empire (House of Manolo?). When I discovered there was a Manolo for the Men, I actually sat in a Manhattan cafe and read the entire archives. Izzy is always funny and often quite trenchant (see his notes on the geopolitical implications for outfits worn by George Bush and Vladimir Putin), and he seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of menswear terminology.

I have to admit, Off the Cuff was a recent addition, and “Menswear from D.C.?” Our nations capitol is probably one of the most boringly conservative menswear markets on earth. I couldn’t disagree more with the assessment of a polo shirt’s value, for instance. Still, know thine enemy! And for those of us who weren’t born in East Coast aristocracy, know their etiquette and conventions to better insinuate yourself across enemy lines.

Finally, I’d like to say that English Cut, a blog by a Saville Row bespoke tailor that doesn’t post often but when it does posts such invaluable information, insight and history that it’s a must-read. Sadly, for me it seems to be a can’t-read, as the URL refuses to resolve, even though I can see an update from just this month in my RSS feeds. Also, I’d like to nudge Molly Bloom to bring back Guy Fridays — I loved that feature.

Any other menswear fetishists or bloggers out there? Please do leave suggestions in the comments.

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road being used to sell cars. Overtly.

Yesterday evening I happened across some signature gatherers canvassing for registered voters who reside in San Francisco. While the sheer volume of such campaigns in the Bay Area, and the often misleading information they give about the cause they’re representing, I often decline as politely as possible and move on. But in this case, I actually walked up and volunteered my John Hancock. Why?

Because the volunteers were out working for The Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco. And before you jump to the conclusion that they’re right-wing nutjobs out to rename everything “Reagan this” and “Reagan that” (like I did when I first got an email from them), check out the site. Instead, it’s a gloriously involved piece of satire, the kind of well-planned joke that reminds me why I love The City.

See, they’re looking to get 10,000 signatures in order to qualify a ballot proposition so that San Francisco voters can decide if they want to rename the local Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant, which, to put it bluntly, processes the stream of shit flowing from our sewage system. And the president they want to bestow this honor upon is none other than George W. Bush.

I can only hope the proposition, as written, stipulates a sign reading “George W. Bush Sewage Plant” in a size proportional to the man’s heroic legacy. Preferrably with some dramatic lighting, or maybe even in neon. Complain all you will about the over-legislation of The City and the volume of seemingly vain proclamations from City Hall and ballot initiatives from motivated cranks, but this one has my full support.

I will do pretty much anything to add a new byline to the ol’ writing bio. I normally joke that I’m a byline whore, but whores get paid — whereas I’m willing to give it up for free, which I think makes me just a slut. Plus, I’m definitely motivated by compulsion and enthusiasm more than strictly money, so again, it’s fitting. On the other hand, whores can have lovers, not just clients, so there’s that. Guess I’d better avoid such loaded terms and just go with the more neutral “collector.” For this week I did get paid, and added a new publication to the list, so it’s like the best of all worlds.

• The People’s Guide: North Beach Blogged
• The People’s Guide: North Beach Blogged, Day 2
• The People’s Guide: North Beach Blogged, Day 3
• The People’s Guide: North Beach Blogged, Day 4
• The People’s Guide: Jackson’s Day 5 Doozie

Thanks to editor Sarah Hromack for the opportunity. She’s left the door open for me to contribute in the future, and I’ve been sitting on a project idea that my friend Jason and I have been discussing since last Summer that I think would fit well, so you may just see me pop up there again.

So I’m spending the weekend trying to accomplish as much as I can towards getting a rough cut of my student film Dominoes done. When editing, it’s always good to have at least a temporary music track to use as a timing reference. I’d also thought about adding music as background ambience — as though a radio were playing in the distance.

Of course, I’d never be able to clear rights to commercial music. So instead I dropped by ccMixter and used the search tools to browse for tracks tagged “hip-hop” that could be used freely with attribution. I turned up about ten choice tracks, of which I used five, and mixed them together using Traktor so that they segued seamlessly and maintained a steady tempo.

While you’ll probably barely be able to hear it in the film, I figured I’d post it here to let you in on my process as I’m working, as well as an example of the quality work that people publishing under a Creative Commons license so that it can be re-purposed by other artists.

Dominoes Mix [9.3mb MP3]

Featuring:

Slumlord by Lo Tag Blanco
Open Your Eyes (Long Island Remix) by CoffeeTrim
The Beat by CDK
Open Your Eyes (Elithrmix) by BOCrew
Martini Madness by DJ Blue

Looking through my bookshelf for something I hadn’t read a few weeks ago, I stumbled across Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. I have to say that as someone who has played writer and designer on the Web, it’s a life-changer I only wish I’d discovered earlier. The edition that ended up on my shelves (from where or whom I know not) is the 1997 printing. But it’s at least as timeless as Strunk and White, and Bringhurst’s poetic prose measuring considerations of reading on, and writing or designing for, computer displays are still quite apt. An excerpt, emphasis mine:

“The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for advertizing [sic] and dogmatizing, but not so good a place for thoughtful text.

“The screen, in other words, is a reading environment even more fugitive than the newspaper. Intricate, long sentences full of unfamiliar words stand little chance. At text size, subtle and delicate letterforms stand little chance as well. Superscripts and subscripts, footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes disappear. In the harsh light and coarse resolution of the screen, such literate accessories are difficult to see; what is worse, they dispel the essential illusion of speed. So the links and jumps of hypertext replace them. All the subtexts then can be the same size, and readers are at liberty to skip from text to text like children switching channels on TV. When reading takes this form, both sentences and letterforms retreat to blunt simplicity. Forms bred on newsprint and signage are most likely to survive. Good text faces for the screen are therefore as a rule faces with low contrast, a large torso, open counters, sturdy terminals, and slab serifs or no serifs at all.”

If you’ve ever designed anything, from pages to packages, web sites to billboards, it behooves you to pick up this book. If you’ve ever written anything, and are curious about the history and the future of text, it behooves you to pick up this book. And if you’re just curious and want to read a master discourse deeply on a rich topic, it behooves you to pick up this book.

With water up to my waist and waves rolling in, I made the decision that I should go no further. I’d mustered enough courage to get over any immediate fear, but I was already cramping in the cold and I’m not a particularly strong swimmer. The decision I made not to dive in and swim further out was a rational one, as doubling the number of men struggling to keep from drowning wasn’t going to help anyone. I was helpless, and though I wasn’t responsible for any of it, I could sense the grief on the horizon, and I was making a conscious effort to numb the feeling.

When the surfer ran up I knew that if the man flailing sixty yards from shore hadn’t drowned already, he’d probably be alright. And the anxiety eased — I wouldn’t have to live with being the helpless bystander who looked on while someone drowned.

Let me now start from the beginning.

It was a beautiful day in San Francisco — grabbing my morning coffee, the warmth reminded me that spring had just arrived. Checking in with my friends Jason and Min Jung online, they had plans to go to the beach. I offered to take the bus and meet them, but they offered to pick me up, and as the afternoon was slipping away I agreed, eager to dip my toes in the sand and water.

It was a nice ride up Geary, with a stop at a market in Japan Town for snacks. Rounding the bend on Sutro Hill past the Cliff House has always been one of my favorite views — with the pastel row house on the left, punctuate by the windmills and the park, the broad expanse of the Great Highway and Ocean Beach running straight into the distance and the vast Pacific stretching off into the haze.

The sand was thick with beachgoers on the first warm Saturday of the year, and the typically strong winds were remarkably calm, though that meant there were few kites in the sky — my favorite thing on Ocean Beach is seeing the varried array of kites, from the colorful Chinese dragons to the huge yet acrobatic sails used by kite-surfers. Still, there would be dogs and people to watch, snacks to eat, and I’d brought a copy of Dubliners and a deck of cards, so I was happy.

We found a parking space rather easily, and the sand at the bottom of the steps from the parking lots was nice and warm. We walked to the water, and in my flip-flops I tested the temperature. Cold as ever (it never really warms up to anything remotely tolerable). Then we walked a few yards up the beach, but I didn’t really notice the couple at first, until Min Jung pointed to the man waving.

“Is he yelling help?” We weren’t sure what he said over the sound of the waves, but it definitely sounded like distress. A friend was on the beach, waving back, and he was only chest deep or so and on his feet, so he might be playing a joke to lure her into the water. But then he stumbled, and went down like a knocked-out boxer. I had already started to pull my phone and cigarettes from my pants pockets as Jason began walking towards him into the shallow water, still wearing his shoes.

When the man didn’t get up, Jason started running. I balled my coat up and handed it to Min Jung, running after him in jeans and a t-shirt, kicking off my flip-flops.

The man was on his back in about a foot of water, but breathing. He was wearing nothing but boxers and gym shorts. Jason and I pulled him by his arms until he became dead-weight. “Breathe, just breathe,” I told him. “Relax and breathe.” Once we had him on hard sand, I asked him if he could stand up. “Yes,” he said.

So I tilted him upright and lifted him up from under his shoulders. Immediately once we had him on his feet, he tumbled into me, and I almost went down but for Jason. We got his arms over his shoulders, and got him to dry sand, where his friend took my place. The man, so exhausted his speech sounded slurred, cursed her for waving back instead of getting help.

By that time two sheriffs had arrived on their quad-bikes. He collapsed at the feet of one, who quickly asked if there was anyone out there with him. He didn’t respond, so I repeated the question, closer and louder. We asked if there was anyone else out there, and it turned out there was. Almost immediately, Min Jung spotted him in the waves, much farther out than we found the first man.

The sherriff obvously wasn’t stripping down to run in, but he wasn’t stopping me, so now down to my shorts I ran out. It wasn’t more than a few yards in that the sands began to shift under my feet with the undertow, and I had to slow down. A few more yards and the waves started to slow me further. My shins began to cramp after a less than a minute, and I was breathing quick, short breaths because of the cold as I reached down and splashed water on my chest in the hopes of acclimating faster.

I dove into the next wave I faced, but as I surfaced, it hit me that it would be suicide to swim out after him. I got my footing again, and turned around to see two other men coming in after me on either side. I scanned the horizon, but it took me a moment to spot the other swimmer. When I did, I saw that he hadn’t made any more progress to shore — in fact, he seemed to be in the riptide and his head was barely above water, bobbing in the spray.

My thoughts turned to three surfers whom I’d seem as we were coming up the beach. They had wet suits and a flotation device, and were probably strong swimmers who knew the local currents. Could I get to them in time? I walked parallel to the beach, towards those surfers, tracking the head in the waves. Then was the moment of helplessness. All I could do was track him — and the other men who’d come in with me.

That’s when the young surfer arrived. “Is there someone out there?” “Yes.” “Where is he?” I pointed, “Straight in front of me is where I last saw him.” The surfer ran out and quickly began cresting the incoming waves on his board. My attention returned to the man who’d gone out further into the surf, the one in the polka-dot boxers — him I could still help if necessary.

I turned around, and Min Jung and Jason were waving me in, the sherriffs standing stoically at the waterline, a small crowd having developed. After a moment, checking the surfer’s progress, I ran to the closest sherriff, thinking to tell him about the other surfers further down the beach. “Search and rescue is on the way,” he told me when I got there, breathing heavily. Min Jung and Jason assured me that the first man was doing okay, and shortly after I looked back out, I could see the surfer, floating on his board and holding the second swimmer.

A fourth man had joined the other two strangers and myself who’d gone after the swimmer in our shorts. The man in the polka dot boxers had made it out. I let the three of them know that the rescuers were on the way. I watched, worried that the pair were still caught in the riptide, and if the young surfer could pull the man across the current.

Turning to walk back to shore, I heard the sirens on the fire trucks as they barrelled down Sutro Hill. In a couple of minutes, the surfer had made considerable progress toward shore. The firemen had arrived, but in boots and coats. Once the surfer into knee-deep water, the other three mean still out there helped hoist the man up into an army carry and walked him up to dry land just as the first surf rescuer in a wetsuit showed up.

The second swimmer was breathing, and at this point, there was nothing to do but get out of the way and let the professionals do their job. But I knew both of them would be fine, and said as much to Jason. The first swimmer was with his friend, under a blanket. The rescuers had turned the second on his side to keep him from drowning any water in his lungs. In five more minutes, both were loaded into trucks and off to the hospital.

I needed a cigarette, though there was a flash of guilt that my cigarettes were dry — what if one of the swimmers had died because I took an extra ten seconds to make sure my cigarettes stayed dry? The conversation between Min Jung, Jason and myself turned to reviewing the events and processing our emotions as we walked up the beach, looking for somewhere to sit down.

We walked up the stairs to the parking lot, and there another small scene had developed. A local cameraman was filming the rescue vehicles, and an officer in a white shirt and tie was directing everyone over the radio. I sat on the concrete and laid down, closing my eyes, crashing from the adrenaline. There was another flash of guilt when the thought occurred to me to introduce myself to the cameraman.

Eventually the commotion died down, and rested a bit, I suggested we celebrate “alls well that ends well” with some oysters at the Cliff House. But the cocktail menu had little to offer for Jason, a vegetarian, so we went to Louis’ instead — where the sight of the crusty sourdough and thoughts of slathering it with butter made me pretty much forget the oysters. We got a prime booth in the corner, with the Headlands lighthouse in the distance and the ruins of the old Sutro Baths below.

It was a fine meal. We all tore into the bread, which hit the spot, and Min Jung graciously let me steal a few scallops. Why hadn’t we acted sooner? Why hadn’t anyone else acted? How did our actions help or hinder, and was there anything more, or less, that we could have done? We came to some agreement that we had all played our own important roles. Jason was the first to commit to action. Min Jung quickly alerted a passerby on the beach to call the authorities. I’d judged the limit that the sincere but casual help a few strangers in shorts could offer wasn’t going to be enough for the second swimmer.

Later that night, I called my dad to thank him for all the lessons on marine safety, and my mother made me smile, calling me her hero. But we were all heroes in our own small ways. If someone has to be crowned with laurels, it should be the young surfer, since he was the one who snatched a drowning man from the sea.

I look forward to hearing the two swimmer are okay in the news somewhere. If there’s a lesson here that applies generally, it’s that you shouldn’t swim at Ocean Beach. Still, bring a towel. And don’t panic.

More from Min Jung.