With a shoulder that feels ripped apart courtesy of Chrome (that sounds very Valencia Corridor-esque), I’ve been looking for something to carry my items around SF in that won’t require Ibuprofin. That’s right: a backpack. No more shoulder bags; this time around, it’s an off-to-third grade two strap style. I noticed a heavy duty one from Freight Baggage at Freewheel, but the white would last about a week before I tried to leave for work with coffee before getting caught off guard by a stop sign.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time yesterday afternoon trying to track down Freight Baggage’s creator, Travis Poh. An online search for freightbaggage.com turned up one of those pages with a photo of a random lady and an offer to buy the URL. Uninterested in freight shipping quotes as well, I started asking strangers and messengers. “Oh yea,” one told me. “Travis. You can find him on Vallejo toward North Beach. By that cafe. Tell him Frank sent you.”

My fault for not getting enough information (or maybe the fact that it sounded a bit too much like a drug transaction). A Freight Baggage MySpace page says Mr. Poh is 100 years old–no big shock there. I was also told that he’s elusive and overworked. I could order one through a bike shop but it could take more than a month to arrive. Is it so wrong to want to end my search and find the maker in our seven-by-seven mile city?

All I want is a backpack, preferably in primary colors and within the range of my tax refund check. It doesn’t have to be big enough for me to fit in. You can stick that logo with a train car anywhere you want on it. But please, let’s end the search.

Everyone loves Diesel Books, the independent store on College Ave. in Oakland [map]. Now they’re planning to open a branch in the L.A. neighborhood of Brentwood, replacing the Dutton’s that closed last year. They already have a foothold down there in Malibu (ooo!).

In other book retailing news, a local neocon blogger criticizes Green Apple Books in the Richmond District for not carrying a book by Douglas Feith, a DoD hack who was involved in pushing the country to war in Iraq and is now one of the Bush administration’s most mocked and discredited figures. (Googling “Feith +idiot” gets 92,000 hits, for example.) The same blogger elsewhere refers to Feith’s book as “a masterpiece of history,” and in another entry characterizes global warming as “hysteria” and says “the most absurd part of this hysteria is the idea that we should reduce the amount of CO² we produce.” So you can judge for yourself whether he’s credible on bookstore ordering policies.

Speaking of Green Apple Bookstore and the Bush administration, the Chronicle’s Kathleen Pender today quoted the store’s co-owner, Pete Mulvihill, as having a feeling customers were spending their Bush “stimulus checks” at the store, and Luan Stauss of Oakland’s Laurel Book Store said three customers had told her they were doing just that.

Rory D. Root, co-founder of Comic Relief and supporter of artists, zine publishers and DIY culture, died last month, the Chronicle reported today. Said to be the inspiration for The Simpsons’ “Comic Book Guy” character, Root co-founded the Berkeley Comic Relief shop and later opened a branch in San Francisco. The Berkeley store is still open.

In addition to selling and promoting the work of DIY publishers, Root’s stores provided employment for a succession of hundreds of artists, musicians, and other bohemians, as well as providing many teenagers their first jobs.

Here’s DC Comics President Paul Levitz with a tribute, and here’s just one of many other blog tributes to Root.

Recently I posted about Michael Chabon, who read from his new book, Maps & Legends, at Stacey’s last Wednesday. During the Q&A session afterwards, he talked about how — before he moved to an unspecified house on 29th Street, between Noe and Sanchez — he studied writing under the guidance of the late Oakley Hall. (The obituary is here.)

I’d never heard of him, but Chabon attested to his influence as a teacher with an entertaining anecdote. It seems that without Hall, we might not have The Mysteries of Pittsburg as we know it. Hall eviscerated the first draft by the 23-year-old aspiring novelist; in a kind, gentle fashion, but still. “He pointed out that basically, my character just went from one party to another without anything else really happening,” Chabon said, “and that in each chapter, one or two new characters were introduced, with which nothing was subsequently done by the author.” But most importantly, Hall pointed out a line where Chabon had described a character as looking like a gangster.

So Hall asked: “Well, is he a gangster, then?”

Chabon: “Um. No.”

“Oh. That would have been interesting.”

And then Hall changed the subject. Of course, Chabon decided to run with that “disappointed suggestion” when he started over. And without it, it just wouldn’t be the book that launched his career.

Anyway, check out this fascinating appreciation of Hall, written by Oscar Villalon, the Books editor of the Chronicle. Hall seems to have been quite a significant force in making San Francisco such a literary town.

And of course, now I’ve got yet another novel to add to my reading list.

Tonight and tomorrow, local genius Michael Chabon will read from his new book The Yiddish Policemen’s Union at two of my favorite small bookstores. The first appearance, tonight at 7:00 PM, will be at the charming Bookshop West Portal; the second, tomorrow at 12:30, will be at Stacey’s. I’ll be heading to this latter event; maybe once others have satisfied their curiosity about the novel, I’ll lob a couple questions at him about his other new book, Maps and Legends. It’s the one I’ve (partly) read, what can I say?

The LAB, located at 16th and Capp in the Mission (that’s one block east of the BART station), is one of the more interesting art spaces in town. For almost twenty-five years it has been a showcase for interdisciplinary, experimental work (i.e., work that involves several media). The show on the walls right now, running through next Saturday, is called Subversive Complicity.

In case you actually follow that link, let me do a rough translation of all that art-speak into English:

The artists involved have created performance pieces (”interventions”) in which they assume various social roles out on the street, and basically behave in unexpected ways for those roles. The aim is to upset preconceptions about these social roles and the way they normally function, and by doing so, get some of these passers-by to think about the social roles they play. And maybe this will even rouse a couple people to constructive action. The exhibit itself documents these interventions. [Note: I haven’t seen the exhibit.]

But wait — wasn’t this post about a poetry reading?

That’s right. Tomorrow night from 7-9, The LAB is to host the first of four evenings in the 2008 Bay Area Poetry Marathon. (The other nights, all Saturdays, are June 28, July 19, and August 30.) Admission is on a sliding scale from $3 to $15. Will you know who the poets are? Not necessarily, but I can assure you that won’t matter at all. Check out Suzanne Kleid’s verdict on last year’s event:

Going to a poetry reading, especially one of poets one hasn’t heard of, can be nerve-wracking: is it going to be embarrassingly confessional, or boring, or bad? I’m not normally a poetry person myself. I’m sure there were dozens of allusions and techniques totally lost on me. But there were also sublime moments, along with some interesting and funny ones, and not a dud in the bunch. [The curators of the show have] clearly put a lot of thought into who they’ve chosen to read, and if watching skilled people do interesting things with language sounds like your idea of a good Saturday night, I recommend coming to cheer on the Poetry Marathon as it rounds into the final stretch. They even serve beer.

Her blow-by-blow review can be read here at KQED.

[Much thanks to Kemble Scott for mentioning this event in his great newsletter, so I could report it here.]

Periodically, Opium Magazine hosts their signature event, the Literary Death Match, and from time to time it doubles as a release party for their latest issue. Such will be the case tonight at 7:00 PM, at the Rickshaw Stop (located at Fell St & Van Ness).

What is a Literary Death Match? It works like this: there are four contenders and a panel of judges. Two contenders are allotted ten minutes each to stun, enchant, and delight the judges and audience with their deathless prose. Subsequently, the judges have an open panel on these readings, and judge them on literary merit, as performance, and on “intangibles” — then they vote to choose the winner of the first round. Repeat with the other two.

In the final round, the two survivors face off. Not with further readings, but rather in some kind of gladiatorial combat: the Death Match Challenge!

Like, for instance, a miniature basketball contest.

Usually by then, audience and contestants alike are somewhere between “kind of tipsy” and “probably-if-not-definitely drunk,” which of course just makes everyone funnier, smarter, and better-looking.

Doors open at 6:00; admission $10, but you get a free copy of Opium 6: Go Green once you’re in there. If past performance is indicative of future results, the show will be great entertainment: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll order one drink too many. Don’t miss it!

Tomorrow at 3:15 PM, the film 1000 Journals will screen at the Kabuki. It’s a light but inspiring documentary about an experiment in collaborative art; it first attracted my attention because the creator of the project (the prime mover, if you will) is a San Francisco native who’s still around, so far as I know. You can read about the project here or get a sense of it from the film’s website. If you have any affinity at all for projects like this, or even if you’re just interested in collaborative art in general, I highly recommend you make time for the show and check it out. My review starts below and continues after the jump.

1000 Journals
Take a hardbound journal — one of those sturdy 6×9″ sketchbooks from an art supply store — and write a little user’s manual on the inside covers: Take this journal and add something to it. When you’re done, give it away to somebody else. When it’s full, please send it home.

Then give the book away, and wish it a wonderful journey.

Back in the year 2000, “some guy” in San Francisco had this idea, and he carried it out. And then he repeated it 999 times over the course of a couple years, sometimes leaving the books in public places, at other times mailing them to people who had heard of the project and wanted to participate. What ultimately happened to the journals he sent out? Whose hands had they passed through? What contributions had they made to the pages?

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Laura Albert (l.) with Savannah Knoop, who appeared as JT LeRoy in public events, at a Los Angeles event in 2007.

Courtesy GalleyCat, here’s this week’s LA Weekly cover story: all about Laura Albert, the fortyish straight woman who, from her San Francisco apartment, became a famous cult author by pretending to be a teenaged, gender-bending former truck stop prostitute-turned-brilliant fiction writer named J.T. LeRoy. Among the revelations in the story:

• She now lives in a “Nob Hill flat,” which suggests she isn’t hurting for money despite the $350,000 judgment against her last year by the film company that cancelled making a movie of one of the LeRoy books.
• She didn’t enjoy her public role in the LeRoy hoax — that of “Speedie,” a member of LeRoy’s entourage, whom she said was treated like a “bicycle messenger” (maybe because that’s how she dressed) .

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The one Cody’s Bookstore remaining from their overly — some say foolishly — otimistic period of expansion, the one on Berkeley’s upscale 4th St. shopping street, will close by the end of March. The company will reopen in downtown Berkeley, on Shattuck near the BART station. This means moving from a very large store in an upscale yuppie shopping area to a smaller store in an area with much more foot traffic, of both UC Berkeley students (who never go to 4th St.) and residents.
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