Living Above the Fold

A comic tale with a serious edge, this novel by a former Adbusters editor takes place in a not-too-distant future when advertising pervades every aspect of daily life. Companies use phony car accidents and hostage crises as publicity gimmicks and hire professional “coolhunters” to ferret out new targets for ad campaigns.

Review: Everyone in Silico (January 29, 2003)

Life isn’t easy for thirteen-year-old paperboy Peter Paddington: He weighs two hundred pounds, he’s at the bottom of the school social ladder, and he’s struggling with strange new feelings about his male classmates. Even worse, his body is changing in unexpected ways — his nipples have started puffing up and speaking to him, urging him to act out his deepest desires.

Review: The Secret Fruit of Peter Paddington (East Bay Express, August 31, 2005)

Guitarist David Sturdevant was nervous about his audience. They were tough. They were unforgiving. And they were five years old.

He was working for the first time as an artist-in-residence in Caren Nelson’s preschool class at Washington School last year. “I was apprehensive at first about working with such young children,” said Sturdevant, who also plays in the jazz and blues-style San Francisco Medicine Ball Band. “I thought they wouldn’t be interested in the music I do; I thought I wouldn’t be able to keep them involved. But it turned out they were very receptive to all sorts of music.”

Back Door Arts Programs (East Bay Express, August 17, 2005)

In this desert landscape, a scraggly group of spectators gathers around wooden picnic tables and plastic lawn furniture. A lone kid runs in circles around the group, desperately dragging a kite behind him. A few feet away, a ragged pink windsock dangles limply in the breeze. For miles around, the dry, scrubby hills of Horseshoe Bend Recreation Park, near the edge of Yosemite, seem abandoned — a vast wilderness of sagebrush and rattlesnakes, baking in the summer sun.

Free as a Bird Now (East Bay Express, June 21, 2006)

Sometimes you need to get away from it all, and Vegas and Disneyland just aren’t far enough away. That’s when you reach for your passport and your travelers’ checks and head for some distant paradise. Nothing compares to the giddy thrill of trekking through uncharted jungle or lying on a tropical beach.

The Agony and the Odyssey (East Bay Express, May 24, 2004)

In this article, I followed a couple of “home stagers” to learn about a most interesting practice: making your home look like a model home to help sell it.  It’s not something that I would have thought of myself, but it actually seems to work!  My wife still remembers this article mainly for my description of those weird “moss ball” things. She still points them out to me everytime that we see them at the furniture store.

Setting the Stage for a Sale (East Bay Express, June 23, 2004)

It’s a problem we’ve all faced at some point: What do you do if you have noisy, inconserate, sloveny neighbors? In this piece, I looked at some of the ways you can get your neighbors to behave.

The Dump Next Door (East Bay Express, June 8, 2005)

I met Bob Fowler at the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco a few years ago and was immediately fascinated by his most unusual collection. Fowler collects Chick tracts, which, if you haven’t heard of them, are these little religious comics that you sometimes find in public restrooms or bus stations that explain how rock and roll is the devil’s music or how Dungeons and Dragons is satanic.  They’re published by southern California evangelical Jack Chick (WARNING: Link may be offensive), under the idea that the best way to reach potential converts is not with long-winded theological debates but with amusing little comics.  I’ve always been intrigued by those things; they’re just so bizarre.  Fowler has written a book where he attempts to interpret and catalog the entire Chick oeuvre.

You Don’t Know Jack (East Bay Express, April 30, 2003)