Three years ago, Laurie Shigekuni and I began a series of interviews with participants in the 1975 filming of the “Farewell to Manzanar” TV movie. Today the first installment of our article based on the interviews appears online in Discover Nikkei. It’s illustrated with photos taken on the set by the late Barbara Parker Narita. Links to the second and third parts of the article will go live on May 20 and May 21.
I wrote this article for the Baffler in mid-2001 about San Francisco on the downward edge of a boom cycle. No boom is ever fully like the last one, but maybe it bears rereading in light of current talk about frothiness in the tech sector.
The article ends by saying J. & I had talked about moving. Funnily enough, we stayed put in our place South of Market.
Meanwhile the former Petopia building at 8th and Folsom, which is mentioned in my 2001 article, went through a whole lot of tenants. It was an a architect’s office some of the time. Sometimes it was hard to tell what exactly was in there.
For a while Lutheran Social Services ran its rep/payee office out of the north end of the ex-Petopia building. I’m nearly sure it was the subject of this 2013 Vice article, the one that said so many mean things about social service clients in “the Tenderloin”. (Brian Brophy and Kevin Montgomery answered that article very well here.)
Now the Petopia building is a tech office again.
Stay tuned.
Who’d have thought it — now the Mission Bay houseboats look like a cozy old-money neighborhood compared with the harder-edged new machines for living all around them.
Garrapata State Park: poison oak, prickly pear, flowers. I’ll spare you the possible platitudes about life.
People in the tourist part of Monterey look at the expensive bronze statuary of the Cannery Row Monument without laughing. Apparently all the time, every day.
The same mentality that took Steinbeck’s jolliest depiction of marginality and further sentimentalized it as a draw for tourists also sponsored this pole full of prohibition signs a very few blocks away: Continue reading
Unquiet Titles 