Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  I promise to keep this one short because, firstly, I know this week we are all more excited about New Year’s than Christmas and, secondly, people have better things to do than here my dismay and I have better things to do than to bell-ache. Still, full confession, the past few Christmas seasons I have actively avoided stations that I know play Christmas tunes from Thanksgiving to Christmas Day. Now, I used to love listening to Christmas music and I don’t think my love for certain carols has gotten any less but, after some meditation on it all I think I know why I’m starting to ditch a lot of it. No, it’s not because they are starting it too early. Not that I don’t think they are but I used to play old Christmas records as early as September and October and visiting the Christmas Loft in North Woodstock every October is an annual tradition. I can also enjoy Christmas movies year round. It’s also not because I think Christmas music has gotten worse over the years. The truth is,...

  The spring and summer of 2001 saw two cases of mass hysteria take hold of two countries, halfway around the world from each other. But both in India and the United States, the press jumped on the frenzy, evidence, rationality and integrity be damned. Exploitative media is, of course, still very much alive more than twenty years later but the two cases of 2001 are an intriguing window into a world still unfamiliar, much less preoccupied, with the term 9/11. In a matter of months the world, and the media, would change. Mass hysteria was nothing new in the spring of 2001. In December of 1997 a number of children in Japan became dizzy after watching an episode of Pokémon featuring the use of strobe lighting. Hospitals later revealed that while a few kids did suffer mild epileptic seizures after viewing the episode most were the result of mass hysteria. Still, it baffles the mind how easily the press in India turned the story of the Monkey-Man of Delhi into national panic without...

  Some of the best things to see in San Francisco have fallen off the tour book grid and yet paint as fascinating a picture of the city and its story as the renowned landmarks. The Painted Ladies of Alamo Square have become icons of the city, but their popularity was generated more by pop-culture than history. Full House ingrained them in the American psyche (as well as its very own Full House-house, which is also a popular, though less recognized site) and ever since Steiner Street has drawn thousands of fans. But the history of these pastel colored Victorian homes predates Full House and television by almost a century. Built in the last decades of the 19 th century, the homes exude the grand splendor of the Gilded Age in all aspects (gable roof, arched doorways, Italianate windows etc.) but one, the vibrant colors. Each of the seven sisters (as they are colloquially called) is also known by the color (the “Pink Painted Lady”, for instance) it vibrates in a way unseen in ...

  Although almost nothing of the original structure survives, the Palace of Fine Arts, even in its current form, is the only standing memory to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 which brought San Francisco back from the ruins of the devastating earthquake almost a decade earlier. Built by Bernard Maybeck to resemble a crumbling Roman temple, it offered spectators a quiet, cool place for reflection and observation beneath its encompassing rotunda. So popular was the place with visitors and the public that even before the end of the Exposition a committee (the Palace Preservation League) was established to ensure its survival afterwards. They were successful. After the Exposition left town the nine other palaces (dedicated to Education, Liberal Arts, Manufactures, Agriculture, Transportation and other industries) were torn down, but the Palace of Fine Arts stood very much as it still stands today. None, however, were built to last beyond the event and by the mid...

  If San Francisco is an East meets West of architecture, culture and even history, Muir Woods is, if only superficially, a taste of the northeastern forests for the West Coast. This is, of course, biologically untrue. The park’s proximity to the Pacific Coast gives it a perpetually wet undergrowth. Nonetheless, the western counterparts of many of the familiar plants and animals that inhabit our woodlands will make East Coast visitors feel at home. Pileated woodpeckers make both coasts their home, Sonoma chipmunks are, unlike their eastern cousin, limited to a very small range (specifically the chaparral regions north of San Francisco), instead of white-tailed deer the forest boasts the larger eared mule deer, and the western grey squirrel fills the niche of our most populous native rodent, the eastern grey squirrel. Black bears have since been extirpated from the area (though a healthy number still exists throughout California), but a lone wanderer was spotted around the park in 2...

  If Alcatraz was a wake up to the media’s softening of the penitentiary (it was not, in short, a facility that toughened men but, rather, one that broke them) Fisherman’s Wharf is everything we collectively imagine San Francisco to be at its best before we reach it. There’s the bay, the sketchiness that over a hundred years since the Red Light district shut its lights off for good can only be described as charming, the kitschy arcades, candy shops and, of course, the sea lions. Walking from one end to another takes you through an assortment of eccentrics, bohemian artists, vendors and wanderers. In other words, classic San Francisco. It’s loud, it’s tacky, but, in its own unique way, Fisherman’s Wharf is as much a part of Americana as is Coney Island. From here too one can hop a ride on the city’s iconic trolleys, a ride which no trip to San Francisco would be complete without. We caught our ride a few das later nearer our hotel in Union Square. True to the nature of the cit...

  Everyone should visit Alcatraz if only to erase every romanticism surrounding it created by Hollywood. It wasn’t just a gritty cold penitentiary. It was a deadly, unsanitary and dirty building of tiny cages not fit for a zoo animal. It has gotten worse since it shut its doors in 1963. The water saturation corroding the structure which was a factor leading to its closure has continued its path of destruction and many of the buildings which were burned during the American Indian Movement’s Occupation of 1969-71 (notably the warden’s house) have been left in ruin and graffiti from the occupation is still visible at entry. Sea bird defecation is inescapable throughout the island. It is not easy to muster much sympathy for a man of the prison’s most notorious inmates. Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly and even Robert Stroud, the famous bird man, all had multiple murders in their records.   Hollywood has at least been honest about the brutality of many of these thugs, though The Bird...