Sitting at the bar, nursing a glass of absinthe, Lapo tells me that as a Berkeley student he’d wanted to design his own interdisciplinary major. Then he discovered that if you declared as such, you were forced to take a bunch of classes on “new media” theorists.

“And I said, ‘Fuck that,'” he tells me. “I’d rather get a classical education.”

This is the moment I knew we’d be friends.

We are sitting in North Beach’s Comstock Saloon, a wonderful bar in which to appreciate the timeless virtues of classicism. A pitch-perfect replica of a turn-of-the-century cocktail joint, it’s all elegantly shaped wood and glass and stone. Jazz musicians perform live from a nook above the main room whose ceiling contains a kinetic metal sculpture that I’m told was installed to fan customers — an early form of air conditioning. If true, this is the secret of what makes the Comstock great: It does the functional aspects of tending bar so well that they come out aesthetically pleasing.

Continue reading Ruthless Inefficiency →

I was prepping to go to an event I’d helped organize when I got a call from someone telling me that he needed four hours of my time tomorrow to do essential planning for an even bigger, more important event.

“Well, I don’t have time to do both,” I thought, and so I reluctantly decided that I’d have to skip a party I’d helped plan in order to make time to plan another party.

That’s when it hit me: I’ve completely acculturated to San Francisco. After eight years in the city I’m now doing all the things I swore I wouldn’t.

I’ve become an overscheduled, hard-to-reach social butterfly whose calendar decides whether he has time for his friends unless they can hit him up at the right events. When they finally do catch up to me and ask what’s going on, I say things like, “I’m helping plan an art event with an experimental ticket mechanism …” and then ask them to mention my book on social media.

Oh God.

Continue reading Going Native at The Page →

(This article originally appeared in the SF Weekly)

I’d been inside Dalva, in the Mission, for a couple of hours with Jimmy and Arnold. We’d walked through the long dark dive bar that makes up the front of the place and gone into the “Hideout” in the back, where a whole different bar in a differently designed space serves superb mixed drinks.

We’d climbed up to the little second floor alcove and been joined by some people we vaguely knew. I sipped a delicious black Manhattan as we played “two truths and a lie.” No one believed I’d taken communion at Mother Teresa’s hospice. My friends were buying my drinks, in payment for all the times they’ve come over and raided my carefully assembled Wall of Booze. I declared that one of the people I’d never met was my new sworn enemy — and then I stood up and told the bar in a booming voice that a new dawn of blood and beauty was descending upon us and that only my loyal minions would survive.

The former pro-domme at our table clapped and said she was in if my minions got to wear really great costumes. “Oh absolutely,” I said, sitting back down. “That’s the most important thing.”

“Then I’m in.”

“Text me your measurements.” Which is a thing I’d never said before.

Continue reading Hiding Out at Dalva →