Plumbed?

Attended a dinner party a few weeks ago that turned out to be a gathering of writers and aspiring writers. The hostess, Anna Del Rosario, has made a fine art out of staging these sorts of salon-style groups around a table lavish with continental fare and the eclat of her renown hospitality. I sat next to Bruce Henderson, prolific author of non-fiction, admiring his gracious generosity in answering, at the expense of his melting desert, the flurry of questions about publishing. Earlier in the evening, I had cornered Bruce in the kitchen to ask him about his report from the trenches that fiction is dead. "They're stacking up on agents' shelves. Nobody's reading them."

The next day, guest columnist Timothy Egan wrote in the New York Times

"The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet? I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate."

You must Read the rest to grasp what's going through the minds of the unpublished.

Hustle Kid

Parents feels so much more enlightened these days. We can't help but invest all that evolved parenting know-how in orchestrating success for the kids. We pull in the guard rails, measure the stepping stones, and engineer downtime. Or not if we know what's really good for them. Sometimes you just gotta step out of the way and let them fall out of the tree, catch head-to-toe poison oak, endure a little bullying, or cold-cock the bully when the inertia breaks. (All of which our resident specimen kid has done.) My good friend Benji wrote about the pleasures of an untethered boyhood in The Last Kid Picked. Sorry Benji, but the marketing strategy for this book was all wrong; today's mothers of boys need this book even more than they need Sheridan, Hobart, or Murkhoff/Eisenberg/Hathaway. I laughed. I cried. I learned to better understand how men work by learning how they play (outside of the play-date or organized league sports) as boys, and if more women read this book, they'd relax more around their sons and give their lovers/partners/husbands a lot more slack.

And so it is with the number one son. When he pitches from one stepping stone to the next in his dream to work in the recording industry/music business, you wanna just lay it all out for him. "Look, kid, it's a dying, if not dead, industry. And there's a protocol to the way it works. And, no, you can't just email the station manager and get them to play your music." But he believes. So you go "Give it a shot." And you hold your breath and wince for the tree limb to break.

The rising star over our friend, Pete Walsh, an 18-year-old talent who was born with a guitar extended off one hand and a capo off the other, along with Neil Young-like vocal chords, has captured Malcolm's imagination in a way like nothing else related to music or his entrepreneurial bent. By recent accounts, on his way to his father's downtown office, where he spends many of his afternoons, Malcolm walked into 55 Hawthorne Lane, the home of several radio stations owned by Cumulus Broadcasting. He signed in, went upstairs to 107.7 "The Bone," and hit up the music director. Yep, post-9/11 world and all. He got in even though he didn’t have an appointment. He popped open his laptop and played a Pete Walsh mp3 for the guy, who apparently liked the song. Wrong audience, though, for Pete's fluid mystical tones. Malcolm walked away with the music director's business card and some bumper stickers.

The playgrounds of today may be safer, more stylish, and parent-approved, but the boys play the same when you get out of the way.

The Olive in the Bay

Let's raise our glasses to the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. Yep, that would be today according to a main headline above the fold in this morning's Chronicle. So, meet me at the 21st Amendment on 2nd and De Boom St., but get there before the parade ends because we'll never get a seat at the bar otherwise. And if you're not from around here, you won't get it. Not the way San Francisco gets it. Is there anywhere else in the U.S. staging a parade today? My scientific research (the first page of a Google search) indicates not, and it's been my understanding since I first visited this city in April 1981 that the "there" here isn't a big red bridge, or an old-money industrial legacy built out of fire and gold, or legendary baseball. It's the Irish Coffee, the Gimlet, the Mai Tai, of course the Martini straight up with olives, and now wine, wine, wine and wine. It's about the woe-be-gone days of three martini lunches, of after-hours house parties where someone's always playing Gershwin at the piano and someone else is pouring cold viscous fluids through a coil strainer into chilled glasses, of Gin Fizz brunches with the ghosts of discourse and fine manners at the WashBag. And while that may answer frightening questions for some, it intoxicates others with a sense of conviviality and community carried on a spirit of accomplishment and economic optimism (or denial) in this city, this only city by a bay with an olive in it. I wonder if Brown and Forman have a float in the parade.

Call It a Night

My grandmother had big hands. Peasant-worker hands with thick, short fingers. They were great for kneading bread dough, knitting weighty afghans, and pulling root vegetables out of the dirt. I got my grandmother's hands. Work today felt like I was plucking my eyelashes out one by one with them. Clumsy, thick-moving, and p-a-i-n-f-u-l. The cold virus I've been deflecting like bumpers do to pinballs scored the big, bell-ringing, neon-flashing prize on me today. Prose, in a word, sucked. Days like this need to end with a spit-polish over the resume. Crap, wrong economy for that. Gram liked to bake. Her sturdy hands cut apples the perfect size for pie and her solid fingers fit the crust up against the bottom and side of the pie plate with not a smidge' of room for air to bubble. On a day like this, Gram would show up out of the blue with an apple pie. Like she knew. Follow that with a little bourbon and honey, call it a night.