No. 84: Patrick Marks
Three decades ago, Patrick Marks set off from St. Louis on his bicycle, bound for Los Angeles. He took a haphazard route, riding through Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Oregon, before traveling along the Pacific coastline and arriving in San Francisco after four months of pedaling. Seduced by the city, he never made it to Southern California. He set up camp in Golden Gate Park and earned a living as a bike messenger. Eventually, he crossed the bay to attend UC Berkeley and work as a buyer for Cody's Books.
Today, Marks leads a more stationary lifestyle: He owns and operates the Green Arcade bookstore, sings in the lounge act Lars Mars and His Men, publishes noir literature, and lives in the same San Francisco apartment he's had for the past 27 years.
That's not to say he's lost his piquancy. He's maintained the same daredevil attitude that brought him halfway across the country on a bike. Despite Cody's closing, Borders' bankruptcy filing, and Barnes & Noble offering itself up for sale, he decided to open his own bookstore.
We talked to Bernhard about what this Jewish mom thinks of the S.F. circumcision ban, why Andy Warhol would have loved Twitter, and why she believes parades bring out the worst in people -- gay, straight, bi, trans, or drunk. Here's what she had to say ...
It has been a incredibly hectic, bone-tiring, brain-stretching couple of weeks. Two weeks ago I called my manager Keri Smith of Whitesmith Entertainment and I said the five words she surely didn't want to hear, "I wanna cancel those shows." I knew she'd prefer to hear a comedy manager's five favorite words: "My YouTube video went viral!!!"
Fun, affordable, and sociable cardiovascular exercise -- what more could you want? So grab a partner to cozy up with, or go solo to meet some new faces, and check out this calendar of daily dancing we've put together for you.
The population of Weed -- a town near the Oregon border -- is nearly 10 percent black, greater than you might expect for rural Northern California. Here's how that came to be. African-Americans had been living and working in the Golden State since the time of the Gold Rush, but in the 1920s lumber mill workers in the South were sent west by their companies to towns such as Weed, Dunsmuir, and Mount Shasta.
Soon African-American communities in many lumber towns were not only established but thriving, even while dealing with the same issues of segregation and discrimination that afflicted the rest of the country. Director and producer Mark Oliver explores this unique moment in black history in his documentary From the Quarters to Lincoln Heights.
Like an aged prizefighter greeting tourists in a casino lobby, poor ol' Mickey Mouse -- still the world's most universally recognized fictional character -- has got little to do these days but wear a tux and tails and welcome people to places imagineered to cost them serious money.
But once upon a time he was more mouse than logo. As you can see on every page of Fantagraphics' gorgeous new collection Mickey Mouse: Race to Death Valley, the young Mickey was a brash, spirited, resourceful, and endlessly charming character, a pluckish everymouse adventuring through life one scrape -- and one daily comic strip -- at a time. Poring over this book is like swimming in the very headwaters of popular American culture.
Mostly drawn and written by the great Floyd Gottfredson, the daily-newspaper adventures collected in Race to Death Valley pick up in 1930, just two years after Mickey's debut in Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks' Steamboat Willie short. (This volume is the first in a series planned to collect all of Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse work.)
