Born 1951 in San Francisco and raised with one root in the traditional Toisanese speaking urban village of SF Chinatown and one root in the heady Bohemian North Beach culture of jazz, Beat poetry,
"The Color of Water" by James McBride
"Notes of a Native Son" by James Baldwin
Alice Walker
Dashiell Hammett
Raymond Chandler
Bible -- King James Version
Mao Tse-tung
Thich Nhat Han
HH Dalai Lama
Thomas Jefferson
Favorite Books
Temple of My Familiar, Red Harvest, The Thin Man, The Long Goodbye, The Love Wife, Androgyny, East of Eden, Notes of a Native Son, Seeing Through Shuck: An Anthology (1960s)
Favorite Authors
Alice Walker, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Gish Jen, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, Sir Author Conan Doyle; Jack Kerouac; Barbara Kingsolver; Henry Miller
What I'm Reading
Serving the People, an ARC; Peony in Love; Vanity Fair, The May Fourth Movement, The Open Road, Intimate Portraits, History as Propaganda (Tibet & China)
A few weeks ago, I had RSVP'ed to attend the 25th anniversary party of Mustard's Grill, that culinary lodestar that placed Napa on the map not only as a wind destination but a gourmet valley.
For those of us who love Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Mort Sahl, Chris Rock, and all other comedian warriors who loved all words and tolerated no hypocrisy, please honor the passing of George Carlin
What a hoot -- journalist Linnea Due pits me, an empircal habitat gardner, in a smack-down against the contra but politic recommendations of a UC Berkeley entomologist, Professor Gordon Frankie, wh
A pleasing afternoon at the Annie Leibovitz Retroseptive yesterday, Tuesday: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, at S.F.'s Palace of the Legion of Honor.
One nicety of living so close to the UC Berkeley campus is the ease of dropping in on lectures, international performances, rarely screened movies at Pacific Film Archives, openings at the Berkeley
Today, the winds are inexplicably blowing down from the Eastern Hills. The leaves are all streaming the wrong way, slightly creaking as if in protest. But spring is bursting out all over.
So no sooner than I return to SF than I discover a friend of mine, Helen Zia, writer and lifelong civil and human rights activist, decided to run the O torch for 2 blocks through San Francisco. S
The Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas is a swell place, i.e., swell as in swanky because it is an old Grand Dame hotel, but so well maintained, it doesn't feel in the slightest dowdy, and seems, we
So we finish up a PR taping for "FYI," a local municipal cable station that keeps folks informed of Ann Arbor events. The cameraman is Japanese-born and subsequently naturalized. I mu
