Category: heroes

Today is World AIDS Day, a worldwide day of remembrance and education for the millions of lives who have been touched by this disease and moreover, for those of us still here to bear witness and tell the stories of those who are not.

I feel strange participating in this effort as I have never known anyone directly who has contracted HIV nor even anyone who has lost a loved one to AIDS. My relation to it is that of one person to a news story, a social phenomenon or a weblog meme to jump aboard. Do I have something geniune to say about the AIDS/HIV pandemic? I have only what I experienced, which is not much, to what I’ve felt, which seems, in the face of it, insignificant.

Nonetheless, ever since I got to know my friend Brad and the Link and Think project, I try, on this day, to clear a shelf in my heart for the memory of Randy Shilts. Mr. Shilts was a national correspondant for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of the book And the Band Played On, widely credited for catapulting AIDS into the consciousness of mainstream America. Shilts won several awards for the depth and wisdom of his reporting. He was finishing his third book, Conduct Uncoming, a study of gays in the military, when he succumbed to AIDS in February of 1994. He was 42 years old.

Although Shilts was largely a shy, private man, he made several foes in both the gay press and activist community. He chastised his fellow gay journalists for cheerleading instead of reporting and insisted on calling himself “a reporter who happens to be gay” instead of the other way around. Critics also mocked his defensive stance on the validity of his research, claiming rightly that Randy Shilts was human and made mistakes too, something Shilts himself had a difficult time admiting. Most incindiary of all, Shilts came out in favor of the city of San Francisco shutting down gay bath houses in the 1980’s as a public health measure to stop the spread of AIDS and he himself kept his own infection quiet. Gay activists accused him of shaming his own. Their anger makes sense to me.

Legitimate complaints aside, I have nothing but respect for Mr. Shilts. And The Band Played On is arguably the greatest work of journalism of the 20th century, a book so wise, so meticulously researched that still brims with passion and fury. It’s as readable as a spy novel and yet I effortlessly learned about imminobiology, public health policy and the history of gay neighborhoods in urban America.

It’s also the reason I have the love for reading and books I do today. In the fall of 1989, a college friend gave me ATBPO and asked me to read it. I begged off, saying I hadn’t read a book for fun in years, that reading was for school and real life was calling. She insisted, saying I could read one or two pages before bed every night and that it didn’t matter how long it took me to finish. I agreed, mostly to shut her up.

Within a week, Mr. Shilts’s vivid, intelligent prose had sucked me in. I marveled at the wisdom and truth a journalist could uncover. I learned about this thing called AIDS that I had heard of plenty but really didn’t understand. And when I finished reading nearly 3 months later, I said to myself “This is what I’ve been missing” and stunned myself into silence. I haven’t stopped reading since.

Now, as I begin a career of writing books of my own, I have Randy Shilts and his couragous work to thank. I wasn’t lucky enough to be in San Francisco when he was alive and working here but I don’t think I would have been embarrased to tell him what I just told you. He’s one of my heroes and what I give to World AIDS Day is a salute to him.

Play on.

Did you know that Paul Harvey, Mr. “Hello, Americans”, is still on the radio after, like 500 years in broadcasting? It’s true. If you didn’t have a classmate who did a Paul Harvey imitation in 7th grade homeroom like I did or you’re under the age of 90, you probably know Harvey as the guy who parodied himself (well Harry Shearer did it actually, but whatever) on that Simpsons episode when Marge and Homer are trying to inject a little romance into their marriage. They buy a sexy audiobook, called “Mr. and Mrs. Erotic American” narrated by Mr. Harvey.

Called the world’s largest one man radio network, Harvey can be heard on over 1200 radio stations and 400 Armed Forces Networks throughout the world. At 84, the dude still gets on the air six days a week and has a few words with millions. They might seem like antiquated papp (and they are) but he’s been doing this little soft shoe for so long that it’s almost hard to remember American radio without him. And that kind of brilliant run gets a hat tip from me, in addition to the compulsory smirk.

The other night I was wasting time playing Game Neverending and Suzan called me in to the living room where she was watching part two of Jimmy Carter: American Experience, a biography from his election to his receiving of the Nobel Peace Prize this fall. I wasn’t in the mood to watch anything but I ambled in anyway. Now I’m glad I did.

Jimmy Carter is a great man. I don’t think I ever realized this when he was president (I was in the first grade) and never quite took a close enough look afterward. Here is a man who had a disasterous run at the most powerful job in the world, then turned around and devoted himself to building homes for the poor, building a center of international diplomacy and acting as a moderator for peace efforts around the world.

I know this is a PBS documentary intended to convey that message but call me converted.

I took the train over to Berkeley last night to see Sarah Vowell read at Cody’s Books. I had misjuded the starting time because there were only 6 people there when I arrived. Fifteen minutes later, there about 120. Apparently I’m not the only earnest NPR geek out there who worships her.

Sarah has said she’s a loner on both This American Life and in her books. The first question during the Q&A was “Are you liking your book tour,” to which she paused and said “Some of it, I guess.” She was polite, answered everyone’s questions (even the really stupid “Do you actually have a twin sister?) but seemed itching to go back to her hotel. “I’m a writer,” she said “Alone in my apartment. That’s my preferred mode of being.”

I waited in line to say hi and introduced myself as the guy from the Grotto. Last year, I started a program of bringing writers on their book tour by the Grotto for breakfast, on the presumption that they might like to begin a hectic day with peers before a day worth of hustling. I guessed right. I had spoken to Sarah’s publicist the week before about brining her by and Sarah liked the idea. But Friday I heard that Sarah was booked for the entire three days she was here.

Sad.

She apologized for not being able to make it this time in San Francisco and we both said we’d try again the next time she was in town. It was exactly the “let’s be best friends!” moment I was hoping for. But I guess I’m feeling like my professional life is on enough of an upswing that Sarah Vowell and I will cross paths again. Maybe at this point I’m beginning to see her as more of a peer and her career something to shoot for than an idol. Maybe last night, I saw her as human.

Are the best kind. Had an amazing few days with Dave and Justin, my old friends, catching up listening to each others’ mixes and putting the year in perspective. Dave had a rough 2001 which he’s only just begun to emerge from in the last month or so. Justin, like myself, moved to a more and is envisioning setting down roots in Chicago. Me, I’ve bought a place to live, am contemplating life after Central Booking and chasing a dream of the perfect career that doesn’t feel like one. Dave said once this weekend if you’re chasing a dream, you’ll never work a day in your life. The analogy I came up with is that dreaming is, in large part, about having faith, about climbing a ladder with the city stretched out below you and jumping, knowing you’ll catch a gust of wind and fly. And even if you don’t, your old friends will be there to catch you when you come down.

I’m really excited that Creative Commons is finally up and running. CC is the brainchild of 3 web visionaries, (including a hero of mine, Lawrence Lessig) who asked “instead of everything created becoming instantly copyright protected, what if there was an open marketplace where creators could determine how or how little the rest of us could use their creations? What is their was a web application that sorted and catagorized these creations for you?

Behold Creative Commons!

Behold Kevin with nothing to give to Creative Commons!

Ah, who cares? Behold it again!

San Francisco is playing host to Herb Caen Days until the end of the week, a series of events, presentations, and general meriment to honor the late-columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle. A Pulitizer Prize-winner, Caen wrote nearly 16,000 columns over from just before World War II to just after the explosion of the Internet, when he died of cancer in 1997. Somewhere in there he managed to add the word “beatnik” to the English language.

Though the official celebrations focus on Tourist San Francisco (which I guess were Caen’s favorite parts. Maybe?), hearing about it all has prompted me to find out a little bit more about the man. Sadly, almost all the collected anthologies of his work are out of print, (a crime in a publishing happy town like this one) which just means a trip to the library. And reading the solid week of rememberences his colleagues and friends penned immediately following his death.

Dean, my insurance agent and a lifelong San Franciscan told me when his father first imigrated to the city from East Asia, he learned to speak English by reading Herb Caen’s column. He later tought his young son that the best way to express one’s self in a new language was clearly, simply and honestly, as Herb Caen had always done. I don’t think you can pay a writer a higher compliment than that.

I’ve been reading a bit about Billy Wilder’s passing this morning, which makes me all kinds of sad. For many years, I considered him my favorite director (a slippery proposition in the Scorsese and Cassavetes-centric halls of film school) and relished the fact that he was still alive long after most of his contemporaries were gone. A few years ago, I heard that my second favorite director, Cameron Crowe, considered Wilder his idol. His book Conversations with Wilder, while an intellectual lightweight compared to Hitchcock/Trauffaut, is nonetheless a wonderful look at their mentor-apprentice relationship, nursed from afar.

If the name “Billy Wilder” doesn’t ring a bell, trust me, you know his work. He’s the writer and director behind a half-dozen films on the AFI 100 (make of that hollow popularity contest what you will), from comic masterpieces like Some Like it Hot and One, Two, Three, to film noir legends like Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. In each of these films, you could turn off the picture and let Wilder’s writing charm the ears off you. He was, at heart, a sardonic, dry man, but his dialogue packed so much pepper you couldn’t help grinning like an imbecile at every third line. It was the linguistic equivalent of being in a food fight.

Start with Double Indemnity and go from there. See them all. I have a feeling Mr. Wilder would like that, although he’d be the last to tell you.

I miss him.

In remembrance of World AIDS Day: Randy Shilts, the man who wrote And the Band Played On. This is the definitive book on the epidemic and one of the greatest works of journalism in the 20th century.

Thank you Mr. Shilts, for helping me understand.

Good night George Harrison. I’ll miss you.