Author Archives: Oscar Bermeo

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Duo

We got our tickets for tonight’s IMAX midnight show of the Watchmen! Huzzah!

Tickets for the SF IMAX midnight show have been sold out, early reviews from critics and fans seems strong, and keeping in line with Gaiman’s Law of Superhero Movies: this movie has the look and feel of the comic book. (As opposed to the accompanying graphic I’ve posted which is up cuz it cracks me the hell up. Schroeder as Ozymandias = Hilarity!) All of this indicates Watchmen will be having one solid opening weekend. A better breakdown can be found at boxofficeguru.com.

A few months back my biggest concern was if Zack Snyder could fit all of Alan Moore’s narrative into a movie form. Now my biggest question is if US moviegoers are really ready for Moore’s commentary on what happens when we give away our decision making power, when we’ve settled for safety for so long that we’ve lost all our agency, when we can’t tell the terrorists from the freedom fighters. Of course, this sounds mighty familiar when you put it through the 9/11 lens and say–Hey that’s us! But it’s not, Moore wrote this for an audience that (whether they knew it or not) were ready for new heroes and the only it was gonna happen was to take the familiar tropes and completely burn em in effigy. Expose them for how hollow they are in the face of real terror and have some of them come up with the courage to put on the costumes again, even if they’re 20lbs and 10 years past their prime. And that’s what I doubt US audiences are ready for. They hate to have someone else tear down their heroes, they’re fine doing ti themselves with the power of the tabloids and negative opinion, but have someone else come in and question all that is popular and sells well on the Home Shopping Network and things change. So, will Snyder go for the explosions and visuals to satisfy Hollywoood or will he delivers all the goods. I’ll find out tonight.

On a related note: Watchmen is #1 on the New York Times’ newly inaugurated Graphic Book Best Seller list. I’d be more excited about the fact that the Times has such a list in place but I think that the reports of the comicbook’s death (If Comics Don’t Change, They “Could Be Dead In 18 Months) are not exaggerated at all. Very littel daring or innovative has come from the spandex brigade in a minute and Marvel seems ready to put more energy and resources into Hollywooding their properties then they are in developing new heroes.

I Speak of the City: Adelia Najarro

[One of my favorite poems from last week’s The Wind Shifts reading–full report can be found at my guest post at Letras Latinas–was Adelia Najarro’s exploration of San Francisco. SF is a gorgeous, complicated city that even after three years of living here still makes me gasp and pause at its beauty (a recent visit to a friend’s home in the Sunset District with a view of Golden Gate Park, Ocean Beach and the sun setting down over the Pacific had me feeling like a five year old looking at a ferris wheel for the first time) while still befuddling me over its contradictions (the number of homeless out in the streets still wigs me out and the Mission blends from hipster glory to ole skool fam real quicks). I’ve also been lucky enough to visit parts of the city that don’t make it to most tourist maps, the spaces in-between destinations that way too many folks gloss over. Najarro’s poem brings me into those places and takes the time to look around and enjoy the view. It’s a call to take pause in the hectic city that I’ll be thinking about more the next time I’m rushing around.]

San Francisco

My great-grandmother taught my mother to read using chalk
and a black slate in León where adobe brick
buildings are white-washed Spaniards

and history. We brought with us red and blue macaws, panthers,
and crocodiles. Tooling up and down
Dolores Street hills, my Papi rode

a bicycle delivering Lela’s nacatamales. Back and forth
from a clock tower at the end of Market Street,
a renovated 1919 streetcar,

transplanted from Milan, works tourist dollars. Advertisements
from the late sixties posted behind
True View Plexi-glass. I can’t read a word

of the European Italian glitz, deep blue of the Mediterranean
and a Coca-Cola, but there is a warm blanket
on a wooden bench and a leather

hand hook. Above a Cuban restaurant, where waiters serve
black bean hummus and chocolate croissants,
hangs the gay pride flag alongside

a Direct TV satellite dish. Gabby walks to school, Pokémon
cards in his pocket. Sanchez Street. I work
in the kitchen with my Lela. Mariposa Avenue,

Valencia Street, Camino Real, are added to masa. Homemade
tortillas puff into sweetness. I’m not
one third Irish, one half German

and two parts English with a little Cherokee thrown in,
but last night I couldn’t translate the word “hinge”
on every door that opens and closes

to clouds beyond four walls. An old lady, perhaps Cambodian,
Vietnamese, Korean, something of her own,
hurries off the 31 Stockton while

my Tía Teresa double parks in front of the mercados on 24th street
para los quesos y los chiles in the backroom. One
whiff and the world is not so small.

© Adelia Najarro

March is Small Press Month

Small Press Month
Small Press Month is a nationwide celebration highlighting the valuable work produced by independent publishers. Held annually in March, Small Press Month raises awareness about the need for broader venues of literary expression. From March 1st-31st, independent, literary events will take place from coast-to-coast, showcasing some of the most diverse, exciting, and significant voices being published today.

More info at www.smallpressmonth.org.

February Readin’


February Literary Happenings
Originally uploaded by geminipoet

[Being a short month and all, I’m really surprised how much reading I got done. A highlight was finding the audio of Nerdua delivering the Nobel Lecture and then getting a comment from the folks at redpoppy.net, an excellent Neruda resource.

Speaking of resources, I also got to check out the Allan Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and Joy Harjo recordings from the Lannan Video Series. Harjo was chill but understated in describing her process and in reading her work, definitely not the same vibrancy I experienced when hearing her live at the Bowery Poetry Club 13 months back. Waldman on the other hand was the same super animated, belting poems using her whole body as an instrument, cross collaborative, deeply introspective on poetics, fast speaking woman I’ve seen on stage. Ginsberg was reading poems he penned 20-30 years back from his “Best of/Collected” tome with so much joy, surprise, and vigor, you’d think that they were the newness from last week; and his talk on how sometimes his poems would start as melodic tunes he converted to vowel and consonant notes on page was one of the most succinct explanations on lyric poetry I’ve ever heard.

I can’t believe Barb and I also were able to hit up five literary events this month with Writers Remembered, the RE:DEFintion Hip-hop Conference, Poor Magazine’s Luchador Poetry Battle, the San Francisco Noir 2 reading, and The Wind Shifts Tour. Damn. Life in the Bay sure is good with that breadth and width of readings that really does give you so many perspectives on what great writing can be and, most importantly, is.

With so much happenin’ and so many influences on my writing, I’m thinking that from now on I’ll be keeping track of more items than just books on my monthly retrospectives.]

• From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger by Lorna Dee Cervantes
• Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas-Llosa
• Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo by Sandra Maria Esteves
• Swamp Thing Vol. 1: Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore, art by Stephen Bissette, and John Totleben
• The Fate of the Artist by Eddie Campbell
• Toward the Splendid City by Pablo Neruda
• When Living Was a Labor Camp by Diana Garcia
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss
• Survival Supervivencia by Miguel Algarín
• Colors! ¡Colores! by Jorge Luján, illustrated by Piet Grobler, translated by John Oliver Simon and Rebecca Parfitt
• The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry edited by Francisco Aragón

I Speak of the City: Peter Maravelis


Akashic Noir Books
Originally uploaded by geminipoet

Excellent fiction reading last night at Moe’s Books to celebrate the newest addition to the Akashic Noir Series: San Francisco Noir 2. All of the readers were excellent with distinct pieces that captured a slice of the City we don’t see (or straight up ignore) when the lights go down: Janet Dawson delivered a modern-day fairy tale with a re-imagining of Hansel and Gretel as “Hank & Gretta” living up on Geary Street; David Corbett’s story of a love/hate triangle gone wrong in Hunters Point moved with crisp dialogue and volatile emotions; and John Shirley came through with a slice of punk-noir details a heist so well-rehearsed, so meticulously planned that you just know everything is going to go wrong.

Editor Peter Maravelis framed each of these stories with a historical time line that examined the City by the Bay with a lens that went beyond the ordinary, highlighting the role of immigration, body trafficking, gentrification, class divisions, labor strife and topography in the noir that is San Francisco. The only thing he left out was the lust of city living, the way we can become so enamored with the beauty of city that we overlook all the ugly and nasty we know exists under the touristy veneer, but this mad love came through in the manner that Peter detailed those histories that lie beneath San Francisco and raised them up not as a mutli-faceted jewel but a cracked mirror to examine ourselves in.

For the first volume of San Francisco Noir, one of Akashic Books’ city-based mystery anthologies, editor Peter Maravelis brought together a team of writers to write original stories about the sinister side of the City. For this sequel he has unearthed classic tales by writers from the last two centuries such as Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, and Dashiell Hammett, as well as modern ones leading right up to 2009.