BOOK
Lisa Margonelli: Oil on the Brain
(Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
When it comes to oil, American thinking might be summed up best by a “No More Blood for Oil” sticker on an SUV—which is to say, our ignorance is surpassed only by our arrogance. In this eye-opening travelogue, Lisa Margonelli, a former San Francisco contributor, maps the terrain between our comfortable existence at the top of the supply chain and the brutal realities on the ground. Bouncing from a Twin Peaks gas station to the oil fields of Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iran, she advances a global notion of oil: it is politics, economics, a blessing, and, as the anarchy in the Niger Delta attests, a curse. Though prone to overkill (at one point, she jams five sets of statistics into three sentences), Margonelli excels at the telling description. A shrewd gas magnate has “pool player’s eyes”; American oil workers in destitute Chad look like “anxious ghosts.” It’s a sobering picture, and Margonelli’s attempts to salvage some hope from this bleak wreckage—she reports on China’s strides toward a sustainable future—sink like stones skipped into the ocean. In the final analysis, she writes, “there is no such thing as cheap gas.” It’s just a question of who pays, and how high the price. A-
CHRIS SMITH
CD
Deerhoof: Friend Opportunity
(Kill Rock Stars)
The late-’70s punk explosion was in part a reaction to the symphonic excesses of progressive rock bands like Yes, Genesis, and King Crimson. Over its 13-year existence, Deerhoof has developed a sound that actually combines the two genres—a kind of punk prog or “prunk.” Now working without longtime guitarist Chris Cohen, who departed to concentrate on his own combo, the Curtains, the Bay Area trio seems even more at home with this synthesis. Its eighth full-length CD is both wildly original and wholly accessible; it sounds like a video game in which the Electric Light Orchestra tries to re-create a Jackson Pollock painting. Each song consists of dozens of parts—peculiar samples, hard-rock guitar riffs, rowdy horns, chaotic drum fills, singer Satomi Matsuzaki’s übergirly chirp—splattered together in a way that seems random but comes to make beautiful sense. In these wonderfully manic compositions, the surreal, childlike lyrics (“If I were man and you a dog, I throw a stick for you”) make perfect (non)sense. Like its recent tour mate Radiohead, Deerhoof continues to blow minds by expanding the idea of what music—be it punk, prog, or pop—can be. A-
DAN STRACHOTA
BOOK
Maxine Hong Kingston, ed.: Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace
(Koa Books)
This is the glowing result of a brave experiment. After the first Gulf War, Berkeley National Book Award winner Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) began a writing and meditation group for Bay Area vets that quickly expanded to include refugees, protesters, veterans’ families, even former gang members. In this first anthology, 80 of the 500 or so participants offer poems and stories spanning five wars. A soldier from the first Iraq war writes that he will not feel whole until he returns to Iraq and makes “peace with the people I once falsely believed were my enemies”; a Vietnam vet describes befriending a northern Vietnamese prisoner after a brutal interrogation; a Cambodian refugee tells of watching her father march to his death and finding his final words, “Do not cry,” a poem of strength that guides her through life. Contributors range from noted authors such as Grace Paley and Larry Heinemann, who helped teach the workshops, to startlingly talented new voices such as veterans Sean Mclain Brown, Sandy Scull, and James Janko, a Vietnam medic who began his Pulitzer-nominated debut novel, Buffalo Boy and Geronimo, at the workshop. Some pieces are vastly better than others, and overall the book might be improved with more cutting. But each story is poignant, and all of them stay with you. A-
JAIMAL YOGIS
BLOG
SFcityscape.com
San Francisco’s urban blueprint is changing at speeds that can make your head spin. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with which architect designed which high-rise-in-progress or to find out if that pit near where you work will become a restaurant or an office tower. Fear ignorance no more, savvy urbanites! Here’s your go-to site for keeping abreast of every development—and the development of each development—in our fair city and beyond. Steve Boland, who was the editor of SF Weekly’s website and now works at the San Francisco architecture firm Case+Abst, produces this “online journal of Bay Area urban design.” In addition to interesting updates, Boland offers his two cents on urban planning, projects, and trends. In a posting on the competition to design the iconic centerpiece building for the Transbay Transit Center, for instance, he reports early on that the names of heavyweight architects Santiago Calatrava and Renzo Piano have been floated. He just hopes that “the design will be as practical as possible.” There’s a thought! An impressive aspect of the site is Boland’s encyclopedic profiles of notable works, from the Transamerica Pyramid to BART. This is one of the best-run and most professional blogs I’ve seen. A
BYRON PERRY
BOOK
Peggy Orenstein: Waiting For Daisy
(Bloomsbury)
In her first two books, Schoolgirls and Flux, Peggy Orenstein turned the stories of ordinary girls and women into gripping reading. Here, she turns away from others’ tales to something more personal: an account of the six years she spent trying to get pregnant. In her quest for a child, she had to deal with breast cancer, failed in vitro attempts, clinical “fertility sex,” estrangement from her husband, and profound self-doubt. Orenstein, who lives in Berkeley, describes all this with admirable honesty. But honest memoirs are nothing special; they fill shelves at the bookstore. What sets this book apart is the way Orenstein uses her reporting skills. When she visits an ex-boyfriend who’s now an Orthodox Jew, she provides a detailed portrait of his life with his wife and their 14 children. When she travels to Japan, we get an investigation into the way that culture ritualizes miscarriage. Best of all, she brings her erudition and intelligence to bear on her own experience. “The descent into the world of infertility is incremental,” she writes. “You’re not aware of how subtly alienated you become from your body, how inured to its medicalization.” This is autobiography as intellectual exploration, and it’s riveting. A-
CLAIRE DEDERER