 Beyonce's album dropped hard, the world shaked from it or shook and I can't stop shaking my booty body for Beyonce. Body rolls and booty shakes, kale and ginger shakes, a smoothie. I'm gonna live forever for Beyonce. All I know to talk about is 23 cat photos, you can't die without seeing. You can't die. Trend report. Women in Japan, Japanese women in Japan don't want relationships. Men pay to cuddle women who don't want relationships in Japan. 36 gifts to make you popular on the holidays, not gifts, gifts. 75 traits that make you an introvert, read before the party or at the party on a phone and company, alone and texting. They left the dumpster open outside our window, so at night we throw things in, an old desk chopped to pieces, craft supplies unused, a succulent collecting dust. I'll have the martinis, apple-tinis, cosmo-tinis, bubble gum vodka past the vodka please, no lemon. Martinis are made with gin and sweet vermouth, I think I'm an introvert, maybe. We throw in 13 novels and three self-help-ish books, a cracked plate, mismatched cutlery, old sheets, a mattress, actual garbage from the kitchen and the bathroom, a chair. Ten photos that will make you believe in humanity, like dying. A man in Hungary cries over his son, sheeted, concreted, crushed under a sheet in the street after a car wreck. Like art, a man straps odd shoes to cold feet and patterns fields of snow into giant snowflakes, it melts in a day or two. He smiles, crunching snow in France, near a lodge, a photographer in a helicopter makes photos, the world's screen shares, stares, wonders why it's so cold and no one will ever see these snow secrets. 15 memes that made 2013-2013. I don't think you know what a meme is, it's a kitten, it's an LOLZ kitten or a cat meme. Cats speak like black men or women are expected to speak in comedies and cartoons, it's okay because it's a joke, it's okay just because it's a joke. It's an internet hoax, it's an internet joke. In the morning they move the dumpster down the street and lock it, install porta-potties in its place that leak brown liquid smelling. Beyonce, bounce, booty, body, Beyonce's body, I'm gonna live forever, Beyonce. Just have to say her name this week you guys and people will love you. Our next person up here is Caitlyn Donahue, she's a DIY media mogul who cut her teeth as culture editor for the San Francisco Bay Guardian where she had weekly columns on weed, sex and style. Please welcome Caitlyn Donahue. Last summer I managed to get my bike stolen twice in one week, don't ask. Financial circumstances dictated that I become reacquainted with our city's streets, so I walked. I walked everywhere and I walked all the time. I ran through shoes. It was summer in San Francisco so that was cute for me. I saw weird tags on buildings that I'd never noticed before. I noticed cobblers who could get the shoes that I was messing up prepared quickly. I got my feet back. Perhaps more excitingly I discovered the feminine wonders of mini skirts without thick leggings and bags that you can wear over one shoulder. These are kinds of trappings that kind of escape the practical bike rider. Of course, being on the street all the time meant I was also available to talk to people more. I just want to take an informal poll. How many people find the street harassment here in San Francisco to be more pervasive than in other cities? Yes or no? A couple in the back, some other people. There's no right or wrong answer. I'm just kind of asking your opinion on this. I don't even know the answer to that either. For me, in my case, there was a lot of hollering going on. You can blame the mini skirts if you must, but it is a fact that I was getting a lot of conversation time, largely with random men, more than any other segment of society and not necessarily by my own instigation. All this begs the question. If street harassment is not always an attempt to get laid, then what is it? Of course, because I'm a rider and because I have a bachelor's degree in sociology, concurrent to starting the journal, I was also starting to research the academic literature that's been written on the sociological phenomenon of street harassment. In her 2002 paper entitled The Harm That Has No Name, scholar Deirdre Davis identifies the term with the following characteristics, quote, the locale, the gender of and the relationship between the harasser and the target, the unacceptability of thank you as a response, which I find, this is Caitlin again, I find interesting but kind of like a problematic way of judging these situations, just because we're trying to say thank you to things that we don't really appreciate. Anyways, back to the quote, and reference to body parts. She also says, quote, street harassment can be understood as an element of a larger system of sexual terrorism. Law scholar Bunkosul Chun argued in a 2011 piece that street harassment may not even fall under free speech laws because it constitutes fighting words, which have been defined by the Supreme Court as aggressive words delivered to a specific person face to face, so that would not be protected by the Constitution. In fact, street harassment has been policed in the past, enforced as many laws are in an extremely racist manner. In 1951, for example, black tenant farmer Matt Ingram of Yancyville, North Carolina was convicted of reckless eyeballing, which he had allegedly directed at a white woman who was at the time 75 feet away from him. So just to keep these things in context. So back to me. I couldn't get used to the fact that sexually explicit conversations with men were a new feature of my pedestrian days. I complained to every single person in my life and heard crazy stories from my friends about men yelling from across the street at them to hold their hand up to see if there was a ring on their finger, men running into elevators just before the doors closed to talk, men pulling up next to my friends who were riding their bicycle, the men are in a car asking if they did sex work. So we came up with the following options for dealing with street harassment. This is not an exhaustive list. Number one, ignore it or pretend you're flattered. If you're me, if you're like me, this is not necessarily a tenable option. Number two, carry a bullhorn. I'm just kidding. Unless someone has a bullhorn, they want to lend me. I meant wear big headphones. Even though as I mentioned before, this is not a foolproof way of escaping conversation. Number three is what I like to call the Pam Grier solution. This approach is typified by a scene in Sheba Baby. How many people have seen Sheba Baby? I see a couple. Okay, cool. My dad, his girlfriend, and Michelle, cool. Right. Okay, so I'm referring to a specific scene in which Pam Grier, aka Sheba Baby, is trying to track down a loan shark who holds some information about the drug cartel who has killed her father. Her informant works behind the counter at a diner, so she goes into the diner, talks to him, asks him where this loan shark is, guy tells her where the loan shark is, and she leaves. She walks away, like Pam Grier does. And he watches her walk away. And the way that she moves in that moment, this is my interpretation, of course, but it's like she's acknowledging his gaze. She just got this dirt from him, and she's, in return, letting him look at her posterior view. In the scene, Pam Grier is gazing at the male gaze and using it to get things. I find this concept interesting, because although it's certainly not the central issue that we should be concerned about as feminists, the practicalities of how to deal with the male gaze have got to be included in any pragmatic feminist school of thoughts. If you're a separatist, the answer is to avoid the male gaze entirely. In Pam's school, which I believe is a school of feminism, she models her physical presence into the perfect object to look at, which is a tool she then uses to dismantle and literally shoot apart male power structure. I'm not saying that the Pam Grier approach is going to work for everyone, plus not everyone wants to wear super, super tight, high-waisted pants, and that's okay because the best part about feminism is that we can do, it can be whatever feels good to you without disempowering others, so I'm just saying this is one approach. But that being said, I do like the ideal of meeting the male gaze head-on, being ready, anticipating, kind of framing the scene, if you will, making it unclear who's having one over on who when inappropriate words are kind of thrown out on the street. Basically, I'm a big fan of studying something in order to defeat it. And to study street harassment, sometimes it is cute to wear a mini skirt. One, I remember New York. I say New York instead of I remember the smell of New York when AIDS was new. David wrote a book about it by accident because as he was dying from it, he wrote, I don't know how, I don't have to say more than New York to you because you know, you know that cheap pizza place on St. Mark's and 1st, you know the CVS at 4th above the subway stop, you know Lessington and 71st, that supermarket so small and very expensive. Central Park, it's green, there's benches, in the winter it's bare. You know the rivers, the east side and the west side, you know the financial district, and I haven't said anything to tell you yet about AIDS or about New York, it's just a list of ideas. Broadway, MTV Studios, Saturday Night Live, Times Square. I want you to know about AIDS, the first wave when it decimated a generation of men but words like skin and ideas like metaphors are failing, so all I say are AIDS, New York, decimate. David tried, made art, he was good at it, then he wrote, and his friends died one by one and also en masse, then he died and now I can never meet him, there's nothing there. There's something there about the not meeting, some kind of grand idea to be uncovered but I've got nothing. AIDS, New York, Central Park time, my friends are getting AIDS now here in San Francisco. Coyt Tower, the Castro, Dolores Park, Golden Gate, Folsom, my friends now are getting HIV here in the Mission and Soma on 6th and Atoma on Buchanan. They're getting HIV here now in December when it's warmer than October and not because October is cold but because December is hot. They're getting HIV during long weekends when the festivals happen and on Monday nights, not a generation, not decimation. I'm not David, I'm not angry about it. My friends are not dying left and right, they're just getting it and bragging. There's something there, a poetic connection to make, a bigger statement than just my friends are getting HIV. San Francisco, New York, me, David, dying, not. It's almost too clever and too easy. Two, there's a woman who lives on the street outside my building. Every day her face is swollen from beatings and I've seen her give an old white guy in a tattered navy trench a hand job for crack. I've seen her yell at men who try to touch her. I've seen her sleep and drool in her sleep. I borrowed her. I put her here in this poem because I can to make it better, to roughen me up, to show you San Francisco, to show you David, to show you I know something about something. She's a novelist, a short story writer and an occasional essayist. Her novel The Prayer Room came out in 2009 and she's currently at work on her second. Let's welcome Shanti. You go first and I'll come up behind you. Okay. I won't be able to pull you up, he said. You'll have to do that yourself. You got strong arms? I don't. He clasped her arm where the muscle should have been. Okay, well, you're small. You'll be fine, he said. Give me your backpack. I'll carry it. But it's mine. There you go again. I'm not going to take it. I'm going to carry it so you can run. She took it off and gave it to him. He had to loosen the straps to get it on. What's in here, he asked. Water. He took the pack off, opened it and cursed quietly. You brought these all the way from Oaxaca? Portillo. He shook his head. I guess they'll come in handy. He was wondering about her, she could tell. What passed across his face was a cool fast cloud of doubt. She wanted to tell Chaco that on a journey like this, you kept the things you owned because you never knew what might be stolen by rough hands or sorry circumstance. But because she was a girl with hummingbirds in her heart, she kept this wisdom to herself. She let Chaco do the knowing. And then you put the backpack down and look straight into Marisol's eyes. You'll have to keep up, okay? He cupped her elbow. Don't get left behind. Running for a train is easy because you have a goal in mind. And that goal makes you forget about the raw skin between your thighs, the pounding in your feet and knees. It's a race. You have a chance of winning. Pulling yourself onto a moving train is something else. It's here that you begin to doubt yourself when you realize just how weak your arms are, how quivering the elbows, the deathblades of the tracks below start to feel very real. Marisol's hand grasped railing. She faltered. Her elbow flailed and the momentum of the train was harder and stronger than she was. She felt her grip slipping. She felt the downward pull of the tracks below. And then she felt Chaco, his arm around her waist, pushing her up and shouting as the train picked up speed. Hold onto it, he yelled. Pull yourself up, pull, grab on. She pulled up, she grabbed. Her foot found a rung and she was on. Chaco was behind her, his chest pressed to her back. Climb up, he breathed. They climbed. He hoisted both of them to the roof of the train. Thank you, she said to Chaco, you saved me. You fall, I fall. He was making a promise. He was stating a fact. He unzipped her backpack and opened a bottle. Salud, he said, took a sip and passed the water to her. We'll get stronger stuff than that tonight. There's a phrase she'd learned since coming to America, one she wished she'd known that day. So long, suckers. She would have shouted it from the train top through the busy streets to Vaca, to the men, to Manuel and Monterey. But she didn't know how to say it then, so she said nothing as the train gained speed. She turned and watched the shrinking past, the far away camp, and let her nose, her throat, her mind fill with the pleasures of her promising wind. As they rode that day, she began to understand the boy man who had given her a road away from Vaca. Chaco's barbaric crown of hair was born of a ceaseless wind. His voice, loudest in the day and with no apparent volume control, came shouting over the rumbling tracks. Everything he said was certain, a pronouncement, because on this train running beside it, lying flat atop it, you needed to know exactly what you were doing. And if you didn't know exactly what you were doing, you acted like you did and hoped for the best. The first day on the train, Chaco told her to sit sideways or even backwards if it didn't make her any sick. Just don't look so much, she said. Stop looking, soften your eyes and try not to see. You learn things on a train, more than you learn in a car. First thing, you learn about the trees. Second, you learn not to see. The trees and the trees and the trees will get you. They will reach out from the tracksides, leafy fingered in your face, like you're an exotic visitor, and you have to touch just once, just once. They will scratch you, they can blind you, surprise you, and with a wap, they can knock you off the train. There were so many trees on this trip from Monterey that Marie wondered a few times if they would ever reach the desert or if they were going south to the Amazon instead. The train slowed down for stretches, slow enough that women could run between the tracks and toss them water bottles. Old women, young, most looked as poor as they were. Chaco took their bottles and waved to them. They looked like they need that water more than we do, she said. Why take from them when we have enough to don't ever assume you have enough, understand? He blinked at her. They give us these because they have people out there, and they hope that someone else is handing bottles to their kids and their husbands. Around them were Chaco's friends, the collection of young men and boys who had found each other on this journey. There was Pepe, Mauro, and Flaco. There was one they called Nutsack. Nutsack was older than the rest and spoke good English. He'd made the mistake of translating the word for them, and the name had stuck for good. The boys talked about their plans. Plans were very important and everyone had one. We're going to be mojados. Flaco threw his fist in the air as if farm labor were a great adventure. Pepe, who was only 11, was looking for his mother. She worked in a factory somewhere in Michigan. If he didn't find her, he decided to be adopted. If any of them could be adopted, it was Pepe. His eyes were dark puddles. They would have shimmered nicely in the orphanage sun. He seemed to imagine an American fairy woman who would take him in and love him and feed him all he could eat. I'm going to get fat like an American, he said. I'm going to get so fat they'll have to wheel me in a wagon. The next time you see me, you won't even know it's me. Nutsack taught the other boys the words they need to know. A jornal was a daily wage, a camión was a truck, a pala was a shovel, and tierra was mud. The boys practiced the sounds, stretching their lips around daily wage, laughing at the word mud. Tierra, Nutsack said, mud. The boys slapped their chest and laughed at the sound of it. Mud, mud, so oafish on the roofs of their mouths, so dead. In the afternoon, they grew quiet. They couldn't sleep because sleeping meant falling. But the afternoon was a time to pretend they were somewhere else, to think of home and slip feathers into the cushions of their futures. When Maddie's soul started to doze off, she felt a pinch. How are you? Chekosa asked. Okay, she said. These trees are driving me mad. The trees look good on you, he said. He cleared a strand of hair from her mouth. If they had been alone, he would have kissed her. Thank you. So I have a brother, a twin brother, and he lives in New York, and he's a writer. And we've been doing this writing project, so I'm going to read some of the things we've written. And some... The first two are... poems written in response to each other, and the rest are collaborations, so... This first one is called Vancouver. There is nothing like a trench coat in the rain. Can you conceive of that? With fuzzy lining that you can zip off if it's too humid. I'm thinking specifically of Vancouver, where the streets are small. There's so much heroin there unexpectedly. The lining kept zipped in there in Vancouver. But I'm trying specifically to be general, so that you don't know what I'm thinking. And I think it's working but failing too, because now all you know about me is that I have a coat and I wore it in a city once. And what I haven't said is that in Vancouver, it was cobblestone and it was cute. And they have thanksgivings while we have Columbus Day, which is kind of weird and funny. And that there really is a lot of heroin there and the street prostitutes are of many ages. And that there's also rich people with babies, just like here. Now I'm staying away from meaning, and what I'm interested in mostly is what I'm not saying. Vancouver indicates a city, one that exists that I've been to, with expectations flipped. But where I am instead, does that make me American? Am I an American with a trench coat? Do you want to be a detective with me? That's where the art is. I think the place is where you have to make up the new thing from the missing thing. I guess I'm lazy. This next one is also called Vancouver. Fuzzy bear lining lined and zipped in, even in Vancouver, where heroin can't cobble enough street together to be more than an alley. I wear a trench coat, Aurora jockeying, pole vault, Columbine leveraged Canadian currency, and I still can't afford any. On Thanksgiving, which is really Columbus Day, but not really here anyway, is it compelling enough for you to know so little about me in this poem? Street prostitutes specify in all ages club the labor market is such supply, demand, invisible hand, et cetera, et cetera. Vancouver. Now we get into the sex. Bears and honeycomb sticky paws stuck to angry bees stinging poor bear pads, even deeper in sex now. Bears are men with hair on bigger bodies, beards, seasonal variety, beach bear, hunter bear, polar bear. You still know nothing about me, though, this poem, lazy as it is leaving it out, all open for interpretation, Vancouver prostitutes and bears. You don't have to clap in between each poem. If I make you want to clap, you should clap. Thank you, Micah Sidourney. Happy early birthday to us all. Our last performer up here is Dax Tran Cathy. Dax is a... Yeah, you can clap for Dax right now. A professional independent artist who makes art and performs under the title Villanette. His cardboard sculptures have been commissioned by the Exploratorium and by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He's the artist in residence at the Exploratorium. That is so amazing. And Falling Sky, which we're about to see images and text from, is his first graphic novel. Please welcome Dax Tran Cathy. Normally I don't do these internet things, but I really wanted to figure out what the possibilities were of publishing in a browser window as opposed to on paper. So what I was trying to do, besides like the content, which is what it is, what I was trying to do formally with this thing is to make a book that I could never publish in paper, like I could never put binding on it, because the pages are different sizes and the reading goes in different directions and stuff. Here we have a boy, and he is mopping the floor outside on the road, and he runs out of the convenience store as we can tell by the open door, and he's shouting after these people, Chow, and she turns around and says, Peter, hello. He says, Chow, how are you? We haven't seen you since June, and she interrupts, this is Kateria Henry Peter. Hello, ma'am. I'm Peter Small. I'm Chow's friend. We grew up together. Chow, can I show you something? We're here to see Jack, she says. And they just watched this lady walk down the pier. Meanwhile, Peter is like, please, he's trying to get her attention. I've been working on something. I thought you weren't coming back, and she acknowledges Peter for the first time. Sorry, hi. It's good to see you. I thought I wouldn't ever see you again. I've been building a boat, and he grabs her hand and he drags her off, and she's like, Peter, you can't swim. Why have a boat? But they go anyway. They go outside of a shipping container. She says, as she snoops around finding this boat and discovering that, in fact, her name is written on the back of the boat, which is a little disturbing. So she says, well, so. But then Peter comes up, and he says, here, I made this last summer, and he presents her with a box. Oh, I never had the chance to give this to you. Oh, wonderful. It's a dress. You made it yourself. So many pockets. And she takes the dress, and he says, I don't know if it'll fit you, right? I finished after you left, and she responds, thanks, Peter. I'm so sorry I didn't write it all. I didn't think I'd be gone so long, and he kind of stammered, chow. I never thought I'd see you again. I thought you'd moved away for good. No one knew where you were. You just left. Oh, sorry, Peter. I didn't mean to worry. And he looks down at his hands kind of nervous. It's just, I swore if I ever saw you again, I swore I'd tell you I should've told you before you left. Can anyone guess what he's about to say? I love you. I'm in love with you. And then her eyes widen. And she looks down into the right, like you do, and you don't like the news that you're hearing. Peter, you're wonderful. Thank you for the gift. And she removes her hand from his. I'm not looking for a boyfriend. I'm not staying here. I'm not staying here. Can I come? No, I don't love you, Peter. I'm sorry. And he looks down at his feet and at the junk on the floor. You're going to show me your boat? She asks. And he looks up at her. No, that's okay. I'd love to see it on you. Will you try it on? Here, I'll be outside. And he leaves. So she puts on the dress and she steps outside. And he's not there. Peter, she asks. And we see the rest of the marina where they are at. And as you can see, there's no more image down here. So I guess we will look around in the marina for Peter. And he's not there. Get it? The wonderful things you can do with infinite canvas. And then here we see a boat. And the boat is listing. And her eyes get wide again. Oh, my God. And then she has disappeared. And here we see that she is running presumably towards the boat. So she dives off into the water. And then all we see is hair. And then after that we see Chao rising to the surface in a midst of bubbles. And then just light. And then she breaks free into the air. And this is one of those infinite canvas things where you can just scroll around and see all the stuff and try to find where the next button is. And there it is, amid all the debris. And then again, looking around. And there's just debris in the water. And no person. Damn it. And we come down to these frames here and we have a thing. We see the garden pruners in her hands and it is cut out of a different thing of paper. So this is the conceit of the novel whenever there is something cut out of paper. You can click on this thing and forgive this block page up and navigation up. But you can click on this thing and it will open up another chapter which is based on those things. So for example, this is another chapter over here which I'm not going to read for you. It's just here for demonstration purposes. There's like another chapter with more story and different people on it. And anytime there's like something that's cut out of another piece of paper it will open up another chapter with more stuff in it. So what I'm trying to do with this graphic novel is to set it up so that you can end up like five chapters or ten chapters just open and going along in them and maybe you never even finish a chapter and maybe you never even finish any of the stories that I've written but you just get like a glimpse of all these different things and you read as much as you want to and then when you're sick of it you just close it. I don't really have anything to say in closing other than I'm still publishing this thing and there will be a new page up this week and it's at failingsky.com as often as you like and you can follow the Twitter stream if you really want to know like everything I'm thinking as I draw it like which brush has failed me today. But thank you very much.