Chris Smith’s blog

The second issue of Longshot Magazine–that’s the one written, edited, and put together in just 48 hours–is out now, and it’s got a piece of mine called “Once Found, Now Lost.” The issue’s theme is “debt,” and I wrote a personal piece about my uneasy relationship with a guy I worked with in South Africa. You can read the story online, or buy a print version of the magazine if you like. I’m proud to have been a part of it.

Late one afternoon, Soul turned up drunk at my place. I was pulling the razor-wired gates shut when he appeared beyond the wall, listing a little. Gray-green clouds massed above our heads; the Highveld rains were coming on. He wanted to know if I’d drive him to Soweto.

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You can’t throw a rock in Silicon Valley without hitting some dude in business casual claiming his start-up is revolutionary. Sometimes, though, it’s actually true. Such is the case with AnchorFree, which makes software enabling activists to block their governments’ Internet-blockers, without being traced by the authorities. Indeed, without software like this, people in less-than-free countries might not be able to get on Facebook or Twitter to plan protests. It’s been used to good effect in Egypt, Libya, and is in heavy rotation in China and Saudi Arabia, too. The new issue of San Francisco magazine runs a short piece of mine on these guys, who just set out to make money and ended up aiding the Arab uprisings. How’s that for “Don’t be Evil”?

The Bay Area has always been a metal hotbed, spawning the likes of Metallica, with its knifepoint riffs and galloping tempos, and Sleep, masters of the sludgy, bong-fueled stomp. (I caught one of Sleep’s reunion shows last week, by the way. Whoa.) These days, we might be better known for our avant-garde metal bands, united less by any particular sound than by a willingness to experiment. San Francisco magazine’s “Best of” issue this month runs a piece of mine on this burgeoning scene. I could have mentioned a ton of bands but chose to go with Ludicra, Grayceon, and Giant Squid. Check it out–and check the bands out when they play.

San Francisco magazine’s “Best of” issue this month runs my short piece on Keith Olbermann, the angry newsman unbound, and his new gig at Current TV. The new Countdown debuted last week, and it appears to be a lot like the old Countdown–not a bad thing, to my mind. I’ve always been a fan of Olbermann’s but haven’t caught the show yet, beyond a few clips. Why? Well, like so many others out there, I don’t get Current.

This month’s San Francisco magazine runs a number of my pieces, most of them as part of its annual “Best of the Bay” package. Here’s one on this fall’s mayoral race, focusing on Ranked Choice Voting, the city’s new-ish voting system. RCV isn’t like your typical, “first past the post, winner-take-all” system. Instead, it has a tendency to kneecap frontrunners (just ask Oakland’s Don Perata), and encourages second-tier candidates to be nice to each other.

You might think that this fall’s mayoral race–the most wide-open in ages, with nine credible candidates and no true front-runner–promises even more of the ritual bloodletting than usual. Instead, look for a race more anodyne than aggro, as hopefuls kiss up to their opponents’ supporters and try not to alienate anyone, ever.

Last week, Thought Catalog published an essay of mine on growing up punk in suburban Detroit. It’s a personal piece about high school, the 1980s, skating, and, mostly, the shitty hardcore band I was in. We did, however, have a great name: Moral Decay. Anyway, here it is.

Like thousands of other basement bands across the country at the time, we spent our days skateboarding, building launch ramps in our driveways, and working up new ways to express our dissatisfaction with the world. Plenty of stuff pissed us off. This was 1986, after all, the high Reagan era. The U.S. was always invading some country I had never heard of, and the threat of nuclear war seemed very real. I wasn’t happy at home, either: I didn’t get along with my parents, and they didn’t get along with each other. Plus, I lived in the suburbs of Detroit, which even then had a feral, end-of-days feel. That year, there were nearly 400 arsons in a three-day period. I remember sitting in front of the TV on Halloween night, watching the city burn. [ ... ]

The new issue of San Francisco magazine is out, and with it my short piece on political correctness in SF (see p.40).

This spring, PETA, the animal-rights group that specializes in pointless PR stunts, petitioned San Francisco to rename the Tenderloin. The name is just far too beefy-sounding for PETA’s taste–”an outdated moniker that evokes the horrors of the meat trade,” according to a letter the group sent Mayor Ed Lee. PETA’s suggestion? The Tempeh District. This won’t happen, of course, but what if we did succumb to our darkest, most politically correct impulses? Herein, a rundown of what some of our neighborhoods might be called if we resolved never to offend anyone, anywhere, ever again.

I’ve got a short piece in the current San Francisco magazine, a Q&A with Susan Freinkel, who’s just written a masterful new book on the yin and yang of plastics.

As symbols of our modern age go, you can’t do better than plastic. It has given us conveniences like the sandwich bag and innovations like the iPhone, but it has also exacerbated global warming and created that garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean (and might be messing with our kids’ hormones to boot). In Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), due out in time for Earth Day, San Francisco journalist Susan Freinkel charts our century-long love-hate relationship with petroleum products …

I’ve got a piece in the new issue of the American Prospect, on some innovative anti-crime efforts in Oakland that actually work. In the most messed-up parts of the city, police action alone can’t do the job; nor can well-intentioned community groups. The key, as it turns out, is to get them working together. Easier said than done–community policing schemes have come and gone (and come again) in Oakland. But this new push, which is harder-edged than community policing but has many of the same aims, looks awfully promising.

It’s been raining and the San Francisco Giants are on TV, so the streets are quiet. We’re cruising through East Oakland, one of the most violent parts of a violent city. A knot of drug dealers loiters in front of a housing project, and crackheads sit in folding chairs on the sidewalk. Two teenagers in hoodies saunter by; another weaves back and forth on a small bike. Anthony DelToro gestures toward them: “When you see youngsters like that, all in black, the majority of the damn time they got guns.” He pauses. “This is Oakland — everybody got a gun.”

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Read the whole thing here.

This fall, Canteen ran an essay of mine on music criticism, the glories of MP3 blogs, and my discovery of Zam-rock. It’s not online, but here’s a pdf.

I’ve always been obsessed with music. When I was a kid, I eagerly awaited each new Rolling Stone and Creem magazine, even though I didn’t necessarily understand the record-geek Aramaic in which they were written. (What’s an 11-year-old to make of a sentence that name-checks both Camus and Ozzy Osbourne?) It hardly mattered, though. It was a wide new world.
Later, I became a loyal reader of Maximumrocknroll, the Bay Area punk bible. A pulpy, grayscale rag that seemed to smudge your fingers if you even looked at it, MRR ran profiles of bands big and small; dispatches from scenes across the world, from Tacoma to Tokyo; and, this being the 1980s, screeds against Ronald Reagan. I always turned to the reviews first. There were pages upon pages of them, capsule reviews of roughly a million bands I’d never heard of. These listings filled me with awe: People had listened to all of this stuff–and they could place every release within the punk cosmology, each tape (they were mostly tapes) a speck of dust in an expanding universe of sound.

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