Hi all, and greetings from what the mass media has lately been portraying as a city in a “doom loop.” Egads! It’s nothing new that lazy reporters recycle received wisdom and don’t question the proclamations of allegedly concerned officials and self-appointed experts but the one-note nature of that Dysopia By the Bay narrative is striking, at least to yours truly.
It’s true that the five-finger discount thing at Walgreens can be reminiscent of the Monty Python sketch in which Apple Records is looted by its employees, but the bigger story should be the $3.5 million the chain recently paid out to resolve a class action lawsuit over wage theft from workers. And I’ve noticed that news reports of the waves of shoplifting at Walgreens forget to mention the role the company played, to its extreme financial gain, in peddling oxycontin to millions of people, many of whom became petty-thieving dope fiends as a result.
I’m also as steamed as a beat cop locked out of a sale on day old doughnuts over how the San Francisco Chronicle parrots City government and business bigwigs who call for additional spending on police alongside streamlined building of more luxury condos and “affordable” housing that’s mostly not affordable (drug wars and rising tides lifting all boats being so successful at addressing our societal woes, lo these many decades). Case in point: a story, which led me to cancel my Chron subscription, on our mayor promoting Mean Old Frisco as the world capital of AI. The article read like a press release and had about as much substance. However one feels regarding the concerns of early AI developers about the technology’s potential threats to the survival of our species, those warnings, which have repeatedly appeared in the New York Times and other mainstream outlets, are certainly worth mentioning. There’s also the little issue, which the puff piece also overlooks, of the massive job loss that will occur if breaks are not applied to the development of HAL and cohort. Yeah, I know, yelling about it won’t stop it from happening, but as actress/author/mover and shaker Cookie Mueller pointed out in one of her wildly entertaining columns on (mostly modern) art, “Grouchhood is great. Being a malcontent, lodging complaints right and left can make you a better person.”
That quote from the gone but not forgotten Ms. Mueller, appears in the recently reissued collection of her writings called Walking Through Water in a Pool Painted Black. I stumbled (literally, someone had knocked it off the display table) upon said volume at my workplace, a store you only have a few more days to visit. Yes, it’s true, Patrick finally gets to retire after forty-two years in the book biz; the brick-and-mortar Green Arcade era will end at the close of the day on Sunday, July 23. To answer your next question, no, Patrick couldn’t train his loyal staff to do the half-zillion tasks he takes care of in his aerie/office overlooking the street-level public part of the store. Nor could the contents of his brain be downloaded in some kind of Nimoy-era Star Trek Vulcan mind meld; without Mr. Marks’s decades of deep knowledge of the book trade and his gift of wildly entertaining and smart gab, the joint would be a pale shadow of its former self.
So if you’re in the Bay Area before Sunday at 5pm, come on down and enjoy the 40% off retirement sale. Better to have too many books than too few! Even if you have no more space in your apartment, you’ll always need presents for those annoying birthday parties you keep getting invited to.
If you must offer your condolences and pity when dropping by, please restrain the impulse to let out any injured animal noises: one of our more annoying patrons already emulated a mortally wounded bear to express his pain over our imminent closing. Once was enough, believe me.
I’ll miss a lot of things about my exalted position in Arcadian retail. The book events were fabulous, as was interacting with return customers who I got to know over the years. The regulars included activists, writers, academics, local historians, out of control autodidacts and, in the parlance of Sly and The Family Stone, everyday people. Friends like Steve, James, Denise, Stacey, Chris, and Lisa, to name a few, were always a treat to see and talk to about all manner of things, as were many characters I didn’t know as well.
Of course, not everyone was interested in engaging in idle banter when I commented on a title, which is fine. Obviously, people should feel free to clam up no matter how civil, charming, and fun to talk to a clerk might happen to be.
And natch, there were certain customers who I’d rather hadn’t spoken to me, like the guy whose range of purchases made me think of the Tom Waits song “What’s He Building In There?” Not hostile but also not exactly left-leaning, he had Patrick track down obscure requests, including one positing that Nixon was framed over Watergate. Other fairly strange stuff he had us get him over the years included a manual on field surgery in Vietnam and a bunch of old high school yearbooks. I hope he’s not on the Unabomber spectrum. Fingers crossed!
Probably my most disturbing interaction involved an oddball with an obvious addiction to cosmetic surgery who had me check the online availability of four or five books on cannibalism. She had been inspired (I would say overly inspired) by a history of that vegan-hostile practice she’d found in our science-adjacent section.
One of the titles on Mademoiselle Facelift’s list was a clearly (to me, not to her) tongue-in-cheek cookbook called To Serve Man, which she explained she wanted to get for her daughter. When I asked if said offspring was a vegetarian, the surgically remodeled carnivore replied, “No, she’s a chef.”
Perhaps I should have asked her if she was related to Ed Gein. At that point I no longer wanted to think about what might have happened to the older gentleman who used to pay for piles of pricey art books she selected; he’d been absent from the scene since long before she showed interest in people eating people. Naturally, my employer later suggested that perhaps the sugar daddy was now in a deep freeze somewhere in a house she’d inherited from him.
Recommending titles was often fun, though I get why my sister Mary was amazed that anyone would ask a complete stranger for reading suggestions. I never guaranteed anything, of course, but it was a nice way to plug writers who deserved a boost. The most hilarious situations on this “staff pick” front involved people who gave me virtually nothing to go on (e.g., the name of a writer or a book they’d gotten a charge out of). One guy asked why I thought he in particular would like Gordo, a hilarious collection of quasi-autobiographical short stories set in a Central Valley farmworker camp in the Seventies,* immediately after I said I had no idea if he’d like it but suggested he read the back cover and maybe a sentence or two from inside to make a judgement for himself. I can’t remember what I replied, though various wiseass responses my employer proposed later do come to mind.
Then there was the of the moment lady who asked what had been “trending” lately. I didn’t grok the question so I gave her the title of some scorching left wing political book, probably the latest from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Another woman came in out of breath, as if from revved-up fast track multi-tasking, to ask for Machiavelli For Women, which turned out to be a “lean-in” guide for ladies scaling corporate ladders, not a fragrance. Though initially I found her plenty annoying, she pleasantly surprised me by springing for her teenage daughter’s purchase of the first volume of Emma Goldman’s memoirs (I steered the kid to it when she explained she wanted a good introduction to Anarchism that wasn’t heavy on theory). Another valuable lesson learned about not making snap judgements, though I can’t say I’ve kept it in mind at all times.
I always had trouble coming up with a “fun” title for some schmo I’d never seen before in my life, but The Fran Lebowitz Reader usually saved the day on that one. Perfect for one who abhors sarcasm! Alas, since it sold out quickly, I never had a chance to recommend The Diaries of Franz Kafka as a beach read, or as something to while away the time in an airport.
The Arcade’s bookmark lists “San Francisco and California history/the built & the natural environment/politics and social justice/cooking, food & farming/select literature, noir, art, and children’s books,” which gives some idea of the store’s scope. The politics were sharper and the novels more interesting than in traditional (i.e., boring) bookshops. Miscellaneous offbeat gems were always popping up: We Go to the Gallery, an illustrated piss-take on art world speak put out by the faux children’s imprint Dung Beetle Reading Scheme; The Book of Whale Insults, a little publication from the National Whale Insult Society (established 1881); various Edward Gorey books and note card sets. Other Arcadian titles not available at Barnes & Noble included novelist Katherine Dunn’s On Cussing and philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit.
Though the query “Do you have any bibles?” was always answered with a rousing “No!,” we did carry the revised and expanded edition of Eddie Muller’s Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, the bible of that essential genre or style (depending on your point of view). Said tome will always be the perfect present for those black and white film enthusiasts who can’t help but agree with Joan Bennett (in Hollow Triumph) that it is indeed a bitter little world. I used to tell devout Christians that it’s the only book of revelations that matters.
It will be strange to find myself in a mid-afternoon mood crash without some cheerfully demented remark from Patrick to pull me out of doom-y reveries. As the weight of the morning’s dystopian news updates pull me down like an anchor affixed to my ankle while I’m treading water somewhere off the Pacific Coast, no customer with a book I can eagerly make an unasked-for remark about will be there to distract me from the realities of USA! USA! USA! circa 2023. Will I have to set up an online inventory of the overstuffed bookshelves in my apartment and beg friends and acquaintances to come by and ask inane questions about those titles? Should I hire a few tweaking methheads to occasionally pace around my pad talking to themselves as if I was back near the Arcade’s open door to Market Street? Alas, my landlord has a strict no pets policy, so I won’t be able to dress up some hapless dog or cat as a chatty bookhound.
Eventually one of my pleas/applications for another job will pan out and
I’ll have the tedium of conventional employment to occupy me. I’m not counting on that revivifying Arcadian spirit being part of the new jobsite’s mix, though I’ve heard there are entertaining people in the most unexpected of places. When the turgid miasma of existence** gets me down I’ll just have to recall Cookie Mueller’s point about the paramount importance of keeping one’s sense of humor no matter what happens.
Thanks for the memories, Team Arcadia. I’ll put away my hanky now and continue meandering onward through the fog. See you down the road for more chagrined observations and belly laughs at some indeterminate point in the future, where you and I will spend the rest of our lives.
* The only book I recommended to more people was Lucia Berlin’s equally great story collection A Manual For Cleaning Women.
* * Phrase stolen from the title of an album by the fantastic Aussie punk/psychedelic rock band The Celibate Rifles.
NOTES:
When I was feeling a little pathetic for going six or seven months (who can be bothered with exactitude these days?) without writing one of these columns, I bought myself this card. It worked wonders! https://guttersnipepress.com/products/fresh-out-of-these
Executive thievery vs. shoplifting: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/07/want-to-be-a-criminal-in-america-stealing-billions-is-your-best-bet-to-go-scot-free
You have until the end of the month to watch Zasu Pitts warble and Edward Everett Horton steal the show: https://www.criterionchannel.com/videos/sing-and-like-it