Best Review
Hey Redroomers (if that's even a word), Gary Singh's review of Beer, Blood and Cornmeal was named "The Best Review" and is currently posted on Redroom's homepage! Singh's piece was titled "Wrestling with Suburbia" and it ran in The Metro (Silicon Valley) on March 5, 2008. Huntingson Sharp, an editor at Redroom, emailed me to say that he selected Gary's piece because he "wrote about (Beer, Blood and Cornmeal) with such verve." While this is a nice plug for me and my punk wrestling memoir, the real acclaim goes to Gary Singh and his great observational style of writing. Gary is a South Bay based writer who pens his "Silicon Alleys" column each week for The Metro. Singh's column is an enjoyably ecclectic mismash. Sometimes it's about music, sometimes it's about the political struggle over San Jose Street names, sometimes it's about East San Jose shopping malls that have remained unchanged since the 1960s. What ties together all of Singh's colums are his dry sense of humor and his love of his hometown's obscurities and oddities. You can click here to check out The Metro's archive of Gary's columns.
Here are a couple of my personal favorites:
The one about the house where the Doobie Brothers used to live.
It doesn't matter what you build downtown, the Caravan will always be there. It will never die.
Keywords:
About Bob
When he's not being hit by steel chairs or fighting Sasquatches, Bob Calhoun is a San Francisco Bay Area freelance journalist. His work has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com and Filmfax. Under a stagename swiped from a comic book kung-fu...
Connections
Causes Bob Calhoun Supports
Unicef
http://www.unicef.org/
The Nuclear Threat Initiative...
Maybe Red Roommates?
One Red Room denizen described the literary establishment as "Tweedy Legions," as terse and poetic a term as I've ever heard. Perhaps, collectively, we could be the Tweedy Legionaires.
I picture the interior of Red Room as an English manor library....lots of dark wood, the fragrance of pipe tobacco, and perhaps an Absinthe bar discreetly hidden behind a rotating bookshelf.
Eric
(No, I've never partaken of Absinthe....I've heard it tastes like Nyquil, which is enough of a deterrent for me. :))
Red Room ambience
Eric, I'm glad you think of the Red Room that way. I agree...if milord's library has writers whose subjects include hip-hop journalism, punk rock memoirs, punk rock vampires, incredibly strange wrestling, the darkest corners of San Francisco's South of Market area, and ghost stories set in seedy motels. And why shouldn't it?
Huntington Sharp, Red Room
Tweed
I don't do tweed so the tweedy legionaires thing doesn't really apply to me. I mean, I'm wearing buckskin in my author pic. The Mexican Viking called this "The Gerry Spense look."