Yesterday I met up with a friend at Mama Buzz Cafe, located on Telegraph and 23rd Streets in Oakland,  the same block where the Oakland Art Murmur takes place. When I was thinking about how to frame the book’s introduction as a discussion of the current state of independent arts communities, it was logical to begin things there, since Mama Buzz was for a long time the informal headquarters of Kitchen Sink Magazine, a live music and spoken word venue, art gallery, and community space. In the two years that have passed since I drafted that intro (which you can download on the Oakestown home page as a PDF or read online at the book’s Holt website), the block of galleries around 23rd street has changed a lot, and my friends Jen Loy and Nicole Neditch no longer own Mama Buzz. Estaban Sabar’s gallery is gone, replaced by the new Fort Gallery space. Ego Park is also no longer around; its space is now occupied by Hatch Gallery, which is overseen by Adam Hatch, late of the Lobot performance space and gallery, where we threw many, many KS parties with bands like Rogue Wave and Deerhoof before they were, you know, famous.

Spaces change all the time in a city and we are in a nasty recession that’s had a big impact on my always struggling hometown of Oakland, so these alternative gallery spaces do tend to come and go. It’s nice that Mama Buzz appears to still be thriving as a business (packed at 3pm on a weekday), and RPS, the local crafting collective, has started to do more outreach work with kids from local schools. To be honest, however, now that I’m no longer helping to run a magazine that served as a kind of community organ for the Oakland indie scene, I feel a little bit distant from that stretch of real estate. I actually live farily close to there, but since my work takes me up to Berkeley most days of the week, I tend to spend more time in that region (the slow creeping death of Telegraph Avenue’s formerly robust independent book and record store scene is a whole different ball of wax).  Art Murmur is actually pretty fun if you like a gallery scene that’s neither snooty nor unaffordable (with free live music to boot), so I’m heartened to know that’s still surviving as well. Community is such an indespensible part of any indie arts scene, but as we all know, the tricky thing about community is figuring out how to make it sustainable. Hopefully the folks around Telegraph and 23rd have that figured out.

Back when my first book came out, somehow I got the idea that it would be excellent to force my cats to pose with copies of it. A big box of copies of this new book came yesterday (which means it’s been released from the warehouse which = on sale very soon), so in the interest of consistency, I repeated the exercise with varying degrees of success.

Jammer (I call him “Grandpa”) was the first victim and does look a bit startled. However, the book is doing a great job of covering up his big gut.

Esperanza is doing her best “smile with your eyes” Tyra Banks pose here.She is the alpha cat but let’s put her in the middle for once.

YoYo (her real name is Yosarian, which my late mother in law gave her thinking she was male) is auditioning for a Nike ad here. Dig the tail action.

I had a blast putting together a playlist for the Henry Holt/Macmillan website for Slanted and Enchanted. If you’re interested in checking out some of the music from the bands discussed in the book, I highly recommend tracking these albums down. Most are still in print and available from your local independent record store (or, as Prince calls it in Under The Cherry Moon, wrecka sto).

I also like the nifty graphic they came up with for the playlist.

I’m going to start answering hypothetical questions people might ask me about this book along with questions people have actually asked me about the book and we’ll all puzzle out which ones are real and which are fake. Ooooh… it’s an experiment.

Q. Why this this book called Slanted and Enchanted?

A. As most of us who are over thirty and went to college in the 90s know, once upon a time there was a very popular indie band called Pavement. They were originally from Stockton, California, notable mostly for being an utter shithole. Their first album was called Slanted and Enchanted, and it is a classic.

Since I am utterly awful at naming things I’ve written (seriously — when I wrote for and edited Kitchen Sink Magazine and had 2-4 essays and short pieces in each issue, I always had to ask my fellow senior editor Jeff T Johnson to name my pieces for me. Sorry, man.), when it came time to send the book proposal off to auction, my agent asked me to brainstorm a list of potential titles.  I came up with one, and it was a rip on a line by Frank O’Hara, one of my favorite poets who I write about in the first chapter of the book. It’s a good line and a great poem, but unfortunately, it doesn’t make a good book title, so as usual I begged people for help. The original subtitle was “Indie Culture in America” (this later changed to the broader “The Evolution of Indie Culture”), so I asked friends for suggestions of snappy phrases to precede that. Stefanie Kalem, genius writer and snazzy dresser, suggested Slanted and Enchanted, my agent liked it, I liked it, the end (yes, Stefanie gets thanked in the book).

This is not to suggest the book is entirely about Pavement; in fact, only 1/2 of one chapter really talks about that band, and my attempts to contact Stephen Malkmus for an interview wound up being fruitless. So the chapter is about the parallels between Pavement and the Silver Jews, because I did talk to David Berman, and the parallels between Matador Records (Pavement’s label, and the biggest indie label in the US), and Drag City (the Silver Jews’ label, and a much more modest operation). Anyway, this has caused some confusion for potential readers who think it’s a book strictly about Pavement and the 90s (like I said, only 1/10th of the book is about Pavement, and only three chapters take place in the 90s, and only about a third of the book is strictly about music). So, just to clarify, no, it’s not a book about Pavement, although they do play a pretty big part in the evolution of what we call indie today.

I really wanted to call it The Hobbit, but that would be even more confusing.

In spite of the fact that I wrote a lot about the nineties in this book, I’m of the mind that it’s far too early for nineties nostalgia. The recent revival of gunge fashion (flannels, torn jeans, Doc Martens) seems to be just another move on the part of chains like Urban Outfitters to market something as kitschy to people too young to remember when it wasn’t kitsch. Pearl Jam is headlining the Outside Lands Festival here in San Francisco later this summer (along with the Beastie Boys and Dave Matthews… umm, what the hell?), and someone told me recently that Sub Pop records is trying to make (yet another) comeback. The nineties seem uncomfortably close for me personally ; after all, I finished both college and grad school in the nineties, and that really doesn’t seem that long ago.

I once dated a guy who railed a lot against musical nostalgia,  though like me he had an inordinate fondness for Dylan (Dylan seems to be the exception for lots of people who can’t stand any other boomer era music).  Generally, I tend to agree that we shouldn’t stay musically paralyzed in the past. But since I’m putting together a playlist and watching lots of videos from the books’ central decades of focus (the 60s, 80s, 90s and the current decade), I am feeling a bit of musical nostalgia, much of it Bay Area centric. I found an MP3 of Berkeley band Crimpshrine’s song “Summertime”, which was a personal anthem in my last year of high school (and up to the point of finding it online, I only had it on a compilation of Gilman bands called “The Thing That Ate Floyd”, which I still own on the original vinyl… yes, I am a dork).  I have to admit I got painfully nostalgic for the late 80s and my teen years — normally a time in my life I’d prefer to forget — for a minute there. And then I remembered what my hair looked like back then, and I got embarrassed enough to stop feeling nostalgic. That must be the trick to quashing sentimental feelings about one’s golden years: just take a minute and recall what you were wearing.

The semester is almost over, and I’ll have much more time, very soon, to read other blogs and post here. I have a ton of catching up to do in terms of book related work — with publication just weeks away, we are in the “final push” (that’s what we called it in the indie magazine biz) of publicity, marketing, and so on. In the meantime, I wanted to share the cake we had at the final faculty meeting of the semester, courtesy of Sweet Adeline Bakeshop (my neighborhood bakery/cafe, where I wrote much of the book), and courtesy of Dr. Jane Stanley, who herself has a book forthcoming this fall. It’s a carrot cake!

Supurna Banerjee, my editor at Holt, sent me a batch of books yesterday, and they are super super super awesome looking. The book is designed by Rebecca Seltzer, and the new design has a glossy treatment on the title lettering that’s hard to see in pictures but looks great in person. People have been complimenting this cover since I first posted the images here and on Facebook. It really is a pretty pretty book. But pretty in a way boys will like too.

After no days off in a month I have the whole weekend free. Thursday night, I had the priviledge of hearing my friend Chad Sweeney read at Moe’s. Chad’s the co-publisher of Parthenon West Review and a fine poet who really, really loves what he does as a teacher, writer, and publisher — a rare combination, believe me. I was running on about 5 hours of sleep that day, however, and the weekend finds me groggy and sluggish (gluggish and sroggy). I am planning on catching up on reading (midway through two books at once and I have a backlog of about ten titles I picked up because I have impulse control issues in bookstores), cleaning the house, and visiting Tacos Sinaloa for some el pastor. Yes, it’s a wicked exciting life in the city.

Lately I’ve been trying to find out how writers whore themselves out via the internet market their books online.  I mean, the basics are pretty basic: blog, Facebook, Twitter (I have resisted the latter option, because Twitter gets entirely too TMI, but friends who do marketing are trying to convince me Twitter is the way of the FUTURE). But these days we have all these other options. You can be an Amazon Connect Author (I feel like I should type “TM” after that); you can do one of the book networking sites like Goodreads or Library Thing (okay, I signed up for both); you can sign up for a site called RedRoom that advertises itself as the place “where the writers are”. I think it’s like Facebook for writers, and it seems to be run by someone here in the Bay Area.

I first got aquainted with RedRoom when I was reading at Litquake a couple of years ago. They were just launching in beta and were filming all the readers on the first day, so we had to sign release forms giving them permission to host the clips on their site. Many months later, I discovered a video of myself reading on the site, only it was labeled as “Kaya Oaks reading at Litquake“. People spell my name wrong a lot (what is it about that “e” in Oakes that is so fucking difficult?), but since I’d signed and printed my name on the release form, I assumed I’d spelled it correctly (this was an 11AM reading on a Saturday, however, so I can’t be sure). I just shrugged it off.

Anyway, I tried to register as a RedRoom author recently, and one of the questions they asked was what category your books would fall into. Slanted and Enchanted is technically social science, but they didn’t have a category for that. They had music criticism, comics, and popular culture, so I checked all of those. The book also talks a lot about independent presses and magazines, but neither of those were options. There were a zillion options for genre fiction, however, and a trillion for various religious and spirituality books. This got me wondering how the library would categorize it, so I checked on World Cat and it’s “Indie Culture, United States, History”. That makes sense, right? Also “Arts and Society”. Also logical (have I mentioned that I have a big crush on library logic? I do). I don’t blame the RedRoom folks for not having a category that fits this book exactly, because there is no such thing. I do think, however, that the proliferation of options for genre fiction and spirituality books says something about what people are using the internet to promote, which is to say niche writing. In fact, I even talk about this in the book.

I’m getting sidetracked, though. In order to register for the site, you had to name a friend who’d referred you, but nobody I know had and nobody I really know was already on the site, so I just picked the name of somebody I did a reading with off the list and hopefully he’s not pissed about it. In spite of the bravado I display at readings and in classes, I’m actually extremely introverted (this is why I kept a private blog for seven years before moving here), so all this “haw, look at me!” shit is still really awkward, and judging from all the spam comments I get here, a mixed bag so far. Nonetheless, if I could staple band flyers on telephone poles in high school and college, I can try social networking.

P.S. My friend Stefanie reports that this site is apparently riddled with typos (”Stefanie”, however, is not a typo, thanks). All such errors are entirely my fault. If anybody wants to copy edit my entries, let me know — WP doesn’t have a spellcheck.

And ETA: Thanks to the RedRoom folks who contacted me and fixed the spelling on that video! You can now visit my author page there.

Still caught in the end-of-semester vortex, and heading into my third straight weekend of essay grading (those who imagine academics live a leisurely life have never taught basic writing courses), but I wanted to drop a few updates while I have a minute of early morning time:

• Today is Buy Indie Day. If you’re lucky enough to live near an independent bookstore, record store, a farmer’s market, or anyplace else that’s not a chain, today’s the day to put your money where your mouth is and support them. If you don’t, there are plenty of online places where you can still support independent artists and media.
• I’ve already posted these on the home page here at Oakestown and on Facebook, but early reviews of Slanted and Enchanted are arriving, and they’re pretty awesome. Publisher’s Weekly calls the book “lively and highly literate” (knew that grad degree was good for something), and says that “as an explanation and excavation of the already fading recent past, it is essential reading.” Library Journal picked the book for a featured review on its website and said it “uses the concept of a creative community as a mediating theme to illustrate how indie culture has oscillated between the music and literary scene throughout the last few decades.” It adds that S&E “will particularly appeal to artists, musicians, writers, and kids with thick-rimmed glasses”, which makes me extra glad I went for the Rachel Maddow frames at the optometrist this year. I’m still getting used to people writing anything about my writing after, ahem, twenty-something years of writing for indie magazines, zines, lit journals and small press pubs that very few folks actually read, but I do appreciate the kind words.
• S&E is also doing pretty well over at Goodreads, where lots of folks are marking it as a “to read”. I’d like to make a deal with those people. If you actually read it when it comes out, let me know and I’ll happily provide you with free issues of Kitchen Sink magazine, shipping included. Although it’s no longer being published, KS won the Utne Independent Press Award and multiple Best Magazine awards from our local free weeklies. I write a bit about it in the book, and still think it was a great experience to write for it and edit it. Also I have approximately 5 million issues collecting dust in my house and they’re a fire hazard.
• Yesterday was National New Majority Facuty Day. Lately I’ve had a lot of discussions with colleagues about the increasing presence of lecturers (I’m one of them) in higher education. Something like 70% of undergraduate courses at Cal are taught by non-tenured faculty and graduate students, and this has steadily become the case at many other schools. Unfortunately, it creates  a two-tiered class system for faculty: those with tenure receive research grants, sabbaticals, regular pay raises on a higher salary scale, marital hiring preferences (eg if you get tenure, your spouse/partner is pretty much guaranteed a job) and nice offices. Those without get bupkes (well, at Cal we do get benefits, and that’s nothing to sneeze at in this economy). Since it’s May Day and I’m a member of the union, I just wanted to mention that one can start to feel quite taken for granted at one’s job when one is not tenured. For example, if one publishes a book or two, one might not even get any acknwoledgement for that from anyone beyond one’s immediate coworkers and students. Ahem. I’m not sure if I agree with the idea that the elimination of tenure is the solution, but something must, must, must be done to increase parity between faculty. It’s an insult that equally qualified, equally trained, equally well published folks are not considered worthy of much beyond one year contracts, if that. End rant! Happy May Day! Go buy stuff from independent artists!