Subculture City: Postmodern Youth in Tokyo

In the streets of Tokyo’s Harajuku district, Hitomi, 15, wears lime green knock-off Converse All-Stars that she customized with a handful of safety pins. An ankle bracelet of multi-colored plastic beads is wrapped around an orange sock, which overlaps her sky-blue fishnet leggings. She’s wearing a pair of day-glow trousers under her lacey silk skirt, and she has topped it all off with a shiny red sash. Her wrists and neck are buried under plastic-beaded bracelets and vintage–looking sweat bands. She wears huge plastic rings on every finger and her hair is ornamented with shiny patterned clips, colorful bits of string and fake flowers. Her sunglasses are disco-huge, and under her hot pink polyester jacket, her shirt reads: Fuck You.

Hitomi is one of thousands of young people in Tokyo just doing their thing. For many of them, identity and reality are exercised as freedoms of choice. Like most teens and young adults, they make friends by having similar choices in dress, behavior, outward appearance and places to hang out.

Throughout Japan’s capitol, individualistic youth are creating a variety of niche culture enclaves. These trend setting subculture style enthusiasts are constantly evolving to stay ahead of their own game, and have a sharp postmodern awareness of their own self-image and its flexibility. Youth subcultures have become an indispensable commodity to Tokyo, not only as tourist attractions, marketing opportunities and photo ops, but as living, breathing landmarks for many of the city’s most frequented metropolitan hubs and train stations.

In Tokyo’s dense urban cityscapes, high land and housing costs coerce many people to socialize outside of the home. Certain public transportation lines, and their respective stations, have become breeding grounds for group interaction. Fascination with urban youth and new technologies in Japan, has kept the media spotlight focused on the teenagers that congregate in and round Harajuku, Shinjuku and Akihabara stations.

Cognitive dress, language, sexuality, gender and spatial choices amongst these young people are balanced somewhere on an increasingly blurred line between fantasy and reality. Ironically, it is their collective individualism that allows us to classify them as part of one subculture group or another, but most of these kids want to put their own spin on whatever lifestyle they are a part of. That is why dress is often so important.

There is also a very accessible opportunity for Tokyo’s young people to engage in solicited sex to support their lifestyle choices and consumerism. It’s not always about fashion. But it is about lifestyle choices.

The D.I.Y. Fashion Fanatics and Cosplayers of Harajuku

Harajuku Train Station, just north of Shibuya on the Yamanote line, has become a cultural mecca for young people from all over Japan. Predominantly under 20, and varied in outward style, Tokyo’s trendiest flock to the Shibuya ward’s most frequented hot spots in droves, namely Takeshita Dori and its surrounding side streets. Some of them are make-it-yourself dressers, with a flared-out fashion-forward sense of personal statement embedded into their extravagantly stylish attire. Others let the costume they wear bring the fantasy character within them to life.

For years, hordes of Japanese teens have gathered in the Harajuku Station area every Sunday afternoon to partake in cosplay, which is short for costume play (kind of like how pokemon is short for pocket monsters). But more recently, just about any day in the Harajuku, you are sure to find numerous gatherings of Lolita (both sweet and gothic), Victorian maids, punk rockers and countless other characters from the fantasy, science fiction and modern worlds. Cosplay is truly a hobbyist phenomenon. Many participants strive to not only look like characters, but to actually become them in thoughts, words and actions—at least on a social level.

There are specialty stores all over Tokyo that specialize in cosplay attire, but the trendsetters make their own. The process of getting together the right fabric, patterns and amount of time necessary to bring an intricate costume to life, is as much part of the culture as wearing one. Some spend months making wings, prepping sheet metal for armor, collecting complicated patterns for sewing , buying beaded jewelry, specially dyed fabrics, leather belts and gloves, pleated skirts, as well as countless props and fake weapons that compliment their outfit.

Tokyo street fashion is far more radical than its counterparts in New York and Paris, but even with its daring and transformative flavor, there are still plenty of bandwagon participants. In order to separate themselves from their peers, trendsetting youngsters are always modifying their look. And as copy-cat kids from all over Tokyo and the rest of Japan start showing up in Harajuku looking just like they do, the originators switch-up quick, and the cycle repeats itself.

The Otaku of Akihabara

The Akiba experience begins as soon as you exit the Akihabara train station. Right across the street there is an eight-story building (Radio Kaikan) showcasing action figures, comics and model kits. Up and down Chuo Dori, you’ll find countless outlets selling manga, anime, erotic computer games and other techy wares. There’s also a slew of recently established cosplay cafes, where young maids and other fantasy characters cater to a mostly otaku (basically a geek) clientele. “Electric Town,” is Neo Tokyo: a place where private fantasy and obsession take over.

Historically a place to buy junk electronics, surveillance equipment and hacker software, Akihabara is now a bustling center of commerce, and home to another one of Tokyo’s most publicized commodities: Akiba-kei, otherwise known as the otaku. There is much debate about the actual origins and functionality of the word “otaku,” as its literal Japanese definition doesn’t put it into current context. It is said to mean “your house/family/side” and is quite formal, like something housewives might say when addressing one other. Whatever—an otaku in Tokyo today is basically a nerd, and the nerds are becoming more and more popular in the digital age. They are way more than into anime, manga, figurines, role play and video games—they completely obsess over that shit. And, and they’re often introverts.

Right when Japan’s bubble economy burst in the late ‘80s, anime and other otaku interests became one of the most popular Japanese exports. Inevitably, the commercial mentality of otaku culture became heavily researched and marketed. Today, otaku is considered to be one of the most important faces of Japanese postmodern society, and an indispensable force behind an estimated 19 billion dollar per year industry. Otaku have even been celebrated in Japanese TV series’, movies and music videos. However, they haven’t always been so well-liked.

In 1989, Tsutomu Miyazaki was arrested for kidnapping, raping and murdering three young girls. In his room, police found an abundance of pornographic anime videos and Lolicon manga. The nature of this crime, and the criminal’s interests, sparked national curiosity about what kind of lifestyle had created such a terrible human being, and as a result otaku were given a very very very bad rap. It wasn’t until otaku culture became indispensable as a marketing commodity, that the stigma began to unravel. There are still negative connotations in calling someone otaku (ota, for short), but it’s usually seen as sort of a term of endearment.

Otaku are predominantly young men, but they come in all ages and genders. Ladies tend to shop for their anime and manga outside of Akihabara, as otaku men and women prefer not to shop at the same stores. This way, gender reality does not interfere with the romantic fantasy world that a lot of anime and manga specialize in. Kei Books, only minutes away from JR Ikebukuro train station, is one hotspot for female otaku. There you’ll find plenty of comics about hunky men in odd uniforms, as well as “The Prince of Tennis—and other quintessentially ‘eastern’ studs.

Kabuki-cho and Easy Money for Tokyo’s Youth

Kabuki-cho is Tokyo’s biggest red light district. It is located southeast of Shinjuku Station in west-central Tokyo. There are an estimated 5,700 sex-related businesses in the 40,000 square meter area, and it’s work for more than 10,000 young women. In Kabuki-cho there are “clubs” and “cabaclas” where patrons can enjoy conversation (sometimes more) with a hostess or host, and there are the many massage parlors which distinguish themselves by the image of the girls that work there (school girl, college student, housewife, etc.), and usually all sorts of “massage” services are offered. But then there are “soap lands” and “image clubs” that offer full-service sex, often in erotically staged fetish-friendly environments.

Prostitution is illegal in Japan, but is only defined as coitus, leaving oral, anal and other sexual acts unaccounted for within the law. Furthermore, the legal age of consent for sex in Tokyo is only 13 years old, not 16 or 17, as is the law as in most other Japanese prefectures.

Mariko, 21, is a full time college student who was featured in an article published on SeekJapan.com. "I've been working part-time at an image club for about four months," she was reported as saying. "It's good money. For only one night a week I can earn more money than if I was working forty hours at Mister Donut, or some stupid job like that. At first I was nervous. I had to dress up in a school uniform, and men would come in and pretend like they were my teacher. It was kind of scary, but I got used to it after the first few times. The job's not so bad, plus it gives me a lot of time to meet my boyfriend. Please understand, I'm not a sukebe onna (a kinky girl). I'm futsu (an average girl).”

Thor Williamson, 26, who was born and raised in Hiroshima, but has lived in Tokyo since 1999, was featured in an article published on hirangatimes.com. His father is a former protestant missionary from Canada. Williamson wears Versace suits to work as a top-ranking host at Club Ai in Kabuki-cho, one of the best known host clubs in all of Japan. He says that the performance-based pay is great, and he’s averaging between 4 and 8 million yen a month. "Everything in this business is liquid," Williamson says. "You can be 20 years old and have 10 people working under you. You can't do that in regular Japanese business. This job takes everything out of perspective, so I try to keep perspective on life. A lot of what happens here is just fantasy.”

Thousands of young people in Tokyo have dabbled in Enjo kosai, which is what authorities describe as compensated dating—marketing themselves to adults through internet sites and phone clubs, mostly to earn money for hobby expenses, as well as designer handbags and brand-name clothing. It usually doesn’t start as a chosen way of life, it’s just a quick way to make a lot of cash.

Kogal girls, often characterized by promiscuity and their distinctive tastes in fashion, music and language, have been frequently associated with enjo kosai as a means to pay for their exuberant lifestyle and attire. The look these girls go for is sort of like a twisted, sun-tanned valley girl— usually wearing platform boots, extremely short skirts and copious amounts of makeup, hair coloring, artificial suntan oil and designer accessories. Many kogals congregate in Ikebukuro because of its cheap karaoke, fast food, department stores, and proximity to Waseda University.

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Sal-on-site

Snip-snip...snip. A clump of clean wet hair rolls down the side of Gail’s shiny black apron and onto the white linoleum floor. Between sage green walls, her blades are hard at work.

The Salon at SRI is a one-woman operation. Gail Coffaro, 49, is an on-site hairstylist at SRI International (formerly known as Stanford Research Institute), in Menlo Park, California. Personality and perseverance keep her scissors a-snippin just inches away from some of the most scientifically productive brains in the world.

She pays no rent for her use of the salon, and passes the savings down to SRI’s workforce, her only clients. This unique situation is part of a growing trend that’s bringing service-related businesses on-site at many major workplaces. At a time when good benefits are becoming harder to provide, these services are very appealing to many Bay Area employers, and it costs them very little.

Industrial campuses are not usually situated very close to many commercial establishments. And local traffic, particularly in the Bay Area, can make leaving work to run errands very frustrating, especially for employers. On-site commercial services allow for more consistent productivity at the workplace, and help to create an interactive culture on-campus.

At SRI, there is a dentist that shows up and works out of his van every other week. A dry cleaning pick-up and delivery service comes twice a week, and their on-site masseuse is there Monday through Friday. Gail opens the salon on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Yahoo’s main complex in Sunnyvale, and Google’s in Mountain View, both employ similar services—but they both get the haircut bus. The Salon at SRI is a little different. It’s exclusively in-house, and it’s a real salon with all the usual trimmings.

Most appointments are scheduled well in advance. SRI employees call Gail directly on her cell phone, and some book several visits. Drop-ins are rare because her schedule is usually full, and her clientele doesn’t have time to wait around.

“It’s very important that I stay on schedule,” she says. "My customers are on their lunch-break, or taking time away from their business day to come see me.”

“I have to be totally on.”

Gail sees about the same number of women as men, but makes a lot more money doing color than cuts. On the high end, women get base color, highlights and cut for $140. Men get a cut for as low as $25; somewhere in between, Gail makes her living.

“It’s easy money,” she says. “But only because I love what I do.”

With 30 years of experience, Gail stays up on the latest trends by going to hair shows, looking at magazines and just paying attention to people. In 2004, she apprenticed with an Italian hairstylist who specializes in color chemistry and treatment.

Employee turnover makes keeping customers one of Gail’s biggest challenges. SRI's campus is completely private, so only current employees are allowed in the salon. Still, there are usually around 1500 heads on campus while Gail is there.

“People change jobs and there’s a lot of visiting researchers, but many of them still call me after they leave SRI,” she says. “I just do their hair in my salon at home; most of my people are very loyal to me.”

One time, a former SRI employee brought her senile mother in-law to see Gail at her home-salon in Redwood City. “The old woman kept asking: ‘Is she a nurse? Are you putting me back in the hospital?’” Gail explains. “We told her that I was just going to fix-up her hair, but she kept saying: ‘There’s nothing wrong my hair!’”

“Eventually we had to give up.”

Gail buys all of her own supplies. She also spends $35 a month on a million-dollar liability insurance policy. And fortunately, she has never had to use it.

Marketing is also tricky. One day Gail handed-out business cards in the cafeteria and got a huge reaction, but the “higher-ups” told her not to self-advertise at lunch. Since then, she’s been restricted to flyers on the bulletin board.

“Word-of-mouth is my best advertising,” she says.

Recently, Gail has been talking with Genentech and Lockheed Martin, who have expressed interest in her services. She has no intention of leaving the Salon at SRI, but is considering territorial expansion.

“I need another set of hands,” Gail says, showing off her color stained appendages. “I just don’t have time to train them as well as these.”

Head Tatts For Sure

Dan Renal, 27, sells expensive salon shoes at Stanford Shopping Center. At work, he wears hand-tailored suits and exotic leather oxfords. A pressed shirt and tie accentuate his dapper look, but the 11 tattoos underneath them do not.

Graveyard scenes, demons, pentagrams and upside-down crosses span across Renal’s arms, shoulders, back and chest. He says there’s more to come.

“Tattoos are the way that I express my inner demon,” says Renal, who likes to get drunk and listen to death metal when he’s not on the job. “I just like them because they’re sick.”

After getting his first tattoo 10 years ago, Renal became addicted to them. Now they are part of who he is.

“If it were up to me, I’d be completely covered, but I can’t because I have to work,” Renal says. “I’d have head tatts for sure.”

Nimby Neighbors Fight Institutional Creep in the Panhandle: Day School gets Shafted

On a sunny day in the North Panhandle neighborhood of San Francisco, Larry DeSpain is in the upstairs flat of his home at 911 Central St. His antique dining room table is covered with stacks of flyers, postcards, and other literature that promote a cause that he and his newly formed neighborhood group care very deeply about: stopping the San Francisco Day School from expanding its campus as they have proposed to.

San Francisco Day School at 350 Masonic Ave has plans to demolish a small Victorian building at 2130 Golden Gate Ave., which they had purchased in 2001, in order to construct a new science building with a 20-car parking garage in the basement. The addition would be a 2-story glass and steel building with a learning garden on the roof. The project would allow them to increase their enrollment cap from 400 to 430 students.

Several of the school’s neighbors are frustrated with the proposition and have combined their efforts to ensure that the expansion of the Day School does not compromise the residential quality, and quality of life, in the neighborhood. They call their alliance Neighbors United to Stop Day School Expansion, NUTSDE or simply Neighbors United for short.

“If we are going to take on the school, we are going to have to be a lot better organized, and use a lot of time and energy, and invest some money into the whole thing,” says Larry DeSpain of Neighbors United, standing over the pile of propaganda on his dining room table. “From buttons to T-shirts, we’re building a stronger case.”

DeSpain, who has lived at his residence for more than 30 years, says that he and several of his neighbors tried to prevent the school from even opening in 1985.

“If you live in this neighborhood, and you’re at home during the day, you pray for rain. You look forward to summer vacation and other school holidays when the children are not here because they scream” says DeSpain, who recently retired. “You go outside and it’s just constant screaming. The noise reverberates throughout the entire neighborhood.”

Nearly 300 residents in the North Panhandle neighborhood have signed petitions, and sent letters to the group, expressing support of Neighbors United’s position.

Carolyn Sasser, Business Manager at San Francisco Day School, says that the private K-8 is interested in the concerns of its neighbors.

“We went to meetings and worked with them to address their suggestions, and then all of a sudden they took a stance against our proposal,” says Sasser. “It’s been an uphill battle.”

Tom Stack, who lives 3-doors-down from the Day School, says that the expansion project will only make matters worse. Stack says that noise, traffic hazards, night-time light pollution, as well as obstruction of sunlight and views are just some of the problems that the Day School creates for its neighbors.

“They never addressed the existing problems,” says Stack, a member of Neighbors United.

With only 8 spaces of off-street parking on the Day School property, many parents resort to double-parking when picking up, or dropping off their children.

Michael Helquist, of the North of Panhandle Neighborhood Association, says that he has a big problem with the Day School’s parking situation, and that his driveway has been blocked on several occasions because of it.

“The Day School is located on a on a particular corner that has 2 major thoroughfares,” says Helquist referring to Masonic Avenue and Golden Gate Avenue. “Most of the kids that go there are not from the immediate neighborhood.”

Helquist says he is not opposed to expansion, or children, but would like to see San Francisco Day School design something that works for them, and for the neighborhood.

“I don’t like the idea of a massive block of a building in the neighborhood,” says Helquist. “Institutionalism changes how people see and relate to where they live.”

Marta Fry, a landscape architect who owns a home on Turk Street, right behind the Day School, says that their expansion proposition is unacceptable.

“I would like to see the school seriously reconsider its configuration and be more creative with the space they have,” says Fry. “They should stay within their own footprint.”

San Francisco Day School first proposed its expansion project to the San Francisco Planning Department February 15, 2005, says the school’s database manager Meredyth Skemp. At that time, they expected to have to wait through a lengthy environmental review process, but the Planning Department insisted that categorical exemption was the appropriate vehicle for them.

Categorical exemption (or Cat Ex) would require a non-extensive historical review of the building that the school plans to demolish in order to receive a conditional-use permit. Once permitted by the Planning Department, the school would be allowed to demolish the existing building at 2130 Golden Gate Ave., and use the space to expand their campus as planned.

Since then, San Francisco architect Joe Butler, of Little House Committee, has taken interest in the Day School’s 117-year-old Victorian. He met with Neighbors United earlier this year and they have since joined efforts to stop the Day School expansion project right in its tracks.

Butler has stopped numerous pre-1906 homes in San Francisco from being demolished by producing reports that illustrate their historical significance and appealing to the city’s Board of Supervisors, according to articles written by the San Francisco Examiner.

“The school needs to work within the law, and with its neighbors, to expand in a way that acknowledges both the history of the site and the needs of the community that they are a part of,” says Butler.

Neighbors United, through Butler, have contracted a secondary historical report on the building at 2130 Golden Gate Ave., and its immediate neighborhood. Butler submitted the report to the Board of Supervisors in an appeal last March.

In April, San Francisco Planning Department rescinded the Day School’s application for categorical exemption, stating that it is necessary to determine the historical significance of the property they plan to demolish, as well as its neighborhood.

“Now they are going to have to hire a consultant and do an EIR (environmental investigative review) that concentrates on historical relevance,” says Mary Woods of the San Francisco Planning Department. “This is going to set them back at least a year.”

While Larry DeSpain says Neighbors United is going to celebrate the Planning Department’s decision, Carolyn Sasser says that the Day School faculty is busy wrapping up the academic year and appointing a new Head of School.

Sasser says that the San Francisco Day School is very disappointed by the decision. She is not sure when, or how, they will resume their expansion efforts.

“Do we take a step back?” says Sasser. “Right now we just don’t know.”

Ali and the iPOD

Ali Thanawalla goes to bed with his iPod, literally.

One morning, he woke up with the headphones wrapped around his neck.

Unlike any of his friends and family, Ali likes heavy metal, even while he is trying to sleep.
“Music helped me realize that there are other people in the world who have similar problems,” says Thanawalla. “Then, I didn’t feel so alone.”

On September 13th 1996, Thanawalla’s mother passed away, shortly after having a stroke at the age of 47. Thanawalla says that he was devastated, but within a few years he began to find some solace in his favorite heavy metal lyrics.

“I think about my mom everyday, and having to deal with the stress of not having a girlfriend, and just everyday life,” says Thanawalla. “When I get into fights with people, and arguments, I listen to music when I go to bed. Otherwise, I’ll be up all night thinking about it.”

As a full-time journalism student with intense passion for sports, travel and photography, Thanawalla has plenty of things to keep his mind occupied, but none of them really quench his thirst for transposition, nor put him to sleep, like heavy metal.

“It just sooths me, and it keeps my mind from wandering to things I don’t want to think about,” says Thanawalla. “Now it is something I do every night, whether I am stressed out or not.”

Thanawalla went online and found the lyrics to his favorite song. “Jade,” from Cleveland-based metal group Chimaira’s 2001 release, “Pass Out Of Existence”, ends with these four lines:

“Can I find a way out besides this?
I need it
I want to be where you are
I miss you”

“Ali finds these obscure metal bands from Norway and Eastern Europe, says best friend Ben Enos, 22. “He is really into it.”

There are eight albums on Thanawalla’s iPod which are set to play on heavy rotation. Heaven Shall Burn, Deadlock, All That Remains, Unearth, Killswitch Engage, Diecast, Hatebreed and Lamb of God are at the top of the hard-core artists on his list.

“His choice in music is totally different then mine, says Thanawalla’s father Hussain, 63. “I don’t like Metallica.”

Hussain Thanawalla, who enjoys listening to Elton John and The Beatles, says that he is used to seeing his son with his headphones on, especially when he picks him up at the North Berkeley Bart Station, near their home in Kensington, CA.

Out of respect, Thanawalla always takes off his headphones before entering his father’s car.

“I don’t get to see him on a daily basis, but wherever he is, I am 100% sure that he has his ipod with him,” says Thanawalla’s cousin Sarah Ruzanov, 26. “I really don’t understand his musical taste, but then he doesn’t understand mine either.”

Recently, Ruzanov offered to go to a heavy metal concert with Thanawalla for his birthday, but only if he would go with her to see Third Eye Blind, first.

Thanawalla agreed.

San Francisco's Early Homes and Families: Haas-Lilienthal

William Haas was only 16-years old when he and his elder brother Abraham sailed from their Native Bavarian village of Reckendorf to New York City, in 1865. Three years later, he joined the wholesale-grocery firm of Leopold Loupe and Kalman Haas in San Francisco. He found a burgeoning city in need of such supplies and soon found himself being able to live well above the modest means from which he emigrated.

After the Gold Rush, there was a lot of money in San Francisco and land value continued to be speculative. William Haas was not a railroad baron; he was a hard-working immigrant who became an upper-middle classman that could provide for his family very well. With the advent of steam-powered milling, by the time of the industrial revolution, and with local timber and other house-building materials in great abundance, Mr. William Haas was in a position to afford a dwelling that was sufficient for his growing family, and suited to meet his needs as a respectable business man and prominent member of his San Francisco community.

A man’s home is his castle, and when it came time for William Haas to build his, he would not pick his out of a pattern book. Some men of class and taste, both architecturally and otherwise, might prefer a more sovereign architectural plan, one of distinction that is suiting to certain levels of style and desire for function.

Mr. Haas employed a local architect, Peter Schmidt, to design his home. Schmidt was known for his creative ability, as an architect, to manipulate the human eye into believing that his designs were larger than they actually were. Evidence of this talent can be observed as one walks past the Haas-Lilenthal house at 2007 Franklin Street. Schmidt used asymmetrical design tactics and creative geometric placement to make his homes really stand out.

Take the layout of the floors for example: From the outside one might notice the apron-band that runs along the bottom-exterior of the house. Well, the 1^st floor starts just below that. Then, above that is the water table, where the 2^nd floor is set at the very bottom. With the ceiling of the 2^nd floor starting at the bottom of the exterior’s freeze band, the 3^rd floor is a lot tighter than the two below, even a lot more than it appears.

On the left-side of the front of the house, there is a rounded tower sitting on an octagonal base. There are square-butt shingles and fishtail shingles mixed, which really helps to break-up the surface and keeps the eyes interested. The windows in the tower are 12-feet off-the-floor (it must be like a grain silo in there).

The Haas-Lilienthal Home is sort of a proto-Queen Anne Victorian, mixed with Eastlake (Stick) style elements. With its rounded tower and rectangular bay windows, the exterior of the property sits today, much as it did when it was first finished in 1886, except for the chimneys and fireplaces on the south wall, which were added in 1900. The interior was remodeled in 1898.

The house is ornamentally decorated with mixed, yet repetitive, geometrics on all four-sides. The home’s elaborate wooden gables, circular corner-tower, and other luxuriant ornamentations are really pleasing to look at

The front-yard is luxuriantly sized, by San Francisco standards. Though many home-owners have previously partitioned-off their larger yards in order to build another house, there are still a few grandiose stretches of private lawn in the city. Have fun trying to find them.

The first two floors of the Haas-Lilienthal home have very high ceilings, as do many Victorians. In the spirit of combing the beautiful and the useful, many of these period homes have a functional need for such expansive ceiling-height. Interior lights, in the old days, were coal-gas burning. If you wanted breathable air at conversation level, you needed a buffer space for the fumes to rise. The higher the ceilings, the higher those fumes could rise, and therefore increase the amount of light and air quality in one’s home. Double-hung windows are also a reaction to that need, because you can open the top half of the window to let the vapors out. Also, medallions on the ceiling acted as a soot-catcher. This way, all you’d have to do is repaint the soot-catcher instead of the whole ceiling when it began to blacken.

The home that Haas built was large indeed (12,000 sq. feet), but with Schmidt’s design, it appeared to be even more spacious and majestic than it actually was, creating a subtle and very impressive effect to all that pass by and care to notice. Those who might pass by and care to notice, by the way, are part of the outermost circle of intimacy within a Victorian environment. That circle of intimacy is actually part of a concentric set which comprises different levels of Victorian social standings and relationships. It was kind of l like a series of spaces within spaces. If you were a close friend of the Mr. Haas, you might be allowed to enter the family parlor, or maybe the formal parlor if you were to conduct very important business with Mr. Haas. Unless you were family, it is more than likely that you would never be able to go upstairs, and unless you were there to work, you’d never be invited into the kitchen.

Once a guest has arrived as far as the portico, you want them to be impressed, which is why the vestibule and the mosaic tile on the floor have been installed so meticulously on the porch. If you were say, a San Francisco grocer, perhaps you might make your vestibule out of redwood, which was not quite a noble wood yet, and then have it faux painted to look like white oak. Materials that were abundantly available on the east coast were extremely pricey to have shipped. Since local materials were very cheap, it was more economical to disguise your home’s dressing than to send for the actual timber

The gateway to the 3^rd closest circle of intimacy within a Victorian home such as Hass’, is its tradesman/service alley (less affectionately referred to as the swamp). The service alley is on the right-side of Hass’ home and is quite narrow for such a large home. It would serve as an entrance for the chauffer, the cook and other domestic servants, and a discreet way to get groceries, ice, and other supplies inside the house. No Victorian Lady would appreciate a pair of dirty servant’s shoes trampling through her second parlor on their way to the kitchen. Not even the thought of it.

In the 1890’s, If you had come to the Haas residence to make a social call and found the outside doors closed, you would know that Mrs. Haas was not receiving visitors on that day. However, if you came and the vestibule was open, you might have a pretty good chance of being seen. Unless, by chance, she was already entertaining a caller (who might not be an acquaintance of yours, in which case you would not be invited to join them), Victorian etiquette would require you to leave your calling card and come back at a more appropriate time. Usually a lady would have one or two days per week that she would choose to receive visitors. This was a very important reinforcement of social structure in the days without telephones.

Upon being invited inside, a guest might notice that the entry hall is decked with real quarter-sawn white oak. Since that’s the room where callers are actually received, they might spend some considerable amount of time waiting there, which is why it is more important to use honest materials on the interior. In the hall parlor, there would always have a place for guests to sit and wait, as well as a table where they may leave their calling card.

In those days, just about everyone had a calling card, which was a lot like our modern day business cards. They even had their own type of language, where if you turned down one corner, it meant that you came by and would like a reciprocal visit in return. If you turned down the other corner, it meant that you just stopped in passing, but you couldn’t stay for a visit. There was also a language in giving flowers. Roses meant one thing, dahlias another and everybody knew what the difference meant. Social communication was a much more nuanced and subtle than it is today and it served as a way to efficiently maintain the second most-outer circle of intimacy, where the friendly visitor might be welcome.

To the left of the entry-hall, is the front/formal parlor. Though it is a relatively grand room, it is not likely to be seen by most visitors that would come to the Haas residence. All doors that would expose adjoining rooms would be closed, and navigating about the house was not done at leisure, but with serious regard to ones standing within the family’s circle of intimacy. This room would be used for very formal occasions. It is a classic-looking room with a very renaissance and anatomically correct interior décor. There is a crown of banded-laurel and an egg & dart a façade along the ceiling which lends itself brilliantly to the environment’s sense of formal antiquity. The formal parlor would not have been used very often by the building’s original inhabitants. At the time, the streets of San Francisco were not paved and dust was a major issue. Instead of constantly dusting everything, most doors would be closed, and most curtains drawn and rooms were used according to their owners needs, but with considerable attention paid to the preservation of each room’s purpose.

Adjoining the formal parlor is the family parlor. Here, young children would be washed and waiting for supper by 6:00 p.m. when the dinner bell would ring. It is where the family would sit and have many evenings. Also, this is where guests would be received when they made social calls. It was actually much less formal than the front parlor and is decorated with light-weight furniture that could be moved about to suit the needs of the family and guests. This room’s interior is part of the 1898 remodel, when the house was made half-electric (functioned for about 3 hours a day). All of the wood paneling is stained-redwood. By the 1890s, there was a sense of pride in using things native to California. The Haas family brought that aesthetic into their house during the remodel.

The dining room is a hybrid of different styles. There are ionic columns, Bavarian lion heads, even fruit carvings, more banded-laurel and even bead & water leaf décor. The wainscot is the original, made of redwood which has been faux painted to look classical. The room’s walls are lined with leather-looking patterned linoleum, which apparently goes on like wallpaper. Not only is the dining table beautiful, but the rest of the Victorian furniture is in this room is very whimsical and fun.

Only the civilized dined with the family. Children learned their manners from the servants and would eat with them until they got to be around the age of 10 or 11-years. When the ladies of the house deemed them capable of exercising formal manners, they would be asked to join the family around the dinner table.

At the rear of the dining room is the breakfast/study room where young the children and servants ate. There is a jib door in there which is very unique to a San Francisco Victorian homes and looks more like a huge window than a door. More often found in southern plantations, these jib doors allow air to flow through the house, supplies to be brought in and out more easily, and dirty feet inside the house without tracking through the front halls.

On the way through the butler’s pantry, and into the kitchen, there is a germproof water filter on the counter. As crude as it was, any line of defense against Louis Pasteur’s newly invented germ, was a modern marvel at any rate.

It was also a very modern luxury to have a linoleum floor in the kitchen, as the Haas’ did. It was a lot easier to clean than hardwood floors and with the kitchen being where all the service items were kept, polished hardwood just wasn’t necessary. A little closet was built into the wall of the kitchen where all the dining room table-leaves were stored, and the original hand-written note is still posted inside, detailing how many leaves were needed to accommodate any given number of guests.

Until the gas stove came into the house in 1927, they used a coal-burning stove. There would have been soot, grease and harmful fumes flying around everywhere. It was not a place to entertain guests, as we might do in our kitchens today. There were no cabinets on the walls and the counters would not even come anywhere near as high as my waist The refrigerator would have been cooled by an ice block, chopped from a larger block of ice that might have been brought into the city from the Lake Tahoe area and stored in sawdust at the Ice House buildings on Battery Street.

There is also an enunciator the kitchen so that the family could easily communicate with their servants from anywhere in the house. The kitchen was left as it was when Mrs. Lilienthal passed away in 1973, which is the last time the entire house had been lived in.

Going up to the 2^nd floor, take the original colonial revival staircase. Mrs. Lilienthal had an elevator installed in 1927, but that is not what anyone is there to see. In the 1890s, only family members were allowed to go up to the 2^nd floor. It wouldn’t be seemly to have some stranger wandering past a lady’s bedroom.

The first room that you come across upstairs is Mrs. Haas’ former sewing room, which is now a room full of period toys and children’s furniture. Inside, there is also an antique phonograph, sewing machine, and baby cradle that belong to the Haas family. Whenever a new baby is born into the family, the cradle disappears and then gets brought back to the house when the baby outgrows it.

There were two orphaned children (nieces and nephews of the Lilienthal family that lived in the addition to the house, which was made in 1927). The chauffer of the family was very fond of the children and built a large dollhouse for Madeline Haas, which is also on display.

Mr. and Mrs. Haas’ master bedroom was turned into a sitting-room, when William Haas died in 1919. Inside, there is a white onyx fireplace, Tiffany lamps, more Victorian furniture, Mr. Haas cedar-lined closet and a beautiful Chinese Screen. The room is at the front of the house, which keeps it well-lit and warmed by the sun. Surrounding the room, are the family’s books, complete with hand-written notes, in some of them. There is a post-humus portrait of Mr. Haas over the mantle of the fireplace.

The bathroom is very much in antiquated style. There are huge porcelain sinks, a gas-burner for heating an old-fashioned curling iron and also to heat water for shaving, an extra large rain-head in the shower, and even a bidet. The walls are lined in porcelain tile and an ornamental porcelain crown and adorned with glass shelves which display a number of antique bottles.

Through the bathroom, toward the back of the house on the left-hand side, is yet another bedroom. It was last used as a children’s bedroom and is decorated with period arts and crafts furniture. There is a Sir Walter Scott needle point piece and a good deal of stained-glass art. There is yet another fireplace in the children’s bedroom.

The rear-half of the 2^nd floor, as well as the attic, of the Haas-Lilienthal house has been turned into offices and storage by the San Francisco Architectural Heritage Society and are not available for public viewing.

On the way back down the main staircase, one might notice the only damage that the house sustained from the 1906 earthquake. It is a crack and some bubbling in the wall which runs along the steps. Only a block away from Van Ness, the Haas-Lilienthal house would have surely been consumed by the flames of the Great Fire of 1906, had many of the homes along that Avenue not been dynamited to create a fire-line barrier that would finally stop the ensuing blaze.

The staircase leads you to ballroom. Originally an unfinished basement, there are still heater ducts running across part of the ceiling. At some point, the Haas family wanted to be able to entertain up to 75 guests at a time. They went ahead and installed gorgeous paneling and trim in the basement, creating the ballroom. It is not a very functional ballroom, with its wooden columns running from floor-to-ceiling, but it probably served as an excellent place to hold large parties and other events at the house.

The Haas family train set, which previously took up more than half of the attic space, has been rescaled and reconfigured downstairs to fit in a very small basement room. The train cars are very large compared to most others and the track and terrain are impressive for their age.

Designated Smoking Story

Imagine finals. It is your first semester at college and the whole thing has been overwhelming. Your friends and family are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. You fell behind on too many assignments over the semester because you’ve been working too many hours at a coffee shop, trying to keep a roof over your head and your tuition paid. Now, you have been up all night writing papers and putting together group projects that are due the next day. You are stressed. You haven’t really eaten all day because don’t have time. Health is the last thing on your mind. Smoking a cigarette might be the only break you have time for. It might be the best part of your day. You don’t want to be saved from the harmful effects of tobacco right now. You light-up.

Even though many policies, programs, and advertising campaigns have been set in place to encourage tobacco cessation, as well as reduce the effects of second hand smoke, both locally and nationally, the college-aged population is still smoking cigarettes considerably more than the rest of us. When it comes to curbing tobacco-use and second-hand smoke on college campuses, policy makers may need to rethink their approach.

In the United States, 44.5 million adults (20.9%) are smokers, but the within the 18-24 age group, 23.6% smoke, as reported by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in 2004. Prevalence of smoking among U.S. adults was 24.7% in 1997, according to the CDC, which illustrates the slow and steady decline of tobacco use over the last decade.

A recent study done by the Department of Health Services of California indicates that 18% of college-aged individuals regularly smoke tobacco, as of 2005. It's an also an obvious decline since 2000, when 20.5% of that population smoked. However, the fact that young adult smokers still rank far above the state average for all adults (14%) has got cessation advocates looking for a new way to convince the tobacco industry’s first legal-targets to stay clear of the harmful effects of tobacco smoke.

“No one cares. Everyone smokes everywhere. There are cigarette butts everywhere,” says San Francisco State University freshman, Ryan Alazo, 18.

He hands-out a menthol-cigarette to a stranger while another one dangles from his own lips, burning under a huge sign that thanks him and his fellow students for helping to make their campus smoke-free. “Ya’ see, Alazo asks, laughingly, nodding up toward the sign. “She just got a smoke-FREE!”

“Fucking bullshit,” Alazo says about his school’s smoking policy. “Those ‘truth’ commercials get on my nerves too. At least they hit pretty hard though. Like the commercial with the body-bags all over the streets.”

Of course, there are the body-bags. According to the National Cancer Institute, tobacco-use remains the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. Smoking is responsible for more than 440,000 body-bags (deaths) each year and results in an annual cost of more than $75 billion in direct medical costs, in the U.S. alone.

There are approximately 3,000 lung-cancer-deaths each year among adult-nonsmokers in the U.S., as a result of exposure to secondhand smoke, according to the National Cancer Institute. NCI also reports that secondhand smoke is linked to nasal and sinus cancer, and some research suggests it is associated with cancers of the cervix, breast and bladder. Not to mention an array of non-cancerous conditions from irritation of the eye to sudden infant death syndrome.

In an effort bring about dramatic changes in Americans’ attitude about smoking, The American Cancer Society (ACS) developed the Great American Smoke Out. It was first put it into action on November 18^th, 1976. Since then, every year, smokers across the nation are encouraged to smoke less or even quit for the day. The ACS states that “The event challenges people to stop using tobacco and raises awareness of the many effective ways to quit.”

On a global level, the World Health Organization has created World No Tobacco Day (WNTD), which is held every year on May 31^st in many locations all over the world. The goal of WNTD is to “encourage countries and governments to work towards strict regulation of tobacco products,” according to WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative, and plans to do this “by raising awareness about the existence of the wide variety of deadly tobacco products.”

Smokers everywhere are finding it increasingly difficult to continue their habit. In the face of deadly health risks, hefty tax-proposals and possibly becoming a social outcast or law-breaker, tobacco users have many prices to pay for their choice.

In order to save money on health-care coverage, a Michigan company, Weyco, Inc., decided to fire all of its employees that refused to quit smoking in 2005. They stopped hiring smokers about two-years prior and gave existing employees that smoked fifteen-months to quit.

In November, 2006, the City Council of Belmont, CA unanimously decided to draft an ordinance that would officially ban smoking everywhere in city, except in privately-owned single-family homes. While in Belmont, smokers would have to refrain from lighting-up anywhere outdoors, in all multi-unit buildings and even while driving through the city. If enacted, the new law would become the most far-reaching anti-smoking rule in the country.

Because common knowledge says that curbing tobacco-use is beneficial to smokers and nonsmokers alike, academic campuses across the nation are making moves to become smoke-free. According to the American Nonsmokers' Rights Foundation, 34 colleges and universities nationwide prohibit smoking anywhere on campus. More are on there way.

Earlier this month, The Student Government Association at Oklahoma State University voted to allow smoking only in designated areas by August 2007. Other college campuses in that area are considering following the example set by OSU.

De Anza Community College in Cupertino, CA only allows smoking on the top-floor of student paring lots. Tobacco use is prohibited elsewhere on campus.

The San Francisco State University campus Tobacco Policy formerly prohibited smoking within twenty-feet of a campus building or ground-level air-intake structure. In 2003, SFSU President Robert A. Corrigan extended the distance to within thirty-feet.

The Academic Senate at SFSU got together and called for a smoke-free campus on April 27, 2004. On August 1, 2004, Corrigan issued a new Smoke-Free Campus Policy. It stated: “This University Executive Directive creates a smoke-free campus and limits smoking to specified areas. It further prohibits the sale of tobacco products on campus,” to be effective August 23, 2004. It proposed: “The success of this policy will depend on the thoughtfulness, consideration and cooperation of smokers and nonsmokers.”

Last year, the American College Health Association issued its Position Statement on Tobacco on College and University Campuses, in which they announced: “ACHA has adopted a NO TOBACCO USE policy and encourages colleges and universities to be diligent in their efforts to achieve a campus-wide tobacco-free environment.” They recommended eleven steps to be taken to address policy, prevention, and cessation as it pertains to tobacco issues, the 11^th being: “Support and provide a process for frequent and consistent enforcement of all tobacco-related policies, rules, and regulations.”

SFSU Health Educator, Albert Angelo, offers to meet with students one-on-one to discuss smoking cessation and offer advice on how to deal with it. “We do the Great American Smoke-Out every November 18^th and put out information-tables in the spring,” Angelo says. He claims that at least five-hundred people came to the Health Center’s tent during Smoke-Out on campus, which was pitched in the rain last month. “We had 500 t-shirts and they were all gone by the end of the day.”

According to Angelo, the university campus smoke-free policy is not working because officials are still looking into ways of enforcing it. “No one can enforce it,” Angelo says. “If we fine students, do we fine faculty? They don’t have all that down yet. It’s all voluntary.”

Australian SFSU student, Israel Redson, 21, agrees that no one can enforce the smoke-free policy. “I’ve been told-off by the cops before, but they just tell you to put-it-out. When they ride off, I just light-it-up again,” Redson says. “I know there is a quiz. The only reason I know that is because I got written up for smoking by the RAs. They made me take a quiz. I didn’t get a fine.”

Kelly Anderson, 21, tried to follow the smoke-free policy at SFSU, but she gave up after it seemed to her like she was the only one trying. “I’m new here,” says Anderson. “For the first week, I felt bad, so I’d hike a mile out to the edge of campus, but since everyone else is smoking wherever they want, I will too.”

When it comes to antismoking messages on college campuses, non smokers are generally supportive of the cause, but smokers will often respond with anger, defiance, denial and other negativity, which might even further their resolve to smoke.

And the same antismoking messages that may successfully encourage many adults and teens to not use tobacco may nevertheless be ineffective with college students that already smoke or are encouraged to do so in social-situations by their peers. Some strategies may even undermine smokers’ efforts to quit. It is clear that different initiatives might be needed for different age-groups and social-sects.

“For me, it’s kind of a cultural thing, being from Louisville KY,” says Corey Riley, 24.

Riley, a junior at SFSU, doesn’t trust antismoking campaigns because he believes that they are all paid for by the tobacco industry. According to Riley, “Phillip Morris is just trying to make their image look good, while doing one thing with their right hand and another with the left.”

A senior at SFSU, Becky Thornton, 23, is sure that the antismoking campaigns she has seen have not persuaded her to quit smoking. “I don’t think they are effective at all,” Thornton says. “Some commercials about cancer scare me, but I usually mute commercials.” Thornton smokes when she gets stressed out, and has only been buying cigarettes for about 6-months. She smokes on campus and is unaware of any programs or services offered by the university that are designed to help her quit.

Instead of tuning-out the risks, some college students justify smoking on the basis of the pleasure it provides. They feel that the rewards and benefits of smoking are greater than the costs.

“I used to hitch hike when I was younger and I actually started smoking as a defense thing. As long as I had a lit-cigarette I could easily fend-off someone, I have actually had to do it a couple of times, says Jessica Fischer, 23, a senior at SFSU.

“Smoking kind of serves as a social thing, especially when I travel. If I want to meet people it is a good way to do it.” Fischer has been smoking on-and-off since she was 14-years-old. She doesn’t smoke everyday. Instead, Fischer smokes during midterms and finals, when she doesn’t have time to go out and eat. “It’s a really good way to curb my appetite,” she says.

“I think it’s funny that we focus so much on shoeing away smokers while we drive cars and make plastics that pollute the environment,” Fischer says. “As, consumers we engage in worse things than smoking. Obesity is a huge problem in our country but you don’t see any ‘truth’ ads going after McDonalds.”

SFSU Journalism student Walter Crasshole wrote in Xpress, “We’re losing our individuality through this uptight moral grandstanding. California and many other states don’t see the irony in making smoking an outlaw activity-the delight of breaking taboo keeps it appealing. And now the campus is doing it, too, with little enforcement and a lack luster message that attempts to uber-PC-ify SF State campus to state standards.”

There is a third-person effect that limits some students’ ability to effectively heed warnings about tobacco use. They insist that ads would not change their own behavior, but may help younger people who have not yet started smoking.

“I am not really affected by those antismoking ads,” says Karen Kerrington, 21.

“Kids younger than us will probably stop smoking as much, I hope, but when I was growing up I really didn’t see all that many messages telling me not to smoke.”

Kerrington has been smoking for five-years and attending SFSU for two-years. She goes to the campus’ Student Health Center regularly. She always refuses offers by the staff to help her quit smoking. “I think about quitting when I wake up feeling like crap because I smoked too much the night before, but I keep on buying these packs.”

When it comes to smoking, individual traits become even more sovereign. University goers should learn to be tolerant and socially responsible, but where tobacco is involved, it can be hard to find any sort middle-ground. Policy makers in favor of successfully curbing tobacco-use on college campuses will need to consistently offer students resources that will help them find a middle-ground within themselves, not as an age group, but as individuals.

San Francisco's Alternative Cyberweeklies

At first glance, it is definitely arguable that the paper versions of San Francisco Bay Guardian and SF Weekly publications are one in the same. Depending on your level of experience with either one of these weeklies, you might choose to read one over the other simply based on the cover story or even your preference in title.

Either way, you are likely to notice some physical similarities. Both are oversized, single-fold, local and free. Also, both of them are printed on paper that looks kind of dirty and leave your hands with that inky not-so-great feeling after extensive handling.

There are numerous ways these freebies are useful in their physical form. They can both serve as what-to-do guides for out-of-towners. Likewise, both papers are great directories for those who know where they’re going and just need a venue address or phone number. Some folks might even grab a stack to use as kindling at an Ocean Beach bonfire. Pallets-check! Gasoline-check! SF Weeklies-check!

These two publications are not one in the same. They are from opposite sides of the tracks. The San Francisco Bay Guardian is a self-confessed independent, locally owned and edited newspaper (though it is widely considered to be a left-wing magazine), whose masthead quote reads: “It is a newspaper’s duty to print news and raise hell.”[1]

SF Weekly, on the other hand, is owned by Village Voice Media, which controls a quarter of the circulation of alternative weekly newspapers in North America. SF Weekly claims to be San Francisco’s smartest publication with a serious attitude about journalism but not about following agendas, and cherishes political independence.

Again, at first glance, it is arguable that the online versions of these two publications appear to be none in the same. Village Voice Media has outfitted sfweekly.com with the exact same layout as the online versions of all of the other alternative weeklies that it owns, such as eastbayexpress.com and 15 others. These sites are clean, functional, and easy to navigate through. The top stories are prominently displayed at the center of the home page, along the left side of which is a well illustrated slideshow of feature story links. Above those, you’ll see a standard index of sections that most large websites have these days (home, news, about us, etc). Underneath the headline stories, you’ll find a “going out guide,” and links to articles and reviews organized into categories such as entertainment, restaurants, movies and music. There is a general appeal to consumer culture, as well as popular urban issues and arts.

The Guardian’s site, sfbg.com, looks a little bit like the website that time forgot. In comparison, its home page seems a little sloppy and under-illustrated, like a successful first attempt at web design with a large amount of content. The font sizes and colors just don’t look right together; the sections and cells are not very well defined, in spite of which it seems to be functional. There is no index on the home page, but all the categories are there: news, features, movies, arts and entertainment, food and drink, etcetera. Contrasting sweekly.com, sfbg.com features sections for reader blogs and articles on literature right on the homepage. You’ll find that there is a left-wing progressive impression on much of the content featured by sfbg.com. Both their news and top stories sections of the homepage are filled with the Guardian’s November 7^th election recommendations. No political independence here, but they don’t hide that fact.

The two publications rarely see eye-to-eye. In recent years, SF Weekly has published articles and satirical advertisements criticizing the San Francisco Bay Guardian approach to the news, as well as to condemn their overt political agenda. In turn, the Guardian has accused New Times (SF Weekly’s parent company before merging with Village Voice Media in late 2005) of practicing unfair competition. Last year, the Guardian sued New Times for unfair pricing in local advertising costs.

The current state of these two websites seems to parallel the fundamental problems regarding the threats posed by the possible outcome of the Senate decision regarding “net neutrality,” more specifically the lack thereof, which could have devastating effect on the ability of many "less fortunate" websites to provide content to their users. Companies like Comcast and AT&T would like to establish a multi-tier hierarchy among internet service provisions that only the super-wealthy big-name websites will benefit from, beacuse they can afford it, leaving the underdog in the dust. Larger corporate websites will be able to send and receive information over the internet much faster than those who simply can’t pay for the new bandwidth. We can only hope that the Senate will decide to protect the interests of these smaller websites and those who use them, and in turn, that of the first amendment and democracy.

Not withstanding these encroachments on net neutrality, sfbg.com will continue to look more low-budget than sfweekly.com, and its content will not be delivered as fast either. They can't afford to rival their competition in the pay-per-play world of the internet in the imminent future. Right or wrong, alternative or mainstream, these websites will need protection if the wealth of the corporate conglomerate press industry continues to overshadow and impede the ability of the alternative press to keep up with the changing times.

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Always as a Writer

“What you’re seeing is a picture of a guy who is just sort going from one aspect of the business to another,” says John. "But it was always as a writer."

“It’s sort of just a bunch of things I fell into. I intended to be a doctor. I went to college at Harvard with medicine in mind, but I’m terrible at math and nearly flunked chemistry. It wasn’t long before I discovered that the sciences were not the way for me to go. I retreated into the English Department thinking ‘this is really cheating, this is stuff I like to do anyhow’. You’re supposed to go to school to suffer right?”

John Poppy was born in Prague in 1935. His father was Czech and his mother was American, and together they fled to the United States in 1938, one year before the Czechoslovakian government went into exile.

“It began to look like a good time to get out of Czech Slovakia,” John says. “We settled-in on a dairy farm on the east coast, right where Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware come together. The closest town was Wilmington Delaware.”

“My father was a refugee. He had been through World War I, and then World War II. He told me that doctors will always be in need and I wanted to help people. Now that I was in the English Department at Harvard, I knew that I could either be a writer or a teacher. I just wasn’t suited for academia. I wanted the real world, gritty experience.

In between his junior and senior years in college, John got a temporary position temporary working several different beats at the Wilmington Morning News, covering for ‘real’ reporters while they were on vacation.

“For two weeks I’d be the police reporter, then for two weeks I’d be the city hall reporter, then for two weeks I’d be something else…I didn’t like the cops very much,” John says. “I liked the City Hall and I liked the schools. I began to see myself as some kind of a feature writer for education and politics. That convinced me I was a newspaper man.”

The next summer, after graduation, they offered John a general assignment job, reporting, for 100-dollars a week. “After a couple years, for various reasons, some of them professional some of them personal, I decided to move onto New York.

The Executive Editor at the Wilmington Morning News used to work at the New York Herald Tribune, and he was supposed to have some connections there that would help John get started in New York.

“It turned out that they couldn’t. These New York newspaper editors just laughed when I showed up. ‘What you had two-years experience on some little paper in Wilmington? Go away!’”

After about six ugly weeks in search employment, John was flopping at a friend’s house for free and there was no money coming in. Then, a friend from college, who was sort of looking out for him at the time, started running a literary agency that he inherited from his father. “He was well connected. He called me up one day and said: ‘Hey, I just heard about a job at Look Magazine for a fact-checker in the Sports Department. I said: ‘Fact-checker? I am writer!’ He said: ‘Oh, a rich writer?’ So, I called.”

John interviewed with Patricia Carbine, who, according to John, was one of the few women that held a position of Managing Editor at a national magazine at the time. “This was 1960. It was pretty much a boys club. She was a smart, tough, brilliant woman. Smart enough to hire me!” John says cheeringly. “She later helped Gloria Steinem start Ms. Magazine.” He spent about a year doing sports-research and fact-checking. “They would give me some paragraphs to do, or a caption or something, to train me,” John says. One thing is for sure, he didn’t intend to spend the rest of his life looking-up batting averages.

John was promoted to Assistant Editor within a year. At Look, Assistant Editor really meant a Senior Writer who did most of his own editing.

“Look called their writers editors because we did do a lot of story construction. We actually went out and traveled with a photographer. We would just go and stay with people until we became invisible, and they would say things that were useful and you could really try to get the sense of them into your article. When you did that, as a writer you were not only taking notes and preparing to write the text for the piece, but you were also collaborating with the photographer, and with the art director to construct the finished product, that way everybody is moving in the same direction but bringing their own expertise.”

A couple of years later, the Editor-in-Chief called John up to his office. John was a little nervous because this boss was the kind that you only bump into in the hall. He ended up being asked how he’d like to move to San Francisco for a year and take a promotion to Senior Editor and become the Bureau Chief in San Francisco.

“At that time, San Francisco was still kind of a mythic city to people who lived out on the east coast,” John says. “The Embarcadero style high-rises hadn’t gone up so it was still a romantic little city.”

John was supposed to be on a one year tour in California. He never moved back. “I Got married, a year after I got here; settled in with a family; worked at Look, says John. “It was probably one of the most exciting times for a journalist on the west coast. In the ‘60s there was the free-speech movement at Berkeley, there was the Summer of Love, and there was all the music! All sorts of stuff was going on here. A real revolution in culture.”

“Look would send you anywhere in the world, if you thought up a story. If you thought it up and they bought it, it was yours,” John smiles. “The first story I remember doing when I first got out here was a civil rights story on location in the south.”

John married his boss, George Leonard’s, sister. “George and I became very good friends. We would go out to lunch together, and walk around the city and look at each other and say ‘this is the best job you could have’. It was an ideal job. It was really nice. It’s too bad the magazine couldn’t compete with television. Television killed off Life, Look, and various other magazines. They just didn’t know how to adapt.”

35 million people read look. It was a magazine that spoke to the middle class about life in America (teacher of the year, a college student profile, some celebrity stuff). The magazine was started in Des Moines, Iowa, so it had that Midwestern, earnest, kind of ‘Here’s how we live’ sort of feel to it. Look folded in 1971 and John had quit a year earlier, seeing the writing on the wall. He wanted to get set up as a freelancer or something before the party was over.

“Look was very generous,” says John. “After I left, they gave me a lot of freelance assignments which served as a nice cushion between what I had thought was going to be a lifetime job, going from a Senior Editor of Look to just another freelancer.”

“Having a resume that said you were a senior editor at a big magazine like Look, even though it was dead, meant that people thought you knew something about publishing. I did some consulting until along came another magazine called The Saturday Review, which was born as The Saturday Review of Literature, which was started and run by a guy named Norman Cousins. It was a high-brow magazine. They decided to split it up into four distinct magazines. There was one about politics, one about science, one about education, and one about its original charter, the arts. It was really confusing if you were a subscriber. They wanted me to edit the one about the arts, even though I had asked for politics or education. I didn’t know anything about the arts. They said: ‘This is creative casting. We don’t want somebody who is already in bed with all of the museum directors’”

He went to New York for five-months to help get the new arts magazine up and running. Then, they would move the whole magazine to San Francisco. “It was a horrible ordeal. It was a year and a half struggle to keep this magazine going and then just it went under,” John says. “At that point I thought, gee, I keep working for companies that go bankrupt, I can do that just as easily on my own, so I think I’ll freelance from here on. I did that for the next 23 years.”

“Unless you have a specialty, you have to convince some editor, somewhere, that you are the right person for that particular article and that you really know something about it,” says John, “You’re selling yourself over and over and over again.”

“Fortunately for me, around 1986, George Leonard, the guy I worked with at Look, had gone on to become a well established author. He got friendly with the people who had just bought Esquire magazine in New York. Two guys named Phillip Moffitt and Christopher Widdle; two hicks from Tennessee. They did a brilliant job of repositioning Esquire to attract young people who were interested in social trends. They decided to do a package on health and fitness. They hired George to manage the whole thing and got me to write a piece on bicycling.”

“A year later they wanted to do it again. George came to me and said: ‘This time we want to do something real big. Do a survey on all the major body systems.’ This was like writing a physiology textbook. I did this thing and it turned out to be this huge project. It eventually developed into what, if I may say so, a very impressive piece.”

The article made such a splash that the editor of Esquire asked him to write a monthly column on health for the magazine. “Well I though that was great,” says John. “It was a dream job. Steady work, plus, being a columnist for Esquire was a very good thing to be. It was fun! They still had this literary feel about them, so I was allowed to be a little bit sarcastic with it. They allowed me to speak in what I consider to be my own voice.”

“That went on for four or five years, and it finally gave me a specialty. Now I was a Health Writer, which I liked a lot because I didn’t have to flounder around reinventing myself every time I came up with a story idea.

Esquire got a new editor when the Tennessee boys sold it to the Hearst Corporation. “The new editor came in and said ‘I want my own team here’ and told me I was history. So I went Men’s Health.”

According to John, “Men’s Health has a formula that they DO NOT deviate from: sex and pecs. I did a health column for them for about a year. It ended kind of bad. The last straw was when they wanted me to write about how men can have bigger better orgasms. Not that I was prudish about it, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be ‘that guy’. I wrote what I felt was a pretty respectable article about the whole thing, and they went and added and subtracted things that made it quite something else, and with my name on it. At that point, we agreed that things weren’t really working out to well.”

Since John had become known as a Health Writer after that, he quickly got a job with a magazine called Health, which was started in 1987 by some people that he knew. It quickly became one of the most successful magazines of its type. It won some national magazine awards.

Eventually, Time Inc. came along and bought it. John was a contributing editor on contract for a certain number of articles per year. He ended up editing a book for them, which actually went very well. Health set up a publishing company that would re-purpose the magazine’s content for books and brochures. John became Editorial Director of Time Inc. Health, until the company was moved from San Francisco to Birmingham, Alabama in 2001. None of the west coast staff went along, which was probably the corporation’s intention. John began freelancing again.

In 2000, John’s wife was diagnosed with cancer. She died in August of 2003. “It was a pretty excruciating illness, John says. “During that period, I wasn’t doing a whole lot of work. Shortly after she died, my friend Bruce Anderson, who is the Editor-in-Chief of Via, and who also worked with me at Time Inc. Health, decided that he wanted an Executive Editor, which Via never had. Via was growing and becoming more ambitious. So, I looked at the requirements and it seemed like the job was tailor-made for me. I was just so heart broken by my wife.”

“Bruce told me I was a perfect fit, but I didn’t think that I could deliver the level of performance that was needed and deserved. I was kind of indifferent to life in general. But, I got over that after some talks with Bruce, and well…here I am.”

“I’m here for as long as I’m here. Bruce was very meticulous about bringing me in. I talked to everybody: the staff, my boss, my boss’ boss and his boss, all over three days, just to make sure I had a good idea of what I was getting into. I knew what I was getting into. Bruce has a lot of integrity.”

According to John, there are a lot of layers of attention that are paid to all the material that Via publishes. John’s responsibilities are: to supervise the five senior editors and the publications coordinator, concerning just about everything from scheduling to time-off. That is the corporate responsibility. He also works with the entire editorial staff on almost everything that is done for quality control. He helps them come up with story ideas and assists the Editor-in-Chief in all sorts of ways that make his life easier.

“All of the editors here are very competent and some of them brilliant,” John says. “I am here to offer a different point of view, from outside the trenches of whatever they are working on. It’s a great job, I like the people. It’s fun.”

John doesn’t often work with the freelance writers, but he writes a few articles him self every now and then; he is more of an editor’s editor; a top editor, which, he says does not mean that he’s the best editor. He comes in behind other editors and helps to bring polish to the finished product. According to John, “Editing is very favorable to freelance work. The pay is it a lot better. I saw myself as a newspaper man at first, then as a magazine writer, and more recently in the game I came into the editing business. I gradually discovered editing as being fun and satisfying.

Even though he works 50-60 hours per week and drives his two-hour commute five days a week, for John, it’s all worth it. He remembers being up at the top of Mount Tamalpais one sunny afternoon, and there was this couple there talking about how great the place was. They happened to tell John that they were locals and that they had never been up there before, but they had just read the article in Via about Mount Tam. “That makes me feel good,” John says, “when people find it useful. I just want to be useful.”

John likes stories that not only say ‘it’s a pretty place’ but that speak to why it is still there and how it ought to be preserved. According to John, “In the Bay Area, you can walk around just about any reserved place and you have to just to raise your eyes and thank heaven.”

“I very much liked the story we did on Point Reyes few years ago. Living in Marin, it’s like my back-yard, but it was a great way to take a well-known park and show the readers its virtues, and the whole idea of setting aside land like that for people to use, not to just give it up to contractors.”

John Bites

· John enjoys eating at Il Fornaio in Corte Madera, but his favorite restraint is Insalata’s in San Anselmo.

· John went to Yosemite and the Hawaiian Islands with his wife quite often until she passed. Since then, bouncing around Italy has been his favorite travel buzz.

· John once saw his dream house in the hills overlooking Sonoma, but he enjoys his house in Marin just as well. He listens to classical music, composed by the likes of Mozart and Schubert.

· John also enjoys the opera, his favorite being Marriage of Figaro.

· John subscribes the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times for delivery on the weekends, he goes to both publication’s websites during the week and he also listens to NPR every morning at breakfast. He reads The Week magazine, amongst other news weeklies and watches Jon Stewart and the Daily Show whenever he gets home in time.

“I think if you have been a professional writer, and really applied yourself to that craft, its really good training to be an editor. Also, you got to have a pathological desire to do it right,” John Poppy.