Homemade, aggressively rinky-dink art and fashion were pretty cool. I used to go around in an old hand-me-down London Fog raincoat with the Flipper logo painted in day-glo tempera paint on the back. Some people used to make their own clothes. A lot of the aesthetic was trash- and refuse-related. None of this beautiful, polished,…

Most people I knew in the 1980s moved a lot. My first few years in the Bay Area I changed addresses about twice a year. It was kind of fun because most residents here were located on a personality spectrum somewhere between oddball and completely insane, so you got a lot of different and unique…

If someone asked me “what was the most San Francisco thing in the 1980s?” I might have to say “Survival Research Labs.” Describing what they were is tricky, but maybe: a collective of artist/engineer/mad genius/mischief-makers led by a guy named Mark Pauline. They constructed elaborate, brutal, surrealistically violent machines, and staged public performances where the…

There used to be a notorious cocktail bar on Haight Street called the Persian Aub Zam Zam Room. The bartender was a cranky old guy named Bruno. When you walked in, he’d size you up and if he didn’t like the looks of you, he’d simply refuse to serve you. Sometimes he’d make up an…