Look and Listen

Biography

I often think I can attribute my peripatetic, largely expatriate lifestyle to having been born in a place that wasn't even really a country at the time: Occupied Japan. And my future development as an army brat. Despite having Japanese babytalk as my first language and going to many formative school years at Taipei American School, I am mostly a product of the American-style education system and body of literature. Before I finally found a school that got rid of me with a diploma rather than some hysterical kicking-out ritual (University of Washington) I attended Wake Forest, Baylor, U. of San Francisco, San Fran State and several Army training programs. I leaned much more in the Army, prison and street warfare, however. But all you really need from school is learning to read, and that opened the door to much wider worlds. Up until the army I read the usual boy adventure stuff and Empire/Raj things like Kipling...but mostly towering piles of science fiction. In my teens most of my reading was international prize-winner types like Mishima, Kawabata, Abe, Oe, Bulgakov, Gombrovitz, Calvino, and those of that ilk. In my thirties I suddenly shifted to what I would call mainstream popular guy lit, others would call "trash". Crumley, Leonard, Perry, Thomas, JD MacDonald, Flashman and Sharpe, James Elroy. tough guy caper stuff, I guess. And I've always liked humor: most recently Tom Sharpe, Christopher Moore, and Joe Keenan. I'm also greatly influenced by several Latin America cartoonist/philosophers, notably Quino and Rius.I wrote and published in some form or another from grade school on. After the army I started underground papers and learned how to publish. I also started selling articles to national magazines and working on a novel. The novel was a ridiculous, infantile piece of junk. But at least it wasn't about the Army or Coming of Age. I then embarked on decades of writing for newspapers, magazines, mail order catalogs, poetry collections, guidebooks, comedy routines, bands, what have you. I wrote for the cream of the West Coast "hip urban weeklies" such as the Seattle Sun, Rocket, Stranger, and Weekly; San Diego Reader, Revolt and Weekender; Bay Area Guardian and Express; Rocky Mountain News, and so on. And national magazines such as Penthouse, Young Athlete, American Photographer, Hustler, Harpers, Science, and anybody in that payment bracket. In recent years I also wrote for publications in Mexico, including Spanish cultural and investigative mags as well as English papers in Los Cabos, Vallarta, Cancun, Tijuana and Mazatlan. This is experience produced a living, awards for journalism and literature, and the formation of deep distrust for the editorial community that survives to this day. I subscribed to the traditional writer's grab bag of odd jobs such as: jail guard, psychometrist, cave guide, mail order marketing hotshot, poetry publisher, smuggler, photographer, webmaster and low-key street crime.

Inspiration

Oh, please.