Three Oakland Poems

by the Editorial Staff of Uncanny Valley Magazine

There Was Something I Just Thought Of (Sixth)

by Douglas Slayton

When it was late I'd stand under the lights

on the platform, waiting for the rattle

of the tracks, as the dark blue black of night

sinks my cover of yellow light crackle.

I miss the moon hanging over my bed,

when I had no where to be the next day.

I miss nights that were quiet in my head

and the bed wasn't mine but I could stay.

I wasn't scared of the streets I walked

knowing they'd be around in the morning.

I hate every night like the one we talked.

You're in my clothes, more with every washing.

I remember every night, they haunt me,

and how the last train was always empty.

Walk Home

by Chris Alarie

A shot sounds at a sideshow

And does not disrupt a thing

Danger is likely, life is lively

Catch a fade, go dumb, super hyphy

A crowd gathers at a warehouse

Tangle of noise & limbs & beer

Money for the touring bands, please

How strange that somebody lives here

Bobby & Huey

Huey & Officer Frey

Little Bobby Hutton

Huey & Tyrone Robinson

New Year's Eve, I walk home

From MacArthur BART, drunk

In the rain, the long way

Past Casper's Hot Dogs twice

Sick to my stomach of

Myself and everything

I buy some Gatorade

Watch The Simpsons 'til dawn

I live here, I am home

Is the bullet hole in the

Window of 'Lectric Washouse

Still there? I wonder, years later

Home

by Alexis Faulkner

Can take your heart at any time

Fashion it into a pretzel shield

And then squeeze all of the blood all over the shoes

Of your tribe

Oakland is a mess of palm trees

And basketball courts and friendly faces

Sometimes turned worried into that frantic well of loneliness and misdirection

It is the punks that press you back into shape

It is the hippies that make you know love

It is the lake that shows you dead catfish

Even the dying are happy to pass

At home

Ivy Drive

The stories I am missing show me that this was a young place

But parents shot at everything

Wrote it all down

My first memory, big shake and smashing the whole kitchen

My mom wrote it in October 1989

Garfield Avenue

The one lemons were three lemons and everyone stopped by to hustle up the tree while my family wasn’t looking

I put my black cat in the swing and Uboo never gave me hell

And Giamocha lent his tail to every occasion

Plum wine, we said, as fruit rained down over the roof

Too many rotten on the concrete

Rottweilers, neighbors and our own kept us all over that hood

Busted hydrants for summer

Winter

Winter was homeless there

Winter has no place in Oakland

My baby sister

My baby bunk beds

My Easter Bunny

My salad of nasturtiums

My friends in Diamond Heights

The school of Redwood Heights

The hills of Grandma lavender and her chemistry

Ever July planning on planting more bushes

A new millennium on Vernon Street

Junk

We had a lot of junk but I kept our books in the best order of the English alphabet And just stuffed the rest in the closet

There was a black cat there too who was sweet with luck

But less than the magic one

BART and the 57 kept late nights up later and long walks up that sunnyslope never felt less than Everest

I haven’t the best habits about keeping memories

Locked in order

I haven’t the best record of where

Shattuck Avenue

The concrete that touched my house touched a cherry plum tree and it broke apart

And threw me off my bike

Gave me the feeling that Oakland would never change

The city would flood and drain with fresh thousands and the streets

Would always be unpaved

This place was right near Ashby

The house had not only been for me

Psychedelic leave-behinds, sharpie skinhead cartoons, tchotchkes generations old

Every crusty creeper in Berkeley left vibes on Shattuck

Shattuck Avenue was a double exposure of holding hands

And spinning as hard as the wind ever blows

Overtop small shadows of dark leaves and flowers

Precious and brilliant and wanting a harder party and never looking back

In the end, we got robbed and I moved back to San Francisco

The best July was the roof on Alcatraz Avenue

First holiday stop: Berkeley Roses

But the view was no good and I’m glad we went back to base

The television volume broke my patience a thousand times over

But this time drowned completely by a campaign of flames

I loved every minute of that dangerous display

I wish memories were something final

I wish memories were easy to keep filed in your brain

And they were an exact representation of a time and place

But mostly they are shifting

Mostly they suit my best fantasy about my own life

All I want to remember

All I can remember

I remember being friends and being in Love with Oakland

Alexis Faulkner is Executive Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine. 
Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
Doug Slayton is Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

For The Right Moment

by Alexis Faulkner

Alexis Faulkner is Executive Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine. 

An Oral History of This Article

by Chris Alarie

Oral histories are one of the more prominent recent journalistic trends. In that spirit, we decided to present you, the reader, with the oral history of this article that you are now reading.

Chris Alarie (Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine; author of this article): This was actually one of the first articles that I pitched when we were first discussing ideas for UVM. Nobody else seemed to be particularly excited about it, though.

Alexis Faulkner (Executive Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine): I had a few different concerns, with the primary one being that it didn't seem to be a particularly interesting idea.

Douglas Slayton (Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine): I just think everything Chris writes is stupid.

Alexis Faulkner: I mean, Clickhole has run a number of hilarious fake oral histories.¹ McSweeney's ran an “Oral History of Oral Histories”. And apparently so did The Daily,² which in turn led to a terrible “Oral History of the Oral History of Oral Histories” in the Observer.

Douglas Slayton: I mean, he's always fucking talking about how much he hates horses. What is his fucking deal with that?

Chris Alarie: I decided to proceed with the article anyway, despite the concerns of my fellow editors.

Alexis Faulkner: Plus, I was pretty sure that the only way he could fill the article would be to make up a bunch of fake quotes from people whom he has never even met.

Bill Simmons (Former Editor-in-Chief of Grantland): Chris told me about his idea and I thought it was great! During my time at Grantland, I made sure we ran as many oral histories as possible.

Alexis Faulkner: Besides, even real oral histories are a pretty lazy, stupid way to fill space.

Bill Simmons: No topic was too insignificant or stupid for us.

Alexis Faulkner: I mean, I understand their usefulness in an academic context, where presenting as many different perspectives on a topic as thoroughly and objectively as possible is important. But as a form of journalism, it just seems like either a way to avoid turning interviews into a real story or just a way to geek out over a topic not deserving of such attention.

Bill Simmons: We literally did an oral history of “The Super Bowl Shuffle”. Who the fuck needs to read something like that? Nobody! But we did it anyway, to fulfill the public's lust for oral histories.

Chris Alarie: I suggested that I use the piece as a means to examine why the oral history is such a popular technique. Like, maybe people read them because it makes them feel like they are being included in some sort of insider-style explanation of the subject beyond what could normally be conveyed in a more conventional article—sort of like a DVD commentary track. Or maybe by presenting so much information in a relatively direct manner, the oral history flatters the reader's intelligence by allowing them to feel as if they are synthesizing complicated information themselves.

Alexis Faulkner: He just kept saying, “Oral histories are like DVD commentaries.” But he refused to elaborate.

Douglas Slayton: I mean, he will just fucking shoehorn this paranoid, horse bullshit into any conversation, whether it makes sense to do so or not.

Alexis Faulkner: I literally got about five emails from him that said just that, in increasingly larger font sizes.

Chris Alarie: I think my persistence and sophisticated analysis eventually won them over because they eventually enthusiastically embraced the idea.

Alexis Faulkner: I kept telling him that it was a terrible idea for an article but I knew it didn't matter. He does whatever the fuck he wants anyway. He's made a total mockery of our editorial process.

Chris Alarie: So I sent Doug and Alexis the first draft of the article—basically everything up to this point—and they really seemed to like it.

Alexis Faulkner: Once it became clear that he was going ahead with the article despite my objections, I kept asking him to send me an outline or a draft or something. I wanted to make sure that he wasn't quoting me despite me explicitly asking him not to.

Chris Alarie: Alexis wrote back, “This is great! I think all you need to do is find a nice, tidy way to wrap things up.”

Alexis Faulkner: Or even worse, fabricating quotes from me.

Chris Alarie: And Doug just texted back a thumbs up and a surfer emoji.

Douglas Slayton: He seriously makes me uncomfortable sometimes.

Chris Alarie: All-in-all, I think it has been a successful project and I am excited to present it to you, the reader.

Douglas Slayton: I genuinely worry that it is dangerous for me to continue to associate myself with such a mentally unstable person.

Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

---

1 RandBall's Stu's “An Oral History of Nick Punto Sliding Headfirst into First Base” is another excellent example of a fake oral history.^↩
2 For whatever reason, all evidence of this particular “Oral History of Oral Histories” seems to have disappeared. I don't want to say that it is the work of the Vast Equine Conspiracy, but I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention the possibility.^↩

Three San Francisco Poems

by the Editorial Staff of Uncanny Valley Magazine

Sorry, I Have A Thing. (Fifth)

by Douglas Slayton

Mornings or evening when they tear out streets

the routes change or disappear completely.

When the cold is close in the heavy sheets

the sound keeps me steady only briefly.

When I'm lost, there are always two ways home.

The day marches when time is all you need.

Beach lights dying, where I sink like a stone.

This is change not growth, I am no seed.

When we talk, I talk quickly, thoughtlessly.

I make the same decisions every time

everyone dissipates through the country.

Not feeling better, I'm holding the line.

The full moon is always a day early

or day late, nothing ends so easily.

Chris's Poem's Title

by Chris Alarie

A placeholder for

Chris's poem

About San Francisco

I hope it is good

But mostly I hope

It is finished

On time

Otherwise

We will have to

Publish the placeholder

San Francisco

by Alexis Faulkner

It is possible to have a good day everyday you are 

Alive in San Francisco

The air near the ocean is so fresh and damp

It's easy to breathe but hard to keep the clothes

In your closet from molding

The most beautiful intersections are the ones where

Two neighborhoods hold hands

Like Arguello and Fillmore and California and Broadway

It is so peaceful to feel always cold and watch the

Fog cover everything

It is so dangerous to take BART to see your friends

Play at the Sugar Mountain because you might

Miss the last train and the 800 is filled with

Zombies and also the warehouse isn't even near a train

It is so burrito to have eating in Dolores

Many people are leaving the city now

Some of them have moved to Los Angeles and New York City and Paris

It is a hard place to dream of and a sad place to

Leave behind

Alexis Faulkner is Executive Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine. 
Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
Doug Slayton is Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

My Important Podcast with Chris Alarie: Episode 7

by Chris Alarie

After a delay of two weeks, Doug and I continue our discussion about podcasts. This is, quite possibly, the least essential episode yet. Enjoy!



Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
Doug Slayton is Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

A List of All the Words that I Know

by Chris Alarie

Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

Three New York Poems

by the Editorial Staff of Uncanny Valley Magazine

One Year Later
by Alexis Faulkner

New York City
Existing in a famous way
All the city surfaces have hardened around the way things used to be
Nouns are tired when they are old and unrested, especially places
The people of New York are tired, too
The people of New York are exhausted
Because the winter is coming
And the snow will cancel all of their plans
And they will have no choice but to sit inside and sulk
So they have to execute all of their ambitions while it is hot

The gaze of the city is lively
Demanding and full of life and intention
It is a mountain for the city's youngest to climb
The gaze is a mirror
And a long look is required to truly evaluate
The way things exist in the Eastern part of the United States

At least there are cheap sandwiches
And even the longest season will turn over eventually


Innumerable Other Places
by Chris Alarie

I'm trying to read Uselysses
In the library—which is cold
Or the park—which is hot
I am still mostly happy to be
Alive & in New York
But,
This is one of those days where
My best isn't good enough

I like New York but
I can't say why because
I can't stand the way that
People who love New York
Talk about New York

"Why do you love it?"
"Because it's like nowhere else."
"But you can say that about almost literally
Innumerable other places."
"Hey, fuck you!
I didn't start this conversation."

The day ends and
I still hate horses


The Next Time I Have Seven Dollars (Fourth)
by Douglas Slayton

When I breath my breathing poisons everything.

The white lights burn away to bone lit neon.

Millions of steps resound, held on a string,

looking up and feeling down when you're on.

When I think of your eyes or something new

I see those towers on every side piercing the sky,

with bridges on every shore surrounding you.

I am thinking of you, but it is a lie.

Every night is a different walk now.

Knowing the place in earnest, it's quiet.

We don't talk anymore about when it will snow

or the stars behind the ambient light.

Don't make promises you don't want to keep.

With you gone now, I'm not fucked on sleep.

Alexis Faulkner is Executive Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine. 
Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
Doug Slayton is Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.