For those who were warm and cozy on March 19 and didn’t feel like braving the rain to attend the Two-Year Anniversary Tenderloin Reading Series event at Koko Cocktails, I understand you as rain sucks. But fear not. Although you missed meeting the parents of two of the readers (Tony DuShane and Joel Langfield), there’s been extensive coverage of the event for you to enjoy it from the comfort of your computer chair. So head over to Litseen for a full video report or to The Creosote Journal for a great photo review.
Also, you’ll now be able to enjoy Tenderloin literature in print any time: TLRS founder Jonathan Hirsch and his muse Valerie Chavez (a frequent reader not only of the TLRS but also of dozens of other events around the city), launched a brand new quarterly literary magazine named TENDER-LOIN (pictured above in Jonathan’s hands). TENDER-LOIN, which was presented and and sold to those in attendance at the last reading event, is a compilation of poems and narratives from the TLRS events as well as the recently-launched Tenderlogues project. This is how Jonathan described to us the idea behind the magazine:
The entire TLRS project intends to get people talking and sharing stories about this amazing neighborhood. TENDER-LOIN, we hope, will enlighten its readers to consider the ways in which art in the city has informed its creative residents and visitors. Not only that, the quality of life down here speaks to something. For many artists, a sense of alone-ness governs the creative process. We bear witness to the machinations of the world and use it to measure our own experience. Many of the people living in the Tenderloin have abandoned their status, their place in the world, for something else. I think many artists feel most at home in a place where people aren’t running around feeling important. Whose concerns are deeper than whether or not their latte was hot enough. In that sense there is a solidarity between all of us in the Tenderloin.
The first issue of TENDER-LOIN has works by Pam Benjamin, Steven Spate, Joel Landfield, Tony DuShane, Maureen Blennerhassett, Joanna Lioce, Steven Gray and Jonathan Hirsch & Valerie Chavez themselves. The magazine opens with a warning from Jonathan Hirsch:
If you want a city where poor people, where crazy people, where creative people, where ill people, where passionate idealists and hopeless drunks and financial district slick suits and pimps, pushers, prostitutes, art students, old queens and homeless teens, the helpless and the hopeless don’t all cram together into one tiny portrait that has more character and integrity than any place this author has seen or lived in, then I suggest you put this book down fast. Perhaps you can still catch a cab to some bougie Marina bar, buy a $15 Manhattan at the cleanest join you can find, and leave the rest of us alone.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the first issue of the magazine is still available for purchase, but don’t miss the next issue coming up alongside the next TLRS event in three months.
In the meantime, keep reading Tenderlogues online. The second one, by Joanna Lioce, just came out. Here’s a teaser:
The Tenderloin is where we met and stuck and snuck around like rats.
The Tenderloin is where I built and took away simultaneously.
The Tenderloin is where I could only think about the process of love through people who grew up without it.
You can participate, too. Just contact tenderloinreadingseries@gmail.com for more information.
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You want some powerful writing? Try this on for size, a piece by my friend Chris Fisher that captures the Hour of the Wolf in the Tenderloin:
Ellis 4AM
You have no idea. 4AM moving through the seedy urban wilderness, emptiness punctuated by small knots of people- dateless whores and drugless crack heads drunks out of booze here for no reason but waiting, waiting for anything. Bars are closed, nothing’s open yet but the city belongs to us, the silence broken only by solitary whispers, quiet murmurs, coded whistles, and the occasional desperate shout/scream from a nearby block. All have meaning- mostly coded and amplified by the oppressive lack of any other sound, background muffled more by the drizzle. We’ve nowhere to go and no reason to go there but the city is ours; it’s too early to rise and too late to go to sleep so we await something, anything that might set up a hustle to come. All encounters now are chances, maybe opportunities- to be examined minutely for those, milked for any possibility that might set up some more or less predatory event tomorrow when there are resources, illusory or not, that appear ready to bear fruit so those of us who paid attention can send the mark on his way with a little less money. They swear they’ll do something but are always too embarrassed and/or frightened to return. They have gained a Tenderloin tale to take back, to tell the ones who will listen and praise the bravery of the exaggerated revenge described. The poor bastards come in tough and drunk but leave, head hung, to cook up that story on their way home and they’ve come to realize they are hopelessly outclassed in that particular venue.
They who come to us in these blocks come unencumbered for they have only mixed expectations of success or failure. Unpredictability is the order of the time and place and the streets belong to us. It’s the keeping at bay the threats that often costs so; paid with time, paid with money, paid with feigned emotion; sometimes paid with life itself, one burned carcass found dumped over $10.00 in desperation left unpaid too long, the inhuman act of one of the monsters we create in the escalating penal system full of bored and necessarily violent near-humans.