Mike provides us a first hand observation of how the struggle of Modern Times Bookstore to survive is part of a larger process of economic distress in the Mission District in San Francisco:

I live a few blocks away from Modern Times. The neighborhood is definitely continuing to take a hit. I was in San Diego for roughly seven weeks earlier in the summer. When I came back, I counted six businesses in the area that had gone under since I left. These were in addition to all the others that have closed in roughly the last two years.

Generally, they are being replaced by restaurants that to me seem unaffordable in a new way. By that, I mean they cater to a whole new crop of people coming in to take advantage of the downturn. The number of condos is slowly increasing. I guess people will live in these hideous monstrosities and eat in these new restaurants.

There is no doubt in my mind that this area has finally tipped toward yuppies, hipsters, the dot-com people, whatever you want to call them. This economy has pushed so many people out and has slowly replaced them pure consumers who seem to have no attachments beyond their wallets. The plight of Modern Times is no exception. It is just one of many businesses that are struggling to exist in a neighborhood and a city that are increasingly difficult to survive in.

Pure consumers who seem to have no attachments beyond their wallets. Yes, this is a fair assessment of what San Francisco, and much of the Bay Area, have become. Of course, one could say that such people have always dominated the social life of the region, and, perhaps, they have, but never to this extent. While the wealthy, and their obssessions of conspicuous consumption, have always been a prominent feature, there were places for middle income, lower middle income and even low income people to live there.

Now, with the current restructuring of the global economy, this diversity, and the cultural richness that was associated with it, is being lost. Large sections of San Francisco and the East Bay have become indistinguishable from similarly wealthy neighborhoods elsewhere, with the exception of the local architecture and the landscape. Within the City itself, homes in the Avenues, neighborhoods to the north and south of Golden Gate Park, often fog bound during the summer, once a middle class redoubt and a destination for Russian and Asian immigrants, sell for about $800 to $1000 a square foot as far out as 43rd Avenue and Balboa near the ocean. Meanwhile, as observed by Mike, an inexorable process of gentrification is coming to a conclusion in the Mission, after being being stalled by decades of admirable community resistance.

Interestingly, the period that commenced after the collapse of the global financial system in 2008, the period in which we still live, appears to have ignited a new wave of gentrification in the coastal areas of the US analoguous to the one that began in the mid-1990s when the US finally began to emerge from 6 or 7 years of economic stagnation. Growth in the technology and biotechnology sectors, heavily concentrated in the Bay Area, transformed some neighborhoods virtually overnight, as it did, for example, the Dimond District in the East Bay hills of Oakland. Stock option yuppies discovered them and rapidly bid up home prices within a matter of weeks.

In this instance, the transformation is taking place more slowly, in a more grinding fashion, as people and small businesses try to outlast the downturn. But, in the end, the remaining bastions of economic and cultural diversity in San Francisco and the East Bay are likely to be much fewer and much smaller than they were after the last burst of gentification, with a new homogeneity ascendant. As for the low income people required for service work, they will live here, segregated from the people who need them, although their mobility will result in some disturbing episodes of violence.

Labels: Bay Area, California, Global Recession, Independent Bookstores, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

I can't overemphasize the importance of Modern Times Bookstore as a social and cultural resource in Northern California. If you live here, as I do, please consider responding to its call for financial assistance as I did. Even if you live elsewhere, it is important to recognize that Modern Times displays and sells books from small publishers, like Verso, 7 Stories Press, AK Press, Zed Books, PM Press, Haymarket Books, Zero Books, Monthly Review Books and Routledge, among others, as well as numerous academic ones. If Modern Times is lost, they will lose one of the few remaining bricks and mortar venues for obtaining public visibility for their books.

Authors and illustrators of zines rely on the store as well. So, even if you don't live in Northern California, and may never actually visit the store, please consider contributing to its survival. Your contribution will also preserve a community resource that makes space available for numerous progressive activities and events. It has been an essential feature of social life within the Mission District in San Francisco for its 39 years of existence, and it would be a tragedy to lose it.

If you are still not persuaded, here is the fundraising appeal put out by the worker-owners of the store:

We Need Your Help: Save Modern Times!

Dear Modern Times Community,

We are writing with a request for community support. Modern Times is facing a financial crisis and urgently needs an influx of cash if we are going to be able to pay our bills through the summer.

The cold, hard economic facts are these: We need to sell a certain amount everyday in order to break even on costs – taxes, rent, payroll, utilities, insurance, and new books – and right now we are not doing this.

We absolutely believe that it is possible to function more sustainably but we need your help right now if we are going to get to the more lucrative fall and winter months and be able to put into place the changes that will help us survive.

We know that times are tight for everyone and many folks are going to the library instead of shopping at bookstores.

However, we hear every day how much people from many communities value the fact that we continue to exist. We are one of the few remaining independent, collectively run, politically progressive bookstores in North America. We have many cherished members, customers and community members who rely on us to stock the titles they are interested in, to host events, open mics and workshops and to foster community here in the heart of the mission district. We're more than a store – we are a community resource.

In the past when progressive, feminist and LGBT bookstores all over North America were closing, it was your support that allowed us to keep going. If every one of you donated $10 we would raise enough to keep going for 3 months, $20 each would keep us in business for 6 months, donations of between $30 to $100 or more would be enough for us to keep our doors open, hopefully for good. If you would like to give more, but cannot do it all at once, consider donating a smaller amount every month. All donations will go directly towards covering the bookstore's costs, and are a part of a larger plan of action and structural change to make the business sustainable in the current economy.

Next year will be our 40th year, we very much want to be there to celebrate it with all of you.

There are so many ways you can help us out:

Donate by mailing us a check, by visiting the store with cash, check or credit card, calling in with you credit card to 415 282 9246, or on our website.

Consider becoming a sustaining or lifetime member, or sponsoring a shelf if you have not already done so.

Spread the word to your friends and community, promote this fundraising drive in your paper, blog, website or radio show, organize your own save the bookstore fundraisers or just pass the hat at a party.

Do you know a professor or teacher who needs to buy books for her/his course or classroom or a book group that is looking to order a quantity of books at one time? Put them in touch with us!

Give a Modern Times membership or gift certificate as a gift.

And, of course, come in and bring all your friends to the store to find the books that you love!

For our part, we are committed to keeping you in the loop, letting you know how our efforts to survive are going and what our longer term plans are as they develop.

In these challenging times, we stand with many other community-based businesses and organizations that are surviving capitalism through the strength of their communities. Please be a part of helping us thrive.

In solidarity and love,
The worker-owners of Modern Times Bookstore:
Leah, Kate, Kermit, Peta and Ruth

Feel free to disseminate this to anyone who might be interested.

Labels: Alternative Media, Bay Area, California, Independent Bookstores, Postmodernism

Black Oak Books on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley has closed, a possibility that I mentioned back in January 2007. Outside investors were uanble to keep it open at its most recent location:

With nary a goodbye to the Gourmet Ghetto community that supported it for years," reports Bob Zagone, Black Oak Books in Berkeley closed May 31.

Gary Cornell, one of a group of investors that bought it a year ago, paid off the IRS and attempted to keep it open in hard times, said attempts to renegotiate a lower rent failed. "We couldn't afford the rent, and the landlord wasn't going to raise it, but wasn't going lower." The investors "didn't care about making a profit, but we couldn't keep losing money."

"Bookstores can't afford to pay prime retail rent anymore. Amazon is just too strong. When the state of California passed a bill - about a month ago - not to charge tax on Amazon purchases, that was the final straw." For a bookstore to survive in this era, said Cornell, it's pretty much necessary for it to own its real estate.

He said the investors are hoping "to buy a building on San Pablo and reopen in a few months. ... There are no villains in this story except for the state Legislature, who didn't want to tax Amazon sales." Three staff members (of about seven full-time) will keep their jobs, maintaining "a small retail presence out of our warehouse. ... We're going to try to buy a building, we love books. We have other businesses, too, we don't need this to make money. We just don't want to lose any money."

Black Oak Books joins Cody's Books as two of the most prominent casualties among lost Bay Area bookstores. Cody's, a fixture on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley since the 1960s, closed in 2007.

There is something especially troubling about the closures of Black Oak and Cody's in Berkeley. Berkeley is, of course, a university town, and one could go there and engage in the delightful pasttime of going through various stores in the commercial districts near campus, searching for things impossible to find elsewhere. To find something strange, fascinating and thought provoking, and go through the pages while deciding whether it was important enough to purchase and take back home was a priceless experience. It was a place that valued literacy and the effort involved in intepreting the world around us in print or creating new ones.

A few sanctuaries for such activity still remain, places like Moe's Books, Pendragon Books and Revolution Books. If one goes across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, Modern Times, Green Apple Books, Dog Eared Books and Bound Together Books remain. But the trend is clear, one that has been remorselessly consistent since the 1990s. The independent bookstore is under siege, even in places where it has socially thrived. Of course, I can always order books over the Internet, but it is so impersonal and intangible, and the loss of these bricks and mortal stores in the real world will invariably affect the quality of the selection.

Labels: American Culture, Bay Area, California, Independent Bookstores, Postmodernism

The loss of independent bookstores, like the closing of the arthouse cinema, has always been something that strikes me keenly. In the 1960s, 1970s and even the 1980s, film, literature and engrossing non-fiction were forms of expression that resisted the general trend towards the commodification of culture. People could describe themselves, their experiences and their values free of the constraints of the marketplace, or, at least, carve a little place for themselves to do so within a world where commerce was relentlessly imposing a homogeneity under the guise of more and more illusory choices. Others could partake of these cultural creations relatively inexpensively.

Throughout much of America, that world no longer exists. The bookstore means Borders, Barnes and Noble and maybe some local used ones, although I concede that perhaps people use the Internet to gain access to materials that are otherwise unavailable, while movies mean the metroplex, although again, those with a feel for film, its history and its great achievements may still be keeping the flame alive through Netflix. Even so, the intimacy of engaging these art forms socially in our communities as a tangible, collective experience has been lost. There is a delight in looking through the stacks of an idiosyncratic bookstore in the presence of others, even if the encounters are non-verbal, just as there is a joy in watching a film in the theatre, and, similar to attending a baseball or basketball game, simultaneously creating and recognizing the emotional response of the audience.

Back in May, I touched upon some of these themes when I posted about the closing of the Cody's Books store on Telegraph Avenue near UC Berkeley (for some, the only authentic Cody's, despite the continued operation of other ones on Fourth Avenue in Berkeley and Union Square in San Francisco). For me, Berkeley is a touchstone for the survival of this sort of culture, because it has been at the center of its creation and so strongly resisted its destruction. By way of contrast, I had the opportunity to visit the commercial district around Harvard about 7 or 8 years ago, and it had already been redeveloped into something that reminded me of an upscale Santa Cruz shopping mall, with one retail establishment exhibiting a salmon colored, faux Spanish style storefront. The heyday of postmodern commercial architecture, I guess, but, at least, I found an excellent Joy Division CD.

So, if it disappears in Berkeley, where can it survive, except in a pallid virtual form? A sad question, rendered all the more poignant by the recently publicized prospect that Black Oaks Books may find itself having to close in the near future:

Don Pretari doesn't want to shut the doors of Black Oak Books. And not just because running the store has been his life's work.

When not attending to the details of the 23-year-old business, he spends every spare minute studying languages, including Quranic Arabic, classical Chinese, biblical Hebrew, Ethiopic and more.

"All the languages I study are dead," he says. "Who would hire me?"

But with profit margins down, a five-year lease coming due and a partner who wants to retire, Pretari, 49, may have to seek a vocation less perfectly suited to a Berkeley-educated polymath.

Last week, he sent up a trial balloon, inviting someone, anyone, to buy one or both Black Oaks stores -- the Berkeley location on Shattuck Avenue or the San Francisco store on Irving Street. (A short-lived third store in North Beach closed last year.)

"We'd like Black Oak to keep going," he says, adjusting his round glasses and settling into a chair in the back office, a warren of books. "We're exploring every possibility, even if that means someone else has to come in and own it."

Whether Pretari and his partners sell the store or find a way to keep it going themselves -- perhaps through renegotiation of the nearly $1 million Berkeley lease -- they don't want to see it change.

Now, I'll be honest, Black Oaks Books is not my first preference when it comes to buying books, I prefer Moe's on Telegraph or Modern Times in the City (how predictable, some of you must no doubt be saying to yourself), and I don't commonly frequent the North Berkeley district when it's Berkeley store is located, but I do shop there, and I have bought books there over the years, and will no doubt do so in the future -- if it is still there. I still remember seeing James Ellroy there several years ago, which was interesting, because, while he is personally right wing (he has written positively of former LAPD Chief Darryl Gates), his novels, as observed by Mike Davis, are readily susceptible to left, and even anarchist, interpretations.

Black Oaks Books is an alluring place because of the attitude that lead to its creation:

In 1975, Pretari came to UC Berkeley to study philosophy. But he dropped out just short of an advanced degree after his professors recommended that he transfer to the comparative literature department, so that he could pursue his study of Jacques Derrida, the French master of deconstruction.

A bookstore career began, dovetailing nicely with a lifetime of reading and book collecting. In 1980, he went to Moe's Books on Telegraph, the venerable used bookstore. "I told Moe, 'I know your inventory better than you do,' " Pretari recalls.

At Moe's, he met Brown and Bob Baldock, like-minded men 20 years his senior who invited him to help them start a new enterprise: Black Oak Books. (Brown is now considering retirement; Baldock has long since moved on.)

"We weren't businessmen, we were just book lovers," Pretari says. With "a few personal loans, very little money and our own personal libraries," they created the store they'd want to browse in. It opened in 1983 to near-instant success, situated in the Gourmet Ghetto, the stretch of Shattuck in North Berkeley near Chez Panisse.

"We put the kind of books we like out there -- and they sold," he says, still surprised. They furnished the front of the store with browser-friendly tables and displayed worthy, even obscure, books among better-known titles -- ideas they borrowed from Cody's Books on Telegraph.

"Fred Cody was my model," Pretari says. "It sounds highfalutin, but that store had a sensibility. It was like a person was choosing the books.

There is also a disarming lack of pretentiousness associated with this store. You can go into it, and look for books about uncommon subjects, like medieval, African or Japanese history, in the same kind of relaxed way that you would look for a ladder in a hardware store. For me, that's a positive, because it suggests a lack of a separation between pop and intellectual culture, even if I have to admit that it has never really existed. I hope it survives.

Labels: American Culture, Bay Area, Independent Bookstores, Postmodernism

For those of us who love the experience of shopping for books in a real, bricks and mortar location, it is a sad day.

Cody's Books, the venerable independent bookstore that has served generations of UC Berkeley students, has announced that it will close its flagship store on the south side of campus because of declining sales and competition from chain stores and the Internet.

The store, on Telegraph Avenue, will close its doors on July 10 after 43 years. "We have lost over $1 million attempting to keep the store open,'' said owner Andy Ross. "As a family business, we cannot continue to afford these ruinous losses.''

Ross said the store had been losing money for 15 years and that pressure from chain stores and the Internet had contributed to an "economic concentration in bookselling'' that was forcing out independent stores like Cody's.

"We leave Telegraph with great sadness but with a sense of honor that we have served our customers and community with distinction,'' Ross said.

I never attended UC Berkeley, but I visited Cody's frequently, and bought many books there, often before or after I watched a film over at the nearby Pacific Film Archive. For example, just last week, I found a rarity, a recently released English translation of Fumiko Hayashi's 1951 novel, Floating Clouds, subsequently made into one of the great Japanese films by Mikio Naruse, just before going over to the Archive to watch the next to last screening of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Bashing.

Of course, it is easy to find and purchase these books over the Internet as Ross observes. But, for me, there just isn't the same delight of discovery. I still recall the excitement of finding Ronald Fraser's riveting oral history of the Spanish Civil War, Blood of Spain, there in the late 1980s. Likewise, as a fan of the prodigal son of the New German Cinema, Thomas Elsaesser's essential Fassbinder's Germany. I could go through my library, and probably identify at least a third of my books as having been purchased at Cody's on Telegraph. A magical collection of novels, histories, biographies and social works that one almost never encounters at Borders and Barnes and Noble. July 10th is the last day of business.

Labels: American Culture, Bay Area, California, Independent Bookstores, Postmodernism