IT WAS A JUXTAPOSITION OF CONTRADICTORY IMAGES. A colorful banner declaring that Cody’s Books was “Now Open” hung above the store’s awning while a photocopied note on an 8.5x11″ piece of paper informing us that the store had closed for good was affixed to the window below with Scotch tape. Passersby on Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley kept on trying to get into Cody’s. As I waited to do my sidewalk reading, I saw at least five people attempt to enter the store. They jiggled the door, found it to be locked and then saw the Xeroxed sign and kept on walking down the street. Who knows where they eventually spent their dollars. The Ross Dress for Less and a few other stores in the neighborhood had also recently folded. Shattuck Ave. is hurting folks.

Now Open

Now Closed – The End.

The eerie thing about Cody’s was that it still looked like a bookstore. It appeared open and functional. The books were all there, neatly on the shelves. Bestsellers and staff picks were clearly visible through the shop’s glass front. Since the venerable bookstore’s abrupt closure on June 20th, no bitter employees had ransacked the place upon suddenly getting their walking papers. Nobody had even bothered to muss the place up a bit. The rats hadn’t moved in. I wondered if there was a box of copies of my book somewhere in the backroom that had been ordered for my previously scheduled June 30th reading there. There probably was.

Still could be selling books.

At about 10 after 7, I began my reading from Beer, Blood and Cornmeal on the sidewalk in front of Cody’s. A small group of friends and librarians gathered to watch me. People walked past me as if nothing was going on. It was Berkeley. I was just another nutjob with a fringe jacket standing on a street corner and spouting off about something. I began the reading by saying something about not feeling so resigned but the words didn’t come out right. Reading about Sasquatches going crazy and wrestlers cutting each other up with razor blades seemed to do better for me. Some hippy kids stopped and watched me for a while but then moved along. A homeless guy seemed to pay attention. I sold a couple of books. The books were supplied by Green Apple. At least one independent bookstore made some scratch from me being there.

Just another nutjob in a fringe jacket.

You know the Cody’s in San Francisco still has its sign up. It was supposed to be transformed into some atrocity called the Ferrari Store in Spring. We’re well into summer and the Ferrari Store still hasn’t opened. One failed business has been piled on top of another in a monument to our nation’s retail slowdown right there in San Francisco’s financial district. The sign for the Telegraph Avenue Cody’s is also still there. Nobody has moved into these pieces of commercial real estate since the bookstore’s game of musical venues. I should do a tour of all of the closed down Cody’s Books. I’ll stand there on the street reading from my weird wrestling memoir as wouldbe shoppers pass me by vainly searching for a store that’s actually still in business.

Special Thanks to Dave Clarke of Hellavision and Heidi from Fora.tv for filming the event. I’ll let everyone know when the video of the reading is posted. All pictures by Rosie Picado.

Folks, It’s staying light out longer these days so I’m going to still show up to Cody’s this coming Monday and hold my previously scheduled reading on the sidewalk in front of the boarded up husk of what was once a great American bookstore. East Bay People, please still show up to the recently closed Cody’s and bring some friends.

Here’s the info
Monday, June 30th, 7pm
Cody’s Books, 2201 Shattuck Ave in Berkeley

I’m going to be sure to have some copies of “Beer, Blood and Cornmeal” available for sale and signing too.

I mean I even got listed on Flavorpill. The show has to go on!

Well, you can’t say we didn’t see it coming but it did it have to unravel so quickly? Despite the recent opening of their Shattuck Ave. store, Cody’s, a force in Bay Area book sales for 52 years, has suddenly shut its doors. I got an email from Melissa Mytinger (their author event booker) on Friday alerting me that all author events were cancelled. I had a reading scheduled there for June 30th. It was going to be a big one too. There was a lot of buzz around my East Bay author event. Now I have a lot of emails to send out. I’ll try to reschedule at Diesel or somewhere and keep everyone posted when Thunderbirds are Go on an East Bay reading once again.

I met Matthew Polly, author of “American Shaolin” at the ill-fated San Francisco Cody’s (I guess all Cody’s are ill-fated when you think about it). Polly had an actual Shaolin Monk from China at his reading. It was inspiring. His book is similar to mine in that they are both about some facet of the fight game but have a rich back story to them. Mine is about pro wrestling and it’s also about the dot com boom and bust and how it affected the SF music scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Polly’s book is about a kid who quits an Ivy League University to learn kung-fu at the original Shaolin Temple but it’s also about the transformations going on in Chinese society in the early 1990s. Due to the similar flow to “American Shaolin” and “Beer, Blood and Cornmeal,” I asked Polly to write a blurb for my book. He took the time to read through my manuscript and obliged me. “Just pay it forward,” he told me after emailing me the much-needed piece of cover copy, “when some author comes to you to write a blurb for them, make sure that you do.”

Now the Barnes and Nobles have been really good to me and my book. I’m happy to see BBAC on their shelves but there’s no scene in those places. Nothing’s happening there. It takes a place like Cody’s for authors to get together and make things happen. Green Apple, Kepler’s and Rasputin have all done extra things to support my book like selling BBAC at non-bookstore events. Green Apple sold books for me Annie’s Social Club and the Edinburgh Castle. Kepler’s handled the sales for me at my Redwood City Public Library reading last Thursday and Rasputin Music is hawking my book at the Blank Club in San Jose this Tuesday. You could never get a Barnes and Noble to do that.

My blog about choking out librarians and booksellers at BEA earned the BEST BLOG spot on the front page of the lit website Redroom.com. I guess choking out librarians taps into some kind of deeply held subconscious desire in the lit community. I mean who doesn’t want to slap a sleeper hold on a librarian? Here’s the screen grab…

And yes, for those of you who aren’t up on your Count Dante/Bob Calhoun trivia, throughout much of the time that I was wrestling in Incredibly Strange Wrestling, I worked as a library technical assistant in several Bay Area specialty libraries. I did far too much loose leaf filing for local law libraries (probably the most tedious job in all of bibliodom) and was sometimes the default library director at St. Mary’s Medical Center in SF because, well, for vast stretches of time, nobody else worked in the library except for me and a couple of volunteers. I was the whole show; doing Medline searches, ordering documents, shelving books, processing books, prepping journals for the bindery and panicking when I realized that the journal subscriptions were about to run out. I was also doing technical support on the library PCs that the residents used and AV setups on top of the library duties. If that wasn’t enough, I often fielded long assed booking calls where Audra, The Cruiser and me would determine just what the hell to do with The Poontangler and Super Pulga in the next Fillmore show. Thank God that place had a sound proof office for some reason. It was a Catholic hospital you know and nuns were always strolling into that library. Come to think of it, some level of Catholic guilt probably fueled the concepts behind those ISW matches.

But yeah, wearing crazy assed kimonos and choking out librarians – it’s the way to get ahead in this world.

(PS: I hope this post doesn’t hurt my current job search! Damn those blogs!)

Suzanne Kleid is invincible. She writes for McSweeny’s and blogs about lit on Bay Area PBS Station KQED’s website. She has a day job slinging books. Seeing her selling Bukowski to British tourists, you wouldn’t think that she was one badassed SOB, but she is. At Book Expo America last weekend, I, Count Dante, The Deadliest Man Alive no less, applied a devastating chokehold to her and look… She laughs—not even fazed by the expertly applied submission! She’s no-selling the move just like The Undertaker!

Count Dante’s most dangerous hold is no match for Suzanne Kleid, bookseller.

I was in LA for Book Expo America last weekend. I stood at the ECW Press booth at the LA Convention Center in full Dante drag on Saturday morning and applied chokeholds and full nelsons to bewildered booksellers and hapless librarians. You can see several pics of my path of destruction by clicking here for ECW’s Picasa gallery of the event. But after terrorizing all those who dared to stray through the Independent Publisher’s Group (my book’s distributor) section of the convention, the tables were turned on me by Claire Thompson of Turnaround Publishing Services, who slapped this extremely painful arm bar on yours truly…

That’s gotta hurt!

After I was done hawking Beer, Blood and Cornmeal to the entire North American literary community, I surrendered the ECW booth to Edward Winterhalder, celebrity biker and author of The Assimilation from ECW Press. Winterhalder had the most amazing pitch line ever. “Do you know any Harley riders?” he’d ask every book dealer who passed by. “Do you want to make them owe you for the rest of their lives?” This line worked every time. He just had the charisma. He drew people to him and gave away every last one of his books while me, with all of my expert grappling and glittery kimono, only managed to move about half of mine. Winterhalder’s got the hustle. You (and I) could really learn a lot from him. I was in awe.

BEA also gave me the chance to finally meet some people from ECW Press who, up until now, have only been voices on the phone. I hung out with Simon Ware, ECW Press Publicity Director, who’s done a smash up job handling BBAC’s media relations. I also met ECW co-publisher Jack David, who really did a lot for me by giving the green light to my weird wrestling memoir. If I didn’t say it enough times this weekend, thanks Jack. Here’s a shot of me, Winterhalder and Ware. One is a biker from Oklahoma and the other’s a literary publicist from Canada. Can you guess which one?

One of these guys works at a publishing house.

After standing around and meeting book people all day, I strolled over to the Pantry on 9th and Figueroa for an opened faced beef sandwich. This was much like the same sandwich that I ate at 3am the morning before getting my ass handed to me in the only Gracie Jiu-Jitsu tournament I ever entered. What was I thinking? That Pantry sure makes a good gravy smothered beef sandwich though. It’s worth the agony of defeat, but on Saturday it just tasted like… Victory.

Beer, Blood and Cornmeal is at City Lights – the birthplace of the Beats, a literary landmark and possibly the most influential independent bookstore of all time. This little store on Columbus in North Beach changed the course of American literature and there, on a display shelf downstairs, is my weird wrestling book…

Best store placement ever (photo: Brandi Valenza)

While my book is lumped with the other pro wrestling titles at your average Barned and Noble store, at City Lights it’s above a book on the Black Panthers and only one book down from “The Secret History of Al Qaeda.” Noam Chomsky sits above and to the left of BBAC. It’s safe to say that my book is probably the only book on pro wrestling to ever be carried by City Lights. I really doubt that Ferlinghetti’s stocking “Batista Unleashed” any time soon.

Okay I’m shoving off to Book Expo America in LA in just a bit here. I’ll be at the ECW Press table at Booth 925 this Saturday at 11am in full Dante drag and handing out chokeholds. If you’re there, please stop by.

There are few more hallowed watering holes in San Francisco these days than the 540 Club on Clement at 7th. It’s a dive in the best sense of the word and here I am, potentially ruining all the lowbrow ambiance by hauling off and having a book reading there. I mean a book reading at the 540? What are you crazy? You have to be shitting me! Well, yes I am crazy, but remember the 540 is right next to Green Apple Books so the cross pollination of books and booze may be inevitable. At least my book has The Cruiser’s thumb going into all the wrong places, Sasquatches going crazy and El Homo Loco pooping hotdogs out onto a grill during a backroom peepshow. If any book should be read aloud at the 540, it’s mine.

Okay, that all being said, I’ll be reading there this Thursday May 22nd. On Thursday nights they have an extended happy hour with lots of drink specials. You can get really plowed there in a hurry. Books will be available for sale and signing. Here are the details:

Thursday, May 22, 2008, 8pm
Count Dante reads from Beer, Blood and Cornmeal
540 Club
540 Clement @ 7th Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94118

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The Count and THOR backstage in Seattle.

IT WAS TEN AM. I was nursing an overpriced ($8.63) Jack and Coke at a San Jose airport bar when Thor called. This wasn’t just any generic Scandinavian dude named Thor mind you. This was the Rock God, the metal avenger. This Thor bends steel bars in his teeth and blows up hot water bottles in between belting out such metal epics as “Let the Blood Run Red” and “When Gods Collide.”

“Hey Count, This is Thor,” he said with a hint of a Canadian accent. Thor is Canadian. In fact, before becoming a heavy metal warrior, he won the Mister Canada bodybuilding competition in the early 70s. “We need you to be a tick tonight. The bassist for the opening band got really sick before we hit the road and I was wondering if you fill in for the Blue Ticks.”

“Blue Ticks?” I said scratching my head. My band, Count Dante and the Black Dragon Fighting Society backed up Thor at a sold out Slim’s in March. I could chug my way through the Thor set with some authority but I’d never even heard of the Blue Ticks.

“Yeah, the Blue Ticks,” Thor explained, “We do covers of songs like ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ but heavy metal versions. Do you know ‘A Hard Day’s Night?’”

“Um, no,” I replied. Those early 60s Beatles songs all sound real easy when you just listen to them but they’re not. They have crazy jazz chords and modulate all over the place. That’s their genius. They make the complicated sound easy.

“Well, how hard can it be you know? We’re only gonna’ do like five songs.” Thor shot back, trying to be encouraging. At least one of those songs he mentioned was “Wild Thing.” That helped.

“Hey Thor, I’ll see what I can do. We can just bury me in the mix and hope for the best.” Thor seemed encouraged by this. It’s what he wanted to hear and honestly, I have a hard time turning down Thunder Gods.

My new girlfriend Rosie and I had planned this trip to Seattle around Thor’s show up there. He was playing this new club called King Cobra’s last Thursday. After the aforementioned Slim’s show, we kind of missed the big guy and his shred-master guitarist Steve Price. Our flight was on time. We got to the hotel and then got to the venue a bit early in the hopes that I could pick up the Blue Ticks songs during an extended sound check. The sound check never happened. The Ticks’ guitarist did show me how to play “A Hard Day’s Night” and some Paul Revere and the Raiders song but I forgot what sequence the chords went in as soon as we had stopped playing them. The seemingly endless supply of Pabst didn’t help.

The opening band, a Seattle outfit transplanted from San Diego called Skelator played this very Maiden-esque set of power metal. They had long, straight hair too. A lot of people there seemed to be there to see them. There was no way that this crowd of metal maniacs wanted to see me and the Blue Ticks murder Beatles songs. They were probably okay with the murdering part but not the listening part. Thor decided to cut to the chase and just go on since the guys from the Ticks were the same guys in his band.

Thor did ask me to wear the creature costume and duel with him in the middle of the set. The Phantom of the Winds of Time performed this duty at Slim’s. I was honored but was somewhat worried that the suit wouldn’t fit. Luckily it had plenty of stretch. They had a skull mask for me to wear with it, making me a very well fed skeleton. Following Steve Price’s solo “Berzerker,” I donned the costume and went out and menaced the audience. Most of them were properly menaced, backing away from me as I grabbed for them. A drunken little punk rock girl wasn’t afraid, however. She ran up on me. I couldn’t retreat from a 5’3” girl. I was the monster, the creature, the undead come to do battle with Thor! I scooped up her small frame as if I were to body slam her, held her for a while and then put her down. Excited by the moment, she spent the rest of the night trying to make out with dudes.

Thor effortlessly bends a micstand around my skull-like cranium to the delight of Northwesterners!

Thor was onstage while the song “Intercessor” was playing. “I sense a presence,” he said. “There is one among you who is not human!” Thor shined a skull light on the audience members to determine that they were in fact human. I climbed up onto the stage. Thor saw me and mimed shooting bolts of energy out of his hands at me. I staggered back and fell to one knee. I got back up and shot invisible energy blasts at Thor. Thor sold them just as I had. We did this for a while. I mugged to the audience while Thor was down to make them hate me. Thor ran over and we locked up. He hit me with some mighty blows finally driving me down to the floor. He picked me back up as if I were a small sack of potatoes and then effortlessly bent a mic stand around my neck to the delight of the audience. Defeated, I crawled off the stage while Thor continued rocking.

This was the first bit of pro wrestling I’ve done since my last ISW match on the 2001 Warped Tour. I’d be lying if I didn’t say it felt great to get out there and work a crowd that way again. Canada is very good to me. My publisher, ECW Press, is Canadian, Thor is Canadian and I just got a very good review in the Ottawa Xpress, Canada’s largest newsweekly. Click here to check it out. Thank you Thor and thank you Canada.

Beer, Blood and Cornmeal debuted at #9 in quality paperbacks on this week’s San Francisco Chronicle Bay Area Bestseller list…

#9 in paperbacks! Yes, I was part of a punk rock and wrestling cult!

Hey, I’m beating out Cormac McCarthy! Now if I could only knock Eat, Pray, Love off the charts, then America can be saved. This is especially amazing when you consider that every other book on this chart is already a national bestseller and/or put out by a major publishing house. ECW! ECW!

I’d like to thank all of you who have bought and supported BBAC. This really means a lot to me.

LUCHA VA VOOM’S MOVING IN, SEE!?! They’ve got Hollywood standup comedians, ya see! They’ve got real luchadores, ya see! ISW’s through, ya see! Finished! Myah, myah, myah!

Yes, LA’s Lucha Va Voom, with its amalgam of post modern burlesque striptease, stand up comedy and authentic Masked Mexican lucha libre, is coming to the Fillmore on June 29th. ISW did shows at the Fillmore from 1999-2001. People threw tortillas at us. They threw a lot of them. One wonders how the Galavision ready luchadores (Eijo de Santo, Blue Panther, etc.) of LVV will take having so much cornmeal hurled at them. I also can’t help but feel that tossing tortillas at unwitting lucha superstars is somehow more racist than throwing them at El Homo Loco.

The Fillmore is still ISW’s backyard even if ISW vacated that backyard years ago. It probably doesn’t help LVV that my recent book readings and media appearances have reminded the entire Bay Area about its proud tradition of throwing food at masked wrestlers. But then again, LVV’s only going to benefit from any masked wrestling nostalgia that Beer, Blood and Cornmeal has whipped up around here. I’ve inadvertently primed the pump for them.

FULL DISCLOSURE: LVV did a show in SF a few years ago. I was retired from ISW but still missed the attention. I contacted LVV and offered them my services as an announcer. The promoter politely told me that they had “famous Hollywood comedians.” She didn’t get the NWO moment that I was offering them there. It’s San Francisco. We hate LA. Local’s always better.

If you’re really jonesing for Masked Mexican Wrestling in ISW’s old stomping grounds, you can buy tickets for LVV here…
http://www.livenation.com/event/getEvent/eventId/326870/
I mean, what self respecting San Franciscan doesn’t want to tag some smarmy LA comedian right in the face with a corn tortilla?