Why Subscribe to What Jack Boulware Fails to Realize?
The title refers to a phrase commonly used whenever someone wrote me an angry letter to the editor. But when you think about it, all of us fail to realize certain things. How boring would life be, if all of us realized everything, all of the time? It’s a big world out there.
Everything here is free for the moment, but I’d like to pay at least some of my bills from my writing. Thank you for subscribing, and if you join as a paid subscriber you will receive extra content, old and new, and help prevent the IRS from breaking down my door, and all of us would prefer to avoid some kind of Willie Nelson tax situation.
There will be a few different sections here:
What Jack Boulware Fails to Realize – News & culture, a bit of memoir, a bit of the ridiculous.
San Francisco in the 90s – Time travel back to the city before the internet swallowed us all.
39-Minute Interviews – Transcribed Zoom calls with current cultural figures that you and I should know more about. (Because free Zoom limits you to 40 minutes.)
Things Read Out Loud – Short pieces written to be performed in bars, nightclubs, libraries, and bookstores. Fiction and nonfiction, occasionally both. Definitely NSFW, if that’s your thing.
Who Are You?
I’ve been writing since the 1980s, first for sketch groups, and then I launched a quasi-humor magazine called U.S. Rag (1986-1988), which was occasionally entertaining. Desktop publishing! I then launched a satirical investigative magazine called The Nose (1989-1995), which covered offbeat news and culture west of the Mississippi River, with an old-school Confidential-style twist. (The Nose was banned from Safeway stores nationwide, and at least one prison.)
In the 1980s I performed in at least ten different improv groups in San Francisco, a few lucky times with Robin Williams, and appeared in several TV commercials and industrials. In the 1990s I produced many unique cultural events, from a Bettie Page film festival, to the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, an evening of literary hoaxes, and a jazz concert benefit for the Church of John Coltrane.
I was also a columnist and features writer for SF Weekly for ten years (1990-2000), and in that time published two books, Sex American Style: An Illustrated Guide to the Golden Age of Heterosexuality (1997), and a mischievous city guide, San Francisco Bizarro (2000). I then freelanced for scads of print publications, because you could do that back then, in both the US and the UK. There was another book a bit later, the Bay Area punk oral history Gimme Something Better (2009).
And amongst all of this, I co-founded the Litquake literary festival in San Francisco (1999), and helped that expand from a single day in Golden Gate Park, to a 16-day festival, with author events throughout the year, film screenings, and satellite Lit Crawl events in several cities.
I’ve hosted and moderated many literary events, from Litquake to the California Book Awards, to JCCSF, Osher Marin JCC, Lit Crawl NYC, South by Southwest, and the Texas Book Festival. My onstage interviews include everyone from Tom McGuane to Adam Johnson, Marc Maron, Harry Shearer, Chris Elliott, Mary Roach, and James Williamson from Iggy and the Stooges. I am proud to contribute to the miniscule canon of literature authored by people named Boulware, which includes The Truth About Boulwarism: Trying to Do Right Voluntarily, and Snoring: New Answers to an Old Problem.
I’ve just retired as Executive Director of Litquake, and don’t worry, it’s still going strong. After four decades of living in San Francisco, I’ve moved out of the city, and if you’re still reading, you can guess this leads us to my Substack page.
A huge thanks if you’re able to afford a paid subscription - it’s only $6/month.
