Walking with Loki: July 4 and all that

We had our annual Independence Day BBQ on Friday ... we hold it on July 1 or July 4 depending upon which falls on the weekend. 26 good friends, loads of food and drink, and hearty conversation. Still warm two days afterward. The long weekend has otherwise been composed only of working ... it is course catalog time again at MRU ... and walking the old pooch, Loki.

On Saturday morning, blissful and muscle weary from the BBQ, Loki and I headed on our usual walk up through Golden Gate Park with a pass through the National AIDS Memorial Grove where I habitually pick up garbage in memory of my many lost friends. The grove is a broad modified ravine, with three stone enclosed circles ... one at the foot, another in the middle, the third at the head. I start at the foot where Thom Gunn's words are engraved on the stone:

Walker within this circle pause
Although they all died of one cause
Remember who their lives were dense
With fine compacted difference

I pause every week in that circle and recite those words silently three times while thining of those I have lost. But this weeks curious action was not there ... it was in the head circle.

I had cleaned up the usual scattering of cigarette butts and wrappers ... no bottle and can orgies this week ... when I espied a curious purple gnome on a rock outsie the circle. I wondered over, and there was this little seated nude man in plaster with a rock hiding his genitals. Beside him was a a pink heart-shaped piece of paper with a note in florid cursive: "Keep me if I make you joyful!" I laughed when I saw him, and he bounced me out of a subverting gloom that was threatening the sunniness consequent upon the Glorious 4th celebration with which I started this post. I photographed my new gnome friend, and then I placed him in a plastic bag and bore him to his new home ... my home.

Gloom and doom, warmth and friendship. Like a pinwheel, the mind flies from one to the other, the succession rapid or slow by reason of the force of the particular wind in which one finds oneself, the blur under pressure sometimes so great that distinguishing is an exercise in futility. The pinwheel in effect for me during the July 4 BBQ was by reason of a conversation about my Gay Day blog post among four of us ... myself and the sainted ex RB, my roommate RL, and my old friend the world-traveler DH who stopped by for an evening between planes. RB thought my remarks on Gay Day were sour, and that bugged me ... stopped my pinwheel short, as it were. I protested, and no doubt took liberties in protesting as one is wont to do with an ex, sainted or otherwise. I claimed it was glum, not sour ... to no avail. I think DH agreed, or at least felt that my present pessimism about the future of the species is at least shallow if not entirely wrong-headed.

I do not want to be sour, or bitter. I cannot help but to be glum on occasion, and I have dark fears about the future. DH asked if I genuinely felt that gays would be hauled off to concentration camps in 2020 ... remember that I have argued that gays today are the like Jews of Germany in 1920. I think I would be a fool to suggest that with any certainty. But gays are, in essence, under the threat of concentration camps as we speak in Iran and Russia and China and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Egypt, and in myriad other places we could face such immanence within a few years at most if conditions were to deteriorate. Der Spiegel had a chilling report only a few days ago about rising homophobia in Germany, fueled not so much by nativist new-nazis as by viciously intolerant muslim youth and bloody-minded Russians. There is some little creep rapper, Bushido, who is of mixed Tunisian-German background notwithstanding the too-cool-for-school Japanese name, who actually sang lyrics calling for gays to be gassed at an anti-violence concert. Gay protesters were flipped off and booed.

But the immanence of violence against gays is not the root of my glumness about the future ... it is immanence of social breakdown by reason of the catastrophe that global warming and its consequences. But even that is not what gets under my skin when the pressure, at work especially, rises.

It's this: how do you plot your own happiness when you find yourself in a society where so many social factors trend in the wrong ethical direction? That's what got me going at Gay Day ... it's what pisses me off when I walk Loki and am jolted out of my reveries by some fool in the middle of the morning park barking rage into a cell phone, or some dimwit in a planet killer sailing a stop sign and putting the fear of gawd into me. That's the me-me-me-ness I referred to, the obesity of American life where all consumption must be defended and all restraint is an evil of otherness.

So it feels sour ... you can see how that bugs me ... but I argue that it is a rational and thoughtful response to a society hamstrung by its joyous oblivion in the face of its unresolved contradictions.

So whadda you do? Activism, of course. Activism requires at least some form of optimism, whether real or feigned. It also requires the means to do it ... whether that be a movement or the leisure or proclivity to operate independently and heroically. Retired activist here, I do not want to hear myself bemoan the lack of opportunity, the more so given the shot of at least feigned optimism that is still attached to Obama notwithstanding his McAuliffe-like pandering and retreating of recent days. But it is not an answer on the personal level to the anxieties of living in a society bound upon eating itself alive.

So one seeks some solace in friends and warmth, in walking the dog, in happenstance, in taking photos and speculating, in reading the past, and especially in trying to do the right thing in your own life. Others see movies, revel to music, renovate the house. And there are those, of course, who sink their sorrows under various excesses. I'm past the party stage, and the solace of retreat is always feigned no matter that it is sometimes fruitful.

I have vowed of late to undercut my own overly responsive anger to the constant little insults ... the bad driving especially, and the ignorance of the cell-addicted who flip you off one way or another all day long. I have to keep at that, especially when the external pressures rise.

This post hasn't gone like I intended it to ... vastly too self-referential and bleak. I feel like a night heron on a rail with a bunch of seagulls! Funny thing about blogging as a genre of writing ... no matter how you plan, you gotta spit it out reasonably fast, and it might not follow the script that seemed so clear as you were wandering around Fisherman's Wharf with the dog.

I wanted to say that life goes on when society is in the grip of its own indissoluble failures, when the casual but fatal decisions taken decades ago are nearing the moment when they explode. The night before the Archduke was shot, merry revelers got drunk in Sarajevo. Imagine Baghdad in 1257 when Hulagu was a rumor ... merchants came and went, lovers sought out-of-the-way hay bales, people washed and dressed and comported as if the sun would keep on rising. It did not save them from the firestorm that wiped their world from the planet ... but they did not know for sure. Life goes on.

I figure the next apocalypse is decades off, maybe I will not see it. But it fills me with gloom when I am not quick enough to think otherwise.

I'm going to work extra hard this week ... I've got to ... and try to get my book, which goes to press on August 4, into a shape such that I can feel lighter. And I will try to write something nice, notwithstanding that I still owe you a post on the Prusso-German state.

So let's be happy ... party while you can! Even if you gotta fake it. And find some joy in the odd purple gnome who crosses your path!


Photos from walks yesterday and today: top photo from Golden Gate Park, the second from the big tourist commercial pier at Fisherman's Wharf, the third from a still accessible working fishing pier, and the last from a storefront on Haight Street.

Walking with Loki: Happy New Year!

Somewhat worse for the wear, and the time nearer to noon than an early riser like myself would prefer to admit, I managed to drag myself and the dog into our magnificent '86 Honda Civic and headed over to Fort Mason for a long New Year's Day walk through Fisherman's Wharf. On NPR, Sam Keen was discussing his Sightings: Extraordinary Encounters with Ordinary Birds. It was a re-run and I had heard part of it before ... no matter because thinking about the miracle of birds is pretty much as spiritual as I get. I tell this anecdote, because Loki and I had unusual luck in casual birding during the three hours we wondered around.

But back up a little ... last night, we had a pleasant, long dinner with a few friends upstairs, eating AW's exquisite offerings and slowly, slowly drowning the old year in fine booze. We basically missed the big moment ... no countdown ... Frobisher quickly found a complete version of Auld Lang Syne on the net, and we sang that all the way through. And then we scattered just like the bunch of early risers we mostly all are, rebeling against being forced to stay awake past midnight.

And so it is 2008.

2007 for me: I started a blog, upgraded my computer life with a new desktop and laptop. I visited Vancouver. I read and read and read. The job went well, and the new boss has turned out to be even more revolutionary than I had imagined. Gave a few good parties, and the Christmas party was perfect. I think we ... that is my roommate and I ... made a lot of progress in ecologizing our personal habits. A good year, not earth shattering. Maybe that is why the days after Christmas often leave me a little melancholy ... good, not earth shattering. It's not that I am objectively stuck ... I have a good life, great friends, comfort and happiness. But some part of me keeps nagging ... isn't there more? Am I missing something that would require more guts, more glory, more risks?

So as Loki, my dog, and I wandered around the piers behind the tourist hordes at Fisherman's Wharf, and as the birds reigned above and on the water, I thought about guts and glory and risks, and living well, and figuring out what to do next.

The night heron at the top of this post was the most sublime avian encounter we had today. You don't see them that often. I saw three today, and one on Sunday when we also walked along the wharfs. I am assuming that they are night herons, but they might be green herons. I asked a couple of cops who were obviously part of the water patrol and who had stopped to look at a rather large starfish. Cops, even when you're being nice, have a tendency to look at you with undisguised skepticism. They didn't know. A couple of young, rough-looking fishermen did confirm they are night herons, and then volunteered that the night herons don't like gulls and harass them. Nice folks ... happy new year's all around.


We also saw several great blue herons. The pic above I actually took on Sunday. My little "belt camera", a late-model Canon Elph, has many positives, but a long telephoto is not one of them. 2008 will see some camera-upgrading once I have caught up with Christmas expenses. In the meanwhile, birds in my photos seem a little far away. But birds are never far away from my wandering thoughts. I have more or less given up on the iPod when walking the dog because I couldn't hear the birds.

Anyway, we also saw grebes, sundry gulls including one that I could not identify (gray body, white head). I'm not an expert of any type, so the assorted sea birds are confusing ... but I assume that we saw lesser scaups and some kind of merganser. We also saw a white egret ... or is that a cattle egret or a snowy egret. An egret nonetheless, and any day in which one sees three different species of egret/herons, well that is a good day. And once we left the shore, we saw and heard all manner of songbirds.

Before the walk, I had decided on creating New Year's resolutions that would be a series of monosyllables. I had three ... write, make, break ... and I wanted to add another ... go. But I tend to avoid even numbers of things ... that's a little nutty, of course ... so I set out to think of another monosyllable. The birds helped out ... fly.

Write, make, break, go, fly.

Write means that what I have started here I need to continue and expand.

Make means that I want to create photos and objects and aquariums and collections.

Break means I need to break up those parts of the comforts that I enjoy which interfere with thinking and changing and growing ... in particular my great comfort in solitude.

Go means I need to travel on down my roads gamely and boldly, and not be afraid to let go instead of running away.

Fly means I go to Europe again this year after taking a year off in favor of dentistry.

Living in comfort and as much security as any working middle class person can pretend to ... it obscures the fact that our world appears to be on the brink of an epochal change, and that change does not appear to be promising. So I can plan to write, make, break, go, fly, but what will it mean if the climate continues to decline more rapidly than even the most pessimistic scientists predicted only a few years ago? What does it mean in a society that continually accelerates the pace of living to the detriment of personal lives and the deeper satisfactions? What does it matter when I live in the midst of the greediest society that has ever dominated the planet, and as the lust for commodities crushes more of our planet ever passing moment?

I do not have answers for that ... not now at any rate ... but it did stir me to some side-vows that this will be a year in which I will not let the anger at the decline in our world impact my personal behavior ... no more fingers at Hummers, no more angry glares at the brain-dead cell phone herd, no more lectures to the passing impertinent. I still get to be cranky here, of course ... what the hell is a blog if you can't be cranky. But I am going to try to blithely ignore the ugliness through which I swim every day as I go about my business as best I can.

So, Happy New Year. Write, make, break, go, fly.


Photos by Arod.

Walking with Loki

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I guess I've been a little glum lately. It strikes me that was the case last year as well at this time except for those fabulous five days in Paris. No Paris this year, alas, or any such European adventure as I have declared this "The Year of the Teeth" ... a bunch of moola laid aside to tackle all the extant dental issues as I head in the latter part of early middle age.

So the period after I publish my catalog makes me a little glum ... I should keep that in mind so it doesn't catch me with my eyes closed again.


The Waterfront: So changed from its grubby before life in the 80s when I first became a San Franciscan. Vastly improved, a thoroughfare for pedestrians and skaters and bicyclists and all manner of folk. I think the City is still dragging its feet in restoring and opening up the piers. The one that they recently opened for high end offices is magnificent, an architectural feast (photo above is of one of the windows there). Why not more of the same. And I quibble with the lack of retail, dining, and drinking down south near the ballpark ... evidently caused by the suburban objections of the condo owners who want their peace and quiet. A pox on them. If you want quiet, move to Montana.

But these are quibbles. The change is for the good.

I tried to write about change obliquely in the immediately preceding post. I don't like it ... the post, that is ... but if a blog is going to be meaningful, I think after-the-fact editing should be limited to typos and style and constructions. Fail your way to success ... gotta leave the crumbling shacks beside the epic monuments, if there are any.

So I spent the long walk along the waterfront and back through downtown thinking about change, and change at work in particular. I don't want to articulate the solid issues here ... the particularities of work are not the point of this blog. But change in the abstract is different than change in the event. Curious instance of that on the waterfront in the last few days.


Red's Java House has been around for a long time ... like so many shacks by the sea, where it starts and ends, and the boundary between it and the pier and the bay, these things are not at all clear or delineated. I have not eaten there in some time, but the last time was with my boss in that one year in the dot com world ... and I ended up with indigestion from a truly threatening hamburger and fries. But the story here is that the city recently and suddenly upped their rent from $800 to $4400 (or figures very near to those). The owners squawked mightily, and through benefit of the predictable public outrage, ended up with a deal around $3000 plus a cut of profits that both sides agree are meager.

Change ... the waterfront changes for the better, but Red's loses out because no incremental increase in business can possibly fund a quintuple rise in rent. An ambience consumer like myself wants Red's there because it has funk. But funk-watchers are not a revenue stream. The handwriting is on the wall ... Red's will get gussied up (I would say gentrified but the word is so loaded that I loathe it) and what was once funk will be funk design. The odor will float away to be replaced by cool framed photos of what used to be odiferous. With any luck the son of the owner might end up manager of a new place and make a lot more money and even have time off for vacation.

Kearny Street: All of this is speculation, but the point is that there is no such thing as a zero sum game. It is not that each winner makes a loser ... but it is that even in big wins, there are those on the winning side who would rather that the game had never begun. The speed of these sorts of things in the modern workplace is dizzying. I guess that explains a little of the glum I feel. It is not that I am not prepared for, even excited, by a change of style and direction. It is that it is fatiguing, and I do not know if I will be the owner of the new franchise or if I will be the former owner of Red's ... so I better decide I will be the new franchisee. Glum is pointless. Buck up, buttercup!

My first job in San Francisco was two blocks from where I shot the photo above today. We were on the fourth floor of a fabulous building on Sutter Street that was home to art galleries and what not. Reardon and Krebs was the name of operation; it had been a long-time byword in high quality typesetting, and the detritus of the old metal type shop lay around the little air conditioned shack that had been built in the middle of the floor to house the new "cold type" operation. A lot of guys had lost jobs, and the several who accepted retraining on the ADS Berthold 3000 system did everything in their power to slow the computer revolution ... they typed slowly, they broke big jobs into tiny pieces, they loaded the glass fonts into the printer slowly. I was not welcome ... young guy full of the new technology, I could out-operate, out-typeset them in my sleep.

I hung with that place for four years before I headed to Berkeley as a 31-year-old freshman in January of 1985. But the foot dragging by the old guard never stopped, and ultimately that along with a raft of other factors led the place to fade away. I never heard that it had actually failed, but evidently it did. The place on Harrison Street to which they moved from Sutter Street in 1983 is now a gay sex club.

R&K was one of the first classic typeshops that moved into the new technology; but the bad attitude eventually sunk it anyway. I didn't share that bad attitude, and ultimately I moved on.

(About the photo ... this is two or three blocks from the Stock Exchange, right downtown. As long as I have been in San Francisco, those few blocks of Kearny have always been tacky at best, cruddy at worst. But we have a nail salon in what was once a real estate office. Progress? Not sure. Change? That it is.)


Zeum: There is a distinctly new Europe feel to the architecture of this place, a playground for children and adults. Notwithstanding how central it is, it is a bit of a forgotten corner. I have been here a few times to see A.C.T.studio productions with my friend RO. You can get a good hamburger upstairs.

That said, when it is empty of people, it has a post-apocalyptic feel, and that feeling is reinforced by the walk south back and forth along the little alleys between 3rd and 4th. Click on the photo above for a little collection of some vignettes from that portion of this walk.

The speculations on change that I tried to represent above had the effect of lightening my mood, and I ended taking around a hundred photos of an area I have photographed many times before. From glum to giddy, and no doubt back again. Life as a low bore manic depressive. I'm laughing.

I allowed myself an Egg McMuffin on the way back ... sort of like pricking yourself with a pin. It hurt, but in a fun, spanky sort of way.

Walking with Loki

I have a sick fish, a Rotkeil who lost a battle for supremacy with his mate in a 40 gallon community tank. He is now exiled to a 10 gallon holding tank until the 60 gallon tank finally has an acceptable ammonia level. I don't want to discuss that. But this fellah keeps getting ill in his isolation tank ... not eating well, all that. So I had to take the dog down to the Polk area where my aquarium dealer of 15 years, Justin and Ady of Ocean Aquarium, hold court. Justin says not to worry, just watch and wait. No meds.

But that means that Loki and I get to walk in the Polk area ... along Polk to Pacifc and then back via Hyde to California.

The Polk area is just plain filthy these days, and the city seems to ignore it. It has always been a pretty scummy area, but it is getting worse in a lot of ways. Back in the 70s and 80s, it was one of three known gay areas of town ... probably the oldest of the three, though not the original in any sense. When I moved here, it was famous for its hustlers who pretty much lined the street ... always on the east side. Back in those days, long before the Internet, and even before pagers and ads and all that, there was every kind of whore ... from the real skanky drug addicts to nervous amateurs testing the waters. Now it is only the real desperate drug addicts, and it is hard to tell if they are really whores. Walking down the street at 6 in the evening on a weeknight, you really don't want anybody to touch you.

Once we left Polk Street and went east to Hyde Street, we're in an extension of Chinatown, and not the upscale part at all. Cheap restaurants and what feels like wall-to-wall nail shops ... nail shops ... call me out of touch, but I missed the memo on nail shops. And how a neighborhood can support a couple dozen of them escapes me. Need to spend a little more time thinking about that.

Wide array of folks walking the groceries home ... Asian of all ages, young white guys, middle aged office worker women, plenty of rough looking types. The usual mad traffic of the incompetent tank-driving types running stops signs and roaring around tight corners. Still, an eyeful.

We find a mural on the side of an African restaurant at California and Hyde. Seems like a metaphor for global warming and all the fun flooding we will get to swim in. Had to step around various garbage and organic compounds to take the pic. One of lots of crazy eateries hidden in the back streets ... a couple of French type bistros, one Italian place that looked good, and lots of cheap Chinese places that allure for romantic reasons but probably would deliver more heartburn than hearty good eating. This African place is right on California, so probably gets some foot traffic. You get the sense that most of these places, though, survive off locals in this dense urban mélange.

Down the road is the John Barleycorn pub that will probably be closed because it lost its lease. Click on the link for the save the place site. They write: ”The John Barleycorn, one of San Francisco's hidden gems for nearly 40 years, is being forced to leave. Luisa Hanson, the new owner of the property at 1500 California Street, the building which houses the Barleycorn, refuses to discuss any renewal of the lease, which expires in June. At issue is not only the continuance of the Barleycorn, a center of the community and an asset to the city as well, but the economic future of the neighborhood of Lower Nob Hill. The Barleycorn, with its cable car benches, church pews from Old St. Mary's and other historic furnishings, is the right size and scale for this neighborhood. Its replacement will be resented, and perhaps shunned, leading to the economic demise of any subsequent business, particularly for a proprietor who turns a blind eye to neighborhood tradition."

Just down the street is a boarded up place ... that is what happens when you kill John Barleycorn and put in a fly by night restaurant bound for failure. Growl.

Voice

Had a nice walk with Loki this morning, and a sweet concatentation of some of my favorite voices on the iPod shuffle. So here is a little stretch of music which accompanied us (well, Loki couldn't actually hear it, but let's say he picked up on the groove) through the Golden Gate Park stretch of the walk:

Alison Krauss: Oh Atlanta
Rosemary Clooney: Brazil
Incubus: Just a Phase
Old and in the Gray: Victim to the Tomb
Ray Charles: This Love of Mine
David Bowie: Song for Bob Dylan
Joni Mitchell: Barandgrill
Red Allen, Jim Buchanan, David Grisman, Herb Pederson: Love Please Come Home
Dixie Chicks: Baby Hold On
Joni Mitchell: You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio
Neil Young: After the Gold Rush
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: Be Wafa

My ability as a music critic is pretty limited ... the "I know what I like" sort of criticism. So pardon the obviousness of this: I like the foregrounded voice more than the arranged voice. So that Rosemary Clooney song is almost my national anthem, and the early Ray Charles does a lot more for me than the later. I love bluegrass voices, whether the rough and ready traditional stuff or the sweet clarion Alison Krauss.

No point to this post other than that ... some voices that I love to hear in the early morning, a cold wind blowing, the dahlias in bloom, the dog leading and following by turns.

Walkin' with Loki

Exquisite day today. We got moving early because this is one of those days with no pause ... I'm able to blog for a bit only because Trader Joe's does not wake up very early.

Panhandle: They've put up an intriguing temporary bandshell in the Panhandle, made entirely of recycled materials ... car hoods, water bottles, and circuit boards, as well as recycled lumber. It is for a summer long festival of non-amplified music, poetry, performance, what not. As I photographed it, I talked about it with a 30-something rugged-looking homeless guy with a square box black tattoo on his face. He bemoaned that somebody would probably graffiti the thing ... but we agreed it is great to get people into public spaces for art. As he walked away I noticed he had a loin cloth hanging over the ass of his pants ... I've seen that before with homeless folks. I wonder what it is for, or if it just style.

I kept thinking all walk long about Sebastiane. I did not expect the film to have such an impact on me in terms of thinking about the modalities by which Christianity conquered the Roman world. I wrote in my dissertation about Anthony Johns' notion of modalities for explaining how Islam conquered the Malay world, and I have been thinking that this would be a fruitful way to answer one of the big questions that got me reading the middle ages over the last year ... why did Christianity win? I am going to take a few days from this, even though I think I have some fruitful paths to follow at this point. I want to spend the next few days thinking about Gay Day and gay liberation and all it has meant to me and mine.

Of course, thinking about gay liberation and thinking about Sebastian have some crossovers.

An old friend, Laurine Harrison, passed away very suddenly in Vancouver this week, and I heard from another old friend who now lives in Los Angeles about it. I guess that is part of getting older ... you hear about things when people die. I had a decade of I call "the Deaths" when I lost an army of friends, acquaintances, and passers-by to AIDS. But no amount of death seems to prepare you for more of it. Laurine was a good person who made a good life, and by report was an iconic figure at Simon Fraser University. I haven't spoken with her in easily 20 years, and now I wish I had. Of course, it is a vain hope to stay in touch with everybody, but the longing for the things we have to pass up is all the more acute when we no longer have the choice.

Squabbling monkeys: A couple of pointless squabbles in my life yesterday. We are monkeys, of course, and we squabble. Unavoidable but loathsome. I am a bit of a coward about conflict ... I just want everything to be calm and pacific ... rather than, say, squalling and atlantic. Does that mean anything? All will soon pass, but I always promise never to squabble again, and it always comes to a bad end.

Walkin' with Loki: Of nasty stuff, redux, oft comes good ... I am happy that I stopped walking on Saturday mornings in the Gough area consequent upon the desecration of the Hebrew Free Loan Association about which I blogged a while back because I am encountering the Haight anew. It is certainly better to walk the Haight very early, and in the sunny morning it is beautiful and calm, a little paradise, or more to the point, a bunch of little paradises nestled into each other. I like to look up because there is more beauty there, and in the Haight you have to watch what you might see if you look down too much ... don't want to step in it though, so one has to be alert.

Photos by Arod, taken today.

Walkin with Loki

Saturday: Still so disgusted at the yeller paint job on the Hebrew Free Loan Association that I changed my normal Saturday morning walk. For a couple of years, Loki and I have headed down Market, across Franklin or the new Octavia Boulevard, then up Hayes or Grove and back home via any number of routes depending upon how much time we have.

So starting this weekend, we're going to go West, wander through the Haight and walk back through the Panhandle, all long ago home to the Summer of Love. The Haight is definitely best in the early morning before the madding crowds of lookie loos and the incessant circling for parking. No neighborhood better illustrates the destructive impact of the monster car counter-revolution than a place like the Haight. SUV driving has caused a marked deterioration in driving skill in general ... people wander all over the place, make left turns like one-eyed drunks, crowd the center stripe, blow through stop signs like they're not there. It has to do with the self-absorption of bloodless cynical empty consumption combined with most people driving vehicles that are just plain too big for either their limited attention span or their driving skills. Cranky. I plan to wax more cranky on this subject again later.

It has been cool and dank, which is the way I like it. Only a few hardy drunks and speeders and generalized homeless on Haight itself. Loki doesn't like the homeless ... I figure they must smell different because my last dog, the red husky Den, also didn't like homeless people. I keep him on a tight leash when they're around.

Found an old mural from the 70s, The Spirit of Youth, on some sort of youthie community center ... they have a lot of community in the Haight, after all. Faded mural, but a couple of the figures struck me as exuding unselfconscious sexiness. I guess as an old fag from the 70s who revelled in the unselfconsciousness of the sexiness of men of the time, this litle faded mural pulled me back in time. I enjoyed the 80s and 90s movement of men into the mainstream of sexiness, and I argue that this has a lot to do with the consciousness that gay liberation commanded, but some nagging sense worries me that we let the secret out of the bag.



Had a bagel in this place once a few months back, and the cream cheese was kinda crappy and cheap. San Francisco abounds in little places like this, but this one never seems very crowded. Just after I took this pic, some young guy came along and sat outside ... he watched me with a look of disinterest as I photographed sundry street art. I wanted to shoot him, but my little belt camera has insufficient telephoto capabilities for candid human shots. This would not have been terribly candid, at any rate.


Stood in the middle of an empty Haight to take a shot of an old bar ... cop drives up slow on me, but lets me do my thing, perhaps because I was pretty efficient about it. I shoot all these photos with a big dog on a rope tied to my left hand, so it is a bit of a balancing act. Loki is reasonably patient but he does get to tugging. I wonder who drinks in this place ... I figure it could be a bar in Phillie or Kansas City. It's up toward the end of Haight, near Stanyan, where the funk of the street runs out quick. At Stanyan, which is where Haight Street ends and Golden Gate Park begins, there is an ill-conceived MacDonalds (where were the NIMBY protesters when we needed them), a boarded up grocery store that is supposed to become a Real Foods, an abandoned bowling alley. There used to be a homeless encampment, but the city finally cleaned them out ... or leastwise moved them a couple of blocks north as best as I can tell.

Sunday: We took the Fisherman's Wharf, North Beach walk that I wrote about when on my first real blog post, but this time took about three hours to do as we dilly-dallied here and there. Again, a nice cool slightly moist day, not too many people about.


I let Loki have a look at the seals at Pier 39 (or some such number ... I'll have to check it out.) Loki, naturally, was inordinately interested, but did manage to suppress any barking. He strangely gets spooked by the bison in Golden Gate Park, but he could not take his eyes off this caviling herd. Amidst the squabbling, certain of their members sleep in utter peace. We are not privy to the particulars of why some sleep, some squabble, and some get shoved back into the water.

We rambled around the waterfront, and over Vallejo again. It appears that they are going to close Vallejo between Columbus and Grant to make room for a pedestrian mall fronting the new national shrine to Saint Francis of Assisi, patron saint of our fair city. I am in favor of pretty much any pedestrian mall, but it amusing to realize that the sanctimonious fathers and mothers of the onetruechurch will be smugly clapping themselves on the back while all the aging beatniks and anarchoids and atheists and philosophes of the venerable Caffe Trieste, directly across the mall, will have even more room to stretch out their indolent limbs.


Loki and I took refuge at the Caffe Puccini ... I never have enough time to wait in the line at the Trieste given that the dog has to wait unhappily outside. We had ... leastwise I had the vast majority of ... a lox bagel and a macchiato. Even here in little Italy, the macchiato is what a cappuccino would have been only a decade or so ago. Everything is bigger now .... the cars, the waistlines, the egos, and the coffee drinks.

Photos by Arod

Walkin with Loki

Another weird walk on Sunday. Somehow, I forgot about Carnaval and a street that is normally pretty empty on Sunday morning was teeming with people. We cut across Valencia as we often do anyway on this route, and then there was this photo op in a parking lot. So I leapt over the chain, and dog followed, and just as I pulled out my little Canon Elph, Loki jumped at some pigeons ... the camera flew out in an arc 10 feet high, and landed kerplunk ... damage minimal, but the aperture no longer functions. That little camera is two years old, and it changed my life, and it was just by luck the last purchase for which I bought a full warranty. So I can get it fixed for free, but I need a camera. I ended up buying the current model (a Canon Powershot SD 750), and I promised Mother that she can have the old one once it gets back from the hospital.

Sheesh, that's two walks in a row with unfortunate moments. I get a new camera out of the deal (well, I get to pay for it too).

Today (Memorial Day), we went to Land's End. I tried out the new camera, shooting shots I've shot many times before. After many tries, I finally had the opportunity to photograph the remains of the Sutro Baths with no other human beings around because we were so early. A madness of pelicans flying overhead .. we stopped in awe ... perhaps Loki had designs on them I would rather not quantify, but I was mightily impressed.

On the way back, we detoured and found ourselves in the middle of the golf course ... legal path, but that did not prevent the Japanese speaking golfers from giving us the withering look. I wouldn't mind golfers so much if their sport was not so environmentally destructive ... why not get back to the Scottish way and let the fairways go fallow.

Anyway, a nice walk, very relaxing.

An Architectural Desecration

Unhappy walk today ... didn't start out that way. Some young female twit blew a stop sign without looking while we were in the crosswalk at Octavia and Hayes ... the dog and I were five feet away. I yelled and she stopped and then gave me a little dismissive flip of the hand. Driving some obscene SUV. It's always somebody else's fault nowadays ... the little shit.

But that was nothing compared to an architectural desecration at Buchanan and Grove, a few blocks away. There is a magnificent old brick building there with a faded tile sign that says "Hebrew Free Loan Association" and a cornerstone that says 1925. This part of town is the Western Addition, and for many decades, especially after the Second World War, it was a relatively poor and very multi-ethnic neighborhood. In the late 40s and early 50s, it was largely razed and turned into ugly subsidized housing, and much of it remains an architectural scar ... opposite the building in question on both Buchanan and Grove are subsidized housing units, albeit in pretty good shape and well-maintained, but nothing compared to the fabulous Victorians that were destroyed in the 50s.

The Hebrew Free Loan Association building had long seemed empty, but in the last year or so several signs in Korean sprouted, and there is one rather weather-beaten metal sign that says "Korean American Residents Association of San Francisco Bay Area."

All well and fine, except ... today they started to paint the ancient bricks a hideous cheap yellow ... and a crappy amateurish paint job to boot. These magnificent bricks have never been painted before. They have already painted over the inlaid "Hebrew Free Loan Association" logo. Do they plan to rip out the iron grates with the stars of David? It is a brutal, bloody-minded assault on San Francisco's architectural heritage, and an assault on historical memory. What are they thinking?

The only organization with online contact information in this location that I can find is the Korean American Women Artists & Writers Association. It is possible that the organization is actually called the Korean American Community Center of San Francisco and Bay Area, but it has no readly accessible online presence. Whoever it is has committed a crime against art. It is bizarre that this is an Asian organization considering the recent, stirring world premiere of After The War by Philip Kan Gotanda (pdf) at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater which treated of the multi-ethnic community and its destruction in the 50s ... now some short-sighted organization does more damage. Shame on them.

I have sent some notes to sundry parties and will post any results here. If this building has already been declared worthy of historical preservation, whoever mucked it up will have some expensive restoration to do.

I have photographed the building numerous times ... it is a difficult subject because it is dark, close to the street and shrouded by trees, so I have mostly shot details. I mounted a folder of photos before the desecration here or just click on the photo. I think I have more photos but I'll have to hunt them down and will post them if I find them.

Walking with Loki

Loki, my big ole mutt, and I did our Sunday morning walk on the Embarcadero this week. We walked from the Giants' ballpark along the Embarcadero to Broadway, then wended our way back through downtown, ending up in Yerba Buena Gardens, the urbane park behind the Metreon, and then back to 3rd and King.

Nice day, clear skies, blustery wind, cool temps. Not so many people on the Embarcadero because of Bay to Breakers, the annual foot race.

I've walked this route many times, and so I only shot a few photos, mostly focusing on reflections, a subject I find endlessly fascinating. Loki is very patient as I stop to shoot, but sooner or later he ends up pulling on the leash. That little tug means I have wasted enough time.

Click here for a little slide show of some of today's shots.

Walkin with Loki

It’s tough to start writing a blog. I write all the time, but when I think of committing it to print, as it were ... or were not ... I figure it is either too cranky or too arcane or not what I want to be the first post on my blog. So something nice and not arcane and fundamental to what it is I do with myself these days when I have moment to relax.

The dog and I take a two plus hour walk every Sunday morning, somewhere in San Francisco ... we have many routes, but Fisherman’s Wharf/Embarcadero/North Beach is one of our favorites. The dog, Loki, is a 90 pound short-haired yeller mutt, rather more concerned than most dogs, but a great walker which is his main job in my life. We started at Fort Mason, amble though Fisherman’s Wharf, march along the Embarcadero, then over Telegraph Hill via Vallejo or Filbert, past the Trieste Café, along Columbus and back to Fort Mason via Bay Street. Various detours here and there.

Stopped for a crab sandwich at Fisherman’s Wharf ... I’ve lived in San Francisco for over 25 years, and this was my first crab sandwich at the wharf. It was cold! Normally I get a lox bagel at Katz’s Bagels on 16th and take it to wherever we walk ... or get one at Puccini’s on Columbus if we’re in North Beach and sit at the sidewalk tables and watch the turisti squeeze by. Think I’ll go back to the old route. The sandwich was okay but so what ... and the dog, strangely, wouldn’t eat the crab. He won’t eat shrimp either, so no surprise. Sat on a wharf and scarfed it down watching some fishermen put out for a day’s labors. Maybe next time I’ll get clam chowder.

Last couple of times I walked the Embarcadero there was some vast cruise ship docking, with crowds of the obscenely overfed gabbing on cell phones and pushing luggage, milling about. None this week ... just the usual rivulet of runners, coursing through scattered clustered families craning and straining.

Cut through Levi Plaza which has two very different but fabulous fountains. The big one on the main plaza can be traversed on stepping stones ... concrete blocks, really. The dog fell in one week ... my fault as I was more concerned with lining up a photo than preserving a few square feet of rock for his foothold. He looked at me with that combo look of surprise and disdain that dogs in their comfort of middle age can get. Shook it off and moved on.

Sometimes we climb the Filbert steps to Coit Tower, but I was lazy this time so we went up Vallejo which is not quite such a climb and has the advantage this time of year of all its many roses in bloom. Homeless older black guy, rather beatnik looking, taking the sun, didn’t return my hello. On the way down the other side I stopped at a sidewalk sale next to the Cafe Trieste run by an old North Beach looking lady who was harassing an old alkie who didn’t know what the L-train was. Funny. I asked her how much the little Eiffel Tower was; she said fifty centavos. “How about a buck”, and she took it. I told her I had been too embarrassed to buy one in Paris, and that got a good round laugh.

We did stop at Puccini’s for a macchiato and biscotto. I was battin my eyes at some long lean drink of water, but battin yer eyes at 54 does not have quite the electricity it had a few decades ago. I gather he didn’t notice. Still a nice sit and spin. Poor dog is never quite content with a pause.

And then we ambled back down Columbus to Bay. Found some kooky hidden gardens on Francisco Street. And took some fotos of the Hercule Poirot wavy building at 1111 Bay which they are, sadly, painting a faint hospital green.

And that’s a walk.