Taken on My Tricycle

I was out this evening on my tricycle (that has a bumper sticker that says "Big Boys Don't Need Big Cars") and decided to give y'all some local color. When I go to boring neighborhoods like the Castro (gay-lite for folks from Topeka that want to keep things bland and safe) I realize just how cool the Mission is.

Here goes as I peddle my way round the 'hood:

This is a part of an amusing exhibit of miniatures in a gallery window, replicating various well known spots in the Mission. This one is particularly amusing since it's two doors down from me and almost exactly where Friday night's shooting took place. Just a little fun with us homies. Bang bang, you're dead.
I really love this funky old van that is almost permanently parked in front of the house where The Pursuit of Happyness was shot. (He he. I said shot twice.)
Though now a DVD store, this spot with paintings of many famed anarchists and revolutionaries was once the site of a leftist bookstore that was a favorite of the most clueless airhead liberals in the neighborhood. Among their activities was holding fund raisers to support the work of the Maoist Shining Path in Peru in the 1980s. Though fighting a corrupt, free-market embracing government, the Shining Path murdered countless peasants who refused to join their ranks and expected those who joined to help fund their work through drug trade. However, one of my favorite icons, Emma Goldman, is pictured on the lower left. I love Emma because although she embraced the Soviet Revolution and anticipated it much of her life, once there she saw it for all it was. After being attacked by the establishment all of her life, she was attacked by the Left in her final years for speaking the truth about the lies of the Soviets nearly three quarters of a century before its fall. She never lost her convictions even in the end but died in exile. Emma is what I consider a model revolutionary -- one that takes on the ruling orthodoxy without creating one herself. Listen up Michael Moore and Sister of Perpetual Annoyance!

Before BART was built, Mission Street was considered the most important shopping district after Union Square. It also had many theaters. Several shells and marquees remain though the screen went dark decades ago.
El Capitan must have been a grand one, though it now serves as a facade that hides a parking lot behind it.
The Grand is a rare example of northern California deco worthy of Miami.
Siegel's is the go to place to outfit your sons in pimp clothing so they'll be ready to get down to business once they reach puberty.
This one says it all.