Street Critic Weighs in on Wicked

Junk Thief/Union Square/San Francisco/January 1996

Discuss among yourselves.

What We're Seeing on Market Street

I've Been Thinking...

...about making a movie (or staging a play) in which...
Rada Khrushchev...
...runs into Juanita Castro...
...at Gimbels on Union Square in the dead heat of the summer of 1974 when the resignation of Richard Nixon is announced over the radio. What do you think they will talk about as they make eye contact while facing each other in the section selling platform shoes?

Discuss and post your suggestions here. Casting is now underway. All applicants will be considered.

Interactive Monday: More Mocks, Faux and Fakes

An article in today's Times about the Tokyo Tower turning 50 got me to wondering how many homages to the Eiffel Tower there are in the world. I've seen and driven under Torre el Reformador (above) in Guatemala City, and I understand that there is one in Paris, Texas.

Do any of you know of others?

This summer a couple with a Nebraska twang walking behind me blurted out "San Francisco is just like Buenos Aires." When I turned and sneered back at them silently, the woman nearly gasped. Maybe that doesn't happen in Omaha, or at lest Lincoln. If Buenos Aires is a faux Paris, I'm not sure what that would make San Francisco. I just know San Francisco in no way resembles Buenos Aires. We can't even bury our dictators, members of the Doors and elite here.

The Eiffel Tower was greeted with the same disdain the Transamerica Pyramid received three decades ago. Simply surviving, however, is not a guarantee of gaining credibility, let alone gravitas. The San Francisco Marriott, for example, will be considered as hideous in the next Millennium as when it opened in the 1980s and brought Far North Dallas Gauche Faux Deco Baroque to South of Market. The fact that all of the glasses in the penthouse bar broke during the 1989 earthquake proves that there truly are acts of an angry god of art. The building itself, however, will probably still be standing after "The Big One".

Much of my life I've thought I was a fake but feel I've matured into being more mock or is it mawkish? Perhaps I need to go back to Guatemala City, sit under the tower and soak in the proper waves of falsiness.

UPDATE: If you look closely at the clouds to the left of Torre el Reformador, doesn't there appear to be a cowboy hat?

And here is the tower of Paris, Tennessee, that is five feet shorter than the one in Texas.

UPDATE: Oh, and lest I forget, we have this lovely eight inch Eiffel Tower in the mini-Edwardian greenhouse right here at the Junkplex.

Last Virgin Standing?

While it's hard to get too teared up about a big box store closing, the announcement of the Times Square Virgin Megastore closing furthers the lingering doubt about how long there will still be one in Union Square. I can't remember how many years it's been since I actually bought music there, but thinking that Best Buy would be the only big box choice for DVDs (they've never heard of Criterion, Kino or most of the labels I seek out) is chilling. It's not as if we don't have Streetlight, Amoeba, Rasputin and this internets thing I keep hearing about, but there is still something about such a big box store that does evoke old memories of trips to "real cities" in my youth and the excitement of picking up music that was not Journey or Rick Springfield. I'm sure there were similar sentiments when sheet music stores started shutting down.

Music and Meaning

We met for tea, juice and scones the way we used to meet for real drinks and fancy sampler platters at half past six in some spot looking down at Market. I drink much less now, and he drinks not at all. The dog I gave him for the holidays six years ago may be dying, and I agree to tend to it Saturday night while he's on a date.

"Provided you don't have a date," he says with the usual after-the-fact concern that is more than familiar.

He laughs with genuine amusement when I counter, "A date, at my age I'd settle for a fig."

Hasn't he heard this a thousand times before? I've lost track myself of how many time's I've offered it like a plate of circus nuts.

We saunter across the street to Virgin Megastore, and he seems genuinely concerned when I mention speculation that it may soon be out of business, the final big box retailer offering music as tangible collateral, not some abstract concept that might disappear with the passing of a giant horse shoe magnet.

Both of us mask our likely disdain for the others selections as we sort through discs. All those years ago when he appeared at my door, he expressed such interest in what he might learn from me, like Ms. Doolittle arriving for tutoring to work in a shop or Leonard Bast following one of the Schlagel sisters through the rain from the "Music and Meaning" lecture, filled with pragmatic intent to recover his umbrella now lost in a sea of others in an exquisite porcelain vase in the hallway.

We part once more, neither finding anything of interest. I saunter up the hill, compelled to buy The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a volume that called out to me months earlier but disappeared into some obscure mental cubbyhole. I realize that he never cared about the difference between Ives and Yves Saint Laurent, and I find myself searching for why the former once meant so much to me.

Walking home in solitude, its very essence brings a faint second of despair, and then I begin humming, finding new meaning in the lyric:

Flying too high with some guy in the sky
Is my idea of nothing to do

Music, meaning and lost umbrellas make me glad to be heading home.

The Violent Galaxies

The old adage that Union Square eccentric Frank Chu who has a Mission Street bar named in his honor is bizarre but harmless may not be completely true. Today, SFIST reveals that his Wikipedia page indicates that in 1985, he took his family hostage and threatened them at gun point.

Whenever I see Frank with his picket sign or pass by the 12 Galaxies bar, I wonder how many years it will be before I take over for him and there's the Junk Thief Saloon on Mission Street.

I Saw a Similar Sign Last Week at Wilkes Bashford

This Cat Will Shall Not Be Moved

One of my favorite parts of the holidays is the annual display of cats up for adoption in the windows of the Union Square Macy's. I'm reminded of why I love cats as this one refuses to pay any attention to the attention hungry brat pounding the window. I actually can like kids too, but not this one.

Feliz Dia de Gracias

A trip to the Sushi Boat, espresso and dessert in North Beach at an outdoor table without those damned outdoor heaters (the whole idea of eating outside is to experience the outdoors, not escape it)and a random stroll through Chinatown, Union Square and back home. That's a enough reasons to be thankful, no?

(Mostly) NOT in My Neighborhood

Though it's only a block and a half from my old place in the more central part of the Mission, I've never really understood what happens in this building. It reminds me of the type of faux castle architecture common in the Midwest and Southern California but rare here.
Showing enormous willpower, I've yet to buy anything here since I know they also have clothing to purchase in Europe. But I take comfort in just knowing that it's there.

Pretty in white and all ready for the holiday.
Prettier in white and ready for any occasion.

Sea Change or Just Climate Change?

Twisters are hitting Brooklyn. Quakes are shaking up L.A. and Indonesia. The Dow is in crisis (and that's not even counting Murdoch's devouring of the WSJ).

And yet it seems so calm here in San Francisco as we enjoy calming foggy days and now nearly perfect Tuscan sunny weather. Warmish but not steaming urine stew hot like the MTA in Manhattan is right now.

Ah, and even if the American economy is teetering on collapse again, Union Square is starting to make you think that this is, you know, like a city or something. Just look at the signs on Stockton Street where I was last night. Forget Grace Cathedral, since we'll soon have the annex of a temple more holy than that as seen at the top of this post. And, yes, I couldn't resist stepping into the Ben Sherman store, but it's really not that much more than what you could find for 75% less for six month old versions of the same things at Nordstrom's Rack. The whole idea of Ben Sherman is that it' timeless vintage, so what half a year for chrissakes?

My first lusting for Ben Sherman goes back to the summer of love when, before going to see Dr. Doollittle with my cousin and my infamously manipulative aunt at the Continental Theatre with its famed reclining seats, we went to Catherine Lype's Canterburry Shop. Both my cousin and I tried on identical Ben Sherman Nehru blazers. My cousin thought they were kind of fruity but went along with the game, but I was overcome by how astonishingly cool and hip I looked. My aunt agreed as we walked to the register. When the clerk rang us up, she looked at me with mock concern and said, "Oh, your mother didn't give you money to buy one? Well, then it appears we'll be buying one not two today, after all."

Needless to say, I've been scarred ever since and have made up with it by purchases ever since becoming a wage earning adult. Perhaps that's why my number of shoes is in the three digits (sorry, I won't reveal how far up into the three digits). Even though I work for an organization battling the evils of the World Bank, IMF, globalization, consumerism, sweat shops, corporate colonialism and Americanism, I fall into the trap of shameless bourgeois consumer many times. Hey, I've slept in huts in Mali and Ha Giang Vietnam, but that doesn't mean I have to buy into the Birkenstock, Tom's of Maine and patchouli/B.O. "aesthetic". That too is a form of branding, just not ones that particularly appeal to me.