Mission Mission

I wanted to get in on the blogging-about-The Wire bandwagon (my favorite so far is Stuff White People Like #85), and then I saw this fabulous t-shirt by Mule Design Studio.

So I’m thinkin, we all know somebody should make a gritty urban crime drama about SF, prominently featuring the Mission District. Sucker Free City took a glorious stab at it (and captured the Mission in all its cinematic wonder), but Spike Lee kiboshed the whole thing. Now The Wire‘s done and Gavin Newsom’s definitely maybe running for governor. He’s Tommy Carcetti incarnate and then some. This is a show waiting to happen: somebody please resurrect SFC or start anew or something.

Visit Mule Design’s blog.

Buy Sucker Free City on Amazon, because it’s really good.

I’m on the Great American Music Hall/Slim’s email list, and every week there’s some show they can’t sell enough tickets to, so they give away a block of free tickets to mailing list members that can answer a trivia question. Last week’s was, “The actor Michael Pitt is also a musician. In which Gus Van Sant movie did he play a brilliant but troubled musician?” I love Michael Pitt the actor, I think mainly because of Hedwig, and since I knew the answer (Last Days), I sent it in. I won, and went to the show. Michael Pitt is in a band called Pagoda, but Friday he played a solo set consisting of brooding, acoustic, one-man grunge peppered with lots of yelps and groans.

Halfway into the opening number: technical difficulties, feedback. An effects pedal is on the fritz. Pitt says, “I just came from New York. They’re doing this thing at the airport now where they take apart your pedals.” Bummer! He fiddled with it a bit, and we got a sampling of some kind of eerie sound collage that presumably would’ve accompanied one or more of his songs. But the pedal proved unfixable, so it was tossed aside and the show went on, sans accompaniment.

As mentioned in the post just prior to this one, I can’t do anything without thinking about how to blog it, so when Pitt finished up I asked him if I could ask him a few questions about the airport experience. He said, “Oh yeah sure,” and then disappeared backstage never to be seen again. As an actor trying to make a go of being a musician too, he’s apparently shy about interviews when on tour, so I was sure to emphasize that I just want to talk about the airport security thing.

In any case, I never got him to elaborate, but I wonder if other working musicians have had similar experiences. Particularly with the whole industry headed down to SXSW, I hope the TSA isn’t fucking up everyone’s gear.

Link to Beautifully Scarred, a helpful Michael Pitt fan site.

In researching last week’s Shannon Wheeler story, I came across an interview at The Wright Opinion in which this strip was featured. It’s funny because it’s true. Blogging is like Tetris. Now, when I’m out and about in the world, instead of seeing falling Tetris blocks everywhere I look, I see blog categories, blog headlines, blog tags, etc. Does this mean that, like with Tetris, I’ll be tired of this in a few months?

Link to interview.

I was on BART the other day, somewhere between 16th and 24th Streets, when this pale humanoid ghostbat creature, apparently off course during a midnight flight through some underground caverns, collided parque acuatico hinchable with the train, shrieking in pain and horror, its mutant face pressed against the glass. I managed to snap a picture.

Though I regret that we were scooped on this story by Boing Boing, I’m glad the world is starting to appreciate the bevy of interesting things to be found in Mission District bathrooms.

Link to post.

Link to Little Star.

It’d been a year with that rusty juegos inflables old setup, so we retooled and relaunched and we’re very happy. Enjoy!

Earlier this month, a post called Cute Cartoon Animals Fucking on Muni caused a spike in Mission Mission readership. Investigation into this incident resulted in the follow-up post Give The People What They Want: Animal Sex, dated March 3. This post detailed the fact that, according to scientific stats, people want animal sex.

Two days later, in the March 5 print edition of The Onion, Shannon Wheeler’s weekly single-panel comic strip Postage Stamp Funnies featured this gag about two dogs fucking. Clearly, Wheeler, famed creator of Too Much Coffee Man, was intrigued by our painstakingly arrived-at conclusions. He obviously placed an eleventh-hour call to Chicago and had the presses stopped in order to replace whatever strip was going to print with this newly drawn ode to doggy-style animal sex. Surely revenues are up across the board.

You’re welcome, dude.

With FasTrak in the news today, I thought it pertinent to share this documentary, Toll Plaza, which offers a behind-the-scenes look at an area toll plaza, provides insight into how to deal with FasTrak-related snafus, and ruminates on the societal implications of the system itself. The movie follows the plight of Malcolm M., frequent bridge tobogan hinchable user and fervent FasTrak naysayer. With music by the Modern Lovers.

Link to FasTrak homepage.