Mission Mission

[via Big Old Goofy World]

Now please enjoy this long list of “history”-themed posts about the Mission and SF…

Congrats, grads!

[via Alex]

From a Dusted Magazine top-10 list by musician Leyna Noel Tilbor:

This one time at Jack’s was the best show any of us had been to in a Very Long Time. Jack’s is a neighborhood place, not too on the scene, and you can tell because moms are there, and gangster looking tough guys, and hipsters, and fun people in general. It’s two dollar buds so that might have to do with the fact that its is popping off. I’ve seen broken glass, broken mirrors, and douche bags walking on tables. If it were a house party, the cops’d come. But Thursdays belong to DJ Purple, his incredible Karaoke with a capital K, and his deep purple velvet (velour?) blazer. There is not a proper stage, just an area by the door crammed with screens and fluorescent-fur-covered wireless mics. DJ Purple is damn unfuckwithable; you have to literally run up to catch your song as it’s starting because Purple doesn’t pause or call roll. He DJs the karaoke songs so they run right into one another. Really embodying the music major grad years later, DJ Purple rocks a saxophone, playing leads on every song and adds pitch-perfect vocal harmonies, unsolicited. This one particular Thursday, I’m rolling in a crowd three-deep — myself, my man Daniel, and his housemate Neale — and we’re enjoying the mayhem. Neale only does songs that have key changes (usually ends up with Neil Diamond). Yours truly sang NIN’s “Closer” with a perfect stranger/gothy lady who seemed timid about the chorus. A duo of Latin dudes did “California Love” and the WHOLE PLACE IS DANCING, I mean getting down. They’re getting in everyone’s faces and it looks just like MTV. A tall kid in skinny jeans just channelled Bowie with “Heroes” and it’s truly epic. Feeling so ebullient. To intensify the vibe further “Bohemian Rhapsody” comes on, and it’s a ridiculous, the tender togetherness in this bar. Swaying and singing loud, as if we were in a pub. Then, the song crescendoes just before the Wayne’s World freakout part and a mosh pit erupts. Neale, who is from Baltimore and hell-bent on being “rowdy” grabs me and throws me into the pit. Though in sneakers, I get caught terribly underfoot in the pit, and there’s a sudden alien pop in my right foot. Hop out of the pit stunned, alas, the problem in my foot is real and we aim for the ER. I’m mostly super-bummed to leave the dance floor. Hours and X-rays and Vicotins later the three of us consummate the bizarre awesome journey of the night with 5am peanut butter shakes at Sparky’s.

Read the rest of the list here.

[via DJ Purple on Twitter] [File photo by Vic Wong maybe?]

Maybe political activism is the problem, maybe white people are the problem, maybe the Internet is the problem, maybe Christianity is the problem — or maybe there is no problem. Maybe we all just need to chill. In the comments section of the “Dear White People” post, commenter Haza Anaya says:

The author is being silly… it ain’t your party, and so you cant keep people out! I’m Mexican (from Ciudad Juarez), and my whole family was always welcoming and open to other people, whether it was our American white friends, or our buddies from Japan, etc., and we would always invite them to participate however they saw fit. This idea of getting snooty about people “doing it wrong” is ridiculous and not part of our culture. It’s very important to not be so delicate about such things. Like my abuelita (grandma) used to say “el que se enoja, pierde!”, “whoever gets mad, loses”. If you were at my Mexican family Day of the Dead party, complaining about people appropriating our culture like you are, you’d get lots of eyerolls. And the drunken white hipsters would get served another cerveza, cuz at least they’re in the right spirit of celebration. You’re asking for people to “challenge” these so called colonizers? To “boycott” their events? Instead I challenge people like you that get butthurt. I find your indignation laughable. I’ll appropriate some foreign culture and give you this quote from our Chinese brother Confucius: “He who takes offense when none is intended is a fool. He who takes offense when offense is intended is a bigger fool.” Perhaps learn one of the cultural lessons we celebrate on the Day of the Dead: Don’t take yourself so serious, cuz we’re all going to die someday! Live life! Love! Celebrate! [link]

[Photo by Rusty Hodge]

A number of readers pointed us to local writer/performer/mom/activist Aya de Leon‘s blog post titled “Dear White People/Queridos Gringos: You Want Our Culture But You Don’t Want Us – Stop Colonizing The Day Of The Dead”:

Dear White People (or should I say Queridos Gringos/Gabachos),

Let me begin by saying it is completely natural that you would find yourself attracted to The Day of The Dead. This indigenous holiday from Mexico celebrates the loving connection between the living and our departed loved ones that is so deeply missing in Western culture. Who wouldn’t feel moved by intricately and lovingly built altars, beautifully painted skull faces, waterfalls of marigold flowers, fragrant sweet breads and delicious meals for those whom we miss sharing our earthly lives. I understand. Many cultures from around the world celebrate these things, and many of them at this time of year. As a woman whose Latin@ heritage is Puerto Rican, I have grown up in California, seeing this ritual all my life and feeling the ancestral kinship to this reverent, prayerful honoring of the departed.

Let me continue by saying that it is completely natural that you would want to participate in celebrating The Day of The Dead. You, like all human beings, have lineage, ancestors, departed family members. You have skulls under the skin of your own faces, bones beneath your flesh. Like all mortals, you seek ways to understand death, to befriend it, and celebrate it in the context of celebrating life and love.

I understand.

And in the tradition of indigenous peoples, Chican@ and Mexican-American communities have not told you not to come, not to join, not to celebrate your dead alongside them. In the tradition of indigenous peoples and of ceremony, you, in your own grief and missing your loved ones have not been turned away. You arrived at the Dia De Los Muertos ceremony shipwrecked, a refugee from a culture that suppresses grief, hides death, banishes it, celebrates it only in the most morbid ways—horror movies, violent television—death is dehumanized, without loving connection, without ceremony. You arrived at El Dia De Los Muertos like a Pilgrim, starving, unequal to survival in the land of grief, and the indigenous ceremonies fed you and took you in and revived you and made a place for you at the table.

And what have you done?

Like the Pilgrims, you have begun to take over, to gentrify and colonize this holiday for yourselves. I was shocked this year to find Day of the Dead events in my native Oakland Bay Area not only that were not organized by Chican@s or Mexican@s or Latin@s, but events with zero Latin@ artists participating, involved, consulted, paid, recognized, acknowledged, prayed with.

Certain announcements of some of this year’s celebrations conjured visions of hipsters drinking special holiday microbrews and listening to live music by white bands and eating white food in calavera facepaint and broken trails of marigolds. Don’t bother to build an altar because your celebration is an altar of death, a ceremony of killing culture by appropriation. Do you really not know how to sit at the table? To say thank you? To be a gracious guest?

Read on for more on the politics of it all, and how Halloween used to be spiritual before white people let it get commercialized.

[Photo by Rusty Hodge]

Here in the Mission, gentrifiers still have about 4 months left til “soldiers” “come out gunnin’” for “hipsters and the yuppies” as promised by some graffiti on a neighborhood wall.

In NYC, it’s already happening. Gawker reports:

Two Brooklyn women have had enough. This weekend, Precious Parker, 30, and Sabrina James, 23, allegedly forced their neighbors out of their Flatbush apartment building at gunpoint.

According to a police source who spoke to the New York Daily News, Parker and James knocked on their neighbors’ door around 9:30 p.m. on Saturday and “held a 34-year-old man, a 37-year-old man, and a 25-year-old woman at gunpoint demanding they move out or be killed.” The trio complied, and Parker and James squatted in their apartment until police arrived. Cops say one of the women told them she didn’t like “that white people were moving into the area.” [link]

No blood was shed, and Precious and Sabrina pretty swiftly ended up in jail, but… it’s happening.

(In 1891.)

[via @bagaun]

Longtime local blogger Andrew Dalton has been getting his feet wet with us the last couple weeks, mostly on the crime beat, and it’s been a welcome parade of hard news:

• Stabbing victim attacked by 5 men at 16th and Mission
• Local tagger really stickin’ it to hipsters
• A discount arsonist attempted to burn down Foods Co.
• City Hall will finally revise fascist anti-arcade game legislation
• Large, intentionally messy game of Twister in Dolores Park
• This creep was arrested for impersonating police, kidnapping immigrants for sexual assault
• 28-year-old man shot and killed at 16th and Valencia

Impeccable work so far, Andrew!

And then this week (possibly today) you’ll meet Chris Bunting and Luke Spray from Roll Over Easy, the best morning radio show in town. They share a passion for San Francisco that is refreshing and infectious, and they’re so good at talking all about it (whether at the bar or on the radio or anywhere else). So we asked them to hop aboard, and I can’t wait to see what happens!

By way of further introduction, here are each of our 21 most recently used emoji, as of about 9:45 last night:

Be sure to look for their work here on the blog, and definitely tune into the show, every Thursday morning from 7:30-9:30 on Mission-based BFF!

(I only have a horse in there because I was telling someone about a horse-and-arugula pizza I had in Berlin one time.)

Is this an effective use of spray paint? Circle one: y/n

(more…)

A new tag on Samy’s Liquors at 24th and Bryant makes some pretty clear threats to a couple broad swaths of people. It instructs to kill hipsters and yuppies, two hard to define groups that were often derided among taggers in the last decade, but makes no mention of techies, the neighborhood slur du jour.

This is my fair warning to the hipsters + the yuppies!!
Get the [fuck?] Up Out the MISSION!! Before this [shit?] starts getting UGLY!!
you got 6 Months, Keep it Kickin!! If you don’t, it won’t be funny!
I Guarantee my Soldiers will GLADLY Come Out GUNNIN!!

Graffiti in #SF warning #hipsters and yuppies to leave the Mission or risk being killed. #KTVU pic.twitter.com/zLAsqNiPbp

— Jacob Jimenez (@OneTakeJake2) July 18, 2014