Mission Mission

One day last summer, Katie and I and our friend Malcolm were walking home after some dancing at the Knockout. This big drunken dude came marching up to us, mumbling in Spanish. He was jolly and seemed harmless enough, so we started making small talk and taking pictures.

The guy was mumbling and mumbling and cracking himself up. It was pretty funny.

Malcolm had just come back from a trip to a Spanish-speaking country, so he was able to communicate a tiny bit at least. The guy was very impressed, took an instant liking to Malcolm.

At some point he got a little rough, but still all in good fun.

Soon, we tried to say our goodbyes and get a move on. Especially Malcolm.

But before we could leave, guy reached down and took a big handful of Malcolm’s genital area, then whirled around and strolled away, giggling to himself. Ouch!

Anyway, Malcolm moved to another continent today, so we thought we’d share this story in his honor. We’ll miss you, buddy!

Also, sorry about the resless photography. Hopefully it gets the job done.

As part of some road construction, they just dumped half a beach worth of sand into a cut-up stretch of Mission Street just north of Chavez. The smell hit me long before I even saw what was going on. It made me think of beach — made me wish it were still summer

Tonight, Needles + Pens hosts an opening for a new photo exhibition titled Welcome All, featuring work by locals Andrew M. Scott and Geoffrey Ellis. Looks like the pair cruised around some Middle American backroads and snapped some artful shots of colorful old junk falling apart. The party starts at 6pm. (via SF Art & Design Lover)

The New York Times travel section spent a weekend in the Mission District and came back with a photo essay. They went to Pirate Cat Radio, Weird Fish, Aquarius Records, Dolores Park, Foreign Cinema (above), St. Francis Fountain and Mission Dolores, and were struck by the “balance between [the neighborhood's] colorful Latino roots and [its] gritty bohemian subculture.” They also refer to people in the park as “Frisbeeing, smuggled-beer-drinking multitudes.” I’ve never smuggled anything into Dolores Park. Link.

There’s a new shop called Arara opening on Saturday, and to celebrate, they’re throwing a “Grand Opening and Fashion Compassion” party:

Gogograciegalleries, in collaboration with Arara, is putting together a GRAND OPENING/ ART / FASHION/ FUNDRAISER EVENT Saturday September 13th, 2008. We will be collecting prom dresses and accessories for the Princess Project which promotes self-confidence and individual beauty by providing free prom dresses and accessories to high school girls who cannot otherwise afford them. As the costs to attend high school prom soar, The Princess Project has made this tradition a reality for over 9,000 Bay Area girls since 2002. Please help us make this a successful and fun event !!!

Guidelines for donations:
*Dresses MUST be from 2002 to present or GREAT vintage
*Dresses MUST be dry-cleaned and on hangers
*Dresses MUST be prom dresses, formal gowns, or fancy party dresses
*Accessories MUST be stylish, clean, and in excellent condition
*Shawls, purses, clutches, jewelry and gloves are all popular items

Arara is near 28th and Guerrero. Full details here. (via the Myopenbar.com newsletter)

Artist Andrew Wilson filled a vessel with dirt, genetically modified corn, water, Skittles, hair gel and rat poison, and it will be on display in the window at ATA starting tonight. From the artist’s statement:

Through an opening in a large Lexan sphere I first laid down soil and planted in it genetically modified corn. I then gradually added Skittles, fruit-infused Garnier hair gel, and D-CON rat poison colored and shaped like candy, all stolen gradually from large chain stores.

Perhaps this thing will present a microcosm of the obscene excesses of global capitalism, as it invokes the spatial limits of growth that the smooth space of smooth capital seeks at every turn to negate.

Lots more here, including lengthy diatribes on each individual ingredient, and suggestions on how to get involved with the food sovereignty movement.

Jenn brings this to our attention:

Crime in the Mission

Seven people have been murdered in San Francisco’s Mission District in the past three weeks. We talk with community members, the mayor’s office and the police about what can be done to stem the increase in violence in the neighborhood.
Host: Michael Krasny

Link. Or, listen live. Also, right after, at 10am, David Simon, creator of The Wire is on.

Better Valencia Project has the scoop, including design details, concerns about the 26-Valencia, and a six-month delay. Link.

A few Mission Mission readers, as well as Mission Mission itself, attended the meeting. Reader dogfella weighed in first:

Overall somewhat disorganized and not really sure what the goal of the meeting was other than a soapbox.

Various community-based organizations used the soapbox to preach one thing: Instead of spending more and more money on more and more cops, put at least some small part of it toward more outreach programs. People are upset that patrols focus on Medjool and the Valencia corridor instead of the more residential parts of the neighborhood, where schoolchildren are getting stabbed up on a regular basis. Instead of SWAT teams and K-9 units, they want rec centers to be open later.

Reader dogfella also calls attention to the poor turnout:

Considering that 7 people were killed in the last week, turnout of about 110 people (incl. city officials, non-profits) seems pretty dismal.

To put that in perspective:
*SFGate reports that Glen Park’s community meeting in response to a stabbing / store robbery had 300 attendees.

*Last year when SF was going to increase street cleaning in the Mission to 2x’s a week per side, over 100 people stormed city hall and Tom Ammiano’s office to protest that the city was adding street cleaning to increase ticket revenues (never mind the crazy amounts of garbage on the streets).

So where was everybody? John offers this theory, which I hope is erroneous: “the mission has been taken over by hipsters. That’s why nobody went to that meeting, hipsters dream about ‘change,’ they preach about it, but they always expect others to deliver those changes.”

Next up, reader zinzin offers another, possibly related possibility:

the meeting was primarily for the Brown people that live in the hood, have lived here since the 50’s – the Latino community from whom the artists / punks / hipsters / yuppies stole the neighborhood – because it’s them that are having their kids killing one another.

for the most part (i’m sure there are exceptions)…no one from any of these newer groups can really understand what it must be like to have your kids in the life, blamming away at one another with guns. kids!

Blam! Is this why turnout was poor? The punks and yuppies don’t get it? Too surreal, all these grisly murders? Do we need a concerted effort to get everyone in the neighborhood more engaged with everybody else? Maybe so.

At the meeting, I met an older dude named Mike who’s been a Mission resident for decades. He said he’d seen it all before — the violence, the efforts to curb it. So I asked if any particular elements of past efforts had seemed valuable at all, and without batting an eye, he said yep. There once was a lady cop who rode her bike around the neighborhood, meeting people and making friends and generally getting engaged with the community. She made neighbors feel at ease, everyone felt good about everything, and then they shipped her off to another precinct.

In any case, Mike sees this kind of police presence as supremely valuable, and one can see why. An engaged police officer is a better police officer, and an engaged neighbor is a better neighbor. Better cops, better neighbors — better neighborhood.

Update: Photos by dogfella.

Jesse Keyes of turkeydinner just wrote in and made our day a little brighter: