Mission Mission

If you’ve got friends coming in from out of town, maybe they should consider staying with local artist Merkley. Here’s his Airbnb listing:

About this listing

You’ll hate it here. San Francisco is terrible. Nobody likes this city. The food is blech, the weather is awful, there are packs of wild dogs and flocks of screeching parrots coming at you from all directions.

Every street is an uphill climb both ways.

I’m being totally serious, the hills actually switch depending on which direction you go and every 45 minutes there’s an earthquake that opens up the earth beneath your feet swallowing up all your friends.

And here’s some more info on the space itself:

The Space

This house is OLD. It was built in 1885 by some weirdo named William Crocker who thought victorians were pretty neat. Boy was he some sort of narcissist, he ran for mayor in 1909 and came in 3rd.

What a loser.

Nobody ever bothered ripping out all the fancy details that come with victorians so you’ll be surrounded by all that bullshit, plus the guy that has owned the place for the last 20 years is some bearded guy named Merkley. He is writing about himself in the third person. He thinks people like interesting things and details so he made the apartment reflect that sort of nonsense.

Have fun rolling your eyes.

Our pal Many Machines takes a moment:

Top: Potrero hillside, 2008.  Bottom: same hillside, 2015.

I was especially fond of the earlier version, as it featured the work of several artists who had an outsize significance in my mind in the first few years after I moved to San Francisco.

Few things make me feel quite so bad about how SF has changed as this hideous current incarnation. [link]

An outsize number of this blog’s early posts were about Girafa. Let’s take a look:

November 2008. Seems like a lifetime ago.

[Top photo by Brendan O’Connor; Bottom photo by Elly]

Local photographer Troy Holden tells us all about it:

The prints are big — 8 feet long. We did this by breaking up each image into 1/4 and paneling them into the larger image. We then mixed fresh wheat paste in the parking lot using a camping heater and 50 lbs of flour. It took 8 hours, two 14 ft ladders, and 35 gallons of glue to mount all 22 images.

There’s some historical gems hung. Local favorite Dave Glass has photos from the 1960′s – 90′s, including a house on stilts being relocated from to the Western Addition and the 1982 Forty Niners parade on Market Street where SFPD are looking at a NUDE GIRLS cinema marquee. Emmanuel Blackwell has a photo of now-gone Candlestick.

Other contributors include Rian Dundon, David Root and Holden himself.

The lot is located at 181 2nd Street, and the show is open to the public as long as the lot is open (which is during normal business hours), and the opening reception is this Thursday, 5-7pm. RSVP and invite your friends.

You know that moment when Valencia is quiet? Early before all the shops open? I show up to work and there’s a woman out front knitting quietly on a little folding stool. A real live yarn bomber.

I wasn’t expecting her to be so open or charming. I thought yarn bombing was done anonymously in the shadows. I started asking questions and here’s what I learned.

Emily Stauffer (fogknits.com) has been doing this since 2010. As sweet as she is, she started out of snark. “All my friends kept sending me this yarn bombing story that had gone viral. It got kind of old saying ‘Yeah, I saw it. Thanks.’ So I decided to yarn bomb something so that I could say yeah, ‘I’ve done it. Thanks.’”

“5 years later, this is probably my 200th bike rack.”

Emily has bombed pansies in a garden, statues, fences, mail boxes and pink flamingos in a neighbors yard (the only time she’s yarn bombed on private property). But her favorite thing to bomb is bike racks.

“I’m so opposed to yarn bombing trees. Trees are beautiful. They don’t need improving. Let’s add some color to something that needs some help. An ugly fence. A steel bike rack.”

“It took me by surprise that the bike community appreciated it,” Emily said. “I used to just cover the very top of bike racks – the most visible part. But I kept noticing that people would slide the yarn down to one side. Eventually I figured out that bikers were doing that to protect their paint from getting scratched by the rack. Since realizing that knitting racks was actually functional, about 95% of my yarn bombing has been on racks.

Emily’s work tends to stay up anywhere from 24 hours (in the Castro) to a year.

When strips get boring, Emily throws in an Easter egg like this Charlie Brown stripe.

Do you recognize this pattern? Take your best guess in the comments below.

So how long does it take to yarn bomb 5 circular bike racks? Emily does most of the work in what she calls “found time.”

“10 minutes while waiting for the bus. Another 10 minutes because the bus was full and it just passed me by. 20 minutes on the bus. I don’t really sit at home and work on a project like this.” When pressed, Emily confesses, “I probably spent 60-70 hours on this one.”

I thanked her for her contribution and with a smile she corrected me, “my egregious act of vandalism.”

Local commuter David Enos tells us about a little Muni mishap:

“Hello? Are you on your way home yet? Where are you?”

“My train…it went the wrong way.  Can you pick me up? I’m lost.”

“Where are you?”

“Patogo.”

“Where?”

“I think it’s close to Ingleside, maybe South of City College, I don’t know.  Can you look it up on maps?”

Read on for the full story. (And be sure to bookmark David Enos and read his blog every day.)

[Photo by David Lytle]

Here at DT&D we feel like every season is a good season to see theater. But the holiday season, with the relative cold, rain and staycation days, is perfect for getting into some cozy theaters. Katie & Brittany suggest some local shows that you might want to check out. Here’s their report:

[file photo by me]

From gin & tonicah Hanukkah fetes, to ugly sweater parties, to awkward office eggnog-a-thons, your calendar may already be booked through 2015. But for those of you who are looking for a theater fix, or to find a family friendly outing while people are in town, we didn’t want to leave you hanging. Although we normally don’t recommend shows without prior viewing, with holiday parties and cold and flu season upon us, we just didn’t have time to see everything. But that’s no reason for you to miss out. So without further ado, here’s our round-up of what caught our eye this holiday season that we didn’t get to see.

Looking for laughs?

A Merry Forking Christmas
PianoFight’s brand-spanking-new-Kickstarter-funded venue is opening this week! The first show to pop the champagne on its main stage is A Merry Forking Christmas, their reliably funny choose-your-own-adventure holiday sketch show. Go check out PianoFight’s new digs, try their new bar, and forget about your holiday stress. From the mouths of marketers:

The Holidays are the most magical time of the year, unless you’re stuck in the mall on Christmas Eve. PianoFight’s A Merry FORKING! Christmas chronicles the final hours of the Christmas shopping frenzy through the eyes of a pot-dealing Santa and his cookie-stand partner in crime, a mall security guard on his last legs, a bride-to-be deserted by her would-be fiancé, and a bored mortician who’s got nothing to do until people get back to the business of dying once the holidays have ended. The fates of these five characters and whether Christmas can be saved for each is left up to the audience who will vote at crucial forks in the plot to determine the final outcome. This December, with 362,880 possible paths through the show, saving Christmas is up to you. Get your tickets here.

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It’s been an intense year for this beloved local bar, so what better way to cap it than with 3 days of nonstop party??? Happy birthday, Uptown!

Everything is free and open to all:

Friday, December 26 – 6pm to 10pm
Birthday Reunion Party
Celebrating Uptown Founder Scott Ellsworth, current and former staff, regulars and all community members. Wear an Uptown T-Shirt and pay 1984 prices!

Saturday, December 27 – 6pm
Musical Review & BBQ Feast
Featuring musicians who have called Uptown home over the years, including Mindi Hadan, Douglas Katelus and Ivy & Devon.

Sunday, December 28 – 6pm
Uptown Salon
An evening of poetry & prose by local writers, hosted by Uptown Bartender & Poet Tym Butler.

Don’t go leavin’ town!

[Photo by Ariel Dovas]

I know, it’s raining. If you’re stir crazy from sheltering in place all day today, here’s a good reason to venture out. Our good buddy Troy Holden wrote in to let us know that tonight (Thursday) is the opening for a group photo exhibition, featuring his own work as well as the works of Dave Glass and Emmanuel Blackwell. These are all photographers I admire, each one capturing a very real, very valuable and very unique side of our city’s life. Troy adds:

“We’ve taken down all the old random photos at Cha Cha Cha and replaced them with huge (4 feet!) photos of the neighborhood around 19th and Mission Street. The printer did amazing work. The photos span from the late 1960s through 2014 and are a permanent installation. A second round will be installed in the spring.”

3D City is a year long stereoscopic photography project by Doctor Popular

Another year, another batch of street fires and riot cops. Here’s some of the craziness I saw on Mission St shortly after the Giants won the World Series. If for some reason, Wigglegrams aren’t your thing… and that’s a big if… I’ve posted more shots on Flickr.

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