San Francisco is My Home

29
Jan

Filming at the Castro

Author: kris, Category: Castro, Celebrities, News

One morning many years ago, long before I moved to The City and became Cool, I spotted Adam Duritz (lead singer of Counting Crows, a band some of us cut our teeth on thanks very much) out the window while breakfasting at All You Knead. My friend, who did live in the city and was and always will be Cooler than me, stopped me from leaping up and running shrieking into the street after him. Apparently, that is not very Cool.

Now that I’ve lived here for a while, I know better than to chase celebrities down the street. And that’s good, because there’s yet another movie being filmed here in the SF, and specifically in the Castro, a block away from my house. This one stars Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to hold political office, a local hero. They’ve seventies-ized much of the area around the Castro Theatre, where filming is currently happening. Head down and check it out if you’re interested, but remember to only stare out of the corner of your eye. That is how the Cools do it.

Other movies filmed in SF include So I Married an Axe Murderer, Dirty Harry, and The Pursuit of Happyness. Check out my friend and neighbor’s amusing tales of running into the props from the last film here and here.

Do not run after this man, cools.

11
Jan

More trouble at the Zoo

Author: kris, Category: Landmarks, News

This summer I was struck for about two weeks with a fierce craving for the Zoo. I kept having this daydream about being there in the early morning, before the heat wave really picked up, and listening to the monkeys chattering at each other. I kept meaning to go but never got around to it.

I’m sorry I didn’t go then, because I’m feeling less and less inclined to go now. It’s not just the recent tiger escape, which killed one man and wounded others, and it’s not just that a snow leopard and a polar bear both almost escaped in the past week alone, although all this helps of course. Then, too, there’s my increasing suspicion that the Zoo is maybe not the most humanitarian place — a suspicion that any sane person feels on entering even the best zoos, and which is doubled by the reports of their reactions to animal misbehavior. The word “fire hose” is being thrown around a lot. Plus the keepers seem to be violently disagreeing with the officials’ take on what’s going on.

Anyway, I don’t know enough of the facts to be fully condemning, but at least for now I don’t want to support the Zoo — or be attacked at the Zoo. Congratulations, journalistic fearmongering: you have worked your crazy magic on this girl.

Zoo officials promise this bear won’t try to eat you:

Photo courtesy of the SF Chronicle.

08
Jan

Accident on the N line

Author: kris, Category: News, Politics, Transportation

Our i.m. Gavin Newsom (that’s “illustrious mayor,” for those of you who don’t keep up with my made-up slang) is ditching three of the seven members of the transit board. Not a bad idea, considering that a different headline reports yet another MUNI accident. This time an N-Judah train ran into a 90 year old woman. In another city this might be a PR disaster for the i.m., but here, let’s face it, it’s kind of par for the course. A day that you don’t read a Chron headline about a MUNI accident is a day you spend vacationing outside the city.

So, okay, they’re not the safest trains in the yard. But say it with me: Ennnnnn. Joo-daaaaahhh. Ennn. Joo-daaaaahhh. There is no train more fun to say.

04
Jan

The first storm of three storms

Author: kris, Category: News

It’s just before sunrise and the storm woke me up. Lightning, thunder, winds to rattle the windows and a driving black rain. In most other cities this would be nothing to blog about, but even though SF gets its share of rain, cold and fog, we rarely see anything like this and it’s scary. Like the Market Street winds on steroids.

In his book The California Feeling, Peter S. Beagle put it best when considering the difference between his east coast brethren and his new west coast friends:

See, they don’t have winter here. I mean, they have a winter — where I live, it’s liable to rain any time between November and June, or all the time — but they don’t have winter. The idea of it isn’t carved into them right down to the chromosomes, the way it is with us.

And he’s right, too. We’re always taken by surprise when the sky does something weird like this.

Prepare for flooding and yet more overcrowding in the homeless shelters. Prepare to be woken up before sunrise.

28
Dec

Sad news for a city legend

Author: kris, Category: Charity, News, People, Volunteering

Pali Boucher is the woman who made me want to be a journalist. I’d already been freelancing for one newspaper for a couple of months when I interviewed her, but it was something I’d kind of fallen into and I wasn’t sure how much I was liking it.

Then I got assigned a story on Pali, the founder of Rocket Dog Rescue. Pali is an amazing firecracker of a woman: warm, articulate, energetic and fiercely caring, she’s dedicated her life to finding homes for dogs that other shelters would euthanize for being “unadoptable.”

Pali spent much of her childhood homeless, and when she grew up she suffered from a drug addiction. But when she got her first dog, Leadbelly, she knew she’d have to get clean to take care of him. The amazing part is that she did: she kicked her habit, found a home, and founded Rocket Dog. After talking to her I knew I wanted to stay a journalist so that I could go on meeting people like Pali.

Recently her apartment burned down, killing the three foster dogs inside, as well as her beloved talking parrot. It happened just before Christmas. The last I heard, she still wasn’t sure whether she’d be allowed to move back into the apartment.

If you want to help out Pali or Rocket Dog Rescue, either with a donation or by volunteering to foster a dog, visit the Rocket Dog website and click “volunteer” or “donate.”

26
Dec

Tiger attack

Author: kris, Category: News

A San Francisco Zoo tiger escaped its enclosure last night and attacked three people, killing one. You can read the full story here.

It’s a tragedy for these families, no question, but other news orgs are covering that. What I’m wondering is how this will affect the Zoo. Will people avoid it like the plague? Or will there be a constant crowd in front of the tiger pens? And I wonder about the city, too: will there be a public outcry because police shot and killed the tiger as it was attacking people? Will people point out that when this tiger attacked a zookeeper last December, another zookeeper convinced it to stop by beating it on the head with a squeegee, so bullets might not have been necessary this time? (For me, this is a no-brainer: you see a tiger attacking someone, you shoot the tiger. But I’m guessing not everyone is going to see it that way.)

Right now I’m seeing a lot of people clamoring for the city to close the Zoo. It’s closed today, but will probably re-open tomorrow. I’m tempted to go down there and see if it’s packed to the gills or emptied out. Stay tuned for details.

20
Dec

Troubles are all the same: the new bar in town

Author: kris, Category: Bars and Clubs, News

Metro Bar, a longtime Castro institution, recently moved their premises to a smaller place further down Market Street.

The location they left is prime real estate: located at the corner of Market & 16th Street, it has an enormous balcony overlooking the intersection which was always thronged with people.

Now it’s been taken over by The Lookout, which, like Metro, is a bar and restaurant. So far the transition seems a little shaky. Some of Metro’s clientele simply followed them down the road, while others stayed on at The Lookout and still others presumably found a new hangout altogether. This is probably not great news for Metro or The Lookout, but it’s nice for me, since now there’s a bar in the neighborhood where I can pop in on a weeknight and get a seat with a view. Plus the bartenders are very friendly.

30
Nov

Mayoral candidate charged with misdemeanor

Author: kris, Category: News, Politics

One of the opponents in the recent mayoral race (won, in the predictable landslide, by current mayor and all-around honey Gavin Newsom) was a homeless taxi driver who –

I’m sorry, I need to take a moment to enjoy that idea. Okay. The candidate, Grasshopper Alec Kaplan –

Nope, still not over it. The homeless taxi driver, Grasshopper, who ran for mayor, was charged with a misdemeanor two weeks before the election for, as the Chron puts it, “allegedly playing guitar naked while atop his purple van outside the San Mateo Expo Center.”

Anyway, he failed to show up for his court date, and here is what the Chron says about that, which is maybe my favorite part of the whole thing:

“If we don’t do something, it’s basically saying, yeah, he can sit out on his van playing his guitar naked anytime he wants,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said. “I think that might infringe on other people’s pursuit of happiness.”

29
Nov

Housing prices drop

Author: kris, Category: News

The housing situation around here is starting to get interesting.

Of course, it’s been interesting for a long, long time. I was interested in the astonishingly high prices being asked — and paid — for houses in the city, to say nothing of the Bay Area at large. I was interested to see that a nice, fairly ordinary three-bedroom apartment in a decent, but not mansion-y, neighborhood (my neighborhood, in fact) sold for over $1 million. I was only mildly interested, of course, because that sounds normal to me. Yes, you should definitely have to pay $1 million or more to be near more than one bus line and more than one restaurant.

Except I am pretty sure this is not normal for most of the country. I went and looked at some listings in other places I’d be willing to live — Denver, Seattle, Portland, etc. — and they don’t seem to be this high.

Anyway, since this business with the subprime loans, home prices have been steadily dropping in the city. I mean dropping in an exciting way, like to the point where my fellow and I could almost maybe afford to buy something halfway decent in an okay neighborhood, possibly.
Since the housing bubble began, more and more families, artists, blue collar workers and all those groups that give a city a feeling of holding many diverse lifestyles cupped in its hilly hands have been priced out, moving to Oakland or Antioch or farther out. It would be exciting to see these people returning to the city. Imagine the improvements we could make to the school systems if more kids were here; the new art scenes that would spring up if more artists could afford to stay. I would find that very interesting indeed.

16
Nov

We Be at The Hemlock

Author: kris, Category: Events, Music, News

We Be The Echo, the band I wrote about that other time, are playing The Hemlock Tavern tonight, so if you’re curious about these geniuses of math rock, head on over. The show is 21+, $6 at the door, and starts at 9:30. Should be, as always, a cracking good time.