Ford's blog

Argh!! Everyone just let the Lacy/Zuckerberg interview debacle go!! Enough already! It was a poorly run interview, plain and simple. I do agree though, she did come across as a hubris-laden yutz. She even saw fit to scold the audience for having the audacity to call her out on her 'interview style' by telling them; 'try doing what I do for a living, it's not as easy as it looks'—yeah so there, she sure told you! The only things missing, the smacking of chewing gum and a small 'purse-dog'.

You wanna see how a presentation should go, see Kathy Sierra's talk, it was top-notch IMHO. BTW, the Mark Cuban and Michael Eisner back-and-forth was decent, though Eisner seemed out of his depth with the geek-crowd, and his performance generated more than a few 'emperor has no clothes' comments from attendees sitting not far from me.

On a positive note, if any presentation had a visceral impact on me, it was Dr. Carlos Brown's discussion of his video-blogs from Iraq. It was a dramatic and welcome change from the prozac-like effect I had felt come over me while watching Moby speak in the room down the hall prior. Can I ask, WHO CARES ABOUT MOBY? Play was released like 9 years ago?! Isn't he Hollywood Squares material by now? I have an idea, lets have Moby interview Sarah Lacy on Facebook! Now that would be entertainment!

PS- never made it to the SaltLick for BBQ. According to Jay Allen, I missed a carnivores dream. Though I am still paying for the artery clogging chicken-fried-chicken experience from Tuesday evening.

PS PS- I REALLY regret not arriving in Austin in time to see BattleDecks II. Next year dammit!

Sobering:

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

I think I have figured out the bad parking situation, I am gonna hire this elephant.

Bad_parking01

More SF parking headaches.
It seems that San Francisco would not be complete without a ton of bad drivers and legions of terrible parkers. The parking spot in front of my house seems to be a magnet for people who cannot park straight or even close to the center of what is an easy space to negotiate. When they do it makes it almost impossible top park both of our cars in the driveway. Sounds petty I know, but after 6 years of leaving calmly written notes on car windshields asking folks to stay out of the divot and to center their car between the two driveways, I can't takes no more. So I called DPT, also known as "Satan's Cushmans" to some of us as here in the city of "25 cents for 5 minutes" parking meters—hmmm..starting to feel a bit like LA, next up, valet parking at 7-11.

DPT gave me the options over the phone of having the car cited or towed. I asked about a written warning but they seemed averse to such warm&fuzzy tactics. I was trying to make a point, but having the owner pay well over $300 to get his car out of impound seemed a bit to jackboot to me, but the dye was cast. As it turns out the meter-person showed up in short order and wrote up a ticket (BTW- if they call male nurses "nurses", they should call male meter-persons "meter-maids", fair is fair, tradition is tradition). The owner rang my doorbell within the hour. He asked "how" he was parked into my drive way? I pointed, readers see attached reference photo. Maybe in his alternate universe his vehicle was not impinging my driveway, but here in "The Land of Real" he was parked like Foster Brookes on Cinco De Mayo. I explained that I had left many, many notes on many, many cars parking the way he had. That it was a recurring theme for people to partly block the driveway and that I had lost any patience I had left when I came out this morning. I kept my tone even, he semi-stomped around and kept muttering something about not having money to pay ticket etc. Sorry, but I have to pay tickets when I park in an other-than-normal fashion, so should he. Cut to a half hour later, car still in same position, engine idling for 15 minutes. At this point he is on his cell loudly telling someone on the other end that he planned to "..fucking leave it in that spot all week"...(there was a lot of "fuckin' fuck fuck fuckety fuck" during conversation). This is why God created tow-trucks, and from his holy bureaucratic clay unleashed a special tribe into the world. In their crisp blue-shirts and race-inspired bicycle helmets, they dole out various flavors or cold parking justice. Darting about in their in blue & white three-wheelers at tectonic speeds, they are the avante garde in the never ending effort to finance the day-to-day expenses that keep SF. humming. They help to keep the coin rolling in so that our great mayor can remain neck-deep in hair gel and keep th e hush-money channled to his ex-campaign manager. God's work I say.

Back to the parking thing.

I hate dealing with this kind of crap. Potrero Hill was known for it's great parking when I moved here. The introduction of the million dollar cardboard condo's across the street (they are only 50 feet tall and block the sun out for us simple peasant folk by 2PM—think "Who Shot Mr. Burns" episode of the Simpsons) and on the corner have pretty much turned a once decent parking situation into a vehicular placement version of "Watership Down".

UPDATE: said parking genius is documenting the his parking prowess with Polaroids, a measuring tape, and notebook. Get 'em tiger!! Fight the power G!!!

So the Bush administration announced that they were allowing several thousand refugees into the U.S. from Iraq. Yet another stark similarity to the Vietnam War. After the fall of Siagon more than 130,000 refugees came into the U.S. I am wondering how these Iraqi's will assimilate? For that matter from a purely security driven standpoint, will there be filters put into place to weed out any former insurgent presence? I mean they can't tell who is a friendly on the streets of Baghdad, are our overburdened immigration agencies going to be able to tell? I guess I am listening to too much AM radio. I am sounding a bit right-wing paranoid aren't I?

At any rate, times are sure reminiscent of the last days of the that o'so famous police-action in Southeast Asia. It would seem that the fog has been supplanted by the sandstorm.

So I worked medical at the She Wants Revenge show at the Grand tonight. Great venue, I must have driven by it a hundred times without ever knowing it was there on the corner of Sutter and Van Ness. The opening band was Brazilian Girls. They were not so bad. Though their lyrics were about a mile wide and an inch deep. The lead singer also must have signed a contract with the show's sponsor to light up a cigarette every ten minutes on stage.Then came "She Wants.." and I'll have to admit, they were pretty great. Seeing them live sold me on them. The performance was something akin to watching an emo distilation of Peter Murphy, Dave Gahan, and Ian Curtis, What they presented is a super clean, and sometimes an all to commercially viable product. The lighting was really gameshow and I felt like I was watching what television wants you to think of when they shoot nightclub scene's. Too slick, too much white light on the band, was impersonal—too "product". I dug their show over all though. Their rendition of Depressed Mode's "Stripped" was right on the money. All in all their live show stood up to their studio work toe-to-toe. If you have a chance, see them.

The show was good in spite of the fact the performances were sponsored by Camel cigarettes (cough-wheez-spit). Who somehow managed to create one of the more contrived concert environments I can remember. Think skeezy-marketer's dream, DJ's, gogo-dancers, and smoker's gift bags for the ladies with "fashion emergency kits", fake tattoo's and makeup samples. Slick, overproduced videos were projected showing saucy, ungilating women feverishly sucking smoke-sticks. This, intermixed with the quick-edit eye candy (composed of usual disparate 50's and 60's stock-footage) that you have come to expect at EVERY nightclub. Camel has even incorporated the use of a "No. 9" motif, ala "Chanel No.5", into their newest product's public face. Smart, as it would seem that their agencies have sucked dry the well of all things culturally applicable to hocking cigarettes, including the use of cute mascots, Casablanca-ish characters, to Bluenote coolster-types. Now into the fashion void we go, "abandon all hope ye who"...well, you know. The braintrust of some agency opts now for a Louis Vuitton-like direction for Camel's latest offering. Trying to tap into the cache of designer perfumes, handbags, shoes, and that cute little top you can't live without. All part of the nebulous cloud of fickle hip that permeates the club scene, and ciggies need to be a part of. What better icon for disposable culture than smokes? In fact they are the ultimate turnabout-is-fairplay accouterment, they in fact make the consumer disposable. Genius I tell you, pure genius. 

Back to the evening. The show was a snore from the standpoint of medical. Which is a good thing. The fewer calls we get the better. I actually thought we would go the entire evening without a call. We got close. At about 11:30P we were called down to  one of the entrances. Once there we found an event staff member bleeding from the mouth, they had apparently taken a bit of a battering to the face from a disagreeable patron. Security had the patron in question subdued and helped this person outside to enjoy some fresh night air. The staff member was sitting on the stairs holding his chin and looking a bit dazed. An assessment was done and ice applied to his jaw. He was riled up but seemed no worse for the wear outside of some sore teeth and a painful jaw. We were then called outside to take a look at the patron. Two of us went out and met security. Our patient sat sprawled on the ground. Handcuffed, disoriented, and bleeding from the right temple. He had a pretty nasty laceration above the right eye. We 4x4'd the the wound and tried to get a SAMPLE and an assessment, but the individual was less than cooperative—what a surprise. He kept demanding that we call a helicopter to transport him. He was sad to hear that SF has no Life-flight services. Then some nice SFPD folks pulled up to help the patient understand their options. With the chopper option off the table, we decided that an ambulance would make a nifty alternative mode of transport. Fire showed up and took over. All in all this was a pretty standard concert occurrence to be honest. What made this situation unique was the presence of two onlookers (a twentysomething couple in the latest fashions) standing nearby, very nearby to where working on Mr. Handcuffs. I did not take much notice of them at first as I was busy figuring out whether the patron needed to be boarded or not. Seems the onlookers in question were asked to make room so we could work and told security (in not-so-subtle terms) that they were standing there to make sure the patients rights were not violated. This seemed like a prime "only-in-San-Francisco" moment to me. The fact that fine folks decided to step into a situation and possibly get in the way of medical personnel somewhat baffles me. Maybe they had good intentions, or they just wanted to piss on the leg of someone wearing a shirt that said "security" on it? In fact they were involving themselves in a sphere that may not have been safe for them to enter into. If things had been more complex than they seemed at first blush, they could have exacerbated the situation and made things worse, or even become patients themselves. Even though it was what it appeared to be—an altered person in handcuffs bleeding on the sidewalk—it could have been something else. Standing right up on us was not necessary to ensure said patron's civil rights were protected. Staying out of the way is the best tack to take in a situation like that. Especially when it is late-night on a city street. You don't know if they scene is safe, there may be elements of the situation that are not readily apparent, that could draw you in and ruin your evening. Oh, and by the way, if someone is bleeding on the sidewalk, don't get near them without BSI precautions—a.k.a having gloves on. Hepatitis doesn't care that you are a well intentioned street-borne amateur civil rights defender. Though I imagine explaining this to said onlookers would be like explaining the importance of a bike helmet to a fixed-gear-Mission-hipster-zealot riding in the wrong direction down a one-way street—insert word: Darwinism.
Hm, I sound cranky, I should get some sleep now.

F

I've always found it really annoying when I've heard guys make rude comments to women. I actually hear it a lot at concerts I work. Girlfriends have always come home with stories of some schmuck hooting some sad mating attempt from across a street or at a club. Does any guy actually think that by making some loutish comment to a stranger he might spark romance in that person's heart. I haven't seen it work—ever. There were many legends that spoke of successful cat-calls-to-hook-ups that I heard at my fraternity house, but those were usually examples of bravado and oneupsmanship floating in a swamp of tequilla. All fables at best. There was also a friend in Vegas—Rockabilly Dave—whose system was to ask every woman he met, on any given night, to sleep with him. His reasoning was that one out of every hundred or so would go for it. Kinda creepy, well, it was really creepy actually. I have to admit though, as low-brow and flawed as this strategy was, I did witness one his success stories. I came home one night and met the grand-prize winner sitting on the couch in our apartment. She was about 50, four feet tall. She wore a weird white "Captain Stubing-like" outfit composed of hotpants (with gold stripes down the legs. A captains' hat (replete with scrambled eggs). A military-esque formal short coat, with gold epaulettes, gold lamet striped cuffs and some strange ranking insignia on the left chest. She sat there chain-smoking and kept calling me "honey"—which I hate. She was a catch to be sure and I am pretty sure I should get therapy regarding the fear  that momentary encounter instilled in me that haunts me to this day. So his system worked at least once—of course a broken clock is right twice a day—so who am I to throw stones? I digress.

The reason I bring this up is a newstory I read today about a site where women can blog about being harassed. It's called Hollabak. Me thinks it's brilliant. Maybe it will help curb the lude behavior towards women that we all have witnessed. I imagine it's less invasive than "other" techniques of reprisal that are open to women feeling objectifed.

F 

F'ing taggers

So late last night I was walking to the CalaFoods on Pine and saw a group of people standing up ahead of me in front of a darkened apartment building. As I approached they seamed to stop what they were doing and stared me up and down. When I got even closer I saw that one of them was scrawling his tag on the side said building with a ball-shaped shoe polish applicator and black paint. One of the guys in the group said to the writer "hey man..(something, something)...". The tagger stopped scrawling for a second and then went back to what he was doing saying loudly, as I passed, "I aint afraid of no square, just the cops". Brando would be proud...though he actually had talent.

Two things about this got under my skin. One, that that I had to witness another idiot tagger exposing the world to his marginal artistic talent---there's enough bad design and artwork in SF already thank you. That this was at the expense of some poor maintenance-guy or building manager, someone who has to go out (undoubtably not the for the last time) and apply yet another jagged block of exterior-latex to the existing tonal patchwork underneath this new "writing". Secondly, it made me angry at myself for not turning around and chewing his ass. Common sense dictated that I not take a sudden and passionate stance on civic-pride against these four while they were in the engaged in their masterbatory late-night ink practices. It would not make for a flattering police report and all I really wanted was some OJ and a frozen pizza.

Many times I have had to scrub or paint over tags scribbled on the front of my place or have to pressure-wash spraypaint off the concrete in front of my garage door---which I equate to a neighbor's cat peeing on a tree so that the other neighbor's cat knows who's really the boss of that part of the yard. Every time I find myself cleaning up these masterpieces I tell myself that if I ever see someone tagging I am gonna give them critical "feedback". I failed to do so last night. I am disappointed in myself. I even drove past some PD on the way home, not far from the scrawl, and did not stop and say anything. Is it because I am full of shit? Is it because I am conflicted about the fact that during high school in Vegas I skated all over town spraypainting my nickname (which I will spare you the knowledge of)), "Lude-boy" (the Social Distortion mascot), or some politically racy slogan like "I hate Reagan" or "FTC"  in abandoned swimming pools, along the concrete banks of skate-ditches, and on the sides of the occasional 7-11 (though never on anyone's house or the like---although the front of one of my high school's took some hits along the way)? I dunno, maybe I am a giant hypocrite? Gee, maybe I'm not recognizing tagging for what it really is, an artistic cry-for-help from a generation navigating troubled social waters without an ethical compass with which to steer by? I seriously doubt it.  

I do know that I am sick of seeing "writing" all over SF. On every flat surface, every wall in the Mission, the Haight,  and scratched into any piece of plexi or glass that doesn't have a guard watching it or a CCTV aimed at it. I am not taking a swipe at all graffiti as a whole. I actually admire and appreciate much of the genre. I respect and appreciate many graf artists including Twist a.k.a. Barry McGee, and the likes of Swoon, Delta, and many others. I dig the BNE stickers you see all over town and the No More Prisons project. Some of the stencil pieces I have seen are really cool as well, though from what I understand SFPD reserves a special place in hell for stencil artists. IMHO writers like Shepard Fairey,  Banksy, and Bigfoot did some amazing stuff in their early work---before the book and sneaker deals took effect and ad agencies stole a lot of the fire---still waiting for the "Invader" signature bathroom tile line to come out at Home Depot. There's a ton of good stuff out there RE graffiti. Some of the artists in that space can employ mind-blowing palettes, and produce fairly impressive---if not site specific---compositions. I've heard great stories from friends at school about writing large pieces on trains by the light of a single cellphone display and communicating with friends across the country be means of those train-pieces. I mean, who cares about those ugly, rusting hulks, playing their part in a deteriorating transportation infrastructure? Graffiti makes them at least interesting visually. For that matter overpasses and freeway sound-barriers make for a better canvas IMHO (I ask you, what would CalTrans do if it were not for spraypaint and roadside trash---oh that's right, they would hire more upper-management and make that agency even more top-heavy and in-effective). But somehow it's different when it's some jagoff writing his or her cartoon-alter-ego's name across the front of someone's apartment or across the front of somebodies' house.

Here's an idea, take a f---king drawing or painting class at City! It's cheap and there's no excuse to not step up and test your skills in an environment where you actually have to back up your work and deal with real criticism about your practice. Just throwing something up on a wall, or on the side of a 1975 Ford F150 cardboard collection pickup on Chavez is boring and ultimately meaningless. Nobody cares outside of the other people stealing spraypaint and Sharpies. 

I even see scrawl at my art school, where you'd think people would be spending their time actually painting and making art instead of cluttering the visual landscape with undecipherable, meaningless self-promotion. Then again rumor has it that some art schools---or should I say tradeschools---like the Academy---apparently embrace many a mediocre street-scribbler like the one I witnessed. They get them off the street and into Kinkos, OR designing fliers for 18-and-over scratch contests or one of the many "oonce-oonce" parties which plaster my windshield in SOMA on weekends---please note that when it's foggy or rainy the varnish on said fliers turns to glue, I'd rather just get an email. Those fliers are the real-world equivalent of African bank scam and cheap Viagra emails.

Rant over. I'm gonna go eat some frozen pizza and look into buying shares of Krylon.

Is this thing on? Hello?!