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July 13, 2011

The Tenderloin National Forest

On the way into work, I see that the artist has completed a painting on Polk Street I've been following for a few weeks, so I stop to shoot it. I don't think "Oh, I'll shoot it later." That doesn't work. If you think 'I'll shoot it later', then you're not a photographer. That's how you can tell. If you want a photo, you stop the bike right now and take a shot. It's the only way. There is no other way.

So, I stop and shoot the mural and the art is brilliant, of course. But I can't quite figure out what I'm seeing. It's a painting of a street scene, but I'm not quite getting it. I'm looking across the street. Apparently, I'm supposed to make something from it. I'm glancing around. Part of it looks right...the planter..the trees. Buildings aren't quite right...but close. Then, I turn around and suddenly I see exactly what he painted. He painted the street behind me. So, if you turn around, you see the exact same scene in real life. Brilliant.

But another screaming firetruck drags me back down into a hellish nightmare. Back into the boiling crucible of madness that is San Francisco. Marred by wailing sirens, earthquakes, and traffic.

They say the generals are always ready to fight the last war, and no place is that more true than San Francisco. Because the city burned in 1906, they're constantly overreacting to countless emergencies.

If you multiple the number of buildings and the number of people in the city times the probability at any point in time that a building or a person is having a crisis, you come up with the fact that there are countless emergencies unfolding all over the city, day and night.

And every emergency is inundated with a wailing fleet of emergency vehicles. Firetrucks. Ambulances. Police. You name it.

It can really get to you after a while. I mean, it's nice to be in the city, and all. But every time I'm driving my bike and a fire engine comes racing up behind me I think I'm going to die.

These block-long fire engines come screaming up behind me the adrenaline rises inside to a crescendo and I nearly lose my mind. These things are loud and long as they race past like an asteroid from outer space and after they pass, you're left, still moving down the street, but drowning in adrenaline. It's hard to know what to do. It's so confusing...so distracting...at a time when you need to stay so clearly focused on the task at hand...driving through the asynchronous bifurcating streams of traffic without dying.

Every car horn rattles me beyond words because, right away, I think, "Am I about to get run over? Am I about to die?" And it's the only acceptable response to a car horn. He's trying to get someone's attention, and it might well be you he's beeping at. If you assume they're honking at someone else, you do so at your own peril. And if you're wrong in that assumption, it may cost you dearly.

I've been in the city so long that I've started to get somewhat rattled from it.

At work, the fire engines and ambulances and police scream away day and night with their sirens.

"Sometimes, I just wish they'd take the sirens off of the firetrucks and police cars and the ambulances. Maybe we'd be better off if the people died quietly and the buildings burned down to ashes in a peaceful and serene silence," I offer at work. Everyone looks at me like I'm insane. I get that a lot, really.

Almost as if on cue, a civil defense siren starts wailing and I'm like..."Christ...what is that for? Is there no end to this madness?"

"THIS IS ONLY A TEST. IN THE EVENT OF AN ACTUAL EMERGENCY YOU"D BE DEAD BY NOW..." the voice inside my head is telling me.

"Where is that coming from?" I ask a girl at work. "Is it inside the building? Outside?"

"I dunno," she replies. "They do it ever so often. About once a month I'd say."

"Christ. Who could live here?" I wonder.


Wheatpaste Artists

Yesterday, I discovered that a lot of the art I've been seeing around the mission is hanging inside a gallery on Larkin near Geary. I'm curious to know what's up with that. Are they using the city as a billboard to advertise their work? That takes balls.

And, sure enough, I walk into this art gallery and they have these same images hanging on the walls. Just a bunch of whacked out images some guy named David Young threw together. And it's not that it's not good. That's not my point. A lot of it is good.

I don't normally like want to hear what the artists have to say. The reason is that, to me, the art should stand on it's own merit. Hearing some drug-addled pseudo-intellectual artsy type expound on what he was trying to communicate when he created a certain piece of art always always makes me want to take my own life. It seriously can ruin a piece of art for me to hear them droning on and on in a ego-fueled soliloquy about a bunch of nonsense like this:

"The work for Make An Effort is a continuation of Young's exploration of a theoretical post-apocalyptic San Francisco - a rebuilt world, full of new ideals, technology, religion and language created from scratch. "

This sort of self-indulgent mindless drivel makes me want to hang myself.

Not that the art pieces are bad. Some of them, I'm looking at and thinking...that'd be cool to have that in my house back in Colorado.

"Who did the wheatpasted images on the outside of the building?" I ask, referring to the U.S. currency based images I'd located previously.

"That's by James Charles," she replies.

But then, I think, wait a minute. I think I've been duped. I'm just shocked, I guess, at the connection between the artist and the wheatpasted images around the city and the gallery. Like, it's all a brilliant conspiracy, I think.

And, probably, technically, they couldn't prove that the artist put the images up across the city, but I think the preponderance of evidence would suggest that he was involved in some way.

I emerge from the gallery with a renewed zeal to understand what, exactly, it is that I'm seeing. Have I been duped? Am I a stool pigeon? Is the tenderloin just an extension of the art galleries?

So now, I'm grid searching the loin, but with the new world view. With the new perspective. I assume that I've not seen anything. That there's more wheatpaste and graffiti in the city than I could ever imagine. More than I could ever find.

I spot a painted panel van on Geary and Leavenworth, where I've seen some interesting wheatpaste graffiti before. So I stop to shoot the truck. I park the bike and start shooting the back of this panel van...it has this massive mural of a bunny on meth.

And I start to take a shot of the mural on the back of the truck and, as I do, this guy steps up and says..."there's much more inside." And he rolls up the back of the truck to reveal an art gallery inside the back of the cargo truck. There's a row of steps leading from the street up into the bed of the cargo truck.

I look at the guy and then back at the inside of the cargo truck. I've seen enough "I Shouldn't Be Alive" episodes to recognize a trap when I see one, albeit a well-constructed one.

I'm like..."for realz bro?"

At first, I don't go near the truck because I think it's some kind of a trap. Like, they're going to capture me and drive me across the bay to Oakland and auction me off to a bunch of gay meth addicts or something.

But, as I study the van, I notice that one wall is opened up about 2 feet, so I could climb out the side if I had to. So I walk up these steps into the back of the truck, and the art hanging on the walls is pretty good.

This guy is explaining to me that they're driving the truck across the country, discovering new artists and displaying their work. He hands me this little pamphlet that says Find Art Magazine.

And I'm like...for real? Like...who would think of this? You couldn't make stuff like this up.

I'm thumbing through the pamphlet and right away, I recognize the art of Jason Hailey (Chor Boogie). He paints all of the acid dream faces with disconnected eyes and teeth. I've seen his murals across the city. Very cool.

I climb out of the rolling art gallery and start walking around this truck and shooting it from all sides because it's wild looking. Make no mistake about that. It's well painted on all sides by several extremely gifted artists..

Now, as I'm shooting and wandering around this truck ...still wearing my helmet, mind you, another guy walks up and squats down to about bumper level in front of this parked cargo truck and starts taping over the truck's headlights with blue painter's tape.

A skinny white guy with a hat and a goatee. Kinda artsy looking, but in a cool forgivable sort of way.

And, right away, I'm like..."uh...dude...what are you doing?"

"Well, I'm going to lay down something here...something different than what they've got going on right now..."

"You're gong to paint it?" I ask, incredulously.

"Mmmmhmmmm..."

"With spray paint?" I stutter.

"That's the plan..."

He's tearing up some cardboard boxes he found on the sidewalk and taping them over the van's windshield.

"Why are you parked here?" I ask the guy that originally attempted to lure me into the vehicle.

"We know some of the people that work in the art gallery right there, and they said we could hang out here, " he replies.

Only then do I realize that I'm surrounded by art galleries. On both sides of Geary, near Leavenworth, are several art galleries, as it turns out. So, I start wandering through these art galleries and I'm thinking...wtf? Why have I been in San Francisco for 6 months and never seen the inside of an art gallery? Like, seriously, dude. WTF?

I mean, how is it that I've missed the best part of being in a city:

So, of course, now I'm wandering through these art galleries and checking out the images. Some of it is that modern art that no one with any sense would want to see. But some of it is just brilliant.

Outside, the homeless are panhandling and smoking crack. I'm not joking. I'm standing here watching a guy smoke crack in a crack pipe. Watching the homeless bum cigarettes, change...whatever they can beg, borrow, or steal.

Small fractions of people roll by in motorized wheelchairs. Missing more limbs and body parts than you could imagine.

Whores stagger up and down the sidewalks. Bruised legs. Dirty knees. People set sofas and lounge chairs out on the sidewalks and the homeless bed down in them.

And a guy is spraypainting a truck on the street.

And now the police come. And I'm thinking...well.. this ought to be interesting. Things are going to be different now. But nothing changes. The police don't care what's going on. I mean, I'm standing here at ground zero in Sodom and Gomorrah and the police are just whistling past the graveyard.

Seemingly oblivious to everything going on around us.

There are so many crimes being committed that, if you started writing tickets, you could write until your hands bled and your pens ran out of ink and not begin to mitigate the crime on this one corner of the city.

Somehow, I think the police realize this, so they just ignore the human circus around us. They wander up to a door, deeply buried beneath countless graffiti slogans and wheatpasted images. They cut a lock off of the door, climb into their squad car and disappear into the madness that is San Francisco.

Only now do I realize how much I love this city. How mad the city is, and how much I need the chaos and insanity. This is the coolest place on earth. I'm standing in the nadir of western civilization.


Tenderloin National Forest

I leave the madness of Leavenworth and Geary and continue grid searching the Tenderloin for graffiti.

I quickly stumble into a little garden behind a wrought iron gate. A sign says "Tenderloin National Forest". I'm about to bust a gut laughing. The "Tenderloin" is "skid row". Not a nice place. Who would think of such a thing? Hilarious. But here, in the heart of the Tenderloin stands an immaculate little garden of flowers and trees, with massive murals adorning the walls.

I wander into the garden and start shooting like a meth addict because now I know that I'm hooked. I'm hooked on the beauty of the city - the murals that the artists throw onto the canvas that is the city of San Francisco.

But now, the gardener appears, a young goateed hipster. I start asking him who did the murals and, unlike most people, this guy actually knows something He knows who did each mural and I'm like..."Holy Moses...someone who actually knows whats going on for once. Nice."

At the end of the garden, a large painted tornado and a tree and he names the artist - Andrew Schoultz. And I'm like..."this guy - Shultz - he did the painting on the building on Lexington Street in the mission, right? With the elephant and the bird houses and everthing?"

"Mmmhhhmmm....that's right...it's the same guy.",

"Who did the bear? I've seen that before."

"That's by Chad Hasegawa," he replies.

And I'm like...oh wow. How cool is that? I'm starting to understand everything works. Starting to ptiece it all together.

Of course now, I can't wait to start wheatpasting my own images all over the city. Now that I see how it's done, I predict that someone will start wheatpasting up "Killing Strangers" posters and "Peenie Wallie" posters all over the city.


The Grove

I was really dreading going to The Grove tonight because I hang out there all the time and, although, in theory, it's a place to meet people, in practice, I seldom meet anyone. Most of the chicks that I hit on treat me like I have the plague. And I don't usually talk to the other guys in there, because I'm not trying to pick up on them, of course.

But tonight there was a guy sitting on the bench where I normally sit, so I sat down beside him and we started talking. Turns out that he used to live in Conifer, near my house in Colorado. And recently moved back to San Francisco. And has taken long cross country motorcycle trips like me. And used to live on Singer Island.

He's as cool as the other side of the pillow, and it's nice to meet new people because, honestly, I've not met a lot of people out here. Probably because I'm getting more antisocial as I get older? I'm not sure. But I was glad as hell to meet this guy and the funny thing is, he looks exactly like my brother.

"...I was a young writer and I wanted to take off. Somewhere along the line, I knew there'd be girls, visions, and everything; somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me." - Jack Kerouac, "On The Road"

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 13, 2011 at 1:44 AM

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