The Angry Young Man

Here's the new bandshell those Burning Man people have thrown together in the Panhandle across from my house. Yes, they told those idiotic NIMBY's to TALK TO THE HAND when they got all up in Larry Harvey's grill and complained about the bandshell dragging down their property values by being a focal point for drunken gutter punk gatherings. Idiots. I hate NIMBYs. I particularly hate NIMBY hippies. They need to be rounded up! Anyway, I took this picture while riding home last week. As you can see, the bandshell is made of old car hoods, motherboards, and empty water bottles. Inneresting. Today is the grand opening and all the hippies in the neighborhood are expected to converge upon this spot so they can do the wild hippie in the wind dance to some Jefferson Airplane cover band doing an acoustic version of "We Built This Starbucks On Rock and Roll." It's like my version of hell. Elisabeth tells me that the whole neighborhood has been invited to bring their instruments down so we can have an old time Haight style jam session. I told her I was going to don my dashiki and bellbottoms and race out of the house with my guitar, singing, "Wellllll, I don't give a damn about no greenback dollar!" As if....

I snapped this one at the #24 bus shelter at Castro and Market. This is the new public service announcement from the SF Department of Public Health's crystal meth addiction prevention program. I don't get it. What are they trying to say? We live in a socialist paradise being degraded by the excesses of corrupt bourgeois capitalism as epitomized by this drug? I mean, what's up with the bad pseudo constructivist imagery here? As you may be aware, I collect Soviet era constructivist propaganda posters and find constructivism particularly appealing. This, however, I just find annoying. When faced with this image, what possible impact could it have on some scrawny 23 year old, meth addled, twinkie queen with his collar turned up and his hair carefully spiked? Hah? I suspect the artist saw "V for Vendetta" one too many times. Regardless, it's an improvement on the last campaign.

This campaign just made me want to do lots of meth so I can have sex with someone who looks like that...

This is from last month's Critical Mass where we converged with the Zombie Parade. The zombies attacked one of the cyclists, ate her brains, and turned her into a zombie cyclist. It was a brilliant moment in urban history.

I took this one on my way to work on Thursday morning. They tore down this old house. It was fascinating to watch them rip off the front of the building and reveal the house's innards like it was some kind of giant dollhouse. I especially liked the ancient wallpaper on the second floor. There are about four burned out or boarded up houses in the surrounding neighborhood. They sit among the rest of the houses like dead teeth in an otherwise healthy mouth. I watched them completely renovate two other dead houses in the last couple years. I guess this one was too far gone. I'm curious to see what kind of design will go up in its place.

I took this one on my way to Mr. English's pad last Friday before last. I am regularly flabbergasted by just how hideous the new Federal Building really is. The design is quite advanced and green - it's constructed in a way that harnesses natural wind sources to cool the building and 90 percent of the interior receives adequate natural light, diminishing the need for artificial lighting. These are good things. Unfortunately, the exterior facade looks like a modernist nightmare made manifest. To steal Kunstler's observation on the Seattle Public library, the new San Francisco Federal Building looks like a celebration of the triumph of the machine over the human spirit. It sorta goes hand in hand with the new anti-meth posters, doesn't it?