Uh oh, looks like the folks at El Faro have been causing their (apparently British) upstairs neighbors some feelings of indifference:
Maybe if they made a bit more noise while taking out the trash they could find themselves in bad neighbor territory, like Schmidt’s. In case you forgot, they’ve been duking it out for over a year now:
Or they could take it the other way. By leaving a few free tacos on their neighbor’s doorsteps they could earn the neighborhood’s first “good neighbors” sign. Now, El Faro, wouldn’t that set a good example for your sons, El Farolito 1 and El Farolito 2?
[via wbtc]
 upstairs neighbors some feelings of indifference: Maybe if they made a bit more noise while taking out the trash they could find themselves in bad neighbor territory, like Schmidt’s. In case you forgot, they’ve been duking it out for over a year […]</p>
%5Bvia+%3Ca+href%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.missionmission.org%2F2012%2F06%2F09%2Fel-faro-just-average-neighbors-nothing-special%2F%22%3EMission+Mission%3C%2Fa%3E%5D&clickthru=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.missionmission.org%2F2012%2F06%2F09%2Fel-faro-just-average-neighbors-nothing-special%2F){kind=link}
Could be they’re claiming to be average themselves– no arrow. But what’s with the window shades all messed up? below avg IMO
This was covered in detail two years ago on Mission Local. Probably more a matter of crazy upstairs neighbor than bad downstairs neighbor, but you can form your own educated opinion:
http://missionlocal.org/2010/06/schmidts-and-the-bad-neighbor-schnitzel/
I posted that sign. It is in response to the bad neighbors sign, which apparently exists as a means to establish a new status quo of sign/neighbor/relationship commentary.
Every night I look out my window at what used to be a beautiful view and is now a snarky, insipid, whiny symbol of everything that is passive-aggressive about our city and it’s typical inhabitants. I can no longer watch a simple sunset without being forced to reflect on how babyish the members of my community constantly are. For two years now.
Victims.
If we all put up signs commenting on each others neighborliness, this is what our world would look like. Gaze into the empty soul. It is an incredibly poignant art project exploring the nature of social rules, signs, snarkiness, religion and sexuality in a post-racial Obamocracy.
I urge all of you to view the Smitzs’ ‘bad neighbors’ sign not as a perfectly ugly window into the most entitled and obnoxious voice of a truly ugly-on-the-inside person, my neighbor. See it as a commentary on the nature of advertizing and it’s divine, invisible power over our whole lives.
Bad neighbor? Good neighbor? We’re all slaves to McDonalds. The face of God is Grimmaces crotch, jerking it off in our faces.
It’s sick, but it’s truth. And the truth can be too ugly for ‘the square police’ that might object to such imagery in a public blog post.
But that maddening sign’s just reminds me, objectively, exactly what kind of people live in my city, and it’s beautiful honesty is too ugly.
The fact that it is surrounded in SF Giants gear is the optimum example of the sign-makers desire to identify in the commercially-contrived fake community of sports fandom, while spreading social corrosion and casual pollution to the community that he or she actually belongs to.
Their stupid bullshit has made it hard to lie to myself about where I live, and what it means about me that I live here. The whores that work my corner don’t bother me, because I can distance myself from them. You, the sign maker are worse than the whore.
I love my sign now.
Neighbors
also shout out Wayne and Young Jeezey. YMCMB YOLO
I don’t see their sign as passive aggressive, its just plain old aggressive, with a side of frustrated and having no other recourse. Your sign, on the other hand, is pretty text book passive aggressive.
As someone who’s lived with an industrial fan on my ceiling, I have deep sympathy for those people. And now they have to deal with passive aggressive rambling assholes like you, too.
My old room… So sad what the neighborhood has come to. I’m sorry it came to this Allen.
“a snarky, insipid, whiny symbol”
And instead of a symbol, you’ve written a whole snarky, insipid, whiny comment on MM. What you need to do is look in the mirror, because the hate is strong in you.
I am with you… so close on the speech, that makes him equal to the ugly sign… you too just think differently and the “bad sign” is ruining your view? Really! this person is your neighbor passive-aggressive saying something (yeah thats bad too!) but you said it ruins your view!Another self-entitled jerk with lots of time.
@six thank you for making an implied, implicate irony explicate. And also for becoming another brick in the wall that is the cycle of trauma that we all participate in as missionites. Silent or insolent, there signs are the font.
haha nice Al-town! JP what up?!?!
The Ron, what a legendary place…
“The face of God is Grimmaces crotch, jerking it off in our faces.” Finally, my life’s ethos in eloquent prose. Next time you see me, that will be on my back as a tatoo.
Let’s not refer to people as whores, please. Sex workers is a fitting title, and is a more respectfuk option. Maybe you have distanced yourself a little too far from the folks in your neighborhood.
@danielle
Aren’t we all whores, in a way though? We all aren’t sex workers, in a way. I feel like the original poetic metaphor stands in this context. It’s not like I just kicked one of them out of my car, then to fling a used condom at them with a cackle and shout it in there face to make my feel like a big, powerful man. Like my father.
But all literary criticism aside, isn’t it clear that I am the victim here? Missing the big picture only to nitpicking my word choice is not entirely unlike spitting in the fact of a rape victim, moments after a police officer laughed in her face and asked her derisively “well, what were you wearing?”
Perhaps I am distant from the less savory elements of my neighborhood, since I admit I somehow do not know the name of a single sex worker on my block. But I am not the kind of person that would spit in a rape victims face moments after she opens up. And I think the other comments would agree, that kind of makes me better than you.
#yolo #YMCMB
@danielle I just re-read that, and I want to retract that I am better than you. Maybe being attacked for a minor choice of words when the big picture is that I am being victimized. I admit that maybe choosing that specific word was a little retarded of me. But all I want to do is gaze at a beautiful sunset once in awhile? Your needless social attack has me a little upset. Although it was, perhaps, not respectfuk of me.
You say that we are nothing but victim-blamers, Allen, but don’t you think that our instinctive feeling of repugnance for those who throw themselves pity parties because they don’t like confronting the reality of the neighbourhood they choose to live in is understandable, even if not forgivable? All of use are surrounded every day by sights and signs and symbols that are a drain on our good will and our energy and our ability to be contributing citizens in a city that heavy-handedly favors the rich elite but you don’t hear most of us whining about it, we’re just trying to better ourselves without getting down on the people who are even unluckier than we are. The guy smoking crack on my stoop might be a less than stellar neighbor but I don’t feel like I have to put if a mocking sign about him.
I think that the disproportionate power we see wielded every day by the petty authority figures we as a society have surrounded ourselves by is indicative of the problem at hand. We have allowed ourselves to be ruled in every aspect of our lives. You give someone the smallest leeway and they exercise it to the limit. The tiny tyranny of the bureaucrat denying a poor woman food stamps because in her hunger-dazed hurry to fill out the dozens of invasive forms she accidentally misprinted the address of her last place of employment but one. The almost vindictive joy the bank manager gets from telling you that your last twenty is a fake bill and then confiscating it. Even the petty bitchiness of the cellphone helpline operator who ‘just can’t help you ma’am’. All those people are causing misery for others and yet we aren’t making ironic signs about their evil ways because it isn’t ‘cool’ or whatever to point out the flaws of those who are in power over you. You’re a coward, Allen, hiding in your hipster-hangout of a house on an ugly street corner feeling superior because you made a sign and called the rest of us rapists for not agreeing with you
What was the “apparently British” comment in relation to?