Mission Mission

Even though I’ve been in Northern California my entire life, I’d never been to Alcatraz until my friend Allie took me last Friday. It was pretty great, particularly the flora and fauna. See the snowy egret or something hiding in there? I was standing there looking at it when suddenly something else started talking at me, so I made a recording. The good part starts a little after the 0:35 mark:

Ewok right?

Since none of us can get enough of Danny Bowien, here’s yet another article about him, in NYMag. (Bonus #1: This one was written by Molly Young, a San Francisco native and one of my favorite young reporters today. Bonus #2: Unrelated, but NYMag also just happened to publish a piece featuring one of our very own writers’ feet.)

In this piece, Danny talks happiness, monosodium glutamate, duck blood extrusion, Martha Stewart and her seating requests, partying, puking, and his tradition of pounding Buds in honor of visiting dignitaries.

In a new Believer interview, Hannah from Grass Widow, asked about where her band’s songs come from, talks a little about the Mission:

With “Disappearing Industries” … I work at a video store on Valencia Street, which I’ve worked at for about five years, and I’m a San Francisco native. And our city, like many cities in the U.S. is getting really gentrified, and there was just this moment when I was just walking down the street, looking at all the specialty novelty coffee places and whatever, and I felt sheer anger. I was like, “I want to paintball this whole street!” I’m from here and I feel like an outsider in my own town! So sometimes it’ll start with subject matter. It’s like, “I need to talk about this right now.” I’m walking down the street and feeling this sadness, and also thinking about entropy, imagining San Francisco two hundred years ago and imagining it two hundred years in the future.” So I brought that to rehearsal and the three of us synthesized it together. We sat around—we wrote some of the instrumentation and then wrote a bunch of lyrics to sum up what all three of us have to say, and then we read what we wrote and put it together in a way that felt good to sing.

Here’s the song in question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbxiXu730qM

Much nicer than a bunch of broken windows! Read the rest of the interview here. Order the new Grass Widow album here.

No idea what these miscreants may have been up to or if an Office Space-style beatdown was about to take place, but here’s hoping they were taking this beast to the top of a staircase so they could kick it down to make it produce some rad fucked-up Cometbus-esque Xerox copies for their zine.

Looks like this would be useful for a variety of purposes, from cleverly infiltrating Kink.com to unscrupulously picking your neighbor’s peaches, but in the end you will probably just run out of gas looking for parking.  Kinda looks like fun, though, in an Indiana Jones at Disneyland kind of way.

[Photo by Mike W.]

Local clotheshorse David Enos made the above illustration following a trip to Macy’s with his girlfriend, who observed:

There’s only two ways it can go these days for guy’s styles; you can look like I forget his name from ‘Drive’, if he was going out-on-the-town, or like some ‘Cargo Apocalypse’. [link]

So guys, which one are you?

But seriously, let’s all watch the opening credits sequence from Drive, mainly to find out what that guy’s name is — but also because it is awesome:

http://youtu.be/LtC64YfY61A

I wonder what it was like to be a married twentysomething in San Francisco in 1890.

(Photos submitted by reader Tim K. Thanks, Tim.)

UPDATE:

Delia Presby Oliver (nee Shattuck)’s death notice in the April 11 Daily Alta.

Delia and Frank were married in October 1885.

And this may have been Delia’s house at 814 Powell (looks like she and Frank lived with her parents):

More details in the comments, which SFBay.ca has summarized.

Lillian (not pictured) is from Texas, just like our pal Carlos (pictured). Apparently this sort of thing happens all too often:

Smug Californian: “So where are you from?”

Me: “Texas.”

Smug Californian: (In a tone that reeks of satisfaction with the smell of one’s own flatulence) “I’m so sorry. That must have really sucked.” [link]

So that’s a bummer. Smugness is the worst! (And Texas is pretty fun.)

[Photo by Corntard]