I took this years ago and I look at it every day as I lay in bed but it was never on the web so here we go. A little girl crying in McDonalds.

On the road up from Half Moon Bay. I’m thnking about redesigning my website around this image.

This is Micah. We’re working together. I’m going to take pictures and she’s going to style / art direct and hopefully we’ll make some stuff that could be the start of a fashion photography portfolio. That’s the idea anyways.

This bastard has been single-handedly fucking over the young, culturally underrepresented people of my neighborhood for years. Not to mention all the people with lots cats and places to rent and so on. He is a strident and thoroughly reviled example of a neighborhood pole scraper. An ex-Marine if I heard correctly. He lives on 19th Street at Lapidge. I’ve watched him with his carpet knife out there in the immediate area of my house tearing down anything affixed to a public structure. He slashes through band flyers with his knife and rips furiously at the packing tape with his gloved hand. He has scraped off more than a few (somewhat artfully applied, if I must say) Primco stickers.

See him now, standing proudly, defiantly even, in front of a clean telephone pole. But look closer and you can see thousands of rusted staples in that telephone pole: clear evidence of the cities long history of public flyering. He can do nothing to erase that tradition but he has made it futile to attempt to continue it within a couple blocks of his house. He is a menace to society. Do not tolerate the pole scraper. He cannot claim moral superiority.

He obviously has a vigilante complex, (and, no doubt, some deep feelings of pain and inadequacy) and thus has inflicted some sort of militarily-instilled sense of order and cleanliness on the area around Lapidge street. Those of us who would rely on haphazard postings of underground cultural happenings find our most important line of communication routinely hacked down by this scoundrel. These events, (of which there are several and for which many of us have decided to move to this area, and in which, many locate this neighborhood’s greatest strength) and the minor urban blight that accompanies the flyering for these events have been deemed unjustifiable by this man. Who is he to unilaterally make this decision?

Now I must admit that I would appreciate an occasional, purely maintenance-oriented periodic cleaning of the poles to remove the detritus of underground advertising — if only to make newer and more relevant postings easier to spot. But this man tenaciously destroys any new flyer immediately after it is taped or stapled up. Who benefits when this week’s Alcoholocaust punk show goes by unnoticed by kids who instead end up spending the night sitting on the couch pulling mad bong rips and watching TV?

It’s bullshit but I have no answer to this problem. How to stop him? Do we just wait for him to die? Believe me, I have numerous fantasies about how to return the destruction he wreaks on our neighborhood (what pain can be visited upon human flesh with a putty knife!) but I do not believe in returning violence with violence. I’m calling for anyone with a solution to help us in our struggle.

Clarion alley

Pete’s Bar-B-Q

BURNING THE SKIN IS NOT A CURE

FOR MENTALLY RETARDED PERSONS WITH EPILEPSY.

GET MEDICAL HELP

New Orleans

Timepass in the Calcutta Underground.

Oh shit, surrounded by Sikkimese kids.

Darjeeling.

More Wood. I didn’t know I was taking this picture for the second time till after I got the slides back.

So much has been written about this piece…where to begin? It holds a place in all our hearts, I’m sure, and its warm, buttery glow stands as a beacon for so many weary late-night diners.

To put it plainly, it’s a lovely rendering of a vertical broiler. In the style, I think, of De Chirico. Another critic has termed it ” Braque-influenced, or perhaps of some Eastern European provenance”

The bold stainless steel facets of the base are clearly cubist, but, I think, only to the extent that it can more forcefully assert its greatness to the common man. The taqueria patron, if you will. The column of meat echoes that stalwart smokestack in “The Anguish of Departure” and as in so many of De Chirico’s paintings, the directional sunlight, here a beam of blue energy, that seems to be coming from a hole in the fluorescent overhead, casts long shadows of despair over all who venture into this nether-region of the taqueria. I’m not joking around here. Because I think that this vertical broiler, as majestic as it is, cannot help but symbolize the same things that are evoked in “Melancholy and Mystery of a Street”

Merely scanning and color correcting it has caused me to stop for a moment this evening and think about the sadness and anger that lives just beneath the reach of my introspection. It is there but I have no access to it. So it remains aloof, like this vertical broiler. It was easily within my grasp near this time one week ago. I was so very angry and the associative properties of my brain had been richly re-wired by so little sleep and so much alcohol. I was ready to write my great rant. My bitch session for all of us. I wanted to write something for the pissed off everyone. I felt like I had a handle on it. If only for a little while I knew what I had to say. I know that a great MOAN is being emitted from our society right now. But it is the noise of a body not in the full sway of its emotion. It is a clouded heart.

I told Rose all about it, ate pancakes at that diner on Market where the freeway goes overhead, and bought a brand new skateboard at DLX. After that, it was gone. I came home and watched TV. That’s right. It was squandered. Shopped away.

I’m protecting myself now so I don’t know if my anger will be provoked any time soon. I have no choice but to protect myself even though it means this anger lives on somewhere in my hippocampus, beyond my conscious mind and its therapeutic attempts. The anger needs to come out and we all need to let it out. I am forgetting what we’ve all forgotten before.