On the side of an auto body shop, adjacent to a mostly razed building at Potrero and Mariposa. I love the boldness and scale. Looking at the picture, someone’s been at work in the cellar below the mural wall, too. (Click for larger image.)
Sponsoring Your Smile
A bus shelter at 17th and Bryant in San Francisco. The ad has been there for gee, at least six months. I like the image and the legend “Patrocinador de tu sonrisa.” Spanish-challenged as I am, I imagined that “patrocinador de tu sonrisa” had something to do with “sunrise.” Naturally, it doesn’t. It translates as, “Sponsor of your smile.”
And the text below?
¿Qué hace una rata en una esquina? Esperando un rato.
It’s a joke (Nesquik sponsors your smile), but one that relies on a pun, one that I can’t fathom, so can’t translate well:
What does a rat in a corner do? It waits a while.
(Spanish-speaking friends, please jump in here.)
Encounters with the Saints
Went down to Santa Clara last night to see our local men’s professional soccer team, the San Jose Earthquakes, play an exhibition against what amounts to a farm team, the Portland Timbers (the home side won, 1-0; thanks, Eamon and Sakura).
The Quakes play in Buck Shaw Stadium at Santa Clara University. Saint Clare, I dimly recall from the Nikos Kazantzakis novel and maybe a Hollywood movie starring someone like Bradford Dillman, was Saint Francis’s one-time squeeze from Assisi (at least that’s how I think the story goes). When he gave up the life of the feckless, dissipating hedge-fund operator (or medieval equivalent) for one of impoverished contemplation and ethical treatment of animals, Clare did likewise.
Fast-forward to the Spanish colonization of California: Both saints wound up having California missions named after them. The one memorializing Saint Francis was part of the settlement that eventually turned into a town full of dissipation and hedge-fund shenanigans and only occasional world-renouncing introspection. The mission celebrating Saint Clare burned down, I’m told, and was replaced by the building you see here, which is on the campus of Santa Clara University–a place that I expect veers constantly between partying and deep reflection.
After Work
After work, I walked from the radio station, at Mariposa and Bryant streets, over Potrero Hill, down to south of Market, all the way to the Bay, then up to the Oakland ferry. It’s about three and a quarter miles. The walk does lots of things, and one of them is to open up the city to view.
San Francisco is every bit as striking as self-conscious locals and awestruck visitors say it is. What I’ve come to like about it are the hard edges, the things that make the place a city rather than just a post-card vista: the Muni bus barn across the street from the station; Mariposa Street’s steep climb across Potrero Avenue; the way the 101 freeway cuts into the shoulder of Potrero Hill and sweeps beneath the pedestrian bridge between Utah Street and San Bruno Avenue; the view of downtown and the Bay Bridge from the hill; the way streets are flung straight up the hill, and all the rest of the hills, damn the contours; the shopping center on the site of the old Seals ballpark and the fact the ballpark was once there; the Double Play bar across the street from the same dead ballpark (I’ve never been inside); the giant phased electric classic Coca-Cola sign along the approach to the bridge; the bail-bond gulch across the street from the Hall of Justice; block after block of new lofts and flats that fill the old industrial district; the corner, 3rd and Brannan, where Jack London was born, according to the plaque there; the works and ramparts of the Bay Bridge where it’s built into bedrock and begins its thrust out over the water; the roar of traffic on the bridge, 15 or 20 stories above the bay shore, and everything else about the Bay Bridge, now that I think about it; the bayfront, for now anyway tamed and manicured and turned into a long promenade; the Ferry Building which I’ll always see with it’s cupola-top flagpole wrenched askew by the 1989 earthquake; and a thousand other things that I’ve seen, remarked to myself, and have forgotten until next time I come across them.
And what I like most of all–that I’ve gotten a chance to walk through these places and am doing it still.
Jam
Occasionally, once every couple of weeks maybe, I’ll drive in to San Francisco for my afternoon shift rather than take the train in. A midday the traffic is usually light and you zip across. And though it’s unnecessary to drive since I live and work close to transit, it’s nice every once in a while not to do the short hike down to the station at 16th and Mission at 9:30 or 10 at night. That’s another story.
This afternoon the bridge approaches were clear as usual at 1 p.m. But the electronic sign at the bottom of the long incline after the toll plazas said there was an accident two or three miles ahead. Just ahead, the traffic was slowing, and it took a good 25 minutes to get up to the accident site on the west side of the tunnel that opens onto the suspension span that carries traffic into the city. Since traffic was just about stopped, I took out the camera and did some distracted driving.
Bridge and Moon
Warm this evening in San Francisco. Lots of people out on the Embarcadero after dark, and no jackets needed. Even the ferry back to Oakland was a shirt-sleeve ride. Before I got on the boat, I looked across the bay and saw the moon coming up beyond the Bay Bridge, over the East Bay hills; it’s that big, indistinct bright thing out there in the distance. I took long exposures by balancing my little camera on a railing along the Embarcadero walk. It worked well for keeping the camera steady, not so well for aiming the camera just anywhere I wanted.
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Bridge and Fog
A favorite cheap excursion: Oakland to San Francisco and back on the ferry ($4.50 each way if you buy a 20-ticket book). We had rain showers early in the afternoon, and then this fog blew in over the bay. Somewhere in this picture are a couple of 50-story tall bridge towers. After we passed under the bridge, the fog swirled away from a tower for a moment (below). We took the ferry back to the East Bay after dark, and later in the evening a front blew through and cleared out the clouds.
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Lest We Forget
From today’s San Francisco ballot:
Measure R
Renaming the Oceanside Water Treatment Plant — City of San Francisco
(Ordinance – Majority Approval Required)
Shall the City change the name of the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to the George W Bush Sewage Plant?
[Update: Given the general loathing for Bush hereabouts–hey, the measure’s backers had to collect more than 10,000 signatures to get it on the ballot–I expected this thing would pass. But no–it actually lost, something like 30 percent to 70 percent. That shows more class than I figured San Francisco voters had.]
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Freeway Overpass
From Friday night on Potrero Hill. From Utah Street just south of Mariposa, there’s a pedestrian overpass crossing U.S. 101 to Vermont Street on the east side. I can’t quite explain it, but I alway like walking over the freeway there. Something about getting to watch the traffic from so close by without being part of it, maybe. Last night after work I went up there and experimented with some time exposure by placing my camera on one of the railings of the pedestran bridge (there’s a fence to prevent it from falling onto the highway) setting the shutter on delay before releasing it.
This view is looking north. Interstate 80, which goes all the way to New York City, starts where you can see the green highway signs in the left center (if you click for the larger image, you can see that one of the signs directs drivers to the Bay Bridge, which is visible in the right center).
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Utah Door
Busy week at the radio station. Got off early tonight, and walked a little on Potrero Hill, up Mariposa and onto Utah, before getting in the car and driving across the bridge home. It was a beautiful, clear warm evening at the end of a beautiful, clear week.
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